Google Doodle: Remembering cosmologist Georges Lemaitre, the Catholic priest who proposed the Big Bang Theory

On July 17, Google paid tribute to Belgian priest, cosmologist and astronomer Georges Lemaitre. He is most famous for formulating the Big Bang Theory, which holds that the universe began in cataclysmic explosion of small, primeval ‘super-atom’.

Born on July 17, 1894, the man whose theory would be held up as proof of non-existence of a higher being, was quite ironically, a Catholic priest. On Tuesday, Google celebrated his birth anniversary with a GIF showing his picture with the ever-expanding universe in the background.

A civil engineer, he served as an artillery officer in the Belgian Army during World War I, after which he entered a seminary in 1923 and was ordained as a priest. He also a student at University of Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge where he came into acquaintance with the findings of American astronomers Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shelpey.

In 1927 he became professor of astrophysics at the Catholic University of Leuven. The same year he proposed his Big Bang Theory, which explained the recession of galaxies within the framework of Einstein’s General Relativity. His theory was confirmed by Edwin Hubble and is now known as Hubble’s Law.

After Lemaitre had delivered his lecture and theory to a group of esteemed scientists in 1933 at the California Institute of Technology, Einstein applauded him and said: “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I ever listened."

He also worke don research on cosmic rays, the three-body problem which concerns itself with the mathematic description of the motion fo three mutually-attracting bodies in space.