Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
Nov 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001phyed..36..498.&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 36, Issue 6, pp. 498-499 (2001).
Physics
Physics Education
Scientific paper
Sir Fred Hoyle, 1915 2001
Astronomer, author and popularizer of science
'There is a coherent plan in the universe, but I don't know what it's a plan for...' Sir Fred Hoyle, 1915 2001
Fred Hoyle, who passed away on 20 August 2001, was one of the most important figures in 20th century physics and astronomy. He is most famous for coining the term 'Big Bang' in a BBC radio broadcast in 1950, even though the fact that his comment was an insult seems to have been lost in time. He left behind a lasting body of work, foremost of which is his work with Willy Fowler and the Burbidges on the origin of the chemical elements in the 1950s. Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, speaking to Physics Education said 'Hoyle was a great astrophysicist, who from 1945 to 1970 contributed more good creative ideas than anyone else in the world.'
Fred Hoyle was born at Bingley in the West Riding of Yorkshire in June 1915. A precocious child who knew his 12 times table aged 4 and could navigate by the stars before he was 10, he won a scholarship to Bingley Grammar School and from there moved on to Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Hoyle excelled at mathematics and won several prizes before he graduated in 1936. He became fascinated by the work of physicist Rudolf Peierls, who became his PhD supervisor, before being replaced by Maurice Pryce when Peierls departed for Birmingham. Hoyle became a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge in 1939.
During the war Hoyle worked at an Admiralty radar establishment on the south coast and met Eastern European émigrés Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi. During this time they developed the theory of continuous creation known as the Steady State Theory of the universe. This states that matter is continuously created at a small rate to replace the matter lost to the expanding universe. Around this same time Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe and George Gamow postulated the idea of a Universe forged in a hot explosion. After the war Hoyle returned to Cambridge, but kept in close contact with his collaborators.
Fred Hoyle was a canny and media-savvy scientist, 40 years before such things were recognized. Martin Rees said after his death '[He] also had other dimensions to his career, his inventiveness and skill as a communicator'. It is hard to realize now the impact that Hoyle's broadcasts had in post-war Britain. His programmes for the BBC on The Nature of the Universe won greater audiences than such unlikely rivals as Bertrand Russell and Tommy Handley. Even today many people recall how they were affected by listening to these broadcasts.
Hoyle used one of his broadcasts to ridicule the hot explosion theory. He referred to the idea of a 'big bang as fanciful'. Unfortunately the name stuck, much to Hoyle's chagrin.
In the 1950s Hoyle began a fruitful collaboration with Willy Fowler of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Hoyle was interested in the origin of the chemical elements. Hans Bethe, Charles Critchfield and Karl-Frederich von Weizsäcker had calculated in 1939 how stars could turn protons into helium nuclei by nuclear fusion. Part of the Vela supernova remmant, the debris left after the type of massive explosion in which Hoyle predicted that heavy nuclei were formed. (© Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, Anglo-Australian Observatory.)
Building on earlier collaboration with Ed Saltpeter, Hoyle used data supplied by Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and, working with Fowler, began to piece together how the elements were formed.
By looking at very large stars near the end of their lives and examining their chemical composition, they noticed that the abundances of elements almost exactly corresponded to those with a low nuclear capture cross section. Hoyle argued that all of the elements in our bodies had been formed in stars that had been and gone before our solar system had even formed. In their classic paper the elements are produced by three basic methods. The α-process, which formed elements up to and including iron using building blocks of protons, alpha particles and light elements like carbon and nitrogen. The s-process, which involved the slow capture of neutrons and then β-decay to form protons. This formed heavy elements. The r-process, where neutrons are rapidly captured by nuclei in supernovae.
This mammoth paper was a milestone in our understanding of stars and of the origin of all the elements from which we are made. Later work has tidied up loose ends and explained a few anomalies but the bulk of the work stands today.
Fowler received the Nobel Prize for this (and other) work in 1983 and there was widespread disbelief when Hoyle did not share the prize with him.
In the early 1960s Hoyle and Roger Tayler produced a seminal paper explaining how the overly large abundance of helium (there is too much about to have been formed exclusively in stars) could be explained by its nucleosynthesis in the early universe. Ironically this is now one of the key pieces of evidence for a Big Bang.
As the evidence for the Big Bang grew Hoyle never accepted the defeat of the Steady State Theory, and long after the Big Bang became conventional wisdom he continued to pick and probe at its defects.
In 1972, following an acrimonious dispute with the Cambridge University authorities, he tendered his resignation, retiring to first the Lake District and then the South Coast. Hoyle, by this time knighted, was held in great esteem and held many honorary research professorships, both in the UK and in the USA, notably at Caltech and Cornell.
Hoyle became increasingly involved in diverse interests away from his previous work. He wrote how life had been (and still is) transported to Earth on comets. This modern version of the Panspermia theory was one of a number of projects undertaken with Chandra Wickramasinge, Professor of Mathematics at University College, Cardiff, a former student of Hoyle's. He also suggested that viral agents were travelling through the atmosphere from space and causing epidemics.
Hoyle also wrote science fiction, which he believed complemented his more serious work. His works included The Black Cloud, A for Andromeda and the children's play Rockets for Ursa Major. He also wrote a series of popular science books about cosmology and astronomy, long before every bookshop had a science section.
Many generations of scientists were influenced by and benefited from Hoyle and his work and he leaves a lasting legacy not only in the field of astrophysics but also in the popularization and promotion of science.
Acknowledgment The author is grateful to the staff of the Royal Astronomical Society Library for their help in finding material, to Martin Rees for finding time to talk at the busy BA Festival and to the late Roger Tayler for teaching me everything I know about the origin of the elements.
References Burbidge E M, Burbidge G R, Fowler W A and Hoyle F 1957 Synthesis of the elements in stars Rev. Mod. Phys. 29 (4) 547 650 Chown M 2000 The Magic Furnance (Vintage) Hoyle F 1987 The Small World of Fred Hoyle (Marcus Joseph) Tayler R 1972 The Origin of the Chemical Elements (Wyndham)
Steven Chapman British Association for the Advancement of Science
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