Feasts, Festivals and Games of the World

Georges Lemaître (1894–1966)

Georges Lemaître was a Belgian Catholic priest and professor of physics. He said that religious beliefs should not clash with a scientific explanation of the universe. He read a book titled The Theory of Relativity written by the German physicist Albert Einstein and published in 1915. Einstein had new ideas about the nature of space and time that reinvented some of the accepted laws of physics. Lemaître suggested that if Einstein were correct, the universe must be expanding. He had no data to support his argument, however, and so it was ignored.

Edwin Hubble (1889–1953)

In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble began to use a powerful new telescope. He discovered that what had appeared to be blurry stars in the sky were in fact whole galaxies. By studying the light given off by dozens of galaxies, he figured out that the ones that were farther from Earth were moving away from Earth at a faster speed than the ones that were nearby. This information provided evidence to support Lemaître’s theory that the universe was expanding. This is now known as the Hubble–Lemaître law.

The Big Bang theory

Lemaître went on to publish the Big Bang theory on how the universe began. This theory says that the universe must have started from a single point because of the fact that it is still expanding outwards. The force of the explosion that formed the universe is still causing it to expand billions of years later. Evidence to support Lemaître’s theory came in 1964, when American physicists Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias discovered that the universe is full of microwave radiation, which was created by a huge explosion billions of years ago. Wilson and Penzias were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1978 for this discovery. The Big Bang theory became the accepted theory of how the universe began.

Georges Lemaître Edwin Hubble at his telescope ©The Educational Company of Ireland

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