ANNOUNCEMENTS•
The Flemish public broadcaster VRT has found a long-lost interview with Leuven cosmologist Georges Lemaître. He was the founder of the big bang theory in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the mid-1960s, the then BRT interviewed the cosmologist about that theory. The broadcaster thought there was only one minute left of that interview. The full 20 minute interview has now been found in the VRT archive.
An archive spokesperson says the video was misclassified and Lemaître’s name was misspelled. “As a result, the interview remained unknown for all those years. The recording was found while digitizing the affected rolls of film. An employee immediately recognized Lemaître in the images and realized that a treasure had been found.”
Although the big bang theory – which states that the universe was born about 14 billion years ago and continues to expand to this day – will be known to many people is the name of the Belgian cosmologist priest not that. He formulated his ideas about 100 years ago.
Lemaître was able to reconcile faith and science. He once said of the creation story, “There’s no reason to give up the Bible, because we now know that creation lasted ten billion years, instead of six days.”
Against the established order
Cosmologist Thomas Hertog of the University of Leuven is satisfied with the retrieved interview, he tells VRT. He calls the conversation a jewel. “It’s nice to see. We know what Lemaître thought from his writings, but this really adds an extra dimension to Lemaître’s persona and the depth of his thinking about the Big Bang.”
With his idea of the origin of the cosmos, Lemaître went against what the science of the time believed, namely that space was static and immutable. Einstein has already challenged this idea with his theory of relativity, in which he relates time and space to energy and mass.
A short time later, Edwin Hubble discovered that there are more galaxies in the cosmos than the Milky Way. And Hubble also found that those galaxies are moving away from each other.
It was Lemaître who united these two discoveries: the expansion of space and the theory of relativity. But he took it a step further and thought: What expands must have once been smaller. In the interview he explains how, according to him, the universe was born. From an atom, a super dense mass that “exploded” and continues to expand.
The big bang was mocking
Lemaître said in the interview that he doesn’t understand why well-known astronomers like Fred Hoyle don’t want to accept the big bang theory. Striking is that Hoyle himself with the term big Bang came to make fun of the theory. While that term has now established itself as a synonym for the big bang.
Slowly but surely, other scientists joined the big bang theory, including Einstein, who initially doubted Lemaître’s ideas. It was not until 1965, a year before Lemaître’s death, that the big bang theory was proven when the cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered.
The Belgian was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. However, in 2018, the name of Hubble’s law, which describes how fast galaxies are moving apart, was changed to the Hubble-Lemaître law.