The Small World of Fred Hoyle: by Fred Hoyle

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this first autobiography of the 20th century's greatest astronomer and cosmologist is that there is very little astronomy and cosmology contained within its 187 pages. What "The Small World of Fred Hoyle" does give us is an amazing insight into the kind of world in which the author spent his formative years. Though his world was "small" in the geographical sense, it was a world which made it possible for Hoyle and others of his generation to assume the status of a giant in scientific achievement and technological development. So we may say that the book is a study of the influences of an era which made possible the tremendous eruption of ideas, discoveries and inventions which poured forth from the fertile mind of its author.

Sir Fred Hoyle opens his first chapter with a discussion of trilby hats. The effect of the trilby hat was that it made the face and head of its wearer appear larger than it actually was. We can only really be cognizant of this fact when we examine it from a historical rather than from a contemporary perspective for facts such as these are best understood within the context of a comparative analysis of the fashions and designs of different eras. This apparent triviality of trilby hats transparently demonstrates the great extent of Hoyle's observational and analytical abilities which, though mainly exercised in scientific fields, could switch to other disciplines and there offer insights of near unfathomable depths such as to shame their practitioners engaged in their full-time study.

In later life, Hoyle bemoaned what he saw as the late 20th century's lack of scientific progress and dearth of scientific ideas all of which stood in stark contrast to the prolific output of scientists in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. Hoyle put all this down to science becoming big, corporatist and above all conformist. The straitjacket in which scientists now find themselves confined militates against any originality of thought and development of ideas. That Hoyle always desisted from taking the eggs from birds' nests that he and his friends found, preferring instead to leave them and watch what eventually happened, is not only indicative of his scientifically enquiring mind forming at an early age but of the non-conformity for which he was known throughout his adult life. Hoyle's persistent truancy during the early years of his schooling, his feelings that most of what was given to children to learn was essentially useless, are other examples of the ingredients that went into the making of Hoyle's non-conformity with establishment norms and practices.

The mysterious untimely deaths on the local Milnerfield estate, the dark strip of woodland enclosed by the "Great Wall of Milnerfield" and the eerie Sparrow Bills Lane with its strange twists and turns all of which went into creating a world of ghosts and ghouls and dragons and ogres must have been for Hoyle an imaginative wonderland whose seeds would eventually sprout in his science fiction novels whose characters, plots and themes became almost as well-known as his work as a serious scientist.

"The Small World of Fred Hoyle" has something big to tell us who are living in the opening years of the 21st century. Our world is bigger, but yet it is smaller! We can travel further and faster but we see less. Hoyle's learning about factory machines and canal lock gates were the fruits of a real education which ironically came from his periods of truancy, from the freeing of himself from the confines of the four walls of a brick and mortar classroom. Situations of scarcity of resources which were manifested in an ill-equipped school chemistry laboratory served to throw the pupils back on their own resources and inventiveness. The mythical creatures of Milnerfield and the machinery of the mills were the contrasting blends which made Hoyle at once the practical scientist and the man of fresh ideas and healthy imagination. Is it not astonishing that factories and fairies' dens were the properties of the Salt family of Milnerfield? Do we not see in these starkly contrasting worlds a microcosm of Britain, a nation which has prospered and succeeded on a marriage of tradition and progress, a Britain which Hoyle loved and to which he showed the greatest patriotism.?

In our world of plenty and privilege, inventiveness is asomewhat scare commodity; in a childhood of electronic games and play stations imagination is stunted and the ghosts and ghouls have fled the tree-shaded winding lanes to become mere blips on a computer monitor. Yet, if we re-read the autobiographical works of the late Sir Fred Hoyle and take as our own his commiserations for a long lost past we may have the chance of re-creating the immensity of his small world and in so doing create a bigger and better world of our own.

Home is Where the Wind Blows: by Fred Hoyle

I have always admired Sir Fred Hoyle's works and writings. His autobiography "Home is where the wind blows" is truly Hoyle's masterpiece among all his works. Although the greatest cosmologist of the 20th century, Hoyle remains totally unpretentious throughout this book; whether as a grammar school pupil or Plumian Professor of Cosmology, Hoyle is never far from the earthy rough and tumble Bingley boy of the early years of the last century.

I have been reading Hoyle's works since I was at school, so much of my thinking on science in general and astronomy in particular has been guided by Hoyle's thoughts and ideologies. And yet it is not only in the field of science that Sir Fred Hoyle had much to say throughout his life, he also showed great astuteness in his analyses of matters political. And so it is here that I would make a mild criticism of his autobiography: Hoyle makes only passing reference to his excellent book "A Decade of Decision" and fails to even mention "Man and Materialism" and "Of Men and Galaxies". These earlier works of Hoyle's demonstrate his penetrating insight into political, social and economic issues which were not only germane and central at the time of their composition, but which can be found as being equally relevant in the 21st century. For example in "A Decade of Decision", written in 1950, Hoyle states that there is very little difference between the Conservative and Labour Parties - a fact that is only beginning to dawn on people now. In these early writings, Sir Fred discusses the problem of the exhaustion of fossil fuels and other finite resources, and argues that the best alternative is nuclear energy: and all this being two decades before the oil crisis of 1973.

In "Of Men and Galaxies", Hoyle rightly bemoans the fact that science has produced nothing outstanding since the early decades of the 20th century, and this is because we rely too much on "big science" with the result that scientists cannot think outside of a fixed establishment mind-set. As large funding is necessary for today's science, the scientist has to spend as much time lobbying government for money as in doing actual scientific research. If this were the case in 1964, it must be even more so in 2004.

So this is why I would classify Sir Fred Hoyle as one of the last of the great thinkers and classical scientists of the 20th century. He said what was on his mind and he said it in no uncertain terms. Hoyle was anti-establishment all his life. Today's scientists simply fit into the establishment mold, and that is why the chances of science throwing up another Hoyle are highly unlikely. Like history, science today has its "givens", which, like articles of faith must never be challenged; two of the most prominent of these are evolution and big bang cosmology - but challenge them Hoyle did with his theory of Panspermia and his Steady State concept of the Universe respectively. Today's stock of scientists are merely functionaries with virtually no imagination or originality of thinking. To be fair, perhaps the only exception to this would be the current Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees. Others of Hoyle's generation, now deceased, that ought to be paid tribute to, and who were at some time or another colleagues of Hoyle are Sir Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold, Sir Bernard Lovell and the late Prof. Raymond A. Lyttleton.

A Life in Science: by Simon Mitton

Dr. Simon Mitton has written an excellent biography on the life of the late Sir Fred Hoyle. For those who are interested in the way the science of astronomy has evolved throughout the 20th century and Sir Fred Hoyle's magnificent contribution to its evolution and development, then this is a must-read book.

The Prologue by Paul Davies and the Forward by the author serve to show the context within which Hoyle conducted his career as a cosmologist - the need to put British astronomy back on the map. Throughout the war and during the postwar years, America was far ahead of any other country in the science of astronomy; Hoyle changed all that and made Cambridge a magnet for budding astronomers from all over the world including the United States. That Simon Mitton starts off the first of the twelve chapters into which his book is divided with Hoyle's resignation in 1972 from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge would seem to highlight this point. Later in the chapter Dr. Mitton follows the regular pattern of most biographers by treating on the birth and formative years of the young Fred Hoyle.

In a superbly interesting and readable style, Dr. Mitton takes the reader through the years of Hoyle's undergraduate life as a student in Cambridge where he encountered some of the great names of the time in science - most notably Sir Arthur Eddington and Paul Dirac. It was during his graduate years in Cambridge that Hoyle decided that his career lay in astronomy. During the war years, when Hoyle worked on Radar development at the Admiralty, he continued to develop his interests in astronomy in close co-operation with Raymond A. Lyttleton, Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold. It was with Bondi and Gold that Hoyle in the post war years set forth the concept of a steady state Universe and continuous creation; this challenged the prevailing superdense model (the Big Bang) as an explanation for the origin of the Universe. Dr. Mitton goes on to explain Hoyle's pioneering work in showing how chemical elements are synthesised in the interior of stars.

It could be argued that Simon Mitton has given too much space to the cut and thrust politics involved in astronomy in the UK. This I do not believe is a valid criticism as the problems of bureaucracy and politics in science were among Hoyle's greatest bugbears. In his book "Of Men and Galaxies" Hoyle bemoaned the fact that scientists were spending too much time on non-scientific matters to the detriment of genuine scientific research and innovation. Hoyle was always the unconventional, always the anti-establishment figure, yet the rebel in him consistently veered towards the positive, never the negative. His boyhood truancy from school resulted in his learning much in the area of fluid mechanics by his observation of the operation of the locks on the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

Throughout his life, Hoyle showed a tremendous capacity for hard and productive work; he was a prolific writer not only of scientific fact but of science fiction ("The Black Cloud" and "A for Andromeda") and politics ("Man and Materialism" and "A Decade of Decision")

Hoyle often ventured into areas outside of his own discipline of cosmology and wrote on biology, paleontology and archeology. He is on record as saying that nature does not respect the distinctions between the sciences that academe makes. This principle may well be extended to all the academic disciplines. In his radio talks "The Nature of the Universe", Hoyle quoted Ray Lyttleton as saying that the human brain may be patterned on the Universe. Lyttleton cuts a rather sad figure in Dr. Mitton's book, yet if we consider what a profound and far-reaching statement Lyttleton had made and placed it alongside Hoyle's thesis on linkages between the various scientific and academic disciplines overall, then we must ask whether or not there is some connection between neurology and cosmology! Is there thus a blurring in the distinction between the subjective and the objective? Thanks to Hoyle, Lyttleton may be in for some posthumous fame.!

Simon Mitton's biography is a twin volume to Sir Fred's autobiography "Home Is Where The Wind Blows". Hoyle was a man of humility and so his scientific brilliance is very much down-played in "Home", but Dr. Mitton truly brings out in his biography the full genius of Sir Fred Hoyle.

A Journey with Fred Hoyle: by Chandra Wickramasinghe

In the prologue to "A Journey with Fred Hoyle" Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe states that after Hoyle's publication of his second autobiography "Home is Where the Wind Blows", Hoyle had advised him 'I have made only a passing reference to our long collaboration, because it seemed disconnected from the thesis I was developing there. Ours is an even bigger story that is certainly worth telling. Perhaps you would like to do that one day?' In the various biographies and autobiographies of Sir Fred Hoyle, hardly any mention is made of the highly controversial theories developed by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe regarding the cosmic origins of life. "A Journey with Fred Hoyle" is therefore the "missing link" in the Hoyle biographical data. Wickramasinghe begins his book with a background outline of his formative years in Sri Lanka and how he first met Hoyle in Cambridge in 1960. Wickramasinghe discussed with Hoyle the problem with the theory of interstellar grains being composed of ice. Considering the difficulties involved in the formation of water droplets in the terrestrial atmosphere, how much more so then in the lesser densities of interstellar clouds where the numbers of atoms range from only 10 to 100 per cubic centimeter. How then to solve the nucleation problem in interstellar grains? The rest of this book is an exciting story of how Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, after carefully considering many conventional models regarding the nature of interstellar dust, came to the conclusion that it was in fact desiccated bacteria. Spectroscopic analyses of the dust seemed to confirm the bacterial hypothesis. After being convinced of the veracity of the bacterial model as an explanation of the nature and composition of interstellar dust, the theory had knock-on effects in other scientific fields. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe developed the hypothesis that bacteria and viruses constantly enter the Earth's atmosphere and are the major causes of diseases such as the common cold and influenza. Their studies of the historic patterns of the spread of influenza epidemics, convinced them that the older theory of person-to-person contact serving as a vehicle for the spread of these diseases was woefully lacking in evidence. Incoming pathogens falling through the atmosphere and being conveyed by wind and rain droplets appeared to fit the bill more accurately. The alternative model for interstellar grains also impacted on evolutionary theory by challenging the standard Darwinian explanation which accounted for species evolving by gradual adaptation involving minor changes over long periods of time. As the fossil record has consistently failed to support this form of evolution, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe offered an alternative theory which explains evolution as a cosmic rather than a terrestrial phenomenon. The concept of evolution by the adoption of beneficial viruses and bacteria by species was proposed by the two scientists as a more satisfactory way of accounting for the fossil record's apparent indication of the sudden extinction of species and the sudden emergence of new ones. Even after three decades of accumulating evidence which points towards the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe thesis of biological activity in the Universe, the mainstream scientific community has still to come round to accepting the alternative models which, if vindicated, would cause upheavals of a revolutionary nature in not only astronomy but in biology, medicine and a range of other scientific disciplines.