A Journey with Fred Hoyle

The following sections are included:

• Foreword

• Contents

• Prologue

During the debate on evolution which took place at a meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford, June 1860, Bishop Wilberforce turns to Thomas Huxley: “Sir, is it on your grandfather's or your grandmother's side that you claim descent from a monkey?” Famously Huxley replied that he would sooner have an ape for an ancestor than accept the dogma of the church. This much mythologised altercation took place a year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. Up until this time, the Judeo-Christian account of creation had dominated Western thought and Darwin's impacting new theory posed a significant threat to the Anglican Church, establishing the autonomy of Science. Darwin's theory of evolution grew in strength throughout the early 20th century with expressions of it being evident in literature, philosophy and social policy. Some sectors of the Church were to assimilate the secular aspects of his theory into their doctrines, but others remained staunchly opposed and an undercurrent of dissention remains even in the present day…

In September 1960, I found myself preparing to leave home for the first time. In those days the normal way to travel from Sri Lanka to England was by ship. Although air travel was rapidly coming into fashion it remained a considerably more expensive option reserved mostly for business travellers and the rich. On a warm September evening I sailed away from the port of Colombo aboard the P&O Liner SS Orcades, wistfully watching a palm-fringed coastline recede slowly into the distance. A two week voyage took us through the Suez Canal, via Naples, Gibralter and Marseilles to Southampton. Nowadays such a voyage would be regarded as a luxury cruise. But my enjoyment of this new experience was hindered by sickness due to rough seas. I spent a lot of the journey in my cabin feeling sorry for myself whilst reading and re-reading Fred's Nature of the Universe, a book I still regard as one of the greatest classics of popular science…

Seeing our first paper in print gave me a thrill, even though my own part in the project had turned out to be relatively minor. But although the problem of the polar field was interesting enough in itself, I could not muster enough enthusiasm to think deeply about it. I began to wonder how this problem with its rather limited scope could pan out into a substantial programme of research occupying the full three years of my Commonwealth scholarship…

Little did I know as I travelled back with Fred to Cambridge that our walks in the hills of Cumbria in the autumn of 1961 marked the beginnings of a line of research that would, decades later, lead to a new theory of the origins of life. The “Black Cloud” of Fred's novel seemed destined to spring into life…

Faced with the almost insurmountable difficulty of perceiving how ice grains form in interstellar space we took a different approach to the problem of dust formation in 1962. What if the dust was not made of water ice but of carbon, similar to the particles of soot that were rising into the chimney from the log fire we watched at the Dungeon Ghyll Hotel? In this case the formation of carbon dust could occur at much higher temperatures, perhaps, for instance, in the outer atmospheres or envelopes of some cool stars? Such dust grains would also have the advantage of being able to survive in interstellar regions of much higher temperatures…

After two years of working as a postdoctoral researcher on interstellar grains the time had come to take stock of what had been achieved. When I first started my studies in 1960, interstellar dust was considered to be a barren field for research. To most astronomers the presence of dust was a nuisance, its only effect being to hinder the observations of distant stars. All they needed were simple rules to correct measured intensities of starlight to compensate for the presence of dust, beyond that interest in dust was minimal. In the few years of my research this situation seemed to be changing. Interstellar grains were certainly coming into vogue with new observational opportunities and techniques paving the way to new ideas, and to ambitious programmes of work. It cannot be denied the entry of Fred Hoyle and myself into this field had a part to play in this transformation of attitude…

In the summer of 1967, the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge came into physical existence in a well-equipped open plan building in the midst of a meadow off Madingley Road. It seemed to be strategically placed between two friendly institutions — the Cambridge University Observatories on the one side and the Geophysics Department on the other. Fred's cosmological adversaries at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory were located only a couple of miles away on Madingley Road, but as far as interaction was concerned they may as well have been as far away as the Moon. Martin Ryle and his team were continuing in their single-minded pursuit of disproving Steady State Cosmology. From their studies of the counts radio sources to various intensity levels, they claimed that radio emitting galaxies appeared to be closer together as one goes further back in the Universe, showing that the Universe could not be in a steady state…

Just as I was beginning to feel settled in our life in the UK, racial tensions began to grow on both sides of the Atlantic. On April 11th 1968, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis and a wave of race riots spread across major US cities. Within an amazingly short space of time ripples of racial disquiet reached Britain. On April 21st, Enoch Powell made his historic “rivers of blood” speech. Powell, a distinguished classical scholar, made his point most eloquently: “As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. Like the Romans I see the River Tiber foaming with much blood” He went on to say that Britain must be, “mad, literally mad as a nation to admit 50,000 dependents of immigrants into the country every year”. The present situation he concluded is like a nation “busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. Conservative Party leader Ted Heath was quick to denounce Powell's speech and expel him from the shadow cabinet, but for those of us who were attempting to adopt Britain as our home, these developments were a source of anxiety and insecurity…

I spent most of the summer of 1972 in Sri Lanka with my wife and family. The era of mass communication had not yet dawned — faxes, mails and the internet were nearly two decades away and international dialling was expensive. So this chit of an isle in the Indian Ocean seemed blissfully but strangely remote…

Two years after I began my tenure at University College Cardiff, I succeeded in getting Fred appointed as an Honorary Professor. This meant that he would be a nominal member of my Department and be entitled to use the university as endorsement for his publications. In turn, Cardiff gained much kudos from this link with Fred Hoyle. During the period of 1975–77, Fred spent large chunks of his time in the United States, so that his appearances in Cardiff were rare. Even so, I usually managed to track him down and keep him abreast of our research developments on organic polymers…

Serendip is an ancient name for the island of Sri Lanka and was in use from the 4th Century AD. In the fairy-tale of Horace Walpole (1717–1797), Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes keep making delightful discoveries of things that they were not in quest of. This, according to the Oxford English Dictionary is the origin of the English word serendipity…

I had wondered for a while what astronomical discovery would encourage Fred to take the step from life emerging on a comet out of interstellar prebiotics to fully-fledged microbial life distributed throughout interstellar space. He had now been expounding the former thesis for nearly two years with conviction and much eloquence, and had he stayed with that our fortunes may have turned out differently. Our position of 1977, was after all the standard point of view of the scientific community in 2004, and we may now have been more openly acknowledged as its pioneers…

The conference in Maryland gave me the first direct experience of the power of the opposition that was rallied against us. I formed the impression that nothing will be spared in an attempt to denigrate our work or to stifle its further progress. The hostility was getting steadily worse as the evidence grew in strength. Fred put this cogently in a piece he wrote for our joint book From Grains to Bacteria (University College Press, 1984):

“It is necessary to come now to a curious situation that we think will eventually be of interest to students of scientific methodology. The more precise the correspondences we calculated between our models and the observation, the greater was the measure of opposition we received from individuals, from journals and from funding agencies like SERC. The introduction of polysaccharides, because of their biological association apparently, became a signal for papers to be turned down by journals, and even for the most modest grant applications to be thrown back in our faces by SERC, an organisation which in a time span of no more than a decade and a half managed to go from a beginning of rich promise to one of the outstanding Gilbert-and-Sullivan operattas of the twentieth century…”.

Despite the mounting hostility towards us, we were able to carry on our work whilst maintaining a degree of cheer. This was due to several reasons. There was the fortunate circumstance that the research we were engaged in did not require much in the way of financial support — certainly not remotely like the funding our colleagues used to get from the public purse. Most importantly we had the support of Principal Bill Bevan who from the outset had an instinct that we were on the right track. We could count on him for all our modest financial needs. At a later stage, Bill Bevan introduced us to Gary Weston, Chairman of Associated Foods whose generous support for our work continued well into the 1990's. This latter support was useful, for instance, to provide Fred with his first fax machine to facilitate our communication, and for meeting the escalating costs of our telephone bills. Last but not least, we had the support of our wives. I know that Barbara encouraged Fred to fight in defence of his views as did Priya, who felt we should continue the struggle to win whatever it took!…

With the amount of evidence we now had for an organic composition of interstellar dust we found it exceedingly puzzling to understand the reluctance to accept even this relatively simple fact. Perhaps there was a perception that very much bigger issues were at stake. If the whole of Darwinian evolution was to come under scrutiny there would be a motive to turn away from even the simplest facts that pointed in such a direction. After all the victory of Darwinism over the Judeo Christian view of creation as exemplified in the Huxley–Wilberforce debate was a hard-won affair and the memory of the blood-letting must still linger in our collective consciousness. It is a victory to be cherished at all cost, and smaller truths may need to be sacrificed in the interests of larger perceived goals…

Fred was far from being a religious man, not in the conventional sense at least. His position, as far as I could assess, was that if there were a cosmic creator it would be scarcely conceivable that any of the world's religions would have fully grasped either His intent or His plan. A degree of incompleteness in comprehending such matters must necessarily remain. I believe he kept an open mind, as I did, and regarded “creation”, in some form, as being a valid intellectual position to hold in relation to the origin of life. He was also cynical of the ambivalent scientific attitude that prevailed in relation to this whole question: whilst it was considered untenable for “creation” to be used in connection with life, it was perfectly acceptable to contemplate that an entire Universe, with all its inherent laws, suddenly came into existence some 16 billion years ago, created to all intents and purposes. If Fred and I ever discussed “creation” or a “creator” we did so only as an abstract concept free of any specific Judeo—Christian implications…

It would be difficult to continue my story without reference to a strange development in 1983 when Fred was cheated of a Nobel Prize. There is little doubt, even in the minds of his arch enemies, that his work on the origin of the elements in the 1940's and 1950's constitutes a monumental contribution to science. I have mentioned earlier that theory of nucleogenesis (the synthesis of elements in the hot interiors of stars) was an outstanding scientific landmark of the 1950's, and Fred's role as leader and pioneer of this entire venture is beyond question. Fred's early calculations had shown that in order for carbon to be produced in adequate quantities in stars the nucleus of the carbon atom had to possess an excited state, and precisely this level was later discovered in the laboratory by Willy Fowler and a Bob Whaling. In the further development of the theory he collaborated with Willy Fowler and with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge in the mid-1950's. In their classic paper B²FH the four authors published a comprehensive account of stellar nucleoynthesis that remained a cardinal influence in astronomy over many decades…

Fred's visits to Cardiff were always major family events. During his stay with us he would find time to discuss matters that were far removed from science and as my children grew older they too came to appreciate his rich and diverse company. Fred had an unerring interest in classical music and on some mornings (he was an early riser), I would find him in the living room listening intently to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or Mozart's Death Requiem — music that I recall hearing on so many occasions blaring out from a gramophone at 1 Clarkson Close. He had grown up in the midst of music, his mother being a gifted piano teacher who had studied at the Royal College of Music, and he himself a paid chorister at a local church. Our home in Cardiff too tended to be filled with music as Priya and our three children share a passion for music. Whenever my elder daughter played the piano, Fred would stop whatever he was doing and praise her talents. When at a later date a publisher suggested that she edits our next joint book, Fred readily agreed saying that he would happily entrust such a job to anyone who played the piano so sensitively and so well! The book, however, never materialised…

I should mention that the academic year 1987/1988 turned out to be traumatic for reasons unconnected with our work. University College Cardiff was deemed to be in financial difficulty by the Government and Principal Bill Bevan was forced to resign. Furthermore, University College Cardiff and the neighbouring University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology was forced to form a merged University institution that came into legal existence in 1988 under the name University of Wales College of Cardiff, later to be called Cardiff University. In the process of merger individual departments in the two constituent colleges had also to merge. There were 4 mathematics departments at University College Cardiff and one at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology that were combined into a single School of Mathematics. The large contingent of astronomers in my old Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy were now “displaced persons” and were forced to join a Department of Physics, that later became the Department of Physics and Astronomy. I had a choice: I could have gone over to physics or stayed with mathematics. Fred advised me to stay in the School of Mathematics, which I did. His argument was that there would always be a call for mathematics, whereas if proposed new courses in astronomy somehow failed to catch on, my position in the new outfit may not be so secure…

We did not stall in any of our various projects during the decade 1990–2000, nor did we feel we had come to the end of the road. Barbara's health was giving cause for concern throughout this period so Fred was finding it increasingly diffcult to spend time away from home. Home for the Hoyles was now in Bournemouth, where they had moved from the challenging climes of the Lake District, partly owing to Barbara's health. This meant we saw less of him in Cardiff although our interaction and collaborations continued, by telephone and fax…

The following sections are included:

• Bibliography
  • Technical Papers
  • Books

• Index