Hoyle’s blunder was in his apparently pigheaded, almost infuriating refusal to acknowledge the theory’s demise even as it was being smothered by accumulating contradictory evidence, and in his use of asymmetrical criteria of judgment with respect to the big bang and steady state theories. What was it that caused this intransigent behavior?
A few statements made by Hoyle himself provide the best evidence. In
Home Is Where the Wind Blows, he wrote the following striking paragraph:
The problem with the scientific establishment goes back to the small hunting parties of prehistory. It must then have been the case that, for a hunt to be successful, the entire party was needed. With the direction of prey uncertain, as the direction of the correct theory in science is initially uncertain, the party had to make a decision about which way to go, and then they all had to stick to the decision, even if it was merely made at random.
The dissident who argued that the correct direction was precisely opposite from the chosen direction had to be thrown out of the group, just as the scientist today who takes a view different from the consensus finds his papers rejected by journals and his applications for research grants summarily dismissed by state agencies.
Life must have been hard in pre-history, for the more a hunting party found no prey in its chosen direction, the more it had to continue in that direction, for to stop and argue would be to create uncertainty and to risk differences of opinion breaking out, with the group then splitting disastrously apart. This is why the first priority among scientists is not to be correct but for everybody to think the same way. It is this perhaps instinctive primitive motivation that creates the establishment.
One can hardly imagine a stronger advocacy for dissent from mainstream science. Hoyle echoes here the words of the influential second-century physician Galen of Pergamum: “From my very youth I despised the opinion of the multitude and longed for truth and knowledge, believing that there was for man no possession more noble or divine.”
However, as Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal for Britain, has pointed out, isolation has its price. Science progresses not in a straight line from A to B but in a zigzag path shaped by critical reevaluation and faultfinding interaction. The continuous evaluation provided by the scientific establishment that Hoyle so despised is what creates the checks and balances that keep scientists from straying too far in the wrong direction.
By imposing upon himself academic isolation, Hoyle denied himself these corrective forces.