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
Ultimate fate of the universe beginning. Observations made by Edwin Hubble during the 1920s–1950s found that galaxies appeared to be moving away from each other, leading to the currently accepted Big Bang theory. This suggests that the universe began–very small and very dense–about 13.8 billion years ago, and it has expanded and (on average) become less dense ever since. Confirmation of the Big Bang mostly depends on knowing the rate of expansion, average density of matter, and the physical properties of the mass–energy in the universe. There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the universe is "flat" (see Shape of the universe) and will