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

Cause of death?

[Mike Schiraldi]

So, did he die all at once in a sudden implosion, or gradually fade away over a long period of time?

Science needs people like Fred

[Rupert]

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.

Re:Science needs people like Fred

[Robert Link]

Ok, sure, why not? But you should be aware that in the case of Steady State cosmology, that's not how it happened. Steady State cosmology was proposed by Hoyle and others (who arrived at the same mathematical solution from following different reasoning) in 1948. Steady State was attractive for theoretical reasons, and at that time it was consistent with all extant observations. As time went on observational evidence mounted, and it became harder and harder to reconcile Steady State with that evidence. Eventually most astrophysicists concluded that the theory was just unworkable. The cosmic microwave background measurements were widely regarded as the final nail in the coffin of Steady State; there isn't any good (i.e. not contrived) way to produce the observed thermal spectrum without having the universe in a hot, dense state at some point in its history, and that is incosistent with the Perfect Cosmological Principle that underlies Steady State cosmology.

Science needs skeptics; no doubt about that. But being a skeptic is not the same thing as being a contrarian. When the commonly accepted explanation has the weight of evidence behind it, a person who refuses to accept it is not by any stretch of the imagination a "good scientist," and he is not doing science any favors by continuing to rail against the accepted theory.

In this "enlightened" age of après-truth, it is not fashionable to talk of right and wrong answers; people prefer, rather, to talk about "different points of view." Nevertheless, nature is what it is, without regard to what point of view we might have on the matter. Any theory that disagrees with what nature reveals about itself through experiment and observation is simply an untruth, and clinging to such a theory in spite of the evidence is simply unscientific.

-rpl

Re:Neatly intresting

[foistboinder]

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

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.)

Re:Neatly intresting

[Phanatic1a]

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.

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.

Panspermia

[NearlyHeadless]

There was some actually some evidence for life from outer space announced a few weeks ago. I don't think they have actually done a thorough job of ruling out other sources, but it's interesting nonetheless. Here's a press release copied from http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0730011.htm

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