Fred Hoyle Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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
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
We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

Fred Hoyle
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
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
These 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.

Fred Hoyle
Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension...

Fred Hoyle
The aim is to bite good and hard on the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

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
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.

Fred Hoyle
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

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
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
I do not see any sense in continuing to skirmish on a battlefield where I can never hope to win. The Cambridge system is effectively designed to prevent one ever establishing a directed policy — key decisions can be upset by ill-informed and politically motivated committees. To be effective in this system one must for ever be watching one's colleagues, almost like a Robespierre spy system. If one does so, then of course little time is left for any real science.

Fred Hoyle
Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

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
If matters still seem very uncertain it must always be remembered that clearly sign-posted roads are not to be expected at a pioneering frontier.

Fred Hoyle
If there is anything more wonderful than matter in the sheer versatility of its behavior, I have yet to hear tell of it.

Fred Hoyle
Only the biological processes of mutation and natural selection are needed to produce living creatures as we know them. Such creatures are no more than ingenious machines that have evolved as strange by-products in an odd corner of the Universe.

Fred Hoyle
Astronomers seem to live in terror that someday they will discover something important.

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

Fred Hoyle
There is not, and never has been, a human being who was capable of thinking straight, except by checking his thoughts against objective experience.

Fred Hoyle
If there is one thing we can be sure enough of in physics it is that all time exists with equal reality.

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
No literary genius could have harvested a story one-hundredth part as fantastic as the sober facts that have been unearthed by astronomical science.

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

Fred Hoyle
If one is obliged to be efficient about everything the best that can be achieved is a moderate measure of competence.

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