  In 1948, a young mathematician, Herman Bondi, in concert with two close friends Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle, proposed a radical new cosmological theory, the Steady State theory. This theory differs from the basic picture shared by both kinematic relativity and relativistic cosmology, namely, that of a universe with a definite origin in a small, dense knot, followed by evolution into the universe we have today. According to Bondi’s theory, the universe as far back into the past as we might look would always look the same; there was no evolution, there could be no “fossils”, as Bondi called putative evidence of a universe different in the past from our present one. What we observe today is the same state of a universe that has been and always will be steady. Bondi came to his notion of the steady state primarily from his commitment to the philosophical components of Milne’s work, most especially the methodology of rationalism plus hypothetico-deductivism; additionally, Bondi coupled to these Milnean notions some ideas taken directly from the philosophy of Karl Popper.