The Institute of Astronomy: The Vintage Years

In the summer of 1967, the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge came into physical existence in a well-equipped open plan building in the midst of a meadow off Madingley Road. It seemed to be strategically placed between two friendly institutions — the Cambridge University Observatories on the one side and the Geophysics Department on the other. Fred's cosmological adversaries at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory were located only a couple of miles away on Madingley Road, but as far as interaction was concerned they may as well have been as far away as the Moon. Martin Ryle and his team were continuing in their single-minded pursuit of disproving Steady State Cosmology. From their studies of the counts of radio sources to various intensity levels, they claimed that radio emitting galaxies appeared to be closer together as one goes further back in the Universe, showing that the Universe could not be in a steady state…