Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle (June 24, 1915 in Yorkshire – August 20in Bournemouth, England, 2001) was a British astronomer, notable for a number of his theories that run counter to current astronomical opinion, and a writer of science fiction, including a number of books co-authored by his son Geoffrey Hoyle. He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, and was director of the institute for a number of years.

Rejection of the big bang

While having no argument with the discovery of the expansion of the universe by Edwin Hubble, he disagreed on its interpretation: Hoyle (with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, who he had worked with on radar in World War II) argued for the universe being in a "steady state", with the continuous creation of new matter driving the expansion of the universe, rather than the universe beginning and expanding explosively in a "Big Bang".

Related Topics:
Edwin Hubble - Thomas Gold - Hermann Bondi - Radar - World War II - Steady state - Big Bang

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Ironically, he is responsible for actually coining the term "Big Bang" in a BBC radio programme, The Nature of Things while criticising the theory; the text was published in 1950.

Related Topics:
BBC - 1950

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Continuous creation offered no explanation for the appearance of new matter, other than postulating the existence of some sort of "creation field", but in itself was no more inexplicable than the appearance of the entire universe from nothing; in the end the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation led to the nearly unanimous acceptance by astronomers (Hoyle being one exception) of the Big Bang theory.

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He did a series of radio talks on astronomy for the BBC in the 1950s; these were collected in the book The Nature of the Universe, and he went on to write a number of other popular science books. He wrote some science fiction; most interesting is The Black Cloud in which it transpires that most intelligent life in the universe takes the form of interstellar gas clouds, who are surprised that intelligent life can form on planets, and a television series A for Andromeda. In 1957 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he was knighted in 1972.

Related Topics:
BBC - 1950s - Science fiction - The Black Cloud - A for Andromeda - 1957 - Royal Society - 1972

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