Christian Cyclopedia

Formulated 1948 by Fred Hoyle (b. 1915 at Bingley, Yorkshire, Eng.; astronomer and math.; taught at U. of Cambridge; assoc. with Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories [now Hale observatories], near Pasadena, California; works include The Nature of the Universe [1950]), Thomas Gold (b. 1920 at Vienna, Austria; astronomer; assoc. with U. of Cambridge and the Royal Greenwich Observatory, London, Eng.; to Cornell U., Ithaca, New York, 1959), and Hermann Bondi (b. 1919; Austrian-Brit. math. and astronomer). In its first form the theory held that the universe is infinite, uniform, changeless, without beginning and end, with density constant. Hoyle modified the theory 1965 to incorporate evidence that the known universe is an oscillating finite region with varying density in an infinite universe. See also Cosmogony; Evolution, I; Lucretius.