Geoffrey Burbidge British astronomer Fred Hoyle, he and his wife were co-authors of "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars", a fundamental paper on stellar nucleosynthesis published in 1957. It is commonly referred to as the BFH paper after the initials of the surnames of the four authors. This paper describes the process of stars burning lighter elements into successively heavier atoms which then are expelled to form other structures in the universe, including other stars and planets. In recent years Burbidge was known mostly for his alternative cosmology "quasi-steady state theory", which contradicts the Big Bang theory. According to Burbidge, the universe
History of the Big Bang theory not measured with high accuracy until COBE in 1990). After some reformulation, the Big Bang has been regarded as the best theory of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. Before the late 1960s, many cosmologists thought the infinitely dense and physically paradoxical singularity at the starting time of Friedmann's cosmological model could be avoided by allowing for a universe which was contracting before entering the hot dense state, and starting to expand again. This was formalized as Richard Tolman's oscillating universe. In the sixties, Stephen Hawking and others demonstrated that this idea was unworkable, and the singularity is an