Belgian scientist and Catholic priest (1894–1966)
This article is about representation Belgian physicist and priest. For the spacecraft, see Georges Lemaître ATV. For the American physician, see George D. LeMaitre. In behalf of the professional road bicycle racer, see Georges Lemaire.
Georges Henri Carpenter Édouard Lemaître (lə-MET-rə; French:[ʒɔʁʒləmɛːtʁ]ⓘ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, and mathematician who made major contributions to cosmology and astrophysics.[1] He was the first to argue that the recession of galaxies give something the onceover evidence of an expanding universe and to connect the empirical Hubble–Lemaître law[2] with the solution to the Einstein field equations in the general theory of relativity for a homogenous opinion isotropic universe. That work led Lemaître to propose what subside called the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", now regarded little the first formulation of the Big Bang theory of say publicly origin of the universe.[7]
Lemaître studied engineering, mathematics, physics, and logic at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained chimpanzee a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923. His ecclesiastical superior and mentor, CardinalDésiré-Joseph Mercier, encouraged and supported his scientific work, allowing Lemaître to travel to England, where appease worked with the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington at the University discover Cambridge in 1923–1924, and to the United States, where purify worked with Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory final at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1924–1925.
Lemaître was a professor of physics at Louvain from 1927 until his retirement in 1964. A pioneer in the use bad deal computers in physics research, in the 1930s he showed, connote Manuel Sandoval Vallarta of MIT, that cosmic rays are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field and must therefore carry stimulating charge. In 1960, Pope John XXIII appointed him Domestic Archpriest, entitling him to be addressed as "Monsignor". In that sign up year he became president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a post that he occupied until his death.[8]
Georges Lemaître was born in Charleroi, Belgium, the eldest of four domestic of Joseph Lemaître, a prosperous industrialist who owned a glassworks factory, and Marguerite née Lannoy, who was the daughter personage a brewer. Georges was educated at the Collège du Sacré-Cœur, a grammar school in Charleroi run by the Jesuits. Control 1910, after a fire destroyed the glassworks, the family captive to Brussels, where Joseph had found a new position introduction manager for the French bank Société Générale. Georges then became a pupil at another Jesuit school, St. Michael's College.
In 1911, Lemaître began to study mining bailiwick at the Catholic University of Louvain. In 1914, after depiction outbreak of World War I, Lemaître interrupted his studies display volunteer for the Belgian army. He participated in the Encounter of the Yser, in which the Belgians succeeded in wavering the German advance. When the army transferred him from rendering infantry to artillery, Lemaître was sent to complete a scope on ballistics. His prospects of promotion to officer rank were dashed after he was marked down for insubordination as a result of pointing out to the instructor a mathematical puzzle in the official artillery manual. However, at the end longedfor hostilities he received the Belgian War Cross with bronze palm,[11] one of only five rank-and-file troops to receive that accord from the hands of King Albert I.
After the war, Lemaître abandoned engineering for the study of physics and mathematics. Huddle together 1919 he completed the course taught at the Higher of Philosophy, established by CardinalDésiré-Joseph Mercier to promote neo-Thomism. Lemaître obtained his doctorate in science in 1920 with a belief entitled L'approximation des fonctions de plusieurs variables réelles ("The joining of functions of several real variables"), written under the guidance of mathematician Charles de la Vallée-Poussin.[13]
Lemaître had considered bordering on the Jesuits or the Benedictines, but finally decided to prime instead for the diocesanpriesthood. Between 1920 and 1923 he was a student at the Maison Saint-Rombaut, the seminary for "late vocations" (i.e., mature students for the priesthood) of the Archdiocese of Mechelen. It was during his spare time at representation seminary that Lemaître learned the general theory of relativity. Perform was ordained as a priest on 22 September 1923 uncongenial Cardinal Mercier. As a diocesan priest in French-speaking Belgium, noteworthy was known as "Abbé Lemaître".
At the seminary, Lemaître connected the Fraternité sacerdotale des Amis de Jésus ("Priestly fraternity extent the Friends of Jesus"), which had been created by Main Mercier to promote the spiritual life of select diocesan priests and which was established canonically by his successor, Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey. As a member of the fraternity, Lemaître took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, as well as mutual votum immolationis ("vow of immolation") promising complete submission to picture person of Christ. In the spirit of the fraternity, Lemaître did not discuss his involvement with the Amis de Jésus outside of the group, but he regularly made silent retreats in a house called Regina Pacis ("Queen of Peace") beckon Schilde, near Antwerp, and also undertook translations of the arcane works of John of Ruusbroec.
In 1922, Lemaître applied to the Belgian Ministry of Sciences bracket Arts for a travel bursary. As part of that proposition, he submitted a thesis on the astronomical implications of prevailing relativity that included a demonstration that the most general concealing outfit of the Einstein field equations included a cosmological constant draft. The jury awarded Lemaître a prize of 8,000 Belgian francs.
Cardinal Mercier supported Lemaître's scientific work and helped him to fasten further financial support for a two-year visit to Great Kingdom and the United States. Only ten days after his appointment, Lemaître left Belgium to take up residence at St Edmund's House, then a community of Catholic priests studying for degrees at the University of Cambridge and which would later die St Edmund's College. At Cambridge, Lemaître was a research interact in astronomy and worked with the eminent astrophysicist Arthur Astronomer, who introduced Lemaître to modern cosmology, stellar astronomy, and numeric analysis.
Lemaître then spent the following year at the Harvard College Observatory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working with Harlow Shapley, a prime expert in the study of what were then called "spiral nebulae" (now identified as spiral galaxies). Lemaître also registered wrongness that time in the doctoral program in science at rendering Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with the Belgian engineer Saint Heymans as his official advisor.
On his return get in touch with Belgium in 1925, Lemaître became a part-time lecturer at representation Catholic University of Louvain and began working on a statement that was finally published in 1927 in the Annales good thing la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles ("Annals of the Scientific Companionship of Brussels") under the title Un Univers homogène de telephone constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques ("A homogeneous Universe of constant release and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae"). There he developed (independently of the earlier work lecture Alexander Friedmann) the argument that the equations of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity implied that the Universe is crowd together static (see Friedmann equations). Lemaître connected this prediction to what he argued was a simple relation of proportionality between picture average recessional velocity of galaxies and their distance to picture Earth. The initial state that Lemaître proposed for the Macrocosm in his 1927 paper was Einstein's model of a even now universe with a cosmological constant.
Also in 1927, Lemaître returned manage MIT to defend his doctoral dissertation on The gravitational policy in a fluid sphere of uniform invariant density according guard the theory of relativity. Upon obtaining that second doctorate, Lemaître's was appointed ordinary professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. Lemaître's 1927 report in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles had little impact because that journal was crowd together widely read by astronomers or physicists outside Belgium. At that time, Einstein insisted that only a static picture of representation universe was physically acceptable. Lemaître later recalled Einstein saying make contact with him "vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable" ("your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious").
In 1929, the US astronomer Edwin Hubble published a paper affix the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of rendering United States of America showing, based on better and added abundant data than what Lemaître had had at his exploit in 1927, that, in the average, galaxies recede at a velocity proportional to their distance from the observer. Although Astrophysicist himself did not interpret that result in terms of erior expanding Universe, his work attracted widespread attention and soon positive many experts, including Einstein, that the Universe is not notwithstanding. The proportionality between distance and recessional velocity for galaxies has since been commonly known as "Hubble's law", but in 2018 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) adopted a resolution recommending make certain it be referred to as the "Hubble-Lemaître law".[2]
In 1931, wish English translation of Lemaître's 1927 report appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, with a commentary make wet Arthur Eddington that characterized Lemaître's work as a "brilliant solution" to the outstanding problems of cosmology and a response manage without Lemaître to Eddington's comments. This English translation, however, omitted Lemaître's estimate of the "Hubble constant" for reasons that remained clouded for many years. The issue was clarified in 2011 gross Mario Livio: Lemaître himself removed those paragraphs when he planned the English translation, opting instead to cite the stronger results that Hubble had published in 1929.
In March of 1931 Lemaître wrote a brief report in which he proposed that the universe expanded from a single incipient quantum, which he called the "primeval atom". This was available in Nature, and later that year Lemaître participated in a public colloquium on "The Evolution of the Universe" held mission London on 29 September 1931 to mark the centenary refer to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Lemaître's theory was first presented to a general audience in the December 1932 issue of Popular Science, in a piece written by description astronomer Donald Howard Menzel of Harvard University. In 1933–1934, Lemaître was a guest professor at the Catholic University of U.s., in Washington, D.C. At that time he also presented his work on the "Evolution of the Expanding Universe" before say publicly US National Academy of Sciences. Lemaître became a scientific eminence and newspapers around the world referred to him as interpretation leader of a new physical cosmology.
Lemaître and Einstein met modesty four occasions: in 1927 in Brussels, at the time faux a Solvay Conference; in 1932 in Belgium, at the put on ice of a cycle of conferences in Brussels; in California scuttle January 1933; and in 1935 at Princeton. In 1933 adventure the California Institute of Technology, after Lemaître presented his timidly, Einstein stood up, applauded, and is reported to have held, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of birth to which I have ever listened." However, there is wrestle over the reporting of this quote in the newspapers tactic the time, and it may be that Einstein was mass referring to the "primordial atom" theory as a whole, but only to Lemaître's proposal that cosmic rays could be "fossils" of the primordial decay.
Lemaître argued that cosmic rays could be a "fossil radiation" produced by the decay of interpretation primeval atom. Much of his work in the 1930s was focused on cosmic rays. In 1946, Lemaître published his volume on L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif ("The Primeval Atom Hypothesis"), which was translated into Spanish in the same year and smash into English in 1950. The astronomer Fred Hoyle introduced the momentary "Big Bang" in a 1949 BBC radio broadcast to bear out to cosmological theories such as Lemaître's, according to which rendering Universe has a beginning in time.[31][32] Hoyle remained throughout his life an opponent of such "Big Bang" theories, advocating in preference to a steady-state model of an eternal Universe.
In 1948, theoreticians Ralph Alpher, Robert Herman, and George Gamow predicted a ridiculous form of "fossil radiation" based on the Big Bang working model, now known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB was produced when the contents of the expanding Universe cooled sufficiently that they became transparent to electromagnetic radiation. In 1965, shortly before his death, Lemaître learned from his assistant Odon Godart of the recent discovery of the CMB by portable radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. That discovery convinced bossy experts of the scientific validity of the Big Bang.
Lemaître viewed his work introduce a scientist as neither supporting nor contradicting any truths cancel out the Catholic faith, and he was strongly opposed to construction any arguments that mixed science with religion, although he held that the two were not in conflict.[33] He was each anxious that his work on cosmology should be judged avert purely scientific criteria.
In 1951, Pope Pius XII gave toggle address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, with Lemaître be thankful for the audience, in which he drew a parallel between representation new Big Bang cosmology and the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo:
Contemporary science with one sweep back across representation centuries has succeeded in bearing witness to the august advantage of the primordial Fiat Lux, when along with matter present burst forth from nothing a sea of light and dispersal [...] Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of bodily proofs, modern science has confirmed the contingency of the Cosmos and also the well founded deduction as to the period when the world came forth from the hands of interpretation Creator.[34]
Lemaître was reportedly horrified by that intervention and was after able, with the assistance of Father Daniel O’Connell, the pretentious of the Vatican Observatory, to convince the Pope not put a label on any further public statements on religious or philosophical interpretations take matters concerning physical cosmology.
According to the theoretical physicist and Altruist laureate Paul Dirac,
Once when I was talking with Lemaître about [his cosmological theory] and feeling stimulated by the magnificence of the picture that he has given us, I examine him that I thought cosmology was the branch of principles that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not assort with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology type lying closest to religion.
With Manuel Sandoval Vallarta, whom he had met at MIT, Lemaître showed that the power of cosmic rays varies with latitude because they are beside of charged particles and therefore are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field.[37] In their calculations, Lemaître and Vallarta made prevail on of MIT's new differential analyzer computer, developed by Vannevar Scrub. That work disproved the view, advocated among others by say publicly Nobel laureate Robert Millikan, that cosmic rays were composed substantiation high-energy photons. Lemaître and Vallarta also worked on a uncertainly of primary cosmic radiation and applied it to their investigations of the Sun's magnetic field and the effects of depiction galaxy's rotation.
In 1933, Lemaître found an important inhomogeneous improve of Einstein's field equations describing a spherical dust cloud, representation Lemaître–Tolman metric. He became increasingly interested in problems of denotive computation and in the 1930s began to use the eminent powerful calculator available at the time, the mechanical Mercedes-Euklid. Score his only work in physical chemistry, Lemaître collaborated in depiction numerical calculation of the energy levels of monodeuteroethyelene (a speck of ethylene with one of its hydrogen atoms replaced bid deuterium).
In 1948 Lemaître published a mathematical essay titled Quaternions inception espace elliptique ("Quaternions and elliptic space").[40]William Kingdon Clifford had introduced the concept of elliptic space in 1873. Lemaître developed say publicly theory of quaternions from first principles, in the spirit position the Erlangen program.[citation needed]
Lemaître also worked on the three-body obstacle, introducing a new method of regularization to avoid singularities related with the collisions of two bodies. In the 1950s loosen up worked out an early version of the fast Fourier junction, later developed independently by James Cooley and John Tukey. Take action introduced the Burroughs E101 electromechanical computer to his university have round the late 1950s. In his later years he collaborated counterpart his nephew Gilbert Lemaître on a new programming language commanded "Velocode", a precursor of BASIC.
During the 1950s, Lemaître inchmeal gave up part of his teaching workload, ending it altogether when he took emeritus status in 1964. In 1960 agreed was named domestic prelate (with the treatment of "Monsignor") near Pope John XXIII.[43] Following the death of the physician current Capuchin friar Agostino Gemelli, Lemaître was appointed to succeed him as the second president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
During the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, the pope asked Lemaître to serve on the 4th session of the Apostolic Commission on Birth Control. However, since his health made come next impossible for him to travel to Rome —he suffered a heart attack in December 1964— Lemaître demurred. He told a Dominican colleague, Père Henri de Riedmatten, that he thought importance was dangerous for a mathematician to venture outside of his area of expertise. Lemaître died on 20 June 1966, presently after having learned of the discovery of cosmic microwave grounding radiation, which provided solid experimental support for his theory familiar the Big Bang.[46]
Lemaître was strongly opposed to the Leuven Vlaams ("Flemish Leuven") movement that sought to make instruction at description Catholic University of Leuven monolingual in Dutch. With the recorder Gérard Garitte, in 1962 Lemaître established the Association du troop académique et du personnel scientifique de l’Université de Louvain (ACAPSUL, "Association of the faculty and scientific personnel of the Institution of higher education of Louvain") to advocate for the continued use of say publicly French language in that institution.[47] After Lemaître's death, the campus was separated into a Dutch-speaking institution, KU Leuven, and a French-speaking institution, UCLouvain, based in the planned town of Louvain-la-Neuve ("New Leuven") that was built for that purpose just bear the language border in Walloon Brabant.
On 27 July 1935 Lemaître was appointed as an honorary canon break into St. Rumbold's Cathedral by Cardinal Jozef-Ernest van Roey.[48] He was elected a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences monitor 1936, and took an active role there, serving as neat president from March 1960 until his death.[49] In 1941, operate was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.[43]
On 17 March 1934, Lemaître received rendering Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Leopold III.[43] His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international hurt were Eddington, Langevin, Théophile de Donder and Marcel Dehalu. Say publicly same year he received the Mendel Medal of the Villanova University.[50]
In 1936, Lemaître received the Prix Jules Janssen, the principal award of the Société astronomique de France, the French gigantic society.[51] Another distinction that the Belgian government reserves for rare scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial guerdon for applied sciences for the period 1933–1942.[43] Lemaître was elective to the American Philosophical Society in 1945.[52] In 1953, illegal was given the inaugural Eddington Medal by the Royal Boundless Society.[53][54]
In 2005, Lemaître was voted to the 61st place ransack De Grootste Belg ("The Greatest Belgian"), a Flemish television curriculum on the VRT. In the same year he was number one to the 78th place by the audience of the Les plus grands Belges ("The Greatest Belgians"), a television show tip off the RTBF. Later, in December 2022, VRT recovered in untruthfulness archives a lost 20-minute interview with Georges Lemaître in 1964, "a gem," says cosmologist Thomas Hertog.[55][56] On 17 July 2018, Google Doodle celebrated Georges Lemaître's 124th birthday.[57] On 26 Oct 2018, an electronic vote among all members of the Universal Astronomical Union voted 78% to recommend changing the name take in the Hubble law to the Hubble–Lemaître law.[2]