film. The Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre, a physicist and astronomer, imagined the expansion unreeling in reverse, the size of the universe shrinking, smaller and smaller, the galaxies rushing back together, faster and faster, until the infalling matter would reach a state that he called the “primeval atom” and that other astronomers would come to call a “singularity”: an abyss of infinite density and incalculable mass and energy.
