Gamow realized that a very small beginning universe would be so concentrated as to be incredibly hot and energetic. So much so that protons and electrons could not aggregate into elements. With expansion, such a fiery soup would eventually cool enough that the protons and electrons could coalesce through mutual attraction into atoms. Gamow, however, found that the mathematical calculations required to make this theory into a realistic model to be impossible for him. He sought help and found it in a young graduate student named Ralph Alpher. This young man was so smart that he had won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at age 16. When he mentioned, however, that his family was Jewish, the scholarship was immediately withdrawn and he had to earn a bachelor's degree at night school at George Washington University while he worked daytime.

Gamow took Alpher on as graduate student in 1945 and the calculations began to go better. Nevertheless, it was three years before they were ready to publish. They were able to account for the proportion of hydrogen to helium and calculated that the whole process of forming these two elements was accomplished in only 300 seconds. The press seized on the astonishing figure of five minutes for the creation of 99% of all matter, and the authors found themselves famous. When Alpher defended his Ph.D. thesis (a public process usually attended only by a small faculty committee, a few friends and relatives) over 300 came to listen.

Alpher, with a young scientist named Robert Herman, published further papers calculating that it took about 300,000 years for the original high energy soup (or plasma) to cool enough for elements to form. They also proposed that the light from the early high-energy state of the universe is still banging around. It would be slowed by the expansion of the universe and the resulting red shift into microwaves, not visible light. They proposed that anyone who could demonstrate this "cosmic microwave background", as they called it, would provide significant evidence for their sudden expansion theory of the origin of the universe.

Fred Hoyle, a Yorkshire man educated at the University of Cambridge, had a brilliant career in astronomy and physics that was temporarily interrupted by World War II. Hoyle favored a steady state universe that had always been there. He recognized that some expansion was a fact but theorized with others that the universe was constantly forming new matter and had to expand to accommodate it. He was happy to point out the problems with the idea of a suddenly exploding universe. In fact, he coined the term "Big Bang" to poke fun at the theory, little expecting that it would catch on and become the word that everyone, lay and scientific, would eventually use. Hoyle and other critics pointed out that the Big Bang theorists had no idea how the highly compressed universe got there in the beginning. Nor did they explain how the presumably uniform soup of hydrogen and helium coalesced into stars and galaxies.

What interested Hoyle the most, however, was that, whether the universe started with a Big Bang or had been more or less steady forever, the continued formation of the elements heavier than helium had to be accounted for. Scientists had recognized that fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium was the fuel that fired stars. This is the same fusion principle used to construct the hydrogen bomb. The loss in mass when four hydrogen atoms fuse into one helium atom releases an incredible amount of energy according to the famous formula of Einstein: E=mc2. In nature, only the intense pressure and temperature at the center of a very large body will initiate this reaction.

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