Slashdot Mirror
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)"
So, did he die all at once in a sudden implosion, or gradually fade away over a long period of time?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
We need good scientists who refuse to accept the commonly accepted explanations. The scientific method is good at testing theories, but we need people who can create alternative theories so they can be tested.
Of course, when you're talking about universe formation, the repeatability part is kind of awkward.
--
E_NOSIG
The term was meant to be pejorative. As in, "this group who thinks the universe started in some sort of big bang is just ridiculous". The proponents of the theory happened to like the name!
Score: -1, Redundant
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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.
Also interesting is how Darwin recanted his life's work on his deathbed, finding it all to be complete non-sense.
It would be interesting if it weren't for the fact that it never happened.
see:
http://www.ediacara.org/hope.html
Yet Another Web Site
I loved "The Black Cloud"; read it repeatedly once I found it. Too bad this grand old man has passed away.
Gray.
Less than a week ago I started reading his novel "The Black Cloud"...seems like a very interesting premise thus far.
For anyone that like understanding the science behind fantastic, but possible, lifeforms, read "The Black Cloud" or Robert Forward's "Dragon's Egg". Characters aren't developed all that well in either, but the hard sci fi makes them each very interesting reads...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
It has been theorized that Hoyle's particles are drifting apart at an increasing rate. After a billion years or so [give or take 50 million or so] his hydrogen atoms will begin to congeal again into clusters that will one day form new stars.
According to the newest data, Hoyle will continue to expand for the next ten billion years at which point it will begin the slow process of contraction until
the beloved science fiction writer condenses
into a single
point
It wouldn't even be interesting if it did happen. Ideas and theories stand and fall on their own merits, not on the opinions of their originators. If Einstein in his later years recanted, and took to hanging out in airports wearing saffron robes and handing out daffodils, it wouldn't make relativity any less accurate.
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.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
[epitome of lameness elided for brevity]
*This* makes it past the lameness filter, but the shell script I tried to post last month didn't?!?!? Grrrr....
I met Fred Hoyle while getting my BA in Physics & Astronomy at Rice in the mid-70s. He came to speak on Newton and give some smaller talks to student, IIRC. After his speech (which was open to the public), there was a reception and Q&A session. Two things at the Q&A stick in my mind: the first was when an adult asked Prof. Hoyle about the whole "Chariots of the Gods" thing, which was very hot at the time. (This was a book that asserted that aliens had visited the earth in the past and were responsible for the pyramids in Egypt & MesoAmerica, among other things.) I could tell that the questioner was a true believer type. A quick cloud of annoyance passed over Hoyle's face, as he was undoubtedly getting asked about this all the time. He quickly and politely dismissed VonDaniken's book as "rubbish". A few questions later, a 10 to 12 year old boy asked him about Stonehenge: was it an alien landing site or something? This time there was no annoyance, and the teacher aspect of his personality came to the fore. He patiently explained to the child what was known about Stonehenge, how the seasons were very important to ancient farmers, and how we shouldn't assume that the people back then were stupid because they didn't have our technology, etc. At this point the Q&A was ended and Prof. Hoyle made sure to talk to the boy and encourage him to think about the world and to keep asking questions. Good advice to all of us. He'll be missed.
First Evidence Of Life Coming From Space Reported
Evidence of living bacterial cells entering the Earth's upper atmosphere from space has come from a joint project involving Indian and UK scientists. The first positive identification of extraterrestrial microbial life was reported on Sunday (July 29) at the Astrobiology session of the 46th Annual SPIE meeting in San Diego, by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University in Wales. He spoke on behalf of an international team led by Professor Jayant Narlikar, Director of the Inter-Universities Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.
Samples of stratospheric air were collected on January 21 under the most stringent aseptic conditions by Indian scientists using the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) cryogenic sampler payload flown on balloons from the Tata Institute Balloon Launching facility in Hyderabad.
Part of the samples sent to Cardiff were analyzed by a team at Cardiff University led by Professor David Lloyd, assisted by Melanie Harris.
Commenting on the results, Professor Wickramasinghe said, "There is now unambiguous evidence for the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers, well above the local tropopause (16 km), above which no air from lower down would normally be transported."
The detection was made using a fluorescent cyanine dye which is only taken up by the membranes of living cells. The variation with height of the distribution of such cells indicates strongly that the clumps of bacterial cells are falling from space.
The daily input of such biological material is provisionally estimated as about one third of a ton over the entire planet.
This new evidence provides strong support for the Panspermia theory of Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe.
"We have argued for more than two decades that terrestrial life was brought down to Earth by comets and that cometary material containing microorganisms must still be reaching us in large quantities," Professor Wickramasinghe said.
Cardiff University is home to the UK's first Center for Astrobiology, which provides the UK with a facility to contribute to space missions probing for life on solar system bodies. The Center is a joint initiative between the University and the University of Wales College of Medicine.
The Center combines research interests in astronomy and molecular cell biology to throw light on the emergence and development of life in the cosmos and planetary bodies. The work of the Center will also provide information essential for the emergent discipline of space medicine.
Cardiff University has a history of service to Wales and the world which dates from its foundation by Royal Charter in 1883. Today, independent government assessments recognize the University as one of Britain's leading research and teaching universities.
30-Jul-2001
Wasn't Ron Jeremy in that?
our knowledge of physics actually breaks down as we theorize back to the "Big Bang"
It certainly was known before "A Brief Theory of Time". What happens is that, as we work backwards in time, trying to figure out what the universe was at certain points in time, we get to a point which is 1.e-43 second away from the Big Bang, and we find that all "laws" break down at that point. We just can't describe what happened in that first fraction of a second; there's no way to get at it. Another way of thinking of it is to say that the "laws" of physics were being created in that first fraction of a second. The analogy is pretty bad, but what is important to realise is that it's not a function dependent on our inability to measure more accurately, or see farther with a bigger telescope, or test with finer granularity...all our laws simply stop working at that point.
A few years ago, Fred Hoyle (along with a couple of other chaps, whose names escape me) postulated a new variation on the steady-state model, known as the quasi-steady-state model or QSSM. This basically says you have periods of rest and then periods of activity in the creation of the universe, perhaps as many as six or seven. Quite seriously, it actually sounds a lot like "On the nth day, God created...and night passed...". (Cue flamebait/troll mods -- but it really does.)
this is not a troll. trigger happy idiots.
Don't get me wrong, Fred Hoyle thought outside of the box and made some contributions -- but because of his contributions coupled with some of the whacked out things he's said, he has also been a detriment to the advancement of science.
Take a look at any Creationist/Evolutionist debate. The Creationists always quote Fred Hoyle, because the dumbass didn't really separate his wild speculation from his more grounded theories. Creationists use the words of a "noted astronomer" to advance their own non-scientific agenda.
Every time I read someone about to quote Fred Hoyle, I cringe, knowing that I'm about to sit through some bullshit foisted on us through the careless attitude toward science of one of "our own".
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
This is sad news. I've just been reading one of his Andromeda sci-fi books, which were also produced a British TV series in the early sixties.
The story involves a criminal entity/corporation called 'Intel' no less! Also a lot of VERY CLOSE parallels to Carl Sagan's 'Contact' (which I also love).
Great stuff, full of good science and a classic Brit feel, written by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot.
**>>BELCH
FWIW, this story as far as anyone knows is not well known outside the US and was originally propagated by an American fundy who probably was not even there at the time. Darwin was known to be a lifelong agnostic and this particular story is thought to be out of character for him...
/brian
It's the #1 play in the religious handbook. Start a rumor about how the scientist/free-thinker renounced all of his heathenistic ways on his deathbed. Darwin is a fairly popular target for this, but I've also heard the exact same rumor directed at Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Paine.
You'll never see someone go to greater lengths in a lie than when that someone is protecting his religious beliefs.
Even if the rumor were true -- what does it matter if someone in fear for his immortal soul makes a last-ditch effort to gain eternal salvation? His human weakness wouldn't hurt the soundness of his theories in any way.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Because the reality of death is frightening and repulsive to just about anyone, even scientists and astronomers. It is easy when we are young to feel 'fearless' of death, because deep inside we really feel like we will never die. When death and our own mortality rears up in a way that cannot be denied, we start looking for ways out, which is why a lot of religious folks are fond of saying things like "there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole!" And it's basically true. As death draws closer, our 'need' for intellectual integrity can be over-ridden by the need for escape from death. If the only escape we can find is the religious/supernatural stories of our youth, then we will cling to those like a drowning victim to a piece of flotsam.
This is especially true if the death is long and drawn out as from disease or some such. If he did recant, it was probably because he 'found religion' in an effort to preserve himself, and knowing the two beliefs to be mutually exclusive hastily dropped the one that did not hold hope for eternal life.
I doubt he did recant, but if he did I wouldn't hold it against him. We'll see how gracefully I go when my time comes!
**>>BELCH
What a coincidence, I hear that Jesus did the same thing!
Hehe. That's funny as hell! Since false rumors are so popular, why not just start our own?
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Ahh yes, he's thrashing in the brimstone pits while the Gracious and Loving Gods watches over the blessed, winged souls of twits like you in Heaven.
I don't THINK so!
**>>BELCH
"Science is prediction, not explaination" - from Hoyle's "The Black Cloud".
No, they dont have a corner on that market. Its merely what their entire market is founded on.
"you must believe in my GOD"
"Love to. Show me some proof"
"just do it cause i said so, I dont need to prove anything, im right, no matter what you say."
"no"
"then youll burn in hell after i kill you for disobeying my god"
Isn't this about the way it goes?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
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.
Da Blog
there's a great quotation that goes something like "Scientific theories are never accepted by their skeptics, they're just embraced by a new generation that has grown up used to hearing them."
Got Rhinos?
I guess it all depends on your idea of a "good scientific theory".
Obviously, you can't mean "any theory that was later proved to be incorrect or inadequate". I'm guessing that you mean something along the lines of "theories that were developed before the advent of - or without recourse to - the modern idea of the 'scientific method'".
Personally, I think the "phlogiston" theory was pretty good for its time - it explained a certain phenomena in a way that agreed with the current paradigm.
Oh. I get it. The phlogiston theory was bad because the "scientist" who proposed it was not visionary enough to first propose a paradigm shift that would allow a different, correct theory to become evident. By the same token, Fred Hoyle was a good scientist because his theories were almost always preceded by a paradigm shift that was not adopted by the rest of the scientific community.
I guess that in order to properly judge Newtonian physics, we should first determine if that theory required a sufficiently radical paradigm shift before it could be proposed.
The same principle applies to creationism, I suppose.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
That's why he invented the Schrodinger's cat experiment where you put a cat in a box with some poison gas which gets released if a certain quantum mechanical event takes place (e.g. radioactive decay of an atom).
You mean quantum computing is based on superposed cats? No wonder it doesn't work. I'm joking but only because the whole thing sounds like a joke.
Thus the cat is in a superposition of "alive" and "dead" which is (according to Schrodinger) nonsense.
Schrodinger was absolutely right. I have a big paversion to physics theories that work only when nobody's looking. But what gets to me is that the tax payer's money is being used to fund someone's snake oil.
I understand that's sort of what the Scorsese film "The Last Temptation of Christ" is about. The idea that Jesus Christ could have wished for a "normal life", living out his days with Mary Magdalene instead of dying painfully on the cross, is of course, rank heresy to some so the film was poorly received by the fundie community. Protests etc. But apparently it's an excellent, moving film. I really should watch it some time.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Something Slashdot readers may not realize is that this was also the guy who gave Intel its name. In 'A for Andromeda', Intel was the name of a shadowy Swiss business organization attempting to control the alien-designed supercomputer built by the government.
This obviously assumes that Intel the semiconductor manufacturer took its name from this source. The TV series came out in 1961 and the book before then.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Dear Dr. Wickramasinghe,
I just saw your article in the Daily Mail, which includes the following.
> engineer and amateur Egyptologist, Robert Bauval, first pointed out that
> overhead photographs of the three Giza pyramids show an astounding
> similarity to the disposition of the three brightest stars in Orion's belt.
>
> This includes the distances between the pyramids and their size in relation
> to the brightness of the stars. It even includes the minute detail of a kink
> in the lines connecting the pyramids that matches a similar kink in the
> lines joining the stars in the sky.
The distances are not even close. The brightest star in Orion's belt is the middle star, but the largest Giza pyramid is on the end. The kink's angle is off by over 20%. Bauval made up most of this. As a scientist, you might check such things.
> This theory is also supported by a pioneering new science, dendrochronology,
> the study of the thickness of tree rings at different times in the past. The
> thinning of tree rings has been discovered in oaks across the entire period
> 2354 to 2345BC which comes close to the final decades of the Old Kingdom.
>
> The most simple explanation is due to the frequent arrival of cometary
> missiles, that would have dusted the atmosphere and dimmed the light from
> the sun, depriving trees of much needed energy. Here is yet further evidence
> that the Egyptians were under a regular torrent of missiles from above.
The Old Kingdom ended long after the Irish tree trauma--c. 2200 BC. The likely cause was extremely low Nile flood levels. And there is no evidence from ice cores to support your claim of high dust levels. You just made up most of this.
Wickramasinghe apparently did not reply. It seems clear that the Daily Mail article Wickramasinghe wrote was fraudulent.
For me, once someone has done something fraudulent, I become suspicious of all their other work. If you consider the prestige that Wickramasinghe might garner from his panspermia claims, there is all the more reason to be suspicious.
It's a good thing life may have been seeded... because otherwise we might have to account for the near-infinite improbability (engine) of the current version of evolution with (cover your ears) the dreaded "creationism"
*shudder*
Oh, wait... I believe in that. How irrational.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
mentioned. And people here at /. just want to talk about big bang and organic stuff from space.
Fred Hoyle was the guy who was bold enough to predict a resonance oxygen burning step in the thermonuclear cycle of stars when everybody else was saying its impossible. Willy Fowler found it, and both wrote a paper on it, solving one of the greatest problem in stellar physics.
Fowler got the Nobel, Hoyle did not. The problem is that Hoyle was a proponent of the "life from space" idea, and the Nobel Committee was embarrassed to give him that.
Shame. Shame on the Noble Committee.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
But it irritates me when people act like "religous people" are any more stubborn about defending their views, even to the point of twisting truth, than "scientific" people.
I'm sorry, but that's been my experience after spending thousands of hours debating Creationism, Evolution, the validity of the Bible, and the utility of the Scientific Method. Religious people tend to play fast and loose with the facts much more consistently than non-religious people.
I think that it has a lot to do with perceived stakes. The scientist/atheist has only some pride at stake -- he doesn't believe in the supernatural, so the discussion for him can remain at an "academic level." Hell, most scientific types I know would be ecstatic to discover proof of the supernatural. I, personally, would give everything I had to learn that the promises of religion were true. Growing old and dying sucks -- who doesn't want to live forever in the light of a loving and sheltering God?
The religious person, on the other hand, has everything at stake. This person is defending the eternity of his soul. He has everything to lose if the scientific/atheistic viewpoint were to somehow win the day. Psychologically, he's in a complete panic when cornered. Everything he wants: that invisible buddy in the sky, everlasting life, justification for his whole existence - is bound up in his beliefs. He has to do absolutely everything to protect those beliefs for himself and in an attempt to "save" those around him. Lying is a small sacrifice to make when you're talking about saving someone else's soul, right?
Not to mention my irritation that the terms are used like they are somehow mutually exclusive.
Think about the ramifications of the word "supernatural", and then think about the Scientist's adherence to methods of uncovering the secrets of our "natural" world. The supernatural by definition is beyond "natural". It flies in the face of everything that science has uncovered so far about our universe. Why? Because there has been no consistently credible evidence for the supernatural. The supernatural are things that can never seem to be witnessed by the credible or proven in a laboratory. Now, that's not to say that I haven't known scientific types who also have unprovable religious beliefs. They definitely do exist. Usually, though, it's sort of an odd blind spot that the Scientist allows to exist. He'll be perfectly rational about the known universe, except when confronting his own religious beliefs. Ah well, no one is perfect.
Another data point to note is the percentage of scientists who are agnostic or atheistic. I think that number was around 80% the last time I saw the poll in Scientific American.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Well, it isn't really a very good term...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid