P EOPLE
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…’
Fred Hoyle, who passed away on 20 August
2001, was one of the most important
figures in 20th century physics and astron-
omy. He is most famous for coining the
term ‘Big Bang’ in a BBC radio broadcast
in 1950, even though the fact that his com-
ment 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 ori-
gin 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 physi-
cist 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 con-
tinuous 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
498 P H YSI C S E D U C AT I O N
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
Sir Fred Hoyle, post-war Britain. His programmes for the
1915–2001 BBC on The Nature of the Universe won
greater audiences than such unlikely rivals
Hoyle argued as Bertrand Russell and Tommy Handley.
that all of the Even today many people recall how they
were affected by listening to these broad-
elements in our casts.
bodies had Hoyle used one of his broadcasts
been formed in to ridicule the hot explosion theory. He
stars that had referred to the idea of a ‘big bang as fanci-
ful’. Unfortunately the name stuck, much
been and gone to Hoyle’s chagrin.
before our solar In the 1950s Hoyle began a fruitful col-
system had laboration with Willy Fowler of the
California Institute of Technology in
even formed. 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.
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 abun-
dances of elements almost exactly corre-
sponded 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 rap-
idly 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 explain-
ing 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 con-
tinued 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
P EOPLE
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.)
Hoyles leaves a Cloud, A for Andromeda and the children’s
legacy not only play Rockets for Ursa Major. He also wrote
a series of popular science books about cos-
in astrophysics mology and astronomy, long before every
but also in the bookshop had a science section.
popularization Many generations of scientists were
and promotion influenced by and benefited from Hoyle and
his work and he leaves a lasting legacy
of science 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
P H YSI C S E D U C AT I O N 499