Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle, FRS (June 24, 1915 – August 20, 2001) was a British astronomer and science fiction author.

Statue of Fred Hoyle in Institute of Astronomy

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Quotes

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia.

In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God.

This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.

• We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that... all such theories are in conflict with observational requirements.
  • BBC radio broadcast, March 28, 1949. Reprinted in April 1949 in The Listener, a BBC magazine.

• "Big Bang" theory
  • The Nature of the Universe (1950), p. 113

• It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas.
  • Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), p. 1

• It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.
  • Quoted in "The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age" by Richard C. Duncan
  • Originally from Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).

• I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon...Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.
  • Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars, Harper and Row, New York, 1965

• We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.
  • Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p. 15

• Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
  • "Sayings of the Week", The Observer (9 September 1979)

• Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.
  • Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981)

• Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate … . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect … higher intelligences … even to the limit of God … such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.
  • Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), pp. 141, 144, 130

• The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.
  • Hoyle on evolution, Nature, Vol. 294, No. 5837 (November 12, 1981), p. 105

• The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.
  • The Big Bang in Astronomy, New Scientist, Vol. 92, No. 1280 (November 19, 1981), p. 527

• A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.
  • Arguing that living organisms could not have arisen by chance alone.
  • The Intelligent Universe (1983), p. 19

• Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. ...As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher,' not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled.
  • The Small World of Fred Hoyle: an Autobiography (1986)

• The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.
  • Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p. 14

• To achieve anything really worthwhile in research it is necessary to go against the opinions of one's fellows. To do so successfully, not merely becoming a crackpot, requires fine judgement, especially on long-term issues that cannot be settled quickly. ...To hold popular opinion is cheap, costing nothing in reputation, whereas to accept that there is evidence pointing oppositely... is to risk scientific tar and feathers. Yet not to take the risk is to make certain that, if something new is really there, you won't be the one to find it.
  • Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life (1994) p. 235.

• When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.
  • As quoted in Scientific American (March 1995)

• There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
  • Attributed in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999) edited by Elizabeth Knowles and Angela Partington

• 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.
  • As quoted by Bernard Lovell in Hoyle's obituary in The Guardian (23 August 2001)

• Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension... Once let the sheer isolation of the Earth become plain to every man, whatever his nationality or creed, and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. (1948)
  • As quoted by El Hadi Jazairy in "New geographies. 4, Scales of the Earth"

The Black Cloud (1957)

All quotes from the mass market paperback edition, published by Signet (catalogue number Q6605) in June 1959 (seventh printing)

• Once the spark was struck the story would spread like wildfire, and would be in the papers in next to no time. The Director had never had any cause to think highly of newspaper reporters, particularly of their scientific accuracy.
  • Chapter 1, “Opening Scenes” (p. 24)

• “But I can’t go along and gatecrash.”
  “Nonsense, of course you can come—a guest from England! You’ll be the lion of the party. Probably half a dozen film moguls from Hollywood will want to sign you up on the spot.”
  “All the more reason for not going,” said Kingsley.
  • Chapter 3, “California Scenes” (p. 53)

• The two men were mentally too dissimilar for more than a half hour of conversation between them to be possible.
  • Chapter 4, “Multifarious Activities” (p. 65)

• “I’m still waiting to hear how I should have compromised. Are you sure that ‘compromise’ and ‘capitulate’ are not synonymous in your vocabulary?”
  • Chapter 4, “Multifarious Activities” (p. 69)

• Ifs and buts are the stuff of politics, Mr. Parkinson. As a scientist I am concerned with facts not with motives, suspicions, and airy-fairy nothingness.
  • Chapter 4, “Multifarious Activities” (p. 70)

• “You haven’t very much respect for my profession, have you, Professor Kingsley?”
  “Since it is you who wish for frankness, I will tell you that I have not. I regard politicians rather as I regard the instruments on the dashboard of my car. They tell me what is going on in the engine of state, but they don’t control it.”
  • Chapter 4, “Multifarious Activities” (p. 70)

• “Not everyone views the government with quite the same disrespect that you do.”
  “No, more’s the pity.”
  • Chapter 4, “Multifarious Activities” (p. 71)

• The policy was to keep everything in watertight compartments. In the interests of security, they said, but more likely in the interests of inefficiency.
  • Chapter 5, “Nortonstowe” (p. 84)

• Before anyone starts criticising, let me say that I know it’s a preposterous idea and I wouldn’t suggest it for a moment if the alternative weren’t even more outrageously preposterous.
  • Chapter 8, “Change for the Better” (p. 131)

• I will say this for you, Chris. I never knew anyone who was better at finding work for other people.
  • Chapter 10, “Communication Established” (p. 146)

• Viewed from a wholly logical point of view the bearing and rearing of children is a thoroughly unattractive proposition. To a woman it means pain and endless worry. To a man it means extra work extending over many years to support his family. So, if we were wholly logical about sex, we should probably not bother to reproduce at all. Nature takes care of this by making us utterly and wholly irrational.
  • Chapter 10, “Communication Established” (pp. 154-155)

• It isn’t the Universe that’s following our logic, it’s we that are constructed in accordance with the logic of the Universe. And that gives what I might call a definition of intelligent life: something that reflects the basic structure of the Universe.
  • Chapter 10, “Communication Established” (p. 158)

• “Now do you see my point?”
  “I’m beginning to see through a glass darkly. You mean that the mental make-up of a leading politician is likely to be such that he couldn’t dream it possible that anyone could find the prospect of becoming a dictator wholly unpalatable.”
  “Yes, I can see it all, Chris,” Leicester grinned. “Graft everywhere, executions just for the laughs, no wife or daughter safe.”
  • Chapter 11, “The Hydrogen Rockets” (p. 167)

• Losing power, utterly and completely, is the most dreadful prospect that a politician can think of. It overshadows everything else.
  • Chapter 11, “The Hydrogen Rockets” (p. 167)

• It’s only too easy to read your own state of mind into what other people say.
  • Chapter 11, “The Hydrogen Rockets” (p. 168)

• Lives loss through an ‘act of God’ are regretted, perhaps deeply regretted, but they do not arouse our wildest passions. It is otherwise with lives that are forfeited through deliberate human agency. The word ‘deliberate’ is important here. One deliberate murder can produce a sharper reaction than ten thousand deaths on the roads.
  • Chapter 11, “The Hydrogen Rockets” (p. 173)

• “By and large, conventional religion, as many humans accept it, is illogical in its attempt to conceive of entities lying outside the Universe. Since the Universe comprises everything, it is evident that nothing can lie outside it. The idea of a ‘god’ creating the Universe is a mechanistic absurdity clearly derived from the making of machines by men. I take it that we are in agreement about all this.”
  • Chapter 12, “News of Departure” (p. 177)

Encounter with the Future (1965)

All quotes from the hardcover first edition, published by Trident Press

• It is easy to give a recipe for writing a successful non-fiction book—simply find grounds for optimism that no one has spotted before and expatiate thereon.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 1)

• Inevitably we are led to ask: why does this appalling rubbish get published—and not merely published, but displayed prominently in the very heart of an apparently respectable newspaper? In a word, because this is what people want, and if The Times didn’t fill itself pretty well from cover to cover with such stuff it would soon go out of business.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 2)

• This may seem like insanity, and so it is. It offsets the real problems of modern life. How can an apparently insane species manage to organize itself in a civilized way? I am not so sure that it can. The big mystery is why we have managed to get so far.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 4)

• Any organization is better than no organization. Tribal customs show great variety, but they have in common the property of enabling a number of humans to act in concert with each other. It is the communal character of group action that is important, not the particular customs of any particular tribe. Group action is the essential common denominator of all tribal life. And any group acting together is far more powerful than the same number of persons acting only as individuals.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 5)

• I have been astonished by the way in which the tug of war between left and right is conducted. What seems to happen is this: the left, the ideas-men, the liberals, propose a new idea involving change. The conservatives oppose all change on principle. An argument now develops in which I find myself unable to take any real part. I know that without new ideas, without change, even the most modest enterprise soon congeals and dies. But I also know that most new ideas, like mutations, turn out very badly. Hence from the beginning I am aware of the basic dilemma. But not so the liberals or the conservatives. The liberals, for their part, are quite convinced that the new idea is an excellent one, but when pressed for proof they merely follow the dictum of Robert Owen, “never argue, repeat your assertion.” So far as the liberals are concerned I feel as if I were in the presence of divine revelation. The conservatives on the other hand are blockers, stone wallers, Verdun-types with “they shall not pass” expression written all over their faces. On the whole, because I know that most new ideas are dubious, I end by voting with the conservatives.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 11)

• The attitude of the conservative is basically wrong: change should not be opposed. Not in a root and branch sense. What the conservatives should demand and insist on is that any projected changes should be reversible. The deadly changes are those which are irreversible, like the British introducing Greeks into Cyprus. Or like taking the sparrow and the rabbit to Australia. So long as a projected change can be shown to be reversible there should be no very serious objection to making a tryout. If the first step along the new road turns out well, the second step can be made, but if it turns out badly one simply retreats to where one was before. This seems to me to be the essential principle of social change.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 12)

• So far from proceeding in this way, the really curious feature of every organization in which it has been my misfortune to be involved is that while people argue vociferously and almost completely without data about all projected changes they show a little or no interest in the effects of changes after they have been introduced.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 12)

• All people are the same, pretty well irrespective of color, creed, or the way they happen to grunt out their language.
  • Chapter 1, “The State of Things” (p. 13)

• Where, then, do we go from here? The answer to this critical question plainly depends on whether the rise of the world population becomes permanently stabilized or not. Will the warnings of the past be heeded? My suspicion is that they will not.
  • Chapter 2, “The Anatomy of Doom” (p. 19)

• However, there is one respect in which the human species has shown not the slightest originality—its excessive reproductive vigor.
  • Chapter 2, “The Anatomy of Doom” (p. 23)

• There may be hagglers who will dispute this statement, but if so I propose to disregard them.
  • Chapter 2, “The Anatomy of Doom” (p. 24)

• The concept here is that a highly organized society can collapse through a population overload, even though the people themselves are not starving. It is the organization that ultimately becomes overloaded and collapses.
  • Chapter 2, “The Anatomy of Doom” (p. 27)

• Experience shows that knowledge dies very hard once it has been obtained—the acquisition of knowledge is essentially irreversible, a truth already recognized in the Garden of Eden.
  • Chapter 2, “The Anatomy of Doom” (p. 35)

• I am often asked what it is like to be a scientist and how one goes about being a scientist. I find such questions uncomfortable because I know of no nicely potted answers to them. It is necessary to dig deep into one’s own experience to produce anything like a worthwhile assessment. And this is to risk the perils of autobiography, usually so fascinating to the narrator and so boring to the reader.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 38)

• Quite recently I was asked to write an article to be entitled, “How to Become a Good Scientist.” In communicating my refusal to the periodical in question I was tempted to end the argument in one sentence, “By not writing articles such as this,” and then demanding my fee.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (pp. 38-39)

• My cast of mind is a very bad handicap in this age of the committee. My true thoughts when I sit on a committee are so grotesquely at variance with the business in hand that they simply cannot be expressed at all. I am overwhelmed by the fatuity of most of what is being said, and there is a constant parade in my mind of the pathetic political figures of the first third of the present century.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (pp. 46-47)

• All people are pretty much alike, except in so far as ambition may change a man from a normal person into a machine or a monster.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 47)

• I helped him willingly and most efficiently, the latter because I knew that if I did jobs cheerfully and badly I wouldn’t be asked too often.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 53)

• His new leisure also afforded my father the opportunity of indulging another of his favorite occupations—talking. There was a great deal of talk in our house, which had two effects on me: one, that I learned not to listen when I don’t want to listen; and the other, an aversion to talking.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 59)

• There is no substitute for continuous endeavor. Of course all older men have good intentions, they have every wish “to keep up.” But the endless calls of students and committees and the ceaseless ringing of the telephone can defeat the best intentions. Only very recently I myself summoned the courage to deal with the problem. My solution is to answer only essential letters, entirely to ignore the telephone, and to restrict severely my participation in committee meetings. In modern ant-like society, with its penchant for excreting mountains of trivial literature, it needs an enormous determination to follow these simple precepts.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (pp. 63-64)

• There is no room in these streamlined days for such artistry. Everything is now decided by rule and rote, but this is one of the reasons why England is no longer in the great country she used to be.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 68)

• My education was still full of holes, which I made a resolve to fill. I am still trying to carry it out.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 74)

• Of all the backgrounds it seems to me that the typical suburban community must be by far the worst. The child’s parents have already compromised with life by living in such a place. It would be far better from the child’s point of view to be raised in an actual slum. The danger is, of course, that the child quickly comes to regard comfort as the number one priority.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 80)

• Assuming children and students do not wish to learn anything, then I suppose the present method of teaching is about right. It seems predicated on the notion that learning is an unpleasant medicine which must be swallowed at any price. But where a child is keen to learn, present methods seem woefully and even shockingly inadequate.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 81)

• The correct procedure I am sure it is to learn by doing, not by being told what to do. The notion that one can learn by attending a course of lectures is as absurd as the notion that the way to learn to ride a bicycle would be to hire someone to ride it for you, and to sit hour after hour watching him. The only reason for attending a lecture is to acquire hints as to the right method of tackling some particular problem or other. And this would be almost unnecessary in a properly designed and graded system of examples.
  • Chapter 3, “Reflections and Reminiscences” (p. 82)

• But only gradually have I learned that such ultimate successes are not what the present-day authorities in Britain really want. What really delights them is extreme tidiness combined with a façade of everyday competence. This of course is why Britain plunges further and further downhill with every passing year. The truth is the opposite: it is the ultimate success that really counts.
  • Chapter 4, “Astronomical Studies, Problems, and Speculations” (p. 91)

• There is an important difference between an advance in science and achievements in the humanities. A great musician consumes intellectual capital, he does not supply it, or at least it is usual for him to consume more than he creates. It has been impossible to use the motto theme of the Fifth Symphony after Beethoven used it. In science, on the other hand, the situation is the other way round. A breakthrough invariably opens up more new problems to be solved. A Newton or an Einstein may leave the world with a century or more of clearing up to be done.
  • Chapter 4, “Astronomical Studies, Problems, and Speculations” (p. 100)

• One could conceive of other abstract systems, the consequences of which could be calculated, without it being necessary to provide a realization in actual material terms. We can conceive of other universes without those universes being compelled to exist. This indeed is the business of the pure mathematician.
  • Chapter 4, “Astronomical Studies, Problems, and Speculations” (pp. 102-103)

Quotes about Hoyle

• God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way.

  And God said: "Let there be Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle … and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased. And Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by supernovae explosions.

  • George Gamow, My World Line: An Informal Autobiography (1970, posthumous), "New Genesis", p. 127 [ellipsis in original]

• Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.
  • Martin Rees, in Hoyle's obituary in Physics Today (November 2001)

• In the popular mind, if Hoyle is remembered it is as the prime mover of the discredited Steady State theory of the universe. "Everybody knows" that the rival Big Bang theory won the battle of the cosmologies, but few (not even astronomers) appreciate that the mathematical formalism of the now-favoured version of Big Bang, called inflation, is identical to Hoyle's version of the Steady State model.
  • John Gribbin, in Hoyle's obituary "Stardust memories", The Independent, Friday 17 June, 2005.

• Not far from the meeting's venue, at one of the famed Observatory Club tea meetings, Fred once started a talk by saying, 'Oh, Ooh, basically a star is a pretty simple thing.' And from the back of the room was heard the voice of R. O. Redman, saying, 'Well, Fred, you'd look pretty simple too, from ten parsecs!'
  • John Faulkner, in his contribution, Red giants: then and now, to The Scientific Legacy of Fred Hoyle, 2005.