Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science , Simon Mitton , Joseph Henry Press, Washington, DC, 2005. $27.95 (401 pp.). ISBN 0-309-09313-9
In June 1967, I was hiking in the mountains of Wester Ross, Scotland. At the end of a long day, my companion and I visited an isolated inn. The landlord confided to us that there was a genius staying there. “He does double integrals,” he quickly added in support of his assessment. This was my first encounter with Fred Hoyle, the subject of Simon Mitton’s Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science.
Hoyle (1915–2001) was an original and a rebel. From his earliest days as a precocious truant from elementary school; through his shaky rise up the academic ranks of Bingley Grammar School and Cambridge University; to his membership of the establishment, which he disliked due to his disposition and Yorkshire upbringing, Hoyle always found a way to be different. In an ironic echo of the cosmological theory he helped to formulate, Hoyle created continuously. His scientific contributions range from Nobel Prize-quality work to the irredeemably embarrassing. He wrote popular books and made radio broadcasts that antagonized his peers and inspired a new generation; he introduced science fiction that embedded serious ideas in breezy yarns; and, perhaps most lasting of all, he created a new approach to addressing the unfolding questions raised by observational astronomy. That approach released astrophysics from the strait-jacket of 19th-century applied mathematics to push the boundaries of quantum mechanics and general relativity into extraterrestrial locales.
The story that Mitton, who knew Hoyle and many of his colleagues, tells is fascinating and has a different vantage point from Hoyle’s own Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist’s Life (U. Science Books, 1994). Hoyle initially applied his considerable formal skills to nuclear physics, working under Rudolf Peierls and under Paul Dirac, who was only too happy not to supervise a student who did not wish to be supervised. He showed his versatility working on the practical problems of wartime radar, all the while pursuing his scientific interests, initially in collaboration with Ray Lyttleton and eventually with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold. The ideas came rapidly over a dizzying range of fields, including interstellar molecular chemistry, stellar evolution, cosmology, and nuclear astrophysics. His work on accretion has proved to be of central importance, although it was irrelevant to its original application—evolution of normal stars; on that topic, he did eventually understand much of what has turned out to be correct.
The steady-state cosmology proposed by Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold, although falsified in the 1960s, contains elements and ideas that resurface in the current standard cosmological model and its extensions; steady-state cosmology also provided just the target radio astronomers needed to develop their techniques. Nuclear astrophysics—usually in the context of a highly productive collaboration with Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and William Fowler and sometimes motivated by mistaken cosmological ideas—yielded the brilliant prediction of a resonance in the formation of carbon from beryllium and helium and a systematic description of a stars’ production of the chemical elements. Early studies of double radio sources, which identified those sources erroneously as “little bangs” of massive stars, nonetheless anticipated several factors that would come into play following the discovery of quasars. Hoyle worked fast and furiously, with friends and against foes, rarely looking back and never intimidated by a puzzle that he found interesting.
Hoyle’s spirit of adventure and quest for discovery emerge clearly in Conflict in the Cosmos. His love of hiking and climbing that started in his graduate-school days led to his climbing all 284 Scottish mountains over 3000 feet. Sad to say, that passion ended during a walk in the Yorkshire moors when, at age 82, Hoyle was probably mugged, fell 300 feet, and spent 12 hours overnight in a stream before being rescued. Miraculously, he survived and recovered most of his faculties.
Hoyle’s comic struggles with the BBC as he developed his radio broadcasts and television dramas are also recounted in the book. In this connection, he recognized the then-unknown actress Julie Christie as a new star, and he chose her for the famous television adaptation, now sadly lost to posterity, of his novel A for Andromeda: A Novel of Tomorrow (Souvenir Press, 1962).
Although he was a poor manager, Hoyle had the vision to found the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge and to promote the Anglo-Australian Telescope in Coonabarabran, Australia, two immensely successful ventures. The first brought him into serious and ultimately destructive conflict with his Cambridge colleagues George Batchelor and Martin Ryle, who were outstanding scientists in their own right. The dispute led to his resignation from Cambridge in 1972. All of those events are recounted in considerable detail, and although that part of the book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the demons that drove Hoyle in the last 30 years of his life, I suspect that many readers will skip it.
What is missing in Mitton’s book is a discussion of a curious circumstance. Since the early 1960s, Cambridge had become an international center for theoretical astrophysics. In many ways, that reputation is Hoyle’s legacy. Led by several of his protégés, such as Dennis Sciama, Leon Mestel, and Roger Tayler, a new constellation of mathematicians and physicists burst upon the scene and started laying the foundations of modern cosmology and relativistic astrophysics. The group included Brandon Carter, Peter Goldreich, Stephen Hawking, Malcolm Longair, Donald Lynden-Bell, Jerry Ostriker, Roger Penrose, Michael Penston, Martin Rees, Peter Scheuer, and Virginia Trimble, along with a new generation of radio observers and a stream of young visitors from around the world. Yet Hoyle, who must have been aware of what they were discovering and its enduring importance, became almost totally disengaged from them and their research. It would be interesting to learn the group’s attitude toward Hoyle then and today.
Was Hoyle a genius, and was his life a triumph or a tragedy? Maybe, in the words of the English writer and politician, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can.” Mitton’s balanced and entertaining biography convinces me to agree with the Wester Ross landlord and provides a clear account of how much of the astrophysics and cosmology that we now take for granted came to be understood.
Roger Blandford is the director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University in California. He was a research student at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy during Fred Hoyle’s directorship from 1970 to 1972.
