Letters

Big Bang’s Start

Posted

To the Editor:

I wish your report (CNY, Oct. 30) on Pope Francis’ address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences had mentioned (as the Pope himself did) that the Big Bang theory was proposed in 1933 by Father George Lemaitre, a Roman Catholic Belgian priest, physicist, mathematician, astronomer and cosmologist who studied at Louvain, Harvard, Cambridge and MIT.

He called the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe  his “hypothesis of the primeval atom “ or the “Cosmic Egg.” 

Albert Einstein shortly came around and accepted it.

The Catholic Church has always respected the role of the natural sciences. Among some of the major figures in the history of science who were Catholic were Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, Copernicus, Galileo, Georg Mendel, Louis Pasteur, and the Curies.

Catholics need to know more about the history of the Church.

Geoffrey Gneuhs

Manhattan