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

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.)

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.