Word: lyttleton
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...such brash young men at England's Cambridge University set out for an assault on cosmology's castle. Fred Hoyle, 22, and Raymond Arthur Lyttleton, 25, of St. John's College, earned their livings (as they still do) by teaching mathematics to Cambridge undergraduates. After hours they planned their campaigns to explain the universe-not just the stars and the galaxies, but the whole vast mechanism, compounded of space and time, of mass and energy, which produces the "objects" seen by telescopes, as well as that oddity, the earth, and its curious inhabitant...
Last week an extraordinary theory of the universe, developed chiefly by the Hoyle & Lyttleton team, ranked as a leading conversation piece in British intellectual circles. It was more than that; broadcast by radio, spread by a bestselling book,* debated in learned societies, it was bidding for a place among Britain's most striking contributions to modern scientific philosophy. It was, of course, also being attacked. Nothing so daring had appeared in the field of cosmology since the early '30s, when Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington led man's imagination out among the "island universes...
Opening for Theory. When Hoyle & Lyttleton began their collaboration, the time seemed propitious for a "new cosmology." Observational astronomy had long since moved away from Cambridge; as a hunting ground for giant telescopes', the grey English sky cannot compete with the sparkling sky of California. But learned little papers from U.S. observatories, bristling with the difficult figures dear to cosmologists, kept crossing the Atlantic...
Then Morrison got down to politics: by attempting to exercise the power of veto over the government, Churchill was aiming to force a coalition on the Labor Party. Up jumped Tory Oliver Lyttleton: "We do not want it." Retorted Morrison: "Do not . . . make any mistake. Half the jokers . . . from that Front Bench want a coalition...