The Catholic Church in Belgium can take pride in the story of Georges Lemaitre, the priest and mathematician who changed the mind of Einstein on the creation of The Universe.
(This post needs a disclaimer, so here it is. It’s a post about science and one of its heroes. It’s a story I can’t tell without a heavy dose of science, so please bear with me. I read the post to my friends Pornchai, Joseph, and Skooter. Pornchai loved the math parts. Joseph said it was “very interesting,” and Skooter yawned and said, “You CAN’T print this.” When I told Charlene about the post, she said, “Well, people may never read your blog again.” Well, I sure hope that’s not the case. I happen to think this is a really cool story, so please indulge me this few minutes of science and history.)
The late Carl Sagan was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University when he wrote his 1980 book, Cosmos. It spent 77 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. Later in the 1980s, Dr. Sagan narrated a popular PBS series also called “Cosmos,” based on his book. Sagan was much imitated for his monotone intonation of “BILLions and BILLions of stars.” I taped all the installments of “Cosmos,” and watched each at least twice.
More than once, I fell asleep listening to Sagan’s monotone “BILLions and BILLions of stars.” I hope you’re not doing the same right now. Science was my first love as a geeky young man. Religion and faith eventually overtook it, but science never left me. Astronomy has been a lifelong fascination, and Carl Sagan was one of its icons. That’s why I was enthralled 25 years ago to walk out of a bookstore with my reserve copy of Sagan’s first and only novel, Contact (Simon & Shuster, 1985).
Contact was about radio astronomy and the SETI project – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It wasn’t science fiction in the way “Star Trek” was science fiction. Contact was science AND fiction, a novel crafted with real science, and no one but Carl Sagan could have pulled it off. The sheer vastness of the Cosmos unfolded with crystal clarity in Sagan’s prose, a vastness the human mind can have difficulty fathoming. Anyone who thinks we are visited by aliens from other planets doesn’t understand the vastness of it all.
The central theme of Contact was the challenge astronomy poses to religion. In the story, SETI scientist Eleanor Arroway – a wonderful character portrayed in the film version by actress Jodie Foster – becomes the first radio astronomer to detect a signal emitting from another civilization. The signal came from a planet orbiting Vega, a star, not unlike our own, about 26 light years from Earth. The message of the book (and film) is clear: if another species like us exists, and we are ever to have contact, it will be in just this way – via radio waves moving through space at light speed.
Here comes the geeky part. For those who never caught the science bug, a “light year” is a unit of distance, not time. Light moves through space at a known rate of speed -about 186,000 miles per second. At that rate, light travels through space about 5.86 trillion miles in one year. That’s a “light year,” and in numbers it represents 5,860,000,000,000 miles. In the vacuum of space, radio waves also travel at the speed of light.
The galaxy in which we live – the one we call “The Milky Way”- is a more or less flat spiral disk comprised of about 100 billion stars. The Milky Way measures about 100,000 light years across. That’s a span of about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, give or take a few. Please don’t ask me to convert this to kilometers!
This means that light – or radio waves – from across our galaxy can take up to 100,000 years to reach Earth. One of The Milky Way Galaxy’s approximately 100 billion stars is shining in my cell window at this moment. Our galaxy is one of about fifty billion galaxies now known to comprise The Universe. The largest known to us is thirteen times larger than The Milky Way. You get the picture. The Universe is immense.
IF E.T. PHONES HOME, MAKE SURE IT’S COLLECT!
In a recent post (”A Prisoner, A Professor, A Prelate, Two Priests and a Poet“) I made a cynical comment about UFOs. I wrote, “The real proof of intelligent life in The Universe is that they don’t come here.” It was an attempt at humor, but the problem with searching for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of practical physics. The limit of our ability to “listen” is a mere few hundred light years from Earth, a tiny fraction of the galaxy – a mere survey of our own backyard. If there is another civilization out there, we may never know it.
Even if we hear from them some day, it will be a one-sided conversation. The signal we may one day receive might have been broadcast hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years earlier. If we respond, it will take hundreds or thousands of years for our response to be detected. We sure won’t be trading recipes, or asking, “What’s new?” If there’s anyone out there – and so far we know of no one else – we can forget about any exchange of ideas, let alone ambassadors.
Still, I devoured Contact twice in 1985, then I wrote Carl Sagan a letter at Cornell. I understood that Sagan was an atheist, but the central story line of Contact was the effect the discovery of life elsewhere might have on religion, especially on fundamentalist Protestant sects who seemed the most threatened by the discovery.
I thought Carl Sagan handled the controversy quite well, without judgments, and even with some respect for the religious figures among his characters. In my letter, I pointed out to Dr. Sagan that Catholicism, the largest denomination of Christians in America, would not necessarily share in the anxiety such a discovery would bring to some other faiths. I wrote that if our galactic neighbors were embodied souls, like us, then they would be in need of redemption in the same manner in which we have been redeemed.
Weeks later, when an envelope from Cornell University’s Department of Astronomy and Space Sciences arrived, I was so excited my heart was beating BILLions and BILLions of times! Carl Sagan was most gracious. He wrote that my comments were very meaningful to him, and he added, “You write in the spirit of Georges Lemaitre!”
I framed that letter and put it on my rectory office wall. I wanted everyone I knew to see that Carl Sagan compared me with Georges Lemaitre! I was profoundly moved. But no one I knew had a clue who Georges Lemaitre was. I must remedy that. He was one of the enduring heroes of my life and priesthood. He still is!
FATHER OF THE BIG BANG
Georges Lemaitre died on June 20, 1966 when I was 13 years old. It was the year “Star Trek” debuted on network television and I was mesmerized by space and the prospect of space travel. Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian scientist and mathematician, a pioneer in astrophysics, and the originator of what became known in science as “The Big Bang” theory -which, by the way, is no longer considered in cosmology to be a theory.
But first and foremost, Father Lemaitre was a Catholic priest – a Jesuit, of course. He was ordained in 1923 after earning doctorates in mathematics and science. Father Lemaitre studied Einstein’s celebrated general theory of relativity at Cambridge University, but was troubled by Einstein’s model of an always-existing, never changing universe. It was that model, widely accepted in science, that developed a wide chasm between science and the Judeo-Christian understanding of Creation. Einstein and others came to hold that The Universe had no beginning and no end, and therefore the word “Creation” could not apply.
Father Lemaitre saw problems with Einstein’s “Steady State” theory, and what Einstein called “The Cosmological Constant” in which he maintained that The Universe was relatively unchanging over time. From his chair in science at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium from 1925 to 1931, Father Lemaitre put his formidable mind to work.
He developed both a mathematical equation and a scientific basis for what he termed the “primeval atom,” a sort of cosmic egg from which The Universe was created. He also concluded that The Universe is not static, as Einstein believed, but expanding at an ever increasing rate, and he put forward a mathematical model to prove it. In 1998, Father Lemaitre was proven to be correct.
Einstein publicly disagreed with Lemaitre’s conclusions, and the priest was not taken seriously by mainstream science largely because of that. In his book, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam Books, 2001), mathematician and physicist Stephen Hawking addressed the controversy:
“If galaxies are moving apart now, it means they must have been closer together in the past. About fifteen billion years ago, they would have been on top of each other, and the density would have been very large. This state was called the “primeval atom” by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, who was the first to investigate the origin of the universe that we call the big bang. Einstein seems never to have taken the big bang seriously.” (The Universe in a Nutshell, p. 22)
Stephen Hawking actually calculated the density of Father Lemaitre’s” Primeval Atom” just prior to The Big Bang. It was 1, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, tons per square inch. I haven’t checked this math myself, so we’ll take Professor Hawking’s word for it.
Though Einstein disagreed with Father Lemaitre at first, he respected his brilliant mathematical mind. When Einstein presented his theories to a packed audience of scientists in Brussels in 1933, he was asked if he thought his ideas were understood by everyone present. “By Professor D, perhaps,” Einstein replied, “And certainly by Lemaitre, as for the rest, I don’t think so.”
When Father Lemaitre presented his concepts of the “primeval atom” and an expanding universe, Einstein told him, “Your mathematics is perfect, but your grasp of physics is abominable.”
They were words Einstein would one day have to take back. When Edwin Hubble and other astronomers read Father Lemaitre’s paper, they became convinced that it was Einstein’s physics that was flawed. They could only conclude that the priest and scientist was correct about the creation and expansion of The Universe from the “primeval atom,” and the fact that time, space and matter actually did begin at a moment of creation, and that The Universe will end.
It’s an ironic twist that science often accuses religion of holding back the truth about science. In the case of Father Lemaitre and The Big Bang, it was science that refused to believe the evident truth that a Catholic priest proposed to a mathematical certainty: that the true origin of The Universe, and of time and space, is its creation on “a day without yesterday.”
For his work, Father Lemaitre was inducted into the Royal Academy of Belgium, and was awarded the Franqui prize by an international commission of scientists. Pope Pius XI applauded Father Lemaitre’s view of the creation of the universe and appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Science. Later, Pope Pius XII declared that Father Lemaitre’s work was a vindication of the Biblical account of creation.
The Pope saw in Father Lemaitre’s brilliance a scientific model of a created Universe that bridged science and faith and halted the growing sense that each must entirely reject the other.
Einstein finally came around to endorse, if not openly embrace Father Lemaitre’s conclusions. He admitted that his concept of an eternal, unchanging universe was an error. “The Cosmological Constant was my greatest mistake,” he said.
In January, 1933, Father Georges Lemaitre traveled to California to present a series of seminars. When Father Lemaitre finished his lecture on the nature and origin of The Universe, a man in the back stood and applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfying explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” Everyone present knew that voice. It was Albert Einstein, and he actually said the “C” word so disdained by the science of his time: “Creation!”
“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.” Albert Einstein
“The more we know of the universe, the more profoundly we are struck by a Reason whose ways we can only contemplate with astonishment” … Albert Einstein once said that in the laws of nature, ‘there is revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it, the merest empty reflection.’ In what is most vast, in the world of heavenly bodies, we see revealed a powerful Reason that holds the world together.” Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning, (Eerdmans, 1986).
“In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1)
“Live long and prosper.” Mr. Spock
For Further Reading:
‘A Day Without Yesterday’: Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang by Mark Midbon
Editor’s Note: Several of you have expressed a desire to join Fr. MacRae in a Spiritual Communion. He celebrates a private Mass in his prison cell on Sunday evenings between 11 pm and midnight. You’re invited to join in a Holy Hour during that time if you’re able.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
As a science buff, this article made for wonderful reading. I know many intelligent people whose faith is diminished by their intellect. But then their are some whose intellect so dwarfs all the rest of us that their understanding of the universe seems to require a depth of faith. I’m not talking about Einstein or Father Georges LeMaitre. I’m talking about you, Father M. This post is brilliant, funny, entertaining, and unfathomably deep. If Father LeMaitre was around today, he would be e-mailing this link to all his friends like I just did.
Thanks for this interesting reading. You are correct that the Big Bang theory is conclusive proof of the Biblical story of creation. My father, who was a physics teacher, and an Orthodox Jew (Modern Orthodox – he did not have a beard and black clothes), used to have a poster which said, “And God said…. [then it displayed Maxwell's Equations, which govern all forms of electro magnetic radiation, including light] … and there was light.” The story of Einstein’s error with the cosmological constant is well known to those with a physics or engineering background. I started out in that field, and then got sidetracked into law somehow. It always struck me that the study of physics leads to religious faith; the mathematics which governs our universe is too elegant to be random, it must be the product of a conscious design. In the beginning, God indeed created the heavens and the earth.
In “Stigmatized” Fr. Gordon wrote about his European friend, Pierre, being blessed by St. Padre Pio many years ago. Recently Pierre wrote that when his family vacationed with Msgr. Lemaitre in Switzerland, he and his brothers were called upon to serve as altar boys. Pierre adds, “I admit we were not aware of the brilliance of this jovial, fun loving, storyteller.”
Pierre has certainly been blessed.
Aloha Father:
.
This is a post my husband will just love! He is a math professor
God bless,
Esther
In these times when the secular press constantly tries to make out The Church is the enemy of science and reason this is a most welcome and fascinating post Father G!
I enjoyed this post, Father. I love astronomy (although have no real scientific knowledge of it) and could gaze at a starry, moonlit sky for hours in sheer awe, and even wondered from time to time if there was anyone else out there.
I don’t know how anyone scientist or not could look at our universe and not believe in God. Thanks to Fr Lemaitre we have the science behind our faith. Now there is a science curriculum our young people should be learning- Fr. Lemaitre’s work along with the Creation story!
Thanks for this enlightening and fascinating post.
Continued prayer for you and the rest of the men there.
Dear Fr. Macrae: I read your article with great interest. Fr Lemaitre is a hero of mine. I should send the following to you as a letter and may try to do so, but I did want to post it since the conceptualization joins both current concepts in cosmology and quantum theory with a potentially new conceptualization of the Holy Trinity. Forgive its length, but I think its meaning may be considerable.
In my retirement years (I am a retired physician), I developed a deep interest in the origins of the Universe and Cosmology as well as Quantum Physics and the “laws” governing those fields and as they relate to Man’s “special place” within the universe. I have actively sought scientific meaning in application to our “special situation” and have believed in the ultimate truth that God did and does play a dominant role in providing that situation.
I am also a great believer in the concept of “messages from God” revealed in epiphanies which occur to all of us if we are willing to see and/or hear the message(s). Because of this, I thought the following was important to communicate widely within the Christian community without relevance to who I am.
The constant developments in science have frequently been used by the Secular Progressive movements to deny the relevance of God. This story and revelation has bearing on that relevance.
In a recent extensive journey, my most memorable encounter came from a Southern Baptist evangelical who my wife and I ran into as a passenger sharing the aisle seat on our flight from Bucharest to London. We do not recall his name, but he was a very loquacious and affable 73 year old on his return from proselytizing (preaching the Gospel and saving souls) in the Ukraine.
We discussed his ministry and its high points and once he was certain that I was already convinced of the truth of Jesus Christ I told him that it seemed to be my lot to confront confirmed atheists who are the most difficult to convince that there “might” be something to either look forward to or contend with after death. I told him I did not ever “push” the gospel, since that usually just drives an atheist into a defensive – even angry – posture, and it seems to be counter-productive since there is usually no further conversation after that.
He seemed to reflect on that, and then reported that his biggest problem during his ministry was to explain the Trinity to the newly saved. After overcoming the difficulty of explaining that Jesus is God – i.e., that they are one and the same with the Holy Spirit, he said that many seemed to want to believe that Christians in fact have “three Gods”. You know: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” He admitted this was a difficult concept to explain but finally, during this particular trip, came upon what seemed to him to be a valid and comprehensible explanation. It occurred to him to compare the Trinity to the water molecule: H2O. That is: two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen combined as one.
What an excellent concept I thought and congratulated him on his epiphany relayed to me and we went our separate ways. But it wasn’t until later that I awoke to the remarkably profound concept he had evolved. Since he had no scientific background — I doubt that he realized what a deeply profound concept he had in fact developed expounded. If you can bear with me, let me explain how this conceptually relates to the Holy Trinity and makes that concept — and, in fact all of Christianity –even more comprehensible:
As we know, water is composed of two explosive gases: diatomic Hydrogen (H2 ) which is exceedingly flammable, “desirous” of stability outside itself and diatomic Oxygen (O2) which is necessary for the Hydrogen to “burn” (oxidize) and then stabilize. When they combine they do so violently and evolve a lot of heat. The end result of that process is that they form water: an exceedingly stable molecule and one which is also the most profound enemy of “fire” = water.
In the process of the combination of the two gases –O2 and H2 — there is one atom of Oxygen left over which is a nascent, elemental [O] which is an exceedingly active free radical. This nascent (new born) component goes free to find another element to combine with and thus itself becoming bound in a “new chemical relationship” and finding stability.
To carry this concept – this simile; this allegory – to a logical conclusion, I would call one of the Hydrogen atoms “the Father” and the other “the Holy Spirit”. Why? Because the most volatile and eruptive of the Trinity are the Father (God “fundamental”) and the Holy Spirit (also God, but “spiritual and fundamental”). They make up the “Old Testament” God. The one who gets REALLY angry and can become violent.
This is the “jealous God” and the component of the trinity which brooks no disloyalty nor deviation from His laws. This is the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah; drove Adam and Eve out of the garden and slew multitudes. But when we speak of the God of Christianity, we speak of a loving, forgiving presence. Thus, the stabilizing “Oxygen” in H2 O is the equivalent of Jesus Christ; the Son. It/He is a/the peacemaker. It (He) unifies the Father and the Holy Spirit together, thus becoming soothing “Holy Water” — (OK, maybe that’s a leap – but conceptually it is the truth!)
To carry the concept one step further: After the fundamental elements have combined, the “liberated” (remaining) single molecule of highly reactive nascent free radical Oxygen which evolved from the combination becomes a “seeker”. It “finds” and stabilizes other elements in need of change and stability. It occurred to me that this was rather like an Apostle! It carries the “message” at the fundamental level from the formation of “the Trinity”.
Now I thought this was profound, but there is much more to this allegory: Fundamental in modern science are the concepts of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics and chaos. The following discussion may sort of “muddy the waters” for those with no scientific background, but I will none-the-less dare to continue:
1) We know the “first” element evolving out of the concept of “The Big Bang” was the proton = Hydrogen. If what I am concluding is correct, Hydrogen was in all likelihood God’s first “messenger” to us, and all subsequent elements evolved from this first element.
2) We also know the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally a truth and that it dictates both the arrow of time and inter-relates closely with entropy.
3) We also know that all gases, particularly Hydrogen (H2 ), tend toward maximum entropy. That is the molecules disperse randomly to fill any provided space-time and are almost impossible to “contain”.
4) We also know that water is a molecule – individually – of exceedingly low entropy. It thus “reverses” the entropy of Hydrogen and Oxygen and – by this conversion – technically reverses the second law of thermodynamics at the atomic-quantum level – by virtue of the fact that it tightly binds oxygen and hydrogen in very stable relationships. Left to themselves as elements, hydrogen and oxygen tend toward very high states of entropy and chaos. Thus again, the value of the concept of the Trinity is exposed.
5) In stellar (star) development early on in the Universe, we also know that, Oxygen evolved as the most abundantly synthesized “new element” and that the fundamental components leading to biologic systems came from the primary constituent: hydrogen in nuclear fusion. From this fusion process there then developed Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N), and Oxygen (O).
Thus the allegorical message of the Trinity as a water molecule is imminently believable.
How good and simple and true can a simile within and allegory be? In my eyes, the concept is profound and the conclusions are extracted — of all things — from science!
I am always astounded at “messages from God”. Some think I am absolutely batty (especially atheists) and some Christians and believers are not so sure either. But the messages are all there and they are exceedingly logical. All we need do is “see and hear and think”.
It’s all there.
John S. Hardy, Jr. M.D., A.C.P., F.A.C.A.
Fr.G, That was really fun and interesting to read. I had forgotten all about Fr. Lemaitre. Such a great post. Loved it.
Patricia
Heb 13:3
JMJ
Great article! Being a Sci-Fi addict has led me from Bradbury to Christ! During my young navy years (1950’s) I read every science fiction book I could get my hands on. Then in the early 60’s I read a book titled “Our Lady of Fatima” and all the sci fi came crashing down as I learned of the great supernatural world that is around us. That started me on my spiritual journey into the true Faith: the Roman Catholic Church. Who needs sci-fi when we have God’s Saints levitating, bi-locating, reading minds, healing, flying, (Joseph of Cuppertino) and like Our Lady at Fatima, coming to us in a globe of light!
Thank You, Jesus & Mary!
Wow! That was fascinating and extraordinary that we have all heard of Einstein but not Lemaitre. Carl Sagan’s programmes were once on British television and I followed them all.
I believe it was Archbishop Fulton Sheen who once wrote:-
Two men looked out from prison bars
One saw mud, the other stars.
May you continue to see the stars from your window Father.