Published by World Scientific Publishing Co 2013

248 p.

ISBN 978-981-4436-12-0

28.00 GBP

File jad19_3.pdf contains this review in pdf format.

I read A Journey with Fred Hoyle: The Search for Cosmic Life shortly after the first edition appeared in 2005. The second expanded edition of this remarkable autobiographical account brings the scientific story up to date. The added Epilogue offers reflections in 2012, and shows that some of Hoyle's and Wickramasinghe's heretical theories have become accepted science today: these scientists were among the forerunners of today's astrobiology.

The book is the story - presented as a blend of personal anecdotes, travel stories, references to political and social events, and science writing - of the remarkable 40-year friendship and scientific collaboration between the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and the Sri Lankan mathematician and astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe. The author illuminates the story of his collaboration with Hoyle with interesting aspects of his personal life, such as the description of his educational background in Sri Lanka, and the story of how he, as a PhD student, made his first contact with his supervisor in 1960. The book also offers insights into Hoyle's and Wickramasinghe's family lives. The narrative also contains plenty of interstellar astrophysics along with the stories.

Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was famous for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, renowned for his coining (on BBC radio) of the term Big Bang and for his later rejection of that theory (coupled to his advocacy of the steady state cosmology), and famed as writer of more than a dozen science-fiction stories. He was the founding director of the Cambridge Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (that later became the Institute of Astronomy). Hoyle was a scientific whistleblower, a radical troublemaker, an unorthodox scientific mind, but also a victim of the system. Hoyle-Wickramasinghe thought was a long-term assault on conventional thinking: especially their notable concept of panspermia (that ever-present life pervades our universe) and their opposition to the accepted views on the origin of life (the primordial soup theory). This led to their two "heresies": disease-causing viruses come from space, and microbial life is omnipresent in interstellar space. They also opposed Darwinian theory, and launched a frontal assault on conventional theories of biological evolution on Earth. Hoyle, though, always played the role of devil's advocate until he was convinced that there were overwhelming arguments to support one of his radical propositions. All of this was done before the era of mass communication and powerful computers.

The book also is a testimony about how scientists really work and how they cope with deep cultural bias, argumentation based on articles of faith, misrepresentations, standard dogmas, prejudices, jealousies, political intrigues, irrelevant squabbles in the "cloisters of universities" and politicised academies of science. Most interesting is also that, already in the first edition, reference is made to the detrimental impact of the practice of counting research papers and citations, to the role of the media in reporting on big science, and to how the publishing business works. The story also reveals that, despite high productivity, the continuity of their team was repeatedly threatened. In this context, Chandra Wickramasinghe's statement "my work was a solace" can be seen as pep talk for the ears of any desperate young scientist.

This book is well worth reading, not only by astronomy students (and their supervisors), but also by any student in the physical sciences. The book is beautifully typeset in LaTeX by Stallion Press, and printed on fine glossy paper. It is a pity that the graphics are rather poor reproductions of the original graphs. More disturbing, though, is the number of typographical errors that were present in the first edition, and were not corrected for the second edition.