Unlike Hoyle, Ryle came from a privileged background—his father was physician to King George VI—and he had received the best of what private education could offer. After some pioneering radio observations of the Sun in the late 1940s, Ryle and his group embarked on an ambitious program to detect radio sources beyond the solar system. Following some impressive improvements to the observational techniques that allowed them to discard background radiation from the Milky Way, Ryle and his colleagues discovered several dozen “radio stars” distributed more or less isotropically across the sky. Unfortunately, since most of the sources did not have visible counterparts, there was no way to determine their distances precisely. Ryle was of the opinion that these were peculiar stars within our own galaxy, and he was prepared to forcefully defend this view at a small gathering of radio astronomy enthusiasts.

This so-called Massey Conference (named after atomic physicist Harrie Massey, who hosted it) took place at University College London in March 1951. Both Hoyle and Gold were present, and they did not hide their skepticism. At one point, Gold stood up and challenged Ryle’s conclusions. He contended that since the discrete radio sources were uniformly distributed in all directions, rather than being concentrated toward the plane of the Milky Way, they must be outside our own galaxy, at much larger distances. The only alternative, he argued, was that the sources were in fact so close that they were all contained within the relatively small thickness of the Galactic disk (distances shorter than one hundred light-years). Ryle’s hypothesis, that the sources were scattered all across the Milky Way, was untenable in Gold’s view. Hoyle fully supported Gold’s position, provoking a sarcastic comment from Ryle: “I think the theoreticians have misunderstood the experimental data.” Hoyle responded by pointing out that of the half a dozen sources or so that had actually been optically identified, five corresponded to external galaxies. Years later, he commented that Ryle used the word “theoreticians” in a way that implied some “inferior and detestable species.”

This was but one of the many major clashes between the steady state theorists and Ryle, and it left emotional scars on both Hoyle and Ryle. In this particular case, Gold and Hoyle prevailed.

About a year after the Massey meeting, astronomer Walter Baade determined that the distance to a radio source in the constellation Cygnus was hundreds of millions of light-years, confirming Hoyle’s suspicion. Ironically, however, it was precisely the great distance of the radio sources that later became the cornerstone of Ryle’s argument in favor of an evolving universe and which led to the downfall of the steady state theory. (The steady state theory never created much resonance in the United States, but in 1952, following a lecture by the Astronomer Royal, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, it did manage to generate a few headlines. Two of these, one in the New York Times and the other in the Christian Science Monitor, are shown in figure 29.)