Astronomer who crashed and burned over the Big Bang

Jane Gregory

Oxford, 20

IN 1950, British radio listeners voted for their broadcaster of the year. The winner was not Tommy Handley or Wilfred Pickles, but an astronomer called Fred Hoyle. As one newspaper commented, Hoyle was receiving "the sort of effusions that are usually devoted to variety stars".

Hoyle found fame thanks to a series of radio talks in which he explained space in down-to-earth terms. He had a voice to match: his Yorkshire accent was in marked contrast to the usual plummy announcers, and listeners warmed to it. But Hoyle used his series as a platform for his own unorthodox views.

The big bang model was gaining favour, yet still lacked real proof. Hoyle proposed an alternative "steady state" model, with new matter constantly being created in an ever-expanding universe which had no beginning. Hoyle supposedly came up with the idea after seeing the horror movie Dead of Night, in which the story ends by looping back to its beginning.

Hoyle's model won support among some British cosmologists, but never really caught on elsewhere. As such, it became a particularly British view of the universe, with Hoyle's media fame giving the steady state model equal billing alongside the big bang. When the Festival of Britain opened in 1951, it featured a Discovery Dome in which visitors could learn about the cosmos, with an accompanying text largely drawn from Hoyle's bestselling book based on his radio series.

Hoyle's fame was not only due to his homely accent. In his talks, he raised the question of whether the universe had a creator. He was an outspoken atheist, and for him the 'big bang' (a term that he coined himself) implied a throwback to religious belief. Hoyle's controversial views were what really caught public attention. Jane Gregory quotes Malcolm Muggeridge in the Daily Telegraph at the time, saying Hoyle showed the "intellectual arrogance which is likely to characterise the contemporary scientist".

Gregory's biography is fascinating for the light it sheds on Hoyle's public profile in the 1950s and 1960s. He became a bestselling science fiction novelist, and scripted a TV series, A For Andromeda, which launched the career of Julie Christie.

Then the tide turned. Gregory graphically describes a scientific meeting in which Hoyle was interrupted by a young man at the back of the room, calling out: "You're wrong!" It was Stephen Hawking.

Hoyle later said he would have ripped the upstart apart if it wasn't for his medical condition. But Hoyle's steady state theory was crumbling.

The media found a new star, Hoyle's nemesis Martin Ryle - "nominated by a panel of actresses as one of the seven most romantic men in the world", says Gregory. The big bang won, or as one headline put it: "The Bible was right".

Hoyle's later years were a sad decline, increasingly caught up in academic in-fighting and research bureaucracy. His views became even wilder. He once suggested Aids came from space and was caught by walking barefoot. He died in 2001 aged 86: a genius and a maverick whose wrong ideas, sadly, are more widely remembered than his many correct ones.