Fred Hoyle Quotes

Sir Fred Hoyle FRS was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. 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, and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth. He also wrote science fiction novels, short stories and radio plays, and co-authored twelve books with his son, Geoffrey Hoyle.

He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for six years. Wikipedia

✵ 24. June 1915 – 20. August 2001

Fred Hoyle photo

vla22, Own work / CC BY-SA 4.0

Fred Hoyle: 19 quotes1 like

Famous Fred Hoyle Quotes

“We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that… all such theories are in conflict with observational requirements.”

BBC radio broadcast, March 28, 1949. http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/hoyle/exhibition/radio/ Reprinted in April 1949 in The Listener, a BBC magazine.

“Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”

Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981)

“Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.”

"Sayings of the Week", The Observer (9 September 1979)

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Quoted in "The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age" by Richard C. Duncan http://dieoff.org/page125.htm <br class="br">Originally from Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).

“Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate …. It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect … higher intelligences … even to the limit of God … such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.”

Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), pp. 141, 144, 130

“The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

The Big Bang in Astronomy, New Scientist, Vol. 92, No. 1280 (November 19, 1981), p. 527

Fred Hoyle Quotes about space

“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.”

Arguing that living organisms could not have arisen by chance alone.
The Intelligent Universe (1983), p. 19

“There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.”

Attributed in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999) edited by Elizabeth Knowles and Angela Partington

“It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas.”

Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), p. 1

Fred Hoyle Quotes about reason

“I do not see any sense in continuing to skirmish on a battlefield where I can never hope to win. The Cambridge system is effectively designed to prevent one ever establishing a directed policy — key decisions can be upset by ill-informed and politically motivated committees. To be effective in this system one must for ever be watching one's colleagues, almost like a Robespierre spy system. If one does so, then of course little time is left for any real science.”

As quoted by Bernard Lovell in Hoyle's obituary in The Guardian (23 August 2001) http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,540961,00.html

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.”

Our Place in the Cosmos (1993), p. 14

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension... Once let the sheer isolation of the Earth become plain to every man, whatever his nationality or creed, and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

1948

Fred Hoyle Quotes

“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

Hoyle on evolution, Nature, Vol. 294, No. 5837 (November 12, 1981), p. 105

“I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon…Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.”

Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars, Harper and Row, New York, 1965

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia… Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.”

Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe (1978), p. 15

“When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.”

As quoted in Scientific American (March 1995)

“"Big Bang" theory”

The Nature of the Universe (1950), p. 113

“Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. …As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher,' not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled.”

The Small World of Fred Hoyle: an Autobiography (1986)

“To achieve anything really worthwhile in research it is necessary to go against the opinions of one's fellows. To do so successfully, not merely becoming a crackpot, requires fine judgement, especially on long-term issues that cannot be settled quickly. …To hold popular opinion is cheap, costing nothing in reputation, whereas to accept that there is evidence pointing oppositely… is to risk scientific tar and feathers. Yet not to take the risk is to make certain that, if something new is really there, you won't be the one to find it.”

Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life (1994) p. 235.

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