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The only known video interview with Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître, widely considered the “father of the Big Bang,” talking about the birth of the universe has been rediscovered almost 60 years after it was lost.
Lemaître (1894-1966) was a professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and a practicing Catholic priest. In 1927, he was the first person to propose that the movement of galaxies away from Earth was a sign that the universe was expanding, which was later observationally confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble.
Lemaître was also the first to derive Hubble’s law, which states that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance, even though Hubble received all the credit at the time. (The International Astronomical Union renamed the idea the Hubble-Lemaître law (opens in new tab) in 2018.) In 1931, Lemaître proposed his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” to account for the universe’s expansion, which stated that the universe began from a single point, and later inspired what we now know as the Big Bang theory.
The rediscovered video (opens in new tab) features Lemaître discussing his ideas with journalist Jérôme Verhaeghe during a Belgian TV interview, which was broadcast on Feb. 14, 1964. A small clip of the interview, around two minutes long, has been widely available for decades, but the full 20-minute video was considered to be lost after the film reel containing the footage disappeared shortly after the interview aired.
But this reel, it turns out, was simply misplaced.
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On Dec. 29, 2022, Belgium’s national service broadcaster for the country’s Flemish-speaking community, Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), rereleased (opens in new tab) the video after it was discovered in the broadcaster’s archives. The film reel had been lost because it was miscategorized and because Lemaître’s name was misspelled on the label, which made searching for it like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” VRT representatives wrote in a…
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