Cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, is science's fairytale princess —grimly guarded by all manner of intellectual spears, deadfalls and barriers. Even the scientists' imperfect understanding of the strange, violent and orderly ways of the stars and the galaxies requires a mastery of nearly every known technique of physics and mathematics. To assail the defenses of cosmology requires versatile, brash and preferably young men.
In 1937 two such brash young men at England's Cambridge University set out for an assault on cosmology's castle. Fred Hoyle, 22, and Raymond Arthur Lyttleton, 25, of St. John's College, earned their livings (as they still do) by teaching mathematics to Cambridge undergraduates. After hours they planned their campaigns to explain the universe—not just the stars and the galaxies, but the whole vast mechanism, compounded of space and time, of mass and energy, which produces the "objects" seen by telescopes, as well as that oddity, the earth, and its curious inhabitant, man.
Last week an extraordinary theory of the universe, developed chiefly by the Hoyle & Lyttleton team, ranked as a leading conversation piece in British intellectual circles. It was more than that; broadcast by radio, spread by a bestselling book,* debated in learned societies, it was bidding for a place among Britain's most striking contributions to modern scientific philosophy. It was, of course, also being attacked. Nothing so daring had appeared in the field of cosmology since the early '30s, when Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington led man's imagination out among the "island universes" in the depths of space.
Opening for Theory. When Hoyle & Lyttleton began their collaboration, the time seemed propitious for a "new cosmology." Observational astronomy had long since moved away from Cambridge; as a hunting ground for giant telescopes', the grey English sky cannot compete with the sparkling sky of California. But learned little papers from U.S. observatories, bristling with the difficult figures dear to cosmologists, kept crossing the Atlantic.
m An enormous amount had been learned since the days of Eddington and Jeans. The chemical composition of stars was known: they are mostly hydrogen. The source of their energy was known: it is chiefly a nuclear reaction that turns hydrogen into helium. The stars—at least those within the telescope's field—had been measured, studied, divided into classes. The galaxies, those vast swirls of stars out in distant space, had also been measured and classified. There were new theories too, and good ones, but no general theory to knit things together. This was because (as Hoyle explains disarmingly) there was no one with enough knowledge imagination and daring to do the formidable job.