弗雷德·霍伊尔Fred Hoyle

弗雷德·霍伊尔的父母是本·霍伊尔和梅布尔·皮卡德。梅布尔的父亲在她很小的时候就去世了。年轻时，她曾在宾利的一家工厂工作，并攒够了钱在伦敦皇家音乐学院学习音乐。在那里接受培训后，她决定不表演，但在嫁给本之前，她在学校教音乐。像梅布尔一样，本也曾在工厂工作。他十一岁时被迫离开学校，因为他的家庭太穷，无法再支持他的教育。

霍伊尔的父母于1910年在西约克郡吉尔斯蒂德村郊外购买了米尔纳菲尔德别墅4号，1914年第一次世界大战爆发时，他们正住在那里。他们的第一个孩子是霍伊尔，就出生在米尔纳菲尔德别墅4号，当时他的父亲刚被征召入英国军队，选择加入机枪军团。他为什么选择这个并不清楚，因为生还的机会极其渺茫，人们可能会认为，有了妻子和年幼的孩子，他会尽量提高自己的生还机会。显然他没有这样想，而且出乎一切意料，他在战争中幸存下来。对霍伊尔的母亲来说，这是一段极其艰难的时期，她不得不在困难的环境中抚养年幼的孩子，生活在持续的恐惧中，害怕收到一封信告诉她丈夫已被杀害。梅布尔通过在宾利电影院的无声电影中弹钢琴赚了一点钱。她还为霍伊尔提供了早期教育，特别是教他数字。

第一次世界大战结束后，本回归平民生活，他在最近的大城镇布拉德福德开办了一家布料生意（尤其经营羊毛）。起初生意兴隆，1920年决定送霍伊尔去一所小型私立学校。然而1921年整体生意急剧下滑，到霍伊尔开始上学时，他父亲的布料生意已经严重受损。霍伊尔学校教育的开始标志着一[2]艰难时期的开端：-

从五岁到九岁，我一直在与教育制度作战。在我早期教育生涯的几次危机中，父亲总是听从母亲的判断，因为她自己曾是一名教师……事情表明，母亲对我的固执宽容得有些不合情理。但正因为她本人当过教师，母亲能看出，当我被独自留下时，我取得的进步最大。

霍伊尔在1921年7月只上了几周私立学校，随后他父亲决定暂时放弃失败的布料生意，搬到埃塞克斯郡的雷利。在那里，霍伊尔进入桑德斯利附近的一所学校，并立即与一位同学交上了朋友。两人想出了一个逃学的办法，但他们还没来得及多试几次这个计划，霍伊尔一家就在1921年11月听说他们出租房屋的住户出了问题后回到了吉尔斯泰德。回到家中，霍伊尔于1922年1月被送回他原来的第一所学校：-

我回到了和以前一样的私立学校，但我回来时已不再是一个天真无邪、准备让管理这地方的老太婆把无关知识灌进我脑袋的孩子了。

3月，霍伊尔将他的逃学计划付诸实践，他的父母以为他在学校，而学校则以为他在家生病。几个月后，他的父母发现了真相，但他被允许选择一所新学校而不是返回原校。他决定去宾利的晨路学校，但在那里进行的测试中，他的表现相当差。这并不奇怪，因为在此之前他大部分时间都避开了学校，很快他又开始逃避学校，部分是因为真正的疾病，部分是在1923-24年冬天假装生病。

尽管他试图逃避正规教育，霍伊尔 确实表现出自我教育的兴趣。他读了父亲的一本化学书，并对这门学科产生了持续一生的兴趣。然而，Morning Road School 的问题促使他们再次搬家，他从1924年9月开始上 Eldwick 学校。在 霍伊尔 以微弱差距错过文法学校奖学金后，他们提出申诉，他勉强通过，于1926年9月开始在宾利文法学校学习。他与教育制度的战争结束了，尽管前方仍有许多教育问题，他现在以积极得多的态度对待教育。

1927年，宾利镇图书馆购得了一本 亚瑟·爱丁顿 的 Stars and Atoms，霍伊尔 如饥似渴地阅读。在文法学校第一年结束时，他已从入学时班级第16名进步到班级第一。他对化学的兴趣持续不减，临近中学毕业时，他决定去利兹大学学习化学。1932年9月参加奖学金考试时，他以微弱差距落选。没有奖学金就无法上大学，他回到宾利文法学校，但没有按部就班地努力一年，争取第二次尝试获得利兹的奖学金，霍伊尔 决定瞄准剑桥大学奖学金。这是一个雄心勃勃的计划，但他觉得至少能让他练习参加这类考试。

宾利文法学校实际上并没有教学资源能让霍伊尔迅速达到剑桥奖学金的水平，但数学老师尽了最大努力，在自己家里给他上课。霍伊尔于1932年12月在剑桥大学伊曼纽尔学院参加了奖学金考试：-

如果奇迹发生，我在剑桥赢得了什么，那也好。我会乐意接受，但我真正的目标……是向自己证明过去三个月的努力确实提高了我的水平。

霍伊尔在物理和化学方面表现良好，但正如他所料，他的数学准备薄弱，数学试卷拖了他的后腿。他未达到奖学金标准，但决定参加1933年3月在剑桥大学彭布罗克学院的奖学金考试。这次他的表现更好，确实达到了奖学金标准，但学院并没有为每个达到标准的人提供奖学金，霍伊尔再次落选。然而，他现在可以通过在约克郡奖学金竞赛中赢得奖学金进入剑桥，他在1933年夏天成功做到了这一点，此时数学已是他最好的科目。

1933年秋，霍伊尔进入剑桥大学伊曼纽尔学院，打算攻读科学学位。他的导师是数学家P·W·伍德，伍德在第一次见面时告诉他，他的数学水平不足以攻读科学学位，因此建议霍伊尔先修读数学荣誉学位考试第一部分，这样之后学习科学时会有更好的数学基础，处于更有利的位置。于是霍伊尔开始了为期一年的数学课程，从慢班的底层起步。他的目标是在参加数学荣誉学位考试第一部分时进入慢班的中游，而实际上他做得更好，到第一年结束时，他已处于慢班的前四分之一。

在数学上达成目标后，霍伊尔本可以顺理成章地按原计划转入科学课程。然而，他向来是个迎难而上的人，既然进展如此顺利，他自然会想自己在数学上还能攀登到多高。还有一个理由促使他继续钻研数学，那就是像艾萨克·牛顿、詹姆斯·克拉克·麦克斯韦、开尔文、亚瑟·爱丁顿和保罗·狄拉克这些剑桥的大科学家，全都是数学家。他决定继续下去，进入了数学学习的第二年，被分在快班的最末位。他再次进展顺利，到年末时已稳稳跻身班级前半部分。

霍伊尔在剑桥读本科时，曾受教于一些杰出人物。例如，马克斯·玻恩教他量子力学，亚瑟·爱丁顿教他广义相对论，他还受教于保罗·狄拉克。1936年，他在数学荣誉学位考试中名列前十，并因应用数学最佳学生而获得梅休奖。他继续在剑桥学习，研究由鲁道夫·佩尔斯指导，他的事业蒸蒸日上，于1938年获得最高史密斯奖，随后在佩尔斯和R H 拉尔夫·福勒作为推荐人的情况下，获得了享有盛誉的戈德史密斯展览奖。此时，他的指导老师是莫里斯·普赖斯，他在佩尔斯前往伯明翰担任应用数学讲席后接任。1939年，霍伊尔在Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society上发表了一篇关于Quantum electrodynamics的重要论文。尽管霍伊尔那时已完成博士学位的工作，但被普赖斯说服不要提交（博士学位对剑桥来说是新的，普赖斯不赞成它）。

尽管他的研究是在应用数学领域，但正是通过雷·利特尔顿与他讨论的大质量引力体吸积气体的问题，霍伊尔的兴趣转向了天文学中的数学问题。一切顺利，1939年5月因β衰变工作当选为圣弗瑞兹·约翰学院研究员，并获得了1851年展览委员会颁发的一项极具声望的奖项，他的职业生涯却因第二次世界大战的爆发而突然中断[2]：-

战争会改变一切。它会摧毁我相对富裕的生活，它会吞噬我最好的创作时期，正当我在研究中站稳脚跟的时候。

战争爆发后不久，霍伊尔于1939年12月28日与Barbara Clark结婚。他们有一个儿子Geoffrey（霍伊尔后来与他有多篇合著）和一个女儿Elizabeth。战争期间，霍伊尔在海军部从事雷达工作，大部分工作是在Nutbourne完成的。他几乎没有时间从事天文学研究，但在可能的情况下继续与Lyttleton合作（其中一次是1942年他因第一个孩子Geoffrey出生而休假时）。在海军部期间，霍伊尔与赫尔曼·邦迪和Thomas Gold共事，并在闲暇时与他们讨论天文学。这三人后来提出了“稳恒态宇宙学”，霍伊尔大概以此最为著名。

1944年，他因雷达方面的工作访问了美国，在那里他弄清了原子弹项目的进展情况。这使他思考核反应，由此产生了他关于元素如何形成的最重要想法之一。战争结束时他回到剑桥，任数学初级讲师。1945-46学年，他的教学任务是讲授一门几何课程和一门统计力学课程。1945年，他发表了On the integration of the equations determining the structure of a star，其中讨论了积分恒星平衡方程的最有利方法。1946年春天，他撰写了重要论文，该论文源于他关于元素形成的想法，The Synthesis of the Elements from Hydrogen发表在Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society上。

在担任了三年数学初级讲师后，霍伊尔被提升为剑桥大学数学讲师并获得终身教职。他不再教授几何学，转而教授电磁学和热力学课程。他的出版物范围随着涉及许多不同主题和不同层次的作品而扩大。1948年，他发表了两篇关于稳态宇宙学的论文。他首次向普通听众解释科学是在1950年。他在第三节目（现称为第三电台）播出了五场天文学讲座。这些讲座极受欢迎，经常重播，版本在美国播出，并基于讲座出版了一本书Nature of the Universe。正是在这五场讲座的最后一场中，霍伊尔为宇宙的创生创造了“大爆炸”一词。尽管现在大多数科学家都接受了，但这个术语实际上是对霍伊尔不接受的创生理论的一种轻蔑描述。

1957年，霍伊尔出版了他的第一部科幻小说The Black Cloud，该书获得了许多赞誉，此后成为经典（他的40本书中约有十几本是科幻小说）[1]：-

……他成功创作[科幻小说]三十余年，赢得了忠实的读者群。他最著名的小说是《十月一日太迟了》，书中英国和夏威夷仍停留在1966年，美洲被切换回15世纪，而苏联存在于一个未来时代，那时地球表面是一块玻璃板。

霍伊尔还写了电视连续剧《A代表仙女座》和儿童剧《大熊座的火箭》。当该剧于1962年在美人鱼剧院上演时，一位评论家写道：“科学的晦涩术语很少听起来如此令人信服。”霍伊尔认为，这种写作补充了他的严肃工作，在工作中间他会停下来沉溺于他所谓的“异想天开的幻想”。他确信真正重要的发现最有可能来自创造性想象力的运用。

1958年10月1日，在哈罗德·杰弗里斯退休后，他成为普鲁米安天体物理学与自然哲学讲席教授，担任该职位直到1972年辞职。在担任讲席期间，他继续发表许多重要著作，例如他与William Fowler的合作成果Nuclear cosmochronology，于1960年发表在Annals of Physics上，描述了如何利用观测到的铀和钍不同同位素丰度比来确定宇宙时间尺度。1966年，霍伊尔在剑桥创立了著名的理论天文学研究所，并担任所长直到1972年。

导致霍伊尔于1972年从剑桥辞职的事件在[2]中有叙述。他在给Lovell的一封信中解释了他的理由（见[5]）：-

我看不出继续在一场我永远不可能获胜的战场上小规模交锋有什么意义。剑桥的体制实际上就是为了阻止任何人建立起一套有方向的方针——关键决策可能被消息不灵通、出于政治动机的委员会推翻。要在这种体制中有所作为，一个人必须永远盯着自己的同事，几乎像罗伯斯庇尔式的告密体系。如果这样做，那么当然就没什么时间留给真正的科学了。

此后他在湖区安了家，但他继续提出有趣的、往往是非正统的理论，比如关于巨石阵、泛种论（地球生命的起源必定涉及来自太空的细胞）、达尔文主义、古生物学以及来自太空的病毒的理论。我[EFR]有幸听到霍伊尔讲述他关于巨石阵是作为日食预测器而建造的理论。那是一场鼓舞人心的演讲，就像霍伊尔的许多工作一样，确实让人以新的眼光思考事物。霍伊尔一直发表作品直到生命尽头，Mathematics of evolution于1999年问世，A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality（与G Burbidge和Narlikar合写）于2000年出版。

霍伊尔获得过许多荣誉。他于1972年被封为爵士。他当选为许多科学院和学术团体成员，包括伦敦皇家学会（1957年）、美国国家科学院（1969年）、美国哲学会（1980年）、American Academy of Arts and Science（1964年）和爱尔兰皇家科学院（1977年）。他获得过许多荣誉，包括：1968年联合国卡林加奖、1968年皇家天文学会金质奖章、1970年太平洋天文学会布鲁斯奖章、1974年皇家学会皇家奖章、达格·哈马舍尔德金质奖章、卡尔·史瓦西奖章、1994年巴尔赞奖，以及1997年由瑞典皇家科学院颁发的克拉福德奖。他因这类奖项而获得的表彰中，典型的是皇家奖章的表彰，其中写道，他的——

……大量涌现的思想立刻被公认为对天文学家普遍具有挑战性……他对天文科学的普及值得热烈赞扬，因为其描述风格以及成功传达出的对其主题的热情。

Wickramasinghe在[7]中写道：——

……霍伊尔试图回答科学中一些最重大的问题：宇宙是如何起源的？生命是如何开始的？行星、恒星和星系的最终命运是什么？他往往在最意想不到的地方发现这些问题的答案。例如，他发现恒星如何演化的秘密在于碳核的某种性质，这种性质（一种共振）直到霍伊尔本人指出其绝对必要性之后才被发现。

Fred believed that, as a general rule, solutions to major unsolved problems had to be sought by exploring radical hypotheses, whilst at the same time not deviating from well-attested scientific tools and methods. ...

霍伊尔不尊重科学学科之间的界限，这些界限是人为的社会建构，常常妨碍对宇宙的正确理解。他会说，宇宙不尊重物理学、化学和生物学之间的差异，而他在天文学领域的职业生涯逐渐涵盖了所有这些学科。

马丁·里斯写了这篇悼词：-

霍伊尔对恒星、核合成和大尺度宇宙的持久洞见，位列20世纪天体物理学最伟大的成就之中。此外，他的理论总是富有启发性，即使后来被证明是暂时的。不仅同事和学生，还有更广泛的通过他的演讲和著作了解他的群体，都将怀着感激之情铭记他。

Fred Hoyle's parents were Ben Hoyle and Mabel Pickard. Mabel's father had died when she was a small child. As a young girl she had worked in a mill in Bingley and had saved up enough money to study music at the Royal Academy of Music in London. After training there she decided not to perform but she taught music in schools before marrying Ben. Like Mabel, Ben had worked in a mill. He had been forced to leave school at the age of eleven since his family were too poor to support his education any longer.

Fred's parents bought 4 Milnerfield Villas on the outskirts of the village of Gilstead in West Yorkshire in 1910 and they were living there when World War I broke out in 1914. Their first child was Fred who was born at 4 Milnerfield Villas just before his father was conscripted into the British army, choosing to join the Machine Gun Corps. Quite why he chose this is unclear for the chances of survival were extremely slim and one might have thought that, with a wife and young child, he would have tried to maximise his chances. Obviously he did not think in this way, and against all the odds he survived the war. It was an extremely difficult time for Fred's mother who had to bring up her young child in difficult circumstances, living in continual fear that she would receive a letter telling her that her husband had been killed. Mabel earned a little money by playing the piano for the silent films in Bingley cinema. She also provided Fred with his early education, in particular teaching him numbers.

After World War I ended Ben returned to civilian life and he set up a cloth business (particularly dealing in wool) in Bradford, the nearest large town. At first the business did well and in 1920 it was decided to send Fred to a small private school. However there was a sharp downturn in business in general in 1921 and by the time that Fred started school his father's cloth business was suffering badly. The start of Fred's school education marked the beginning of a difficult time [2]:-

Between the ages of five and nine, I was perpetually at war with the educational system. My father always deferred to my mother's judgement in the several crises of my early educational career, because she had been a schoolteacher herself ... events would suggest that my mother was unreasonably tolerant of my obduracy. But, precisely because she had been a teacher herself, my mother could see that I made the best steps when I was left alone.

Fred only attended the private school for a few weeks in July 1921 before his father decided to temporarily give up his failing cloth business and move to Rayleigh in Essex. There Fred entered a school near Thundersley and immediately made friends with a classmate. The pair worked out a way to play truant but before they had much chance to try their scheme out Fred's family returned to Gilstead in November 1921 on hearing that there were problems with the people to whom they had let their house. Back home, Fred was returned to his first school in January 1922:-

I returned to the same private school as before, but I returned no longer an innocent child prepared to have irrelevant knowledge poured into my head by the old beldame who ran the place.

In March Fred put his truancy scheme into practice and while his parents believed he was at school, the school believed that he was ill at home. After a couple of months his parents found out what was going on, but he was allowed to choose a new school instead of returning. He decided to attend Morning Road School in Bingley but there he performed rather poorly in tests that were carried out. This was hardly surprising since he had avoided school most of the time up till then, and soon he was avoiding school again partly through genuine illness and partly through pretending to be ill during the winter of 1923-24.

Despite his attempts to avoid formal education Hoyle did show interest in educating himself. He read a chemistry book which belonged to his father and found an interest in the subject which would last a lifetime. However problems at Morning Road School prompted another move and he began to attend Eldwick school from September 1924. After Hoyle narrowly missed out on a scholarship for grammar school, an appeal was entered and he scraped through beginning his studies at Bingley Grammar School in September 1926. His war with the education system had ended, and although there were still many educational problems ahead, he now approached education with a much more positive attitude.

In 1927 Bingley town library acquired a copy of Eddington's Stars and Atoms and Hoyle read it avidly. By the end of his first year at the Grammar School, he had progressed from his entry position of 16th in the class to top the class. His interest in chemistry continued and as he neared the end of his school career he decided to go to Leeds University to study chemistry there. Taking the scholarship examinations in September 1932 he narrowly missed out. Unable to study at university without a scholarship, he returned to Bingley Grammar School but instead of working steadily through the year with the aim of gaining a scholarship to Leeds at the second attempt, Hoyle decided to aim at a Cambridge University Scholarship. It was an ambitious scheme but one which he felt would at least give him practice at taking such examinations.

Bingley Grammar School did not really have the teaching resources to bring Hoyle rapidly up to Cambridge Scholarship standard, but the mathematics teacher did his very best and gave him lessons in his own home. Hoyle sat the scholarship examinations in Emmanuel College Cambridge in December 1932:-

If a miracle happened and I won something in Cambridge, well and good. I would be glad to accept it, but my real aim ... was to prove to myself that the efforts of the past three months had really improved my standards.

Hoyle's performance was good in physics and chemistry but, as he expected, his preparation for mathematics had been weak and the mathematics paper dragged him down. He missed the scholarship standard but decided to take the scholarship examinations at Pembroke College, Cambridge in March 1933. This time his performance was better and he did make the scholarship standard, but the College did not have scholarships for everyone who made the standard, and again Hoyle missed out. However, he could now get into Cambridge by winning a scholarship in the Yorkshire scholarship competition and he was successful in this in the summer of 1933, with now mathematics as his best subject.

In the autumn of 1933 Hoyle entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, intending to read for a degree in science. His tutor was a mathematician, P W Wood, who told him at their first meeting that his mathematics was not good enough to read for a degree in science so he advised that Hoyle take Part I of the Mathematical Tripos which would put him in a good position to study science after that with a better grounding in mathematics. So Hoyle embarked on the one year mathematics course, entering at the bottom level of the slow stream. His aim was to get himself into the middle of the slow stream by the time he took Part I of the Mathematical Tripos and indeed he achieved better than this for he was in the top quarter of this slow stream by the end of year one.

Having achieved his aim in mathematics, it would have been natural for Hoyle to move into the science course as he had intended. However, he was always one to rise to a challenge and having progressed so well it was natural for him to wonder how much higher he could climb in mathematics. There was another argument which told him to carry on with mathematics which was that the great Cambridge scientists like Newton, Maxwell, Kelvin, Eddington and Dirac had all been mathematicians. He decided to carry on and entered his second year of study of mathematics at the bottom of the fast stream. Again he progressed well and ended the year well into the top half of the class.

Hoyle was taught by some outstanding people while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. For example Born taught him quantum mechanics, Eddington taught him general relativity, and he was also taught by Dirac. He was placed in the top ten when he took the Mathematical Tripos in 1936 and was awarded the Mayhew Prize as the best student in applied mathematics. Continuing to study at Cambridge, his research was supervised by Rudolf Peierls and his career went from strength to strength with the award of the top Smith's Prize in 1938 and then, with Peierls and R H Fowler as referees, he was awarded a prestigious Goldsmith's Exhibition. By this time he was being supervised by Maurice Pryce who took over when Peierls went to the chair of Applied Mathematics at Birmingham. In 1939 Hoyle published a major paper on Quantum electrodynamics in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Although Hoyle had completed the work for a Ph.D. by then he was persuaded by Pryce not to submit (the Ph.D. was new to Cambridge and Pryce did not approve of it).

Although his research was in applied mathematics, it was through the problem of accretion of gas by a large gravitating body which Ray Lyttleton discussed with him that Hoyle's interests turned towards mathematical problems in astronomy. With everything going his way, with election to a Fellowship at St John's in May 1939 for work on beta decay and receiving a highly prestigious award from the Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, his career was suddenly put on hold with the outbreak of World War II [2]:-

War would change everything. It would destroy my comparative affluence, it would swallow my best creative period, just as I was finding my feet in research.

Shortly after the outbreak of war Hoyle married Barbara Clark on 28 December 1939. They had one son Geoffrey (with whom Hoyle would have several joint publications) and one daughter Elizabeth. During the war Hoyle worked for the Admiralty on radar, doing most of this work in Nutbourne. He had little time for research in astronomy but continued collaboration with Lyttleton when it proved possible (one occasion being when he had leave in 1942 for the birth of his first child Geoffrey). During his time with the Admiralty Hoyle worked with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold and he discussed astronomy with them in spare moments. These three would later propose "steady-state cosmology" for which Hoyle is probably best known.

In 1944 he visited the USA because of his work on radar and while there he worked out what was going on with the atomic bomb project. This led him to think of nuclear reactions, and out of this came one of his most important ideas about how the elements were created. He returned to Cambridge at the end of the war as a Junior Lecturer in Mathematics. His teaching duties were to give a geometry course and a statistical mechanics course in 1945-46. In 1945 he published On the integration of the equations determining the structure of a star which discussed the most advantageous way of integrating the equations of stellar equilibrium. In the spring of 1946 he wrote his important paper which developed from the ideas he had about the creation of the elements The Synthesis of the Elements from Hydrogen which appeared in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

After three years as a Junior Lecturer in Mathematics, Hoyle was promoted to Lecturer in Mathematics at Cambridge and given tenure. He stopped teaching geometry, teaching instead courses on Electricity and Magnetism, and on Thermodynamics. His range of publications broadened with works on many different topics and at many different levels. In 1948 he published two papers on steady-state cosmology. His first move into explaining science to a general audience came in 1950. He broadcast five astronomy lectures on the Third Programme (now called Radio 3). These were extremely popular and were often repeated, with versions being broadcast in the United States and a book Nature of the Universe being published based on the lectures. It was in the last of these five lectures that Hoyle coined the phrase "Big Bang" for the creation of the universe. Although now accepted by most scientists, the term was actually meant to be a scornful description of the creation theory which Hoyle did not accept.

In 1957 Hoyle published his first science fiction novel The Black Cloud which achieved much praise and has since become a classic (about a dozen of his 40 books have been on science fiction) [1]:-

... he wrote [science fiction] successfully for more than three decades, winning a devoted following. His most famous novel was 'October The First Is Too Late', in which Britain and Hawaii remain in 1966, the Americas are switched back to the 15th century and the Soviet Union exists in a future time when the surface of the Earth is a plate of glass.

Hoyle also wrote the television serial 'A for Andromeda' and the children's play' Rockets in Ursa Major'. When this was performed in 1962 at the Mermaid Theatre, one critic wrote: "Seldom can scientific mumbo-jumbo have sounded so convincing." This writing, Hoyle believed, complemented his serious work, in the middle of which he would stop to indulge in what he called "whimsical fantasies." He was convinced that really important discoveries were most likely to come from an exercise of creative imagination.

He became Plumian Professor of Astrophysics and Natural Philosophy on 1 October 1958 after Harold Jeffreys retired, a position which he held until he resigned in 1972. During his tenure of the chair continued to publish many important works such as his collaborative work with William Fowler, Nuclear cosmochronology published in 1960 in the Annals of Physics which described how the observed ratios of the abundance of different isotopes of uranium and thorium can be used to determine a cosmical time-scale. In 1966 Hoyle founded the renowned Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge and was its Director until 1972.

The events leading up to Hoyle's resignation from Cambridge in 1972 are recounted in [2]. He explained his reasons in a letter to Lovell (see [5]):-

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.

Following this he made his home in the Lake District but he continued to come up with interesting, and often unconventional, theories such as those concerning Stonehenge, panspermia (that the origin of life on Earth must have involved cells which arrived from space), Darwinism, palaeontology, and viruses from space. I [EFR] was lucky enough to hear Hoyle speak about his theory that Stonehenge was built as an eclipse predictor. It was an inspiring talk which, like so much of Hoyle's work, really made one think about things in a new light. Hoyle continued to publish up to the end of his life with Mathematics of evolution appearing in 1999 and A Different Approach to Cosmology: From a Static Universe through the Big Bang towards Reality (written jointly with G Burbidge and Narlikar) being published in 2000.

Hoyle received many honours. He was knighted in 1972. He was elected to many academies and learned societies including the Royal Society of London (1957), the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (1969), the American Philosophical Society (1980), the American Academy of Arts and Science (1964), and the Royal Irish Academy (1977). He received many honours including: the United Nations Kalinga Prize in 1968, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1968, the Bruce Medal from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1970, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1974, the Dag Hammarskjöld Gold Medal, the Karl Schwartzchild Medal, the Balzan Prize in 1994, and the Crafoord Prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1997. Typical of the citations he received for such awards was that of the Royal Medal which states that his:-

... enormous output of ideas are immediately recognised as challenging to astronomers generally... his popularisation of astronomical science can be warmly commended for the descriptive style used and the feeling of enthusiasm about his subject which they succeed in conveying.

Wickramasinghe writes in [7]:-

... Hoyle sought to answer some of the biggest questions in science: How did the Universe originate? How did life begin? What are the eventual fates of planets, stars and galaxies? More often than not he discovered answers to such questions in the most unsuspected places. For instance he discovered that the secret of how stars evolve lay in a certain property of the carbon nucleus, a property (a resonance) that was not discovered until Fred himself had pointed to its absolute necessity.

Fred believed that, as a general rule, solutions to major unsolved problems had to be sought by exploring radical hypotheses, whilst at the same time not deviating from well-attested scientific tools and methods. ...

Fred Hoyle had no respect for the boundaries between scientific disciplines which were artificial social constructs that often stood in the way of a proper comprehension of the cosmos. The Universe does not respect the differences between physics, chemistry and biology, he would say, and his career in astronomy progressively embraced all these disciplines.

Martin Rees has written this tribute:-

Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th -century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient. He will be remembered with fond gratitude not only by colleagues and students, but by a much wider community who knew him through his talks and writings.