Expanding Universe Discovery Lost in Translation?

[orin stepanek]

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archiv ... s/2011/36/

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Writing in the Nov. 10 issue of the journal Nature, Space Telescope Science Institute astrophysicist Mario Livio solves the mystery of why paragraphs disappeared during the 1931 translation of Belgian cosmologist Georges Lemaître's remarkable 1927 paper showing that the universe is expanding. For nearly a century, American astronomer Edwin Hubble has held the fame for this landmark discovery, which would recast all of 20th century astronomy. After going through hundreds of pieces of correspondence of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as minutes of the RAS meetings, and material from the Lemaître Archive, Livio has discovered that Lemaître omitted the passages himself when he translated the paper into English!

This illustration shows Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) on the right and Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) on the left. The telescope on the left is the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson in California. The Hubble Space Telescope is on the right.

[FrancFurtado]

Sorry i repeated the post in other topic but very interesting, i didn't know the man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre

[Ann]

This is really very interesting. I'm sure this kind of thing has happened many times before. Maybe not the "lost in translation" detail, however.

I remember reading that astronomers in parts of Europe had already proved that the Milky Way was not the entire universe at the time when Shapley and Curtis were arguing about it in 1920. The European astronomers had published their proofs of the existence of other galaxies in little-read publications in obscure languages, which is why astronomers in the United States didn't take them seriously or were even aware of what they had written.

Ann