Fred Hoyle

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Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a British astronomer who developed the steady state theory of cosmology. He was noted for his rejection of naturalistic theories of how the universe came into being.[1] Nobel Prize winner William Alfred Fowler wrote: "Fred Hoyle was the second great influence in my life. The grand concept of nucleosynthesis in stars was first definitely established by Hoyle in 1946."[2] During a radio lecture, he coined the term "big bang" to ridicule the theory (which he disbelieved[3]) that the universe began from an explosion.

Hoyle was best known for his seminal contributions to the theory of the structure of stars and on the origin of the chemical elements in stars. He was a joint proponent of the steady state model of the universe, which claims, in contradiction to the Biblical creation account, that the universe had no beginning.

In 1983 the Nobel Prize committee insulted Hoyle by passing him over and giving the award to underlings for his work. "For ... one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of modern physics, he was ignored by the Nobel Prize committee which chose to reward others who had done lesser work in this field. Thus, the scientific establishment, which claims to seek truth dispassionately, treated one of its finest proponents with contempt."[4] In the same year Hoyle had declared that the Archaeopteryx - then a favorite of promoters of evolution - was a fraud. Several years earlier, Hoyle had also condemned the exclusion of Jocelyn Bell Burnell from the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics.

By 1946 Hoyle had formulated the original and still generally accepted idea that the elements are generated in evolving stars and injected into the interstellar medium by supernova explosions. In 1957 he collaborated with William Alfred Fowler, Margaret Burbidge and Geoffrey Burbidge on an epoch-making paper on the nucleosynthesis of elements in stars.[5]

"The likelihood (probability) of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter is one to number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." Sir Fredrick Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 148. [6]

References

  1. He supported the anthropic principle, holding that there is a design in creation: the universe was designed in such a way as to produce life. [1]
  2. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hoyle.htm
  3. Hoyle held out against Big Bang theory, even post-1965, when the discovery of a microwave background in the universe led most cosmologists to favor it. Physics Today obituary
  4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jul/24/biography.features1
  5. http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0275%2FHoyle
  6. http://www.discoveryevent.com/quotes1.htm

External links