Controversial Cosmologist Fred Hoyle Dies At 86

MikeCamel writes: "The BBC announced today that Fred Hoyle, astronomer, science populariser and science fiction writer, died yesterday, aged 86. He is best known for having coined the phrase 'Big Bang,' though he was actually an opponent of the idea, and advocated the 'steady state' theory. He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were 'seeded' from outer space."

farrellj adds: "Hoyle was famous for a number of things, inventing the term 'Big Bang,' figuring out how stars create the heavier elements, and his most controversial, the idea that the seeds of life on earth came from space. He was also a noted Science Fiction writer, with many books, sometimes co-authored with his son, Geoffrey. We have lost one of the more original thinkers in the field of Astrophysics. You can read more at the NY Times site. (free reg. required, yadda yadda)"

Comments

Neatly intresting

[Runt-Abu]

I find it incredibly cool that the guy who invented (or at least first classified) the term "Big Bang" didn't susbscribe to the theroy behind it.

Steady state theorist, not big bang

[Doctor Fishboy]

I don't think he would've been too pleased to be called a big bang theorist - he was an advocate of the steady state theory, and came up with the name 'big bang' to make fun of the then opposing cosmological theory. Ironically, the name 'big bang' stuck.

I was a graduate student at the IoA in Cambridge (which Fred Hoyle founded), and I met him a couple of times. He was still keeping up with contemporary research and had a few great stories to tell. A very clever man, and sharp as a tack.

His sci-fi books feature (unsuprisingly) a lot of astronomy - I just read "The Black Cloud" and it's a pretty good read, I'd recommend it to anyone interested.

The Black Cloud

[Nova Express]

Hoyle's most famous novel was probably The Black Cloud. Though not one of my favorite SF novels (though it is a favorite of my father's), it's a solid "hard SF" work about a sentient cloud of interstellar gas enetering our solar system and attempts to communicate with it before it blocks out the sun and extinguishes all life on earth. One summer in college I had a roomate who wasn't the brightest bulb in the strip and didn't read much, but he picked up The Black Cloud and read it all the way through, saying it was one of the few novels he could really get into. It's a book still worth reading even today. (Since it's not in print, you may want to go to http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abep/il.dll to look for a used copy.)

Space and Eternal life

[beanerspace]

Not as a troll, but rather from the perspective of the fly on the wall ... I wonder what Chandra Wickramasinghe and Daisaku Ikeda have to say about Hoyle's passing.

Some of Hoyle's views

[SilentReproach]

He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were "seeded" from outer space

Hoyle spent decades studying the universe and life in it, and became convinced that life on earth could not have happened solely through "the blind forces of nature". Lecturing at the California Institute of Technology he once explained:

"The big problem in biology isn't so much the rather crude fact that a protein consists of a chain of amino acids linked together in a certain way, but that the explicit ordering of the amino acids endows the chain with remarkable properties . . . If amino acids were linked at random, there would be a vast number of arrangements that would be useless in serving the purposes of a living cell. When you consider that a typical enzyme has a chain of perhaps 200 links and that there are 20 possibilities for each link, it's easy to see that the number of useless arrangements is enormous, more than the number of atoms in all the galaxies visible in the largest telescopes. This is for one enzyme, and there are upwards of 2000 of them, mainly serving very different purposes. So how did the situation get to where we find it to be?"

Hoyle added: "Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act."

Hoyle left us with some fascinating intellectual gems to consider. As our knowledge of biological complexity increases, more and more educated people who understand these complexities are in agreement with his observations.

Seeded from space

[Reality Master 101]

He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were "seeded" from outer space.

I've never read his theory, and I'm sure he had his reasons for believing this, but I've never understood this reasoning. Does he think that Earth doesn't have the raw material necessary to create complex proteins? I seem to remember "lightning bottle" experiments that proved that you could create simple proteins from primordial earth "stuff".

Just using "the simplest explanation is usually the right one" logic, one would tend to believe that we don't need extraterrestial explanations to theorize how life began.

Re:Seeded from space

[ethereal]

The big question is whether true life could have evolved from those primordial simple molecules. Since the odds of this happening in the known time period on Earth are under considerable dispute, the "native origin" theory of life could turn out to require more bizarre coincidences than the "space seed" theory. If life could have come from somewhere else (I like the comet theory myself), then it would have had much more time to come into existence and the chain of random chance that created life forms wouldn't have to be so shaky.

Woops, I'm sorry, I was thinking of something else. The "Space Seed" theory is the one where Ricardo Montalban seeded the primordial Earth with Ceti eels, isn't it? :)

New interstellar ice supports Hoyle's Panspermia

[meehawl]

One of his major theories was that complex organic matter drifted through and evolved in interstellar space. It's long been seen that organic matter could form huge clouds, but it was always an open question as to how it could possibly "evolve".

But the recent discovery of exotic forms of ice that possess many of the properties of liquid water rather than the usual, crystalline solid properties of earth-bound ice make this possible. Evolution happens *much* more slowly in interstellar space and within comet cores, but now the discovery of this new ice makes it probably, even likely, that exotic forms of space-bound life exist and thrive.

http://ccf.arc.nasa.gov/dx/archives/planets/comets /comets3.html

http://www-space.arc.nasa.gov/~leonid/ice/strong.h tml

High-density amorphous ice,the frost on interstellar grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake, D.F.; Wilson, M.A.; Pohorille, A. Astrophysical Journal vol.455, no.1, pt.1 p.389-401. Dec.

High-Density Amorphous Ice, the Frost on Interstellar Grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake,D.F.; Wilson,M.A.; Pohorille,A. NASA/TM-95-207251. 21 January 1995.

Liquid Water in the domain of cubic ice Ic P.Jenniskens, S.Banham, D.F.Blake, and M.R.S.McCoustra, Journal of Chemical Physics 1997, 107 1232-1241

As a side note, he was originally a campaigner against the singularity theory of universal origins (which he derisively coined the "Big Bang Theory"). It was the "all or nothing" part of it that most offended him. And the insistence on bounded, finite time.

He was more all about a continuous and random creation of matter in what he termed "interstitial spaces".

Nowadays, the hottest theories of cosmology involve quantum foam expansion, oscillations, and string loops spitting off random particles. Kind of a weird synthesis of the two. I guess we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.

In another generation, the debate about Bing Bang versus Steady State will seem as quaint and alien as the argument over which theory could best explain diseases: Humoral, Miasmatic, Contagia, or Germ.