In spite of Hoyle’s valiant efforts, beginning in the mid-1960s most scientists stopped paying attention to the steady state theory. Hoyle’s continuing attempts to demonstrate that all the confrontations between the theory and emerging observations could be explained away looked increasingly contrived and implausible. Worse yet, he seemed to have lost that “fine judgment” that he had once advocated, which was supposed to distinguish him from “merely becoming a crackpot.” At an international symposium on the topic “Modern Cosmology in Retrospect,” which took place in Bologna, Italy, in 1988, he gave a talk entitled “An Assessment of the Evidence Against the Steady-State Theory.” In that downright anachronistic talk, Hoyle tried (unsuccessfully, I should add) to convince his audience that all the compelling pieces of evidence for the big bang—the existence of the cosmic microwave background; the implied need for a primordial synthesis of the light elements deuterium, helium, and lithium; and the counts of the radio sources—could all still be explained by the steady state theory. Hoyle’s obstinate resistance to changing his views stood in stark contrast to the attitude adopted, for instance, by co-originator of the steady state theory Hermann Bondi. Recall that Bondi had insisted on being shown some fossil remains of what the universe was like in the past, if the universe was indeed evolving. In his own talk at the same conference in Bologna, Bondi admitted that such fossil evidence had indeed emerged, both in the form of the cosmic helium abundance, which had been shown to have most likely formed in the big bang, and in the cosmic microwave background, which beautifully matched the big bang predictions. Bondi therefore concluded graciously, “So my challenge of whether fossils could be found has had an answer long after I posed it.”

Hoyle, on the other hand, continued to advocate a somewhat modified version of the steady state theory (which he called “quasi–steady state”). Even as late as the year 2000, at the age of eighty-five, he published a book entitled A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe Through the Big Bang Towards Reality, in which he and his collaborators, Jayant Narlikar and Geoff Burbidge, explained the details of the quasi–steady state theory and their objections to the big bang. To express their contemptuous opinion of the scientific establishment, they presented in one of the book’s pages a photograph of a flock of geese walking on a dirt road with the caption, “This is our view of the conformist approach to the standard (hot big bang) cosmology. We have resisted the temptation to name some of the leading geese.” By then, however, Hoyle had been out of the conventional cosmological wisdom for so long that very few even bothered to point out the shortcomings of the modified theory. Perhaps the best thing said about the book appeared in the review by Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, and it referred not so much to the contents of the book as to Hoyle’s fiery personality: “Hoyle systematically reviews the evidence for the Big Bang theory, and gives it a good kicking . . . it’s hard not to be impressed with the audacity of the demolition job . . . I can only hope that I possess one-thousandth of Hoyle’s fighting spirit when I, like him, have reached my 85th year.”

Hoyle’s blunder was somewhat different from those of Darwin, Kelvin, and Pauling in two important respects. First, there was the issue of the scale of the topic, in the context of which the blunder occurred. Darwin’s blunder involved only one element of his theory (albeit an extremely important one). Kelvin’s blunder concerned an assumption at the basis of a particular calculation (a very meaningful one). Pauling’s blunder affected one specific model (unfortunately for the most crucial molecule). Hoyle’s blunder, on the other hand, concerned no less than an entire theory for the universe as a whole. Second and more important, Hoyle did nothing wrong in proposing the steady state model—unlike Darwin, who did not understand the implications of a faulty biological mechanism; Kelvin, who neglected unforeseen physical processes; and Pauling, who ignored basic rules of chemistry. The theory itself was bold, exceptionally clever, and it matched all the observational facts that existed at the time. Hoyle’s blunder was in his apparently pigheaded, almost infuriating refusal to acknowledge the theory’s demise even as it was being smothered by accumulating contradictory evidence, and in his use of asymmetrical criteria of judgment with respect to the big bang and steady state theories. What was it that caused this intransigent behavior? To answer this intriguing question, I started by asking a few of Hoyle’s former students and younger colleagues for their opinions.

Cosmologist Jayant Narlikar was Hoyle’s graduate student, and he continued to collaborate with him throughout Hoyle’s life. The two researchers developed, among other things, a theory of gravity known as the Hoyle-Narlikar theory, which fits into their quasi–steady state model. Narlikar suggested that Hoyle’s displeasure with the big bang model stemmed, at least initially, from genuine discomfort that Hoyle felt with some of the physical premises of the big bang. For instance, Narlikar recalled, Hoyle pointed out that all the other observed background radiations (optical, X-ray, infrared) were found to be associated with astrophysical objects (stars, active galaxies, and so on), and he saw no reason why the cosmic microwave background would be different and related to a singular event (the big bang). Similarly, around 1956, he thought that stars could somehow produce the energy observed in the cosmic microwave background, if one could find a way to synthesize all the helium in stars. On the more emotional side, Narlikar felt that the fact that Hoyle was not a religious person might have also contributed to his objection to a universe that appeared all at once.

Astrophysicists Peter Eggleton and John Faulkner were both Hoyle’s research students in the early 1960s (Faulkner is the person farthest right in the front row in figure 22), but I was somewhat surprised to discover that their sentiments were rather different. Eggleton remembered Hoyle as a person who knew everything that was worth knowing in astrophysics at the time and also knew everybody that was anybody in the world of astrophysics. He remarked that a whimsical line that had been used to describe the Victorian scholar Benjamin Jowett could be adopted as a genuine characterization of Hoyle, namely: “What he didn’t know wasn’t knowledge.” Concerning Hoyle’s attitude toward science, Eggleton’s impression was that if the scientific community believed something, Hoyle would be inclined to believe the opposite, to see how far he could go. When I pressed him on why he thought Hoyle was so reluctant to accept the big bang, Eggleton expressed the view that Hoyle’s rejection of the idea that life on Earth emerged through a natural, chemical evolution was at the root of this resistance. Hoyle insisted, Eggleton said, that the origin of life required much more time than the age of the universe as inferred from the big bang theory. This is an interesting point, to which we shall return shortly.