Lemaitre's Big Bang
History and Philosophy of Physics
2015-03-31 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Abstract
I give an epistemological analysis of the developments of relativistic cosmology from 1917 to 1966, based on the seminal articles by Einstein, de Sitter, Friedmann, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow and other historical figures of the field. It appears that most of the ingredients of the present-day standard cosmological model, including the acceleration of the expansion due to a repulsive dark energy, the interpretation of the cosmological constant as vacuum energy or the possible non-trivial topology of space, had been anticipated by Georges Lemaitre, although his articles remain mostly unquoted.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1503.08304,
title = {Lemaitre's Big Bang},
author = {Jean-Pierre Luminet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.08304},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages. To be published in Proceedings of Frontiers of Fundamental Physics FFP14, pos.sissa.it (2015)