You may have noticed that the story of the genesis of the elements—the “history of matter,” as Hoyle called it—contains in it some sort of “cosmic compromise.” Gamow wanted all the elements to have been created within a few minutes following the big bang (“in less time than it takes to cook a dish of duck and roast potatoes”). Hoyle wanted all the elements to be forged inside stars during the long process of stellar evolution. Nature chose a give-and-take: Light elements such as deuterium, helium, and lithium were indeed synthesized in the big bang, but all the heavier elements, and in particular those essential for life, were cooked in stellar interiors.

Hoyle got a chance to present his version of the history of matter even at the Vatican. Just a few months before the B²FH paper appeared in print, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Vatican Observatory organized a scientific meeting on “Stellar Populations” at the Vatican. The two dozen invitees included some of the most distinguished scientists in astronomy and astrophysics at the time. Both Fowler and Hoyle presented their results on the synthesis of the elements, and Hoyle was also asked to give a summary of the entire meeting from a physical point of view. The Dutch astronomer Jan Oort summarized from an astronomical perspective. At the opening of the meeting, on May 20, 1957, the participants met Pope Pius XII. Figure 23 shows Hoyle shaking the Pope’s hand. Willy Fowler (with his back to us) stands to Hoyle’s right, and Walter Baade (facing us) is to the Pope’s right.

The rest, as they say, is history. The experimental and theoretical program at Kellogg Lab became, under Willy Fowler’s dynamic leadership, the hub for nuclear astrophysics. Fowler went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1983 (together with astrophysicist Subramanyan Chandrasekhar). Many people, including Fowler himself, felt that Hoyle should have also shared the prize. In 2008 Geoffrey Burbidge went so far as to say, “The theory of stellar nucleosynthesis is attributable to Fred Hoyle alone, as shown by his papers in 1946 and 1954 and the collaborative work of B²FH. In writing up B²FH, all of us incorporated the earlier work of Hoyle.”

Figure 23