Georges Lemaître, Big Bang, Fireworks universe

Today's neglected pioneer is Georges Lemaître, who is the most famous alumnus of my College (St Edmund's College, Cambridge). He interpreted Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe correctly. As Marcia Bartusiak says in her book The Day we Found the Universe (Pantheon 2009) "Lemaître was the first to say directly that the galaxies are fleeing from us because spacetime at each and every point throughout the cosmos is continually stretching." Crucially. Lemaître did not say the galaxies are fleeing from us. Rather, as Bartusiak puts it, the galaxies embedded in spacetime are participating in a free ride

Stay tuned for more blogs on great astronomers who have been neglected by the textbook writers. Tomorrow I'll write of Robert Grosseteste and the medieval Big Bang universe

Simon
http://www.totalastronomy.com