The H & W keys were pressed liberally in January
1990, when the two men published an article in the journal Nature
claiming that sunspots caused 'flu epidemics. Their conclusion, which
infuriated medical scientists, was based on their rigidly held belief
that space is full of viruses that cause not only 'flu but Aids and
Legionnaire's disease as well. Storms on the Sun's surface (indicated by
sunspots) were supposed to drive these viruses into the Earth's
atmosphere, whereupon diseases spread.
Still greater fury arose from their claim that
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was wrong, and that
evolution occurred because mutating life forms continually fall from
space. Nor, Hoyle thought, was this an accident. It was deliberately
arranged long ago by a super-intelligent civilisation who wished to
"seed" our planet.
To establish this case, they made claims that outraged
their critics still further. The accusation that caused the most anger
was that Archaeopteryx, one of the most significant pieces of
evidence for natural selection, was a fake.
Archaeopteryx was a
creature, half reptile, half bird, that lived about 60 million years
ago. The fossil of this feathered reptile, one of the prides of the
British Museum, showed that the creature was in the process of evolving
from one species to another. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe rejected this
inconvenient evidence by claiming that its feathers were actually made
of concrete and were surreptitiously put there in 1861 by its
discoverer, Carl Haeberlein.
Their book Archaeopteryx, the Primordial Bird: A
Case of Fossil Forgery (1986) was reviewed with unprecedented
savagery in the New Scientist by the Reading University zoologist
Beverly Halstead:
"This book is couched in such intemperate
language and contains such demonstrable falsehoods, as well as hardly
imaginable calumnies of persons unable to defend themselves, that it is
exceedingly difficult not to fall into the trap of exploding into an
emotional tirade. ts main thesis is patently ludicrous and can be proved
to be false. We must ask the question: what is this all about? This is
the unsavoury aspect, which makes this one of the most despicable pieces
of writing it has been my misfortune ever to read.
"It displays utter contempt for minimal standards
of scholarship -- the book seems to portray a hatred of Charles Darwin
and a most involved and twisted mentality towards zoologists. This
libellous nonsense will remain for a long time a stain on the
reputations of both authors."
Dr Tom Kemp, curator of the University Museum at
Oxford, added: "Certainly the claim that Archaeopteryx is a
fake should be investigated. But the investigation should be done by
those who actually understand fossils, not a couple of people who
exhibit nothing more than a Gargantuan conceit that they are clever
enough to solve other people's problems for them, when they do not even
begin to recognise their nature and complexity."
Hoyle himself denied writing anything objectionable,
but conceded: "We may have included a few mild sarcasms." The
most puzzling aspect of these disputes was that Hoyle made many genuine
and significant contributions to physics and astronomy. These included
monumental examinations of the modelling of the structure of stars,
nucleosynthesis, cosmology, and theories of star formation and planet
condensation.
The most important was his discovery in 1958, with the
American physicist William Fowler, of the way that the heavy chemical
elements that fill our bodies, such as oxygen, carbon and iron, were
forged in the nuclear furnaces of giant stars which later exploded and
from whose relics the solar system was born. In short, we are literally
made of stardust. But this epochal discovery was strangely rewarded.
Fowler won a Nobel prize for it, but Hoyle, to his justifiable
annoyance, did not.
Until the end of his life, Hoyle championed the
"steady state" theory of the universe which maintained that
the cosmos had no beginning. This was despite increasing evidence,
amounting in the view of many to proof, that the cosmos began in a Big
Bang some 12,000 million years ago. (It was Hoyle himself who,
mockingly, coined the term "Big Bang". But the phrase stuck.)
In 1992, when the American George Smoot found tell-tale ripples in the
fabric of the cosmos, Hoyle refused to accept it. "I have an
aesthetic bias against the Big Bang," he admitted.
He also challenged the evidence of the radio
astronomer Sir Martin Ryle, who in the 1960s had found similar, if less
conclusive, evidence of cosmic origins. Barbara Gamow, the wife of the
pro-Big Bang astronomer George Gamow, was inspired to describe their
dispute in verse:
"Your years of toil,"
Said Ryle to Hoyle,
"Are wasted years, believe me,
The steady state
Is out of date
Unless my eyes deceive me,
"My telescope
Has dashed your hope;
Your tenets are refuted.
Let me be terse:
Our universe
Grows daily more diluted!"
Said Hoyle, "You quote
Lemaitre, I note,
And Gamow, well, forget them!
That errant gang
And their Big Bang -
Why aid them and abet them?
"You see, my friend,
It has no end
And there was no beginning.
As Bondi, Gold,
And I will hold
Until our hair is thinning!"
In 1985, when Halley's Comet visited the Earth, Hoyle
and Wickramasinghe's theory of space viruses gave them the chance to
start another furious quarrel. They accused an American astronomer, J.
Mayo Greenberg, of plagiarism.
Greenberg had developed a theory that space contains
"pre-organic" material which Hoyle and Wickramasinghe said was
an unacknowledged copy of their own theory. "We must congratulate
him on his startling accuracy," they said slyly.
"These two men are constantly making these stupid
accusations against me," Greenberg retorted. "I think they
have never forgiven me for pointing out some years ago at a public
meeting that they had made an elementary scientific error."
Hoyle was a masterly science fiction writer. One of
his finest novels, The Black Cloud, published in 1957, described
a mysterious cloud of cosmic dust which approached the solar system and
parked around the Sun, blocking light and creating a temporary Ice Age.
It turned out that the cloud was intelligent and using solar energy to
replenish itself. The plot closely mirrored Hoyle's contempt for
politicians and his ideas about a cosmic super-intelligence.
Equally frightening was his A for Andromeda
(1962), which became a television series, in which radio instructions
were received from aliens, telling humans how to build an all-powerful
and destructive machine. He also wrote a children's play, Rockets in
Ursa Major, which in 1962 ran in the West End, and a libretto, The
Alchemy of Love.
He wrote many other works of fiction and non-fiction
including (with his son Geoffrey) Common Sense and Nuclear Energy
(1979). In this he made a convincing case for nuclear power. Ryle, still
smarting from the cosmological dispute, attacked the book bitterly, and
a furious correspondence ensued. Hoyle, in his autobiography Home is
Where The Wind Blows (1994), remarked cryptically that Ryle lacked
his own "sense of humour".
Fred Hoyle was born on June 24 1915, at Bingley in the
West Riding of Yorkshire. He was educated at Bingley Grammar School and
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied Mathematics. In 1939, he
was elected a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He conducted
research for the Admiralty during the Second World War.
He received numerous scientific prizes, honorary
degrees and professorships. His many other books included Frontiers
of Astronomy (1955), Man and Materialism (1956), Star
Formation (1963), Galaxies, Nuclei and Quasars (1965), The
Relation of Physics and Cosmology (1973), Ten Faces of the
Universe (1977), On Stonehenge (1977) and The Cosmogony of
the Solar System (1978).
Hoyle was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in
1957 and knighted in 1972. He served as president of the Royal
Astronomical Society from 1971-3. He held visiting professorships at
numerous British and American universities, including the California
Institute of Technology (in both astrophysics and astronomy) and Cornell
University, where he was Professor-at-Large. He founded the Institute of
Astronomy at Cambridge, where he was Plumian Professor of Astronomy from
1958 until 1972. In 1997, he was awarded the Crafoord Prize, designed to
honour work in fields ineligible for Nobel Prizes, by the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences.
He married, in 1939, Barbara Clark. They had a son and
a daughter.
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