One might have thought that with such a coup under his belt, Hoyle would immediately rush to announce it to the world. In reality, more than a half year passed from the confirmation of his prediction until Hoyle reported on it briefly at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Albuquerque. Even in subsequent years, Hoyle never made a big deal of his remarkable achievement. In 1986 he commented:

In a sense this was but a minor detail. But because it was seen by physicists as an unusual and successful prediction it had a disproportionate effect in converting them from the currently held view that the elements were all synthesized in the early moments of a hot universe to the more mundane view that the elements are synthesized in stars.

Others did not think that this was “but a minor detail.” When the boisterous George Gamow came to summarize his own views on Hoyle’s role in the theory of the formation of the elements, he did so by a witty account that he entitled “New Genesis”:

In the beginning God created radiation and ylem. And ylem was without shape or number, and the nucleons were rushing madly over the face of the deep. And God said: “Let there be mass two.” And there was mass two. And God saw deuterium, and it was good. And God said: “Let there be mass three.” And God saw tritium and tralphium [Gamow’s nickname for the isotope of helium ³He] and they were good. And God continued to call number after number until He came to the transuranium elements. But when He looked back on his work He found that it was not good. In the excitement of counting, He missed calling for mass five and so, naturally, no heavier elements could have been formed. God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way.

And God said: “Let there be Hoyle.” And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle . . . and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased. And Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by supernovae explosions. But in doing so he had to obtain the same abundance curve which would have resulted from nucleosynthesis in ylem, if God would not have forgotten to call for mass five. And so, with the help of God, Hoyle made heavy elements in this way, but it was so complicated that nowadays neither Hoyle, nor God, nor anybody else can figure out exactly how it was done.