Pope says god was behind Big Bang, world awaits proof.

Enkidu wrote: »

It was actually Alexander Friedmann who came up with it, after finding out that it was a consequence of General Relativity. LaMaitre argued for it, but it didn't originate with him.

robindch wrote: »

No, Friedmann (Фридман) was a Russian physicist of jewish extraction who came up with the idea of an expanding universe five years before Lemaître did (something that seems to be forgotten regularly by people who hold catholic religious beliefs).That's the spirit

The Big Bang theory developed from observations of the structure of the
Universe and from theoretical considerations. In 1912 Vesto Slipher
measured the first Doppler shift of a "spiral nebula" (spiral nebula is the
obsolete term for spiral galaxies), and soon discovered that almost all
such nebulae were receding from Earth. He did not grasp the cosmological
implications of this fact, and indeed at the time it was highly controversial
whether or not these nebulae were "island universes" outside our Milky
Way. Ten years later, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian cosmologist
and mathematician, derived the Friedmann equations from Albert Einstein's
equations of general relativity, showing that the Universe might be
expanding in contrast to the static Universe model advocated by Einstein
at that time. In 1924, Edwin Hubble's measurement of the great
distance to the nearest spiral nebulae showed that these systems were
indeed other galaxies. Independently deriving Friedmann's equations in
1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest,
proposed that the inferred recession of the nebulae was due to the
expansion of the Universe.

In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the evident expansion in
forward time required that the Universe contracted backwards in time, and
would continue to do so until it could contract no further, bringing all the
mass of the Universe into a single point, a "primeval atom" where and
when the fabric of time and space comes into existence.

Starting in 1924, Hubble painstakingly developed a series of distance
indicators, the forerunner of the cosmic distance ladder, using the
100-inch (2,500 mm) Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory.
This allowed him to estimate distances to galaxies whose redshifts had
already been measured, mostly by Slipher. In 1929, Hubble discovered a
correlation between distance and recession velocity—now known as
Hubble's law. Lemaître had already shown that this was expected,
given the Cosmological Principle.
link

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I never understood why it mattered that LaMaitre was religious, the fact
that he didn't fudge his work or imply some religious connection when there
was none is just what any honest person would do & apparently that's
what LaMaitre did, it's irrelevant to know he was a priest. The fact that
he put forward the big bang idea based off equations that implied it
means what exactly?