The astrophysicist who denied the Big Bang and supported the extraterrestrial origin of life

"The centenary of the birth of Fred Hoyle, a heterodox and highly creative scientist is celebrated

He never settled for the most widely accepted explanations and challenged many well-established theories.

The astronomer Rafael Bachiller shows us in this series the most spectacular phenomena of the Cosmos. Topics of pulsating research, astronomical adventures and scientific novelties about the Universe analyzed in depth.

The figure of Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) does not leave indifferent any contemporary astronomer. Researcher, professor and author of science fiction, Hoyle developed the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and applied Einstein's equations to describe the universe. A heterodox scientist of enormous creativity, he never settled for the most widely accepted explanations and challenged, with original ideas, many well-established theories.

Prodigious intelligence

Fred Hoyle was born in Bingley (United Kingdom) on June 24, 1915. He was educated in Cambridge, where since childhood he proved to have a prodigious intelligence. From there he left at the end of 1940, in the middle of the world war, to go to work on radars in Portsmouth; there he met the physicists Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold with whom he would later make several of his scientific works. This work also offered him the opportunity to travel to the US twice, where he was able to discuss with Caltech astronomers and the Monte Palomar Observatory, exchanges that turned out to be very inspiring for his subsequent work on nucelosynthesis.

Fred Hoyle in his maturity.

In 1945, once the war was over, Hoyle returned to Cambridge and at his university he would enjoy his most scientifically productive years. In 1967 he founded the prestigious Institute of Astronomy of Cambridge (then called Institute of Theoretical Astronomy), of which he would be its first director. In 1971 he was appointed president of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 1972 Knight of the British Empire ('Sir').

But in 1973 he resigned from his position as director of the Institute of Astronomy, remaining without stable salary and disconnected from the world of official astronomy. It was then that he moved to the Lake District, in northwest England, and devoted himself to writing books (many of them science fiction) and exploring heterodox ideas, most of which have been rejected by official science. On November 24, 1997 he suffered a fall during a country trip that had serious effects on his physical and intellectual state. He died on August 20, 2001 after a stroke in Bournemouth.

Nucleosynthesis

In 1946, Hoyle showed that the nuclei of stars can reach temperatures of billions of degrees, much higher than those that are required to trigger nuclear reactions, and that at those temperatures, the balance between nuclear processes should lead to a great abundance of carbon and iron, as observed in nature. He also identified the nuclear reactions that create the elements of the periodic table that lie between carbon and iron, and proposed that some of the precise reactions to create the heavier elements only happened when the stars exploded in the form of supernovas. These works gave birth to an entire astrophysical discipline, nucleosynthesis, which explains the origin of heavier elements than helium from different nuclear reactions.

Big Bang Challenge

Hoyle never agreed with the theory developed by George Lemaître about the expansion of the Universe. Although this theory was verified experimentally shortly after by Hubble, confirmed that the universe had an origin, Hoyle referred to all this as if it were pseudoscience. In a broadcast of the BBC in 1949 he referred for the first time to this theory, with a clear pejorative intention, with the term 'Big Bang'. I could not think at that moment that, with this ironic comment, I was coining the world-popular designation to that theory to which I would dedicate so much trying to refute it.

Mosaic with Hoyle in the National Gallery, London. | Boris Anrep

The British astronomer was a defender of his "theory of the stationary universe" that tried to justify that the universe remained eternally identical to itself, without any change, that it had not had an origin, nor would it have an end. To ensure that the separation of the galaxies from each other, which had been observed by Hubble, did not cause a dilution of the universe, Hoyle was forced to assume that there was matter that was created continuously between the galaxies, giving rise to new galaxies that occupied the space that was emptied during the expansion.

Obviously this creation of matter proposed by Hoyle was no more plausible than the creation of the entire universe in a single Big Bang, but what made this last theory prevail over that of the stationary universe was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1964, which is considered a relic of the great explosion. Although this cosmic background does not find an explanation in Hoyle's theory, he died in 2001 without having accepted the validity of the Big Bang theory.

Scientific controversies

Together with his Indian collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the idea of ​​panspermia, arguing that the first forms of life came to Earth from space and that, thanks to comets, life can spread throughout the universe.

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These two authors also attributed an extraterrestrial origin to some diseases such as polio, mad cow disease, AIDS and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. For example, in the case of the Spanish flu, they hypothesized that a comet had deposited the virus in different parts of the planet simultaneously, a hypothesis that was unanimously rejected by experts in the pandemic.

In 1982 they published the book 'Evolution from space' in which they argued that the probability of obtaining a cell was ridiculously small. According to a comparison that has become famous, the probability of obtaining a cell from a primordial chemical soup is as small as the probability that a tornado could create a Boeing 747 in a junkyard. From here, although Hoyle declared himself an atheist, he went on to defend a theory of the 'Intelligent Design' type according to which life must have been created by some superior intelligence.

Hoyle supported the theory of the inorganic origin of terrestrial hydrocarbons according to which oil is not a fossil deposit of biological origin, but arises from large carbon deposits existing on Earth from its origin, or arrived at our planet through impacts of comets or asteroids...." 

"The most famous work of science fiction written by Hoyle, 'The black cloud', relates the arrival of a huge cloud of gas to the solar system. By shielding sunlight, the cloud seems capable of ending life on Earth. Finally, the cloud is revealed as a superorganism much more intelligent than human beings. This story conquered all the readers of the time passionate about science.

Hoyle starred in several controversies surrounding the delivery of the Nobel Prizes. For example, in 1974 when Antony Hewish won the prize for the discovery of pulsars, Hoyle immediately pointed out that the real discoverer had been Jocelyn Bell, and not Hewish, her thesis director. According to some authors, these criticisms of the Nobel were the cause of never being awarded the prize to himself, although he was received in 1983 by his collaborator in the work of nucleosynthesis, the American Willy Fowler."

Rafael Bachiller

Reference: 

http://www.elmundo.es/ciencia/2015/06/24/558a71c4ca4741504f8b4575.html