Fred Hoyle

Fred Hoyle (Bingley, Yorkshire, England, June 24, 1915 – Bournemouth, England, August 20, 2001) was an English astrophysicist best known for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stances on other cosmological and scientific issues, especially his rejection of the Big Bang theory in defending the Steady State Theory, and his promotion with Chandra Wickramasinghe of panspermia in which the origin of life arose in the Earth through comets capable of dispersing the same type of life to different worlds. He was also a science fiction writer and co-authored a few books with his son Geoffrey Hoyle. Hoyle spent most of his career working on the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy as Plumian Professor and director for several years.Sir Fred Hoyle received the Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal in 1968, the Balzan Prize in 1994 (with Martin Schwarzschild) and e n 1997 Crafoord Prize. He died in Bournemouth, England, after a series of strokes.

Biography

Early years and career

A blue plaque at Bingley Grammar School in your memory.

Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, Yorkshire, England. His father, Ben Hoyle, who was a fiddler and worked in the wool trade in Bradford, served as a machine gunner in World War I. His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College of Music in London and later worked as a film pianist. Hoyle was educated at Bingley Grammar School and studied mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1936, he won the Mayhew Prize (along with George Stanley Rushbrooke).

In late 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge for Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research, for example devising a method of obtaining the altitude of approaching aircraft. He was also put in charge of countermeasures against radar-guided weapons found on the Graf Spee. Britain's radar project employed more personnel than the Manhattan project, and was probably the inspiration for the larger British project in The Black Cloud. Two colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three of them had many in-depth discussions on cosmology. The radar work paid for a couple of trips to North America, where he took the opportunity to visit astronomers. On a trip to the US, he learned about supernovae at Caltech and Mount Palomar and, in Canada, the nuclear physics of plutonium implosion and explosion, noted some similarity between the two and began to think about nucleosynthesis of the supernovae. I had an intuition at the time: 'I'll make a name for myself if this works'. Eventually (1954) his prescient and groundbreaking article was published. He also formed a group at Cambridge exploring stellar nucleosynthesis in ordinary stars and was concerned about the paucity of stellar carbon production in existing models. He realized that one of the existing processes would be a billion times more productive if the carbon-12 nucleus had a resonance of 7.7 MeV, but the nuclear physicists did not mention such. On another trip, he visited the nuclear physics group at Caltech, spent a few months on sabbatical there, and convinced them to search for and find the Hoyle state in carbon-12, from which he developed a complete theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, against his considerable skepticism in co-authoring Hoyle with some members of the Caltech group.

After the war, in 1945, Hoyle returned to Cambridge University, teaching at St John's College, Cambridge. Hoyle's years at Cambridge, 1945-1973, saw him rise to the top of world astrophysical theory, on the basis of a surprising originality of ideas covering a wide range of topics. In 1958, Hoyle was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. In 1967, he became the founding director of the Institute for Theoretical Astronomy (later renamed the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy), where his innovative leadership quickly led this institution to become one of the world's leading groups in theoretical astrophysics.. In 1971, he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture at the Scottish Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders. He chose the topic & # 34; Astronomical instruments and their construction & # 34;. Hoyle was knighted in 1972. Hoyle resigned from his post as Plumian professor in 1972 and from his post as director of the institute in 1973, and this move effectively insulated him from most of the power base, connections, and salary. landline of your establishment.

After leaving Cambridge, Hoyle wrote many popular science books and science fiction, as well as speaking at lectures around the world. Part of the motivation for this was simply to provide a means of support. Hoyle was still a member of the joint policy committee (since 1967), during the planning stage of the 150-inch Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. He became Chairman of the Board of the Anglo-Australian Telescope in 1973 and presided over its inauguration in 1974 by Charles of Wales.

Decay and death

After his resignation from Cambridge, Hoyle moved to the Lake District and filled his time with a combination of moorland walks, writing books, visiting research centers around the world and working on scientific ideas that have been almost universally rejected. He enjoyed hiking, even up the Scottish Highlands. But on 24 November 1997, while walking on the West Yorkshire moors near his childhood home in Gilstead, Hoyle fell into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen.. Approximately twelve hours later, Hoyle was found by a search dog. He was hospitalized for two months with pneumonia and kidney problems (both resulting from hypothermia), as well as a broken shoulder from the fall. From then on he went into a marked decline, suffering from memory problems and mental agility. In 2001 he suffered a series of strokes and died in Bournemouth on August 20 of that year.

Scientific theories and controversies

Atomic Energy Levels of Carbon

In 1958 he published his seminal discovery, for which he will be remembered as one of the most eminent scientists of the 20th century. Until then, there was an obstacle in explaining the nucleosynthesis of carbon, that is, how this element could have formed inside certain stars until it was even abundant enough to make life possible on our planet. Hoyle theoretically predicted the existence of certain energy levels that carbon atoms must have. His prediction was based on the need for the presence of specific energy levels so that this element could be produced, from simpler elements, in thermonuclear reactions in the nuclei of stars. His work on these reactions and his extensive contributions to the study of stellar internal structures allowed us to deepen our knowledge of nucleosynthesis, that is, the generation of heavy elements from hydrogen and helium inside stars, allowing us to explain the formation of heavier elements such as carbon, silicon and oxygen. This fundamental discovery was made in conjunction with the American physicist William Fowler, who received a Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1983, shared with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, another of the great astrophysicists who studied the interior of stars. Hoyle also contributed to the theory of galaxy formation through the cooling of primordial gas clouds by radiation on a suitable time scale.

Steady state and rejection of the Big Bang

Pursuit (1952) part of a series of mosaics Modern Virtues Boris Anrep in the entrance hall of the National Gallery in London. It represents the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle as a grasshopper climbing into the stars.

Hoyle was a strong critic of the Big Bang. Although he did not dispute Georges Lemaître's theory (which agreed with Edwin Hubble's redshift observations) that the universe was expanding, Hoyle disagreed with his interpretation. To him, the idea that the universe had a beginning was pseudoscience "because it is an irrational process and cannot be described in scientific terms" which resembled arguments for a creator (see Kalām cosmological argument). In a BBC interview he said: "The reason scientists like the Big Bang is because they are overshadowed by the book from Genesis. It is deep in the psyche of most scientists to believe the first page of Genesis". It was Hoyle himself who coined the term "Big Bang" in the broadcast of the third program of BBC radio on 28 March 1949. Georgy Gamov and his opponents said that Hoyle was intended to be pejorative, and the script he read aloud was portrayed by his opponents to be "conceited, one-sided, insulting, not BBC-worthy" although Hoyle explicitly denied that he was being insulting, saying it was just a shocking image meant to emphasize the difference between the two theories for the radio audience.

Together with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi (with whom he had worked on radar in World War II), Hoyle proposed in 1948 that the universe was in a "steady state)" and formulated their steady state theory. The theory tried to explain how the universe could be eternal and essentially unchanging while the galaxies we observe are still drifting away from each other. The theory revolved around the creation of matter between galaxies over time, so that even though galaxies get further apart, new ones that develop between them fill the space they leave. The resulting universe is in a "steady state" in the same way as a flowing river: the individual water molecules are moving away, but the river as a whole remains the same. The stationary model would avoid the problem of Genesis according to Steven Weinberg, but Gold maintained that it does not imply the rejection of religious belief and, for Lemaître, the Big Bang is a matter "apart from metaphysics and religion".

Hoyle, unlike Gold and Bondi, offered an explanation consistent with the principle of conservation of energy for the appearance of new matter by postulating the existence of what he called the "field of creation", or simply the "field C" or "C_ik", which had negative pressure to drive the expansion of the universe. Replacing the cosmological constant with the field C, Hoyle derived the equation:

(Rik− − 12gikR)− − Cik=KTik{displaystyle {biggl}R_{i}{_{k}}}-{frac {1}{2}{2}{i}{_{k}R{Biggr}}}}-C_{i}{i}{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }}{ }}}{ }}{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }{ }

This field C is the same as "de Sitter's solution" later for cosmic inflation but the C-field model acts much slower than the de Sitter inflation model. They jointly argued that continued creation was no more inexplicable than the appearance of the entire universe out of nothing, although it had to be done on regular basis. The C field would also be a response to the fine-tuning of the universe.

[E]ntonces, instead of physics, I made a mathematical hypothesis. I assumed that matter was created everywhere at a slow pace, which I visualized as adjustable, as the water flow of a tap can be adjusted. Subject to this hypothesis, I could prove what attracted my attention as a remarkable result, namely, that the expansion rate of the Universe was always balanced with the flow of the tap. The faucet rises and the Universe accelerates; the faucet closes and the Universe slows down. Now I felt that I understood why the Universe was expanding: it was because matter was being created everywhere.

Hoyle had a famously heated discussion with Martin Ryle of the Cavendish Radio Astronomy Group about the steady state theory. The controversy somewhat restricted the collaboration between the Cavendish group and the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy during the 1960s. In the end, mounting observational evidence convinced most cosmologists that the steady-state model was incorrect and that the Big Bang was the theory that best agreed with the observations, although Hoyle continued to support and develop his theory. The evidence that resulted in the victory of the Big Bang over the steady state model included the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in the 1960s, and the distribution of "young galaxies" and quasars throughout the Universe in the 1980s indicate a more consistent age estimate of the universe. Regarding the prediction of the microwave background, Hoyle stated that:

The inference of common sense from the plankian nature of the microwave fund spectrum and the softness of the fund is that, with regard to microwaves, we live in a fog and that fog is relatively local. A man who falls asleep on the top of a mountain and wakes up in the fog doesn't think he's looking at the origin of the Universe. He thinks he's in the fog.

In 1993, in an attempt to explain some of the evidence against the steady state theory, he presented a modified version called "quasi-steady state cosmology" (QSS), but the theory is not widely accepted. After the observation of an accelerating universe, further modifications were made to the model. Hoyle died in 2001 never having accepted the validity of the Big Bang theory.

How, in the cosmology of the Big Bang, is the microwave background explained? Despite what supporters of Big Bang's cosmology say, it is not explained. The so-called explanation is only an entry into the gardener's hypothesis catalog that constitutes theory. If the observation had given 27 Kelvin instead of 2.7 Kelvin for temperature, then 27 Kelvin would have been added to the catalog. Or 0.27 Kelvin. Or anything.

Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity

Together with Jayant Narlikar, Hoyle developed a theory of particles in the 1960s, the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity. He made predictions that were roughly the same as Einstein's general relativity but incorporated Mach's Principle that Einstein had tried but failed to incorporate into his theory. Stephen Hawking showed in 1965 that the theory is incompatible with an expanding universe, because the advanced Wheeler-Feynman solution would diverge. In his doctoral theses, Hawking argues that the Hoyle-Narlikar Hoyle-Narlikar theory "excludes models that seem to correspond to the actual universe, primarily Robertson-Walker models" and postulates the existence of matter with gravitationally negative mass, which has not been observed and "would create more difficulties than solve them." Hawking himself requested that Hoyle review his thesis, but it was assigned to Dennis Sciama. This paper was written before the Lambda-CDM model concept of dark energy, which possesses a repulsive gravitational force, was postulated.

Panspermia and rejection of abiogenesis

In his later years, Hoyle became a staunch critic of abiogenesis theories to explain the origin of life on Earth. Together with Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the scientific hypothesis that the first life on Earth began in space, spreading through the universe through panspermia, and that evolution on Earth is influenced by a constant influx of viruses. that arrive through comets four billion years ago. His belief that comets had a significant percentage of organic compounds was far ahead of his time, as the prevailing views in the 1970s and 1980s were that comets consisted largely of water ice, and the presence of organic compounds. organic was then very controversial.

I believe that all the genes we have were already here, and the event that added them to Earth was 570 million years ago. You know, the beginning of the Crab, that big event. And that all that we have subsequently used has simply been a question of permuting and combining what entered at that time. That's the only way I can see, that I feel comfortable with logic.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have advanced several cases in which they say disease outbreaks on Earth are of extraterrestrial origin, including the 1918 flu pandemic and certain outbreaks of polio and mad cow disease. For the 1918 flu pandemic, they hypothesized that cometary dust brought the virus to Earth simultaneously in multiple locations, a view almost universally dismissed by pandemic experts. In 1982, Hoyle presented Evolution from Space for the Omni Lecture at the Royal Institution. After considering what he considered to be a long shot of Earth-based abiogenesis, he concluded:

If it proceeds directly and plainly in this matter, without being diverted by the fear of incurring in the anger of scientific opinion, it is concluded that biomaterials with their astonishing measure of order must be the result of intelligent design. I didn't think of any other possibility...

In Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe) and in The Universe: Past and Present Reflections, Hoyle calculated that the probability of a random combination of amino acids that produce a viable set of enzymes required for even the simplest living cell without panspermia was one in 10 ^40,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10 ⁸⁰ ), he argued that Earth as the place of origin of life could be ruled out.

The notion that not only biopolymer but also the operating program of a living cell could happen in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is obviously a high-level nonsense.

He claimed that "is big enough to bury Darwin and the entire theory of evolution. There was no primordial soup, on this planet or any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, then they must have been the product of purposeful intelligence" and that "there is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what a plan is for." He compared the random appearance of even the simplest cell without panspermia to the probability that "a tornado Whoever hits a junkyard can assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials it contains, and compare the chance of getting even a single functional protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind people solving Rubik's cubes simultaneously..

Although Hoyle declared himself an atheist, this apparent suggestion of a guiding hand led him to the conclusion that "a superintellect has played with physics as well as chemistry and biology, and... there is no blind forces worth speaking of in nature', thus "it is almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence should reflect a higher intelligence, even to the idealized extreme limit of God".

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has played with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth talking about in nature. The numbers that one calculates from the facts seem to me as overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost out of doubt.

Wickramasinghe wrote in 2003: "In the highly polarized controversy between Darwinism and creationism, our position is unique. Although we do not side with either side, both sides treat us as opponents. Therefore, we are strangers with an unusual perspective, and our suggestion because a way out of the crisis has not yet been considered."

However, his calculations are not compatible with modern molecular evolution, including research into the world of RNA and the evolution of proteins from simple peptides. Richard Carrier points out three flaws in Hoyle's reasoning: "(1) that natural selection is equivalent to random shuffling, (2) that the two thousand enzymes, all the enzymes used in all of biology, had to be hit all at once in one giant jerk of the cosmic slot machine, and (3) that life began to require complex enzymes working together." This is known as "the junkyard tornado" or 'Hoyle's fallacy'. Those who advocate the intelligent design belief sometimes cite Hoyle's work in this area to support the claim that the universe was fine-tuned to allow intelligent life to be possible..

In 2009, the Indian Space Research Agency (ISRO) discovered three new species of bacteria in the stratosphere, one of which was named Janibacter hoylei after the scientist.

Other controversies

While Hoyle was well regarded for his work on nucleosynthesis and popular science, he held controversial positions on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to the prevailing theories of the scientific community. Paul Davies describes how &# 34;loved his maverick personality and his contempt for orthodoxy,quoting Hoyle: "I dont care what they think" about his theories on dissenting redshift, and "it's better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right."

Hoyle often expressed anger against the rambling and petty politics at Cambridge and frequently fell out with members and institutions at all levels of the British astronomical community, leading to his resignation from Cambridge in September 1971 over the way that he thought Donald Lynden-Bell had been chosen to replace the retired professor Roderick Oliver Redman behind his back. According to biographer Simon Mitton, Hoyle was crestfallen because he felt that his colleagues at Cambridge did not support him.

In addition to his views on the steady state theory and panspermia, Hoyle also supported the following controversial hypotheses and speculations:

• The correlation of influenza epidemics with the cycle of sunspots, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that the contagion of the influenza would disperse in the interstellar environment and reach Earth only when the solar wind had the slightest power.
• Two fossils Archaeopteryx They were forgeries made by man. This statement was definitely refuted by, among other strong indications, the presence of microfissures that spread through fossils to the surrounding rock.
• The theory of abiogenic oil, supported by Hoyle and Thomas Gold, where natural hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) are explained as the result of deep carbon deposits, instead of fossilized organic material. This theory is rejected by the geochemical community of conventional oil.
• In his book of 1977 About StonehengeHoyle supported Gerald Hawkins' proposal that the fifty-six holes of Aubrey in Stonehenge were used as a system for the neolytic British to predict eclipses, using them in the daily positioning of marking stones. The use of Aubrey holes to predict lunar eclipses was originally proposed by Gerald Hawkins in his book on the subject Stonehenge Decoded (1965).

Nobel laureates in physics

Hoyle was also at the center of two unrelated controversies involving the politics of selecting the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. The first came when the 1974 prize went, in part, to Antony Hewish for his leading role in the discovery of pulsars. Immediately, Hoyle made an offhand comment to a reporter in Montreal: "Yes, Jocelyn Bell was the actual discoverer, not Hewish, who was her supervisor, so she should have been included." This comment received wide international coverage. Concerned about being misunderstood and about British libel laws, Hoyle carefully crafted a letter of explanation for The Times.

The second controversy occurred when the 1983 prize went in part to William Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies of nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements of the universe". The controversy arose because Hoyle had been the inventor of the theory of nucleosynthesis in stars with two research papers published shortly after World War II. Fowler stated that it was Hoyle who "definitively established the great concept of nucleosynthesis in the stars in 1946". Some suspicion then arose that Hoyle was denied a third of this award due to their earlier disagreement. public with the 1974 award. In Nature, editor John Maddox called it "embarrassing" that Fowler has been awarded a Nobel Prize and Hoyle has not. Later, British scientist Harry Kroto said that the Nobel Prize is not just an award for work, but recognition of a scientist's general reputation and that Hoyle defended many disreputable and disproven ideas that may have invalidated it.

Literary work and scientific dissemination

Hoyle was noted as the author of numerous works of popular science and works of science fiction. As a science popularizer he gave a series of talks for the BBC in 1950 collected in the book The nature of the Universe .

He also had a taste for science fiction and found time to write a few books. "These people dont know real science," he would say, "I know some science, I should be able to do much better". Black Cloud" (1957), in which the same themes are explored as in Carl Sagan's Contact and Stanisław Lem's Solaris. He co-wrote with John Elliot a television series for the BBC titled A for Andromeda where aliens radioed instructions telling humans how to build an all-powerful and destructive machine. The novelized version of the series was published in 1961 and in Spanish by Plaza & Janés in 1963. The series was remastered into a film in 2006.

In 1967, Hoyle received the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science.

Media appearances

In the play Sur la route de Montalcino by Jean-François Viot, the character of Fred Hoyle confronts Georges Lemaître on a fictional trip to the Vatican in 1957.

Hoyle also appeared in the 1973 short film Take the World From Another Point of View.

In the 2004 TV movie Hawking, Fred Hoyle is played by Peter Firth. In the film, Stephen Hawking (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) publicly confronts Hoyle at a Royal Society lecture in the summer of 1964, about an error he found in his last publication.

Awards and recognitions

• Elected member of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1957.
• Kalinga Prize (1967)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1968).
• Bakerian Reading (1968).
• Medalla Bruce (1970).
• Henry Norris Russell Prize (1971).
• Jansky Award for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
• Title of knight (1972).
• President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1971-1973).
• Royal Medal (1974).
• Klumpke-Roberts Award for the Pacific Astronomical Society (1977).
• Balzan Prize for Astrophysics: evolution of stars (1994, with Martin Schwarzschild).
• Crafoord Award of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden, with Edwin Salpeter (1997).

Named after him

• Hoyle Building, Cambridge Institute of Astronomy.
• Asteroid 8077 Hoyle.
• Janibacter Hoylei, species of bacteria discovered by ISRO scientists.
• Sir Fred Hoyle Way, a section of the A650 motorway in Bingley.
• Medal and Fred Hoyle Award from the London Institute of Physics.