SIR FRED HOYLE
Born: 24 June 1915 in Bingley, Yorkshire, England
Died: 20 Aug 2001 in Bournemouth, England
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 south 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.
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
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)
... 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. 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.
Born: 24 June 1915 in Bingley, Yorkshire, England
Died: 20 Aug 2001 in Bournemouth, England
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 south 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.
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
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)
... 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. 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.