Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life - Hardcover

Fred Hoyle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 093570227X ISBN 13: 9780935702279

Publisher: University Science Books, 1994

Synopsis

One of this century's most eminent scientist offers a revealing and charming account of his life and work. Mathematician, physicist, astronomer, cosmologist and originator of the term the 'Big Bang'-Sir Fred has always been ready and able to challenge established thinking.

About this title

About the Author

Sir Fred Hoyle was a lecturer in mathematics (1945-1956) and Plumian professor of astronomy and experimental philosophy (1958-1972) at Cambridge.

Reviews

Twentieth-century winds have blown astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle from radar development projects in WW II England to modern cosmology, where his key contributions include naming the Big Bang theory. His memoirs of his early schooling and family life as the son of a Yorkshire wool merchant are as charming as James Herriot's recollections. Hoyle's career, spent mostly at Cambridge University, spans the watershed years of quantum theory in physics and radio astronomy. Ever the reserved English scientist, he raises no more than a bon mot about the exalted company he has kept--Paul Dirac, Sir Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, among them--who comprise the first generation to work under the assumptions of relativity. Although this is mainly a memoir, Hoyle offers some model general science writing about his work on the synthesis of heavy elements in star formation. His modesty and quirky attraction to various anthropic theories have kept him in the background for much of his later career, but on these pages, seen against his own firmament, Hoyle blazes bright, as human being and scientist. Photos. $25,000 ad/promo.
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Hoyle (The Intelligent Universe, 1983, etc.) is never dull. You may disagree with his latest theories; you may take issue with his interpretation of past events; but he is ever the lively protagonist here, telling the story of a life in which he has seen much of the world and discoursed with the prime movers of science. As if to underscore that the child is father to the man, Hoyle begins his story with details of growing up poor in rural Yorkshire and how he did his best to avoid school while at the same time teaching himself to read and do arithmetic. In due course he won scholarships that eventually led to Cambridge, where he stayed for 39 years, accumulating wonderful stories and numerous colleagues who were the movers and shakers of 20th-century theoretical physics. Hoyle describes the chain of events that led to his major contributions in nucleosynthesis--how the elements are formed in stars and supernovas. He also provides details of his radar work in WW II and later snippets about his mathematical creativity, but these are rather compressed in relation to the life. Hoyle eventually resigned from the chair in astronomy he held because of a dispute that had become a bureaucratic nightmare. By this time the reader is well prepared for the backbiting and partisanship that make government science and academic politics anything but genteel and impartial, and Hoyle is ever ready to tell it like it is. He reserves for a final chapter his cosmology theory, which is no surprise: Down with the Big Bang and up with the continuous creation, with the universe perhaps as the manifestation of God. For readers of Hoyle's science fiction, there is an echo of Consciousness and the Black Cloud about it all...and just as controversial. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In an autobiography of singular depth, a renowned theoretical physicist recounts his efforts to wrest from the universe its profoundest secrets. Although he was born to a family of modest means--he was the son of a World War I machine gunner--Hoyle so distinguished himself at Cambridge for his mathematical prowess that he was subsequently awarded a high place within the British scientific establishment. Hoyle pursued research interests that brought him in contact with such giants as Eddington, Dirac, and Hubble in Britain and Fermi, Chandra, and Pauli abroad. But it was Hoyle's willingness to stand apart from the scientific establishment, his intellectual daring, that enabled him to fathom supernovas and to predict the existence of quasars. Perhaps because he achieved his breakthroughs in cosmology, the most expansive of the sciences, the author has maintained a refreshingly broad perspective: his memoirs are rich with literary allusion, political shrewdness, and philosophical reflection. Concluding with metaphysical speculations that will challenge the atheist and the fundamentalist alike, Hoyle invites his readers to reassess the meaning of life in an expanding cosmos. Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: University Science Books
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 093570227X
• ISBN 13: 9780935702279
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 443