In 1951, Pope Pius XII gave this highly publicized
speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Right. And he basically stands up and proudly
declares to the world that modern physics had
finally proven the Christian doctrine of creation
out of nothing. A huge moment for the church.
Oh, massive PR victory. Yeah. The Pope claimed
that the Big Bang was the literal scientific
observation of the exact moment God said, let
there be light. Yeah. But the wild thing is the
guy who actually invented the Big Bang Theory
was sitting right there in the audience. And
he was not happy. No, he was absolutely horrified
because that guy wasn't just a brilliant theoretical
physicist. He was a Catholic priest. Exactly.
And he was about to do the unthinkable walk right
up to the head of his own church and tell the
pope to back off. It's a moment that perfectly
captures one of the most remarkable yet somehow
historically overshadowed figures in 20th century
science. Welcome to today's Deep Dive. Our mission
today is to explore the life of Georges Lamentre.
We're drawing from a really comprehensive Wikipedia
article detailing his life, his work, and his
legacy. Quite a legacy. Truly. The goal for you
listening today is to help us unravel the mechanics
of his genius. Like, how does a guy navigate
the absolute highest echelons of theoretical
physics and the deep spiritual commitments of
the Catholic priesthood without ever compromising
either? Right, because we're so used to seeing
faith and empirical science as these mortal enemies,
you know? Yeah. Fighting for the exact same territory.
Exactly. But spoiler alert. He is responsible
for the most famous law in astronomy and the
most famous term in cosmology. Even if the history
books haven't always given him the credit. Yeah,
to really grasp the physics he eventually proposed,
we kind of have to look at the psychological
foundation he built first. Makes sense. His defining
traits, this immense mathematical discipline
and just a fierce independence from authority,
they were actually forged in the trenches of
World War I, way before he ever looked at a telescope.
Wow, WWI. Yeah, he was born in Charleroi, Belgium
in 1894, and he was actually studying engineering
when the war broke out in 1914. So he just dropped
everything. Pretty much. He volunteered for the
Belgian army and was assigned to the artillery.
OK, let's unpack this, because artillery isn't
just, you know, loading a cannon and pulling
a lanyard. Far from it. It's entirely about applied
mathematics. You're dealing with ballistics.
Calculating trajectories based on payload weight,
explosive force, wind resistance, elevation.
Right. It is a grueling, high stakes math problem.
And getting the variables wrong means, well,
hitting your own troops. Exactly. Which makes
what happened next just so illuminating. He was
sent to take this course on ballistics to improve
his unit's accuracy. OK. Now, in any military
setting, the chain of command is absolute. Right.
Of course. You do what you're told. Right. You
do not question your commanding officers, and
you certainly do not question the official training
manuals. Uh -oh. Let me guess. Yep. LaMaitre
was reading through the artillery manual and
found a fundamental mathematical error. In the
official manual? In the official manual. An error
in how they were calculating trajectories. And
he didn't just quietly fix it for his own calculations.
He openly pointed it out to his instructor. No
way. Yeah. He argued that the manual was objectively
wrong. I mean, he's sitting in the middle of
a global catastrophe surrounded by mud and artillery
fire, and bad math is the line he absolutely
refuses to cross. That's Lemaitre for you. They
actually marked him down for insubordination
because of it. You're kidding. Nope. It completely
derailed his prospects for being promoted to
an officer. He stayed a rank -and -file soldier
for the rest of the war. Wow. But his physical
courage was undeniable. By the end of the conflict,
he got the Belgian war cross with bronze palm.
That's a huge deal, right? Oh, yeah. He was one
of only five rank -and -file troops to receive
it directly from King Albert I. Honestly, that
insubordination detail tells us everything we
need to know about the guy. He fundamentally
cared more about what was objectively true than
what authority told him was true. Exactly. If
the math said one thing and the commanding officer
said another, the math wins. And if we connect
this to the bigger picture, that unwavering commitment
to mathematical truth is the exact same mechanism
that later allows him to challenge Albert Einstein.
Oh, we are definitely getting to that. Yeah.
So after surviving the war, he abandons his engineering
path, shifts completely into physics and mathematics,
and gets his doctorate in 1920. And then makes
a pivot that just completely baffled his secular
peers. Right. He enters the seminary to become
a priest. But not just a regular parish priest,
right? ordained in 1923, he joined a specific
group called the fraternity sacerdotau des amis
de jesu. Right, the friends of Jesus. Yeah, and
he took the standard vows, poverty, chastity,
obedience, but he also took a special vow, the
votum immolationis. The vow of immolation. Yeah,
what does that actually entail? It's a profound
total submission to the person of Christ. It
goes way beyond standard religious duties. It's
essentially a complete surrendering of the ego
and the self to his spiritual calling. It seems
so contradictory on the surface. You've got this
stubborn, mathematically rigorous combat veteran
taking a vow of complete spiritual submission.
It does seem paradoxical. You know, maybe Lamech's
life is less like these two clashing forces and
more like, think of it like two parallel train
tracks, absolute devotion to his faith and absolute
rigorous commitment to science running side by
side, but never crossing. That's a really good
way to put it. Right. He's using two completely
different lenses. One lens, his science was strictly
for looking at how the universe functioned. The
other lens, his faith was strictly for exploring
why it had meaning. He never tried to jam the
two lenses together because that would just distort
the picture. And that separation is what allowed
his scientific mind to operate with absolute
freedom. His superiors in the church actually
recognized his brilliance. They fully supported
his scientific ambitions. Which is pretty cool.
Yeah. After his ordination, they sent him to
Cambridge to study under Arthur Eddington, one
of the top astronomers at the time. Then he goes
to Harvard. to work with Harlow Shapley. And
he even enrolls in a doctoral program at MIT.
So he's just absorbing the absolute cutting edge
of physics. Exactly. Which brings us to 1927
and his collision with Albert Einstein's theory
of general relativity. OK. Here is where we really
need to understand the physics of the era to
get why this was such a big deal. Right. Einstein's
relativity essentially said that gravity is the
warping of spacetime. by mass. Massive objects
pull on each other. So if you look at the universe
as a whole, all the galaxies should be pulling
on each other. Left to its own devices, a universe
full of mass should eventually collapse inward
under its own gravity. Right. But Einstein, like
almost every other scientist at the time, firmly
believed the universe was static. Frozen. Yeah,
that it had always existed, unchanging, in a
steady state. So to prevent his theoretical universe
from collapsing inward in his equations, Einstein
mathematically wedged this fudge factor into
his formulas. A fudge factor. Yeah, a repelling
force called the cosmological consonant. He essentially
balanced the inward pull of gravity with an outward
push, freezing the universe in place. But LeMetro
looked at that exact same math. the exact same
equations, and notice the exact same kind of
problem he saw in the artillery manual. Precisely.
The math didn't describe a frozen universe. Well,
Metra realized this balance Einstein created
was incredibly unstable. How so? Well, if that
outward pushing force was even slightly stronger
than the inward pull of gravity, the universe
wouldn't just sit there. It would actively stretch
apart. Wow. In 1927, he published a paper in
an obscure Belgian journal proposing exactly
that. the fabric of space itself is expanding.
And he didn't stop there, right? No. He calculated
that because space is stretching, the further
away a galaxy is from us, the faster it will
appear to be moving away. The source text gives
a really brilliant, simple analogy for this that
makes the physics easy to visualize. Oh, the
bread one. Yeah. Imagine the universe is like
raisins in a rising loaf of bread. As the dough
bakes and expands, the space between the raisins
grows. Every raisin moves further away from every
other raisin. If you're sitting on one specific
raisin, all the other raisins look like they're
receding from you. And the ones furthest away
have more expanding dough between you and them,
so they're receding the fastest. It perfectly
captures the concept. The galaxies aren't just
flying through empty space. Space itself is the
dough, and it's expanding. That's mind -blowing.
But when Lemaître presented this 1927 paper to
Einstein at the Solvay conference, Einstein's
response was famously brutal. Oh, I love this
quote. He looked at Lemaître and said, your calculations
are correct, but your physics is abominable.
Abominable. The greatest mind of the century
tells you your grasp of reality is terrible.
Most people would just quit on the spot. Most
people, yeah. But Lemaître had already been told
by his commanding officers that his math was
wrong, and he knew he was right then, too. He
trusted the equations. He did. And he was entirely
vindicated just two years later. In 1929, the
American astronomer Edwin Hubble published observational
data from the Mount Wilson Observatory. This
is the famous Hubble's law. Exactly. Hubble tracked
the light from distant galaxies and proved exactly
what Lemaitre had theorized. Galaxies were indeed
receding at a velocity proportional to their
distance. The scientific community immediately
embraced it. And for decades, this phenomenon
was universally known as Hubble's law. Wait,
I have to push back on this timeline. Go ahead.
Lemaitre published the math and a proportional
relationship in 1927. Hubble published his observations
in 1929. Right. Why didn't Lemaître fight for
the credit? If he was so stubborn about the artillery
manual, why let Hubble take the glory for the
expanding universe? It's a great question. And
for a long time, the history of science actually
viewed this as a massive conspiracy. Really?
Yeah. In 1931, Lemaître's 1927 paper was finally
translated into English and published in the
prominent monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society. But mysteriously, The specific paragraphs
where Lemaître estimated the rate of expansion,
what we now call the Hubble constant, were completely
missing from the translation. So people assumed
the English editors censored Lemaître to protect
Hubble's legacy, like a classic scientific cover
-up. That was the prevailing theory. Until 2011,
an astrophysicist named Mario Livio dug into
the archives of the Royal Astronomical Society
and found the original correspondence. He proved
conclusively that Lemaitre translated the paper
himself, and Lemaitre intentionally deleted those
paragraphs. He erased his own discovery. Why
would he do that? Because by 1931, Hubble's observational
data from 1929 was vastly superior to the data
Lemaitre had access to back in 1927. Oh, wow.
Lemaitre realized his old estimates were outdated,
so out of pure scientific integrity, he omitted
his own groundbreaking calculations to defer
to the more accurate data. Yes, just to all.
He didn't care about his ego or securing his
name in the history books. He only cared that
the most accurate version of the truth was being
advanced. That is a staggering application of
that vow of immolation. The total surrender of
the ego. It really is. Though, to be fair to
history, the record is finally being set straight.
In 2018, the International Astronomical Union
officially voted to rename the phenomenon the
Hubble Ametra Law. A deeply necessary correction,
yeah. But LeMatch's brilliance wasn't just in
seeing the expansion, it was in realizing the
logical conclusion of that expansion. Here's
where it gets really interesting, because if
you know the universe is expanding like that
rising loaf of bread, you can conceptually just
hit rewind on the universe's movie. Precisely.
If things are moving apart today, yesterday they
were closer together. Right. La Major followed
the mathematics of thermodynamics and quantum
mechanics all the way back to day zero. In a
short, highly provocative paper published in
the journal Nature in 1931, he proposed that
if you wind the clock back far enough, all the
mass and energy of the entire universe must have
been compressed into a single, unimaginably dense
quantum state. And he called it what? He called
it the primeval atom. So the entire cosmos...
Every star, every galaxy, all of space and time
crushed into a single unstable microscopic point
that eventually fractured and expanded outward.
He essentially birthed modern cosmology with
a single logical leap. Yeah, and people noticed.
By 1932, this idea was being featured in Popular
Science magazine. By 1933, Lemaître was a global
celebrity. That was fast. He was touring the
United States, lecturing in California. And during
one of these lectures, Albert Einstein was in
the audience. Oh no, round two. Actually, when
Lemaître finished explaining the primeval atom,
Einstein stood up, applauded, and declared, this
is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation
of creation to which I have ever listened. The
man who called his physics abominable gives him
a standing ovation. Complete 180. But if we look
at the source text, Lemaître never actually used
the phrase Big Bang. No, he didn't. The term
Big Bang was actually coined years later in 1949
as a mocking insult. Yeah. An astronomer named
Fred Hoyle, who fiercely defended the old idea
of an internal steady state universe, was giving
a BBC radio broadcast. He was trying to make
Lemaitre's theory sound ridiculous, so he derisively
referred to it as this Big Bang idea. And it
totally backfired. Completely. The name was so
catchy that it stuck forever. but Hoyle's resistance
highlights a major tension that Lemaitre had
to deal with. To a lot of secular scientists,
the idea of a universe bursting into existence
from a single point at a specific moment in time
sounded suspiciously like the book of Genesis.
It sounded like a priest trying to smuggle religion
into the physics lab. And to be fair, early in
his career, Lemaitre did actually attempt to
harmonize the two. There's this philosophical
approach called Concordism, which is the attempt
to read scientific facts directly into theological
scriptures. OK, how did you do that? Well, for
instance, in 1917, Lemaitre tried to link the
physical concept of black body radiation to the
Bible. Just to clarify for anyone who hasn't
taken a physics class recently, black body radiation
is basically the concept that when objects heat
up, they emit light. The color of the light depends
on the temperature, like iron glowing red in
a forge. Good summary. So how did he link that
to the Bible? He theorized that the initial expansion
of the universe would have been intensely hot,
creating a massive burst of primordial light.
He tried to argue that... This physical radiation
was the literal manifestation of God saying fiat
lux, let there be light in Genesis. So he's trying
to prove that physics and scripture were saying
the exact same thing. Exactly. But he realized
how dangerous that was, didn't he? Because if
our understanding of physics changes, which it
always does, does that mean the scripture is
suddenly false? That's exactly the trap. And
he eventually abandoned Concordism entirely.
He realized that using science to prop up religion
or using religion to dictate science fundamentally
to lead to grades both of it. It muddies the
waters. Yeah. He gave an interview to the New
York Times where he stated plainly, there is
no conflict between religion and science to reconcile.
To Lemaître, the Bible was a guide for salvation
and human morality, not a textbook on astrophysics.
Right. A scientific theory had to stand entirely
on its own mathematical and observational merits,
completely isolated from theology. Which brings
us crashing back to the story we started with.
Oh, the pope? Is it incredibly ironic? For years,
secular scientists distrusted his theory because
they thought he was secretly pushing a religious
agenda. And then in 1951, the Pope actually does
exactly what the scientists feared. He publicly
declares that the Big Bang is scientific proof
of the Catholic faith. You can imagine Lemaître's
panic. I mean, if the head of the Catholic Church
officially brands the Big Bang as Catholic dogma,
every non -Tatholic scientist in the world might
reject it at a pure religious prejudice, regardless
of what the math says. Exactly. Lemaître knew
this would destroy the objective credibility
of his life's work. So what exactly did he do?
Because telling the pope he's wrong about theology
is a historically dangerous move. Well, Lemaître
teamed up with Father Daniel O 'Connell, who
was the director of the Vatican Observatory.
Together, they requested an audience with Pope
Pius XII. Just marched right in. Yeah, and they
painstakingly explained that linking a physical
cosmological model to eternal theological truths
was a massive mistake. Science is inherently
mutable. It updates as new data arise. Theology
claims to be eternal. If you tie them together,
you put the church in a highly vulnerable position.
And it worked. Remarkably, yes. They convinced
the Pope to completely stop making public statements
linking the Big Bang to creationism. He guarded
the integrity of his physics with the exact same
fierce dedication he gave to his religious vows.
Exactly. He kept those two lenses completely
separate. And because he didn't view his theory
as the final divine word on the universe, he
kept hunting for physical evidence to back it
up. Yes. Lemaitre reasoned that if the entire
universe exploded from a primeval atom, that
event must have left behind fossils residual
energy still echoing through space today. So
he spent a massive portion of his later career
studying cosmic rays, believing they might be
the literal debris of the Big Bang. Cosmic rays
are essentially high energy particles zooming
through space that constantly bombard the Earth.
But the source text mentions that his study of
cosmic rays led him into a totally different
field. Oh, the computing stuff. Yeah. So what
does this all mean? How does a chalkboard theoretical
physicist become a pioneer of early computer
programming? It loops right back to his time
in the WWI artillery. He had a lifelong obsession
with complex numerical computation. At the time,
there was this fierce debate in physics. A Nobel
laureate named Robert Milliken argued that cosmic
rays were basically just high -energy light photons.
But Lemaître disagreed. Right. Lemaître thought
they were physical charged particles. But to
prove it, he had to calculate how these theoretical
particles would be deflected by the Earth's curved
magnetic field as they approached the planet.
Doing that kind of complex three -dimensional
calculus by hand for thousands of different trajectories,
that would take a human lifetime. Which is why,
while working with a scientist named Sandoval
Velada at MIT, Lemaître turned to one of the
world's first analog computers. Vannevar Bush's
differential analyzer. I looked this up and we
have to be clear. This is not a computer with
a screen and a keyboard. No, not at all. This
is a massive room -sized mechanical beast made
of physical gears, rotating shafts, and metal
wheels. You literally programmed it. using a
wrench to physically connect different gears
to solve calculus equations through mechanical
rotation. He was an engineering marvel, and LaMetra
mastered it. By feeding the equations into the
differential analyzer, LaMetra and Volarda proved
that the intensity of cosmic rays changes depending
on your latitude on Earth. Which means? That
behavior is only possible if the rays are charged
particles being bent by the magnetic field. They
used a mechanical brain to completely disprove
a Nobel laureate's theory of light. It's the
artillery manual all over again. When the calculations
get too complex, he just finds a better tool
to correct the math. Exactly. He eventually introduced
the Burroughs E -101. an early electromechanical
computer to his university in Belgium, and even
worked on developing an early programming language
called VeloCode, a precursor to BASIC. It's incredible.
And beyond early computing, his ability to look
at the math and see reality decades before anyone
else continued to yield massive results. Let's
look back at that fudge factor in Einstein's
equations, the cosmological constant. Oh, right,
the anti -gravity push. Once Hubble proved the
universe was expanding, Einstein completely abandoned
in the constant, famously calling it his biggest
blunder. Because if the universe is expanding,
you don't need a mathematical force keeping it
static. So Einstein threw it out. But Lemaître
argued passionately to keep it. He told the scientific
community that a positive cosmological constant
was still mathematically necessary. He proposed
that it didn't just keep things static. It represented
a repulsive energy inherent to the vacuum of
space itself. He argued it would eventually cause
the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Wait, he predicted an accelerating universe in
the 1930s? He did. And in 2011, the Nobel Prize
in Physics was awarded to a team of modern astronomers
who proved, using distant supernovae, that the
expansion of the universe is indeed accelerating.
That's dark energy. Yes. We now call the mysterious
force driving this acceleration dark energy.
When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences published
the scientific background for that 2011 Nobel
Prize, they explicitly credited Georges Lemaître
for his incredible decades ahead of its time
foresight regarding the cosmological constant.
So he foresaw the Big Bang. He predicted dark
energy. He helped pioneer computer programming
all while actively serving the church. Right.
He eventually became the president of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences in 1960. He held that position
until his death. But Even with that high -ranking
Vatican role, he never lost his intellectual
humility. During the Second Vatican Council in
the early 1960s, the Pope asked La Metra to serve
on a special commission examining the incredibly
complex theological and social issue of birth
control. A commission that could fundamentally
alter Catholic doctrine. What was his response?
He politely declined. Really? Yeah. His health
was failing, he had recently suffered a heart
attack, but he also confided in a colleague that
he believed it was deeply dangerous for a mathematician
to venture outside his specific area of expertise.
He knew exactly what he was qualified to analyze
and what he wasn't. He knew which lens to use.
Precisely. Which brings us to the end of his
life and frankly a moment of cosmic timing that
feels almost scripted. It really does. George
Lemaître died on June 20th, 1966. But just a
few days before he passed away in his hospital
bed in Belgium, his assistant came to his room
to deliver some breaking news. What happened?
Two radio astronomers in New Jersey, Arno Penzias
and Robert Wilson, had accidentally detected
a faint uniform microwave signal coming from
every direction in the sky. The cosmic microwave
background radiation. Exactly. When the primeval
atom expanded, the universe was incredibly hot.
dense. As it expanded, it cooled. The CMB is
the residual heat from that initial expansion
stretched out over billions of years into microwave
frequencies. It is the literal physical echo
of the Big Bang. Yes, it was the ultimate irrefutable
proof that the Lemaître's 1931 theory was correct.
He got to hear that his life's greatest work
was proven true just days before he died. That
is beautiful. So looking at his entire life,
The thing that resonates the most is how he managed
his own internal complexity. Oh, absolutely.
We live in a culture that constantly demands
we pick a side. Are you a person of cold, hard
data, or are you a person of deep spiritual intuition?
We are told that these identities are at war
with one another. But look at Lamentra. What
if his genius didn't happen in spite of his divided
life, but because of it? What could you achieve
if you stop trying to force all of your diverse
interests, your varied beliefs, and your seemingly
contradictory passions into one neat, unified,
easily explainable box? What if, like Lemaitre,
you just let them exist powerfully and independently,
side by side? It's a solid reminder that the
universe and the people who study it are rarely
simple. A profound thought to leave on. Thanks
for joining us on this deep dive into the expanding
mind of Georges Lemaitre. Keep questioning the
manuals and we'll catch you next time.