This is the story of the author''s unique scientific journey with one of the most remarkable men of 20th century science. The journey begins in Sri Lanka, the author''s native country, with his childhood acquaintance with Fred Hoyle''s writings. The action then moves to Cambridge, where the famous HoyleOCoWickramasinghe collaborations begin. A research programme which was started in 1962 on the carbonaceous nature of interstellar dust leads, over the next two decades, to developments that are continued in both Cambridge and Cardiff. These developments prompt Hoyle and the author to postulate the organic theory of cosmic dust (which is now generally accepted), and then to challenge one of the most cherished paradigms of contemporary science OCo the theory that life originated on Earth in a warm primordial soup.This new edition examines the many scientific developments that have transpired since the first edition was published. The discovery of bacteria in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, biological signatures in meteorites, spectroscopy of high-z galaxies and more all mesh with many of the ideas that had their origin in the first edition. Pushing into the future, the updated text examines the many experiments and probes currently operating or planned that will shed more light on the theory of planetary panspermia. A Journey with Fred Hoyle is an intriguing book that delineates the progress of a collaboration spanning 40 years, through a sequence of personal reflections, anecdotes and reminiscences.

This is the story of the author's unique scientific journey with one of the most remarkable men of 20th century science. The journey begins in Sri Lanka, the author's native country, with his childhood acquaintance with Fred Hoyle's writings. The action then moves to Cambridge, where the famous Hoyle-Wickramasinghe collaborations begin. A research programme which was started in 1962 on the carbonaceous nature of interstellar dust leads, over the next two decades, to developments that are continued in both Cambridge and Cardiff. These developments prompt Hoyle and the author to postulate the organic theory of cosmic dust (which is now generally accepted), and then to challenge one of the most cherished paradigms of contemporary science — the theory that life originated on Earth in a warm primordial soup.This new edition examines the many scientific developments that have transpired since the first edition was published. The discovery of bacteria in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, biological signatures in meteorites, spectroscopy of high-z galaxies and more all mesh with many of the ideas that had their origin in the first edition. Pushing into the future, the updated text examines the many experiments and probes currently operating or planned that will shed more light on the theory of planetary panspermia. A Journey with Fred Hoyle is an intriguing book that delineates the progress of a collaboration spanning 40 years, through a sequence of personal reflections, anecdotes and reminiscences.

Fred Hoyle was one of the most widely acclaimed and colourful scientists of the twentieth century, a down-to-earth Yorkshireman who combined a brilliant scientific mind with a relish for communication and controversy.Best known for his steady-state theory of cosmology, he described a universe with both an infinite past and an infinite future. He coined the phrase 'big bang' to describe the main competing theory, and sustained a long-running, sometimes ill-tempered, and typically public debate with his scientific rivals. He showed how the elements are formed by nuclear reactions inside stars, and explained how we are therefore all formed from stardust. He also claimed that diseases fall from the sky,attacked Darwinism, and branded the famous fossil of the feathered Archaeopteryx a fake.Throughout his career, Hoyle played a major role in the popularization of science. Through his radio broadcasts and his highly successful science fiction novels he became a household name, though his outspokenness and support for increasingly outlandish causes later in life at times antagonized the scientific community.Jane Gregory builds up a vivid picture of Hoyle's role in the ideas, the organization, and the popularization of astronomy in post-war Britain, and provides a fascinating examination of the relationship between a maverick scientist, the scientific establishment, and the public. Through the life of Hoyle, this book chronicles the triumphs, jealousies, rewards, and feuds of a rapidly developing scientific field, in a narrative animated by a cast of colourful astronomers, keeping secrets, losingtheir tempers, and building their careers here on Earth while contemplating the nature of the stars.

Living material contains about twenty different sorts of atom combined into a set of relatively simple molecules. Astrobiologists tend to believe that abiotic mater ial will give rise to life in any place where these molecules exist in appreciable abundances and where physical conditions approximate to those occurring here on Earth. We think this popular view is wrong, for it is not the existence of the building blocks of life that is crucial but the exceedingly complicated structures in which they are arranged in living forms. The probability of arriving at biologically significant arrangements is so very small that only by calling on the resources of the whole universe does there seem to be any possibility of life originating, a conclusion that requires life on the Earth to be a minute component of a universal system. Some think that the hugely improbable transition from non-living to living mat ter can be achieved by dividing the transition into many small steps, calling on a so-called 'evolutionary' process to bridge the small steps one by one. This claim turns on semantic arguments which seek to replace the probability for the whole chain by the sum of the individual probabilities of the many steps, instead of by their product. This is an error well known to those bookies who are accustomed to taking bets on the stacking of horse races. But we did not begin our investigation from this point of view.

- Gives a unique insight into the minds of two men who challenged one of the most cherished paradigms of modern science - Highlights the personal and social contexts of a major scientific controversy as it developed and was finally resolved - Shows how an idea that was heresy eventually became accepted by the scientific community

A 1959 classic 'hard' science-fiction novel by renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. Tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers - including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly - engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians. In the pacy, engaging style of John Wyndham and John Christopher, with plenty of hard science thrown in to add to the chillingly credible premise (he manages to foretell Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech converters), Hoyle carries you breathlessly through to its thrilling end.

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