The Black Cloud Society into the book. Hoyle was also responsible for the term "Big Bang", though Hoyle himself did not subscribe to the Big Bang theory in favour of his own Steady State Theory. In a plot twist that foreshadows Hoyle's stance on panspermia, the cloud expresses surprise that intelligent life is capable of forming on planets. The novel has a recurrent theme of the duplicity and shallowness of politicians compared with scientists. The Black Cloud The Black Cloud is a science fiction novel by British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Published in 1957, the book details the arrival of an enormous cloud of
Big Bang is popularly reported that Hoyle, who favored an alternative "steady state" cosmological model, intended this to be pejorative, but Hoyle explicitly denied this and said it was just a striking image meant to highlight the difference between the two models. The Big Bang theory developed from observations of the structure of the universe and from theoretical considerations. In 1912 Vesto Slipher measured the first Doppler shift of a "spiral nebula" (spiral nebula is the obsolete term for spiral galaxies), and soon discovered that almost all such nebulae were receding from Earth. He did not grasp the cosmological implications of this