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Re: [OM] IMG: Friday Flower, sort of ...

Subject: Re: [OM] IMG: Friday Flower, sort of ...
From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:28:02 -0800
Andrew Fildes wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud
> Fred Hoyle - serious astronomer and so-so writer who, ironically, invented 
> the term Big Bang.
> I remember it - fairly ordinary but I had enough stamina to finish it!
>   

I don't think that was it. I'm sure I read Hoyle's book, and I'd 
remember if that was it. Seems more likely an older book and maybe an 
Eastern European author- maybe. Certainly someone more unknown and 
mysterious to me than Hoyle.

To those challenged in the history of cosmology, the irony is that Fred 
Hoyle was the leader of the Flat Earth Society - oops, the Steady State 
Universe group of astronomers and astrophysicists. Evidence of expansion 
was by then irrefutable, but they held that density stayed steady, as I 
recall, through matter popping into existence in deep space.

George Gamow was the major mouthpiece for the expanding universe with a 
fixed quantity of matter, so density was dropping. Hoyle was said to 
have coined the term Big Bang as a taunt, to make Gamow & Co. sound 
silly. Didn't work; he gave the name that stuck to the theory that won.

Can you tell I was a science nerd back when all this was current? :-D

Moose
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