Georges Lemaître - The Birth of Space, 1931.
According to the Big Bang theory, the expansion of the observable Universe began with the explosion of a single particle at a definite point in time. This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître. The theory, accepted by nearly all astronomers today, was a radical departure from scientific orthodoxy in the 1930s. Many astronomers at the time were still uncomfortable with the idea that the Universe is expanding. That the entire observable Universe of galaxies began with a bang seemed preposterous.
Lemaître explored the logical consequences of an expanding Universe and boldly proposed that it must have originated at a finite point in time. If the Universe is expanding, he reasoned, it was smaller in the past, and extrapolation back in time should lead to an epoch when all the matter in the Universe was packed together in an extremely dense state. Appealing to the new quantum theory of matter, Lemaître argued that the physical Universe was initially a single particle - the “Primeval Atom” as he called it - which disintegrated in an explosion, giving rise to Space and Time and the expansion of the Universe that continues to this day. This idea marked the birth of what we now know as Big Bang Cosmology.
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