Todd Whitcombe, in his recent column about Albert Einstein, spoiled what might have been a good article by slightly demeaning another of the 20th century’s great thinkers, Fred Hoyle, with an oblique aspersion that “...Hoyle might not have been a crank.”
Fred Hoyle, as I’m sure Todd Whitcombe knows, was the man who led a small group of experimental and theoretical physicists in one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, determining how the chemical elements in the universe were manufactured in stars in a process known as nucleosynthesis.
Hoyle was an intellectual giant who was not afraid to head off in radical directions that challenged his peers to find better hypotheses.
Some of his ideas that might once have been thought of as crank are now reappearing in different forms.
The current leading theory of cosmology involves an early epoch of inflation that potentially leads to a multiverse of bubble universes in a scenario that, philosophically at least, looks a lot like Hoyle’s Steady State theory; and Hoyle’s idea that life might have originated in comets that I heard him present in a public lecture at the University of Toronto in the 1970s is starting to gain traction with respect to the precursor building blocks of life.
In an epitaph that I wrote for the August 26, 2001 issue of Prince George This Week, I commented: “I don’t think it mattered greatly to Sir Fred Hoyle whether he was ultimately proven right about particular ideas. What seemed to be more important to this respected scientist and free thinker, was the chance to think up wondrous new possibilities, give them a basis for mathematical and scientific credibility, and throw them out to the world to prove or disprove.”
Seven years later in 2008, this Prince George Citizen obituary was deposited in the Fred Hoyle Archive at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, England.
As a footnote to Todd Whitcombe’s story, another paper was recently published that gives a fascinating historical perspective on Einstein and his changing ideas on the origin and expansion of the universe. It can be accessed free at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.2763
Mike Nash
Prince George
