Sir Fred Hoyle, Astronomer, 86

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

Wednesday August 22 5:48 AM ET 

Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle Dies

By ROBERT BARR, Associated Press Writer 

LONDON (AP) - Sir Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term ``Big
Bang'' but never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe, has
died at age 86. 

Hoyle died Monday in Bournemouth, England, his family said. 

He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast
lectures on ``The Nature of the Universe,'' and he recalled using ``Big
Bang'' for the first time in the last of those talks. But over time, his
belief in a ``steady state'' universe was shared by fewer and fewer
scientists because of new discoveries. 

Hoyle continued to robustly defend his view, and last year published ``A
Different Approach to Cosmology,'' co-authored by Geoffrey Burbidge and
Jayant V. Narlikar. 

Working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle proposed the steady
state theory in the 1940s, arguing that the universe developed in a
process of continuous growth. ``Every cluster of galaxies, every star,
every atom had a beginning, but the universe itself did not,'' said Hoyle,
who graduated from Cambridge University and was professor of astronomy
there from 1958 to 1972. 

Observations by radio astronomy in the 1950s demonstrated that the
universe was expanding faster than Hoyle's theory predicted, giving
credence to the view that the universe began in an explosion of incredibly
dense matter - the theory Hoyle called the ``big bang.'' 

``He coined that phrase in fact as a denigration for the conventional
wisdom,'' said Hoyle's associate, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe of
University College, Wales. 

``And it was his belief, an it is also my belief, that the standard 'Big
Bang' theory which says that everything began at a definite moment in time
and that there was nothing before that, this has to be essentially wrong,
and that the universe has an infinite age and an infinite extent in
space,'' Wickramasinghe said Wednesday on British Broadcasting
Corp. radio. 

In the 1950s, Hoyle worked with Fulbright scholar William Fowler and
Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge to demonstrate that chemical elements
heavier than helium were the product of nuclear reactions inside
stars. They published ``Synthesis of the Elements in Stars'' in 1957. 

Fowler, then at California Institute of Technology, shared the Nobel Prize
for physics in 1983 with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar of the University of
Chicago for their work on the creation of chemical elements. Fowler, in
his autobiography for the prize, credited Hoyle as one of the great
influences in his life. 

With Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the theory that life - and some
diseases including AIDS (news - web sites) - reached earth from
space. Their publications included ``Diseases from Space'' (1979), and
``Space Travelers: The Origins of Life'' (1980). 

Hoyle also wrote science fiction, including ``The Black Cloud''
(1957) about an intelligent cloud around the sun which caused an ice age,
and ``A for Andromeda'' (1962) about aliens instructing human on building
a destructive machine. 

Hoyle also was a staff member of the Mount Wilson and Palomar
Observatories in 1957-62, visiting professors at California Institute of
Technology in 1953 and 1954, and professor of astronomy at Cornell
University in 1972-78. 

He is survived by his wife, a son and a daughter. Funeral arrangements
were not immediately announced. 



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This mailing list is brought to you by Slick.ORG at http://www.slick.org
to remove yourself from the list, send e-mail to majordomo@slick.org
and include the words "unsubscribe deathwatch" in the message (not in the
subject).  For web-based help, go to:

http://www.slick.org/cgi-bin/majordomo

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *