We Are Made of Stardust; Timescales of the Universe and of Life

Abstract

In Chap. 9 we saw that shortly after the World War II, British scientists Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold (Fig. 11.1) proposed the Steady State Theory of the universe, because on philosophical grounds they could not believe in a universe that started a finite time ago with a Big Bang. To ensure that, despite its expansion, the universe would in the course of time keep looking always the same, they proposed that, as mentioned in Chap. 9, out of the vacuum between the galaxies spontaneously new hydrogen atoms gradually are created, which in the course of time concentrate in new stars and galaxies. The Steady State Theory is therefore also called the Continuous Creation Theory. Since there was no Big Bang in this theory, and since in the 1940s, due to the work of Gamow, the idea still was that all elements were created in the Big Bang, Hoyle had to look for other ways to make the elements in the universe. He proposed therefore in 1946 that the elements heavier than hydrogen were all made in the interiors of stars. He was not the only one that had this idea. In the Netherlands Bruno van Albada, who later held the chair of astronomy at the University of Amsterdam as my predecessor, also in 1946 put forward this model for the formation of the elements.