Fred Hoyle

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Lore & Background

Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. His 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. 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 1936, he shared the Mayhew Prize with George Stanley Rushbrooke. In late 1940, he left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research, devising a method to get the altitude of incoming aeroplanes and put in charge of countermeasures against the radar-guided guns found on the Graf Spee. Two colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had many discussions on cosmology. On trips to North America, he learned about supernovae at Caltech and Mount Palomar and, in Canada, the nuclear physics of plutonium implosion and explosion, noticing similarity between the two and starting to think about supernova nucleosynthesis. He published his prescient and groundbreaking paper in 1954. He also 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, and persuaded the Caltech nuclear physics group to find the Hoyle state in carbon-12, from which a full theory of stellar nucleosynthesis was developed.

Reader's Guide

After the war ended in 1945, Hoyle returned to Cambridge University as a lecturer at St John's College, Cambridge (where he had been a Fellow since 1939). In 1958, he 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). In 1971, he delivered the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland on "Astronomical Instruments and their Construction". He was knighted in the 1972 New Year Honours. By 1972, Hoyle had become unhappy with his life in Cambridge; a dispute over election to a professorial chair led him to resign as Plumian professor in 1972, and the following year he also resigned the directorship of the institute. He later wrote: "I do not see any sense in continuing to skirmish on a battlefield where I can never hope to win." After leaving Cambridge, he wrote several popular science and science fiction books, and became chairman of the Anglo-Australian Telescope board in 1973, presiding at its inauguration in 1974 by Charles, Prince of Wales. After his resignation, he moved to the Lake District and occupied his time with treks across the moors, writing books, and working on science ideas that have been largely rejected, including "Stonehenge, panspermia, Darwinism, paleontology, and viruses from space". On 24 November 1997, while hiking near his childhood home in Gilstead, he fell into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen, was located about 12 hours later by a party using search dogs, and was hospitalised for two months with a broken shoulder bone. In 2001, he suffered a series of strokes and died in Bournemouth on 20 August of that year.

Did You Know?

• Hoyle jokingly coined the term 'Big Bang' on BBC Radio, though he later denied doing so in derision.
• He shared the Mayhew Prize in 1936 with George Stanley Rushbrooke.
• During WWII, he devised a method to get the altitude of incoming aeroplanes and countermeasures against radar-guided guns from the Graf Spee.
• He predicted the carbon-12 nucleus would have a resonance at 7.7 MeV, later confirmed experimentally as the Hoyle state.
• On 24 November 1997, he fell into a steep ravine called Shipley Glen and was found 12 hours later by search dogs.