The Day Without Yesterday

by John Farrell

The Big Bang theory is now so widely accepted it's easy to forget how skeptically it was greeted by the scientific establishment -- which was uncomfortable, to say the least, with a theory positing an absolute beginning to the universe, with its echoes of biblical Creation. That anti-religious bias may help to explain why it took a physicist who was also a Catholic priest to make the initial discoveries leading to the Big Bang theory -- and why, in the near-century since, Fr. George Lemaitre's pioneering work has been ignored. Now, in The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, John Farrell relates how Fr. Lemaitre convinced a generation of scientists, among them Albert Einstein, to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion that could be traced back to a starting point for space and time -- what Fr. Lemaitre called "the day without yesterday."

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• How Fr. Lemaître's skill with mathematics enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein

• How, as the first specialist in general relativity to train himself in astronomy and astrophysics, Lemaitre became the first true modern cosmologist -- able to combine theory with observational data

• How Lemaitre posited the idea of a temporal and spatial origin to the cosmos, in a "primeval atom" theory of a superdense cosmic nucleus from which the universe expanded -- what later became the Big Bang theory

• How Lemaître proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein -- who initially rejected it

• How Lemaître was a lifelong proponent of the "cosmological constant" even after Einstein had abandoned it, and was proven right in the 1990s

• How Lemaitre developed the key theory that allowed later astrophysicists to model black holes

• How Lemaitre derived Hubble's Law two years before Hubble did

• How Lemaitre's faith and priestly vocation influenced his outlook on science, relativity and cosmology -- and vice versa