History of creationism the universe was concentrated into a single point, a "primeval atom" where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence. However, in the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist subscribed to a view that the universe is in an eternal steady state. After Lemaître proposed his theory, some scientists complained that its assumption that time had a beginning amounted to a reimportation of religious concepts into physics. When the expression "Big Bang" was coined by Fred Hoyle in 1949, he meant it to be slightly pejorative, but the term stuck and gained currency. Lemaître himself concluded
History of the Big Bang theory 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. Hoyle repeated the term in further broadcasts in early 1950, as part of a series of five lectures entitled "The Nature of The Universe". The text of each lecture was published in "The Listener" a week after the broadcast, the first time that the term "big bang" appeared in print. As evidence in favour of the Big Bang model mounted,