Why is Fred Hoyle the main enemy of the Big Bang model?
September 29, 20245 Mins Read
The Second World War finally stopped after ravaging the whole world for six long years. The date is September 2, 1945. A week later a movie was released in Britain. Black and white, horror movie. A bit of a comedy. The name is Dead of Night. Horror movies were banned in Britain during World War II. So after a long time any such movie was released in Britain. Because of that, who knows, the movie got huge popularity in that country. Which is called housefull.

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One night in 1946, three friends went to the Guildford cinema in Surrey, Britain to see the movie. Fred Howell, Herman Bondi and Thomas Gould. All three are scientists. They are very enthusiastic about the birth mystery of the universe. None of the three Big Bang models agree. So they were looking for a new model of the universe.

Dead of Night movie is a collection of five ghost stories. But in the last scene, the whole story took a strange turn. At the beginning of the movie, the main character wakes up. After that, new characters started appearing with time. Along with that the plot also develops. But the interesting thing is that in the end, the movie ended right where it started.

Even in the last scene, the main character wakes up, as if everything happened in a dream. Then all the previous events started happening exactly. So the cinema is in a sense like a circular cycle, which has no beginning and no end; That is, the movie will continue in the same way forever. It is said that at the end of the movie, Gould said, 'What if the universe was like this?'

A few months after watching Dead of Night, Gould was inspired to develop a new model of the universe. In his model, the universe is expanding, yet contradicts the Big Bang model in every way. As mentioned earlier, proponents of the Big Bang model postulate a universe that was very small, dense, and hot in the past.

And the universe was created billions of years ago. In contrast, in the model proposed by Gould, Bondi and Hoyle, the universe has existed forever in an almost unchanged state. Just like the movie Dead of Night, which has no beginning or end. Even in this model, parts of the universe actually expand. But new matter is constantly created from absolutely nothing. So the density of the universe is always the same. However, they could not give any detailed explanation of how matter is created from nothing so mysteriously.

The theory soon became attractive to those who were fighting against the Big Bang theory at the time. A fiery chaos appearing out of nowhere and sending the galaxies flying in all directions—the idea seemed wildly absurd to Howl. He preferred the creation of matter from nothing. In other words, according to this theory, the universe is timeless, eternal. It has no end, no beginning.

The universe has been like this forever. It is called steady state model or stable universe model. The model soon became the main rival of the Big Bang model. Fred Hoyle became the main proponent of the stable universe model and the main enemy of the Big Bang model.

Bondi and Gould grew up in Vienna, Austria. Then they studied in Cambridge. The two lived in the same house while working at the Admiralty Research Laboratory. He spent several nights every week with these two friends. He used to talk about astronomy in whatever time was available between his research on radar. In particular, the expanding universe found by Hubble's observations and its implications were discussed. Three people had different roles in these discussions.

At the end of World War II, the three chose different careers. Hill took Astronomy, Bondi Maths and Gould Engineering. But three scientists lived in Cambridge. So they started discussing cosmology part time.

Even around 1940, the big bang theory could not attract Hoel. The error in determining the age of the universe was the main reason behind this. In this context, Fred Hoyle prepared to develop a new or rival theory with colleagues Thomas Gould and Herman Bondi.

Apart from the Big Bang model, another theory was discussed about the origin of the universe. That is the eternally stable model. Arguments for and against these two rival theories were regularly discussed at Bondi's house. Naturally, their discussion was biased towards a fixed universe. But Hubble's observations forced them to accept that the universe was expanding.

But Hubble proved that the universe is expanding. How did Heil and his colleagues adapt their universe model to this? The evolution of the universe is proven. Because, it turns out, the universe is steadily expanding. If nothing but expansion happened, the universe would change over time and become less dense.

The Big Bang model proposed exactly this. But Thomas Gould II suggested another possibility. It prevented the loss of density due to expansion and caused no overall change. He said that the universe compensates for its expansion by creating new matter, that is, new matter is gradually created between galaxies that are moving away from each other.

One such unchanged but evolving model of the universe is called the steady state model or the stable universe model. Sitting at Bondi's house one evening, Thomas Gould explained the model. Heal and Bondi called it a crazy theory after hearing about the idea. Hoyle remarked that the model would crumble before dinner. But they did a lot of calculations about it till dinner time. This trio was able to correct several errors one by one.

As predicted by the steady state model, baby galaxies are scattered throughout the universe. On the other hand, the Big Bang model predicted that baby galaxies could only be seen at great cosmic distances. But even in the late 1940s our telescopes were not advanced enough. Therefore, it was not possible for astronomers to distinguish between infant galaxies and mature galaxies. So which model is correct remains unresolved.

But there was an opportunity for astronomers to choose the model. One could have chosen either the Big Bang or the Steady State model as desired. So the pro-astronomers in both groups continued to grow. Naturally, the astronomical society also split into two groups. For scientists who could not accept the Big Bang model of the universe, the Hoyle team's steady state theory came as a boon.