S P A C E L I G H T

VITAL STATISTICS

Name: HOYLE, Frederick Aged: 86
Born: June 24, 1915 Where:Bingley, Yorkshire, ENGLAND
Died: August 20, 2001 Where: Bournemouth, Dorset, ENGLAND
Interred: _ _ _
Married: Barbara Clark When: 1939
Awarded: He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957 and knighted in 1972 and made chief astronomer to Her Majesty. Many awards included the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the UN Kalinga Prize, and the Balzan Prize.

Born to a family of very limited resources, Hoyle was drawn to chemistry and studied it on his own. He survived blasting experiments with gunpowder (the three ingredients readily available across the counter) and won a scholarship at Bingley Grammar School. He went on to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied Mathematics and graduated in 1939 into the teeth of WW II. Fred went to work for the Admiralty where a team of scientists had been gathered to turn radar into a defensive warning device. Hoyle helped to establish the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge in 1958, becoming its first director and served in that capacity until 1972, when he resigned after a turbulent tenure of disagreements with the radio-astronomers. In America, Hoyle had been a visiting professor at Caltech in 1953-54, a staff member of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories from 1957-62, then worked at the Hale Observatories and at Princeton, becoming a professor of astronomy at Cornell from 1972-78. Obviously, he traveled back and forth a great deal.

One of the major architects of the "steady state theory" for matter in the universe, Fred coined the term "big bang" for the competing model during a radio lecture. Hoyle was a theoretical astrophysist and cosmologist who didn't much care for creationism (the religious version) or darwinism...which made him somewhat unpopular. He also held the view that we are bombarded by material, some infectious, from outer space and that life came to earth from elsewhere via comets. [I was always fascinated by his theory (over-simplified here) that a cubic yard of vacuum could be the condition required to create a single atom of hydrogen....ergo, infinite space is continually creating large clouds of hydrogen which, in turn, form and fuel the suns as they travel through it. GCW]

But that was his day job. Fred Hoyle liked to write science fiction and to think in those terms because he felt that it kept his mind creative...just in case water stopped running downhill. His fiction was primarily in the novel form although a few short stories were collected in Element 79 in 1967. Well known novels were The Black Cloud, A for Andromeda (w John Elliot), and October the First Is Too Late. Several of his sf books (14) were partial collaborations with his son, Geoffrey. In October the First Is Too Late, Hoyle conceives of various parts of Earth's land mass shifting into different times, some forwards and some backwards while others remain unaffected.

Unfortunately...genius, by its nature, almost always runs out of control and slightly mad. Add to that a sense of humor and a tendency to bait his detractors, and Hoyle became someone who was almost constantly involved in the most outlandish controversies imaginable (see the Daily Telegraph obituary for a liberal sampling). Yet, in a time when cosmologists and radio astronomers think they understand the universe based on observations made from this small world, and then twist creationism into that mixture because they cannot conceive of infinity without purpose...Hoyle was exactly what he never wanted to be; a Godsend.

Still, Hoyle was a wonderment. No question that Fred was brilliant, yet he would think quirky things. He elevated Stonehenge, a pile of rocks, to cosmic importance while degrading Darwin's work, sensing that Darwin's theories of natural selection somehow challenged his own ideas about life originating in outer space (and AIDS, good lord). And then when the religious belief of 'the only life in the universe was created on Earth by God' was firmly disavowed, Hoyle turned about-face and said that life carried here from outer space was created by a higher intelligence (but not a God, which opens the can of worms of who created the higher intelligence). The charm of Hoyle's steady state theories was that they simplified the structure of things. In one fell swoop, Fred had taken Mankind from 'an infinite God creating an infinite universe' to 'an infinite universe creating itself'...50% simpler...and then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over some viruses in space ice. Every sf fan could have told him to expect those (and probably did).

Like Carl Sagan, Fred Hoyle left his imprint on several generations of scientific peers. Unlike Isaac Asimov, Fred confused everyone. And that may have been his biggest joke. Gotcha. But, oh my, look at how far our knowledge has progressed in the time period of his life and in so many ways, thanks to him and thanks to those trying to spite him. He was the personification of the expression, "If you don't make mistakes, you aren't doing anything." It was the 80% that Sir Frederick Hoyle got right that we are left to ponder and build on...and to wonder what else he may have been expecting us to find after he was gone.

PEN NAMES: None known.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Home is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters From a Cosmologist's Life. University Science Books, 1994

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

OBITUARY: Various & New York Times...(all quite different)

George C. Willick, 514 East Street, Madison, IN 47250