Fred Hoyle coined "big bang" / Three Mile Island accident - March 28

On this day in 1949, British astronomer Fred Hoyle coined the term "big bang." / On this day in 1979, a failure in a reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station led to a partial meltdown.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey y'all, we're rerunning two episodes today. Enjoy the show. Hi,
I'm Eves, and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that uncovers a little bit more about history
every day. The day was March nineteen. British astronomer and

(00:24):
mathematician Fred Hoyle appeared on BBC Radio's Third Program to
discuss his continuous creation theory. It was on this broadcast
that Hoyle used the term Big Bang to refer to
the point when the universe began, but he didn't believe
that the universe began. In the nineteen forties, Hoyle reformulated

(00:47):
the steady state theory along with astronomer Thomas Gold and
mathematician Hermann Bondi. The theory said that the universe is
uniform through time and space, so the universe is expanding
but always looks the same, and it has no beginning
or end. Instead, matter is created continually and spontaneously throughout space.

(01:08):
At the same time, scientists were exploring the idea that
a singular explosive moment brought the universe into being and
the universe kept expanding from there, but Hoyle defended his
cosmological theory to the end On March nine, Hoyle gave
a twenty minute radio lecture on the theory on BBC's

(01:29):
Third Program. After explaining the theory, he contrasted it to
theories that were based on quote, the hypothesis that all
the matter of the universe was created in one big
bang at a particular time in the remote past. During
the talk, Hoyle mentioned the Big Bang three times. People

(01:50):
have read Hoyle's use of the term as derogatory, but
he has said that it was not. He once said,
I was constantly striving over the radio where I had
no visual aids, nothing except the spoken word for visual images,
and that seemed to be one way of distinguishing between
the steady state and the explosive big bang, and so

(02:12):
that was the language I used. Hoyle wasn't convinced of
the validity of cosmologies that predicted that a definite origin
of the whole universe occurred a precise, finite time ago,
as he put it in a nineteen sixty lecture. Even
though his use of the term wasn't expressly derisive, Hoyle
made it clear that he thought the idea of a

(02:34):
big bang creation process was irrational. After Hoyle's talk aired,
The text was put in a BBC magazine called The
Listener and distributed widely. In early nineteen fifty A series
of broadcasts featuring Hoyle aired on BBC, and books based
on the talks were soon published in England and the

(02:55):
United States. In the book, Hoyle again used the term
big Bang several times, twice in the English version, four
times in the American one. Scientists were critical of Hoyle's theory,
but they didn't pay much mind to his use of
the phrase At this point. The term didn't immediately catch on,
though the Big Bang creation theory gained tons of traction

(03:18):
beginning in the nineteen sixties, big Bang wasn't commonly seen
in scientific publications until more than two decades after first
coined the phrase. Nuclear physicists William Fowler might have been
the first to get the term into a research publication
in nineteen fifty seven, but it wasn't until the nineteen
seventies when scientific papers began using the phrase regularly. After

(03:42):
nineteen ninety, use of the term regarding the origin of
the universe exploded pun intended research on cosmic background radiation.
We can support of the steady state theory, and now
evidence points to the likelihood of the universe changing over time. Today,
the Big Bang theory is the most widely accepted explanation

(04:02):
for the universe's beginnings. There are people who feel the
term it's inappropriate and too undignified to represent such a
momentous occasion, but today big Bang is widely used by
scientists and lay people alike. I'm Eaves, step Coote, and
hopefully you know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. And here's another note about the usage

(04:27):
of big bang. In the beginning. The first scientific paper
to use the term big Bang and its title was
received by the Journal of Meteorology a couple of months
before Hoyle coined the phrase. The paper was about the
meteorological effects of a large TNT explosion. Thank you for
listening and see you again tomorrow. Keep up with us

(04:50):
on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at t d i HC Podcast.
Hey everyone, it's Eaves again and welcome to another episode
of This Day in History Class, a podcast that brings
you a little bit of history every day. The day

(05:19):
was March nineteen seventy nine. A failure in a reactor
at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station led to
a partial meltdown. It was the worst nuclear disaster in
US history. Three Mile Island was a nuclear power plant
in London Dairy Township, Pennsylvania. The plant had two pressurized

(05:41):
water reactors. Unit one went into service in nineteen seventy
four and Unit two began operation at the end of
nineteen seventy eight. On March nineteen seventy nine, the Unit
one reactor was shut down from a refueling outage. Wild
Unit two was operating at ninety seven percent power. A

(06:02):
failure caused the feet water pumps to stop sending water
to the steam generators that removed heat from the reactor core.
This triggered the shutdown of the turbine generator, and because
the steam generators weren't getting feed water, the temperature in
the primary coolant rows. This caused the reactor to go
into an emergency shut down. Also, the pressure was rising

(06:24):
in the primary loop. To control the pressure, the pilot
operated relief of valve on the reactor. Cooling system opened
as it was supposed to, but it stayed open after
it should have closed, and coolant water continued to escape
from the relief of valve because instruments in the control
room indicated that the valve was closed. Operators did not

(06:45):
realize that coolant water was still being released. Due to
the loss of coolant water, high pressure injection pumps sent
replacement water into the reactor system. As the water level
rose in the pressure rizer, operators decided to reduce the
flow of replacement water because they thought the reactor system
was too full of water. The reactor coolant pumps began

(07:07):
to vibrate, so the operators shut them down. This stopped
forced cooling of the reactor core. The core in turn
overheated as reactor coolant water boiled away. The fuel rods
were damaged, and they released radioactive material into the coolant water.
Operators continued to attempt fixes based on their training, but
hundreds of thousands of gallons a radioactive coolant water had

(07:31):
been released. Radioactive gases were sent into the atmosphere from
the ventilation stack of an auxiliary building. Initially, officials believed
that there may be a big hydrogen explosion and that
a meltdown was possible. The governor of Pennsylvania recommended pregnant
women and young children evacuate the area within a five
mile radius of the plant. People panicked and Within days,

(07:55):
tens of thousands of people had fled the area. Schools
and businesses closed posed, but officials said that the small
amount of radiation that was released had no measurable adverse
health effects on people who lived near the Three Mile
Island facility. Still, the accident energized anti nuclear sentiment and
lead to new regulations in the nuclear power industry. For instance,

(08:20):
there were changes to standards for nuclear plant design, inspections
were expanded, and emergency preparedness requirements were strengthened. Many people
have claimed over the years that nuclear radiation contamination did
have an effect on the physical health of local residents.
Unit two was too damaged to continue operating. Clean up

(08:40):
officially ended in nineteen. Unit one went back on line
in but it was shut down for a good in
twenty nineteen. I'm each Jeff Coote and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
You can send us a note on Facebook, Instagram or
Twitter at t d i HC Podcast, and if you

(09:02):
want to, you can send us a note via email
at this Day at I heeart media dot com. Thanks
again for listening to the show and we'll see you tomorrow.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i

(09:24):
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