Jean-Pierre Luminet, a French astrophysicist specializing in black holes and cosmology, is emeritus research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is a member of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTH) of the Paris-Meudon Observatory. Luminet has been awarded several prizes. These include the Georges Lemaître Prize (1999) for his work in cosmology, the UNESCO Kalinga Prize (2021), and the Einstein medal for the Popularization of Science (2021). He has published more than twenty science books, eight historical novels, and eight poetry collections. The asteroid 5523 Luminet was named in his honor.
Hubble and Einsten are often credited, but the real heroes of the Big Bang revolution are the Russian Alexander Friedmann and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître. The Big Bang Revolutionaries amends the record, telling the remarkable story of how these two men, joined by the mischievous George Gamow and in the face of conventional scientific wisdom, offered a compelling view of a singular creation of the universe in what Lemaître termed a “primeval atom.”
