Fred Hoyle

Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer who in 1948 independently developed his own version of the steady-state theory alongside Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and who coined the term big bang in a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, intending it dismissively for the rival theory he rejected. Hoyle never accepted the big bang model, even after the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background that the model had predicted, and continued developing steady-state and quasi-steady-state variants for the rest of his career. He also did foundational work on stellar nucleosynthesis, the process by which stars manufacture the heavier chemical elements.