Fred Hoyle - Other Controversies

Other Controversies

While Hoyle was well-regarded for his works on nucleosynthesis and science popularization, his career was largely dominated by the controversial positions he held on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to the opinions and evidence supported by the majority of the scientific community. Hoyle often expressed anger against the labyrinthine and petty politics at Cambridge and frequently feuded with members and institutions of all levels of the British astronomy community, leading to his resignation from Cambridge in September 1971 over Donald Lynden-Bell being chosen to replace retiring professor Roderick Oliver Redman (rather than his own preference). This resignation was the "watershed" moment in Hoyle's career, after which he was only a maverick outsider pushing fringe claims.

In addition to his views on steady state theory and panspermia, Hoyle also supported the following claims:

1. The correlation of flu epidemics with the sunspot cycle, with epidemics occurring at the minimum of the cycle. The idea was that flu contagion was scattered in the interstellar medium and reached Earth only when the solar wind had minimum power.
2. The fossil Archaeopteryx was a man-made fake. This assertion was definitively refuted by, among other strong reasons, the presence of microcracks extending through the fossil into the surrounding rock.
3. The theory of abiogenic petroleum, where natural hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) are explained as the result of deep carbon deposits, instead of fossilized organic material. "The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time."
4. The use of the fifty-six Aubrey holes at Stonehenge as a system for the neolithic Britons to predict eclipses, using them in the daily positioning of marker stones (a theoretically possible, but practically impossible system) as proposed in his 1977 book On Stonehenge.