Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper.

He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory (a term coined by him on BBC Radio) in favor of the "steady-state model", and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth.

He spent most of his working life at St John's College, Cambridge and served as the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge.

Hoyle also wrote science fiction novels, short stories and radio plays, co-created television serials, and co-authored twelve books with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle.

Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Riding of Yorkshire, England.

His father, Ben Hoyle, who was a violinist and worked in the wool trade in Bradford, served as a machine gunner in the First World War.

His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College of Music in London and later worked as a cinema pianist.

Hoyle was educated at Bingley Grammar School and read mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

In his youth, he sang in the choir at the local Anglican church.

In 1936, he won the Mayhew Prize (jointly with George Stanley Rushbrooke).

In late 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research, for example devising a method to get the altitude of the incoming aeroplanes.

He was also put in charge of countermeasures against the radar guided guns found on the Graf Spee after its scuttling in the River Plate.

Britain's radar project employed more personnel than the Manhattan project, and was probably the inspiration for the large British project in Hoyle's novel The Black Cloud.

Two colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had many and deep discussions on cosmology.

The radar work paid for a couple of trips to North America, where he took the opportunity to visit astronomers.

On one trip to the US, he learned about supernovae at Caltech and Mount Palomar and, in Canada, the nuclear physics of plutonium implosion and explosion, noticed some similarity between the two and started thinking about supernova nucleosynthesis.

He had an intuition at the time "I will make a name for myself if this works out."

After the war, in 1945, Hoyle returned to Cambridge University, as a lecturer at St John's College, Cambridge (where he had been a Fellow since 1939).

Hoyle's Cambridge years, 1945–1973, saw him rise to the top of world astrophysics theory, on the basis of a startling originality of ideas covering a very wide range of topics.

Eventually (1954) his prescient and ground breaking paper came out.

He also formed a group at Cambridge exploring stellar nucleosynthesis in ordinary stars and was bothered by the paucity of stellar carbon production in existing models.

He noticed that one of the existing processes would be made a billion times more productive if the carbon-12 nucleus had a resonance at 7.7 MeV, but the nuclear physicists did not list such a one.

On another trip, he visited the nuclear physics group at Caltech, spending a few months of sabbatical there and persuaded them against their considerable scepticism to look for and find the Hoyle state in carbon-12, from which developed a full theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, co-authored by Hoyle with some members of the Caltech group.

In 1958, Hoyle was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy in Cambridge University.

In 1967, he became the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (subsequently renamed the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge), where his innovative leadership quickly led to this institution becoming one of the premier groups in the world for theoretical astrophysics.

Hoyle was still a member of the joint policy committee (since 1967), during the planning stage for the 150-inch Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales.

In 1971, he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland.

He chose the subject "Astronomical Instruments and their Construction".

Hoyle was knighted in 1972.

Hoyle resigned his Plumian professor position in 1972 and his directorship of the institute in 1973, with this move effectively cutting him off from most of his establishment power-base, connections and steady salary.

After leaving Cambridge, Hoyle wrote many popular science and science fiction books, as well as presenting lectures around the world.

Part of the motivation for this was simply to provide a means of support.

He became chairman of the Anglo-Australian Telescope board in 1973, and presided at its inauguration in 1974 by Charles, Prince of Wales.

After his resignation from Cambridge, Hoyle moved to the Lake District and occupied his time with a mix of treks across the moors, writing books, visiting research centres around the world, and working on science ideas that have been nearly universally rejected.

On 24 November 1997, while hiking across moorlands in west Yorkshire, near his childhood home in Gilstead, Hoyle fell into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen.

Roughly twelve hours later, Hoyle was found by a search dog.

He was hospitalised for two months with pneumonia and kidney problems (both resulting from hypothermia), as well as a broken shoulder from the fall.

Thereafter he entered a marked decline, suffering from memory and mental agility problems.

In 2001, he suffered a series of strokes and died in Bournemouth on 20 August of that year.

Hoyle authored the first two research papers ever published on the synthesis of the chemical elements heavier than helium by nuclear reactions in stars.