Happy B-day Father Georges! (by @sciencemug) |
Lemaitre's pic is a Public Domain img adapted by @sciencemug
(Source Wikimedia Commons)]
Happy birthday to Georges Henri-Joseph-Edouard Lemaître (aka Abbé Lemaître, since, after serving, as a volunteer, in the belgian artillery during the 1st World War and gaining a Military Cross, the man enters the seminary and becomes a priest), dad of the Big-Bang Theory (the 1927 science stuff*, not the 2007-still-on-air tv-show stuff... C'mon dude!)
By the way, do you know that the term "Big-Bang" comes up as a mockery of Lemaitre's theory in a 1950 radio broadcast? Yup, English astronomy dude Sir. Fred Hoyle (who is all into the concept of a static homogeneous universe that never started and will never end) that year does a thing where he explains science to common people. The thing is a series of five lectures, by Hoyle himself, about stars and the universe. The lectures air on the Third Programme (the present Radio 3) of the English BBC network, aaaand during the last of these radio lessons, well, our guy Hoyle spits his "Big-Bang"ing disdain on his colleague's cosmological idea... Sic!
* See "Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques" published in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles in 1927.