2 November 2026

Georges Lemaitre was born on 17 July 1894 in Charleroi, Belgium. He grew up to be both a Roman Catholic priest and a scientist. Although he didn’t coin the phrase ‘Big Bang’, he was responsible for developing the theory of the origins of the universe.

It grew out of his observation that the universe was expanding. If it was expanding then at some point it must have been very small indeed. He posited the idea that it started with a single atom but this has since been developed differently.

With the primeval explosion which created the universe, he argued that there must be cosmic background radiation resulting from the Big Bang. Thirty years later, the radiation was observed by American physicists, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias in 1965. Lemaitre heard of this result shortly before he died.

For Lemaitre, there was so issue arising from his work as a priest and his work as a scientist. He saw that those who were involved in religion and science were all searching for the truth. He distinguished between the origin of the universe which was a physical notion and the creation of the universe which was a philosophical concept.

His status as a priest caused some suspicion amongst other scientists and his humble persona meant that he didn’t always get the credit for what he had discovered. He himself contributed to this obfuscation and devoted the later part of his life to mathematics.

Since his death, scientists  have plotted the origin of the universe to 10^-43 seconds before it began. This is a very small amount of time but it is enough to baffle the scientists. They can get no closer to the origin or to the creation of the universe than this. The mystery of the universe still remains in God’s hands! Deo gratias!