Transcript: Where did the heavy elements come from? They were not present at the big bang, the birth of the universe. Stars are the cauldrons that have produced the calcium in our bones, the nitrogen and oxygen in the air we breathe, the metals in the cars we drive, and the silicon in our computers. The story of the creation of heavy elements was first worked out in the 1950s by four young astrophysicists working at the California Institute of Technology. They were the husband and wife team of Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, Fred Hoyle, an iconoclast astrophysicist from the north part of England, and Willie Fowler, an American. All four became famous; the Burbidges were both observatory directors, Fred Hoyle was knighted, and Fowler won a Nobel Prize. Their masterwork was a long paper which produced a perfect explanation of the origin of the heavy elements in the advance stages of stellar evolution.