I wonder why the author says that Gamow made the great leap backwards, when Gamow was in fact developing a theory first proposed by Georges Lemaitre a decade earlier than what the author states for Gamow.
I frequently find this used by people who don't want to discuss that the Big Bang was originally theorized by a priest. It doesn't fit their narrative.
Per Wikpedia, he "was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg".
It would seem this guy, who got his Ph.D. at MIT, was erased from history due to anti-religious bigotry, "Let there be light" maps too well into the Big Bang, as the Pope recognized (but took too far). Fred Hoyle was one such figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Bi...
Of interesting historical note: Fr. Lemaître's studies of Einstein's theories were prompted by the encouragement of another churchman, Cardinal Mercier of Belgium.
