Hoyle in one

[AntonioLao]

Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) carried a lost cause to the end of his life. He was the one and only cosmologists who actively believed a steady state universe: no expansion, no acceleration, and no big band singularity.

In the 1930s, as a postgraduate at Cambridge University, he chose to not complete all the requirements for a PhD because he was broke and the idea of tax advantages by remaining a student. Nonetheless, he was a Fellow of St John’s College by 1939. During World War II, he worked on radar for the British Admiralty. After the war, he returned to Cambridge and lectured in mathematics.

His one in a lifetime achievement began in the 1950s. This was on the origin of carbon based organic compounds essential for all life: plants and animals.
He believed that these must be manufactured inside stars when 3 Helium-4 nuclei undergo fusion into an excited state of Carbon-12. During the 1950s, no one had any reason to believe that such an excited quantum state could exist. However, he persuaded his friend Bill Fowler (1911-1995) to do an experiment to find this needle in a haystack state of Carbon-12. The outcomes of the experiment vindicated Hoyle’s hypothesis. He was knighted in 1972. But as a big bang dissent he did not share with Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) and Fowler the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics. Chandrasekhar’s was his works on the hydrodynamic stability of black holes and Fowler’s was the experiment that proved Hoyle’s in one verification of stellar origin of all life.

[mkirkpatrick]

A man of vision,and insight,a rare commodity these days!




regards michael.

[AntonioLao]

A man of vision,and insight,a rare commodity these days

I think what he was implying is that we are radioactive beings but of very long lifetime.