LONDON -- Sir Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term "big bang" but who never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe, has died at age 86 in Bournemouth, England.
He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on "The Nature of the Universe," using the term "big bang" for the first time in the last of those talks. However, Hoyle did not propose that the universe originated in such an explosion, but rather that it evolved in a steady state from materials that already existed.
But over time, Hoyle's belief in a "steady state" universe was shared by fewer and fewer scientists because of new discoveries.
Hoyle continued to robustly defend his view, last year publishing "A Different Approach to Cosmology," co-authored by Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant V. Narlikar.
Working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle proposed the steady state theory in the 1940s, arguing that the universe developed in a process of continuous growth.
"Every cluster of galaxies, every star, every atom had a beginning, but the universe itself did not," said Hoyle, who graduated from Cambridge University and was professor of astronomy there from 1958 to 1972.
Observations by radio astronomy in the 1950s demonstrated that the universe was expanding faster than Hoyle's theory predicted, giving credence to the view that the universe began in an explosion of incredibly dense matter, the theory Hoyle called the "big bang."
"He coined that phrase, in fact, as a denigration for the conventional wisdom," said Hoyle's associate, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of University College, Wales.
"And it was his belief, and it is also my belief, that the standard big-bang theory which says that everything began at a definite moment in time and that there was nothing before that, this has to be essentially wrong, and that the universe has an infinite age and an infinite extent in space," Wickramasinghe said Wednesday on British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
In the 1950s, Hoyle worked with Fulbright scholar William Fowler and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge to demonstrate that chemical elements heavier than helium were the product of nuclear reactions inside stars. They published "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" in 1957.
Fowler, then at California Institute of Technology, shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1983 with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of the University of Chicago for their work on the creation of chemical elements. Fowler, in his autobiography for the prize, credited Hoyle as one of the great influences in his life.
With Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the theory that life and some diseases, including AIDS, reached earth from space. Their publications included "Diseases from Space" (1979) and "Space Travelers: The Origins of Life" (1980).
Hoyle also wrote science fiction, including "The Black Cloud" (1957), about an intelligent cloud surrounding the sun which caused an ice age, and "A for Andromeda" (1962), in which aliens instruct humans on building a destructive machine.
Hoyle was also a staff member of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in 1957-62, visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1953 and 1954, and professor of astronomy at Cornell University from 1972 to 1978.
He is survived by his wife, a son and a daughter. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
