Science and religion in the worldview of Georges Lemaître. Biographies of great people

After graduating from the Jesuit school Collège du Sacré-Coeur in Charleroi, 17-year-old Georges entered the Catholic University of Louvain.

He studied engineering, and with the outbreak of the First World War, Lemaitre went to the front, he served as an officer in the Belgian army and at the end of the war he was awarded the Military Cross with palms.

After the war, Georges continued to study mathematics and physics, and also prepared for the priesthood - in addition to engineering, he also studied astronomy and theology.

Lemaitre received his doctorate in 1920, and in 1923 he was ordained and became abbot.

The education of the young scientist and priest, however, did not end there - in the same 1923, Georges went to Cambridge (University of Cambridge), where he spent a year at St Edmund's House College (today St Edmund's College). By the way, at that time Lemaitre was very lucky - he became a student of Arthur Eddington, and it was under his leadership that he carried out a number of works on stellar astronomy, cosmology and computational mathematics.

The following year he worked at the Harvard College Observatory and received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1927, Lemaitre became a professor of astrophysics at the University of Louvain, and later, in 1940, became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican.

nces of the Vatican); By the way, in 1960 Lemaitre became president of this Academy.

Lemaître received his greatest fame as a scientist for creating the theory of the expanding Universe. The scientist formulated it in 1927, in the USA, after studying in detail the research of Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley on the red shift of lines in the spectra of galaxies; Thus, Lemaitre interpreted the recession of galaxies as evidence of the expansion of the Universe.

In addition, Lemaitre theoretically substantiated Hubble's law on the proportionality between the radial velocities of galaxies and the distances to them, thereby laying the foundations of modern physical cosmology.

Lemaître's theory of the evolution of the world from the "primordial atom" was called the "Big Bang" - an ironic name proposed by the famous British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle in 1949, and it became entrenched in cosmology.

In 1941, Lemaitre became a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium.

In 1953, Lemaitre received the Eddington Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society of London.

A crater on the Moon and asteroid No. 1565 were named in honor of the scientist.

On June 20, 1966, Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre died in Leuven. This priest and professor at the Catholic University of Louvain is recognized today as one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century for his important contributions to physical cosmology. It is no coincidence that the European Space Agency (ESA) named the fifth Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) of the International Space Station (ISS) after Lemaitre. On July 29, 2014, ATV-5 Lemaitre was launched from Kourou for a six-and-a-half month mission aboard an Ariane 5 launch vehicle.

Born in Belgium, in Charleroi, on July 17, 1894. Completing his higher education at the Jesuit college of this city, he felt two callings within himself simultaneously: to the priestly life and to science. Because his father advised him to delay entering the seminary, Georges began to study engineering.

But after three years of study in Leuven, his studies were interrupted by the First World War. He participates in the fierce battles of the Ysère and uses his free time to meditate on Scripture and read some of Henri Poincaré's books. During his vacation, he travels to Paris to meet Léon Blois, whose work he greatly admired.

At the end of the war, Lemaitre abandoned his engineering studies and in 1919 received what we would today call a master's degree in mathematics and physics, as well as a bachelor's degree in Thomist philosophy. This takes place at the Higher Institute of Philosophy, founded by Cardinal Mercier.

In 1920, true to his calling, Lemaître entered the seminary for later vocations in Mechelen: the Maison Saint Rombaut (House of Saint Rombaut). Recognizing an exceptional mind in Georges, Cardinal Mercier allows him to continue scientific research during his spiritual studies: this will allow him to discover and deepen the theory of special and general relativity and write on this occasion the work “Physics of Einstein,” which brought him a scholarship to continue his studies in England.

In 1923, in Malines, Cardinal Mercier ordained Georges Lemaître to the priesthood. At the time of his ordination, Lemaitre also joined the priestly brotherhood of the Friends of Jesus, founded by the same cardinal.

Georges Lemaitre would remain faithful to this brotherhood for the rest of his life, where the diocesan members took a vow of non-covetousness, as well as a special vow of dedication to Christ. Father Lemaitre, like all members of the Friends of Jesus, spent an hour in adoration before and after daily Mass and each year took part in ten days of spiritual exercises in solitude from worldly concerns. Many in the scientific field neglected this "deep spiritual duty" as Georges Lemaître considered it, but he himself would forever remain faithful to the brotherhood and its demands, especially the vow of poverty and daily adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. He was constantly with the Friends of Jesus, who studied and meditated on the texts of the blessed Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck (the Delightful).

During his stay at the House of St. Rombaud, while studying physics at the same time, Georges took every opportunity to learn the basics of the Chinese language. In this he was helped by a Chinese seminarian, whom Lemaitre taught French and catechism. This explains why, in the early thirties, he was actively involved in the reception of Chinese students arriving in Leuven, in close collaboration with Father Lebbe and with the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-André in Bruges, especially with Don Theodore Neve. Between 1929 and 1930, the young priest Georges Lemaitre became the director of a home for Chinese students in Leuven.

In 1923-1924 - thanks to the aforementioned scholarship - Lemaitre studied astronomy and general relativity at Cambridge (UK) with Sir Arthur Eddington. The influence of the latter on Lemaître was very profound, and some of the scientist’s considerations essentially guided the scientific activity of the young priest.

Lemaitre then went to the United States, where in 1924-1925. worked at the Harvard College Observatory and began writing his doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He took advantage of this stay to visit large astronomical observatories and collect - what would be of fundamental importance in the future - the latest data on the speed and size of galaxies, which were then called nebulae.

Returning to the University of Leuven in 1925, Abbé Lemaître was appointed professor in the French-language section. He would remain there until 1964, enormously influencing generations of students, engineers, mathematicians and physicists with his original lectures and deep humanity. It was in Leuven, after defending his dissertation, that he made his most significant contribution to cosmology. What was it?

First of all, Lemaitre was the first to explain what would later be called "Hubble's Law" in 1927. This law, published only two years later, states that the speed at which galaxies are moving away is directly proportional to their distances. His explanation is based on a model of an expanding universe without beginning or end (today called the "Eddington-Lemaître universe"). In this model, not only are galaxies moving around in the universe, but the universe is “expanding,” moving galaxies farther apart. Thus, Lemaitre introduces the idea into the very heart of physics stories the Universe itself.

Lemaitre is also known as one of the first physicists to introduce and define - in 1931 - the idea of ​​a "natural beginning" of the universe. The Belgian cosmologist represents it in the form of an “initial singularity” and a physical state of extreme concentration of energy-matter, translated into the well-known, today outdated concept of the “primitive atom”. Between 1931 and 1965, few defended this theory because they did not yet have data to support it, and also, and perhaps especially, because they confused the idea of ​​a “cosmic beginning” of the universe with the theological idea of ​​creation.

The term "Big Bang" was, among other things, invented by Fred Hoyle to ridicule Lemaître's hypothesis. Hoyle, Bondi and Gold developed an alternative theory to the "primitive atom" cosmology. This theory was called Steady State Cosmology: in it, the Universe always remains the same, constantly expanding, without beginning or end. Paradoxically, in order to obtain such a model of the Universe, they had to postulate the continuous creation of matter! In 1965, the discovery of the Cosmological Microwave Background of the 2.7 K CMB by Penzias and Wilson would confirm Lemaître's intuition.

Since 1931 Fr. Lemaitre was one of the first to argue that radiation must have existed from the very first moments of the Universe and that it could provide us with valuable information. Only a year before his death, the Belgian scientist learned about the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation (which underpins Big Bang cosmology) thanks to one of his friends and associates, Odon Godard. However, Lemaitre mistakenly believed that this cosmic microwave background radiation consisted of "cosmic rays", charged particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. However, he deeply studied the trajectories of these particles and made significant contributions to the development of the theory of the northern and southern auroras.

Such research required the use of powerful computers, such as the Busch analog computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the first computer at the University of Leuven, installed in 1958. The first programmer of this computer was Fr. Georges Lemaitre.

The model of the universe that Lemaitre proposed in 1931 in support of his primordial atom hypothesis is characterized by a modern acceleration phase. The latter is connected with the famous “cosmological constant” and with the mystery of “dark energy”, which is widely studied today. It is interesting to note that Lemaitre always defended, contrary to Einstein's own opinion, the importance of the cosmological constant, which he considered to be related to quantum phenomena.

It is impossible not to recall that Lemaitre made many other important researches and discoveries. Among them, we note research in the field of general relativity, singularities and coordinate systems that make it possible to eliminate them. Lemaitre also excelled in the fields of classical mechanics (the three-body problem), numerical analysis (the fast Fourier transform before its official invention), as well as the algebraic theory of spinors.

Lemaitre was a friend of Einstein, Elie Cartan and many other famous scientists. He also received many prestigious awards (Prix Francqui, Mendel Medal and others).

Georges Lemaitre always highly valued the religious dimension of his life, methodically and scrupulously distinguishing between the scientific and theological spheres, which were for him “two paths to the truth.” However, in the very center of life, in action - as he elaborated in 1936 during the Catholic Congress in Malines - these two dimensions, scientific and religious, found their unity. Lemaitre said that faith gave him optimism, because he knew that the riddle of the Universe had a solution.

In 1951, Pope Pius XII gave a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in his speech the Bishop of Rome mentioned (without naming Lemaitre) the beginning of the Universe, following the hypothesis of the primordial atom. Father Lemaitre reacted vividly to this speech: however, his reaction was not related to the problem of the relationship between science and faith as such. The cosmologist did not want his hypothesis, untested at that time, to be put forward as evidence, even indirectly. The Belgian scientist reported this to the Pope, who, deeply respecting the priest and his works, took this into account. In 1935, Lemaitre was elected honorary canon of the chapter of the House of St. Rombaud.

In 1960, Pope John XXIII elevated him to the rank of bishop and entrusted him with the leadership of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which he had been a member since its founding in 1936. During the Second Vatican Council, Msgr. Lemaître was appointed by Pope Paul VI as a member of the Study Commission on Birth Control. As the prelate of Leuven's health then began to deteriorate, he declined the appointment, writing a detailed report for this group.

A man of great culture - he was a pianist and was interested in French literature, especially the works of Moliere - Msgr. Lemaitre retained throughout his life a simple soul and great kindness, as well as great respect for all people he met, whatever their beliefs. Fifty years after the death of Georges Lemaître, his journey remains a powerful and eloquent testimony that it is possible to practice science at the highest level and conduct cutting-edge research while maintaining humanity and deep faith.

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Material from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia

Georges Lemaitre(full name - Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaitre(fr. Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître listen), 1894-1966) - Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer and mathematician.

Biography

The main works in relativistic astrophysics and cosmology are related to the Big Bang theory. He is the author of the theory of the expanding Universe, which he developed independently of A. A. Friedman, whose first article on relativistic cosmology was published in 1922. Having become acquainted with the research of Vesto Slifer and Edwin Hubble on the red shift of galaxies during his stay in the USA, in 1927 he published his explanation of this phenomenon: he identified the spectroscopically observed recession of galaxies with the expansion of the Universe.

Lemaitre was the first to formulate the relationship between the distance and speed of galaxies and proposed in 1927 the first estimate of the coefficient of this relationship, now known as the Hubble constant. When publishing a translation of the work in the notes of the British Royal Astronomical Society, it refused to publish a number of results, including Hubble's law, due to insufficient observational data. This value was empirically established by E. Hubble several years later.

Lemaître's theory of the evolution of the world since the "primordial atom" was ironically called the "Big Bang" by Fred Hoyle in 1949. This name, the Big Bang, has historically stuck in cosmology.

Awards

Publications

• G. Lemaître, Discussion sur l"évolution de l'univers, 1933
• G. Lemaître, L'Hypothèse de l'atome primitif, 1946
• G. Lemaître, The Primeval Atom - an Essay on Cosmogony, D. Van Nostrand Co, 1950

see also

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Notes

Literature

• Kolchinsky I.G., Korsun A.A., Rodriguez M.G. Astronomers: Biographical Guide. - 2nd ed., revised. and additional.. - Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1986. - 512 p.
• Peebles P. Physical cosmology. - Moscow: Mir, 1975.
• Heller M. M., Chernin A. D. At the origins of cosmology: Friedman and Lemaitre. - M.: Knowledge: New in life, science, technology (Cosmonautics, astronomy), 1991.

• Dirac P.A.M. The scientific work of George Lemaître. - Commentarii Pontificia Acad. Sci.,2, No. 11.1, 1969.

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Excerpt characterizing Lemaitre, Georges

Kiryanov Dimitri, priest

Georges Lemaitre was at the origins of modern scientific cosmology, while at the same time being a Catholic priest. His view of the relationship between science and religion is of great importance both for understanding the history of these relations and in the context of modern discussions in this area.

Modern cosmology began to develop only in the 20th century. In the period preceding this, the cosmological views of individual scientists were exclusively hypothetical in nature and were practically not based on a serious scientific basis. A significant change in the situation in cosmology occurred in the first quarter of the 20th century, when Albert Einstein formulated the equations of general relativity that describe the behavior of the Universe. Einstein himself, like most scientists of that time, believed that the Universe exists forever and is unchanging in space and time. However, the stationary solution of Einstein's equations proposed by de Sitter described a universe without matter, which contradicted Einstein's basic intuition that led him to formulate the general theory of relativity (GR). The first to propose a non-stationary solution to the equations of Einstein’s general theory of relativity was the Russian scientist A. Friedman. However, in the articles that A. Friedman published in the magazine Zeitschriftfur Physik in 1922 and 1924, the main emphasis was placed on the mathematical aspects of general relativity; he did not consider the possibility of any experimental confirmation of his guesses. However, Friedman was the first to introduce 2 key concepts into relativistic cosmology - the age of the world and the creation of the world. He, in particular, wrote: “The time since the creation of the universe is the time that has passed from the moment when space was point-like (R_0) to the present state (R_R0); this time can also be infinite.” In his articles, Friedman used the term “creation” (German Erschaffung), but it can hardly be argued that he associated the use of this word with any metaphysical or religious meaning. In his work "The World as Space and Time" Friedman tried to calculate the time that has passed since the moment of "creation". Without explaining the criteria for estimating age, he concluded that the universe is “10 billion ordinary years old.” It is hardly possible today to say with certainty how religious A. Friedman was, however, as the epigraph to his book he took a quote from the book of Wisdom, “Thou hast created all things by measure and number” (Wisdom 11:20), and ended with a fragment from the ode "God" G.R. Derzhavina:

Measure the ocean deep,

Count the sands, the rays of the planets

Although a high mind could, -

You have no number or measure!

A. Friedman's work in the field of cosmology remained virtually unnoticed in the West, and the main role in the reception of the expanding universe model by the scientific community belonged to another scientist, the Catholic priest J. Lemaître. He received a physics and mathematics education at the University of Louvain, Belgium, defended his doctorate in mathematics, and in the same year entered the seminary of the Archdiocese of Malina. He was ordained as a priest in September 1923 and immediately afterwards went to Cambridge for a postdoctoral fellowship under A. Eddington.

After Lemaitre received his PhD from MIT in 1927, he was appointed to the position of professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. In the same year, he made his key contribution to cosmology with the publication of the paper "A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Radius Increase with the Radial Velocity of Distant Galaxies." At the time of writing the 1927 article, Lemaitre did not know that A. Friedman had anticipated him by five years. From a formal mathematical point of view, Lemaitre made no greater contribution than Friedman, but from a physical point of view, his paper was completely different. His work was not an instrumentalist description or a simple mathematical exercise in general relativity, but, on the contrary, aimed at presenting a picture of the real universe. Friedman considers the expansion model exclusively from the standpoint of mathematical formalism and speaks of the impossibility of confirming it with any astronomical data. In contrast, Lemaitre considers the possibility of obtaining observational data in favor of an expanding universe, such as the galactic redshift, here he derives a relationship between distance and linear velocity, which, as shown in the article by D. Block, was undeservedly named after Hubble, not Lemaitre.

Lemaitre's 1927 article was a scientific work created exclusively within the framework of relativistic cosmology, and did not concern philosophical and religious issues. Lemaitre's model of the universe included a cosmological constant and began with a slow expansion from a stationary universe state, ending in a state close to the de Sitter model of the universe. Lemaitre emphasized that it is necessary to find the cause of the expansion of the universe, but this cause, in his opinion, lies entirely within the framework of the physical description. Unfortunately, the 1927 article remained little known because Lemaitre published it in French in an obscure journal, sending copies to Eddington and de Sitter, but they paid no attention to the article. Einstein knew about the theory, but refused to take it seriously as a description of the real universe. It was not until 1930, at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, that Eddington and de Sitter recognized that no static model was satisfactory and that the only solution to the problem must be a non-stationary universe. By 1931, most scientists agreed with Eddington and de Sitter that the universe was expanding, and further development of cosmological theories should be based on the Friedmann-Lemaître equations. Unfortunately, Lemaitre's 1927 paper was seriously censored when the Royal Astronomical Society published its English translation in 1931. However, it was from this time that the expanding universe model received public recognition, and the first publications devoted to its popularization appeared. The first was J. Jeans's The Mysterious Universe, followed in 1931 by J. Crowther's Survey of the Universe, in 1932 by de Sitter's Cosmos, and in 1933 by Eddington's The Expanding Universe.

After the work of Friedmann and Lemaitre became known and the expanding universe model gained general acceptance, it became apparent that some of the solutions to the Friedmann-Lemaitre equations involve expansion of the universe from a singular state. However, at that time such solutions or models of the world were ignored or viewed as inconsistent with physical reality. For example, in June 1930, shortly after turning to Lemaitre's theory, De Sitter explored possible world models, including those that began at a singularity. However, he considered them nothing more than mathematical solutions to which it was impossible to assign any physical meaning.

In the paper "The Expanding Universe", published in March 1931, Lemaitre developed various aspects of the expanding universe model that he had proposed 4 years earlier. His model suggested that the universe evolves from a stationary Einstein-type model of the universe, but Lemaître also takes seriously the question of what caused the initial instability. In a note for the journal Nature dated May 9, 1931, Lemaitre writes that “the present state of quantum theory presupposes a beginning of the world substantially different from the present order of nature.”

Around 1930, there were many discussions among physicists that challenged the classical idea of ​​the space-time continuum. Such discussions were especially relevant in the field of quantum physics. For example, Niels Bohr argued a few months before Lemaître that the concepts of space and time have only statistical validity. The text of the note on the beginning of the universe suggests that the Belgian cosmologist was familiar with the views of Bohr and other quantum physicists: “Now in atomic processes the concepts of space and time are no more than statistical concepts: they disappear when applied to individual phenomena involving a small number of quanta. If the world began with one quantum, the concepts of space and time must be devoid of any meaning at the beginning; they must begin only when the original quantum has split into a sufficient number of quanta. If this assumption is correct, the beginning of the world was slightly earlier than the origin of space and time. I think that this beginning of the world is very different from the present order of nature.”

Lemaître understood the incomplete state of quantum and nuclear physics, and admitted that it was premature to talk about the state of the original quantum, but nevertheless suggested that it could be associated with heavy atomic nuclei. He wrote that in this case, “we can represent the beginning of the universe in the form of a unique atom (atomic nucleus), an atomic weight, from which all the mass of the universe is derived. This highly unstable atom split into smaller and smaller atoms through some kind of superradioactive process." This was written before the discovery of the neutron and the 1932 turn in nuclear physics, so Lemaître expressed himself vaguely and metaphorically. The supposition of a super-transuranium atom may seem strange, but it was simply an attempt to imagine an inconceivable primordial state of the universe. In the last paragraph of his note, Lemaitre turns to another result of quantum physics, fundamental indeterminism, expressed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Lemaitre believes that the beginning of the evolution of the universe may be due to quantum uncertainty: “It is obvious that the original quantum cannot conceal within itself the whole cause of evolution; but, according to the uncertainty principle, this is not necessary. Our world was now understood as a world where things actually happen; the whole story of the world does not need to be recorded in the first quantum like a song on a record. All the matter of the world must be present at the beginning, but the story must be written step by step." His picture of the early universe was this: “In the beginning the whole mass of the universe must exist in the form of a unique atom; The radius of the universe, although not strictly zero, is still relatively small. The entire universe must have been produced by the decay of the original atom. It can be shown that the radius of space must increase. Some fragments retain decay products and form clusters of stars or individual stars of arbitrary mass." In his original cosmological beginning hypothesis, Lemaitre did not associate cosmological radiation with the initial explosion of the proto-atom, but with the formation of successive decays of superradioactive stars shortly thereafter. The evolution of the Lemeter universe took place in three phases: “The first period of rapid expansion, in which the atom-universe disintegrated into atomic stars; slowdown period; and finally, a third period of accelerated expansion. There is no doubt that we are today in this third period, and the acceleration of space that follows the period of slow expansion may be responsible for the separation of stars in the extragalactic cores of galaxies."

Lemaître's 1927 model and his 1931 universe assumed that space was closed, although this choice was made on epistemological grounds. Lemaître's commitment to the finiteness of space was evident even in his first paper on relativistic cosmology in 1925, and it stemmed from his theological views. He believed that the universe, like all its constituent parts, was comprehensible to the human mind, a belief which he could not reconcile with an infinite space containing an infinite number of objects. Lemaître's attitude towards the presence of cosmological singularities was also influenced by his epistemological premises. Although his primordial atom model of the universe was a Big Bang model, it did not begin at a singularity. Such a singularity is beyond physical understanding, while Lemaître's hypothetical superatom must be subject to the laws of physics. At the same time, Lemaître insisted that it was physically meaningless to speak of time (and therefore existence) in the primordial atom “before” the initial explosion. He found it impossible to determine the physical state of a system when there was no conceivable method of measuring time. Lemaitre was also completely convinced that the cosmological constant had a non-zero value and played a specific role in cosmology. In contrast to Einstein, who since 1931 was no longer interested in models with a constant, Lemaitre recognized its “theoretical necessity.” He tried several times to convince Einstein of the need for a non-zero cosmological constant, but in vain. Einstein considered the introduction of a cosmological constant into equations an awkward but necessary choice, which he made in 1917, but from the point of view of the progress of cosmology by 1931, this choice should be rejected. Lemaître's understanding of scientific aesthetics differed significantly from Einstein's.

Given Lemaître's deep understanding of physical theory and theological issues, it was natural that he would be concerned with the question of the relationship between science and religion. As a young scientist back in 1921, Lemaître published his first reflections on the topic, entitled The First Three Words of God, where he sought to reinterpret the sayings of Genesis using concepts from modern physics. Here he examines God's creation of light and the subsequent creation of the material world. For example, he used the idea of ​​black body radiation, interpreting the words of Scripture "Let there be light" as God's way of creating the world out of nothing: "It is impossible for any body to exist without emitting light, since all bodies at a certain temperature emit radiation of all wavelengths (black body theory ). In a physical sense, absolute darkness is nothing... Before “Let there be light,” there was absolutely no light and, therefore, absolutely nothing existed.” As a young scientist, Lemaitre thought it wise to use physics to study the Bible because he believed there was general agreement between Scripture and modern science. However, after some time, Lemaitre comes to the conclusion that concordism cannot be correct, and the Bible should not be read as a scientific text.

During Lemaitre's trip to the USA in 1932-1933. journalists became interested in his views on the relationship between science and religion. Thus, the New York Times wrote: “Here is a man who firmly believes in the Bible as a revelation from above, but who develops a theory of the universe without any regard to the teachings of revealed religion about Genesis. And there is no conflict!” In an interview with Aickman, Lemaitre explained his view in the form of a parable in which he emphasized that concordism is not a correct methodology for dialogue between science and theology: “It will simply encourage unthinking people to imagine that the Bible teaches infallible science, while how can we only say that by chance one of the prophets made the correct guess.”

Lemaître received a classical Catholic education within the framework of Thomistic philosophy, which especially emphasized the autonomy of philosophy and science in their matters. The scientific path and the religious path are expressed in different languages, touching different areas, both of these paths move in parallel towards the same truth - the transcendental reality of God. To Aickman, Lemaître replied that since there were two ways to comprehend the truth, he decided to follow both: “Nothing in my work, nothing that I have ever studied in the field of science or religion will induce me to change this opinion. I don't need conflict reconciliation. Science has not shaken my faith in religion, and religion has never challenged me about the conclusions reached through scientific methods.” As Lemaitre's biographer D. Lambert notes, Lemaitre's views on the relationship between science and faith were largely influenced by his teacher A. Eddington. Lemaitre emphasized that there could be no real conflict between faith and science. The Bible gives information about the means of salvation, but says almost nothing about the natural world. Sometimes scholars take Scripture too literally. He writes: “Hundreds of professionals and renowned scientists actually believe that the Bible claims to teach science. This is like saying that there must be an authentic religious dogma in the binomial theorem... Should a priest reject the theory of relativity because it does not contain any authoritative statement of the doctrine of the Trinity? Likewise, although the astronomer knows that the world has existed for 2 billion years, and the book of Genesis clearly tells us that creation was accomplished in six days, there is no reason to reject the Bible. "The book of Genesis is simply trying to teach us that one day out of seven should be devoted to rest, worship and worship - all that is necessary for salvation." Moreover, if scientific knowledge were necessary for salvation, it would have to be revealed to the authors of Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity - "much deeper than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics" - is expressed in the Bible because it is necessary for salvation, which is not the case with the theory of relativity, of which neither the Apostle Paul nor Moses had any knowledge. the slightest idea. Lemaitre develops his position as follows: “The authors of the Bible were guided to varying degrees - some more than others - by the question of salvation. In other matters they were at the level of people of their time. Therefore, it does not matter at all whether the Bible contains errors in historical or scientific facts, especially if the errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them. The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right in all other subjects is simply the error of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us in the first place."

It should be noted that the idea that Scripture is not a textbook where answers to cosmological questions can be found has a long history within Christian thought. Lemaitre was undoubtedly aware that this view was held by Augustine more than 1500 years ago: “What, indeed, does it matter to me whether the sky, like a globe, surrounds the earth, which occupies a central place in the system of the world, on all sides, or does it cover it on one upper side, like a circle?” asks the Father of the Church. “... our authors had correct knowledge about the figure of the sky, but the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, did not want them to teach people about such objects, useless for salvation.”In a similar way, G. Galileo defended the view of the relationship between science and the Bible in his 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, saying that “the positions of the sun, earth and stars” in no way relate to the first purpose of the Holy Scriptures, which is the service of God and the salvation of the soul.” . Galileo added that “the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens move.”.

In 1936 Lemaitre became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and from 1960 until his death in 1966 he served as its president. The first international symposium, sponsored by the renewed academy and devoted to the problem of the age of the universe, was supposed to take place at the end of 1939, but was canceled due to the outbreak of war. Lemaître's activities within the academy were interrupted during the war years, and were only restored in 1948, when he presented a lecture on the proto-atom hypothesis to a meeting of academicians. It was on the recommendation of Lemaître that in 1961 Paul Dirac was invited to become a member of the academy. Dirac had some interest in religion and discussed these issues with Lemaître. Dirac wrote that he was delighted with “the greatness of the picture that he presented,” and in one of his discussions with Lemaître he emphasized that cosmology is the field of science closest to religion. To Dirac's surprise, Lemaitre did not agree with this thesis and said that the closest thing to religion is psychology. Lemaitre constantly emphasized the significant conceptual distance that lies between the two ways of knowing the truth. From his point of view, the sciences, including cosmology, had no direct relation to religion, a subject whose domain was souls, not galaxies. Lemaître often expressed the difference between faith and science, or between God and the physical world, by appealing to the notion of Deusabsconditus. The prophet Isaiah speaks of the God of Israel as a God who hides Himself (Is. 45.15). In 1936, Lemaitre, in a speech at the Catholic Congress in Malines, emphasized that “The Divine omnipresence is essentially hidden. There can be no question of reducing the Supreme Being to the rank of a scientific hypothesis.” Lemaitre did not change this view until the end of his life.

In 1958, speaking at the Solvay Congress with a report on cosmology, Lemaitre expressed his position on the relationship between cosmology and religion: “As far as I can see, such a theory (of the primary atom) remains completely outside of any metaphysical or religious questions. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being. He can hold for the beginning of space-time the same relation that he could take for events occurring at non-singular places in space-time. For the believer, this eliminates any attempt to get to know God, be it Laplace's click or Jeans' finger. This idea is consistent with the words of Isaiah, who speaks of a “Hidden God”, hidden even at the beginning of creation... Science does not give up in the face of the Universe and when Pascal tries to deduce the existence of God from the supposed infinity of nature, we may believe that he is looking in the wrong direction. There is no natural limit to the power of the mind. The universe is no exception; it is not beyond his reach.” This statement by Lemaitre was once cited by V. Ginzburg in his book “On Physics and Astrophysics” as an alleged defense of the materialistic vision of the world. True, V. Ginzburg removed from the quote all references to God, hidden at the beginning of creation, which completely distorted Lemaitre’s view.

In the recently published book “In Praise of Science” by Sander Buys, with reference to the famous physicist W. Weisskopf, an incident is cited that allegedly occurred while lecturing in Göttingen. After a lecture on relativistic cosmology, and Lemaitre's estimate of the age of the Earth at 4.5 billion years, the students asked Lemaitre how he reconciled this with the biblical picture. Does he think the Bible is true? Lemaitre replied: “Yes, every word is true.” When asked how to reconcile two contradictory points of view, the students received the answer: “There is no contradiction. God created the earth 5800 years ago with all the radioactive entities, fossils, and other indications of great age. He did this to test mankind and test their faith in the Bible." Then the students asked why Lemaitre was interested in scientifically determining the age of the Earth if it was not the real age, to which he replied: “Just to convince himself that God did not make a single mistake.” It is impossible to talk about the authenticity of this story, since Victor Weiskopf did not leave written evidence of this event, especially since in his book “The Joy of Insight” he cites another statement by Lemaitre about science and religion: “... perhaps the believer has the advantage of knowing that the riddle has a solution, it is found in the final analysis of the actions of an intelligent being; thus the problems posed by nature must be solved, and the degree of difficulty is no doubt in keeping with the present and future intellectual faculties of mankind. This may not provide the believer with greater resources for his research, but it will help to ground him in a sense of healthy optimism, without which persistent search is impossible.”

Although Lemaître often emphasized the division between science and religion, he also recognized that the Christian faith could, to some extent, influence the way scientists think about the world and how they represent the physical world. Faith can be an advantage for a scientist. It is she who gives him the confidence to reveal all aspects of the universe. Lemaitre writes: “As science passes through the simple stage of description, it becomes true science. She also becomes more religious. Mathematicians, astronomers and physicists, for example, are very religious people, with few exceptions. The deeper they penetrate into the mystery of the universe, the deeper becomes their conviction that the force behind the stars, electrons and atoms is law and goodness." In a popular lecture presented in Brussels in 1929, Lemaître gave an overview of the state of cosmology and ended by expressing his gratitude to "Him who said, 'I am the truth,' and gave us the mind to know it, to read and discover His glory in our universe, which He adapted in such a wonderful way to the cognitive abilities He has given us.”

Lemaitre's emphasis on two different levels of understanding - scientific and religious - does not imply that cosmology, or other sciences, had nothing to do with religion. He believed that religious and metaphysical values ​​were important, even essential, for the scientist on a broader ethical level, but that they should not be confused with methods and conclusions.

A number of researchers have been inclined to see in the universe from Lemaître's first atom a projection of his religious view of creation in a scientific context, but such statements are unfounded. Lemaître emphatically denied that the doctrine of creation could be a scientifically valid concept, or that God could be included as an argument in a scientific theory. Lemaitre made a sharp distinction between the “beginning” and the “creation” of the world. What he called the “natural beginning” belonged to the realm of science and was completely different from the “supernatural creation” of theology: “We can speak of this event as a beginning. I'm not talking about creation. Physically, it is a beginning in the sense that if something happened before, it has no observable effect on the behavior of our universe... Physically, everything happened as if the theoretical zero was the real beginning. The question whether this is a real beginning or rather a creation, something arising out of nothing, is a philosophical question which cannot be subjected to physical or astronomical consideration."

Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, when 70 years have passed since the recognition of Lemaître’s contribution to the development of scientific cosmology, we can say with confidence that not only Lemaître’s scientific intuitions associated with the model of an expanding universe, such as the need for a quantum mechanical description of the initial stages of the existence of the universe, have been justified , the need to preserve the cosmological constant in the equations in connection with its possible role in cosmology (the vacuum energy tensor), but also theological views that involve considering the interaction of science and theology within the framework of the complementarity model. The action of God in the world can be found not in the violation of the laws of nature, but in the ontological dependence of the world on God for its existence.

Nussbaumer H. Bieri L. Discovering the Expanding Universe. Cambridge, 2009. P. 76.

Quote by: Kragh H. Matter and Spirit in the Universe. Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology. London, Imperial College Press, 2004. P. 124.

Fridman A.A. The world as space and time. M., Nauka, 1965. P. 101.

Right there. P. 11.

Right there. P. 107.

Lemaitre G. Un Univers homogene de masse constante et de rayon croissant, rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nebuleuses extragalactiques // Annales de la Societe scientifique de Bruxelles, serie A: sciences mathematiques, 1927. T. XLVII, PP. 49-59.

Fridman A.A. Quote Op. P. 101.

Block D.L. Georges Lemaitre and Stigler's Law of Eponymy. Url.: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1106/1106.3928.pdf

Block's article shows paragraphs deleted from the English edition, indicating Lemaître's primacy over Hubble. Articles can be compared using the links: French text: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1927ASSB...47...49L&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf English text: http:// articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1931MNRAS..91..483L&db_key=AST&page_ind=4&plate_select=NO&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_GIF&classic=YES

Jeans J. The Mysterious Universe, 1931, Crowther J. An Outline of the Universe; De Sitter. Kosmos, 1932. Eddington A. The Expanding Universe, 1933. See Kragh H. Op. cit. P. 132.

Lemaitre G. The Expanding Universe // Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1931, T. XCI, No. 5 (March), PP. 490-501.

Lemaitre G. The beginning of the world from the point of view of quantum theory // Nature, 1931, No. 127., P. 706.

Farrell J. The Day without Yesterday. NY, 2005. pp. 107-108.

Kragh. Op. cit. P. 135.

Ibidem. P. 136.

Ibidem. P. 137.

Lemaitre G. Sur l’interpretation d’Eddington de l’equation de Dirac // Annales de la Societe scientifique de Bruxelles, serie B, 1931, T. LI., PP. 83-93.

Lemaitre G. Les trois premieres paroles de Dieu. // Lambert D. L'itineraire spirituel de Georges Lemaitre. Bruxelles, Lessius, 2007, P. 46.

Kragh. H. Op. cit. P. 142.

Quote By: Lambert D. L’itineraire spirituel de Georges Lemaitre. Bruxelles, Lessius, 2007, P.123.

Kragh H. Op. cit. P. 143.

Ibidem.

Farrell J. Op. cit. P. 203.

Blazh. Augustine. About the book of Genesis literally. II, 9.

Hodgson P., Carrol W. Galileo: Science and Religion. - Url.: http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/icu029.htm (date of access: 08/15/2011).

Farrell J. Op. cit. P. 191.

Lambert D. Op. cit. P. 126.

Farrell J. Op cit. P. 206.

Ginzburg V. About physics and astrophysics. M, Nauka, 1985. pp. 200-201.

Bais S. In Praise of Science: Curiosity, Understanding, and Progress. MIT Press, 2010. P. 36.

Weisskopf V. The Joy of Insight. NY, 1991. P. 287.

Lambert D. Op. cit. P. 125.

Lemaitre G. La grandeur de l’espace // Revue des questions scientifiques, 1929, T. XCV., 20 mars, P. 216.

Kragh H. Op. cit. P. 148