======================================================================
= Fred_Hoyle =
======================================================================
Introduction
======================================================================
Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 - 20 August 2001) was an English
astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and
was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper.
He held controversial views on some scientific matters -- in
particular, in his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory (a term he
allegedly jokingly coined on BBC Radio but later denied doing so in
derision) in favour of a "steady-state model", and his promotion of
panspermia as the origin of life on Earth.
He spent most of his working life at St John's College, Cambridge, and
served as the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical
Astronomy at Cambridge.
Hoyle also wrote science fiction novels, short stories, and radio
plays, co-created television serials, and co-authored twelve books
with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle.
Early life
============
Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Riding of Yorkshire,
England. His father Ben Hoyle was a violinist and worked in the wool
trade in Bradford, and served as a machine gunner in the First World
War. His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College
of Music in London and later worked as a cinema pianist. Hoyle was
educated at Bingley Grammar School and read mathematics at Emmanuel
College, Cambridge. As a youth, he sang in the choir at the local
Anglican church.
In 1936, Hoyle shared the Mayhew Prize with George Stanley Rushbrooke.
Career
========
In late 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the
Admiralty on radar research, for example devising a method to get the
altitude of incoming aeroplanes. He was also put in charge of
countermeasures against the radar-guided guns found on the 'Graf Spee'
after its scuttling in the River Plate. Britain's radar project was a
large-scale operation, and was probably the inspiration for the large
British project in Hoyle's novel 'The Black Cloud'. Two colleagues in
this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had
many discussions on cosmology. The radar work involved several trips
to North America, where he took the opportunity to visit astronomers.
On one trip to the US, he learned about supernovae at Caltech and
Mount Palomar and, in Canada, the nuclear physics of plutonium
implosion and explosion, noticed some similarity between the two and
started thinking about supernova nucleosynthesis. He had an intuition
at the time "I will make a name for myself if this works out" (he
published his prescient and groundbreaking paper in 1954). He also
formed a group at Cambridge exploring stellar nucleosynthesis in
ordinary stars and was bothered by the paucity of stellar carbon
production in existing models. He noticed that one existing process
would be made a billion times more productive if the carbon-12 nucleus
had a resonance at 7.7 MeV, but nuclear physicists at the time omitted
such an observed value. On another trip, he visited the nuclear
physics group at Caltech, spent a few months of sabbatical there and
persuaded them against their scepticism to find the Hoyle state in
carbon-12, from which a full theory of stellar nucleosynthesis was
developed, co-authored by Hoyle and members of the Caltech group.
In 1945, after the war ended, Hoyle returned to Cambridge University
as a lecturer at St John's College, Cambridge (where he had been a
Fellow since 1939). Hoyle's Cambridge years, 1945-1973, saw him rise
to the top of world astrophysics theory, on the basis of a startling
originality of ideas covering a wide range of topics. In 1958, Hoyle
was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental
Philosophy in Cambridge University. In 1967, he became the founding
director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (subsequently
renamed the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge), where his innovative
leadership quickly led to this institution becoming one of the premier
groups in the world for theoretical astrophysics. In 1971, he was
invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution
of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject
"Astronomical Instruments and their Construction". Hoyle was knighted
in the 1972 New Year Honours.
Although the occupant of two distinguished offices, by 1972 Hoyle had
become unhappy with his life in Cambridge. A dispute over election to
a professorial chair led to Hoyle resigning as Plumian professor in
1972. The following year he also resigned the directorship of the
institute. Explaining his actions, he later wrote: "I do not see any
sense in continuing to skirmish on a battlefield where I can never
hope to win. The Cambridge system is effectively designed to prevent
one ever establishing a directed policy - key decisions can be upset
by ill-informed and politically motivated committees. To be effective
in this system one must for ever be watching one's colleagues, almost
like a Robespierre spy system. If one does so, then of course little
time is left for any real science."
After leaving Cambridge, Hoyle wrote several popular science and
science fiction books, as well as presenting lectures around the
world, partly to provide a means of support. Hoyle was still a member
of the joint policy committee (since 1967), during the planning stage
for the 150-inch Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring
Observatory in New South Wales. He became chairman of the
Anglo-Australian Telescope board in 1973, and presided at its
inauguration in 1974 by Charles, Prince of Wales.
Decline and death
===================
After his resignation from Cambridge in 1972, Hoyle moved to the Lake
District and occupied his time with treks across the moors, writing
books, visiting research centres around the world, and working on
science ideas (that have been largely rejected); the topics he wrote
about include "Stonehenge, panspermia, Darwinism, paleontology, and
viruses from space". On 24 November 1997, while hiking across
moorlands in west Yorkshire, near his childhood home in Gilstead,
Hoyle fell into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen. He was located
about 12 hours later by a party using search dogs. He was hospitalised
for two months with a broken shoulder bone. In 2001, he suffered a
series of strokes and died in Bournemouth on 20 August of that year.
Origin of nucleosynthesis
===========================
Hoyle authored the first two research papers ever published on
synthesis of chemical elements heavier than helium by stellar nuclear
reactions. The first of these in 1946 showed that cores of stars will
evolve to temperatures of billions of degrees, much hotter than
temperatures considered for thermonuclear origin of stellar power in
main-sequence stars. Hoyle showed that at such high temperatures the
element iron can become much more abundant than other heavy elements
owing to thermal equilibrium among nuclear particles, explaining the
high natural abundance of iron. This idea would later be called the
'e'Process. Hoyle's second foundational nucleosynthesis publication,
published in 1954, showed that the elements between carbon and iron
cannot be synthesised by such equilibrium processes. He attributed
those elements to specific nuclear fusion reactions between abundant
constituents in concentric shells of evolved massive, pre-supernova
stars. This startlingly modern picture is the accepted paradigm today
for the supernova nucleosynthesis of these primary elements. In the
mid-1950s, Hoyle became the leader of a group of talented experimental
and theoretical physicists who met in Cambridge: William Alfred
Fowler, Margaret Burbidge, and Geoffrey Burbidge. This group
systematised basic ideas of how all the chemical elements in our
universe were created, with this now being a field called
nucleosynthesis. Famously, in 1957, this group produced the B2FH paper
(known for the initials of the four authors) in which the field of
nucleosynthesis was organised into complementary nuclear processes.
They added much new material on the synthesis of heavy elements by
neutron-capture reactions, the so-called s process and the r process.
So influential did the B2FH paper become that for the remainder of the
twentieth century it became the default citation of almost all
researchers wishing to cite an accepted origin for nucleosynthesis
theory, and as a result, the path-breaking Hoyle 1954 paper fell into
obscurity. Historical research in the 21st century has brought Hoyle's
1954 paper back to scientific prominence. Those historical arguments
were first presented to a gathering of nucleosynthesis experts
attending a 2007 conference at Caltech organised after the deaths of
both Fowler and Hoyle to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the
publication of B2FH. Ironically the B2FH paper did not review Hoyle's
1954 supernova-shells attribution of the origin of elements between
silicon and iron despite Hoyle's co-authorship of B2FH. Based on his
many personal discussions with Hoyle Donald D. Clayton has attributed
this seemingly inexplicable oversight in B2FH to the lack of
proofreading by Hoyle of the draft composed at Caltech in 1956 by G.
R. Burbidge and E. M. Burbidge.
The second of Hoyle's nucleosynthesis papers also introduced an
interesting use of the anthropic principle, which was not then known
by that name. In trying to work out the steps of stellar
nucleosynthesis, Hoyle calculated that one particular nuclear
reaction, the triple-alpha process, which generates carbon from
helium, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific
resonance energy and spin for it to work. The large amount of carbon
in the universe, which makes it possible for carbon-based life-forms
of any kind to exist, demonstrated to Hoyle that this nuclear reaction
must work. Based on this notion, Hoyle therefore predicted the values
of the energy, the nuclear spin and the parity of the compound state
in the carbon nucleus formed by three alpha particles (helium nuclei),
which was later borne out by experiment.
This energy level, while needed to produce carbon in large quantities,
was statistically very unlikely to fall where it does in the scheme of
carbon energy levels. Hoyle later wrote:
His co-worker William Alfred Fowler eventually won the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1983 (with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar), but Hoyle's
original contribution was overlooked by the electors, and many were
surprised that such a notable astronomer missed out. Fowler himself in
an autobiographical sketch affirmed Hoyle's pioneering efforts:
Rejection of the Big Bang
===========================
While having no argument with the Lemaître theory (later confirmed by
Edwin Hubble's observations) that the universe was expanding, Hoyle
disagreed on its interpretation. He found the idea that the universe
had a beginning to be pseudoscience, resembling arguments for a
creator, "for it's an irrational process, and can't be described in
scientific terms" (see Kalam cosmological argument). Instead, Hoyle,
along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi (with whom he had worked on
radar in the Second World War), in 1948 began to argue for the
universe as being 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 still having the galaxies we
observe moving away from each other. The theory hinged on 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
manner that a flowing river is--the individual water molecules are
moving away but the overall river remains the same.
The theory was one alternative to the Big Bang which, like the Big
Bang, agreed with key observations of the day, namely Hubble's red
shift observations, and Hoyle was a strong critic of the Big Bang. He
coined the term "Big Bang" on BBC radio's 'Third Programme' broadcast
on 28 March 1949. It was said by George Gamow and his opponents that
Hoyle intended to be pejorative, and the script from which he read
aloud was interpreted by his opponents to be "vain, one-sided,
insulting, not worthy of the BBC". Hoyle explicitly denied that he was
being insulting and said it was just a striking image meant to
emphasise the difference between the two theories for the radio
audience. In another BBC interview, he said, "The reason why
scientists like the "Big Bang" is because they are overshadowed by the
Book of Genesis. It is deep within the psyche of most scientists to
believe in the first page of Genesis".
Hoyle had a famously heated argument with Martin Ryle of the Cavendish
Radio Astronomy Group about Hoyle's steady state theory, which
somewhat restricted collaboration between the Cavendish group and the
Cambridge Institute of Astronomy during the 1960s.
Hoyle, unlike Gold and Bondi, offered an explanation for the
appearance of new matter by postulating the existence of what he
dubbed the "creation field", or just the "C-field", which had negative
pressure in order to be consistent with the conservation of energy and
drive the expansion of the universe. This C-field is the same as the
later "de Sitter solution" for cosmic inflation, but the C-field model
acts much slower than the de Sitter inflation model. They jointly
argued that continuous creation was no more inexplicable than the
appearance of the entire universe from nothing, although it had to be
done on a regular basis. In the end, mounting observational evidence
convinced most cosmologists that the steady-state model was incorrect
and that the Big Bang theory agreed better with observations, although
Hoyle continued to support and develop his theory. 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.
The evidence that resulted in the Big Bang's victory over the
steady-state model included 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. Hoyle died in 2001 having
never accepted the validity of the Big Bang theory.
Theory of gravity
===================
Together with Narlikar, Hoyle developed a particle theory in the
1960s, the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity. It made predictions that
were roughly the same as Einstein's general relativity, but it
incorporated Mach's Principle, which Einstein had tried but failed to
incorporate in his theory. The Hoyle-Narlikar theory fails several
tests, including consistency with the microwave background. It was
motivated by their belief in the steady-state model of the universe.
Rejection of Earth-based abiogenesis
======================================
In his later years, Hoyle became a staunch critic of theories of
abiogenesis to explain the origin of life on Earth. With Chandra
Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the hypothesis that the first life on
Earth began in space, spreading through the universe via panspermia,
and that evolution on Earth is influenced by a steady influx of
viruses arriving via comets. His belief that comets had a significant
percentage of organic compounds was well ahead of his time, as the
dominant views in the 1970s and 1980s were that comets largely
consisted of water-ice, and the presence of organic compounds was then
highly controversial. Wickramasinghe wrote in 2003: "In the highly
polarized polemic between Darwinism and creationism, our position is
unique. Although we do not align ourselves with either side, both
sides treat us as opponents. Thus we are outsiders with an unusual
perspective--and our suggestion for a way out of the crisis has not
yet been considered."
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe advanced several instances where they say
outbreaks of illnesses on Earth are of extraterrestrial origins,
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 at multiple
locations--a view almost universally dismissed by experts on this
pandemic. In 1982, Hoyle presented 'Evolution from Space' for the
Royal Institution's Omni Lecture. After considering what he thought of
as a very remote possibility of Earth-based abiogenesis he concluded:
Published in his 1982/1984 books 'Evolution from Space' (co-authored
with Chandra Wickramasinghe), Hoyle calculated that the chance of
obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living
cell without panspermia was one in 1040,000. Since the number of atoms
in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (1080), he
argued that Earth as life's place of origin could be ruled out. He
claimed:
Though Hoyle declared himself an atheist, this apparent suggestion of
a guiding hand led him to the conclusion that "a superintellect has
monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and ...
there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." He would go
on to compare the random emergence of even the simplest cell without
panspermia to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a
junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein" and
to compare the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein
by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind
men solving Rubik's Cubes simultaneously. This is known as "the
junkyard tornado", or "Hoyle's Fallacy". Those who advocate the
intelligent design (ID) philosophy 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.
Other opinions
================
While Hoyle was well-regarded for his works on nucleosynthesis and
science popularisation, he held positions on a wide range of
scientific issues that were in direct opposition to the prevailing
theories of the scientific community. Paul Davies describes how he
"loved his maverick personality and contempt for orthodoxy", quoting
Hoyle as saying "I don't care what they think" about his theories on
discrepant redshift, and "it is better to be interesting and wrong
than boring and right".
Hoyle often expressed anger against the labyrinthine and petty
politics at Cambridge and frequently feuded with members and
institutions of all levels of the British astronomy community, leading
to his resignation from Cambridge in September 1971 over the way he
thought Donald Lynden-Bell was chosen to replace retiring professor
Roderick Oliver Redman behind his back. According to biographer Simon
Mitton, Hoyle was crestfallen because he felt that his colleagues at
Cambridge were unsupportive.
In addition to his views on steady state theory and panspermia, Hoyle
also supported the following controversial hypotheses and
speculations:
* The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with
epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu
contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth
only when the solar wind had minimum power.
* Two fossil 'Archaeopteryx' were man-made fakes.
* The theory of abiogenic petroleum, held by Hoyle and by Thomas Gold,
where natural hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) are explained as the
result of deep carbon deposits, instead of fossilised organic
material. This theory is dismissed by the mainstream petroleum
geochemistry community.
* In his 1977 book 'On Stonehenge', Hoyle supported Gerald Hawkins's
proposal that the fifty-six Aubrey holes at Stonehenge were used as a
system for Neolithic Britons to predict eclipses, using them in the
daily positioning of marker stones. Using the Aubrey holes for
predicting lunar eclipses was originally proposed by Gerald Hawkins in
his book of the subject 'Stonehenge Decoded' (1965).
Nobel Prize for Physics
=========================
Hoyle was also at the centre of two unrelated controversies involving
the politics for selecting recipients of the Nobel Prize for Physics.
The first arose when the 1974 prize went in part to Antony Hewish for
his leading role in the discovery of pulsars. Hoyle made an
off-the-cuff remark to a reporter in Montreal that "Yes, Jocelyn Bell
was the actual discoverer, not Hewish, who was her supervisor, so she
should have been included." This remark received widespread
international coverage. Worried about being misunderstood, Hoyle
carefully composed a letter of explanation to 'The Times'.
The 1983 prize went in part to William Alfred Fowler "for his
theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of
importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe"
despite Hoyle having been the inventor of the theory of
nucleosynthesis in the stars with two research papers published
shortly after WWII. So some suspicion arose that Hoyle was denied the
third share of this prize because of his earlier public disagreement
with the 1974 award. British scientist Harry Kroto later said that the
Nobel Prize is not just an award for a piece of work, but a
recognition of a scientist's overall reputation and Hoyle's
championing many disreputable and disproven ideas may have invalidated
him. In his obituary, 'Nature' editor and fellow Briton John Maddox
called it "shameful" that Fowler had been rewarded with a Nobel prize
and Hoyle had not.
Because of his many unorthodox views, Hoyle was described as "the
scientist whose rudeness cost him a Nobel prize"; Donald D. Clayton
wrote that "He made himself look like a sorehead who only cared about
the steady state universe and life from outer space. … He made himself
look foolish."
Media appearances
======================================================================
Hoyle appeared in a series of radio talks on astronomy for the BBC in
the 1950s; these were collected in the book 'The Nature of the
Universe', and he went on to write a number of other popular science
books.
In the play 'Sur la route de Montalcino', the character of Fred Hoyle
confronts Georges Lemaître on a fictional journey to the Vatican in
1957.
Hoyle appeared in the 1973 short film 'Take the World From Another
Point of View'.
In the 2004 television movie 'Hawking', Fred Hoyle is played by Peter
Firth. In the movie, Stephen Hawking (played by Benedict Cumberbatch)
publicly confronts Hoyle at a Royal Society lecture in summer 1964,
about a mistake he found in his latest publication.
Honours
======================================================================
Awards
* Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964)
* Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1957
* Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1968)
* Bakerian Lecture (1968)
* Elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences
(1969)
* Bruce Medal (1970)
* Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1971)
* Jansky Lectureship before the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
* Knighthood (1972)
* President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1971-1973)
* Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge (1973-2001)
* Royal Medal (1974)
* Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
(1977)
* Elected member of the American Philosophical Society (1980)
* Balzan Prize for Astrophysics: evolution of stars (1994, with Martin
Schwarzschild)
* Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, with
Edwin Salpeter (1997)
Named after him
* Hoyle Building, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
* Asteroid 8077 Hoyle
* 'Janibacter hoylei', species of bacteria discovered by ISRO
scientists
* Sir Fred Hoyle Way, a stretch of the A650 dual carriageway in
Bingley.
* Institute of Physics Fred Hoyle Medal and Prize
Memorabilia
=============
The Fred Hoyle Collection at St John's College Library contains "a
pair of walking boots, five boxes of photographs, two ice axes, some
dental X-rays, a telescope, ten large film reels and an unpublished
opera" in addition to 150 document boxes of papers.
Non-fiction
=============
* 'The Nature of the Universe - a series of broadcast lectures', Basil
Blackwell, Oxford 1950 (early use of the Big Bang phrase)
* [
https://archive.org/search.php?query=fred%20hoyle 'Frontiers of
Astronomy'], Heinemann Education Books Ltd, London, 1955. The Internet
Archive. HarperCollins,
* Burbidge, E. M., Burbidge, G. R., Fowler, W. A. and Hoyle, F.,
[
https://www.pmf.unizg.hr/_download/repository/burbidge_RMP_29_547_1957.pdf
"Synthesis of the Elements in Stars"] , 'Revs. Mod. Physics'
29:547-650, 1957, the famous B2FH paper after their initials, for
which Hoyle is most famous among professional cosmologists.
* 'Astronomy, A history of man's investigation of the universe',
Crescent Books, Inc., London 1962,
* 'Of Men and Galaxies', the University of Washington Press, Seattle,
1964,
* 'Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars', Harper & Row, Publishers, New
York, 1965,
* 'Encounter with the Future', Trident Press, New York, 1965,
* 'Nicolaus Copernicus', Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., London, p.
78, 1973
* 'Astronomy and Cosmology: A Modern Course', 1975,
* 'Energy or Extinction? The case for nuclear energy', 1977, Heinemann
Educational Books Limited, . In this provocative book Hoyle
establishes the dependence of Western civilisation on energy
consumption and predicts that nuclear fission as a source of energy is
essential for its survival.
* 'Ten Faces of the Universe', 1977, W.H. Freeman and Company (San
Francisco),
* 'On Stonehenge', 1977, London : Heinemann Educational, ; San
Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, pbk.
* 'Lifecloud - The Origin of Life in the Universe', Hoyle, F. and
Wickramasinghe C., J.M. Dent & Sons, 1978.
* 'Diseases from Space' (with Chandra Wickramasinghe) (J.M. Dent,
London, 1979)
* 'Commonsense in Nuclear Energy', Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle,
1980, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd.,
* The big bang in astronomy, 'New Scientist' 92(1280):527, 19 November
1981.
* 'Ice: The Ultimate Human Catastrophe', Continuum, New York, 1981,
* 'The Intelligent Universe', 1983
* 'From Grains to Bacteria', Hoyle, F. and Wickramasinghe N. C.,
University College Cardiff Press, 1984
* 'Evolution from space (the Omni lecture) and other papers on the
origin of life' 1982,
* 'Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism', 1984,
* 'Viruses from Space', 1986,
* With Jayant Narlikar and Chandra Wickramasinghe, The extragalactic
universe: an alternative view, 'Nature' 346:807-812, 30 August 1990.
* 'The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion',1993,
* 'Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life'
(autobiography) Oxford University Press 1994,
* 'Mathematics of Evolution', (1987) University College Cardiff Press,
(1999) Acorn Enterprises LLC.,
* With G. Burbridge and Narlikar J. V. 'A Different Approach to
Cosmology', Cambridge University Press 2000,
Science fiction
=================
Hoyle also wrote science fiction. In his first novel, 'The Black
Cloud', most intelligent life in the universe takes the form of
interstellar gas clouds; they are surprised to learn that intelligent
life can also form on planets. He wrote a television series, 'A for
Andromeda', which was also published as a novel. His play 'Rockets in
Ursa Major' had a professional production at the Mermaid Theatre in
1962.
* 'The Black Cloud', 1957
* 'Ossian's Ride', 1959
* 'A for Andromeda', 1962 (co-authored with John Elliot)
* 'Fifth Planet', 1963 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'Andromeda Breakthrough', 1965 (co-authored with John Elliot)
* 'October the First Is Too Late', 1966
* 'Element 79' (collection of short stories), 1967
* 'Rockets in Ursa Major', 1969 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'Seven Steps to the Sun', 1970 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'The Inferno', 1973 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'The Molecule Men and the Monster of Loch Ness', 1973 (co-authored
with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'Into Deepest Space', 1974 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'The Incandescent Ones', 1977 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'The Westminster Disaster', 1978 (co-authored with Geoffrey Hoyle
and Edited by Barbara Hoyle)
* 'The Frozen Planet of Azuron', 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored
with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'The Energy Pirate', 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored with Geoffrey
Hoyle)
* 'The Planet of Death', 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored with
Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'The Giants of Universal Park', 1982 (Ladybird Books, co-authored
with Geoffrey Hoyle)
* 'Comet Halley', 1985
Most of these are independent of each other. 'Andromeda Breakthrough'
is a sequel to 'A for Andromeda' and 'Into Deepest Space' is a sequel
to 'Rockets in Ursa Major'. The four Ladybird Books are intended for
children.
Some stories of the collection 'Element 79' are fantasy, in particular
"Welcome to Slippage City" and "The Judgement of Aphrodite". Both
introduce mythological characters.
'The Telegraph' (UK) called him a "masterful" science fiction writer.
Further reading
======================================================================
* Alan P. Lightman and Roberta Brawer, 'Origins: The Lives and Worlds
of Modern Cosmologists', Harvard University Press, 1990. A collection
of interviews, mostly with the generation (or two) of cosmologists
after Hoyle, but also including an interview with Hoyle himself.
Several interviewees testify to Hoyle's influence in popularising
astronomy and cosmology.
* Dennis Overbye, 'Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Quest
for the Secret of the Universe', HarperCollins, 1991. 2nd ed. (with
new afterword), Back Bay, 1999. Gives a biographical account of
modern cosmology in a novel-like fashion. Complementary to 'Origins.'
* Simon Mitton, 'Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science', Cambridge University
Press, 2011.
* Douglas Gough, editor, 'The Scientific Legacy of Fred Hoyle',
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
* Chandra Wickramasinghe, 'A Journey with Fred Hoyle', World
Scientific Pub, 2005. .
* Jane Gregory, 'Fred Hoyle's Universe', Oxford University Press,
2005.
* [
http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/8622 'A
Journey with Frey Hoyle: Second Edition'] by Chandra Wickramasinghe,
World Scientific Publishing Co. 2013.
External links
======================================================================
* [
http://www.hoyle.org.uk Fred Hoyle Website]
* [
http://www.lifefromspace.com Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe
Website]
*
[
https://archive.today/20130223083527/http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_54/iss_11/75_2.shtml
Obituary] by Sir Martin Rees in 'Physics Today'
* [
https://www.theguardian.com/obituaries/story/0,3604,540961,00.html
Obituary] by Bernard Lovell in 'The Guardian'
*
*
[
http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/hoyle/exhibition
Fred Hoyle: An Online Exhibition]
* [
http://www.panspermia.org/hoylintv.htm An Interview with Fred
Hoyle, 5 July 1996]
*
*
* [
https://www.nndb.com/people/758/000113419/ Fred Hoyle] at the
Notable Names Database
*
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle
