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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

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Fred Hoyle
Age: 86 †
Born: 1915
Born: June 24
Died: 2001
Died: August 20
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Mathematician
Non-Fiction Writer
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Bingley
West Yorkshire
Property
Carbon
Blind
Designed
Chance
Super
Minuscule
Force
Intellect
Calculating
Nature
Forces
Properties
Must
Findings
Atom
Would
Finding
Utterly
Otherwise
Atoms

More quotes by Fred Hoyle

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The universe is a put-up job.
Fred Hoyle
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Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way.
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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.
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It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas.
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One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.
Fred Hoyle
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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
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The notion that not only the biopolymer 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
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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
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There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.
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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.
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Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
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Words are like harpoons. Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.
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Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension.
Fred Hoyle
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Outstanding examples of genius - a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or a Carl Friedrich Gauss - are markers on the path along which our species appears destined to tread.
Fred Hoyle
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The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.
Fred Hoyle
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It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.
Fred Hoyle
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When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.
Fred Hoyle
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I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers.
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I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon...Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.
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Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.
Fred Hoyle