Fred Hoyle
Astronomer. For him, life is far too improbable to have arisen by chance: as well believe that a tornado could assemble a Boeing 747 in a scrapyard.
Life
Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was a British astronomer, a professor at Cambridge. With Bondi and Gold he proposed in 1948 the steady-state theory, a rival to the Big Bang, a term he coined on the radio in 1949. He showed how stars make the heavy elements, a major piece of astrophysics. Later in life he argued that life is too improbable to have arisen by chance on Earth and, with Chandra Wickramasinghe, defended an origin from space. He also wrote novels, among them The Black Cloud.
Main works
A popular book presenting steady-state cosmology.
A science-fiction novel in which an interstellar cloud turns out to be intelligent.
With C. Wickramasinghe: life and its evolution would come from space.
Argues that the chance origin of life is absurd and suggests a higher intelligence.
In his own words
« 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. »
« 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. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe infers a "superintellect" that tuned physics, but not the God of any religion.
Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (1983); "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections" (1981)