Georges Lemaître, is a Belgian astronomer and cosmologist who formulated the modern big-bang theory, which holds that the universe began in a cataclysmic explosion of a small, primeval “super-atom.”
Lemaître was born in 1894 in Belgium. As a young man he was attracted to both science and theology, but World War I interrupted his studies. After the war, Lemaître studied theoretical physics, and in 1923 was ordained as an abbé. The following year, he pursued his scientific studies with the distinguished English astronomer Arthur Eddington, who regarded him as “a very brilliant student, wonderfully quick and clear-sighted, and of great mathematical ability.”
Lemaître then went on to America, where he received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It is tempting to think that Lemaître’s deeply-held religious beliefs might have led him to the notion of a beginning of time. After all, the Judeo-Christian tradition had propagated a similar idea for millennia. Yet Lemaître clearly insisted that there was neither a connection nor a conflict between his religion and his science. Rather he kept them entirely separate, treating them as different, parallel interpretations of the world, both of which he believed with personal conviction. Indeed, when Pope Pius XII referred to the new theory of the origin of the universe as a scientific validation of the Catholic faith, Lemaître was rather alarmed. Delicately, for that was his way, he tried to separate the two:
“As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God… It is consonant with Isaiah speaking of the hidden God, hidden even in the beginning of the universe.”
(amnh.org)
