38 Facts About Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential BFH paper.

Fred Hoyle 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.

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

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

In 1936, Fred Hoyle shared the Mayhew Prize with George Stanley Rushbrooke.

In late 1940, Fred 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 incoming aeroplanes.

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

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

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

Fred Hoyle noticed that one existing process would be made a billion times more productive if the carbon-12 nucleus had a resonance at 7.7 MeV, but nuclear physicists at the time omitted such an observed value.

In 1945, after the war ended, Fred Hoyle returned to Cambridge University as a lecturer at St John's College, Cambridge.

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

Fred Hoyle chose the subject "Astronomical Instruments and their Construction".

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

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

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

Fred Hoyle was located about 12 hours later by a party using search dogs.

Fred Hoyle was hospitalised for two months with a broken shoulder bone, and pneumonia and kidney problems, both resulting from hypothermia.

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

Fred Hoyle showed that at such high temperatures the element iron can become much more abundant than other heavy elements owing to thermal equilibrium among nuclear particles, explaining the high natural abundance of iron.

Fred Hoyle attributed those elements to specific nuclear fusion reactions between abundant constituents in concentric shells of evolved massive, pre-supernova stars.

Those historical arguments were first presented to a gathering of nucleosynthesis experts attending a 2007 conference at Caltech organized after the deaths of both Fowler and Fred Hoyle to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of BFH.

In trying to work out the steps of stellar nucleosynthesis, Fred Hoyle calculated that one particular nuclear reaction, the triple-alpha process, which generates carbon from helium, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific resonance energy and spin for it to work.

Fred Hoyle theorized that other rarer elements could be explained by supernovas, the giant explosions which occasionally occur throughout the universe, whose temperatures and pressures would be required to create such elements.

Fred Hoyle found the idea that the universe had a beginning to be pseudoscience, resembling arguments for a creator, "for it's an irrational process, and can't be described in scientific terms".

The theory was one alternative to the Big Bang which, like the Big Bang, agreed with key observations of the day, namely Hubble's red shift observations, and Fred Hoyle was a strong critic of the Big Bang.

Fred Hoyle coined the term "Big Bang" on BBC radio's Third Programme broadcast on 28 March 1949.

Fred Hoyle explicitly denied that he was being insulting and said it was just a striking image meant to emphasize the difference between the two theories for the radio audience.

Fred Hoyle had a famously heated argument with Martin Ryle of the Cavendish Radio Astronomy Group about Fred Hoyle's steady state theory, which somewhat restricted collaboration between the Cavendish group and the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy during the 1960s.

Fred Hoyle died in 2001 having never accepted the validity of the Big Bang theory.

In 1982, Fred Hoyle presented Evolution from Space for the Royal Institution's Omni Lecture.

Fred Hoyle often expressed anger against the labyrinthine and petty politics at Cambridge and frequently feuded with members and institutions of all levels of the British astronomy community, leading to his resignation from Cambridge in September 1971 over the way he thought Donald Lynden-Bell was chosen to replace retiring professor Roderick Oliver Redman behind his back.

Fred Hoyle was at the centre of two unrelated controversies involving the politics for selecting recipients of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Worried about being misunderstood, Fred Hoyle carefully composed a letter of explanation to The Times.

The 1983 prize went in part to William Alfred Fowler "for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe" despite Hoyle having been the inventor of the theory of nucleosynthesis in the stars with two research papers published shortly after WWII.

Fred Hoyle appeared in a series of radio talks on astronomy for the BBC in the 1950s; these were collected in the book The Nature of the Universe, and he went on to write a number of other popular science books.

Fred Hoyle appeared in the 1973 short film Take the World From Another Point of View.

Fred Hoyle wrote a television series, A for Andromeda, which was published as a novel.