Lost video of Georges Lemaître, father of the Big Bang theory, recovered

Followers of science historical past can now entry a brand new gem: A 20-minute video interview with the daddy of the Huge Bang idea, Belgian Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître.

The total recording, initially aired in 1964, was considered misplaced—with solely a brief excerpt preserved. In 2022, the 20-minute interview was found within the archives of Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), the nationwide public broadcasting community for Belgium’s Flemish neighborhood.

Within the video, Lemaître discusses the beginnings of the universe and his “speculation of the primeval atom,” the concept our universe expanded from a single point. This idea, which Lemaître first proposed in 1931, developed into the Huge Bang idea now broadly accepted by cosmologists.

“Of all of the individuals who got here up with the framework of cosmology that we’re working with now, there’s only a few recordings of how they talked about their work,” mentioned Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, a scientist on the Division of Power’s Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “To listen to the turns of phrase and the way issues had been mentioned…It appears like peeking by time.”

Gontcho A Gontcho partnered with two researchers on the Vatican Observatory, Jean-Baptiste Kikwaya Eluo and Paul Gabor, to make the Lemaître video extra accessible. The interview was performed in French and aired with Flemish subtitles. The English translation (led by Gontcho A Gontcho) and French transcription are actually out there in a paper on arXiv, an open-access assortment of scientific articles.

“Lemaître and others gave us the mathematical framework that types the premise of our present efforts to grasp our universe,” mentioned Gontcho A Gontcho, who works on the Darkish Power Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Specifically, scientists need to perceive dark matter, the skeleton of our universe, and dark energy, which is making it develop sooner and sooner.

“Cosmology is making an attempt to grasp what occurred within the universe’s previous—and for many of us who do observations, meaning measuring, very exactly, the speed of acceleration of the universe at totally different moments in time,” Gontcho A Gontcho mentioned. “And in the event you perceive how the universe has expanded at totally different moments in time, then you definitely’re in a position to slender down what darkish power may very well be.”