To those who came of age in the 1950s, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), like Carl Sagan a generation later, was the popular voice of science. Hoyle's Frontiers of Astronomy, published three years before the October 1957 launch of Sputnik I, became an instant best seller in both Great Britain and the United States, inspiring legions of overachieving adolescents--including many of today's practicing physicists and astronomers--to choose careers in research. For masses of radio listeners, Hoyle's talks on life, the universe, and everything in between, delivered in his folksy Yorkshire accent, were a delight and a wonderment. "He describes events in interstellar space as if commenting on a cricket match," one BBC blurb proclaimed.

In a 1949 broadcast on the origin of the universe, he coined the term "big bang" to describe theories of a primordial explosion, a term so vivid and descriptive that it soon became standard English. Whether people liked him or not, they followed his talks and his published writings because there was no telling what barroom debate he might stir up next. "It seems to me," he wrote in a typical passage, "that religion is but a blind attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful state in which we find ourselves."

Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science by Simon Mitton Joseph Henry Press, 2005; $27.95