A professor and chair of the astronomy department at Boston University in the United States, he published in 1963 an analysis of Stonehenge in which he was the first to propose that it was an ancient astronomical observatory used to predict movements of the sun and moon, and that it was used as a computer.
Archaeologists and other scholars have since demonstrated such sophisticated, complex planning and construction at other prehistoric earthwork sites, such as Cahokia in the U.S. Gerald Hawkins was born in Great Yarmouth, England and studied physics and mathematics at the University of Nottingham.
It includes a conventional overview of the history of the field and discusses topics of interest such as the formation and evolution of the Solar System as well as the properties of distant galaxies.
[1] However, he dismisses the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang as a false notion, despite the evidence compelling science "to adopt the expanding solution at the present epoch".
[3] Hawkins acknowledges the age of Earth (over 4 billion years old) and the truth of Darwinism, and suggests the poetic compatibility of religious creation myths with cosmology.
The archaeological community was sceptical and his theories were criticized by such noted historians as Richard Atkinson, who denounced the book as being "tendentious, arrogant, slipshod, and unconvincing".