Google Honors Priest Who Created The Big Bang Theory With Doodle
- By C Barnett --
- 22 Jul 2018 --
Catholic priest honored for the time by Google
Google honored Father Georges Lemaitre through a Doodle on its principal landing page.[/tweetit] The company changes its “Google Doodle” to honor luminaries and events. This is, however, the first time it honored a Catholic priest.
Google Honors Priest Who Created The Big Bang Theory With Doodle[/tweetit]
Fr. Lemaitre was no ordinary Jesuit priest. He was also a noted scientist who achieved fame for being the first to propose the Big Bang Theory. Google decided to honor him on his 124th birthday. His theory was so outlandish at one time that another luminary scientist, Albert Einstein, dismissed his work, saying that although Lemaitre's mathematics hold water, the physics part was terribly wrong. The German-origin scientist was later forced to retract this statement after it was found Lemaitre was correct on all counts.
Lemaitre gave his theoretical proposal of the expanding universe. This hypothesis was confirmed through observation by Edwin Hubble. This event was later given the name Hubble's Law. The Belgian scientist first proposed the now widely accepted concept of the universe being expanded from a point. He termed this initial point as "Cosmic Egg" or "primeval atom" which exploded at moment of creation. He presented the theory in his 1931 academic papers, the contents of what is known as "Big Bang" theory.
Georges Lemaitre came into this world on July 17, 1894. His birthplace was Charleroi in Belgium. He enrolled in civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven when he was 17 years old. The doctorate came in 1920. He became a fully-fledged priest in 1923. He joined the University of Cambridge the same year, studying astronomy at the post-graduate level. In 1924, he spent his time in the United States, at Harvard College Observatory.
Love that today's Google Doodle is celebrating #Catholic Priest, Fr George Lemaître, proposer of the Big Bang Theory https://t.co/pPsSZySo5Q #science @DanielAngRC @nathanahearne @beingcatholic1 @FrankChiment @JeremyREteacher @edu_ivers @fizwiz @MattdeD @Madeline_Bev @travis_lyon pic.twitter.com/HZRCD3177y
— Kurt Challinor (@kchalls) July 17, 2018
In 1925, Lemaitre went back to Belgium to take up the part-time lecturer post at the Catholic University of Leuven. This university was the place where he started his momentous research. In 1927, he published his revolutionary theory of the continuously expanding universe. However, the link to the Big Bang Theory came much later. He proposed the concept of "Primeval Atom," a single point from which the entire known universe came into being.
The Belgian scientist attended several seminars at California Institute of Technology in 1933. His co-scientists later went on to became path breakers in their respective fields. Albert Einstein was among them. Lemaitre was awarded multiple accolades in his life, including the 1936 prize of Prix Jules Janssen, the French Astronomical Society's highest award.
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