This is CBSI on the World.

I'm John Batchel with Professor Paul Halper.

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 Bourne, Rudolph Pyrrills. They're building an accelerator. The professor DeSitter dies, but others come, Professor Price, Professor Dirac. 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 Gamov was doing sometime earlier.

So Gamov would develop models of how nuclear particles interacted.

Hoyle had a great respect for Gamov's work and wanted to kind of continue along those lines.

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