Note, by the way, that according to this “New Genesis,” even God made a blunder!

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences also did not think that Hoyle’s prediction was merely a minor detail. In 1997 it decided to give the prestigious Crafoord Prize (awarded in disciplines chosen to complement those for which the Nobel prizes are given) to Hoyle and Salpeter “for their pioneering contribution to the study of nuclear processes in stars and stellar evolution.” In their announcement of the prize, the academy noted: “Perhaps his [Hoyle’s] most important single contribution within this field was a paper where he demonstrated that the existence of carbon in Nature implied the existence of a certain excited state in the carbon nuclei above the ground state. This prediction was later verified experimentally.”

Figure 21

Hoyle followed up on his prediction for the carbon level with a paper that established the foundation for the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars: the concept that most chemical elements and their isotopes were synthesized from hydrogen and helium by nuclear reactions within massive stars. In this paper, published in 1954, Hoyle explained how the abundances of heavy elements today are the direct products of stellar evolution. Stars spend their lives in a continuous battle against gravity. In the absence of an opposing force, gravity would cause any star to collapse to its center. By “igniting” nuclear reactions in their cores, stars create extremely high temperatures, and the associated high pressures support the stars against their own weight. Hoyle described how after each central nuclear fuel is consumed (first, hydrogen is fused into helium, then helium into carbon, then carbon into oxygen, and so on), gravitational contraction causes the temperature in the core to increase until the “ignition” of the next nuclear reaction. This way, Hoyle reasoned, new elements are synthesized, all the way up to iron, in each successive core-burning episode. Since each burning core is smaller than the preceding one, the star develops an onionskin-like structure, in which each layer is composed of the main product—“ashes,” if you like, of the preceding nuclear reaction (figure 21). Since iron is the most stable nucleus, once an iron core forms, no more nuclear energy is available from fusion of nuclei into heavier ones. Without a source of internal heat to combat gravity, the stellar core collapses, triggering a dramatic explosion. These so-called supernova explosions powerfully eject all the forged elements into interstellar space, where they enrich the gas from which later generations of stars and planets form. The temperatures attained during the explosions are so high that elements heavier than iron are formed by neutrons bombarding the stellar material. Hoyle’s scenario remains to this day the broad picture depicting the evolution of stars. Surprisingly, this key paper in the development of the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis received relatively little attention at the time, perhaps because it was published in a new astrophysical journal that was relatively unknown to the nuclear physics community.