Priest of the Cosmos
The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern
Cosmology
by John Farrell
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005
(262 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Guillermo Gonzalez & Jay W. Richards
Can a priest be a first-rate scientist? Doesn’t religion dull one’s scientific acumen, destroy one’s objectivity, and bind one to espouse unscientific doctrines? Such, at least, is the caricature. But in reality, most of the founders of modern science were Christians—a fact known to most science historians if not to science textbook writers.
So it should not be surprising to find that the first modern cosmologist, Georges Lemaître, was also a priest. And yet the false caricature probably explains why this book is the first biography of Lemaître, though he died forty years ago—an astonishing omission, since he hardly fits anyone’s stereotype.
The Day Without Yesterday is a mix of history, cosmology, and theology—topics that must be included if the reader is to understand Lemaître’s discoveries and beliefs. The book, an easy read, lacks equations but includes historical and technical illustrations and even a glossary. We would recommend it to anyone interested in religion and the history of modern cosmology.
The author, a Boston-based writer and producer, is not a newcomer to the science-faith dialog. In the early 1990s, for example, he reviewed Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg and The Mind of God by Paul Davies for First Things.
Lemaître’s Finite Past
Soon after completing his studies in Belgium, Lemaître traveled to work for Sir Arthur Eddington at Cambridge University as a research student in astronomy. He then spent a year at Harvard and M.I.T. (from which he later earned his second doctorate) before returning to Belgium to teach at the University of Louvain.
Farrell spends a considerable amount of time describing Lemaître’s high-level interactions with the other leading astronomers and physicists of the day, such as de Sitter, Einstein, and Hubble. He also describes Lemaître’s “Primeval Atom” hypothesis for the origin of the cosmos, the precursor to the Big Bang theory, first published in 1931.
But Lemaître’s greatest scientific achievement was surely his 1927 publication of a dynamic solution to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which applied Einstein’s theory to the whole universe. He predicted a relationship between the distance and velocity of galaxies that astronomer Edwin Hubble would confirm only two years later.
It was this evidence that first suggested an expanding universe, which itself implied a finite past. Eddington and Einstein both initially rejected the idea, though a few years later Einstein came to describe Lemaître’s theory as “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”
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