Here is the cover of my book, with a neat photograph of Fred Hoyle
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Monday 6 December 2010
Fred Hoyle first time he used expression BIG BANG
My biography of the astronomer Fred Hoyle, a life in science, first published in 2005, is being re-issued in February 2011, in paperback, published worldwide by Cambridge University Press. There is an amazon.co.uk page for this book
The recording in which Hoyle introduced the expression Big Bang went on the air at 6.30 p.m. on 28 March 1949. This time the Radio Times gave his affiliation as University Lecturer in Mathematics. In that year, he was one of the very few academics invited to speak on the Third Programme who was not already a full professor.
Before the listeners heard Fred’s gruff voice, a plummy-toned station announcer read the introduction. ‘This is the BBC Third Programme’, he began. ‘In this talk Fred Hoyle gives his reasons for thinking that matter is being created all the time, so that the universe must have had an infinite past and will have an infinite future.’
Hoyle cut to the chase immediately, launching off with, ‘I have reached the conclusion that the universe is in a state of continuous creation.’ He reviewed the state of observational cosmology, frequently using the rhetorical device of posing a question and then answering it, question and answer both of course being phrased suitably to suit his stance.
An obvious problem with a radio lecture is the absence of visual aids. Hoyle went to great lengths to get over technical points with word pictures. He explained the Doppler effect by analogy with the fall in the pitch of the whistle of a receding train. Galaxies in the expanding universe he compared with dots on the surface of a balloon in the process of being inflated, the changing radius of the balloon being a measure of the flow of time. He had a lovely picture for the rate of creation of matter: ‘This means that in a volume equal to a one pint milk bottle about one atom is created in a thousand million years.’
Early in the talk he tackled rival theories of cosmology.
We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements. And to a degree that can hardly be ignored.
Hoyle, the hill climber, positioned himself to insult his colleagues, using a mountaineering analogy.
Investigators of this problem are like a party of mountaineers attempting an unclimbed peak. Previously it seemed as if the main difficulty was to decide between a number of routes, all of which seemed promising lines of ascent. But now we find that each of these routes peters out in seemingly hopeless precipices. A new way must be found.
At this point he included a last minute insertion, jotted on the script:
The new way I am now going to discuss involves the hypothesis that matter is created continually.
As to the method of creation, he invoked for his rapt radio audience, ‘groundwork that has already been prepared by H. Weyl, a German mathematician now resident in the United States’. Hoyle then tells his audience that it was not difficult for him to establish the consequences of the creation theory. The expansion of the universe receives a natural explanation as the receding galaxies move over the horizon (so to speak) while making room for the new matter. And then there is another down-to-Earth analogy: ‘Although no individual person lives more than about seventy years, the human species replaces itself through the births of new individuals replacing the deaths of others.’ And so it appears with the universe!
The recording in which Hoyle introduced the expression Big Bang went on the air at 6.30 p.m. on 28 March 1949. This time the Radio Times gave his affiliation as University Lecturer in Mathematics. In that year, he was one of the very few academics invited to speak on the Third Programme who was not already a full professor.
Before the listeners heard Fred’s gruff voice, a plummy-toned station announcer read the introduction. ‘This is the BBC Third Programme’, he began. ‘In this talk Fred Hoyle gives his reasons for thinking that matter is being created all the time, so that the universe must have had an infinite past and will have an infinite future.’
Hoyle cut to the chase immediately, launching off with, ‘I have reached the conclusion that the universe is in a state of continuous creation.’ He reviewed the state of observational cosmology, frequently using the rhetorical device of posing a question and then answering it, question and answer both of course being phrased suitably to suit his stance.
An obvious problem with a radio lecture is the absence of visual aids. Hoyle went to great lengths to get over technical points with word pictures. He explained the Doppler effect by analogy with the fall in the pitch of the whistle of a receding train. Galaxies in the expanding universe he compared with dots on the surface of a balloon in the process of being inflated, the changing radius of the balloon being a measure of the flow of time. He had a lovely picture for the rate of creation of matter: ‘This means that in a volume equal to a one pint milk bottle about one atom is created in a thousand million years.’
Early in the talk he tackled rival theories of cosmology.
We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. It now turns out that in some respect or other all such theories are in conflict with the observational requirements. And to a degree that can hardly be ignored.
Hoyle, the hill climber, positioned himself to insult his colleagues, using a mountaineering analogy.
Investigators of this problem are like a party of mountaineers attempting an unclimbed peak. Previously it seemed as if the main difficulty was to decide between a number of routes, all of which seemed promising lines of ascent. But now we find that each of these routes peters out in seemingly hopeless precipices. A new way must be found.
At this point he included a last minute insertion, jotted on the script:
The new way I am now going to discuss involves the hypothesis that matter is created continually.
As to the method of creation, he invoked for his rapt radio audience, ‘groundwork that has already been prepared by H. Weyl, a German mathematician now resident in the United States’. Hoyle then tells his audience that it was not difficult for him to establish the consequences of the creation theory. The expansion of the universe receives a natural explanation as the receding galaxies move over the horizon (so to speak) while making room for the new matter. And then there is another down-to-Earth analogy: ‘Although no individual person lives more than about seventy years, the human species replaces itself through the births of new individuals replacing the deaths of others.’ And so it appears with the universe!
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