Background and undergraduate years at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and later return to Cambridge to study relativity under Paul A. M. Dirac, against father's wishes. Work with a Trinity fellowship, 1952-1958, alongside Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold, Fred Hoyle and Raymond Lyttleton, developing and extending steady state theory and doing other broad-scale theory. Move to University of Oxford, 1970, after other posts. Interest in Mach's Principle; abandonment of steady state theory; work of student Stephen Hawking on black holes; development and social context of cosmology. Also prominently mentioned are: Jacob David Bekenstein, Brandon Carter, Lidia Dina, Arthur Stanley Eddington, Albert Einstein, George Ellis, Gilman, William Hunter McCrea, Roger Penrose, Derek Raine, Martin J. Rees, Martin Ryle, Harold Spencer-Jones, Ludwig Wittgenstein; Cornell University, and Kings College (University of London).