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Cosmology needed alternatives, he argued, not lemmings following their leader over a cliff.The next scene begins with Sheldon and Amy walking down the stairs of their apartment. It’s also the sort of quandary that threads its away through contemporary debates among physicists: about dark matter versus modified gravity theories about what dark energy is and how the universe’s “inflation” happened moments after the Big Bang and about a persistent discrepancy in measurements of the universe’s expansion rate, known as the “Hubble tension.” Halpern unfortunately gives only brief mention to these active areas of research, which owe a lot to Gamow and Hoyle.Īt one point in the book, Halpern relates a conversation he had with Geoff Burbidge, a colleague of Hoyle’s who also continued to support a steady-state model. Hoyle’s investment in the theory raises important philosophical and sociological questions about when we should consider an idea proven. But this shouldn’t cast a pall over his legacy. In particular, he shows how Hoyle’s work later in life lay on the fringes of physics, including his controversial “panspermia” hypothesis, that organic material and even life on Earth came from colliding comets, and his unsuccessful attempts to revive steady-state theory. Halpern doesn’t shy away from the characters’ flaws.
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They and their colleagues eventually realized the signal came from relic radiation from the hot fireball of the early universe. After ruling out possible experimental sources of noise (including pigeons and their droppings on the antenna), they deduced that the radio hiss had a cosmic origin. In 1964, the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson noticed a constant signal of radio static with the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey. Physicists were evenly divided between the two.īut that changed as more evidence emerged, and a key discovery eventually seemed to settle the debate. Initially, the Big Bang theory predicted a universe only a couple billion years old, which conflicted with observations of the sun and other stars, known to be much older. Tompkins series, whose main character’s predicaments illustrated aspects of modern science.įor years, their dueling theories - a Big Bang origin of matter and energy (championed by Gamow) versus a steady-state universe that created matter and energy through quantum fluctuations (championed by Hoyle) - remained highly speculative. Hoyle wrote the science fiction novel “The Black Cloud” and the television screenplay “A for Andromeda,” while Gamow produced “One, Two, Three … Infinity” and the Mr.
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They also frequently appeared on early television and radio programs, becoming among the first well-known science communicators, paving the way for Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Carolyn Porco, Pamela Gay and others today. They discussed many ideas in that coastal town, hanging out in Gamow’s white Cadillac, but for the most part, their debates took place in the pages of physics journals, newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American. They had only one significant in-person meeting, in the summer of 1956 in La Jolla, Calif., where Gamow had briefly served as a consultant for General Dynamics, the aerospace and defense company. Gamow and Hoyle make for a challenging “joint biography,” Halpern acknowledges, in part because their parallel stories so rarely intersected. When do you decide, for example, to abandon a theory? Ultimately, his book seeks to vindicate Hoyle, who in his later years failed to admit his idea had lost. Halpern also poses fundamental questions about how science should be done. Halpern, a physicist himself at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, skillfully brings their fascinating stories to light, out of the shadow of the overlapping quantum physics debates between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, which Halpern has written about in an earlier book. In his new book, “Flashes of Creation,” Paul Halpern chronicles the rise of Gamow and Hoyle into leaders of mostly opposing views of cosmology, as they disputed whether everything began with a Big Bang billions of years ago. That monumental discovery sparked decades of epic debates about the vastness and origins of the universe, and they involved a clash of titans, the Russian-American nuclear physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. But scientists didn’t realize that a century ago, when astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Leavitt discerned that other galaxies exist and that they’re hurtling away from the Milky Way at incredible speeds. FLASHES OF CREATION George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate By Paul Halpern