Background
Georges Lemaître was born in Charleroi on July 17, 1894.
Georges Lemaître was born in Charleroi on July 17, 1894.
After a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school, the Collège du Sacré-Coeur, in Charleroi, Lemaître began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven at the age of 17. In 1914, he interrupted his studies to serve as an artillery officer in the Belgian army for the duration of World War I.
After the war, he studied physics and mathematics, and began to prepare for the diocesan priesthood, not for the Jesuits. He obtained his doctorate in 1920 with a thesis entitled l'Approximation des fonctions de plusieurs variables réelles (Approximation of functions of several real variables), written under the direction of Charles de la Vallée-Poussin.
In 1923, he became a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Cambridge, spending a year at St Edmund's House (now St Edmund's College, Cambridge). He worked with Arthur Eddington, who introduced him to modern cosmology, stellar astronomy, and numerical analysis. He spent the next year at Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Harlow Shapley, who had just gained renown for his work on nebulae, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he registered for the doctoral program in sciences.
By 1914 he had become a first-class civil mining engineer, and at the outbreak of World War I he joined the Belgian army.
In 1923 he was ordained a priest.
In 1925 he returned to the University of Louvain, where he was first put in charge of courses and later appointed professor.
Lemaître's most important scientific contribution, his ideas on the origin of the universe, later to be termed the "big bang" theory of cosmogony, developed at Louvain during 1925-1931.
These ideas were stimulated by V. M. Silpher's observations which showed that the spectral lines of stars in nebulae are shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, which implied that these nebulae are receding from the earth. To Lemaître, this seemed inconsistent with Einstein's matter-filled static model of the universe; more promising was De Sitter's model, in which the nebulae were forced progressively farther apart. But De Sitter's model also seemed unsatisfactory to Lemaître.
In 1925 Lemaître announced his intention of exploring De Sitter's theory further.
Two years later he succeeded in reconciling De Sitter's universe with Einstein's universe by an intermediate model, a matter-filled expanding universe, for which Lemaître deduced a law relating the distances of nebulae to their velocities of expansion, a law that proved to be in accord with E. P. Hubble's measurements of 1929.
In 1931 Lemaître formulated his famous hypothesis, the "big bang" theory of cosmogony, to account for the expanding universe. By Lemaître's own account, it was while reading a 1931 article on the origin and end of the world that the basic idea occurred to him. Suppose, he reasoned, we reverse a well-known process, the ever-increasing multiplication of radiant energy particles (or quanta) in the universe. If the total energy remains constant, we will then obtain at some remote time in the past only one huge energy quantum, a "primeval atom, " as he termed it. This primeval atom-at the creation of the universe-must therefore have exploded in a huge fireball; and Lemaître later demonstrated how this explosion, obeying only the known laws of physics, could have produced the ever-expanding nebulae, the stars, and all other constituents of the observable universe, including the radioactive elements and the extremely highenergy cosmic rays.
Lemaître also explored a variety of fields, from cosmic rays to calculating machines. While he saw Baade's postwar researches support his cosmological time scale, he also saw his cosmogonical model challenged by the steady-state theory of H. Bondi, T. Gold, and F. Hoyle.
At present, however, Lemaître's model has received additional support from the detection of a very small amount of radiation in the universe, presumably left over from the primordial fireball which burst asunder several billion years ago.
Lemaître died in Louvain on June 20, 1966.
Georges Lemaître was a Belgian astronomer and cosmologist who formulated the modern big-bang theory, which holds that the universe began in a cataclysmic explosion of a small, primeval “super-atom. ”
He proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.
Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".
Lemaître also did research on cosmic rays and on the three-body problem, which concerns the mathematical description of the motion of three mutually attracting bodies in space. His works include Discussion sur l’évolution de l’univers (1933; “Discussion on the Evolution of the Universe”) and L’Hypothèse de l’atome primitif (1946; The Primeval Atom: An Essay on Cosmogony).
On 17 March 1934, Lemaître received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Léopold III. His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international jury were Eddington, Langevin, Théophile de Donder and Marcel Dehalu.
In 1936, Lemaître received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society.
Another distinction that the Belgian government reserves for exceptional scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial prize for applied sciences for the period 1933–1942.
In 1953, he was given the inaugural Eddington Medal awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society.
The asteroid (1565) Lemaître was named in his honor.
Lemaître Crater on the Moon is located west-southwest of Berlage Crater and south-southwest of Minkowski Crater.
In Charleroi, on boulevard Devreux, a maison de maître, designed by the architect Auguste Cador, acquired by the Catholic University of Louvain, is called "Georges Lemaître House 14" now .
The memory of his discovery is engraved on the monument that adorns the "Îlot des sciences" intersection at the intersection of Devreux and Audent boulevards and Willy Ernst and Pont Neuf streets in Charleroi.
A work by Jean-François Diord paying tribute to him and is installed on a lake in front of the old glass museum, today extension of the Palais de Justice, in the Jacques Depelsenaire Park.
A building of the Louvain-la-Neuve Faculty of Sciences has the auditorium of Georges Lemaître.
On 16 February 2012, the European Space Agency announced that the fifth and final ATV, a European automatic transfer vehicle, the International Space Station (ISS) refueller, will be named Georges Lemaître. It was launched on July 30, 2014.
A Norwegian electro-pop band is called Lemaitre in his memory.
On 30 and 31 May 2017 two statues of him were inaugurated by the rectors of the UCL and the KUL, one on the place of sciences in Louvain-la-Neuve, and another in Louvain.
He never saw any essential conflict between science and religion.
Quotations: He said: "Do you know where the heart of the misunderstanding lies? It really is a joke on the scientists. They are a literal-minded lot. Hundreds of professional and amateur scientists still actually believe that the Bible pretends to teach science. This is a good deal like assuming that there must be authentic religious dogma in the binomial theorem. "
In 1936, he was elected member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
In 1941, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.
