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Science

Controversial Cosmologist Fred Hoyle Dies At 86 203

Posted by timothy from the expanding-outward dept.
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)"
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Controversial Cosmologist Fred Hoyle Dies At 86 More

Controversial Cosmologist Fred Hoyle Dies At 86

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  • Cause of death? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Mike Schiraldi ( 18296 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @09:13AM (#2203781) Homepage Journal
    So, did he die all at once in a sudden implosion, or gradually fade away over a long period of time?

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

      According to the NY Times article, he died a month after suffering a stroke, from which he never recovered. So would seem that in death, as in life, Hoyle chose the unconventional route -- a sudden implosion, followed by fading away over a long period of time.

  • Science needs people like Fred (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rupert ( 28001 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @09:14AM (#2203787) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Science accepts heretics a lot better than religion. This is good.

      Otherwise we would still have alchemy, phlogiston, Newtonian gravity, creationism and COBOL (oh - sorry about the last two).

      His theories may have been largely bollocks, but at least it makes people think.
    • this is not a troll. trigger happy idiots.
    • 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

  • Neatly intresting (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Runt-Abu ( 471363 )
    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.

    • 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.


      If I remember correctly, it was intended to be a derogatory term.

    • 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!

    • When he coined the term, he was trying to make up a derisive, emabarassing name for the theory. Unfortunately for him, the name turned out to be catchy and subscribers to the theory took advantage of that.


    • I find it incredibly cool that the guy who invented the term "Big Bang" didn't susbscribe to the theroy behind it.



      Well, it isn't really a very good term...

  • to give us a working non-reg link? me no how to typie..

    http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/22/obituaries/2 2HOYL.html [nytimes.com]

  • "Big Bang Theorist Fred Hoyle Dies At Age 86"

    "...he was actually an opponent of the idea..."

    So he wasn't actually a theorist of the Big Bang?

    • Even though he was the creator of the big-bang theory, he later rejected his own theory.

      Details here [cambridge.org]

    • Describing Fred Hoyle as a "Big Bang Theorist" is a bit like saying that RMS invented that notion of free Unix licenses, like BSD [gnu.org].

    • Actually, Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" as a way of deriding the theory of the universe beginning at a set point in the past.

      Fred Hoyle was always a proponent of the Steady State theory, which at least until the late 1980s was a reasonable (if unfavored) contender to the Big Bang. However, with the precise measurements of the fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (performed by the COBE satellite) and the subsequent measurement of the curvature of the universe with Supernovas at extreme redshifts...well, lets just say the Big Bang is a pretty good theory at predicting what we will see. Although there are still surprises out there (the universe appears to be accelerating instead of decelerating for one thing).

      Funny thing is I remember a few years ago Carl Sagan and others at Sky & Telescope ran a contest to come up with a new phase for the "Big Bang" theory, because it was really a bad term (it makes people think of an explosion, which it was not), after several hundred entries, the empaneled committee couldn't decide on a better term than "Big Bang". :)
  • I really liked his ideas about Texas Hold'em, Canasta and Honeymoon Bridge. My granddad used to say "do it according to Hoyle's or don't do it" and I understand now he was referring to the physics of the universe! Wow!
    • I really liked his ideas about Texas Hold'em, Canasta and Honeymoon Bridge. My granddad used to say "do it according to Hoyle's or don't do it" and I understand now he was referring to the physics of the universe! Wow!

      Yeah, "big bang" was actually his nickname for having pocket rockets sucked out by a gutshot straight on the river.
  • Actually, Hoyle was not the only one who didn't support what he "invented".. Einstein himself strengthened the base of quant fysics but believed in determinism. I am sorry if I didn't spell this stuff correctly, as I haven't learnt those words in english class just yet. :P
  • 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.

  • Hoyle's SF (Score:2, Insightful)

    by grayhaired ( 314097 )
    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...

  • The Black Cloud (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nova Express ( 100383 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [nosrepecnerwal]> on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @09:31AM (#2203857) Homepage Journal
    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 [abebooks.com] to look for a used copy.)

  • Not as a troll, but rather from the perspective of the fly on the wall ... I wonder what Chandra Wickramasinghe and Daisaku Ikeda [amazon.com] have to say about Hoyle's passing.
  • Spontaneous human combustion is a heck of a way to go.


    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


    . [ridiculopathy.com]

  • [Hmm. I hit return at the wrong place and may have posted something utterly blank.]

    I will long remeber encountering Fred Hoyle's science fiction. My favorite is "The Black Cloud" in which Hoyle posited intelligent space-borne entities whose internal communication was radio waves. It was excellent hard-science science fiction for its day and remains interesting today.

    Hoyle's steady state hypothesis and his ideas about panspermia were interesting, but seemed to fall at the fringes of his solid science -- speculations developed in scientific dress rather than presented as science fiction entertainment.
  • ...that is, the idea that life on earth was seeded from space, is this: Where did that life come from?

    OK, I haven't read much of what Hoyle himself said about this, but I'd think you'd have to confront that question right off. Otherwise, you've got the same sort of problem as the flat-earth myth: What is the earth sitting on? Four elephants. What are the elephants standing on? The back of a giant turtle. What is the turtle standing on? You get the picture.
    • Otherwise, you've got the same sort of problem as the flat-earth myth: What is the earth sitting on? Four elephants. What are the elephants standing on? The back of a giant turtle. What is the turtle standing on? You get the picture.

      Can't resist the quote...

      "Didactylos gave him a blank look. 'It doesn't stand on anything,' he said. 'It swims, for heaven's sake. That's what turtles are for."

      TP, "Small Gods"

    • Obligatory: "Oh, no. You can't fool me. It's turtles all the way down."

    • Well, here [sciam.com] is ONE possible place.
      And here is another Sci-Am article about space seeding [sciam.com].
      And of course, there is also a meteorite, like martian-meteorite with life on it, as a vessel.
      Or an alien race which is humanoid could have developed, then seeded the entire galaxy with humanoids who can all breed with each other, have the same number of fingers, speak vocally, have male and female and a variety of forehead structures. They also could have put a puzzle in the DNA of certian life on certian worlds. This would then make a hologram appear to talk to the assembled life forms about how cool they are and how nice it is that space travel was acheived by their offspring.
    • All Hoyle said was that life didn't originate on Earth. While I think that's a little far-fetched, there's nothing infinitely regressive about his theory.

      It's like saying humans didn't pop up all of a sudden in North America, but that the species began somewhere else. Most anthropologists believe that "somewhere else" is Africa. Reasoning by your line of argument, since life in Africa had to have come from yet another place, scrap anthropology and say we've been in North America all along.

      • That's not all Hoyle said. What Hoyle said was that life could not have originated on Earth.

        That assertion does run into the problems above. Clearly, life exists. If it exists, it must have originated on Earth, or somewhere else. If it could not have originated on Earth, why did it originate elsewhere? Hoyle's arguments say nothing about that, and if they are valid arguments, they seem like they could be equally valid about the rest of the universe; I mean, if life is far too complicated to arise out of a random process on Earth, then it would seem that life is far too complicated to arise out of a random process anywhere.

        But Hoyle says it did arise somewhere else. So, barring a supernatural creator, it must have arisen out of the same random process that Hoyle claims is impossible. So how did it arise?

        Panspermia is at best unnecessary to explain life, and at worst just plain bad science. Shame on Hoyle for supporting it.

  • Some of Hoyle's views (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SilentReproach ( 91511 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @09:50AM (#2203945)
    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.
    • It seems to me that this argument of Hoyle's is rather circular.

      He says that the statistical chance of life developing on earth is so damn small that it couldn't have happened. Therefore, he says, life must have been dropped here.

      But for life to have been dropped here, it must have developed somewhere (despite the odds).

      So by using his argument we come to the conclusion that life developed somewhere against great odds, which puts the kaibosh on his original statement that it couldn't have happened here merely because of the odds.

      All we can really say is that life developed somewhere against large odds. Whether it started here or somewhere else (my hunch is Saturn - such a pretty planet...) we have no way of telling.

    • This argument is interesting, however, characteristics of proteins makes for that very high number of possibilities :


      In an enzyme, only a few of the amino acids are active, and most of the others only serve as a superstructure, being somewhat interchangeable.


      Our proteins have higher variations than what was previously thought, and in a single species may be found in dozens of similar yet diferrent forms.


      Some hypothesis are that self-reproducing RNA could have been the beginning of life, not proteins and DNA.


      Lastly, many enzymes are just versions of older proteins, that have evolved into having a completely different role, and yet come from the same basics. This also reduces the amounts of different amino acids combinations needed before life was possible.

    • The problem with all these arguments, which are also used by Creationists, is that these things simply don't happen like that. He says "If amino acids were linked at random...", but the very simple fact is that they don't.



      Chemicals don't combine randomly; they do so according to predictable physical laws. Carbon atoms don't link up with hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen at random. Proteins don't form randomly. And considering that the time needed for a chemical reaction to occur can be on the order of femtoseconds, the universe has had plenty of time and sufficient raw material for those non-random linkages to occur. Also, his estimates are too high; he commonly uses the figure of 2000 essential enzymes, but we don't know if they are in fact essential; are there alternatives that would do just as well? Hoyle also categorically denies that biochemistries other than our own particular flavor of carbon-based biochemistry are even possible, an assertion that isn't even scientific, let alone supported by evidence.



      Hoyle's arguments on this topic are indistinguishable from standard Creationist spiel, and it's profoundly disappointing to see a scientist of his accomplishment sink down into irrational morass in his later years.

    • So how did the situation get to where we find it to be?

      Doesnt anybory believe in God anymore? isn't it reasonable to believe that we were engineered by a superior being that we could call our creator? And if someone has enough power or wisdom or technology at his disposal to engineer life as complex as ours, wouldn't he/she have god-like ability to our eyes?

      I don't know, but THIS is the logical explanation to me.

  • Seeded from space (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `101retsaMytilaeR'> on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @09:50AM (#2203947) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • From the BBC News article:
      He believed it had all been arranged by a super-intelligent civilisation who wished to seed our planet.

      • Oops. I guess I should have RTFA. :)

        But this is even more absurd and easy to refute. If we were seeded by a super-intelligent species, then how did the super-intelligence species evolve? Super-seeding? At some point, there must have been a "progenitor" species (to use Brin's term).

        Given that, wouldn't it be simpler to believe that we are simply a progenitor species?

        • Why do you think that (in your sig) about AI/nanotech?

          • Of course, it's all guesswork for anyone, but here's my thinking.

            For AI, we don't even have the beginnings of a good theory of intelligence/conciousness, even after 50 years of computers, not to mention 2000 years of the greatest thinkers and philosophers thinking about it. We have made small amounts of progress, but mostly we've learned is how hugely complex the brain is. Given that major techological revolutions seem to occur in 25 year cycles, it looks to me like the progress arc is 4 cycles away from "real" AI.

            Keep in mind that it took 25/30 years for the Internet to go from the lab into real use.

            As for nanotech, it may not even be practical. The engineering challenges are insane: power, communication, reliability, movement, manipulation, and probably hardest of all, organization. It's definitely not just a matter for making "small parts".

    • Re:Seeded from space (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ethereal ( 13958 )

      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? :)

      • 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.

        I'm actually on the side that self-concious life is hugely, insanely unlikely. But it actually doesn't matter how unlikely it is, because before we came along, we don't sense the passage of time. Life could have failed on a billion billion other worlds, until the Earth just happened to give rise to us. In fact, if you believe in the cyclic universe theory, we could have gone through a billion billion universe cycles before we just happened to spring up. We simply don't know.

        I think it's also pretty likely that we are totally alone in the galaxy. If you do the math, once a space-fairing species develops, it only takes a few million years to fill up the whole galaxy, even at sub-light speeds. The why I think that self-concious life is hugely unlikely, simply because the planet hasn't been filled up in 10 billion years of history.

    • There are several theories about "The beginning of life" that mostly center around where complex molecules came from first.

      They have been found in meteors and comet debries. They have been generated in labs under "lightning" conditions. They form deep underground in oil deposits.

      Saying any one was first doesn't make much difference, when all of them were present when early life (self reproducing compounds) first appeared.

      It's like saying the sand that made the silicon that made the microprocessor in my computer came from california while the sand that made the silicon that made the microprocessor in your computer came from florida, so they are very different computers for that reason.

      Now, if he were to claim that complex-self-reproducing compounds came from off-world, and the mechanism that they use is the same mechanism that most cells use today, then he'd have something different.

  • Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is irrelevant. What is relevant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.
  • 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.

  • Panspermia (Score:3, Informative)

    by NearlyHeadless ( 110901 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @10:06AM (#2204035)
    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

    • This is not, in any way, evidence of Panspermia. It is evidence for "the presence of clumps of living cells in air samples from as high as 41 kilometers" at altitidues which normally do not see mixing with air from lower altitudes.

      For Wickramasinghe to look at that evidence and view it as support for not only the assertion that living organisms are carried to Earth on comets, but also for the assertion that these organisms are the origin for life on earth, is a stunning example of crackpottery.

      We found these organisms in the atmosphere. Where did they come from? Somewhere down below, where we observe an abundance of life in a multitude of forms, or from space?
    • In May, Wickramasinghe published an article in The Daily Mail (a British newspaper). Someone I know sent him (wickramasinghe@cardiff.ac.uk) the following.


      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.

  • Wasn't Ron Jeremy in that?
  • 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".
    • Just because idiots cite Fred Hoyle (I will note Fred Hoyle was very opposed to Creationism too, at least in the Biblical sense) doesn't make Fred Hoyle the problem.

      Also, as a scientist, it can sometimes be hard, except in detailed writing, to seperate my speculations from detailed theory...there is a spectrum of thought between the two.

      At the time Hoyle coined "Big Bang" as a derogatory term for that theory, the BB theory was, frankly, pretty far out there. It had General Relativity backing it, which was pretty good, but observationally it was not as strongly supported as today.

      You have to remember that what makes a speculation into a well established theory is how well it makes predictions. The BB theory makes detailed predictions as to what will be seen, and so far, it has stood the test of time.

      Just because some jokers take Hoyle's quotes out of context (by assuming something he said 30 years ago was his viewpoint today) doesn't make Hoyle a bad scientist.

      After all, I hate to think that I will be held accountable for all my theories I espouse today 30 years from now.
  • This is sad news. I've just been reading one of his Andromeda [ntlworld.com] 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.

  • "Science is prediction, not explaination" - from Hoyle's "The Black Cloud".

  • 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 [nasa.gov]

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

    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.

  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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