This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Professor Paul Halpern. His new book is Flashes of Creation, George Gamoff, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang debate. We've now found evidence of the Big Bang, or the Big Squeeze, or the creation moment. We also have better and better understanding of how long ago it happened, 13.8.

The temperature of the cosmos turns out to be, I believe, 3 degrees Kelvin, is that correct, Paul?

3?

Yeah, more precisely about 2.73 degrees, Kelvin, but 3 was about what they came up with at that time.

And we follow Gamma first because he's older and his health becomes a challenge to him

in the 1960s. He will die in 1968. He's a smoker and he has troubles with alcohol. However,

before he passes away, he recognizes that his work has contributed

to these discoveries. Is that correct, Paul? Oh, yes. He started writing to people. He wrote to

Peebles. He wrote to Dickie. And his student, Ralph Alfer, also was writing continuously to them to try to get the record straight

because some of the calculations that were done by the Dickie and Peoples group essentially

reproduced some of the work that Alfer under the tutelage of Gamov had done in the 1940s.

So they were trying to bring attention to their earlier papers.

And at one point, Gamov went to a conference in New York,

and at the conference, he made a statement,

if you lose a penny and then you later find a penny, it's still the same

penny, the same with my theories. Yes, it's a wonderful metaphor. I liked him for it. Now, Fred

Hoyle, Fred Hoyle works with a husband and wife, Margaret and Jeffrey Burbridge and Wilson Fowler.

You've mentioned him earlier. William Fowler, you've mentioned him earlier, William Fowler, you've mentioned him earlier.

You said that Hull's work pursues into the bodies of stars.

They come up with an explanation for elements heavier than iron.

The puzzle here is not that they did it, it's genius work, but that later on, the Nobel Prize

skips the Burbages and Hoyle and gives the Nobel Prize for that work to Fowler only.

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