Fred Hoyle Quotes

Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

He who lives among dogs must learn to pant.

One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.

I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.

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.

I don’t see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible … the establishment defends itself by complicating everything to the point of incomprehensibility.

On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the Universe that openly invites the concept of creation.

I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers.

There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule 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 intelligence -even to the limit of God.