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

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
Real
Scarcely
Clue
Wholly
Significance
Fantastic
Existence
Whether
Universe

More quotes by Fred Hoyle

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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.
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.
Fred Hoyle
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Hoyle's enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.
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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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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A superintellect has monkeyed with physics.
Fred Hoyle
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A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.
Fred Hoyle
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Words are like harpoons. Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.
Fred Hoyle
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Science is prediction, not explanation.
Fred Hoyle
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He who lives among dogs must learn to pant.
Fred Hoyle
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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.
Fred Hoyle
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It is no more likely that our world has evolved out of chaos than that a hurricane, blowing through a junk yard, should create a Boeing.
Fred Hoyle
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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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Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
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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There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.
Fred Hoyle
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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.
Fred Hoyle
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Perhaps the most majestic feature of our whole existence is that while our intelligences are powerful enough to penetrate deeply into the evolution of this quite incredible Universe, we still have not the smallest clue to our own fate.
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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Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.
Fred Hoyle