by (opens in a new tab)
The only known video interview with Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître, widely considered the “father of the Big Bang”, talking about the birth of the universe has been rediscovered almost 60 years after his disappearance.
Lemaître (1894-1966) was a professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and a practicing Catholic priest. In 1927, he was the first to propose that the movement of galaxies far from Earth was a sign that the universe was expanding, which was later confirmed by the observation of American astronomer Edwin Hubble.
Lemaître was also the first to derive Hubble’s law, which states that galaxies move away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance, although Hubble was given all the credit at the time. (The International Astronomical Union renamed the idea the Hubble-Lemaître law (opens in a new tab) in 2018.) In 1931, Lemaître proposed his “primitive atom hypothesis” to account for the expansion of the universe, which stated that the universe started from a single point, and has then inspired what we now know as The Big Bang Theory.
The video found (opens in a new tab) features Lemaître discussing his ideas with journalist Jérôme Verhaeghe during a Belgian television interview, broadcast on February 14, 1964. A small excerpt from the interview, about two minutes long, has been widely broadcast for decades, but the 20 minutes The video was deemed lost after the film reel containing the footage disappeared shortly after the interview aired.
But that coil, it turns out, was just misplaced.
Related: Long-lost copy of Newton’s famous book ‘Opticks’ to be auctioned for half a million dollars
(opens in a new tab)
On December 29, 2022, the Belgian national service broadcaster for the country’s Flemish community, Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), reissued (opens in a new tab) the video after its discovery in the broadcaster’s archives. The film reel had been lost because it had been miscategorized and because Lemaître’s name was misspelled on the label, which was like “finding a needle in a haystack,” wrote representatives for the VRT in a translated press release. (Flemish, also known as Dutch Flemish, is one of Belgium’s three official languages; it is spoken by people living in the Flanders region in the north of the country.)
In the interview, Lemaître speaks in French, with Flemish subtitles added to the video. In a new article, uploaded January 19 to the preprint server arXiv (opens in a new tab)a team of researchers translated the interview into English to make it accessible to a wider audience.
“To our knowledge, this is the only video interview of Georges Lemaître that exists”, write the researchers in the newspaper.
In-depth interview
The video begins with Lemaître answering an unknown question that was probably asked by Verhaeghe during the introduction to the interview. While it’s unclear what these introductory remarks refer to, Lemaître quickly dives into how his primitive atom hypothesis differs from the steady-state model – the idea that the universe is always expanding. but maintains a constant average density, with no beginning or end – which was the preferred view of the cosmos at the time.
Lemaitre talks at length about his rival Sir Fred Hoyle, an English physicist who was one of the best-known and fiercest proponents of the steady-state model, but who also coined the term “Big Bang” by accident. Although he repeatedly yells at Hoyle for getting the interview wrong, Lemaître remarks that he has the “greatest admiration” for his colleague’s work.
Lemaître explains that the steady-state model could only work if the hydrogen needed to make stars appeared “like a ghost” out of nowhere, which he says would go against the principle of conservation of energy, the idea that energy is neither created nor destroyedonly transformed from one type to another, which he described as “basically the safest, strongest thing in physics”.
Instead, Lemaître argues in the video, the expansion could be attributed to the “disintegration of all that exists. question in a atom“, which created “expanding space filled by a plasma” via a “process that we can vaguely imagine”.
Related: How was the universe created?
Lemaître also discusses the work and ideas of several renowned academics, including French mathematician Élie Cartan, English astrophysicist Edward Arthur Milne, and Sir James Hopwood Jeans, an English physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who was another champion of the Earth model. ‘stable state.
During the interview, Lemaître notes that the detection cosmic rays – high-energy particles or clusters of particles that move through space at near the speed of light, which Lemaître poetically describes as “the rays of primitive fireworks” – would play an important role in proving his theory. (Lemaître died shortly after learning of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, which occurred two years after the interview and was the first major proof that he was right.)
The priest-turned-physicist was also asked if his theories contradicted his religious views, but he explained that his research involved no “religious ulterior motives” and that “the beginning [of the universe] is so unimaginable” and “so different from the present state of the world” that he saw no reason why it disproved God’s involvement in creation.
The researchers who translated the French-to-English transcript are pleased to have helped make Lemaître’s only filmed interview more accessible to the astronomical community and the public.
“Of all the people who proposed the framework of cosmology we currently work with, there are very few records of how they have talked about their work,” said the study’s lead author. Satya Gontcho A Gontcho (opens in a new tab)a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the Department of Energy in California, said in a statement (opens in a new tab). “Hearing turns of phrase and how things were discussed…It’s like taking a peek back in time.”
