George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the great Big Bang debate

It's also interesting to note that Hoyle's objection to the Big Bang was basically philosophical, and his steady-state theory had more to do with how he thought the universe "should be" than anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle#Rejection_of_the_Bi...

This is a book review. The book itself certainly discusses Lemaître. For example, regarding the paragraphs that Lemaître removed from his own article,

> It turns out that Lemaître, who had translated his paper himself, had left out certain findings because he preferred not to distract readers from Hubble’s results, which were based on more extensive data. In his supreme modesty, Lemaître was little interested in what history would think of him. He only wanted the most accurate estimates to be available—which he believed were Hubble’s, not his.

Nor is there any mention of Ralph Alpher, who predicted the cosmic microwave background as a consequence of the big bang, well before it was accidentally discovered, and also showed that the cosmic abundances of hydrogen and helium can be predicted from the big bang - two results important to the theory's acceptance.

Alpher was a doctoral student of Gamow's.

To be fair, we can't expect a book review to be a comprehensive review article on a big topic.

I think the whole argument over the definition of theory is overblown. Sure there's a group of people who use "theory" to mean some unconfirmed hypothesis as a way to discredit the theory of natural selection in favor of creationism. This is hardly a matter of confusion for the general public nor is it a particularly big deal.

There is no singular "theory of gravitation", there are multiple theories of gravitation and they are just that, theories. Some are meaningless (like the theory that gravity is due to the earth and every physical object growing in size), some are useful for every day uses, like gravity is some kind of force whose charge is mass and whose strength decreases with the square of the distance, and some theories are very accurate but very hard or impractical to work with, like gravity is due to some sort of 4 dimensional space-time curvature.

All of those are just theories, they have various pros and cons and use cases and problems to varying degrees. I don't think this is a problem for most people to understand.

Please don't react to the most objectionable aspect of a title. We can always change the title. I've done so now.

What we want are reflective responses to content, not reflexive reactions to surface bits.

Bethe wasn't too happy as he was the junior and Gamow was pretty senior and unrelated, so Bethe didn't get the credit he deserved iirc.

I think you're reading a headline written by an editor who is conflating widely-accepted theory that beat out other competing theories which had heavyweight adherents with not-a-theory anymore.

Please don't react to the most objectionable aspect of a title. We can always change the title. I've done so now.

What we want are reflective responses to content, not reflexive reactions to surface bits.

The title of the article contributes to the unfortunate but common confusion between the scientific and colloquial meanings of the word "theory".

it is a theory, it cannot be replicated.