https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/ Recent content in The Primeval Atom on Superphysics Hugo en https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/introduction/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/introduction/ <!-- ABBE GEORGES EDOUARD LEMAITRE was a Belgian astronomer who was born in 1894 at Charleroi and died at Louvain in 1966. He studied at the University of Louvain and worked as a civil engineer. During World War I he served as an artillery officer in the Belgian army. After the war, he returned to Louvain and graduated from there in 1920. Lemaitre's interest in theology led him to enroll at a seminary at Malines after which he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1923. He then changed careers and went back to mathematics and physics. Lemaitre spent a year studying astrophysics with Arthur Eddington at Cambridge and a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Observatory. He returned to the University of Louvain to accept an academic appointment in 1925 and was later promoted to professor of astronomy in 1927 after receiving his Ph.D. from M. I. T. that same year. Lemaitre discovered several solutions to Einstein's general relativity field equations that describe an expanding cosmic model as an alternative to the static model originally proposed by Einstein. The observational evidence to support Lemaitre's cosmology was supplied by the work of Hubble but it was only when a paper outlining his views was translated and published in a 1931 issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that Lemaitre's theory began to receive much attention from physicists and astronomers. The most important feature of Lemaitre's work is the idea that if one extrapolated the expanding Universe backward in time, the galaxies would converge at some point into what Lemaitre described as a "superatom." He suggested that the expansion of the Universe had resulted from the explosion of this superatom-caused perhaps by radioactive decay-which hurtled its superheated materials in all directions, sowing the seeds of future stars and galaxies. Lemaitre's model suffered from a lack of mathematical detail as well as ae its reliance on the then understated age of the Universe, which in the 1930s had been estimated at about 2 billion years. The German astronomer Walter Baade who discovered a correction to the period-luminosity ~e law of Cepheid variables showed that the galaxies are far more distant than Hubble thought. Baade's work increased the volume of the known Universe by a factor of twenty and more than tripled the accepted age of the Universe to about ten billion years-a time sufficient to allow for the evolution of the earth to its present state. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Genesis 1:1 and 1:3 --> <p>THE PRiMEVAL ATOM hypothesis is a cosmogonic hypothesis which pictures the present universe as the result of the radioactive disintegration of an atom.</p> https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-1/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-1/ <p>We picture the primeval atom as filling space which has a very small radius (astronomically speaking).</p> <p>Therefore, there is no place for superficial electrons, the primeval atom being nearly an isotope of a neutron. This atom is conceived as having existed for an instant only, in fact, it was unstable and, as soon as it came into being, it was broken into pieces which were again broken, in their turn.</p> https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-2/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-2/ <p>The theory of relativity allows me to complete my description of space with a variable radius by introducing new concepts.</p> <p>This space is in the interior of a sphere, the center can be choosen arbitrarily.</p> https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-3/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-3/ <!-- This interpretation gives the explanation for a remarkable coincidence upon which de Sitter insisted strongly, in the past. --> <p>Calculating the radius of the universe in the theory which bears his name, that is, ignoring the presence of matter and introducing into the formulas the value <code>T subH</code> given by the observation of the expansion, he obtained a result which scarcely differs from that which is obtained, in Einstein&rsquo;s totally different theory of the universe, by introducing into the formulas the observed value of the density of matter.</p> https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-4/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.superphysics.org/research/lemaitre/primeval/part-4/ <p>if the spirals have this origin, it must follow that the stars are formed by an encounter of clouds in two very distinct processes. in the first place, and especially in the central region, the clouds encounter one another in their radial movement, and this is the phenomenon which we have invoked for the elliptical nebulae. Kapteyn&rsquo;s preferential motion may be an indication of it.</p>