Georges Lemaître, Father of Big Bang theory

One of the lesser known characters of the heroic age of “modern” physics is Georges Lemaître. He’s not real unusual in the grand history of Western Civilization, lots of members of Catholic religious orders made important contributions to science. Of course, the Catholic Church invented the scientific method, and the idea that the universe is understandable and orderly is almost inherently Catholic.  He is unusual in being a Catholic Priest who published important physics papers in the 1920s heroic era of “modern” physics.

 

I find this photo hilarious, as Lemaître had just defeated Einstein, and it shows: priestly Chad

 

Lemaître was a Belgian who studied mining engineering before being drafted into WW-1, where he was an artilleryman who served with distinction, and witnessed one of the first poison gas attacks at Ypres. After the war he studied physics, was ordained as a diocesan priest (aka a humble priest who says mass and hears confessions at a local church), working with men like Eddington and ultimately getting his PhD from MIT.

His early astronomical work integrated Leavitt’s Cepheid variable star data, with Hubble’s Galaxy data, and Silpher’s data on redshifts; a masterful integration of seemingly unrelated data. Hubble’s law, despite the name, was first discovered by Lemaître. It was from observations he made while at Harvard, and unfortunately published in an obscure Belgian astronomical journal. The paper was translated by Eddington, but Lemaître humbly asked him to leave out his Hubble law results because Hubble had published better calculations since then. Eddington, the model of a good thesis advisor, made sure Lemaître got credit for this later. Lemaître also worked on the cosmic ray anisotropy and correctly deduced (using the early differential analyzer) it was due to the Earth’s magnetic field. He (incorrectly, but Einstein agreed with him) thought cosmic rays might have been a sort of fossil record of the big bang, which he called ‘the primeval atom.’

The young abbe after ordination

Lemaître was an early innovator in computard use and numerical methods in physics; his cosmic ray work used the differential analyzer and he later helped develop the fast Fourier transform. He also used early relay/mechanical computers to calculate the spectrum of monodeutero-ethylene, a considerable technical achievement at the time, and even now a non-trivial calculation. He also innovated in iterative solutions to differential equations long before that sort of thing was in textbooks. While he was at it, he and his nephew wrote an early programming language.

Interestingly, Lemaître developed methods and techniques of teaching arithmetic to children involving a combination of decimal and binary. The idea of this was to make it easier to calculate without remembering anything; just use fingers. There was a brief revival of a variation of this idea in my childhood days, right before calculators rendered the idea obsolete.

He was also excellent at classical pencil and paper calculations: he did solid work in General Relativity in the early days when it was poorly understood -also a considerable achievement considering his many other interests and works. In addition he came up with a quaternion extension to the Dirac equation; helping to develop spinor theory.

Another area he made important contributions: the three body problem. This is something I went deep on myself as I did my thesis on helium. The two body problem (hydrogen or just the sun and earth in isolation) has all these useful symmetries that allows you to analytically integrate the equations of motion and write down nice closed form equation results like the rough spectrum of the hydrogen atom or Kepler’s law. Then you add another gizmo and the whole thing falls apart and turns into devilishly difficult things which require numeric analysis or abstruse math. Lemaître used functions of a complex variable (an idea from Levi-Civita) and provided a coordinate change which… while it was an idea that laid fallow for years has recently been rediscovered by specialists in symplectic geometry. It’s a beautiful paper, very hammer and tongs in hindsight stuff, but one has to wonder where he got the idea in the first place: it’s non obvious enough it could have remained undiscovered until today had he not written it. Great and noble problem with origins in Eudoxus time; Legendre, Poisson and many other great men of physics and astronomy have worked on it.

One of the interesting things about his character, while he never spoke of his religious beliefs in front of scientific audiences, he was often reviled and his theory was more or less discounted by fedora-atheist types because he was a priest. He did have ideas on the subject of the conflict between faith and science; in fact he fairly bravely rejected an earlier Catholic idea that the Bible was a good guide to science. He had an unusual frienemy relationship with fedora-atheist Fred Hoyle who actually coined “big bang” as a sort of insult.  (Hoyle believed in stuff considerably weirder; remember he’s the guy who thinks the flu is from space). Oddly, Hoyle’s idea of a steady state universe was more favored by other Christian scientists like Millikan. Another point on his character; he refused an offer of a grant to fund computer research from the US Air Force for reasons of independence of thought.

In addition to his tremendous scientific contributions, Lemaître was an avid classical music fan and expert pianist. He also liked the theater, to the despair of the Church hierarchy; priests at the time were forbidden to attend the theater.  He had degrees in ancient Greek and of course Latin, was a scholar of Moliere, Aquinas, and was a friend and student of Leon Bloy, whose writings were one of the reasons he took up the priesthood.

Fedora Atheist types and people who think priests should get married should look at Monsignor Lemaître and realize volcel power allied with powers of God is superior; as a well rounded intellect and complete man of culture he had it all. Had he had some vicious harridan to care for such as Einstein’s first wife, I doubt as he would have been as interesting or filled with energy and intellectual force. Being highly religious, extremely cultured and a great scientist and an overall wonderful human being is one of the most punk rock and brutal flexes on bugman fedora types that one can imagine. I hope more priests find this scientific vocation in future.

Lemaître never won the Nobel prize in physics, though he lived long enough for Penzias and Wilson to publish verification of his ideas (if he lived another 12 years he would have shared the Nobel with them). He did receive Belgium’s highest scientific honors and was a member of the  Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Was he influenced by his religious beliefs? Yah, probably. In the Tridentine rite, the priest reads the following passages from the book of John. So what? He was right about the primordial atom and almost everything else he did. He even calculated the age of the universe properly, long before everyone else got it right. U mad fedora bros? He was also firmly of the camp that the physics should be evaluated on its own merits, without any interference or assistance from religion. He felt strongly enough about it, he even argued with the pope about it (and got his way). As such he was a lot more intellectually honest than dipshits who babble on about nonsense involving selfish genes because they think it owns their religious relatives or whatever.

 

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.
Hoc erat in principio apud Deum.
Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est:
in ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum:
et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.
Fuit homo missus a Deo, cui nomen erat Ioannes.
Hic venit in testimonium, ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine,
ut omnes crederent per illum.
Non erat ille lux, sed ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine.
Erat lux vera quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum.
In mundo erat, et mundus per ipsum factus est
et mundus eum non cognovit.
In propria venit, et sui eum non receperunt.
Quotquot autem receperunt eum, dedit eis potestatem filios Dei fieri,
his, qui credunt in nomine eius:
qui non ex sanguinibus, neque ex voluntate carnis, neque ex voluntate viri,
sed ex Deo nati sunt.

ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST,
et habitavit in nobis:
et vidimus gloriam eius, gloriam quasi Unigeniti a Patre,
plenum gratiae et veritatis.