Related papers: The Curious Case of Lemaitre's Equation No. 24
Who discovered the expanding universe? Was it Hubble, or Lema\^itre, or was it just the end result of a long series of investigations? In this article we summarise the main steps and contributions that led to one of the most exciting…
This is an editorial note to accompany printing as a Golden Oldie in the Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation of the fundamental article by Georges Lema\^itre first published in French in 1927, in which the author provided the…
One of the greatest discoveries of modern times is that of the expanding Universe, almost invariably attributed to Hubble (1929). What is not widely known is that the original treatise by Lemaitre (1927) contained a rich fusion of both…
Recently Block published an astro-ph{{http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3928 (2011).}} insinuating that Lemaitre discovery paper of the Expanding Universe was censored prior to its translation into English and publication in the Monthly Notices of…
Georges Lemaitre was a remarkable contributor to the advancement of cosmology in the heady years following two great revolutions in theoretical physics in the last century: general relativity and quantum mechanics. In the present century,…
Recently much attention has been paid to the discovery of Hubble's law: the linear relation between the rate of recession of the distant galaxies and distance to them. Though we now mention several names associated with this law instead of…
The myth that the expansion of the Universe was discovered by Hubble was first propagated by Humason (1931). The true nature of this discovery turns out to have been both more complex and more interesting.
Hubble's announcement of the magnitude-redshift relation \cite{Hub29} brought about a major change in our understanding of the Universe. After tracing the pre-history of Hubble's work, and the hiatus in our understanding which his…
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…
The Big Bang predicted theoretically by Friedmann could not be discovered in the 1920th, since global cosmological distances (more than 300-1000 Mpc) were not available for observations at that time. In 1927-29, Lema\^itre and Hubble…
We present a translation and analysis of a cosmic model published by Einstein in 1931. The paper, which is not widely known, features a model of a universe that undergoes an expansion followed by a contraction, quite different to his static…
Arthur Stanley Eddington was one of the leading astronomers and theorists of his generation and a prominent proponent of the general theory of relativity. Yet when his former assistant Georges Lemaitre sent him a paper in 1927 suggesting…
This is an editorial note to accompany reprinting as a Golden Oldie in the Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation of the famous note by Georges Lemaitre on the quantum birth of the universe, published in Nature in 1931. We explain…
The recent literature of astronomy and cosmology has included a good many suggestions for "who first recognized the expansion of the universe?" with cases having been made for Lemaitre, Lundmark, de Sitter, Slipher, Shapley, Friedmann,…
It is well known that, following the emergence of the first evidence for an expanding universe, Albert Einstein banished the cosmological constant term from his cosmology. Indeed, he is reputed to have labelled the term, originally…
We analyze Hubble's approach to cosmology. In 1929 he accepted a finite expanding universe in order to explain the redshifts of distant galaxies. Later on he turned to an infinite stationary universe due to observational constraints. We…
Georges Lemaitre gave a theoretical proof for his 1927 doctoral thesis in astronomy that the maximum spherical radius of our Universe can be computed from first principles to be 14.2 billion light-years (Lemaitre 1927a). That estimate,…
One of main sources of uncertainty in modern cosmology is the present rate of the universe's expansion, H0, called the Hubble constant. Once again, different observational techniques bring about different results, causing new 'Hubble…
In 1917 Einstein initiated modern cosmology by postulating, based on general relativity, a homogeneous, static, spatially curved universe. To counteract gravitational contraction he introduced the cosmological constant. In 1922 Alexander…
We provide an epistemological analysis of the developments of relativistic cosmology from 1917 to 2006, based on the seminal articles by Einstein, de Sitter, Friedmann, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow and other main historical figures of the field.…