Fred Hoyle

It has all of these little secrets and ambiguities, but it's all sort of below the text.

But I was thinking about, you know, I try on this podcast and in my writing a lot, sort of like... grasp if there is a sort of like vague thing that science fiction is in a certain period and one thing that it is not right now is enamored of sort of like competence right in this in the way that you get like I was thinking about Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud reading this right where this idea that like if Earth is threatened by a big celestial thing you'll just put a couple astronomers in charge of the government and they'll take care of things right you don't see that kind of work very often anymore

Not in the West.

I mean, the great poet of that in our moment is like Lou Sixson or Sixson Lou, right? The Wandering Earth and the three-body problem, right? Like, surely in the face of a global catastrophe, everybody would simply pull their weight and fix it, right? And he plays with that in different moments in different ways, but...

And actually, I myself thought about this a very long time ago when I was at school.

I was a fan of an astronomer called Fred Hoyle, largely forgotten today.

But Fred Hoyle was really one of the top astronomers at the time, and he wrote popular books on astronomy.

I remember I got the school science prize, and my prize was Frontiers of Astronomy by Fred Hoyle.

He also wrote science fiction, and he wrote a book called The Black Cloud.

I don't know if you've ever read it.

And they gradually come to the conclusion that this plasma cloud is intelligent, that it has a mind, it has a consciousness, and they can interact with it through electromagnetic impulses.

And finally, they managed to persuade it to go away and solve the problem.

improbable.

I think a very good example of a reaction to an early form of fine-tuning was Sir Fred Hoyle, who was an atheist.

and who was my examiner at Cambridge.

And he predicted the resonance in carbon, which was later discovered.

And their concern is primarily with comets.

And they include the late Sir Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickform Singh, Victor Kluge, Bill Napier, and many others.

They point out that there's an ancient fear of comets.

Every culture feared comets.

Now, what happened to end the Younger Dryas so abruptly 11,600 years ago? We're beginning to understand why it started, but the science on the end of the Younger Dryas is not nearly as advanced as the science on the beginning.

And I'm really open to a number of possibilities, including the possibility raised by my colleague, Professor Robert Schock, of solar flares being involved in this.

But interestingly, back in the early 1980s, Sir Fred Hoyle, professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, was intrigued by that sudden temperature rise at the end of the Younger Dryads.

And he proposed, I think, presciently, what could have caused it.

So I said Freeman Dyson before, it almost seems like the universe knew we were coming.

And Fred Hoyle, one of the sort of great astrophysicists of the 20th century, saying, it looks like someone's been monkeying with the physics here.

That...

If you take the universe just is and that's all there is to it approach, our universe just looks unbelievably unlikely, right? The typical universe is just dead.

It's very unlikely that this thing popped into existence in the same way as a rock did.

It could have, but the chances are so astronomically small, it's much more likely to have been designed by someone.

Yes, but there was a similar argument by Fred Hoyle who Luke mentioned about when you look at the nature of the universe, it's like imagining a whirlwind tore through a junkyard and constructed a 747, right? What you expect to be constructed out of it is basically just a rearranged junkyard rather than an intricate machine that can fly.

But it did end up being a 747, so why aren't you at least someone who believes in an intelligent first creator?

We discussed this when we talked about creation.

One of the scientists, Fred Hoyle, he said he put together hordes and hordes of monkeys typing away on typewriters, thousands and thousands of typewriters, and you give them thousands and thousands of years, they will never come up with Shakespeare.

Tell me the universe came about by chance.

Tell me that Shakespeare was written by chance.

I don't think so.

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term Big Bang, said that his atheism was greatly shaken by these developments.

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Paul Davies, has said that the appearance of design is overwhelming.

Even the late Christopher Hitchens, one of atheism's most aggressive proponents, conceded that without question the fine-tuning argument was the most powerful argument of the other side.

We discussed this when we talked about creation.

One of the scientists, Fred Hoyle, he said he put together hordes and hordes of monkeys typing away on typewriters, thousands and thousands of typewriters, and you give them thousands and thousands of years, they will never come up with Shakespeare.

Tell me the universe came about by chance.

Tell me that Shakespeare was written by chance.

But if I step back and I try to look into this in the context of matter and this whole idea that it from bit, do you think that, uh, information plays a central r- role in the construction of this universe as a whole or perhaps the matter that is there in the universe? Do you have a view on that?

Well, I do have a view, um, uh, but it, it may be a biased view because, uh, uh, I've reached that stage in my career when I look back and I think, "Well, how did I get where I am, uh, and who might I thank for that?" And there've been a number of, uh, scientists who have been sort of mentors or inspiration, sources of inspiration to me, and the first of these was Fred Hoyle, the British cosmologist who gave me my first job in Cambridge in the 1970s.

Um, and, uh, the other was Freeman Dyson, a, a sort of like, uh, part crazy, uh, futurist, uh, with all sorts of wonderful, um, and highly speculative ideas, but also some, some very, very sound contributions to theoretical physics.

And the third of these was John Wheeler, who I got to, to know very well, and it was, uh, Wheeler who coined this term it from bit.