VATICAN CITY (AP) – The Vatican is celebrating the big-bang theory. That’s not as out of this world as it sounds.
The Vatican Observatory has invited leading scientists and cosmologists to talk black holes, gravitational waves and space-time singularities as it honors the late Jesuit cosmologist considered one of the fathers of the idea that the universe began with a gigantic explosion.
The Tuesday-Friday conference honoring Monsignor George Lemaitre is being held at the Vatican Observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to help correct the notion that the Roman Catholic Church was hostile to science. The perception has persisted in some circles since Galileo’s heresy trial 400 years ago, even though the observatory and Catholic universities around the globe have produced top-notch science over the centuries.
In 1927, Lemaitre was the first to explain that the receding of distant galaxies was the result of the expansion of the universe, a result he obtained by solving equations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Lemaitre’s theory was known as the “primeval atom,” but it is more commonly known today as the big-bang theory.