Monsignor Georges Lemaître is the father of the Big Bang. He invented what is widely known as the “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the universe. It was Lemaître who first proposed the “hypothesis of the primeval atom” calling it “the beginning of the world”.
His theory explained that the recession of nearby galaxies was because of an expanding universe. Hubble observationally confirmed his theory which is now known in science as the Hubble–Lemaître Law.
“This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened”.
Albert Einstein.
Lemaître was a pioneer in applying Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity to cosmology. In 1933 at the California Institute of Technology, after Lemaître detailed his primeval atom theory, Einstein stood up and applauded saying, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”
Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, a mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain.
“It seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux, when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and reunited in millions of galaxies”.
Pope Pius XII
“Georges Lemaitre was the first to propose a model in which the universe had such an infinitely dense beginning. So he, not George Gamow, is the father of the big bang”.
Pope Luciani School of Catholic Science Thinking 