Georges Lemaitre

Hoyle coined the term big bang himself, in a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, intending it dismissively for the model this edge credits to Lemaitre. He continued developing steady-state and quasi-steady-state alternatives for the rest of his career and never accepted the big bang model, even after the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background that the model had predicted and his own theory could not satisfactorily explain. Carried here as the historical dispute it was: Hoyle stayed the model's rival most durable and most publicly identified critic, not a claim that his steady-state alternative was correct.