(From Basic Books)

Now available in print, e-book, and audiobook editions from all bookstores and online sellers.

“Science buffs will enjoy this nicely written biography of a little-known but towering figure in modern cosmology.”— Publisher’s Weekly.

Lemaître convinced Einstein’s generation that the universe was in fact expanding according to the field equations Einstein himself laid out in 1917. He is credited with first positing the idea of a temporal and spatial origin to the cosmos, in a “primeval atom” theory of a superdense cosmic nucleus from which the universe expanded—what later became the Big Bang theory. 

He also developed the “dust” solution, modifying the work of Karl Schwarzchild, which allowed later astrophysicists to model black holes. He was in fact the first physicist to combine training in Einstein’s theory with a rigorous background in astronomy and astrophysics, allowing him to test, before anyone else, the true cosmic implications of the general theory of relativity.