The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology [Hardcover]

John Farrell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1560256605 | ISBN-13: 978-1560256601 | Publication Date: October 5, 2005

Sometimes our understanding of our universe is given a huge boost by one insightful thinker. Such a boost came in the first half of the twentieth century, when an obscure Belgian priest put his mind to deciphering the nature of the cosmos. Is the universe evolving to some unforeseen end, or is it static, as the Greeks believed? The debate has preoccupied thinkers from Heraclitus to the author of the Upanishads, from the Mayans to Einstein. The Day Without Yesterday covers the modern history of an evolving universe, and how Georges Lemaître convinced a generation of thinkers to embrace the notion of cosmic expansion and the theory that this expansion could be traced backward to the cosmic origins, a starting point for space and time that Lemaître called "the day without yesterday." Lemaître's skill with mathematics and the equations of relativity enabled him to think much more broadly about cosmology than anyone else at the time, including Einstein. Lemaître proposed the expanding model of the universe to Einstein, who rejected it. Had Einstein followed Lemaître's thinking, he could have predicted the expansion of the universe more than a decade before it was actually discovered.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Few people realize that the Belgian scientist Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) played a seminal role in the development of our current understanding of the Big Bang and black holes. Lemaître was also a Roman Catholic priest, rising to monsignor, but he carefully maintained a firewall between his two vocations, even reacting with horror when Pope Pius XII described the Big Bang as the biblical moment of creation. Science writer Farrell recounts that Einstein dismissed Lemaître's ideas at their first encounter, in 1927; later, the great man regarded him as a valuable colleague. Lemaître believed at first that the universe expanded from an initial static state; only later did he arrive at his theory of a "primeval atom," which George Gamow and others developed into the Big Bang theory. Farrell explains how Lemaître determined that what we now call a black hole is a singularity where the radius of the sphere collapses to zero. Lemaître also stuck with the cosmological constant after Einstein had abandoned it, a stance validated in the 1990s when scientists discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating. Science buffs will enjoy this nicely written biography of a little-known but towering figure in modern cosmology. B&w illus.
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Review

"Lemaitre's story is so fascinating that I could not put this book down." -- Science Books and Films, November 1, 2005

"Students and teachers will learn about a mostly unknown but quite important figure in the history of astronomy." -- National Science Teachers Association

"The Day Without Yesterday is among the most fascinating biographies of this year." -- New York Resident, January 30, 2006

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (October 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560256605
• ISBN-13: 978-1560256601
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #867,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm an author and producer based in Boston. I write a blog called Progressive Download for Forbes and have also written for the Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Huffington Post, National Review and Cosmos Magazine. My favorite writers include Alice Munro, Elmore Leonard, William Trevor, Bruce Sterling, Gene Wolfe, Sean B. Carroll and Herbert McCabe. Some of my published articles and short stories can be read at my website: www.farrellmedia.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun and informative, January 31, 2006

By 

S. A. Hughes (Arlington, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Hardcover)

This book was a joy to read. I'm an astrophysicist who does a lot of work with general relativity, and I had absolutely no clue how deep and important the contributions of Lemaitre are to my own field! What was particularly fascinating for me to see was how deeply Lemaitre's thinking was driven by data and observations. Over much of its history, general relativity has been a rather mathematical subfield of physics; it is taught in math departments rather than physics departments in many British universities, for example. It's much more common for this data-driven thinking to be applied to work in relativity today than it was in during Lemaitre's era.

That's just one one thing that I was fascinated by. The book is extremely well written and enjoyable; I read it on my morning train commute to the office and nearly missed my stop several times. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in an in-depth biography of an underappreciated founder of modern cosmology and astrophysics.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable and Informative, December 27, 2005

By 

Brendan M. Hodge (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Hardcover)

I strongly recommend The Day Without Yesterday to anyone with an interest in physics, astronomy and the history of the universe. As well as being an excellent layperson's introduction to Lemaitre's development of the expanding model of the universe (what has become known as the "Big Bang") it provides an excellent description of how real scientists deal with new data, theories and their philosophical implications.

Up until the mid Twenties, virtually all scientists (from ancients like Aristotle and Lucretius to the greats of early and modern science such as Newton and Einstein) had envisioned an essentially static universe. Lemaitre (a World War I veteran, Catholic priest, and physics/mathematics PhD) realized that Einstein's field equations equations implied an expanding universe, which must have had its origin in a "primeval atom" containing all matter in the universe. Lemaitre also made important contributions to "black hole" theory and other areas of theoretical physics.

He was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Pius XI and was made its president by John XXIII, who also (somewhat to Lemaitre's confusion) appointed him to the pontifical commission to study birth control. (Lemaitre died well before the commission provided its report to Paul VI.)

Although a certain amount of familiarity with mathematics will help, you don't need a great deal of knowledge about the field to enjoy Farrell's writing. I would class The Day Without Yesterday with books like Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, which provide a good popular introduction to an important transitional period in science while remaining accessible to the general reader.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Primeval Big Bang Cosmologist, December 31, 2005

By 

Bruce Crocker "agnostictrickster" (Whittier, California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Hardcover)

Georges LemaÎtre may just be the Rodney Dangerfield of cosmology - he just can't get the respect he deserves [in the book I'm currently reading, it says "Modern cosmology is based on the big bang theory proposed by George Gamow..."]. _The Day Without Yesterday_ by John Farrell goes a long way towards making the case that Georges LemaÎtre should at the least share the title of the Father of Modern Cosmology. In the book, we follow the trajectory of the life of Fra Georges LemaÎtre, priest, mathematician, and physicist, played out against the first 2/3rds of history of the 20th Century and the history of modern cosmology. We learn of LemaÎtre's "primeval atom" - the original version of the big bang - and his interactions [or lack thereof] with Einstein, Hubble, Gamow and others. I am pleased to report that LemaÎtre lived long enough to hear about the discovery of the cosmic background radiation and the vindication of the big bang. LemaÎtre is a good example of the fact that religion and science need not conflict. I highly recommend this fine book to fans of biography and the history of science.