Day Without Yesterday quote

If I had to ask a question of the infallible oracle... I think I should choose this: “Has the universe ever been at rest, or did the expansion start from the beginning?” But, I think, I would ask the oracle not to give the answer, in order that a subsequent generation would not be deprived of the pleasure of searching for and of finding the solution.

Georges Lemaître, during a discussion of cosmology before the British Association for the Advancement of Science

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology