Fred Hoyle Quotes

#1. I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers.

Fred Hoyle

#2. Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. [Coining the "big bang" expression.]

Fred Hoyle

#3. Words are like harpoons. Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.

Fred Hoyle

#4. Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

Fred Hoyle

#5. The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Fred Hoyle

#6. Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Fred Hoyle

#7. The man who voyages strange seas must of necessity be a little unsure of himself. It is the man with the flashy air of knowing everything, who is always with it, that we should beware of.

Fred Hoyle

#8. The establishment defends itself by complicating everything to the point of incomprehensibility.

Fred Hoyle

#9. Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down

Fred Hoyle

#10. He who lives among dogs must learn to pant.

Fred Hoyle

#11. Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way.

Fred Hoyle

#12. I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon ... Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.

Fred Hoyle

#13. I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.

Fred Hoyle

#14. It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas.

Fred Hoyle

#15. Outstanding examples of genius - a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or a Carl Friedrich Gauss - are markers on the path along which our species appears destined to tread.

Fred Hoyle

#16. The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.

Fred Hoyle

#17. It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.

Fred Hoyle

#18. There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.

Fred Hoyle

#19. Perhaps the most majestic feature of our whole existence is that while our intelligences are powerful enough to penetrate deeply into the evolution of this quite incredible Universe, we still have not the smallest clue to our own fate.

Fred Hoyle

#20. When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.

Fred Hoyle

#21. The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.

Fred Hoyle

#22. I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.

Fred Hoyle

#23. The universe is a put-up job.

Fred Hoyle

#24. It is no more likely that our world has evolved out of chaos than that a hurricane, blowing through a junk yard, should create a Boeing.

Fred Hoyle

#25. There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

Fred Hoyle

#26. Science is prediction, not explanation.

Fred Hoyle

#27. The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the Universe that openly invites the concept of creation.

Fred Hoyle

#28. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

Fred Hoyle

#29. It isn't the Universe that's following our logic, it's we that are constructed in accordance with the logic of the Universe. And that gives what I might call a definition of intelligent life: something that reflects the basic structure of the Universe.

Fred Hoyle

#30. In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.

Fred Hoyle

#31. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.

Fred Hoyle

#32. Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.

Fred Hoyle

#33. It is a mistake to imagine that potentially great men are rare. It is the conditions that permit the promise of greatness to be fulfilled that are rare. What is so difficult to achieve is the cultural background that permits potential greatness to be converted into actual greatness.

Fred Hoyle

#34. Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.

Fred Hoyle

#35. Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

Fred Hoyle

#36. It seems to be a characteristic of all great work that it creators wear a cloak of imprecision.

Fred Hoyle

#37. I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.

Fred Hoyle

#38. The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.

Fred Hoyle

#39. Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.

Fred Hoyle