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Belgian-born Georges Lemaître was a young and upcoming engineering student when Germany invaded his homeland in 1914. Out of necessity, he put his education on hold to serve in the Belgian army, where he fought in the Battle of Yser. Afterward, he studied physics at the Catholic University at Louvain. Then, he was admitted to the Catholic seminary in Malines, where Cardinal Mercer granted him special permission to study Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

In 1923 after completing his advanced education and with a clerical collar in place, Lemaître crossed the English Channel to work under the famous Sir Arthur Eddington at the Cambridge Observatory. By 1925 Lemaître's grasp of how General Relativity fits into our cosmic history exceeded that of Einstein himself. While Einstein stubbornly fought to maintain Aristotle's Static Universe theory, in 1927 Lemaître published an article in an obscure French journal suggesting that the available Doppler redshift data indicated that our universe is expanding.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble released observations obtained by his assistants at his observatory on Mount Wilson that confirmed Lemaître's little-known predictions. Hubble's announcement came as no surprise to Lemaître, who had already shown in equation number 23 of his 1927 paper that distant galaxies were getting further away from Earth in a manner predictable by the equation V=Hd, where V is the velocity of recession, d is the distance the subject galaxy is from Earth, and H is an experimentally determined constant. This relationship became known as Hubble's law, with H being known as Hubble's constant.

The calibration details needed to be tweaked, but by the end of 1929, the cosmological community was starting to realize that our universe was indeed expanding, not static, as Aristotle and Einstein believed. Also, they began to ponder many theories that could explain away our universe's expansion, or at least the appearance of expansion. In 1930, Sir Author Eddington called a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society to consider these matters. Also, he ordered that an English translation of Lemaître's overlooked 1927 paper be immediately published for all to study.

By 1931 Einstein had conceded that his inclusion of a fudge factor (aka, cosmological constant) on the left side of his equation for General Relativity so that a static universe would result was the biggest blunder of his life. Although Einstein removed the cosmological constant from his equation, Lemaître felt it needed to be moved to the equation's right side, not eliminated. Lemaître's preliminary thought processes were published in the May 1931 edition of Nature in a 457-word article titled “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory.” Herein, Lemaître explained that we must consider the interplay between Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, and gravity to understand how our universe began.

Subsequently, Lemaître explained that a cosmological constant was needed on the right side of the equation for General Relativity to account for the energy variations our universe had gone through during its different stages of expansion. Next came the shocker. Lemaître hypothesized that the expansion that was being observed first began with the explosion of a primal atom, an explosion that he believed should still be evidenced by faint traces of cosmic background radiation, which Lemaître likened to the ashes and smoke one sees lingering in a cold night sky after an explosive display of fireworks.

His theory initially was somewhat crude, but Lemaître had the best understanding of General Relativity and its cosmic implications for anyone then alive, bar none. Before long, his theory almost perfectly matched today's full-blown Big Bang theory. Not surprisingly, by 1950, Lemaître had become accepted as the father of Big Bang Cosmology.

Due to his also being a Catholic priest, agnostic and atheistic cosmologists were skeptical of his motives. However, as time passed, Lemaître gained more clout within the scientific community. The Catholic church also found that the science Lemaître had discovered (not invented) had great relevance. This fact prompted Pope Pius XII to approve the big bang theory in 1951 as scientific confirmation of the first few verses of Genesis.

Just three days before Lemaître's death in June 1966, he was notified of what became the cosmological shot heard around the world: Bell Lab researchers' accidental discovery of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang, just as Lemaître had predicted. Lemaître was still conscious and could now gleefully rest in peace. In 2018, the International Astronomical Union honored Lemaître by changing the name Hubble's law to the Hubble-Lemaître law, with H becoming known as the Hubble-Lemaître constant.

God has a way of using certain people to help non-scientists and scientists alike appreciate the beauty and awe of the universe he has so perfectly tweaked for life as we know it. Georges Lemaître was 70 years ahead of his time, and his contributions remain an eternal tribute to our Creator.

—  Larry B.

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