Fred hoyles universe, p.1
Fred Hoyle's Universe, page 1
FRED HOYLE’S UNIVERSE
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FRED HOYLE’S
UNIVERSE
Jane Gregory
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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Contents
Acknowledgements
ix
1 Coming to light
1
Schooldays and scientific ambition; undergraduate life at Cambridge;
becoming a mathematician; graduate studies; marriage to Barbara
2 Hut no. 2
19
War posting; radar; meeting Bondi and Gold; radar problems; a trip to the
USA; the origin of the elements; return to Cambridge
3 Into the limelight
36
A new cosmology; post-war gloom; steady-state theory in the spotlight; The
Nature of the Universe ; the Massey conference; confronting Ryle
4 New world
58
Out of the doldrums; an American road trip; getting noticed at Caltech;
meeting Willy Fowler; finding a new state of carbon; the cosmological
controversy; religion and politics; A Decade of Decision
5 Under fire
78
Fowler, the Burbidges and the origin of the elements; a challenge from Ryle;
Frontiers of Astronomy ; cosmological controversy
6 New Genesis
94
The origin of the elements and B2FH; The Black Cloud ; Clarkson
Close; the Plumian Chair; the age of the universe; Ossian’s Ride;
Alchemy of Love
7 Eclipsed
111
Funding for science; the politics of science; an idea for an institute; the
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics; another
challenge from Ryle
vi / Contents
8 Fighting for space
129
Responding to Ryle; trouble for the institute; problems with computers; A for
Andromeda on television; Rockets in Ursa Major on stage; the
institute goes to Sussex
9 Storm clouds
147
Hoyle on television; the Ferranti ATLAS affair; Fifth Planet ; what, and
where, are quasars?; curing the Los Angeles smog; a new theory of gravity
(without apples); Roger Tayler and the helium abundance
10 ‘Dear Mr Hogg’
164
Problems at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical
Physics; problems at the Treasury for the Sussex institute; Hoyle lobbies the
Minister; Hoyle makes a decision and takes to the hills; an invitation from
the Minister; the Vice-Chancellor’s Special Committee on the Hoyle
Problem
11 His institute
186
A change of Government; Of Men and Galaxies ; more trouble for the
institute; a blow for steady-state theory; Hoyle despairs of Cambridge; the
institute comes to Cambridge
12 The end of the beginning
208
Establishing the institute; October the First is Too Late; more on the
quasar redshift; steady-state theory revisited; Stonehenge is an observatory;
Australia will host a telescope for the southern hemisphere; organic polymers
in space
13 The Astronomer Hoyle
228
Problems at the institute; Northern Hemisphere Review; an attack on the
Royal Observatories; the new Astronomer Royal; the merger at Cambridge;
Sir Fred
14 The beginning of the end
246
Resignation, The Inferno, the Anglo-Australian Telescope
15 On the loose
266
Moving to the Lake District; how to write science fiction; pulsars; controversy
over Nobel Prize; Hoyle’s 60th birthday
Contents / vii
16 Apocalyptic visions
283
Academic isolation; more on interstellar dust; life from space; diseases from
space; championing nuclear power; The Incandescent Ones ; dust grains
are bacteria; the last Munro; ‘there must be a God’; the next Ice Age
17 Evolution on trial
302
The battle of Little Rock; the cosmic intelligence; controversy over another
Nobel Prize; Comet Halley and Comet Halley; feathers fly over ‘fake’
fossil; autobiographies; astrobiology
18 A new cosmology
321
Steady-state theory turns 40; the redshift problem; the quasi-steady-state
theory; Hoyle’s legacy
References
342
Picture acknowledgements
392
Index
393
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Acknowledgements
The research for this book has its roots in my postgraduate studies, and my PhD thesis ‘Fred Hoyle and the Popularisation of Cosmology’ (University of London, 1998). The people who helped with that deserve thanks here too.
More recently, Hoyle’s colleagues have generously been the source of information, entertainment and enlightenment, and meeting them was a privilege. Their names are given alongside their contributions.
Of the many libraries that were useful, three deserve special mention.
The Caltech Institute Archives at the California Institute of Technology is a remarkable resource, and proved invaluable. Shelley Erwin, Bonnie Ludt and Jay Labinger enabled my very productive time there. The National Archive at Kew, still known to many as ‘the PRO’ from its days as the Public Record Office, is a national treasure. The Library of St John’s College, Cambridge holds Hoyle’s personal papers, and Jonathan Harrison has done sterling work in cataloguing this extensive collection in the short time since Hoyle’s death. He was always helpful and hospitable in the face of my frequent requests.
Sincere thanks are due to four people who read draft manuscripts: Jenny Campbell, Alison Goddard, Andrew Gregory (no relation) and Colin
Gregory (my father). Each brought a different critical perspective to bear on the book, and helped me to see it with fresh eyes.
Two colleagues generously shared unpublished research with me. Carolyn Little’s work on radioastronomy in Australia provided important insights, and Allan Jones’ on-going study of the early days of science broadcasting added valuable context.
I am grateful to Cambridge University for allowing me access to administrative records, and to Jacqueline Cox for facilitating this research. Thanks too to Jen Cole and Simon Lock for assistance with Chapter 18, to Andrew Gregory, Ofer Lahav and Steve Miller for sharing their technical expertise, and to Bruce Armbruster and John Faulkner for opening doors in California. Jacqueline Cox, Carol Dyhouse, Shelley Erwin, Jonathan Harrison, Geoffrey Hoyle and Angela Milner responded mercifully to last-minute cries for help. Lawyers Carter-Ruck gave constructive and sensitive advice.
x / Acknowledgements
Small but hugely empowering research funds were awarded to this pro-
ject by Birkbeck College (my former employer) and by the Royal Society.
At Oxford University Press, this book was in the charge of Michael
Rodgers until his recent retirement. I am grateful
Jane Gregory
1
Coming to light
Schooldays and scientific ambition; undergraduate life at
Cambridge; becoming a mathematician; graduate studies;
marriage to Barbara
As autumn turned into the bitter, fog-bound winter of 1930, a small
volume of thoughts on astronomy was selling fast in the book-
shops of Britain. Its author, Sir James Jeans, a distinguished and
well-known mathematician, had abandoned Cambridge University for the Surrey countryside to commit himself to two passions: music, and the popularization of science. His little book, The Mysterious Universe, was the text of recent lecture, and had been rushed into print to take advantage of the interest the lecture had aroused. Jeans himself was enthralling radio audiences every Tuesday evening on the BBC, and the Daily Mirror – a publication stuffed with advertisements for radio sets – marked out his talks as broadcasting highlights. The Mirror’s editor noted that ‘thousands who are not mathematicians, physicists or chemists do yet endeavour to stare unblinded at the latest shafts of light cast on man’s destiny and place in the world by discoveries about atoms, electrons and wavelengths.’1 His readers wrote in to ask how scientists could say anything at all about electrons when they could not even see them.
Much of the interest in Jeans’ book focused on one particularly startling suggestion:
Fifty years ago, when there was much discussion on the problem of communicating with Mars, it was desired to notify the supposed Martians that thinking beings existed on the planet Earth, . . . . [It] was proposed to light chains of bonfires in the Sahara, to form a diagram illustrating the famous theorem of Pythagoras. . . . To most of the inhabitants of Mars such signals would convey no meaning, but it was argued that mathematicians on Mars, if such existed, would surely recognise them as the handiwork of mathematicians on earth. . . .
So it is with the signals from the outer world of reality. . . . [F]rom the intrinsic
2 / Coming to light
evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.2
The talk of Martians was ordinary enough. But God, a mathematician?
Churchmen were divided: from pulpits across the country, Jeans was
denounced for this blasphemy – unless, that is, he was congratulated for opening a space within science for religious belief: as the Church Times noted,
‘the most up-to-date cosmology, then, if it does not exactly postulate a creator, at least leaves logical room for such a conception, and that very obviously.’3 A letter to The Times pointed out that others had already suggested God the Poet and God the Lover: were we now, by adding God the Mathematician:
. . . setting up a fresh pantheon containing a variety of departmental deities . . .?
Either we ask who made the mathematician, or we take refuge in the old myth that the earth is supported on a giant who stands upon a tortoise that rests upon an elephant, and the elephant’s legs reach all the way down. There seems to be no escape from the conclusion that every avenue of thought leads to a mystery at the end.4
The science journal Nature was more interested in how Jeans’ original lecture, with ‘the clarity and suggestiveness to which we have grown accustomed in his welcome utterances’ carried his readers from the old mechanical universe into the new world of quantum physics. Nature noted that Jeans’
views ‘would not meet with general acceptance, and indeed it was one of the merits of the lecture that it was provocative of far more thought than it expressed.’5 When astrophysicist Herbert Dingle of Imperial College London reviewed the book, he chastised Jeans for his submission to the new physics, and concluded with a warning about the limits of scientific enquiry: We can follow Sir James Jeans through the maze of present-day physics, and do so gladly, charmed by the facile mastery of his exposition, which is so obviously the child of clarity and depth of thought. But when he attempts to discuss the status of physical conceptions in the world of realities, in an utterance which will be accepted as the authentic voice of science by thousands who seek guidance in matters of philosophy and religion, we feel strongly that he is darkening counsel, not by words without knowledge, but, much more dangerously, by knowledge without equivalent balance of judgement. Physics has much to say for the present time; there is no need for it to speak for other departments of thought and feeling as well.6
Fervent correspondences were transacted through the winter, about gods and physics, among scientists and in the press, and the fires were stoked
Coming to light / 3
every Tuesday evening by the radio talks from London. And miles away, in a northern public library, a muddy teenage truant, sheltering from the weather and awaiting the next instalment of this saga, added Jeans to his list of heroes.
Fred Hoyle was 15 years old when Sir James Jeans stirred up the establishment with his tall tale of God the Mathematician, and he enjoyed the whole affair thoroughly.7
Missing school in order to explore the latest science was typical of Fred Hoyle’s childhood, which teetered between the kind of rebellion that could have ruined him for life, and a conscientiousness and application that would bring him many rewards.8 His parents’ lives similarly were full of contradictions: his mother, Mabel Pickard, had left her job in a textile mill in the small town of Bingley, Yorkshire, to study music at the Royal Academy in London, and had worked as a singer and music teacher. She had returned to Bingley in 1911 to marry Ben Hoyle, a working man whose fortunes were to swing them in and out of the middle class. Fred, their first child, was born in June 1915, and Ben, who was well over 30 by then, had just enough time to meet his new son before he was conscripted into the Machine Gun Corps and dispatched to France. Machine gunners were swiftly consumed in the searing gunfights across the trenches, and his family thought they would never see him again – every day, the arrival of the postman was anticipated with dread. But the compact, cheerful, sprightly Gunner Hoyle would
fight on and dodge the bullets for long enough to return to his family and resume his trade as a merchant of textiles – he bought the substandard cloth that the mills did not want to sell to their big customers, and sold it on to tailors.
Home, 4 Milnerfield Villas, was a sturdy stone house, rather suburban in style, at the top of a hill in Gilstead, then just outside Bingley but now on its outskirts. The house still stands, though the address has been changed. It was adjacent to Milnerfield Estate, the grand residence of the managing director of one of the textile mills, and had once been home to one of the higher-ranking servants there. It was a rather ambitious investment for the Hoyles, but it gave them splendid views across the Milnerfield Estate and up to the Yorkshire moors. Hoyle later reckoned that he could have walked to Edinburgh and been in countryside all the way.
Married women were not allowed to teach in schools, so Mabel stayed
at home, and when Fred was a baby, she played the piano for hours every
4 / Coming to light
day. Hoyle never would take up an instrument himself: he later said that knowing, from an early age, how music ought to sound made it impossible for him to struggle through the trite little pieces beginners are taught to play.9 Nevertheless, music would become a life-long passion.
While Ben was in France, Mabel received the serviceman’s wife’s
allowance of a few pence a day; and it was not enough. The ban on
married women teaching was relaxed as the young men were absorbed
by the war, but Mrs Hoyle had a baby to look after, and she sought
some other employment. It came along in 1916 in the form of silent
films, which were shown in a cinema in Bingley. Mabel secured work as an accompanist, and she mustered the soundtrack for comedies, action films and romances by splicing together extracts from Beethoven sonatas.
This was not the kind of music the cinema manager had had in mind,
and he fired her, but when audiences at the cinema dwindled the manager asked her to come back: the cinema’s former patrons had told him that they had only come for the music. So Mabel left young Fred tucked up in bed while she earned a living at the cinema in Bingley, and his earliest memory was of lying awake wondering what he would do if she did not
come back.
Mabel always did come back. At home during the day, she turned schoolteacher and while she could not coax Fred to the piano, she did give him a good start in other subjects, including mathematics: by the age of three or four he had worked out the multiplication tables. He was also fascinated by machines: at around this time, concerned neighbours called his mother to collect him after he had stood entranced in the street for two hours watching a steamroller fix the roads. He learned to read the clock by repeatedly asking his parents to tell him the time, and then seeing how their answer related to the position of the clock’s hands. He did not, however, master reading until the age of seven: at the cinema, the subtitles on the silent films suddenly made perfect sense. Hoyle later attributed the late start – and persistent headaches – to a problem with his vision: he was extremely short-sighted.
