Philip Stewart

"Imagine trying to tell ordinary people about things they have never seen, such as galaxies and hydrogen atoms, without any visual aids. Imagine succeeding not just in telling them but in exciting them. That’s what Fred Hoyle achieved in his radio lectures on The Nature of The Universe in 1950, at a time when there was hardly any television and anyway it was only black and white.

I was eleven years old at the time and had just read H G Wells The War of the Worlds, and I was thrilled by the picture that Fred Hoyle painted, using nothing but his rich Yorkshire voice. Suddenly, Mars seemed to be just down the road and my mind boggled at the talk of billions of light years and trillions of stars. I dreamed of floating endlessly through space and visiting strange worlds, hoping to find out there ‘the cricket team that could beat the Australians’, in Hoyle’s vivid image. Within days I had opened a clay mine in the garden and was busy baking stars and planets in the oven, hanging them on strings under the stairs, from which they crashed to the floor, shattering into myriads of pieces.

Hoyle’s lectures fired me with enthusiasm to become a scientist, and the memory of them coloured my many visits to the Science Exhibition at the Festival of Britain in 1951. One of the first things you saw there was a large mural of the Periodic Table of the elements, painted in vivid colours by the artist Edgar Longman. It was in the form of an elliptical spiral, and it made me think of the spiral galaxies described in the lectures. Indeed, the impression was so strong that I never reconciled myself to the boring version on the wall of the school lab, which had the grace of a pile of bricks. In the end I gave up science subjects, only coming back to them much later when I took a degree in forestry.

Fred Hoyle eventually came back into my life through my teaching of ecology at Oxford. I read his work with Wickramasinghe on the cosmic origin of life. He awakened the old excitement with his suggestion that the whole Universe might be bound together by biological molecules drifting through space. I read his science fiction and bought his ladybird books for my children. I thought it wonderful that this great scientist could also produce charming fiction.

I recently published a wall-chart, Chemical Galaxy, in which I set the series of chemical elements against the background of a starry path wound round in an elliptical spiral. It is an attempt to express visually the union of astronomy and chemistry that Fred Hoyle excited me with all those years ago. In the article that introduced the design, I suggested that one of the next trans-uranian elements should be named Hoylium, in honour of the man whose discovery of the Hoyle Resonance of the carbon nucleus showed how there could be any chemicals at all beyond the lightest ones. I have always felt it shameful that he was not awarded a Nobel Prize, but at least he could be immortalized in the name of an element. And in my imaginary space tours, I fancy that the beings on the surface of neutron stars may be able to dig Hoylium mines. "