The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

—WILLIAM JAMES

On March 28, 1949, at six thirty in the evening, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle gave one of his authoritative radio lectures on the BBC’s The Third Programme, a cultural broadcast that featured such intellectuals as philosopher Bertrand Russell and playwright Samuel Beckett. At one point, as he was trying to contrast his own scenario—one of continuous creation of matter in the universe—with the opposing theory, which claimed that the universe had a distinct and definite beginning, Hoyle made what was to become a controversial statement:

We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past [emphasis added]. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements.