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This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelworth, Professor Paul Halpern. His new book is

Flashes of Creation, George Gamoff, Fred Hoyle and the Great Big Bang debate. I met Fred Hoyle

from a science fiction book he wrote in the 1950s. I met George Gamoff from a book that he

wrote about cosmology, one, two, three, infinity in the 1950s. I never understood Gamoff. I

loved Hoyle. So those are my prejudices, but to have them both together as a joy, thanks to Paul's

work. So we pick up our story of the son of the pianist at the movies, Fred Hoyle. He

arrives at Cambridge through a series of, you can't make this up debates. He has mentor professors

and he's guided to Cambridge. He arrives at the time of a rich turning of physics at Cambridge.

Max Borin, Rudolph Peerles, they're building an accelerator. The professor DeCitter dies, but

others come. Professor Price, Professor D'Arach. And he wins his PhD eventually in 1939.

What did Fred Hoyle think he was while at Cambridge with all these distinguished physicists, Paul?

He definitely wanted to be a particle physicist or a nuclear physicist. Originally, in high school, he

wanted to be a chemist. And as a child, he loved astronomy, but he went from astronomy to chemistry.

And finally at Cambridge, he imagined himself working in particle labs and interpreting the

information, so interpreting the data, very, very similar to what Gamoff was doing sometime earlier.

So Gamoff would develop models of how nuclear particles interacted. Hoyle had a great respect for

...