(ORDO NEWS) — It is not every day that one manages to rediscover the words of the world-famous thinker, the influential man of Albert Einstein himself.
A nearly 20-minute video interview with the “Father of the Big Bang” was found in the archives of the state broadcaster Vlaamse Radio-en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), located in the Flemish region of Belgium.
Watching lost footage is like looking back in time, scientists say. “.
The intellectual interview, conducted in French, was originally shown in 1964 and the footage was believed to be missing. Now it has finally been restored and is available for public viewing, albeit with Flemish subtitles.
For those who do not speak Flemish or French, an English translation was also provided in the arXiv preprint.
Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest who first discovered that the universe was expanding, even before Edwin Hubble demonstrated this effect with the world’s largest telescope.
Lemaitre’s logic eventually convinced Einstein in the early 1930s to admit that he was wrong and that the universe might not be static, given general relativity.
According to Lemaitre, the universe was hatched from a primordial “cosmic egg,” an atom that exploded in an ever-expanding firework of cosmic rays that continues to this day.
Not everyone was convinced by Lemaître’s theory, however, and much of his 1964 interview was devoted to refuting his opponents.
“A long time ago,” Lemaitre explains in the footage, “Before the expansion of the universe (about 40 years ago) we expected the universe to be static. We expected nothing to change.”
This is known as the Steady State Hypothesis, an idea advocated by the English astronomer Fred Hoyle in opposition to Lemaitre’s ideas.
According to Hoyle, the universe was constantly creating new matter in an unchanging but dynamic way, like a “flowing river”.
If this is true, if matter is constantly being created and sent downstream, there must be a mixture of young and old galaxies scattered throughout the universe.
On the other hand, the Big Bang (a term coined by Hoyle) means that old galaxies are farther away from the epicenter of the explosion.
For many years these two scenarios were hotly debated, and it was not until the 1950s that astronomical observations confirmed the correctness of the latter proposition.
“What will be the first result of this decay, as far as we can follow this theory, is actually to have a universe, an expanding space filled with plasma, very energetic rays going in all directions,” Lem Atre explains in a recently open interview .
“Something not at all like a homogeneous gas.
Then, by a process which we may vaguely imagine, we unfortunately cannot trace that in many details the gases must have been produced locally; gas clouds moving at great speed…
Both Hoyle and Lemaitre agreed that these gas clouds were composed almost entirely of hydrogen. But the two scientists didn’t agree on how these hydrogen gases came to be.
>Hoyle thought they were produced naturally by an “intelligent physical process,” Lemaitre explains in an interview Lemaitre thought of the beginning as “a kind of phantom hydrogen that appears with enough hydrogen to test an a priori law.”
The cosmic rays piercing the universe are essentially the fossils of this primordial ghostly atom.
“Of all the people who came up with the framework of cosmology that we are currently working with, there are very few records of how they talked about their work,” says physicist Satya Gontho A Gontcho of the US Department of Energy, co-author of the preprint.
One of the most exciting parts of the lost interview is when Lemaitre is asked how he reconciles his scientific theory with his religion.
“I am not defending the primordial atom for some ulterior religious motive,” he says in an interview.
“This is clearly a bit of a sensitive issue,” he adds. “I’m a little afraid now to dwell on it in a few words.”
The astronomer and priest did not consider the Big Bang to be contrary to his religion, and he did not think that science required a religious explanation. This topic was clearly not one he wanted to openly discuss.
“Lemaitre and others gave us the mathematical foundation that underpinned our current efforts to understand our universe,” says Goncho.
“Cosmology is trying to understand what happened in the past of the universe, and for most of us who make observations, this means very accurate measurement of the rate of acceleration of the universe at different points in time.
And if you understand how the Universe expanded at different points in time, then you can narrow down the range of possible dark energies.”
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