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A few weeks before Einstein roamed over the summit of Mount Wilson, Eddington delivered an address to the British Mathematical Association, where he called attention to the notorious elephant in the room, present ever since Lemaître first introduced the concept of an expanding universe. In his masterly 1927 journal article, Lemaître had coyly asked the question that likely arose in the mind of anyone reading the paper: How did this expansion get started? “It remains to find the cause,” he answered at the time.

Eddington in his January 5 talk to the British mathematicians faced this conundrum head-on. In his mind's eye, he mentally put the expansion of space-time into reverse and pondered the condition of the universe at earlier and earlier epochs, back to the very launch of space, time, and all of creation. Could you reach a “beginning of time,” he asked, when all matter and energy had the highest degree of organization possible? Eddington was horrified by this thought. The Cambridge theorist concluded that “philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me…. By sweeping it far enough away from the sphere of our current physical problems, we fancy we have got rid of it. It is only when some of us are so misguided as to try to get back billions of years into the past that we find the sweepings all piled up like a high wall and forming a boundary—a beginning of time—which we cannot climb over.” A few years earlier, before the reason for the retreating galaxies was even known and he was simply contemplating an early universe with more energy and order, Eddington had already declared that he did “not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang” (a precursor to British astronomer Fred Hoyle using a similar description on a 1949 BBC radio program, this time with an added adjective, which secured the scientific name—Big Bang—for the moment of creation). Eddington, though, preferred a commencement less abrupt and more restrained. “I picture…an even distribution of protons and electrons, extremely diffuse and filling all (spherical) space, remaining nearly balanced for an exceedingly long time until its inherent instability prevails… There is no hurry for anything to begin to happen. But at last small irregular tendencies accumulate, and evolution gets under way…. As the matter drew closer together in the condensations, the various evolutionary processes followed—evolution of stars, evolution of the more complex elements, evolution of planets and life.” The universe, in effect, eased into its expansion, like a massive train starting up slowly and then gaining speed.

Lemaître, however, was far bolder and had no hesitation at all in contemplating a more dramatic genesis. In response to Eddington's repulsion at an abrupt cosmic beginning, Lemaître submitted a short note to the journal Nature with the splendiferous title: “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory.” “If we go back in the course of time,” replied Lemaître, “… we find all the energy of the universe packed in a few or even in a unique quantum…. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time. I think that such a beginning of the world is far enough from the present order of Nature to be not at all repugnant… We could conceive the beginning of the universe in the form of a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe. This highly unstable atom would divide in smaller and smaller atoms by a kind of super-radioactive process.” He called his initial compact cauldron the “primeval atom.” Today's stars and galaxies, he surmised, were constructed from the fragments blasted outward from this original superatom.

Lemaître was spurred by the revelations of atomic physics in the early decades of the twentieth century, where radioactive elements were seen to endure over times similar to the age then calculated for the universe, a few billion