Lemaitre, Hubble, and translational fidelity!

You remember Lemaitre of Bible, age of earth and God’s mistakes fame? Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a nice discussion as to whether the credit for Hubble’s law should actually be given to Lemaitre; apparently, Lemaitre got the constant value, now known as Hubble’s constant, quite close; however, Arthur Eddington (of the Sir Arthur Adding-One fame), when he translated Lemaitre’s paper–which gave the cosntant–from French into English, dropped that one sentence which discussed the data!

Having said that, Sean argues as to why it should still be called Hubble’s law and not Lemaitre’s law:

However — Lemaitre didn’t have very good data (and what he did was partly from Hubble, I gather). And for whatever reason, he did not plot velocity vs. distance. Instead, he seems to have taken the average velocity (which was known since the work of Vesto Slipher to be nonzero) and divided by some estimated average distance! If Hubble’s Law — the linear relation between velocity and distance — is true, that will correctly get you Hubble’s constant, but it’s definitely not enough to establish Hubble’s Law. If you have derived the law theoretically from the principles of general relativity applied to an expanding universe, and are convinced you are correct, maybe all you care about is fixing the value of the one free parameter in your model. But I think it’s still correct to say that credit for Hubble’s Law goes to Hubble — although it’s equally correct to remind people of the crucial role that Lemaitre played in the development of modern cosmology.

An interesting piece of science history; take a look!

Tags: Abbe Lemaitre, Edwin Hubble, expanding universe, Hubble's constant, Sir Arthur Eddington