Why then wasn’t the Nobel Prize awarded to Hoyle? Opinions vary. Geoff Burbidge concluded, based on private correspondence, that a major reason for the exclusion was a perception (which he insisted was unjustified) that Fowler was the leader of B²FH. Hoyle himself apparently thought that he was denied the prize because of his criticism of the Nobel committee when it decided to award the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars to Antony Hewish instead of to his graduate student Jocelyn Bell, who actually made the discovery. Others thought that Hoyle’s insistence on unorthodox views concerning the big bang, which we shall discuss in detail in the next chapter, might have played a role in his not getting the prize.

What were those dissenting views? What was the background for Hoyle’s opposition to the big bang?

During the years of World War II, Hoyle found himself working at the Admiralty Signals Establishment in Witley, Surrey. There he befriended two of his younger colleagues, Hermann Bondi and Thomas “Tommy” Gold, both of them Austrian-born Jews who’d escaped to England following the rise of Nazism. Ironically, prior to their work for the navy at Witley, the British government had interned the two men as enemy aliens because of their Austrian roots.

This is how Gold described his initial impression of Hoyle: “He seemed so strange; he seemed never to listen when people were talking to him, and his broad North Country accent seemed quite out of place.” Very quickly, however, his opinion changed:

I also discovered that I had misinterpreted Hoyle’s attitude of apparently not listening. In fact, he listened very carefully and had an extremely good memory, as I would find out later when he frequently had remembered what I had said much better than myself. I think he put on this air not to say, “I am not listening,” but instead “don’t try to influence me, I am going to make up my own mind.”