PEOPLE

Fred Hoyle’s varied and prolific output spanned more than 60 years. Indeed, throughout the entire period 1945-70, he was preeminent among astrophysicists in the range and influence of his contributions. His engaging wit and relish for controversy—which he retained throughout his long life—gained him a high public profile. He had a wide following as a popularizer of science and as a successful writer of science fiction. He also played an active organizational role in UK science. Hoyle died on 20 August 2001 in Bournemouth, England. He was physically and mentally robust until the year before his death, during which he suffered a series of strokes.Born on 24 June 1915 in Bingley, Yorkshire, in the UK, Hoyle was the son of a wool merchant. He attended the local grammar school, from which he gained a scholarship to Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College, where he studied mathematics. The university awarded Hoyle a BA in mathematics in 1936; that year, Hoyle also won Cambridge’s Mayhew Prize for his outstanding performance. He was elected to a fellowship at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1939 for work on beta decay. His shift toward astrophysics was stimulated by his colleague Raymond Lyttleton, with whom he wrote papers on accretion and stellar evolution. During the years of World War II, Hoyle was engaged mainly on technical problems related to radar. He found himself working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold; in spare moments the trio discussed astronomy. The most celebrated outcome of this collaboration was the steady-state cosmology, put forward in two papers in 1948. Bondi and Gold’s arguments were general (almost philosophical). But Hoyle’s model was more specific: He introduced a negative-pressure C-field into Albert Einstein’s equations. As Hoyle enjoyed pointing out, this formulation was, in some sense, a precursor of currently fashionable inflationary models. The steady-state theory was a serious contender for 15 years. It had the virtue of being testable, and was the focus of often acrimonious controversy, especially with Martin Ryle and other radio astronomers. Hoyle held out against Big Bang theory, even post-1965, when the discovery of the microwave background led most cosmologists to favor it. He nonetheless contributed important studies of Big Bang nucleosynthesis with Roger Tayler, Willy Fowler, and Bob Wagoner.From 1945, Hoyle was based in Cambridge, first as lecturer in mathematics, and subsequently, from 1958, as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy. But he derived stimulus from frequent visits to the US. At Princeton University, he and Martin Schwarzschild modeled the evolution of low-mass stars right through to the red-giant branch. He spent much time at Caltech, where he followed up the ideas adumbrated in his famous 1946 paper, “The Synthesis of the Elements from Hydrogen” (published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society), in a long and fruitful collaboration with Fowler on nuclear processes in stars and supernovas. This research was codified in a classic 1957 article, universally referred to as “B2FH” (published in Reviews of Modern Physics), which Hoyle and Fowler coauthored with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge. Many of us felt that Hoyle should have shared Fowler’s 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences later made partial amends by awarding Hoyle, with Edwin Salpeter, its 1997 Crafoord Prize. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Hoyle kept up his wide-ranging interests in solar physics, on the origin of the Solar System, the structure of galaxies, and the nature of gravity. The discovery of quasars in the 1960s led to a stream of stimulating papers, many coauthored with the Burbidges, on supermassive objects and various aspects of high-energy astrophysics. Committee work and administration held little attraction for Hoyle. Nonetheless, especially during the 1960s and early 1970s, he served effectively on the UK’s Science Research Council and the Council of the Royal Society, among other UK bodies. In Cambridge, his energetic advocacy and fundraising led to the creation, in 1966, of an Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. Its building, now named after him, was modeled on the University of California’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in La Jolla, California, although it overlooks a field of cows rather than the Pacific Ocean. The Institute of Theoretical Astronomy quickly made an international mark, and Hoyle organized an extensive visitors’ program. Key ideas on supernovas and explosive nucleosynthesis were developed by Hoyle’s US colleagues during such visits.Hoyle’s regular collaborators Jayant Narlikar and Nalin Wickramasinghe were part of the institute’s full-time staff. In addition, a lively group of postdoctoral scientists benefited from the stimulating environment of the institute. I was privileged to be one of these scientists. Hoyle was supportive to us all, even when our researches were orthogonal (or even contradictory) to his own.On the broader UK scene, Hoyle’s role was pivotal in establishing the Anglo-Australian Observatory, in the early 1970s. As a result, for the first time, UK astronomers had guaranteed access to a world-class optical telescope. A regrettable dispute led to Hoyle’s premature retirement from Cambridge in 1972. He thereafter based himself for many years in a remote part of England’s Lake District (hillwalking being one of his lifelong enthusiasms) before moving to the more sedate environs of Bournemouth. His consequent isolation from the broad academic community was probably detrimental to his own science; it was certainly a sad deprivation for the rest of us. His later scientific writings, which continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, dealt, often controversially, with topics as disparate as Stonehenge, panspermia, Darwinism, paleontology, and viruses from space. But he never lost his interest in cosmology: His book A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality, coauthored with G. Burbidge and Narlikar, appeared in 2000 (Cambridge U. Press).His lifelong success as a popularizer started in 1950—in the pre-Sagan era, long before the dominance of television—with a celebrated series of radio talks. Huge numbers of people (including many who later achieved scientific distinction) were inspired by these talks, by books such as Frontiers of Astronomy (Heinemann, 1970), and by his lectures. Throughout his life, he retained the agreeable manner and accent of his native Yorkshire.Hoyle’s first novel, The Black Cloud (Harper, 1957), about an alien intelligence embodied in a cloud of interstellar gas, has achieved classic status. It was followed by a dozen others, including A for Andromeda: A Novel for Tomorrow (Souvenir Press, 1962), coauthored with John Elliot, which was dramatized as a television series; Ossian’s Ride (Harper, 1959); and October the First is Too Late (Harper & Row, 1966). Some of Hoyle’s books, including those he wrote for children during his later years, were coauthored with his son Geoff Hoyle. Hoyle’s autobiography Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist’s Life (University Science Books, 1994) sensitively evokes his early life in Yorkshire and offers entertaining perspectives on later academic disputes.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. He will be remembered with fond gratitude not only by colleagues and students, but by a much wider community who knew him through his talks and writings. Fred Hoyle RAMSEY & MUSPRATT, COURTESY AIP/ESVAPPT|High resolution© 2001 American Institute of Physics.

In Chap. 9 we saw that shortly after the World War II, British scientists Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold (Fig. 11.1) proposed the Steady State Theory of the universe, because on philosophical grounds they could not believe in a universe that started a finite time ago with a Big Bang. To ensure that, despite its expansion, the universe would in the course of time keep looking always the same, they proposed that, as mentioned in Chap. 9, out of the vacuum between the galaxies spontaneously new hydrogen atoms gradually are created, which in the course of time concentrate in new stars and galaxies. The Steady State Theory is therefore also called the Continuous Creation Theory. Since there was no Big Bang in this theory, and since in the 1940s, due to the work of Gamow, the idea still was that all elements were created in the Big Bang, Hoyle had to look for other ways to make the elements in the universe. He proposed therefore in 1946 that the elements heavier than hydrogen were all made in the interiors of stars. He was not the only one that had this idea. In the Netherlands Bruno van Albada, who later held the chair of astronomy at the University of Amsterdam as my predecessor, also in 1946 put forward this model for the formation of the elements.

Although the big bang theory has troubles, it obviously still has considerable support. The heart of the theory, namely the idea that the universe began as a hot explosion, seems to be intact. Still, it is possible that the evidence against it will eventually become so great that we will have to abandon it. If this happens we will obviously have to take a serious look at the rival theories. And there are several of them. Most have only a few supporters at present, but they are worth looking at.

Martin Harwit, in his memorial to Ralph Alpher (Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 12 2007 67 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2825079. December 2007, page 67 ), mentions that Alpher and Robert Herman were overlooked when the 1978 Nobel Prize was given for the discovery of the Big Bang’s background radiation. Joseph D’Agnese quotes Alpher’s reaction to not getting credit for his seminal work, “I would rather not have gone through that experience, to put it mildly. It was very painful.” 1 1. J. D’Agnese, Discover , July 1999, p. 60. Perhaps the slighting of Alpher’s contribution can be traced to the following: After his adviser, George Gamow, read Alpher’s thesis, he wanted to include Hans Bethe’s name on the resulting paper, so that its author list would be a wordplay on “alpha, beta, gamma.” Bethe had not seen the paper, nor did he contribute to it. Alpher, suspecting his work would not get full credit, opposed including Bethe. D’Agnese quotes Alpher as saying, “This is my dissertation. How can Gamow kid around like this?” But Alpher finally assented.Much later, while he was at the General Electric Research Laboratory, Alpher chaired the American Physical Society’s committee on opportunities in physics. In 1981, because a publisher had infringed on my intellectual property, I petitioned to appear before the committee. When I met with the committee, which included physicists who were officers of major corporations, one of its members vehemently opposed its involvement in my case and immediately walked out. Alpher was resolute that the committee hear my case. No doubt because of its involvement, the case was later resolved to my satisfaction.When I first met Alpher at that hearing, I did not know his feelings about Bethe’s being included as an author of the famous Alpher, Bethe, Gamow paper. I mentioned that everyone knew of that paper. Alpher took the reference with equanimity.Besides his great intellectual achievements, Ralph Alpher was a gentleman of unfailing kindness and a keen sense of justice.REFERENCESection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCE <<CITING ARTICLES1. J. D’Agnese, Discover , July 1999, p. 60. Google Scholar© 2008 American Institute of Physics.

Maverick astronomer Thomas Gold died on 22 June in Ithaca, New York, at the age of 84. Gold was best known for the steady-state theory of the universe, which he developed with Hermann Bondi and the late Fred Hoyle in 1948. The theory assumes that we live in a static universe that has no beginning or end. But to keep the density of matter constant given the observed expansion of the universe, the theory also requires that matter is continually created at the rate of a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre per billion years. Although the theory initially seemed plausible, the discovery in 1965 of the cosmic microwave background – remnant radiation from the early universe – led to the Big-Bang theory being widely accepted instead.