VRT discovers a lost interview with a major content creator decades later

flemish Public Broadcasting Corporation VRT He found a long-lost interview with Leuven cosmologist Georges Lemaitre. He was the founder of the Big Bang Theory in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the mid-1960s, the then BRT interviewed a cosmologist about this theory. The announcer believes there is only a one-minute clip left of that interview. The full 20-minute interview has now been found in the VRT archives.

An archive spokesperson said that the video was false and that Lemaitre’s name was misspelled. “As a result, the interview remained undiscovered all those years. The recording was found while digitizing the damaged rolls of film. An employee immediately recognized Lemaître from the photographs and realized that treasure had been found.”

Although the Big Bang theory – which states that the universe arose about 14 billion years ago and It continues to expand to this day – many people will know it as Belgian priest cosmologist not this. He formulated his ideas about 100 years ago.

Lemaitre managed to reconcile faith and science. He once said of the creation story: “There is no reason to abandon the Bible, because we now know that creation lasted ten billion years, instead of six days.”

Cosmologist Thomas Hertog of the University of Leuven said he was happy with the recapture that was recovered, he told VRT. He calls the conversation a gem. “It’s cool to see. We kind of know what Lemaître was thinking from his writing, but that really adds an extra dimension to Lemaître’s persona and the depth of his thinking about the Big Bang.”

With his idea of ​​the origin of the universe, Lemaître went against what science assumed at the time, namely, that space was static and unchanging. Einstein actually contrasted this idea with his theory of relativity, in which he relates time and space to energy and mass.

A short time later, Edwin Hubble discovered that there are more galaxies in the universe than the Milky Way. Hubble also found that these galaxies are moving away from each other.

It was Lumet who united these two findings: the expansion of space and the theory of relativity. But he went one step further and thought: what is expanding must have been smaller. In the interview, he explains how the universe came into existence, according to him. From a single atom, a superdense mass “explodes” and continues to expand.

Lemaitre said in the interview that he did not understand why famous astronomers such as Fred Hoyle did not want to come to terms with the big bang theory. Remarkably, Hoyle himself came up with the term .the great explosion He came to make fun of the theory. While this term is now firmly established as a synonym for the big bang.

Slowly but surely, more scientists joined the Big Bang theory, including Einstein, who initially questioned Lemaitré’s ideas. The Big Bang theory was not proven until 1965, a year before Lemaitre’s death, when the cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered.

The Belgian has not received the Nobel Prize for Physics. However, in 2018, Hubble’s law, which describes the speed at which galaxies are moving apart, was renamed the Hubble-Lematter’s law.