It’s remarkable to me that in this month’s Special Issue of Scientific American on the work of Einstein, the feature article on the Cosmological Constant and the development of cosmology using Einstein’s field equations for General Relativity, the authors mention the contributions of Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre…without ever once giving him credit.
Just one example of how far Lemaitre has dropped off the radar screen. Admittedly, scientists make poor historians by their own admission. Yet, if you’re going to point out, as Krauss and Turner do, that Willem de Sitter’s model of the universe was “shown to have accelerating expansion,” then is it too much to expect them to mention who first pointed this out?