Fred Hoyle An observer of the world and a ponderer on its problems ...

Scientific Work

My Image

Estate of Boris Anrep, photo © The National Gallery, London.

Mathematician, physicist, astronomer, cosmologist.

'The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and it has no place in the endeavour of science'. Carl Sagan

In a career spanning over 60 years Hoyle published some 400 research papers. And, when papers and ideas were not accepted for publication by the scientific establishment, they received a platform in preprints or in his books and broadcasts.

'Throughout my life I have had continuing trouble from referees, the bedbugs of the scientific world'. Fred Hoyle

'Undeterred by this rejection, Hoyle found another avenue for publicising his idea: a channel more dramatic than a research paper. He wrote a science fiction novel The Black Cloud in which molecular clouds were described.' Jayant V Narlikar Resonance Oct 2010

Hoyle’s pioneering work on Stellar Evolution developed from his trip to
America in 1944, and, in particular, meetings with Walter Baade and scientists stationed at a nuclear establishment near Montreal.

His first major paper on the subject ‘The Synthesis of the Elements from Hydrogen’ was published in
1946. This formed the inspiration for a number of papers that followed, culminating in
‘Synthesis of the Elements in Stars’, commonly known as B²FH, after the authors Geoffrey Burbidge, Margaret Burbidge, Willy Fowler and Fred Hoyle, published in 1957.

Hoyle received many awards throughout his career. He failed to be awarded a Nobel prize, although his work was certainly embodied in the 1983 prize for physics. The controversy surrounding this omission rumbles on.

Some restitution came in the award of the Crafoord Prize in 1997.