Home Is Where the Wind Blows

Chapters from a cosmologist's life
Fred Hoyle
University Science Books, 1994

Part Two. The Larger World of Science: 1939-1958

17. Brave New World

p 248
One important thing I learned in my psephological studies was that, except in the unlikely event that the votes on the two sides differed by one or less, it didn't matter how you voted.

Part Three. Home Is Where the Wind Blows: 1959-

22. Droll Stories

p 320
In physics, the word “power” has a precise meaning. The word circulates in general use, in politics, in commerce, as if it also had a clear meaning, which it hasn't.

28. A Lucky Ending

p 407
And with a modest degree of creation, the Universe oscillates, but it becomes a little expanded at each oscillation. Broadly speaking, this, I believe, is the path to be followed—at any rate, it is the model best suited to the general time range in which we happen to live. To put it into numbers, each oscillation takes about 40 billion years to complete, 20 billion years from minimum to maximum and 20 billion years back from maximum to minimum. And becoming a little larger at each oscillation, the Universe doubles its scale in about 20 oscillations—which is to say, in about 800 billion years.

p 408

The supposed big bang, on the other hand, is beyond the range of observation, and as the young Paul Dirac used to tell us students in the 1930s, “That which is not observable does not exist.”

p 413

How, in big-bang cosmology, is the microwave background explained? Despite what supporters of big-bang cosmology claim, it is not explained. The supposed explanation is nothing but an entry in the gardener's catalogue of hypotheses that constitutes a theory. Had observation given 27 kelvins instead of 2.7 kelvins for the temperature, then 27 kelvins would have entered in the catalogue.

Essays
Marc Girod