No-one with any intelligence should waste their time thinking about insoluble problems. Not his exact words, but spoken with derision and anger. Fred Hoyle was implying that the gift of intelligence should be repaid by a life spent in the scientific investigation of well-formulated questions which can be answered with a yes, with a no or with a set of numbers. Political questions cannot be clearly stated and have no clear solutions. Leave them to worldly dullards. Outcomes are going to be messy, whatever.
Crichton Porteous, the Peak District-based writer on farming and country life in the last decades of horse-power, once expressed similar thoughts to me with even greater passion. Talking about Samuel Looker, with whom he had collaborated in editing unpublished writings of Richard Jefferies, he answered my enquiry, of why the collaboration had ended, with the outburst He got involved in politics - silly fool, SILLY FOOL! Porteous of course was thinking of focused literary labours as the alternative to the disputes and conspiracies of public life.
Hoyle was attacking something I had said about the situation in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where Ian Smith had recently made his UDI, Unilateral Declaration of Independence to forestall the British Commonwealth Office's plan to grant independence and majority rule. The date was during the winter of 1966 -1967. The occasion was a Foundation Dinner at St. John's College, Cambridge, of which Fred Hoyle was a fellow. I had just been elected to a Scholarship, rather belatedly, as I had already left College, on the strength of a final-year research project in the Engineering Department. The trouble was I had already given up "pure thought" for worldly affairs. Obsessed with the historic architecture and townscape of England and outraged (along with John Betjeman and Ian Nairn) at the Holocaust of demolition and redevelopment then at its height, I had given up Physics to hop sideways into Civil Engineering, then Transportation (if anyone still knows what that means) and finally Town and Country Planning. But Hoyle proved to be right in my case, I couldn't stand the slipshod and dishonest methodology of planning, and its irrelevance in the face of economic power (AND I was no good at the job) and so escaped into this world of independent bookselling and publishing - still unfocused, but with more of the ingredients of Porteous's ideal of the creative life. In 1966, though, I felt and talked as righteously about the world problems of the day as most of us did and still do, so at the High Table, amongst the urbane dons, I argued and argued. Hoyle, no doubt, enjoyed leading this naïve young man on, to be charitable he will have hoped for some startling or well-defined ideas to emerge. They didn't, I got more and more drunk, the other Fellows across the High Table looked on with patronising smirks. I have never been invited back to any of the Feasts, in Rotation! that membership of the College Foundation was said to imply, and presume I was blackballed there and then as unworthy, an error of judgement on the part of the College. One of those embarrassing episodes of humiliation that haunt us. Not just embarrassment, however, but regret at a missed opportunity. How could I have been so shy and unassertive not to have outlined for Hoyle's comments, my THEORY of the UNIVERSE, the result of the one great EUREKA moment of my life! I had actually written to him - his secretary had answered, he had been abroad at the time - and now, sitting next to him I must have decided that my great idea was too naïve to bother him with.
What was this great idea of mine? What was my answer to The Problem of Life, the Universe and Everything?
In the mid-sixties, we were right in the middle of the Cold War nuclear missile race between Russia and America, with Britain and France heavily implicated. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been marching on the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment every year, the
CND badge was perhaps the most widely recognised of all logos in Britain.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had made us all feel that, though we had escaped destruction this time, we had been lucky to do so. There had been a small, but definite, chance of a full-scale nuclear exchange, and that small probability remained in place. However small the probability, I felt, sooner or later the worst was BOUND to happen. The very existence of the power to destroy all advanced life on the planet meant that the days of our society and species were numbered. (This was slightly stretching mathematics, with a very small probability, mankind MIGHT last a very long time, but a probability of one thousandth of nuclear war in any particular year would imply that the average time we could expect to survive before destruction would be a thousand years - not long). What has this to do with Theories of the Universe? Well, many good ideas come from cross-fertilisation between apparently unrelated fields. One lunchtime in the Spring of 1965, after a morning cosmology lecture by
Dennis Sciama, while I was eating a bread-and-cheese lunch in my Lyndewode Road digs, it came to me "in a flash" that perhaps this danger of self-destruction might apply to the whole Universe, not just to the Earth, and that the very fact of the continued existence of the Universe, after the immense period of ten billion years or more, implied that there could not be enough energy available in it for it to destroy itself! What bound would this proposition place on the total energy contained within the Universe? I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
How much energy is there in the Universe? Well, as with the H-Bomb we can use Einstein's most famous of all formulas (perhaps the ONLY formula that most people can quote)
The value I obtained was G = 4 X 10-11m3kg-1s-2 (metres cubed per kilogramme seconds squared)
The accepted value is G = 6.67 X 10-11m3kg-1s-2
My estimate wasn't just in the same approximate ballpark, not just of the same order of magnitude - I was out by a factor of less than two. No doubt to be so close after so many approximations was a matter of good luck, but the a priori probability of being correct even to an order of magnitude was surely infinitesimal.
How did I feel? Was I stunned? Did my head spin? Did I turn white or red or cold or hot? Did may hair stand on end? Did my skin prickle and stand out in goose-pimples? I can't remember - perhaps you, the reader, have had a similar experience? - more recently maybe! All I can remember is the exhilaration, the excitement, the awesomeness of having surely discovered a great universal truth, a rush back of the self-confidence and pride that the Cambridge experience had somewhat dented. I went out and ran my favourite lonesome and romantic long-distance run, out to the Gog Magog Hills (bare and gently-rolling wolds that stand in for mountains at Cambridge) and along the chalk agger of the Roman Road, almost unchanged in nearly 2000 years.
A week later, I took this little calculation to Dr. Sciama. He gave me a warm, but rather sad smile. I'm afraid all the simple ideas have long been had , he said and looked out an offprint of one of his own papers from a desk drawer. In it, if I recall aright, was a discussion of
I was too chastened and unassertive (assertiveness hadn't yet been invented in 1966) to bother the great man (and he was) further, and left without asking for his comments on my (re-)discovery's apparent great implication - that the Universe was created from, and still consists of NOTHING.
Applying the Principle of Mediocrity (now rather pushed aside by theAnthropic Principle), that we should not expect anything particularly special about our own time and place,
M = Rc2/G
should be true not just now but at all times in the history of the Universe, so that the mass of the Universe at any given time in its history is proportional to its radius, its density being proportional to the inverse of its radius squared. Thus as we reel backwards towards the Big Bang, although the density increases very rapidly towards a limit of infinity, the MASS, the total amount of material stuff, decreases towards a value of zero as R tends to zero. I had already posited a Universe with zero net energy. Now we are adding that at the Big Bang it had zero mass!! Truly a Universe created from nothing!!! All existence is a sort of separating out of very large pluses and minuses from an initial zero. 1042 minus 1042, you might say. Surely this hypothesis has a must-be-so feeling and beauty at least matching that of Hoyle, Gold and Bondi's discredited Steady State Theory of the Universe. Intriguingly, "my theory", like Hoyle's, requires the continuous creation of matter as the Universe expands.
So there is my tale. My Eureka Moment. Wonderful to have experienced such a moment, and surely I could scarcely have experienced one more satisfying. I don't mind that my Big Idea was brought down to earth by a Professional, but I do regret the resulting demoralisation, so deep that I thought the idea, and how it was generated, too trivial a story to tell Fred Hoyle when heaven sent me the ideal opportunity! Is there a moral to this story? Several, I suppose.
Fred Hoyle is commonly thought of as a stereotyped fiery, tenacious, rude and ugly bulldog of a Yorkshireman - the transmutation into a scientist of an amalgam of cricketers Freddy Trueman, Brian Close and Geoffrey Boycott. If so, he could certainly look after himself, but I did once see him having a very hard time of it. The date may have been 1965. He was defending his Steady State Theory at a packed evening meeting in a steeply-raked old lecture theatre in the Cavendish Laboratories. Although this took place, I think, just before the discovery of Cosmic Background Radiation had been made public, radio telescope observations had already shown the observable Universe to be far from uniform, as they looked further and further into the distance and into the past. To a succession of objections of this kind from the floor, Hoyle produced more and more ingenious but implausibly "post-hoc" answers, until the whole audience was reduced to painful and helpless laughter! I wonder whether anyone kept a record, made notes or wrote up the evening? It may have been a meeting of a physical or astronomical society. I would love to know. DJM September 2009