“Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.” Albert Einstein
Be bad enough to get a handwritten margin note like this from your professor on a freshman physics quiz. Imagine being an aspiring young physics scientist and mathematician getting this commentary in a letter from Albert Einstein in the nineteen twenties? That would have a fledgling mathematician rethinking his career and switching to something like becoming an engineer – driving a train.
Fortunately, young brilliant Georges had a fallback career and confidence in his ideas and his abilities. Father Georges Lemaître was a Belgian priest[i] who proposed a theory when he analyzed the equations in Einstein’s theory of relativity. His investigation led him to the conclusion that the static and eternal universe model as it was then currently understood by Einstein and most other physicists was inadequate. Father Lemaître proposed that his examination demonstrated that the fabric of the universe, that mysterious combination of time and space, was expanding, and doing so very rapidly. Not just the trillions of galaxies and seemingly infinite solar systems flying apart from one another and us like shrapnel, but the whole universe was expanding into an unknown void like a balloon. An ‘abominable’ conclusion was the reaction from the greatest scientist of modern times.
Georges had experienced a career setback before when as a highly decorated soldier for bravery in WWI, he was transferred to the artillery to learn ballistics with the potential for officer training. But when he told his instructors that the ballistics math in the manual was incorrect, he was bounced out for insubordination. Some guys never learn. Undaunted by his earlier rebuff from the artillery trainers that derailed his military career, he persisted with his conclusions regarding relativity and developed a theory that became known derisively as the “Big Bang.” He wrote to Einstein suggesting that his equations showed that the universe was expanding, and thus going backward in time, the corollary was that the universe had a day “with no yesterday.” In effect, “Nonsense!” responded the good genius from Princeton.
In the thirties, another renowned scientist, a gifted astronomer in England, Edwin Hubble,[ii] 
demonstrated that the galaxies were flying away from us as proven by his observations of a red shift phenomenon in the light from his images. Not only flying apart, but those farthest away were flying apart even faster than the relatively nearby ones. Eventually it was shown that while Einstein had proven nothing within the universe could exceed the speed of light, the entire universe could expand faster than that.[iii] Einstein eventually conceded that Lemaître’s Big Bang and ‘day without a yesterday’ theory that the universe had a beginning was right. Albert Einstein and Father Lemaître later met and conferred. As we say around here, they were both “wikkid smaht.”
Not until the fifties did researchers at the AT&T Bell Labs, using advanced instruments, and others from
Yale University detect and identify the existence of a barely detectable radiation, Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is ubiquitous and distributed throughout the entire universe. The extremely low temperature CMB was predicted by Lemaître’s math of the Big Bang Theory and verified again the singular event that was the origin of every known entity in our universe, including our tiny planet. This cosmos of ours is still expanding with unimaginable speed from its instantaneous beginning. For the CMB discovery, the AT&T and Yale scientists shared a Nobel Prize. Father Lemaître learned of this new confirmation of his decades old work shortly before his death, the margin notes from the Professor finally put to rest.
Our universe is imbued with a tiny whisper of its beginnings. A whisper from everywhere that permeates and penetrates all things, including you and me.
Father Georges was once asked in a NY Times interview by a skeptical reporter how he could reconcile his brilliant career as a scientist with his vocation as a priest with the implication clearly that the two were incompatible. His elegant and simple answer resonates into our times now hewn with a false bifurcation of science and faith.[iv]
These whispers suggest those of an entirely different kind, but perhaps they are the same.
Until next time.
“The real cause of conflict between science and religion is to be found in men and not in the Bible or the findings of physicists… For those who understand both, the conflict is simply about descriptions of what goes on in other people’s minds…. I was interested in truth from the standpoint of salvation, just as much as in truth from the standpoint of scientific certainty. …
It appeared to me that there were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both.” Father Georges Lemaître (from the NYT’s interview)
[i] “Lemaître studied engineering, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain and was ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Mechelen in 1923. His ecclesiastical superior and mentor, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, encouraged and supported his scientific work, allowing Lemaître to travel to England, where he worked with the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington at the University of Cambridge in 1923–1924, and to the United States, where he worked with Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1924–1925. Lemaître was a professor of physics at Louvain from 1927 until his retirement in 1964.” From Wikipedia biography.
[ii] The same Edwin Hubble who was the source of the name of the space deployed Hubble telescope that forever changed our view of the universe.
[iii] Galaxies flying off the screen indicates what is now known as the event horizon. If something, star, planet, galaxy, accelerates away from us faster than the speed of light, its light cannot ever reach us, and it effectively disappears. What happens to them after that is empirically unknowable; even their continued existence can only be inferred. And in fact, galaxies do ‘disappear’ never to be seen by our eyes again beyond a horizon that beggars the imagination. That will get your wonder button pushed. But I digress.
[iv] Duncan Aikman, “Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth,” The New York Times, February 19, 1933, p. 3.
Shareable reproduced copy available via the Vatican Observatory archives: Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth (PDF)
Illustrations:
1.) societyforthehistoryofastronomy.com-public-domain-wikipedia-commons.jpg Father Georges Lemaître
2.) From https://strangenotions.com/fathers-of-science/
3.) Open source NASA from Hubble Telescope galaxy 240 light years away and moving fast.
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