It goes without saying that Hoyle himself did not agree with Ryle’s interpretation. Rather than engaging in long arguments, however, he decided to wait for superior observational data to surface and refute Ryle’s finding. To the surprise of many astronomers, such contradictory results have indeed emerged. Australian radio astronomers showed in 1957 that Ryle’s earlier survey was seriously flawed: The map of radio sources that Ryle had produced was so blurred that blends of two or more radio sources were often counted as one. The consequences were clear to the Australian astronomers: “Deductions of cosmological interest derived from the analysis are without foundation.”

Hoyle did not bother to rejoice. The year 1957 witnessed the publication of the celebrated B²FH, and he was deeply engrossed in the synthesis of the elements rather than in steady state cosmology. It had not escaped him, though, that forging most of the nuclei in stellar cores (instead of in a big bang) could also be seen as supporting (at least partially) a steady state perspective. In the same year, Hoyle was also elected as Fellow of the Royal Society, an honor that put him on par with Ryle in terms of his academic status. But Ryle did not give up. He and his team continued to introduce significant upgrades both to their instrumentation and to the data reduction and analysis. Their efforts resulted in the production of the third generation of the Cambridge catalogue of radio sources (known as the 3C Catalogue).

By the early 1960s, Ryle’s group had at its disposal even an entirely new radio observatory, funded by the Mullard electronics company. The intellectual skirmishes between Ryle and Hoyle continued, culminating in one particularly unpleasant incident. Hoyle later described this traumatic experience in his autobiographical book Home Is Where the Wind Blows. It all started with what appeared to be an innocent phone call from the Mullard company in early 1961. The person at the other end of the line invited Hoyle and his wife to attend a press conference at which Ryle was expected to present new results that were supposed to be of great interest to Hoyle. When they arrived at the Mullard headquarters in London, Hoyle’s wife, Barbara, was escorted to a seat in the front now, while Hoyle was led to a chair on stage, facing the media. He had no doubt that the announcement would be related to the counting of radio sources according to their intensity, but he couldn’t believe that he would have been invited if the results were to contradict the steady state theory. In his words:

Was I being uncharitable in thinking that the new results Ryle would shortly be announcing were adverse to my position? Surely, if they were adverse, I would hardly have been set up so blatantly. Surely, it must mean that Ryle was about to announce results in consonance with the steady-state theory, ending with a handsome apology for his previously misleading reports. So, I set about composing an equally handsome reply in my mind.

Unfortunately, what Hoyle found utterly unthinkable did happen. When Ryle appeared, rather than making a brief announcement, as advertised, he launched into a technical, jargon-filled lecture on the results of his larger, fourth survey. He finished by claiming confidently that the results now showed unambiguously a higher density of radio sources in the past, therefore proving the steady state theory wrong. The shocked Hoyle was merely asked to comment on the results. Incredulous and humiliated, he barely mumbled a few sentences and rushed away from the event. The media frenzy that followed in the subsequent days disgusted Hoyle to the point that he avoided phone calls for a week and was absent even from the following RAS meeting on February 10. Even Ryle realized that the press conference had crossed the border of common decency. He called Hoyle to apologize, adding that when he agreed to the Mullard event, he “had no idea how bad it would be.”