EPS Historic Site, Leuven, Belgium : Georges Lemaître, founder of the Big Bang theory
On 23 May 2019, the Belgian Physical Society, the European Physical Society, and the sister-universities UCLouvain and KU Leuven will celebrate the person and the work of Monsignor Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), who was a professor at the yet undivided University of Louvain, and the original founder of the theory of the Big Bang.
On this occasion, the EPS will recognise Heilige Geest College, in the historical city centre of Leuven, Belgium, as an EPS Historic Site. It is here that Monsignor Lemaître wrote his famous Nature paper in 1931. In this visionary paper, containing just over 450 words, he defined for the first time the idea of the Big Bang. The scientific community originally met his idea with scepticism. However, it gained significant support by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. As a remarkable side note, the paper of Penzias and Wilson – co-published with that of Dicke, Peebles, Roll and Wilkinson, that interprets the CMB as the remnant of a hot and dense point – reached Professor Lemaitre a few days before his death in 1966.
Recent satellite observations show, moreover, that the CMB radiation fits for over four decades in frequency with the Planck curve for the radiation of a black body (at a temperature of 2.725+-0001K). Since we cannot create such a perfect black body on earth, this radiation must thus have originated from something in extraordinarily good thermal equilibrium. The only known source with such properties is the universe at an earlier time when it was very hot and dense. This represents a recent spectacular support for the concept of the Big Bang.
On 23 May 2019, the “Big Bang Route” will be inaugurated as well. This 75 km long track is a thematic cycle route that the sister universities UCLouvain and KU Leuven have developed together with the cities of Leuven and Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve as well as the provinces of Brabant Walloon and Flemish Brabant. Along this route, starting from the statue of Georges Lemaître in Louvain-la-Neuve to his statue at the Premonstratensian College in Leuven, the origin and evolution of the universe are explained.
On the occasion of this festive celebration of Professor Lemaître, a book is in preparation containing the manuscript of Lemaître’s unpublished treatise “La Physique d’Einstein” in which he exposes both the special and general theory of relativity in his own very didactic words. Lemaître’s genius is shown by the fact that he submitted this original work in 1922, a mere seven years after the publication of Einstein’s paper on general relativity. This work earned him fellowships that launched him onto his path of ground-breaking scientific discoveries. The new book is entitled “Learning Einstein’s Physics with Georges Lemaître”, and is edited by Professor Jan Govaerts and Professor Jean-François Stoffel of UCLouvain. This original publication is of timely interest to young minds and of great value for the history of science. The book will become available in the coming months from Springer Verlag.
More information on the celebration in Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve on 23 May 2019, can be found at: https://ucl.odoo.com/en_US/event/big-bang-day-2019-05-23-74/register-open?&
