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Professor Jayant Vishnu Narlikar is an Indian astrophysicist. Narlikar is a defender of the steady state cosmology. His work on conformal gravity theory with Sir Fred Hoyle, called Hoyle-Narlikar theory, demonstrated a synthesis can be achieved between Albert Einstein\'s theory of relativity and Mach\'s principle. India\'s second highest civilian honour, Padma Vibhushan, was awarded to him for his work. Prof. Narlikar is the founder director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune, India.

Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge is a British-American physics professor in the University of California, San Diego. He is married to Margaret Burbidge.

In 1957 he and his wife were co-authors, together with Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, and William Fowler, the American physicist, of a famous paper on stellar nucleosynthesis, which was referred to as the B?FH paper, after the initials of the surnames of the four authors. Burbidge is known mostly for his alternative cosmology theory, which contradicts the Big Bang theory.

According to Burbidge, the universe is oscillatory and as such expands and contracts periodically over infinite time. This theory, due to its controversial nature, has brought a certain amount of fame (or even infamy) to Burbidge. He was the Director of Kitt Peak National Observatory from 1978 to 1984.