A Belgian Catholic priest mapped the expanding universe before Edwin Hubble and told Albert Einstein, at the height of his fame, that his physical intuition was wrong. This episode traces the life of the father of modern cosmology, born in Charleroi in 1894, from the artillery ballistics course where he was marked down for insubordination after pointing out a math error in the official manual, to the harsh feedback from writer Leon Bloy that convinced him to abandon concordism and stop forcing science and scripture to speak with one voice.

After earning a mathematics doctorate and being ordained in 1923, he studied with Arthur Eddington at Cambridge, Harlow Shapley at Harvard, and at MIT, becoming fluent in both theory and observation. His 1927 paper proposed an expanding universe, which Einstein rejected at the Solvay Conference. When Hubb ...