Hubble Law --> Hubble-Lemaitre Law

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 23:05:33 GMT

Last month (August), the IAU met and decided to take a vote on changing the Hubble Law to become the "Hubble-Lemaitre Law". They will use electronic voting to get greater participation. [The Pluto demotion vote appeared mishandled so they seem to be avoiding those voting issues of the past, at least in this case.]

Abbe Georges Lemaitre (Belgian priest with a PhD from MIT) was the first to propose the expanding universe in a scientific manner (1927). [Edgar Allan Poe had suggested it in a poem written in 1848.] Lemaitre did this with his knowledge of General Relativity and a couple years before Hubble had discovered the correlation of distance and redshift. [Hubble never chose to call it expansion leaving theory to the theorists.]

The entrenched Static Theory held the universe essentially immutable, so it seemed a bit absurd to many that our universe may have had a beginning. Einstein initially looked at Lemaitre's paper and, by some accounts, considered his math as fine but his physics "abominable".

I think most expect the vote to go without much of a.... Bang!