Hoyle’s challenger

SIR: During the early 1970s, when I was editor of New Scientist, my colleague Peter Stubbs came back to the office and told me something remarkable had happened at the Royal Society. In the middle of a talk by Sir Fred Hoyle, a little voice in the audience had interjected, ‘That’s wrong.’ ‘How do you know?’ Hoyle asked. ‘Because I worked it out,’ said the interrupter. He turned out to be the then little-known Stephen Hawking. Dr Bernard Dixon, Ruislip

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