The Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang

The breech was still hot when Georges leaned over the firing table with a pencil stub and told the gun captain the manual was wrong. I remember the cold on my hands that morning, the smell of cordite hanging low over the position, and the flat disbelief on the officer's face when this artillery corporal — a seminarian's face on a soldier's body — pointed at a column of figures and said the trajectory tables did not add up. He was right. The correction went up the chain. The reprimand came down just as fast, because you do not tell an officer his manual is broken, even when it is. I served beside him through those years of mud and range-finding, and I can tell you the war did not blunt him. If anything it sharpened something in him that never went dull again.

He had come to it, like the rest of us from that country, sideways. Georges was a Charleroi boy, born in July of 1894 in a town built on coal seams and blast furnaces, the kind of place where a clever son was steered toward mining engineering the way water is steered downhill. He'd gone through the Jesuits at the Collège du Sacré-Coeur, all Latin declensions and disciplined hours, and by 1911 he was enrolled at the Catholic University in Louvain as an engineering student, headed, everyone assumed, toward the pits and the furnaces that had made the town. Then the guns started in August of 1914, and engineering waited.

He came home from the artillery with a decoration pinned to his chest and a mind that had gone somewhere the mining companies could not follow. Physics. Mathematics. He finished a degree in both by 1920, and then he did something that surprised even those of us who thought we knew him: he walked into the seminary at Malines for men called late to the priesthood. I asked him once, only half joking, whether the war had driven him to God or to differential equations, and he looked at me like the question made no sense, because to him they had never been two roads. He was ordained in 1923. From then on we called him Abbé Lemaître, and the title never once slowed him down.

He left for Cambridge that same year, on a fellowship, to sit under Arthur Eddington and learn the mathematics of a universe that bent under its own weight. Einstein's general relativity was still strange furniture to most physicists then, a house nobody had finished walking through. Eddington had proved light itself would bend around the sun; Georges wanted to know what the equations said about the shape of everything, not just the light passing near one star. I got letters from him in that Cambridge year, dense with symbols I could not follow, buoyant in a way his letters from the front had never been.

From England he crossed to America, first briefly to Canada, then to the Harvard College Observatory, where Harlow Shapley kept the great plates of the sky and the calculations that went with them. Harvard had no doctoral program of its own to give him, so he registered just down the road at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to finish the degree properly. He haunted both buildings at once, and by his own account those years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mattered as much to him as the ones in Cambridge, England, had. It was there, piecing a dissertation together, that the shape of his later work first showed itself, though none of us, him included, quite knew yet what it would become.

What he was gathering, without at first seeing the single thread through it, were facts other men had measured for other reasons. In 1925 word reached him of Edwin Hubble's distances to the spiral nebulae, proof they lay far outside the Milky Way, whole island systems of stars in their own right. He went out to California, to Caltech, and sat with Robert Millikan talking about cosmic rays raining down from beyond the atmosphere. He traveled to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona and learned what Vesto Slipher had spent years measuring with a patient spectroscope: the light from those distant nebulae was shifted toward the red, as if every one of them were running from us.

I picture him on the train back east with all of that rattling in his head at once — distances from Hubble, redshifts from Slipher, the elastic geometry of Einstein's equations from his own hard-won mathematics — and something in him simply closing the circuit. If the universe obeyed those equations, and if the galaxies really were retreating, the retreat was not an accident of a few unruly nebulae. It was the fabric itself stretching. And if it was stretching now, it had been smaller before, and smaller before that, all the way back to something almost unthinkable: everything that exists compressed into a single, dense point, what he would later call the primeval atom.

He wrote it up in French and sent it to a modest Belgian journal, the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, in 1927. There was no fanfare. It sat there, this quiet paper with its section proposing a straight-line relationship between a galaxy's distance and the speed of its retreat, a number near six hundred kilometers per second for every megaparsec, and almost nobody outside Belgium read it. I remember him shrugging about it more than complaining, the way a man shrugs about a good letter that got lost in the post.

That same autumn the Solvay Conference gathered in Brussels, and the great men of physics filled a room together — Einstein among them, Bohr, Marie Curie, Heisenberg, the whole roster that made the newspapers when it traveled anywhere. Georges was young enough, and Belgian enough, to be at the edges of it, but he found his way to Einstein, and the two of them talked cosmology while more official business waited. I heard from more than one man in that room that Einstein was polite about the mathematics and unconvinced by the physics — abominable was the word that came back to me, though I did not hear it myself — because to Einstein an expanding universe still felt like an offense against a settled cosmos. Georges did not flinch from that. He simply kept working.