[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my conversation with Jean Pierre Luminae about his new book, the Big Bang Revolutionaries, the Untold Story of Three Scientists who re Enchanted Cosmology, published by Discovery Institute Press. The discovery that the universe had a beginning is one of the most remarkable achievements of 20th century science. It sparked a cosmological paradigm shift and offered a radical new way to understand our world. But alas, the three scientists most responsible for the Big Bang revolution are largely unknown to the general public and underestimated by astrophysicists and cosmologists.
Well, the Big Bang Revolutionaries amends the record by telling the remarkable story of how three men, Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaitre, Russian physicist Alexander Friedman, and the Russian American physicist and cosmologist George Gamow, in the face of conventional scientific wisdom, offered a compelling new view of a singular creation of the universe in what Lemaitre termed a primeval atom. Dr. Luminaire who is joining me today is a French astrophysicist specializing in black holes and cosmology.
He is emeritus research director at the French national center for Scientific Research.
He is a member of the Astrophysics Laboratory of Marseille and the Universe and Theories Laboratory in Paris. Luminae has been awarded several prizes including the Georges Lemaitre Prize for his work in cosmology, the UNESCO Kalinga Prize, and the Einstein Medal for Popularization of Science. He has published more than 20 science books, eight historical novels and eight poetry collections. And get this, the asteroid 5523 Luminae was named in his honor. Jean Pierre, welcome back to ID the Future.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Thank you Andrew, for this second invitation to develop a little bit about this fascinating history of modern cosmology.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yes, thank you for your time. Well, in the first half of the conversation that we've had, we talked about the importance of knowing the history of science.
You talked about discovering it yourself and then being able to share with others the history of science. Through your non fiction and your fiction books, you began to give us more detail about the true fathers of the Big Bang theory, Lemaitre, Friedman and Gamo. We also talked about whether the Big Bang theory was friendly to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. And we did get a chance to zoom into Lumatra's faith and how, how that informed his work, which I thought was very interesting. Well, today we'll continue to discuss the true heroes of the Big Bang revolution and how the Big Bang theory has fared in light of the latest scientific evidence.
Well, let me jump in there. In explaining the sad neglect of Lumatra in the standard history of the Big Bang theory's triumph, one cause that you point to was Lumatra's humility.
He seemed much more interested in pursuing the truth than in who got credit for it. And in fact, just a few weeks before he died, and I read this in your book, when informed by his assistant of the fossil radiation discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, he is said to have commented I am glad now we have the proof.
But for many years he did not have the proof and he had to rely on his intuition.
Tell us about Lemaitre's humility and his patience.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
In fact, before Lemaitre humility, one of the reason, as I also explained in my book, of the initial neglect of Lemaitre thinking was just because his first fundamental paper published in 1927 about the interpretation of galaxy redshift with expanding space was written in French. Okay, so it's a long story and it's only after English translation, 1931 that Lemaitre became internationally known.
But well, you're right, Le Met's humility. In fact you know that it's a French astronomer called Paul Kuder, probably American people have never heard about Paul Couder was probably the first to rightly underline the priority of Lemaitre over Hubble concerning in fact the discovery of the expanding universe and the so called Hubble law until it was only so recognized in 1950, the book of Paul Couder. But what's interesting is that Lemaitre himself never claimed any priority about that. And in fact Lemaitre even found that the coup der praise overly complementary for him. And this was of course one of the sign of his deep humility.
Another sign has been told to me by the assistant of Georges named Odon Godard that I met in Leuven University 30 years ago before himself died, unfortunately. And Godard told me that story that when the news of the discovery of fossil radiation by Penzias and Wilson was announced in 1965, Lemaitre was very ill in hospital in Louvain with heart problems. And so Godard told me that yes, he was very. And Godard told him, told Lemaitre about the discovery and Lemaitre replied that he was happy because we know had the proof of his theory, but a little bit disappointed because the fossil radiation was not made of cosmic ray as he initially expected. But in the form of electromagnetic radiation. But in fact, contrarily to George Gamow who after the discovery of Pendersse Wilson claimed that he had the priority and he claimed for a Nobel Prize. In fact, Lemaitre never claimed to have priority on any major advantage in modern cosmology, although he was really the father of most major advances, advances which should have won him the Nobel Prize in physics that of course he never got. So this is a real humility of Lemaitre and well consistent with his personality, very attaching personality of both religious man, but with very deep thinking and everything. Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: And that intellectual humility is very important to scientists, you know, or, or needs to be part of the, the scientific enterprise. We do have to be humble, we do have to be patient and we shouldn't be too selfish about this enterprise because we're all standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, we're all building on what has come before. So I think Lumetra demonstrates this.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: But it's a rather rare attitude in fact among the scientists, if we take the example of Hubble, it's exactly the contrary. Herbert constantly claimed that everything came from his research in order to get more credit for Mont Wilson Observatory and all that. And even also today some of the great scientists of the day try to claim that they everything come from them. So it's quite remarkable that personality like Leitre, who was really the real father of the big Bang, never claimed any priority on all that.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it is indeed. Well, what about Alexander Friedman? Was he as cautious as lmatra about using science to support a Judeo Christian worldview?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: In fact, you have some information about Alexander Freeman's religious beliefs. In fact, we know that he was an orthodox Christian, for instance, in 1925, in fact, just before his accidental death, when he was still the director of the main Geophysical Observatory in St. Petersburg at a time of anti religious, anti church persecution by the communist regime, Freeman married his second wife according to the orthodox Christian rule.
So in fact the term of creation of the world out of nothing that he used for the first time in 1924 in his book the Universe, Space and Time was not in fact a matter of empty words for him, it meant really something deep. However, it's funny that in fact, no doubt that the precaution towards the communist authorities, Friedman did not make the connection with the biblical account, but did the connection with the Hindu doctrine of the cyclical creation of the world with the God grammar. So in some sense, in some way Freman was a little bit more was more concordist than George Lemaitre but with well, a strange way of invoking rather Hindu religion rather than Catholic or Christian religion. Yeah.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Was he able to leave the Soviet Union or was he sort of stuck there? Could not visit America or other parts of Europe?
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Could not leave Russia, Soviet Union. But I told, I'll tell the interesting story of the fact that when Friedman published his first fundamental article of 1922 about the first dynamical solution of the sense equation, Eisenstein in the first moment reacted negatively to this article.
Friedman could not leave the Soviet Union but he talked to one of his friends Krutkov who had the right to leave Soviet Union to meet an son in Berlin and discussed with him. And in fact it's Krutkov was who convinced Einstein that it was Griman who was right and not Ansle.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of, a lot of barriers here. You know there's a language barrier, there's the distance barrier between these, these great thinkers and it's amazing that we, we still got the revolution out of it. Well, by all accounts George Gammo seemed to have a personality that fitted him well for bucking the system and thinking outside the box. Tell us a bit more about Gamow's personality.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Well, Gamov was a Soviet and American polymath. He was born in, in Russia but after a naturalized American so he was really a polymath. And Emily was also a theoretical physicist. He was a cosmologist. Later on he was interested in adn in biology and something like that.
And he was in the field of cosmology. He was an early advocate and developer of lemaitre Big Bang theory. But he added to its nuclear physics. He added to the Big Bang theory, the nuclear physics and the fundamental idea of what we call the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, namely the generation of light elements in the hot Big Bang universal.
But however, it's interesting to see that Gamow's scientific reputation was a little bit altered by his high sense of humor and fantasy. Gamow delighted in practical jokes and humorous twists including in very serious scientific publication. So there is the famous story of his most famous prank was pioneering article called the Halfer Betty beat a gamow paper of 1948 in which they described the genesis nucleosynthesis of light elements. So it was a very serious paper in its style and contents. But Gamow in fact could not resist adding his colleague Hans Bethe to the list of authors as a pun to the first Three letters of the Greek Alphabet. Alpha, beta, gamma, alpha, beta, Bete, Kamov. Whereas Bete never participated to the writing of the article.
The first moment, Bete reacted negatively to this utilization of his name because he was not asked for that. But after seeing the success of the article, he said okay.
It was okay.
I can add that in his late career, Gamov directed much of his attention to teaching and wrote popular books on science, including the famous Mr. Tompkins series of books, very books for popularizing general relativity and all that. And some of them remain in print more than half a century after their original publication. Well, but anyway, well, Gamow didn't get a Nobel Prize in physics as he claimed after the discovery of cosmic bag radiation. Well, maybe it was too late for him, but because his sense of humor and fantasy could refrain a little bit, the idea of giving him a Nobel Prize, very serious Nobel Prize in physics.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Well, he sure sounds like a character. Now, what specifically did he do to help further the Big Bang theory and Lumatra's ideas? I just want to be clear on that.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: Well, as I said before, in fact, one of the reason was the lack of convincing and definite experimental proofs, in fact, until the discovery of fossil radiation. But in fact, at a more theoretical level, I'd say that also that was the wrong idea. That the Big Bang necessarily implied an initial point like singularity, namely an absolute beginning of time where all physical quantities become infinite, which is of course physically absurd. In fact, real big is not that. It's just the history of the evolution of universe, starting not from a point like singularity, but starting from a very hot and dense state, probably described also not only by general relativity, but also by quantum physics. And now we try to develop new theory mixing general relativity and quantum physics to describe the very, very, very early universe. They are called quantum gravity theories. Another and maybe also interesting reason, and maybe more interesting reason for the reluctance and to accept LE MD is in fact of philosophical nature. Because for minds like Einstein, Eddington, and later on Fred Euler. In fact, it was the British astrophysicist Fred Euler who proposed the term Big Bang by derision to mock the idea. And he proposed instead the alternative Sidious state theory. Because for him and for them, it was difficult to admit that the universe was changing with time. So it's just a philosophical prejudice. That universe must be eternal, does not change with time. And this is really why the Big Bang theory was a scientific revolution. The idea that the universe is not a journal, it has a history.
Part of the history begins at time, finite time in the past. Perhaps the universe existed before the new theory of contra gravity. We have some idea of very Big Bang universe. Well, it was not the case at the time of Friedman and L. But so was really a revolutionary idea which was not accepted by most of the scientific community, that the universe was finite in time. That's beginning in the past and he was evolving.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: Okay, yeah. And you do explain in your book the stages of this relativistic science revolution. And I thought that was very interesting. You know, it takes time for these ideas to percolate, to be accepted, to be built on and added to. And you allude to that in your book. So it did take several decades for the basic ideas of the Big Bang theory to be accepted for the reasons that you have mentioned. Well, what about today? Is the Big Bang theory today now confirmed by astronomical observations?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Yes, well, in fact, until the 1970s, the three observational pillars of the Big Bang models were based on the interpreter. One, on the interpretation of galaxy redshifts in terms of expansion of space made by Lemaitre after by the origin of light atoms like hydrogen, deuterium and helium in a very hot phase of the early universe made by Gamow and his collaborators. And finally the discovery of fossil radiation which was a cooled electromagnetic remnant of this hot phase in 1965. Well, now, since then immense progress has been made, thanks to major telescopes such as WMAP Planck, who observed in very, very details the structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation. And also more traditional telescopes such the famous Hubble Space Telescope and more recently the James Webb Space Telescope, which allowed astronomer to go deeply, more deeply in the past of the early universe.
And we can now say really that we have entered an era of high precision experimental cosmology which was not at all the case at the time of LEMAITRE and even gamow. And this high precision experimental cosmology enables us to fix the fundamental parameters of the universe to within a few percent. Only a few percent. So, well, not really detailed prediction.
Well, despite all this, a number of questions remain unanswered today.
Notably the exact nature of the dark matter and dark energy that we know govern the cosmic evolution.
So it's not the ordinary matter with galaxies and stars which govern the cosmic evolution.
Two strange ingredients, much more important, dark matter and dark energy.
Also there is the, and I have a special chapter on this in the book the topological question that I've been working on a great deal concerning. In fact, it concerns the global shape of the space.
Is it Infinite or is it finite with no limits, with no edge, with a particular shape?
I described that in one of my book, translated in English, which called the Wraparound Universe. Okay. And there is also the question of whether the Big Bang was really a singularity or whether thanks to quantum effects that are still poorly understood, Big Bang could have been preceded by a pre Big Bang phase. So this is a work in progress with some quantum gravity theory which extend the general picture of Big Bang theory to a possible pre Big Bang phase, adding some quantum effect and. Well, for me it's a more interesting part of fundamental physics today to try to enlarge the general picture of the Big Bang model without changing the fundamental claims from the but eliminating some problems of the Big Bang theory itself, like for instance, the singularity.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, it's an exciting time to be studying this and researching this. Now a final question. What do you make the Big Bang theory has been in the news lately.
What do you make of the recent claims that the image of mature early galaxies captured by the James Webb Telescope are undermining or changing the the Big Bang theory?
[00:21:16] Speaker B: Well, I will say that it's just for me to make buzz, you know, in fact, scientific information, including that of coming from very serious space agencies like NASA, European Space Agency has become partly spoiled, in fact by exaggerated claims just to sell better the business of scientific research and get more credits, for instance, and more recognition of searchers. Okay. You know, in fact, for the general audience it's more selling for popular Science magazine or website of scientific information to say that new observation called into question the Standard model cosmology, rather than to say it's the same, for instance, for also this discovery of black holes. Okay, but for cosmology.
So it's more appealing rather than to say that in fact the detail of the Standard Model just need to be studied in greater depth. And this is exactly what is happening now with the recent discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope. Fascinating discovery, but of galaxy that form a little bit faster after the Big Bang than previously thought.
But I can say that believe me or not, this does not in any way call into question the broad outlines of the Big Bang model, but it does invite researchers. And in fact this is what is most interesting in this fair to better refine the parameters required for galaxy formation. For example, the idea of a first generation of primordial black holes, which is wonderful, you know, black hole we mentioned, it's one of my speciality. So the idea of a first generation of primordial black holes created just after the Big Bang that would have acted as seeds accelerating the formation of a galaxy could be taken up again to explain this observation.
And this idea was put forward some 30 years ago. And I mentioned, for instance, this idea in my popular book on black holes that I published by Cambridge in University Press as soon as 1992. So. Well, as I said, of course, the observation of the James Webb Space Telescope are fascinating, but as far as I know, they does not undermine the general Big Bang that you have to look more deeply into the details of the, of the Standard Model.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Well, I think it's very interesting to have the instruments that we have today, like the James Webb telescope and the other, the other machinery that you've mentioned, because you mentioned in your book that telescopes don't just go the distance as far as space, but they also help us go back in time. You know, they, they help us see the past.
And that's exciting and, but it's great to hear that these ideas are holding up and the Big Bang revolution is still very much in play. And it's good to have that intellectual humility and patience that Lumetra demonstrated as we move further into the exploration of this. And on that note, I want to thank you for all of what you've brought to the subject. You have an amazing mind and amazing skill to demonstrate this to the public. So I want to thank you for all that you've done in service of cosmology and this grand exploration of our universe.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Thank you, Andrew. It was a great honor and pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss about what made most of my life as a researcher with this, this fascinating mystery of the universe.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Well, readers and viewers, it's time to get your copy of the Big Bang Revolutionaries. You can do that at Discovery Press. It's of course, available everywhere the books are sold, but Discovery Press will take you straight to it. You can read more and you can tap into some excerpts that we have in written form as well as a reading that I've done for ID the Future. So lots of resources and just get your own copy and read this fascinating story of the history of this amazing cosmological revolution that has changed our view of the universe. Discovery Press is the website to get the book. Thank you again, Dr. Illuminate for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening and watching.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
