The Primeval Atom and the Big Bang!
I recently read a couple of publications by Fr. Georges Lemaître- the first major proponent of the Big Bang Theory. I found his works enlightening, so I began to dig into his Big Bang postulation and the circumstances surrounding its acceptance. I’ll share a quick summary of my findings with you.
In 1927, Fr. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest, physicist and astronomer, theorized that planetary bodies were constantly receding from each other; he explained this phenomenon using the expanding universe concept. This theory was rooted in applying Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory to cosmology.
The Big Bang!
By deduction, if the distance between planetary bodies today is more than yesterday (in the past) and is less than it’ll be tomorrow (in the future), then there was a time (billions of years ago) when all the energy in the universe were packed into a single point; before the expansion commenced.
Lemaître called it the Primeval Atom- that tiny point into which every energy (some of which would later become galaxies, stars, planets) was jammed at inception. The first iteration of expansion of the Primeval Atom has now come to be known as the Big Bang.
However, his brilliant publication was received with skepticism even by Einstein himself as there was no direct evidence to back it up. Until 1929.
Enter Edwin Hubble. In 1929, the legendary American astronomer was planet-watching when he observed that the galaxies were constantly drifting away from each other (at a relative speed directly proportional to their distance of separation). This discovery provided the much-needed evidence to back up Lemaître’s earlier published theory.
For Lemaître, Hubble’s findings could not have come at a better time. The evidence it presented fundamentally changed the scientific view of the universe. Einstein and other contemporary astronomers/ scientists duly altered their stance on Lemaître’s theory. Since they could not explain Hubble’s observation by any other means, they began to accept the logic in Lemaître’s theory of universe (and multiverse) expansion.
Footnote: Before Lemaître’s publication, Soviet physicist Alexander Friedmann had proposed a similar approach by suggesting that the radius of the universe was constantly increasing.
