Andrew Fildes wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud
> Fred Hoyle - serious astronomer and so-so writer who, ironically, invented
> the term Big Bang.
> I remember it - fairly ordinary but I had enough stamina to finish it!
>
I don't think that was it. I'm sure I read Hoyle's book, and I'd
remember if that was it. Seems more likely an older book and maybe an
Eastern European author- maybe. Certainly someone more unknown and
mysterious to me than Hoyle.
To those challenged in the history of cosmology, the irony is that Fred
Hoyle was the leader of the Flat Earth Society - oops, the Steady State
Universe group of astronomers and astrophysicists. Evidence of expansion
was by then irrefutable, but they held that density stayed steady, as I
recall, through matter popping into existence in deep space.
George Gamow was the major mouthpiece for the expanding universe with a
fixed quantity of matter, so density was dropping. Hoyle was said to
have coined the term Big Bang as a taunt, to make Gamow & Co. sound
silly. Didn't work; he gave the name that stuck to the theory that won.
Can you tell I was a science nerd back when all this was current? :-D
Moose
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