Fred Hoyle Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Fred Hoyle
The Universe is everything; both living and inanimate things; both atoms and galaxies; and if the spiritual exists as well as the material, of spiritual things also; and if there is a Heaven and a Hell, of Heaven and Hell too; for by its very nature the Universe is the totality of all things.

Fred Hoyle
It is true that we must not accept a theory on the basis of emotional preference but it is not an emotional preference to attempt to establish a theory that would place us in a position to obtain a complete understanding of the Universe. The stakes are high, and win or lose, are worth playing for.

Fred Hoyle
What constitutes proof in one generation is not the same thing as proof in another.

Fred Hoyle
It is almost a matter of principle that in any difficult unsolved problem the right method of attack has not been found; failure to solve important problems is rarely due to the inadequacy in the handling of technical details.

Fred Hoyle
An ultimate theory, like the Holy Grail, is something the physicist must always seek but will never find.

Fred Hoyle
I realized that only in music could I find the answer I was seeking to the questions of the previous evening. Argument I could follow, it weighed with me, yet I could decide nothing from it.

Fred Hoyle
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
The physicist is mainly interested in the detailed structure of the threads in our tapestry. He is less interested in the broad pattern on the tapestry itself. The broadest pattern of all, on the scale of stars and galaxies, is the business of the astronomer.

Fred Hoyle
On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much the less palatable of the two [steady state theory or point source origin theory]. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms.

Fred Hoyle
To the optical astronomer, radio data serves like a good dog on a hunt.

Fred Hoyle
Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate …. It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect … higher intelligences … even to the limit of God … such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.

Fred Hoyle
The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.

Fred Hoyle
Whales can make progress through water either by wagging their tails up and down or from side to side. Light can travel through space in two ways, one like a tail moving up and down and the other like the tail moving from side to side.

Fred Hoyle
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
I wouldn't go into biology if I were starting again now. In twenty years' time it is the biologists who will be working behind barbed wire.

Fred Hoyle
The laws of physics are governed by a process of intellectual natural selection. When they make correct predictions they survive. When they make incorrect predictions they become extinct. Physicists then look for new laws that do not make incorrect predictions.

Fred Hoyle
The astronomer seems at first sight to be the most helpless of all scientists. He cannot experiment with the Universe. It is a significant matter of nomenclature that whereas we speak of experimental work in other sciences we speak of observational work in astronomy.

Fred Hoyle
With so many possible planetary systems, should we not expect inhabited planets to be moving around some of the nearby stars? We certainly should.

Fred Hoyle