Measuring the Potentially Infinite

Abstract

Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) was born in Charlerio, Belgium. He studied religion, humanities and classical languages at a Jesuit school before enrolling at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1911. His engineering studies were interrupted by the World War, in which he served as a soldier in the Belgian army. Returning to the university, he turned his attention to physics and mathematics, earning a doctor of sciences in mathematics in 1920. Lemaître was ordained into the priesthood in 1923, later serving as the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences from 1960 until his death. During the time between his ordination and his appointment as university professor in 1927, Lemaître travelled to Cambridge, where he studied under Arthur Eddington, and to the United States, where he received his Ph.D. under the guidance of Harlow Shapley. He was increasingly drawn to recent developments in cosmology and astrophysics, and in 1927 Lemaître published a paper in which he suggested that the universe originated from the radioactive disintegration of a single primeval atom and that its size was increasing according to what is now known as Hubble’s law. The ideas presented in this paper were initially rejected by many prominent cosmologists since they suggested that the universe had a beginning—a notion which contradicted the prevailing static view of the universe. Nonetheless, Lemaître’s ideas profoundly shaped modern Big Bang cosmology. The reading selections that follow were taken from the 1950 English translation by Betty H. Korff and Serge A. Korff of Lemaître’s 1946 publication entitled L’hypothèse de l’atome primitif. Lemaître begins this book on The Primeval Atom by inquiring as to the actual size and shape of the universe taken as a whole. In attempting to answer this ancient question, considered over two millennia earlier by both Archimedes and Aristotle, Lemaître draws upon the recent work of Poincaré, Einstein, Hubble, De Sitter and Friedmann.

The world is not a dungeon, not even a nicely-decorated dungeon; it is a boundless perspective, marked out with bright guideposts.

—Georges Lema