Fred Hoyle
(Sir Frederick Hoyle)
(1915 - 2001)
British physicist and atronomer,
also well-known for his works of science fiction, an astronomy lecturer
at Cambridge University, best science-fiction writer among scientists of
his generation. He presented many unique theories about space and time
and objects in space. Hoyle devised a structure for a nuclear reaction
inside a star. At the time he announced the theory, he was already ahead
of those arguing to change from hydrogen reactions to helium. Hoyle explained
that the core of the helium atom would burn at a certain temperature and
create an atom with either an oxygen or carbon core. In 1946, Hoyle
proposed that the Sun was initially a binary star. One part of the binary
star exploded, leaving only a planet rich in heavy elements. Hoyle also
proposed that the earliest forms of life were carried through space on
comets and that these primitive forms of life found their way to Earth.
He is probably best known for his support of the steady state cosmology
model. In 1997 the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the Crafoord
Prize designed to honour work in fields that are not eligible for the Nobel
Prize. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, Foreign Associate of the US
National Academy of Sciences, a Vice
President of the Royal Society,
and the President of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was knighted by
Her Majesty the Queen in 1972.
A perfectly timeless universe
is pictured in his outstanding sci-fi novel October the First Is Too
Late (1966).
Quotations from Fred Hoyle's "October the
First Is Too Late":
""You take a number
of radioactive nuclei of a particular kind, the number being chosen so
that there's an even chance of one of them going off in a certain period
of time, say ten seconds. Then for ten seconds you surround them with counters,
or any other detecting device you might like to use. At the end of the
time the question is, has one of them decayed or not. To decide this you
take a look at your counters. The conventional notion is that the state
of the counters decides whether a nucleus has gone off or not....
.... my problem now concerns
an individual case...
It is perfectly possible
to put your counters, or your bubble chamber, your camera, all your gobbledegook
in fact, into your calculations - and we know quite definitely that any
attempt to get a definite answer out of calculation will prove completely
fruitless. The thing that gives the answer isn't the camera or the counter,
it's the actual operation of looking yourself at your equipment. It seems
that only when we ourselves take a subjective decision can we improve our
description of the world, over and above the uncertainty of our theories.
I'm talking about quantum theories now.""
(Fred Hoyle: October
the First Is Too Late, p. 46)
"(John said:) "... the idea
of time as a steady progression from past to future is wrong. I know very
well we feel this way about it subjectivelly. But we're the victims of
a confidence trick. If there's one thing we can be sure about in physics
it is that all times exist with equal reality..."
"...Suppose you have a lot
of pigeon holes, numbered in sequence, one, two, and so on... up to thousands
and millions, and millions of millions, if you like. In fact the sequence
may be infinite both ways, if you prefer."
I said that I didn't mind.
John went on, "All right, let's come now to the contents of the pigeon
holes. Suppose you chose one of them, say the 137th. You find in it a story,
as you might find one of those little slips of paper in a Christmas cracker.
But you also find statements about the stories you'll find in other pigeon
holes. You decide to check up on whether these statements about the stories
in the other pigeon holes are right or not. To your surprise you find the
statements made about earlier pigeon holes, the 136th, the 135th, and so
on, are substantially correct. But when you compare with the pigeon holes
on the other side, the 138th, the 139th, ...you find things aren't so good.
You find a lot of contradictions and discrepancies. This turns out to be
the same wherever you happen to look, in every pigeon hole. The statements
made about pigeon holes on one side are always pretty good, those made
about pigeon holes on the other side are at best diffuse and at worst just
plain wrong. Now let's translate this parable into the time problem. We'll
call the particular pigeon hole, the one you happen to be examining, the
present. The earlier pigeon holes, the ones for which you find substantially
correct statements, are what we will call the past. The later pigeon holes,
the ones for which there isn't too much in the way of correct statements,
we call the future. Let me go on a bit further. What I want to suggest
is that the actual world is very much like this. Instead of pigeon holes
we talk about states."
".... Suppose that in each
of these states your own consciousness is included. As soon as a particular
state is chosen, as soon as an imaginary office worker takes a look at
the contents of a particular pigeon hole, you have the subjective consciousness
of a particular moment, of what you call the present. Think of the clerk
in an office taking a look, first at the contents of one of the pigeon
hole, then at the contents of another. Suppose he does this, not in sequence,
but in any old order. What is the effect on your subjective consciousness?
So far as the clerk himself is concerned, he's jumping about all over the
place. But the strange thing is that your subjective impression is quite
different. You have the impression of time as an ever-rolling stream.""
(dtto, p. 64, 65,
66)
""Doesn't the idea of a sequence
of choices on the part of your clerk itself imply the flow of time? If
it does, the argument gets you nowhere."
"I'm sure it does not. A
sequence is a logical concept in which time doesn't really enter at all.""
(dtto, p. 66)
""... We've got our sequence
of pigeon holes, that's the physical world. We don't think of one pigeon
hole as having any more significance than another... We don't think of
one particular state of the Earth as having any more significance than
any other state of the Earth. We've completely eliminated the bogus idea
of a steady flow of time. Our consciousness corresponds to just where the
light falls, as it dances about among the pigeon holes. It lights up first
one, then another, in some sequence that is quite irrelevant.
Now let's come to the hard
part. What is this light? I'm no longer talking in terms of a clerk in
an office, because I don't want to get bogged down in human images. All
our pigeon holes are in darkness except where the spot of light falls.
What that light consists of, where it comes from, we know nothing. It lies
outside our present-day physics.
You remember I told you that
it's possible to defy our own present-day physical laws and still to make
a clear gain in our assessment of the world. You remember the radioactive
nuclei with the counters surrounding them? We wanted to know whether or
not in a certain period of time a nucleus had undergone decay. I said there
was only one way to find out. By looking. In other words by using the spot
of light in our pigeon hole. My strong hunch is that it's the spot of light
that permits decisions which lie outside the laws of physics. This is why
I'm so sure something else must be involved. It doesn't need to be anything
mystical. It may be subject to precise description, to law and order, the
same as in our ordinary physics. It may only be mysterious because we don't
understand it.""
(dtto, p. 67)
""There's certainly a lot
of things I don't understand. This light of yours, or whatever you like
to call it, how does it decide that you are you and I am me?"
"That could be another illusion.
Look, along one wall of our office we have one complete set of pigeon holes,
all in their nice tidy sequence. Along another wall we have another set
of pigeon holes. Two completely different sets. But there is only one light.
Wherever it happens to be, there is the phenomenon of consciousness. One
set of pigeon holes is what you call you, the other is what I call me.
It would be possible to experience both and never know it. It would be
possible to follow the little patch of light wherever it went. There could
be only one consciousness, although there must certainly be more than one
set of pigeon holes."
I found this a staggering
idea. "If you're right it would be possible to be a million people and
never know it."
"It would be possible to
be much more than that. It would be possible to be every creature on every
system of planets, throughout the universe. My point is that for every
so-called different creature, for every different person, you need a separate
set of pigeon holes. But the consciousness could be the same. There could
even be completely different universes. Go back to my decaying nucleus.
Hook up a bomb which explodes according to whether you have decay of a
nucleus or not. Make the bomb so big that it becomes a dommsday machine.
Let it be capable - if exploded - of wiping out all life on the Earth.
Let the whole thing go for the critical few seconds, you remember we were
considering whether a nucleus would decay in a particular ten seconds?
Do we all survive or don't we?
My guess is that inevitably
we appear to survive, because there is a division, the world divides into
two, into two completely disparate stacks of pigeon holes. In one, a nucleus
undergoes decay, explodes the bomb, and wipes us out. But the pigeon holes
in
that case never contain anything further about life on the Earth. So although
those pigeon holes might be activated, there could never be any awarness
that an explosion had taken place. In the other block, the Earth would
be safe, our lives would continue - to put it in the usual phrase. Whenever
the spotlight of consciousness hit those pigeon holes we should be aware
of the Earth and we should decide the bomb had not exploded."
(dtto, p. 68)
""You speak about completely
different worlds, different universes. Do you think there was a world in
which everything went normally? I know I'm not using words perhaps in the
way you'd like me to, but I think you can get the idea. Was there a world
in which none of these queer things happened?"
"I don't have any doubt about
it. There was certainly a world in which, on September 27th, the men in
the trenches in Flanders had Lloyd George as their Prime Minister. We know
what happened in that world. It remains to be seen what will happen in
this one.""
(dtto, p. 68-69)
