糖心Vlog

Jon Brix

Our current view of the universe has taken millennia to become the unfinished portrait that it is today. We have discovered that it is elegantly predictable, while at the same time, agitatingly uncertain. During its evolution, countless numbers of people have made important contributions to what we believe the overall picture should look like. While many are forgotten, there are some controversial scientists whose ideas and theories are still remembered and examined, even if they have turned out to be confronted with a large amount of opposing evidence that has suggested otherwise. One of these scientists turned out to be a man named Fred Hoyle.

Hoyle was born on June 24, 1915, in Bingley, Yorkshire, England. His dad was a wool merchant, and his mother was a teacher. It is said that by the age of 4, he could multiply numbers all the way up to 12x12, and around the age of ten, he studied stars by reading various books by well known scientists at the time (Liukkonen 2003). Growing up, he attended the local school, and later received a scholarship to Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College due to his exceptional academic performance. In 1936 he received a BA in mathematics from the university, and was elected to a fellowship at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1939 for work on beta decay (Rees, online). He became interested in astrophysics from the help of his friend and colleague Raymond Lyttleton, who persuaded him to focus on that particular discipline rather than plain mathematical physics. They wrote papers together on the accretion of matter and stellar evolution. He later took part in World War II, where he was involved with radar, and it was there where he met Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold. In the free time that they had, the three men would discuss astronomy together (Rees 2001). The biggest idea to come from their collaboration was that of the “steady-state” theory.

Hoyle, Bondi and Gold, expounded this theory of cosmology in 1948 in order to counter the idea of the “big bang”, which was first “introduced in the 1920’s by Georges LeMaitre, a priest and cosmologist. When evolution theory had been a problem for the Catholic Church, the ‘big bang’ was not – partly because it strongly supported the idea of creation” (Liukkonen 2003). Hoyle was actually the person who gave the “big bang” theory its nickname. He mentioned it during a radio interview one time, and it stuck. Bondi’s and Gold’s arguments were more general in nature, but Hoyle’s model was more specific. In it, he introduced a negative pressure C-field into Albert Einstein’s equations (Rees 2001). It was already widely believed at the time that the universe would essentially look the same regardless of what direction you looked at it, which is known as the cosmological principle. But what set Hoyle’s idea apart, was that he believed it looked the same at all times as well, making it eternal (Guth 1997, p.57). This is known as the perfect cosmological principle, and it implies that there never was a “big bang”, no moment of creation, and therefore, no Creator.

Hoyle did not want to believe that the universe was created from a big bang, because that would imply that there was a creator, and to him, that idea wasn’t a possibility becaause he was an atheist. He believed that, “religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves…No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory” (positiveatheism.org). His belief, in his own words, was that “‘every cluster of galaxies, every star, every atom...had a beginning, but the universe, itself, did not’” (Willick 2003). This is why he proposed that the universe has been around forever, and that we were not created from some all powerful deity, but from the right combinations of heavy elements that were fused through the nuclear reactions that take place in the center of stars, a process that he named “nucleosynthesis”.

He conjectured that the heavy elements later got distributed throughout their galaxy through supernova explosions, which he claimed is how stars that are a few times more massive than our own sun, die. Over time, from all of the particles exerting a gravitational force on each other, large clouds of gas that contain the heavy elements along with interstellar dust began to form. Eventually, what was once a small accumulation becomes the f