The Bold Star Gazer

Curly-haired Astronomer Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University takes delight in setting off mathematical firecrackers under his more conservative colleagues. Hoyle glories in the mysteries that swarm in the inexhaustible sky, and he believes that they should be attacked boldly--from all possible angles. In his new book, Frontiers of Astronomy (Harper; $5), he pelts most of the astronomical mysteries with showers of theories. Some of these theories, he says, "are well known and well tried, but sometimes they are less well known and sometimes they lie at the very frontiers of knowledge."

Many of the "frontier" theories offered by Hoyle will be tut-tutted by conservative astronomers, and some will eventually turn out to be wrong. But Hoyle, though brash, is no amateur. He is leading spokesman for "the Cambridge cosmographers," a group of innovators who apply modern mathematics and physics to the problems of the universe.

Astronomy, Hoyle explains, has hardly digested the "third revolution" of physics (relativity, quantum theory, etc.), and now it is forced to cope with a "fourth revolution": the recent discovery of mesons and numerous other short-lived subatomic particles that are only dimly understood. Mysteries and contradictions are popping up everywhere, and new mathematical tools are being devised for attacking them. Hoyle believes that all the current confusion in astronomy calls for bold theorizing. So in his book he blazes away. Some of his frontier theories:

P: The earth's climate is affected by interstellar dust and gas that sometimes shut off much of the sun's light. The Ice Ages were caused partly by such shadowing, partly by the slipping of the earth's crust, which shifted now-tropical sections of the earth's surface into the polar regions.

P: Most stars were formed by a complicated process that leaves a good deal of material outside the star in the form of planets. This star-forming process is still going on in many places, notably the Orion nebula. A sequel to this theory: about 100,000 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy must have planets, and a considerable fraction of them must be suitable for life. Where life is possible, Hoyle believes, it will appear. He thinks that it may originate in the cooler gases around a newborn planet.

P: The sun's mysterious corona (seen during solar eclipses) is caused by dust and gas falling into the sun. This may mean that the sun is still growing slowly.

P: "Supernovae" (exploding stars) have used up much of their material by a series of nuclear reactions. Part of the energy generated escapes in the form of neutrinos--small, uncharged particles that pass through matter as if it were not there. Eventually, the star becomes hollow (in a sense) and collapses. Because of the density of its center (100 to 1,000 tons of its matter would fill a matchbox), the star's gravitation is extremely strong, and thus the collapse happens very fast. The star shrinks down to almost nothing in about one second. Then it blows itself to smithereens, giving off for a fortnight as much light as 200 million suns.

P: Matter is being created continuously in the form of hydrogen. This is Hoyle's favorite and widest-sweeping theory. He admits that it cannot be proved conclusively at present because of man's incomplete knowledge of the infinitely small (mesons, neutrinos, etc.) and the infinitely large (galaxies). He believes that the mysteries must be connected somehow, and he hopes that a breakthrough on the meson front will tell astronomers why the galaxies appear to be flying apart through space, and whether the universe is still being created.

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