The most famous phrase in science began as an insult. In a 1949 BBC broadcast, English astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term Big Bang to mock a theory he despised, and he went to his grave in 2001 still denying it happened. This episode traces the life of one of modern physics' most brilliant and frustrating contradictions, from his Yorkshire childhood and Cambridge mathematics training to wartime radar work that connected him with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold.

The hosts explain Hoyle's greatest triumph, predicting a specific 7.7 MeV energy resonance in carbon by reasoning from his own existence and then badgering Caltech experimentalists into finding what is now called the Hoyle state. They cover the 1957 stellar nucleosynthesis paper with William Fowler and the Burbidges, the steady state theory and its C-field of continuous creation, th ...