This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchler.

I welcome Professor Paul Halper at the University of Sciences, the author of a new book, Flashes of Creation,

George Kamoff, Fred Hoyle, and the great big bang debate of the 20th century.

Professor Avery Good evening to you. Thank you for this. Let's get our two protagonists, Born.

Georgie Antonovich Gamoff, born Odessa, March of 1904.

I find most ironic, his father was a teacher.

This was the time that there was much excitement in Russia because of the revolution, 1905, and then the 1917-1918 revolution.

But his father, who was one of his father's students and what did our hero, Georgie Antonovich Gamoff make of that fact? Good evening, too, Paul.

Good evening. Thank you for having me on the show.

Joe is pronounced, it's spelled Geo and pronounced Joe Gamoff, that he always went by the American nickname Joe, interestingly enough.

Or you could say, George, his father was Anton Gamoff, who was a very bright school teacher, and his student was Lebronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolutionary, a future Russian Revolutionary.

And interestingly, the young Trotsky tried to institute a kind of coup in Anton's classroom.

He thought that Anton was an unfair teacher and circulated a petition, and every student signed one letter of the petition to emphasize the fact that everybody was united against the teacher.

And they circulated it to the headmaster of the school, but luckily for the Gamoffs, Anton was not fired, so the coup d'etat failed.

This is the early part of the 20th century, and what we're talking about is revolution, but not revolution politically, revolution in physics and cosmology.

Gamoff, our hero, is born now, and we leave him because his education will include the lucky step to go to the university of one time St. Petersburg, later Petrograd, later Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg in Russia.

We need to turn to Fred Hoyle, born in 1915, 11 years younger, January, in West Yorkshire.

His mother and father also significant in his life, especially my reading poll, his mother, a penis, a very good penis.

What did the young explorer learn from his mother that he used later in life, Paul?

Well, we'll find that our protagonists are very cinematic, and Hoyle loved the cinema, and that's because his mother had a job at the cinema for silent films.

She would play the background music for the films, and these films would be sort of corny westerns or early love stories and so forth, kind of kitschy films.

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