Final Day Without Yesterday quote

The microwave background was discovered in 1941. Andrew McKellar, at the Dominion Observatory on Victoria Island, B.C., discovered an excitation temperature of 3K…. Factually speaking, this was just as clear cut a discovery of the background as that of 1965, but the world was not in an intellectual position to appreciate it, demonstrating the great importance of sociological factors in assessing the merits of scientific work.

Great credit accrues to those who make a scientific discovery when the world is already teetering on the edge of it, whereas the discoverer who is markedly too early scarcely earns a footnote in scientific history.

Fred Hoyle, “Final Remarks”

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

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These quotes are dedicated to Georges Lemaître and all other Scientists at heart, in search of the Truth.

Day Without Yesterday quote

The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less – some more than others – on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if 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 on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.

Georges Lemaître, answering a question in a 1933 interview (How does a priest-physicist reconcile his faith with his science?)

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

Day Without Yesterday quote

When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.

Paul Dirac, “The Scientific Work of Georges Lemaître”

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

Day Without Yesterday quote

Lemaître’s insights were in fact key in almost all the important milestones of early modern cosmology, from the expanding universe, to the cosmological constant, to black holes. He was first to see how the Einstein and de Sitter models were but two limited cases of a larger body of expanding universe models; he was the first to see that such models had to evolve from a super-dense state; and perhaps most importantly – from the very beginning – he was the first to tie the predictions of relativity about cosmology to actual astronomical observations.

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

Day Without Yesterday quote

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the exponentially expanding space that I discovered was hardly new – it was in fact one of the earliest known solutions to the equations of general relativity. I had rediscovered the equations of de Sitter’s cosmology of 1917, written in a form that was introduced by Georges Lemaître in 1925 as part of his Ph.D. thesis at MIT.

Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe

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

Day Without Yesterday quote

Thermodynamical principles from the point of view of quantum theory may be stated as follows: (1) Energy of constant total amount is distributed in discrete quanta. (2) The number of discrete quanta is ever increasing. If we go back in the course of time we must find fewer and fewer quanta, until we find all the energy of the universe packed in a few or even in a unique quantum.

Now, in atomic processes, the notions of space and time are no more than statistical notions: they fade out when applied to individual phenomena involving but small number of quanta. If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.

Georges Lemaître, May 9, 1931, letter to Nature

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

Day Without Yesterday quote

Physical scientists have a healthy attitude toward the history of their subject; by and large we ignore it.

P.J.E. Peebles

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

Day Without Yesterday quote

If there is a connection, it’s a coincidence, and of no importance. And if you should prove to me that it exists, I would consider it unfortunate. It will merely encourage more thoughtless people to imagine that the Bible teaches infallible science, whereas the most we can say is that occasionally one of the prophets made a correct scientific guess.

Father P. Ernest Verreux, one of Lemaître’s teachers at College Saint Michel, referring to the use of the Bible as a source of science

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

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

The Day Without Yesterday

The Day Without Yesterday by John Farrell


Have you ever heard of Georges Lemaître? No. And if I tell you he is the inventor of the Big Bang theory?

This book is a good read and can help you get into the early developments of Einstein's relativity theory.

You can also watch a short author interview.