Customer Reviews

Home Is Where the Wind Blows: Chapters from a Cosmologist's Life

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This is an often-fascinating glimpse into the life of the incomparable Sir Fred Hoyle, astronomer, cosmologist, panspermicist, sci-fi afficionado, stellar nucleosynthesist and generally mathematician/scientist extraordinaire. I knew of Hoyle's work in stellar nucleosynthesis and steady-state cosmology before, but I came to this book intentionally after reading and thoroughly enjoying his sci-fi novels (especially "The Black Cloud" and "A for Andromeda"). Here, we peer into Hoyle's life as a scientist, beginning with his stubborn truancy in grammar school and continuing with his adolescent chemistry experiments, his work for the British goverment in WWII, his involvement in astronomy and cosmology from the 1950's through the 1970's, and ending with his political duels with stodgy representatives of British institutional science and his critique of Big-Bang theory as sheer metaphysic, indicting all the while fundamentalists of all ilk, Big-bangers and Bible-thumpers alike. His stories are often very funny, and those about Paul Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli (with whom he worked at Cambridge) are truly priceless. However, I always find his prose a bit stilted, and slogging one's way through Hoylistc grammar and obscure British slang can make for some slow, hard reading. Worst of all, several aspects of Hoyle's most interesting and controversial scientific work is completely absent, for example, panspermia (nothing to speak of) and evolutionary genetics (1-2 paragraphs). And despite both the cover photograph and the fact that Hoyle wrote a well-received book on Stonehenge as an ancient observatory, there is not one word about Stonehenge here. What a pity. On the other hand, he does immerse us in his deep distrust of politics and politicians, and even give's us a taste of his surprisingly Vedanta-like spiritual attitude and a kind of Pythagorean wonder at the Universe. The quote in my title is from Hoyle's self-described scientific activity as crab-like, inching foward cautiously over a lifetime. All told, it is a fascinating life-story told by one of the 20th century's greatest scientific iconoclasts.

Of all the stories and anecdotes I use to tell to my friends, many, surprisingly many, were learnt from this charming and wise book. How to buy a car, when to do it, etc., according to the ethics of times harder. Of course Sir Fred is a great astronomer, learned quantum mechanics from Dirac and is as much famous as a science-fiction writer. So, he wrote one of the best books I read in recent years.