Michael Turner’s Reference Frame incorrectly states that “[George] Gamow’s Big Bang model spurred Fred Hoyle to think more creatively about the stellar nucleosynthesis to keep his steady-state model competitive.”
“That’s absolute rubbish,” said Hoyle, whom I interviewed in 1993 for my book The Alchemy of the Heavens: Searching for Meaning in the Milky Way (Anchor, 1995). “The one thing you’ve got to get right is this [work on nucleosynthesis] had nothing to do with cosmology at all. It was [J. Robert] Oppenheimer, with whom I never got on very well, who spread the canard that the reason I got onto this theory was to support the steady-state cosmology. Anybody who looked at the dates in the literature could see it was rubbish: My first paper on the synthesis of the elements came in 1946, whereas the steady-state cosmology didn’t come till 1948.”
