BEFORE DARK MATTER COULDN'T BE FOUND: 1/4: Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate, by Paul Halpern
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2023
⏱️ 12 minutes
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BEFORE DARK MATTER COULDN'T BE FOUND: 1/4: Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate, by Paul Halpern
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08PV5CLZQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
A respected physics professor and author breaks down the great debate over the Big Bang and the continuing quest to understand the fate of the universe. Today, the Big Bang is so entrenched in our understanding of the cosmos that to doubt it would seem crazy. But as Paul Halpern shows in Flashes of Creation, just decades ago its mere mention caused sparks to fly. At the center of the debate were the Russian-American physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Gamow insisted that a fiery explosion explained how the elements of the universe were created. Attacking the idea as half-baked, Hoyle countered that the universe was engaged in a never-ending process of creation. The battle was fierce. In the end, Gamow turned out to be right—mostly—and Hoyle, along with his many achievements, is remembered for giving the theory the silliest possible name: "the Big Bang." Halpern captures the brilliance of both thinkers and reminds us that even those proven wrong have much to teach us about boldness, imagination, and the universe, itsel
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| 0:25.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. |
| 0:28.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:59.0 | This was the time that there was much excitement in Russia because of the revolution 1905 and then the 1917-1918 revolution. |
| 1:09.0 | 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 to you Paul. |
| 1:19.0 | Good evening. Thank you for having me on the show. |
| 1:23.0 | Joe is pronounced, it spelled Geo and pronounced Joe Gamoff that he always went by the American nickname Joe, interestingly enough. |
| 1:32.0 | 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. |
| 1:47.0 | And interestingly, the young Trotsky tried to institute a kind of coup in Anton's classroom. |
| 1:55.0 | 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. |
| 2:08.0 | 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. |
| 2:18.0 | This is the early part of the 20th century and what we're talking about is revolution, but not revolution politically. |
| 2:24.0 | 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 |
| 2:35.0 | one time St. Petersburg, later Petrograd, later Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg in Russia. |
| 2:43.0 | We need to turn to Fred Hoyl born in 1915, 11 years younger in January, in West Yorkshire. |
| 2:51.0 | His mother and father also significant in his life, especially my reading poll, his mother, a penis, a very good penis. |
| 2:59.0 | What did the young explorer learn from his mother that he used later in life, Paul? |
| 3:07.0 | Well, we'll find that our protagonists are very cinematic and Hoyl loved the cinema and that's because his mother had a job at the cinema for silent films. |
| 3:17.0 | 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. |
| 3:28.0 | And instead of playing the kitschy music that went along with the films, she would play beautiful classical music and one point she was fired because they found that she was playing the wrong music, but then they realized the people were going to the cinema to hear her play the music, not to see the films. |
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