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Person

Fred Hoyle

A black-and-white portrait of Fred Hoyle, wearing glasses and a collared shirt, set against a dark background.

English astrophysicist (1915–2001), abrasive and brilliant. Best known for coining the term Big Bang as a derision (he favoured a steady-state cosmos and lost the argument) and for the 1953 prediction of an excited state in carbon-12 needed to explain why the universe contains any carbon at all. Also wrote science fiction. His collaborator William Fowler took the 1983 Nobel Prize alone, an omission widely regarded as a snub.

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