In 1930 the Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître published a revolutionary view of the cosmos as one with a finite age and a definite beginning. But how he got there is as interesting a story as the idea of the Big Bang itself, and reveals just how profoundly this one man of faith and science set the stage for modern cosmology, the study of the universe’s origin and evolution.

Jonathan I. Lunine, David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the department of Astronomy at Cornell University, tells the story of this extraordinary adventure. This lecture was given at the Morningside Institute on December 2, 2020.