Geoffrey Burbidge | Physicist, 84

Geoffrey Burbidge, 84, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died Jan. 26 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego.

His death came after a long illness, said the University of California, San Diego, where Dr. Burbidge was a physics professor for more than four decades.

As the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, Dr. Burbidge pushed to open big telescopes to a larger community of astronomers. As a senior astronomer at the university in San Diego, he was, to the consternation of most of his colleagues, a witty and acerbic critic of the Big Bang theory.

In 1957, in a long, groundbreaking paper in The Reviews of Modern Physics, Burbidge; his wife, E. Margaret Burbidge; William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology; and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University - a collaboration noted by their initials B2FH - laid out the way that thermonuclear reactions in stars could slowly seed a universe that was originally pure hydrogen, helium, and lithium, the simplest elements in the periodic table, with heavier elements like oxygen, iron, carbon, and others from which life is derived.

Dr. Burbidge, born in Chipping Norton in England, was the first of his family to progress beyond grammar school.

He attended the University of Bristol intending to study history, but on discovering he could stay in college longer if he enrolled in physics, he did, and found he liked it. He furthered his studies at University College, London, from which he earned a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1951. - New York Times News Service