Fred Hoyle
Fred Hoyle | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 24, 1915 Bingley, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | August 20, 2001 (aged 86) Bournemouth, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Stellar nucleosynthesis, the triple-alpha carbon resonance, steady-state cosmology, coining the term "Big Bang", quasi-steady-state cosmology, panspermia |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics, cosmology, nucleosynthesis |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge |
Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astrophysicist, for most of his career at Cambridge, who did foundational work on how the chemical elements are made in stars and who spent five decades as the most prominent scientific opponent of the Big Bang.
His central mainstream achievement is stellar nucleosynthesis. In 1954 Hoyle argued that carbon-12 must possess a previously unobserved excited state near 7.65 MeV, because without such a resonance the triple-alpha process could not produce carbon in the quantities observed; the state was subsequently found by Willy Fowler's group at Caltech, and it remains one of the most striking successful predictions in nuclear astrophysics. In 1957 Hoyle, with Geoffrey Burbidge, Margaret Burbidge and Fowler, published the review known as B²FH, which set out the reaction networks by which stars build the elements heavier than helium. Fowler received a share of the 1983 Nobel Prize for this work; Hoyle's exclusion has been widely regarded, including by many who disagreed with his cosmology, as an injustice.
In 1948, with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle proposed the steady-state cosmology: a universe that expands but has no beginning, its mean density held constant by the continuous creation of matter at a rate far too small to detect directly. It was a genuine rival to the evolving-universe models until the 1965 detection of the microwave background, after which most astronomers abandoned it. Hoyle did not. With Burbidge and Jayant Vishnu Narlikar he developed the quasi-steady-state cosmology, in which matter is created in bursts at the nuclei of active galaxies and the microwave background is thermalised starlight rather than a relic of a hot origin. Their case is set out at book length in A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality (2000). Narlikar's A Tribute to Fred Hoyle (2002) is also catalogued here.
The name of the theory he opposed is his own. In a 1949 BBC radio broadcast Hoyle referred to the rival model as "this big bang idea" — a phrase he intended as a contrast to continuous creation rather than as a compliment, and which stuck.
In his later years Hoyle worked with Chandra Wickramasinghe on panspermia, arguing that interstellar dust contains biological material and that life did not originate on Earth. He also wrote science fiction, including The Black Cloud (1957), and popular astronomy of unusual reach.
On this wiki
Hoyle is one of the most frequently invoked figures in the cosmology material collected here, and for two distinct reasons.
First, as the author of the surviving alternative to the Big Bang. The Big Bang article on this wiki records that the term was Hoyle's coinage, and the quasi-steady-state programme he built with Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge and Jayant Vishnu Narlikar is the main line of descent for the non-expanding and continuously-creating models catalogued under Category:Cosmology and Non-standard cosmology. Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, his co-authors of 1948, both have pages here.
Second, through the Hoyle–Narlikar variable mass hypothesis, which supplies the mechanism Halton C Arp drew on for Intrinsic redshift. On that account newly created matter begins with low particle mass and therefore emits at redshifted frequencies, so a young ejected object looks redshifted because its matter is young, not because it is receding. This is the theoretical backbone of the discordant-redshift work described in Quasar, Redshift and A Survey of Anomalous Redshifts.
Researchers documented here who extend or argue from this tradition include William C Mitchell (Bye Bye Big Bang, Hello Reality, The Recycling Universe), Paul A LaViolette (Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous Creation), and the many contributors to Tired Light and Eternal Universe.
It is worth stating what is not in dispute. The steady-state theory in its original 1948 form made predictions — a uniform density of radio sources at all distances, no evolution of galaxy populations with lookback time — that were not borne out, and Hoyle's own nucleosynthesis work is a load-bearing component of the standard model he rejected. The quasi-steady-state cosmology is a minority position that has not persuaded the professional community. What the literature here draws from Hoyle is less a finished cosmology than the demonstration that the standard model's central assumptions can be questioned by someone in full command of the physics.