Fred Hoyle Quotes

Quotes about:

• The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

  Fred Hoyle

  Life, Theory Of Evolution, Numbers

  96 Copy quote

• The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.

  Fred Hoyle

  Origin Of Life, Boeing 747, Junk

  91 Copy quote

• A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

  Fred Hoyle

  Science, If There Is A God, Numbers

  35 Copy quote

• Imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

  Fred Hoyle

  Cells, Order, Trying

  72 Copy quote

• Life cannot have had a random beginning. ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000 power, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

  Fred Hoyle

  Two, Trials, Enzymes

  "Evolution from Space". Book by Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle, 1981.

  58 Copy quote

• 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.

  Fred Hoyle

  Thinking, Origin Of Life, Limits

  "Big enough to bury Darwin", www.theguardian.com. August 23, 2001.

  42 Copy quote

• Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down

  Fred Hoyle

  Running, Editors, Trying

  27 Copy quote

• 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.

  Fred Hoyle

  Doe, Scientist, Curious

  Fred Hoyle (1981). “The universe: past and present reflections”

  26 Copy quote

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

  Fred Hoyle

  Science, If There Is A God, Common Sense

  "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections". "Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics", volume 20, p. 16, September 1982.

  64 Copy quote

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

  Fred Hoyle

  Inspirational, Funny, Space

  1979 Quoted in the Observer,'Sayings of the Week', 9 Sep.

  63 Copy quote

• It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner... Indeed, such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.

  Fred Hoyle

  Fun, Self, Ironic

  36 Copy quote

• In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.

  Fred Hoyle

  Origin Of Life, Support, Earth

  Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”

  40 Copy quote

• It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.

  Fred Hoyle

  Mistake, Learning, Example

  45 Copy quote

• There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

  Fred Hoyle

  Meaning Of Life, Plans, Knows

  26 Copy quote

• A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

  Fred Hoyle

  Blow, Yards, Pieces

  Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”

  60 Copy quote

• Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

  Fred Hoyle

  Powerful, Taken, Ideas

  40 Copy quote

• It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup of any kind.... Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup ever existed on this planet. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario the myth of the pre-biotic soup.

  Fred Hoyle

  Soup, May, Fairness

  4 Copy quote

• Science is prediction, not explanation.

  Fred Hoyle

  Science, Predictions, Explanation

  4 Copy quote

• Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.

  Fred Hoyle

  Atoms, Would Be, Chance

  8 Copy quote

• Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory.

  Fred Hoyle

  Real, People, Giving

  Fred Hoyle (1960). “The nature of the universe”

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Fred Hoyle

  Philosophical, Sight, Ideas

  Fred Hoyle (1960). “The nature of the universe”

  9 Copy quote

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

  Fred Hoyle

  Bangs, Creation, Bigs

  Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”

  13 Copy quote

• Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.

  Fred Hoyle

  Real, Clue, Fantastic

  Fred Hoyle (1960). “The nature of the universe”

  8 Copy quote

• It is a mistake to imagine that potentially great men are rare. It is the conditions that permit the promise of greatness to be fulfilled that are rare. What is so difficult to achieve is the cultural background that permits potential greatness to be converted into actual greatness.

  Fred Hoyle

  Mistake, Greatness, Men

  Fred Hoyle (1966). “Of Men and Galaxies”, p.21, University of Washington Press

  33 Copy quote

• 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.

  Fred Hoyle

  Differences, Long, Today

  "Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe". Book by Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle (p. 15), 1978.

  35 Copy quote

Page 1 of 3

← Prev

1

2

3

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin