Astronomer cosmologist mathematician physicist
Fred Hoyle was born on June 24, 1915, in Gilstead, Bingley, Yorkshire, United Kingdom. His father was Ben Hoyle, a businessman in the cloth trade. His mother was Mabel Pickard, a musician, and former school teacher - she taught Fred arithmetic before he started school. Money was usually very tight in the Hoyle home and Fred was an only child.
Although Fred knew his 12 times table by the age of four, he was seven before he learned to read - his eyes had focusing problems. Strong-minded from a very early age, he loathed the idea of going to school. He resisted starting at the usual age of five, only beginning when he was legally obliged to at six, and then he hated it.
Fred skipped school for most of the following year - it bored him - recalling later that he learned more going to the cinema - he got in for a penny - and watching people at work than he would ever have learned at school.
At age eight, on one of the days he actually turned up at school, his teacher hit him hard on the head. Aching from both the blow and a sense of injustice, Fred refused to go back to school. Unusually, the education authorities agreed to allow his mother to homeschool him - she had, after all, once been a teacher herself. At home, Fred found a chemistry book and became very enthusiastic about the subject. He made gunpowder and, wishing to prove to himself that he was a real chemist, he synthesized phosphine - a highly toxic gas - in his mother’s kitchen. On less safety-conscious days than our own, he personally bought chemicals such as concentrated sulfuric acid at the local pharmacy.
His parents hoped Fred could win one of the small numbers of county scholarships to attend a grammar school. To achieve this, he would need to finish primary school with outstanding marks. With this in mind, and probably because he was driving his mother up the wall with his kitchen experiments, his parents enrolled Fred at the village school in Eldwick. He was now nine years old.
His scholarship exam, which he sat at the age of 11, did not go very well. However, he performed well in arithmetic and was invited for an interview at Bingley Grammar School. There the headmaster learned about Fred’s interest in chemistry and sent him to talk to the chemistry teacher. At first, the teacher could hardly believe the experiments Fred said he had done at home, but Fred described them in enough detail for the teacher to realize he was telling the truth. Fred won his scholarship. He would now have to walk four miles to reach school and four miles home.
Fred Hoyle’s goal at grammar school was to win a university scholarship. At the age of 17, he achieved his goal. Soon, however, he was told the scholarship had been withdrawn; the year was 1932 and the great depression was biting hard: education spending had been cut. Hoyle had intended to study Chemistry at the University of Leeds. Angrily he returned to grammar school. The headmaster agreed he should prepare himself to win a scholarship to the University of Cambridge. Within a year he was able to reach the required standard and became a Cambridge freshman in October 1933, aged 18.
Soon after arriving at Cambridge, Hoyle was told his standard of mathematics was too weak for an academic career in chemistry or physics. Strengthening it would be his best possible preparation for a degree. He was persuaded to devote himself to mathematics in his first year. This had an additional advantage for Hoyle - it meant he could dodge freshman science courses such as geology and botany. In the end, Hoyle did not return to chemistry or physics. He studied for a mathematics degree. Inspired by earlier Cambridge mathematicians such as Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, Hoyle decided his true calling was to apply mathematics to physics - theoretical physics. In 1936, close to his 21st birthday, he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics (honors with distinction), winning the Applied Mathematics prize.
Hoyle continued at Cambridge, carrying out theoretical research in atomic and nuclear physics. He fulfilled the requirements to be awarded a Ph.D., then chose not to graduate: if he had, he would have lost his status as a student and been forced to pay more tax.
In 1939, aged 23, four months before the outbreak of World War II, Hoyle became a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. Hoyle now planned to carry out his own independent research work. However, as a student, he needed an official supervisor. He approached the great Paul Dirac, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. Dirac was notorious for his aversion to research students, but he accepted Hoyle.
Hoyle would later humorously recall that he became the student who didn’t want a supervisor paired up with the professor who didn’t want a student. Hoyle applied his nuclear physics expertise to investigate the behavior of stars: he was now working as an astrophysicist. His aim was to use the chemical composition of stars to understand their behavior. He worked in this field full-time until the summer of 1940, after which war work became his priority.
Although his career was largely put on hold with the outbreak of World War II, it was also a fertile period for gestating some ideas he would later expand on. He had refused to be drafted for weapons research, having immediately realized that the recently discovered phenomenon of a nuclear fission chain reaction could be used to create a nuclear bomb, and he mainly worked on radar for the Admiralty in Nutbourne, near Portsmouth. It was there that he met fellow astronomers Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three were able to discuss astronomy in spare moments (they would later propose together the steady-state cosmology for which Hoyle is probably best known). Through his work on the radar, he also visited the United States in 1944, where he became more familiar with the atomic bomb project. It was then that he first began to hypothesize on the role of nuclear reactions in stars.
At the end of the war, he returned to Cambridge as a Junior Lecturer in Mathematics. He published an important paper in 1945 on the structure of stars, in which he introduced a new method for solving the equations determining the structure of a star with a convective core, and discussed the most advantageous way of integrating the equations of stellar equilibrium.
In 1948, Hoyle was promoted to Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge and given tenure. He published two papers on steady-state cosmology in 1948, providing the only serious alternative to the Big Bang which agreed with key observations of the day. He found the idea that the universe had a beginning to be philosophically troubling, and, along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi (with whom he had worked on radar during World War II), he argued that the universe was actually in a "steady state," despite the clear evidence that the galaxies we observe are moving away from each other. His justification hinged on the creation of matter between the galaxies over time, so that, even though galaxies get further apart, new ones develop between them to fill the space they leave, so that the overall density of the universe remains more or less constant.
In 1949, Hoyle began a popular and often repeated series of BBC radio broadcasts on astronomy, with versions being broadcast in the United States as well as in a book "The Nature of the Universe." It was in the last of these radio lectures that Hoyle coined the phrase "Big Bang" for the creation of the universe, although many people believe he actually intended it as a scornful description of a theory which he did not himself accept. In 1957, he published "The Black Cloud," the first of many science fiction novels.
He became a Plumian Professor of Astrophysics and Natural Philosophy in Cambridge in 1958, a position he held until his resignation in 1972. In 1966, he founded the renowned Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge and was its director until 1972, the year in which he received his knighthood. He received many awards and prizes throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and was elected to many academies and learned societies, including the Royal Society of London (1957), the American Academy of Arts and Science (1964), the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (1969) and the Royal Irish Academy (1977).
He resigned all his positions in Cambridge in 1972, frustrated by the politics, and moved to the relative solitude of the Lake District. However, he continued to publish interesting (often unconventional or controversial) theories, such as those concerning Stonehenge (which, he argued, was built for the purpose of tracking the orbits of the Sun and Moon to facilitate the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses), Darwinism (in 1978, he described Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as "wrong" and argued that natural selection could not possibly explain evolution) and paleontology (he questioned the authenticity of fossil Archaeopteryx).
Hoyle died on 20 August 2001, aged 86, in Bournemouth, England, after suffering a severe stroke the previous month.
Fred Hoyle is considered one of the most creative and provocative astrophysicists of the second half of the 20th Century. Fred Hoyle proved that the great majority of natural elements in the periodic table were made inside stars and distributed through space by supernova explosions. He coined the phrase "Big Bang" while strenuously denying that there had ever been one.
Hoyle was elected to the Royal Society in 1957, a year after joining the staff of the Hale Observatories (now the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories). In collaboration with William Fowler and others in the United States, he formulated theories about the origins of stars as well as about the origins of elements within stars. Hoyle was director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge, an institution he was instrumental in founding. He received a knighthood in 1972.
He has been listed as a noteworthy astronomer, a mathematician by Marquis Who's Who.
(A landmark of British science fiction, The Black Cloud (1...)
2015(Author Fred Hoyle is an internationally renowned astronom...)
1967(Renowned scientist John Sinclair and his old school frien...)
1966(Resurrecting the plot of a classic television science fic...)
1962Rather than believing God designed the universe, Hoyle speculated that the laws of physics in our current era may have been set by a previous, extraordinarily advanced civilization.
In a 1946 paper, on the creation of elements and the synthesis of elements from hydrogen, Hoyle introduced (or at least formalized) the concept of nucleosynthesis in stars, building on earlier work in the 1930s by Hans Bethe. Stellar nucleosynthesis is the process of nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the heavier elements, which are then incorporated in other stars and planets when that star "dies" so that the new stars formed now start off with these heavier elements, and even heavier elements can then be formed from them, and so on.
Hoyle also theorized that other rarer elements could be explained by supernovas, the giant explosions which occasionally occur throughout the universe, whose immensely high temperatures and pressures would be sufficient to create such elements. Remarkably, he had found a way of testing the theory of star formation in the laboratory and was able to prove his earlier prediction that carbon could be made from three helium nuclei without an intervening beryllium stage. Although his co-worker William Fowler eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his contributions to this work, for some reason Hoyle’s original contribution was never recognized.
As part of this work, Hoyle invoked the so-called Anthropic Principle to make the remarkable prediction, based on the prevalence on Earth of carbon-based lifeforms, that there must be an undiscovered resonance in the carbon-12 nucleus which facilitates its synthesis within stars. He calculated the energy of this undiscovered resonance to be 7.6 million electron-volts, and when Fowler's research group eventually found this resonance, its measured energy was remarkably close to Hoyle's prediction.
In the 1980s, he developed and promoted, along with Chandra Wickramasinghe, the theory of "panspermia." This is the idea that the origin of life on Earth must have involved cells that arrived from space, and that evolution on earth is driven by a steady influx of viruses arriving from space via comets. He calculated the chances of the simplest living cell forming out of some primordial soup as infinitesimally small, and described that theory as "evidently nonsense of a high order."
Quotations:
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards."
"There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for."
"Things are the way they are because they were the way they were."
Fred Hoyle was a Fellow of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University (honorary). He also was a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (foreign associate), American Academy Arts and Sciences (honorary), American Philosophical Society (foreign), Royal Irish Academy, Mark Twain Society.
Hoyle became a great popularizer of science, appearing on British radio and television, and writing popular science books. He was a voracious author of books. In addition to dozens of scientific books, Hoyle wrote or co-wrote with his son, over 20 science fiction novels. His first novel was the 1957 sci-fi classic The Black Cloud.
His A for Andromeda and Andromeda Breakthrough plots were made into TV series and he also wrote four children’s books and a libretto for an opera - having grown up in a home where his mother played Beethoven’s music on the piano for several hours every day, he was an enormous classical music fan.
The scientific life of Fred Hoyle was truly unparalleled. During his career, he wrote groundbreaking scientific papers and caused bitter disputes in the scientific community with his revolutionary theories. Hoyle is best known for showing that we are all, literally, made of stardust in his paper explaining how carbon, and then all the heavier elements, were created by nuclear reactions inside stars. However, he constantly courted controversy and two years later he followed this with his "steady state" theory of the universe. This challenged another model of the universe, which Hoyle called the 'big bang' theory. Fred Hoyle was also famous amongst the general public. He popularized his research through radio and television broadcasts and wrote best-selling novels.
Hoyle married Barbara Clark in 1939. They had two children: Geoffrey, who became a science fiction writer; and Elizabeth, who became a stockbroker.
