Georges Lemaître & the Big Bang
June 20, 1966
Shortly before his death on June 20, 1966, the Belgian diocesan priest and physicist Georges Lemaître learned of the discovery of cosmic background wave radiation. This discovery further confirmed the theory he had propounded in 1927, known today as the Big Bang, which asserted that the universe was not eternal and unchanging, as the leading physicists of his day believed, but temporal and expanding.
Fr. Lemaître titled his 1927 paper “The Primeval Atom,” but astronomer Fred Hoyle, with eye-rolling sarcasm, called it “the Big Bang” in an attempt to dismiss his findings. A universe that was expanding over time implied a point at which time itself began. This not only contradicted the static-universe theory favored by Hoyle (and Einstein), but was also, as Hoyle and many of his fellow scientists believed, suspiciously harmonious with the creation account found in the Book of Genesis.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
24.2—March/April 2011
Certain Death & the Last Lectures of Socrates & Jesus by Randall B. Smith
31.2—March/April 2018
The Transmission of Christianity Is Not a New Task by Nathanael Devlin
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
