{"id":12857,"date":"2016-06-20T14:10:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T21:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12857"},"modified":"2016-06-20T14:10:12","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T21:10:12","slug":"father-of-the-big-bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/20\/father-of-the-big-bang\/","title":{"rendered":"Father of the Big Bang"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre\">Georges Lema\u00eetre<\/a> died fifty years ago today, on 20 June 1966. If anyone deserves the title &#8220;Father of the Big Bang,&#8221; it would be him. Both because he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/12\/catholic-priest-proposes-new-model-for-creation\/\">investigated and popularized the Big Bang model<\/a>, and because he was an actual Father, in the sense of being a Roman Catholic priest. (Which presumably excludes him from being an actual small-f father, but okay.) <\/p>\n<p>John Farrell, author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Day-Without-Yesterday-Lema\u00eetre-Cosmology-ebook\/dp\/B007ZS0T42\/\">a biography of Lema\u00eetre<\/a>, has put together a nice video commemoration: &#8220;The Greatest Scientist You&#8217;ve Never Heard Of.&#8221; I of course have heard of him, but I agree that Lema\u00eetre isn&#8217;t as famous as he deserves.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/171397809?title=0&#038;byline=0&#038;portrait=0\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/171397809\">The Greatest Scientist You&#039;ve Never Heard Of<\/a> from <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/farrellmedia\">Farrellmedia<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Georges Lema\u00eetre died fifty years ago today, on 20 June 1966. If anyone deserves the title &#8220;Father of the Big Bang,&#8221; it would be him. Both because he investigated and popularized the Big Bang model, and because he was an actual Father, in the sense of being a Roman Catholic priest. (Which presumably excludes him [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12857"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12860,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12857\/revisions\/12860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}