“Here was this funny little man”: Interview by Charles Weiner, American Institute of Physics, in February 1973. Cited in Kragh 2010.

“To my surprise, Willy didn’t”: Hoyle 1982, p. 3.

Ward Whaling and his colleagues: Described also in Fowler’s Nobel lecture, “Experimental and Theoretical Nuclear Astrophysics; the Quest for the Origin of the Elements,” given on December 8, 1983.

In their just-over-one-page: Dunbar, Pixley, Wenzel, and Whaling 1953. The paper and its significance is described also in Spear 2002.

Despite his amazingly successful prediction: Given that life as we know it is carbon based, much has been made of the anthropic significance of the resonant level in carbon. This issue is beyond the scope of the discussion here. I should note that in 1989, I, along with colleagues, showed that even if that energy level had been at a slightly different value, stars still would have produced carbon (Livio et al. 1989). This conclusion was confirmed later by more detailed work by Heinz Oberhummer and colleagues (Schlattl et al. 2004). For a detailed review, see Kragh 2010.