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Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science
Conflictin the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science by Simon Mitton Joseph Henry Press, 2005; $27.95
To those who came of age in the 1950s, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), like Carl Sagan a generation later, was the popular voice of science. Hoyle's Frontiers of Astronomy, published three years before the October 1957 launch of Sputnik I, became an instant best seller in both Great Britain and the United States, inspiring legions of overachieving adolescents--including many of today's practicing physicists and astronomers--to choose careers in research. For masses of radio listeners, Hoyle's talks on life, the universe, and everything in between, delivered in his folksy Yorkshire accent, were a delight and a wonderment. "He describes events in interstellar space as if commenting on a cricket match," one BBC blurb proclaimed.
In a 1949 broadcast on the origin of the universe, he coined the term "big bang" to describe theories of a primordial explosion, a term so vivid and descriptive that it soon became standard English. Whether people liked him or not, they followed his talks and his published writings because there was no telling what barroom debate he might stir up next. "It seems to me," he wrote in a typical passage, "that religion is but a blind attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful state in which we find ourselves."
Professionally, Hoyle was just as creative and controversial. The cosmological theory he favored, against a tide of big-bangers, came to be known as the steady-state universe. Along with the mathematician and cosmologist Hermann Bondi, and the astronomer and geoscientist Thomas Gold, Hoyle argued that there was no big bang, and that time has no beginning and no end. The observed expansion of space, the steady-staters surmised, is accompanied by the continuous creation of matter, which keeps things from thinning out. The universe, on average, has always looked the same.
To those who objected that spontaneous matter creation had never been observed, Hoyle responded that the big bang presupposed it too, but as a single event. Besides, the creation rate that the steady-state theory required to maintain a universal constant density was far too low to detect. As Hoyle put it, for every volume of space the size of a one-pint milk bottle, about one atom is created every thousand million years. For a decade thereafter, the big bang was seldom mentioned without giving equal time to Hoyle's alternate theory.
Beginning in the 1960s, however, a growing mass of evidence, most notably the detection of the background radiation from the big-bang fireball, left the steady-state theory with little to recommend it.
Hoyle's contributions to other areas of astronomy, however, have been lasting and profound. Together with E. Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey R. Burbidge, and William A. Fowler, Hoyle worked out the details of how the chemical elements were built up from primordial hydrogen in the interiors of stars. He contributed seminal ideas to theories as diverse as the structure of atoms and the formation of planetary systems. His forceful leadership in a variety of administrative roles brought a prominence to British astronomy that it had not enjoyed since the days of Newton.
Simon Mitton, an astronomer, writer, and editor who knew Hoyle in his heyday, has written a sensitive, literate portrait of the man and his science. In spite of Mitton's demurral that he lacks the historian's credentials needed for a definitive biography, he has mined a wealth of personal papers, oral histories, and other primary sources with skill and flair. The result is a balanced and exceptionally readable account of a remarkable man.
Although Mitton only touches on it, it is ironic that today's proponents of so-called intelligent design should claim Hoyle as an ally. They do so mainly by selectively quoting his assertion that life could not have arisen from the random assemblage of molecules on Earth. They ignore (of course) his contention that life arose in clouds of interstellar dust, where, at least in the steady-state universe, there was plenty of time for random processes, and thus no need for a creator. Like so much of what Hoyle wrote, the idea was brilliant, if ultimately more seminal than convincing. Mitton's biography makes one wish Sir Fred (he was made a knight in 1972) were still around to carry on the good fight with his scientific critics, as well as with those pious polemicists who would co-opt him for their own.
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