An allegedly lost interview with the Leuven priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître was found in the archive of the Flemish TV channel VRT. Lemaître was the founder of the big bang theory in the 1920s and 1930s. He was interviewed about this in 1964 for the then BRT, but until recently only a short fragment was thought to have been preserved. Now the entire twenty minute interview has been found.
The universe was created about 14 billion years ago in a “big bang” or big bang. Since then, the universe has been expanding and getting bigger and bigger. The theory is known to almost everyone. It is less well known that Lemaître arrived at this intuition already one hundred years ago.
In the 1960s, the BRT was able to interview Lemaître on his big bang theory. But the interview has been lost, and only a brief one-minute fragment appears to have been preserved in the VRT archive. The recording was lost because it was misclassified and Lemaître’s name was misspelled. He was discovered by accident while digitizing compromised film reels.
For twenty minutes, Georges Lemaître explains how he believes the universe originated from a primitive atom: a super-dense mass that “exploded” and continues to expand. In doing so, he went against what many scientists had thought until then: that the cosmos was static and unchanging. The theory was therefore initially met with skepticism.
In the interview, Lemaître says, among other things, that he doesn’t understand why other astronomers, like the British Fred Hoyle, continue to believe in a ‘firm universe’. Incidentally, it was Fred Hoyle himself who first used the term “big bang” to mock the theory. But gradually more and more scientists joined. Yet it was only in 1965, a year before Lemaître’s death, that the big bang theory was proven by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. (AND AND)
