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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some good advice to scientists,
This review is from: Ossian's ride (Hardcover)
Fred Hoyle's Steady State cosmology has now pretty much gone by the boards, but in his time he was a serious contender in the race to understand Creation. He also supplemented his income by writing some really crappy sci-fi books.
Ossian's Ride is an exception to the last generalization. I think it's his best book. It reveals a lot about how a well-educated and intelligent scientist thinks and behaves. The book is a lot more biographical than Hoyle would have been willing to admit, and I find it fascinating. For example, the Hero is a scientist who is trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious Corporation that appears to have an inside track on knowledge (one thinks of Microsoft or Google). He discovers that they have "a deliberate policy of turning out spoof documents, which they fed to foreign agents much as one might fling hunks of poisoned meat to a pack of snarling wolves." OK, not the best writing. But consider Hoyle's example: "I even found an elementary blunder: the statement that apart from an additive constant every monotonic continuous function is equal to the integral of its derivative." Counterexamples to this proposition (e.g. Cantor's ternary function) are so abstract that you are unlikely to encounter them in college calculus. In other words, Fred is not fooling around here. He is staking out an intellectual high ground for his character. Later we read Hoyle's take on scientific meetings: "Anyone who could ask intelligent questions of the lecturer of the day gained great prestige ... I deliberately began to read up carefully on all manner of topics ... Within a month the high and mighty were looking at me with averted vision. Within two months they were nodding openly. Within three months I had a recognized saet in the front row." To this day, this is good advice to scientists. Hoyle was a formidable character in his own time, and it is exceptionally interesting to read his thinly-disguised intellectual biography.
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