In a sense, the steady-state theory may be said to have begun on the night that Bondi, Gold, and I patronized one of the cinemas in Cambridge . . . It [the film Dead of Night] was a sequence of four ghost stories, seemingly disconnected as told by the several characters in the film, but with the interesting property that the end of the fourth story connected unexpectedly with the beginning of the first, thereby setting-up the potential for a never-ending cycle.

When the three colleagues returned to Trinity College, Gold asked suddenly, “What if the universe is like that?” meaning that the universe could be eternally circling on itself without a beginning or an end. The idea was certainly intriguing, except that at first blush it appeared to be at odds with the discovery by the Belgian priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaître and astronomer Edwin Hubble that the universe was expanding. The cosmic expansion seemed to be pointing rather to a linear evolution, starting from a dense and hot beginning (the big bang) and indicating a clear direction for the arrow of time. Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold were fully aware of these findings, since Hubble’s discovery and its potential implications had already featured frequently in the discussions of the trio. In an interview in 1978, Gold reminisced about those intense analyses:

What happened was that there was a period when Hoyle and I would sit around in Bondi’s rooms in college a substantial amount of the time and discuss, as Hoyle always insisted, what does the Hubble thing really mean? . . . all those galaxies, all this flying apart, would the space be terribly empty afterwards? Has it been very dense in the past?

All of those contemplations had led to an unexpected outcome: Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold started to think seriously about the problem of whether the observed cosmic expansion could somehow be accommodated in the context of a theory of an unchanging universe.

But before delving into that fascinating topic, let’s go back to the 1920s for a moment. The discovery of the expanding universe is not only the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century, it plays such a crucial role both in Hoyle’s blunder and Einstein’s that it would be instructive to take a short detour to review the history of this breakthrough. This story is especially pertinent, since a new, very intriguing twist in the chronicle of events created a huge buzz in the astronomical and history of science communities in 2011.