Martin le maitre biography of george

He volunteered and served as an artillery officer in the Belgian army. He was decorated for bravery, receiving the Military Cross, but the dreadful carnage he had seen on the battlefields troubled him deeply and changed his life. After the war ended he returned to his university studies but his interests now moved away from engineering and towards mathematics.

In he accepted a position as a part-time lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium but continued to spend time at Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.

Martin le maitre biography of george: Georges Lemaître was a Belgian astronomer

He was awarded a Ph. In the famous Solvay Conference was held and most of the leading physicists attended. Einstein said:- Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable. However in Hubble published work presenting considerably more evidence of an expanding universe, contradicting the then accepted theory of a static universe.

Eddington and other members of the Royal Astronomical Society began to undertake work to try to solve the problem brought about by the discrepancy between theory and observation. Almost all wanted to believe that the universe had always existed. He wrote:- If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta.

If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. This was the first explicit formulation of the currently accepted 'big bang' theory. Once the war was over, he began studying mathematics and physics, obtaining his doctorate in He was also preparing for the priesthood and eventually became a priest in Upon returning to Belgium, he became a lecturer and first presented his idea of the ever-expanding universe, which was published in The reason those findings were first accredited to Edwin Hubble was that the paper was published in a lesser-known journal, rarely read outside Belgium.

His theory on the universe as being in a constant state of expansion was beginning to gain more and more praise from his colleagues. For the American physician, see George D. For the professional road bicycle racer, see Georges Lemaire. The Reverend Monsignor. RAS Associate. CharleroiBelgium. LeuvenBelgium. Early universe. Subject history.

Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation. Early life [ edit ]. University studies and military service [ edit ]. Religious training [ edit ]. Voyage to Britain and the US [ edit ]. Work on cosmology [ edit ]. Hypothesis of the primeval atom [ edit ]. Views on relation between science and faith [ edit ]. Other scientific work [ edit ].

Final years [ edit ]. Honours and recognition [ edit ]. Namesakes [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ].

Martin le maitre biography of george: Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a

Van Nostrand Co, April Bibcode : ASSB Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. March Bibcode : Natur. ISSN S2CID October Bibcode : PNAS PMC PMID References [ edit ]. Physics Today. September A Science Odyssey. Retrieved 31 July Pontifical Academy of Science. Archived from the original on 19 October Retrieved 4 September Retrieved 7 September BBC Genome.

Fred Hoyle: An Online Exhibition. St John's College Cambridge. Einstein, however, believed in a steady-state model of the universe.

Martin le maitre biography of george: Georges Lemaître was born

He estimated the age of the universe to be between 10 and 20 billion years ago, which agrees with modern opinion. At seventeen years old, after studying humanities at a Jesuit school, he entered the civil engineering school of the Catholic University of Leuven. Inat the beginning of World War I, he paused his studies to engage as a volunteer in the Belgian army.

At the end of hostilities, he received the Military Cross with palms. After the war, he undertook studies in physics and mathematics and began to prepare for priesthood. The tragedy of the war in which he took part deeply marked him: he entered the Mechelen seminary and was ordained as a priest in However, neither the war nor his studies nor his vocation dried up his curiosity: sincehe had learnt the theory of relativity and perfectly mastered it.

Inhe visited the University of Cambridge where the astronomer Arthur Eddington initiated him into modern stellar astronomy and numerical analysis. He spent the following year at Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Harlow Shapley, who had just gained a name for his work on nebulae, and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he registered for the doctorate in sciences.

Inon his return to Belgium, he became a part-time lecturer at the University of Leuven.