The Big Bang itself had been proposed in 1931, long before this period, by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist, who suggested that the evident expansion of the Universe in time required that the Universe, if contracted backwards in time, would continue to do so until it could contract no further. This would bring all the mass of the Universe to a single point, a "primeval atom", to a state before which time and space did not exist. Hoyle is credited with coining the term "Big Bang" during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast, saying that Lemaître's theory was "based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past." It is popularly reported that Hoyle intended this to be pejorative, but Hoyle explicitly denied this and said it was just a striking image meant to highlight the difference between the two models. Lemaître's model was needed to explain the existence of deuterium and nuclides between helium and carbon, as well as the fundamentally high amount of helium present, not only in stars but also in interstellar space. As it happened, both Lemaître and Hoyle's models of nucleosynthesis would be needed to explain the elemental abundances in the universe.
