As someone who has worked for more than two decades with Hubble’s namesake—the Hubble Space Telescope—I became sufficiently intrigued by this whodunit to attempt to appraise the facts more carefully. I started by examining the circumstances surrounding the translation of Lemaître’s article.

First, I obtained a copy of the original letter sent by the editor of the Monthly Notices at the time, astronomer William Marshall Smart, to Georges Lemaître. In that letter (figure 26), Smart asked Lemaître whether he would allow his 1927 paper to be reprinted in the Monthly Notices, since the Royal Astronomical Council felt that the paper was not as well known as its importance deserved. The most important paragraph in the letter reads:

Briefly—if the Soc. Scientifique de Bruxelles [in the annals of which the original paper was published] is also willing to give its permission—we should prefer the paper translated into English. Also, if you have any further additions etc. on the subject, we would glad[ly] print these too. I suppose that if there were additions a note could be inserted to the effect that §§–n are substantially from the Brussels paper + the remainder is new (or something more elegant). Personally and also on behalf of the Society I hope that you will be able to do this.

My immediate reaction was that the text of Smart’s letter was entirely innocent, and it certainly did not suggest any intent of extra editing or censorship. But while I was fairly convinced of the correctness of this nonconspiratorial interpretation of Smart’s letter, the two main mysteries—who translated the paper and who deleted the paragraphs—remained unresolved. In an attempt to answer these questions definitively, I decided to explore the matter further by scrutinizing all of the council’s minutes and the entire surviving correspondence from 1931 at the Royal Astronomical Society Library in London. After going through many hundreds of irrelevant documents and almost giving up, I discovered two “smoking guns.” First, in the minutes of the council from February 13, 1931, it is reported: “On the motion of Dr. Jackson it was resolved that the Abbé Lemaître be asked if he would allow his paper ‘Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant,’ or an English translation thereof, to be published in the Monthly Notices.” This, of course, was precisely the decision mentioned in Smart’s letter to Lemaître. (As an amusing aside, the same minutes also report, “A motion by Sir Arthur Eddington that smoking be permitted at meetings of the Council was discussed. It was resolved that smoking be permitted after 3:30 p.m.”) The second piece of evidence was Lemaître’s response to Smart’s letter (figure 27), dated March 9, 1931. The letter reads: