The oldest house in Abington, Cambrideshire.
Recently I happened to be in Abington, Cambridgeshire, for a family reunion event. One of the activities provided by the hosts was a very interesting guided tour round the historic village. The village is stacked with old houses some of which are pre-Tudor, an example of which I've pictured above. This particular house, which boasts the resilience of wood frames, is the oldest in the village, perhaps 14th century, the century of the societal mold breaking disaster of the black death. The existence of so many old houses is product of an irony: Going back some years we would likely find that the inhabitants of Abington were by and large dirt poor rural workers. In fact, too poor to support an economy with the wealth to update the houses of Abington. The effect was to preserve what to our modern eyes are delightful & quaint rural cottages, so delightful that only the rich can now afford to buy them and maintain them: Hence the area is now the sedate backwater for the relatively well-heeled.
Like history in general the development of Abington is a microcosm of chaotic twists and turns with no grand plan to explain or rationalize its complex history or layout. As with most human settlements it evolved in a haphazard fashion; a dwelling here and a dwelling there built as the complex vicissitudes of daily life made themselves felt. For me, however, there was to be in interesting twist at the end of the tour.
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As our guide was finishing off he made a passing comment that just round the corner from where we were assembled cosmologist Fred Hoyle had his home during his tenure at Cambridge university. This was a complete surprise: I'd been coming to Abington and visiting relatives here for 38 years and this was the first I'd heard of it. It was as big a surprise to me as finding Cromwell's house in the shadow of Ely Cathedral. After I expressed an interest one of the guides took me to see it; it was an elegant looking Georgian/Regency house:
The plaque on the front wall reads:
At the age of 58 and after 28 years Hoyle resigned from the faculty of Cambridge university in 1973 as a protest against university bureaucracy* and moved to the Lake District, not that far from his region of provenance. By all accounts Fred Hoyle was not an easy-going character and didn't suffer fools gladly. I suspect that he put much of his own personality and how he viewed himself in relation to those around him in the pugnacious character of John Fleming, the scientist in Hoyle's novel "A for Andromeda". Fleming, like Hoyle, was constantly picking arguments with those lesser intelligences around him. Only Fleming could read the writing on the Wall about the danger of an intruding cosmic intelligence that had taken on the form of a computer. I watched the 1961 BBC production of A For Andromeda and apart from having a crush on Julie Christie (at the age of nine!) and a fascination with the sinister sounding staccato pulses from the computer's speaker,** the only other strong memory I have is of a bad-tempered John Fleming curtly snapping his way through the series; Fleming, like Hoyle, believed he knew better than most, particularly the bureaucrats and politicians. We have to admit, of course, that Hoyle himself often did know better!
Hoyle's new environment in the Lake district is described by an Express reporter who visited him in 1981 and wrote an article in the Express titled "Spaceman Sir Fred still winning his Star Wars". I don't know about winning, but he was still fighting those wars, just like his alter ego Dr. Fleming. In the article we read this:
Fred Hoyle lives in almost perfect peace. His old stone farmhouse is just a few telescope lengths from the lip of Ullswater and from the panoramic windows of his study the Helvellyn Hills drift silently away against the sky, as though into space. Far away is where Professor Sir Fred Hoyle likes to be. Distance and seclusion, and perhaps even the double glazing which shuts out sounds no more disturbing than the singing of garden birds, have been his way of life for almost a decade. It is also symbolically shuts out the aggravating sound of the ribald laughter with which the academic establishment greets so many of his pronouncements. For more than 30 years Hoyle, who will be 66 this month, has been rocking the world with his theories......... "At the time people were laughing at me" he says peering at the hills with dark penetrating eyes. (Geoffrey Levy, Express 16 June 1981)
As time progressed the objects of Hoyle's novel generating imagination became inextricably mixed with his science. In his 1983 book "
The Intelligent Universe" (of which I have a copy), the "scientific" ideas he sketches out could be a plot to one of his novels. The book provides insight into the direction his thought was taking as he mulled over the meaning of life, the universe and everything during his rambles in the epic landscape of the Lake District where, unlike Abington, the sense of ancient geologic time is very real. The book is subtitled "
A new view of creation and evolution" and tenders an original way of looking at the cosmic evolutionary dynamic. Hoyle was well known for his startling originality and this book is no exception. In fact the book has, to my mind, parallels with
A for Andromeda. In "
The Intelligent Universe" Fred Hoyle is effectively playing the part of a Dr. Fleming type figure, telling us what he thinks an alien cosmic intelligence, an intelligence which literally pervades our own cosmos, is up to. In fact chapter 9 is titled "
What is Intelligence up to?". For Hoyle that Intelligence emanates from the unimaginably long eons of the eternity of time posited by his
Steady State Theory of the Universe. This Intelligence has learnt how to fine tune the universe to suit its eternal propagation. This management of the universe takes place largely via the vectors of microorganisms which travel across space delivering the information in their genetic makeup. This propagation has parallels with the radio signal from deep space in
A for Andromeda. This signal transmitted information about how to build a computer intelligence, an intelligence that ultimately was looking out for its own survival at the expense of humanity. In Hoyle's mind the cosmic Intelligence he tenders in "
The Intelligent Universe" is God-like in that its causation can be transmitted from the future as well as the past and therefore it straddles all of infinite time. Therefore, for Hoyle this Intelligence is, as it were, the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). But Hoyle's Intelligence is no transcendent Christian God: His is a pantheistic view where his proposed Intelligence is very much part of and trapped in the cosmos as it engages in an eternal struggle to subdue its own internal tendency toward chaos: So, the meaning of life for Hoyle is a kind of eternal Kaos Kampf. In Hoyle's worldview the cosmos has no real endgame but is forever struggling to maintain intelligent self-awareness and humanity is bound up with this struggle.
All this, of course, is very far removed from that peaceful country lane in Abington where one Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2022 I stumbled across the large cottage Fred Hoyle occupied for a couple of decades or more. For someone like Hoyle I imagine that the quiet lanes of Abington with their trimmed hedgerows and the gentle undulating countryside of Cambridgeshire felt nearly as claustrophobic and stultifying as Cambridge University's bureaucracy. When Hoyle eventually settled in the untamed landscape of the Lake District, not so far from the wild lands of Wuthering Heights, it connected much better with his mentality. In this dangerous far-seeing landscape eternity & the cosmic perspective are much more palpable than they are in the cozy lanes of Abington. As with the Bronte's I suspect the elemental landscape around him helped to inspire his creativity. As he aged Hoyle started to speculate on the meaning of life and what appears to be some kind of God-consciousness surfaced in his later years. He was trying to make anthropic sense of the universe, much like myself. Moreover, like many others he was puzzled by the highly contingent anti-chance configurations & specifications of the cosmos and thought that this fact demanded explanation; on that score I'm with him. But being an atheistic science buff, he sought to keep his speculations as far as possible within the material universe he knew, and so as a kind of seat-of-the-pants project he wrote The Intelligent Universe.
As I've already said the landscape, he was now in was dangerous and that proved to be the case for poor Fred. Hoyle's end was hastened when during one of his country hikes, he fell into a ravine near Shipley not far from where he was born. That wouldn't have happened if he lived out his retirement in Abington. But then perhaps neither would some of his off-the-wall ideas have happened.
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| Hoyle: Tough, pugnacious and cantankerous. |
Footnotes
* ...according to the journalist Geoffrey Levy.
** The early computers had their program loops linked to loudspeakers as a crude way of helping to debug a program and detect the cause of software lock ups. On the BBC's
A for Andromeda this auditory rendering of algorithmic looping was an eerie sound effect successfully conveying the mystique associated with the "thinking machines" of that era & also represented the sinister nature of the "thoughts" of the Andromeda computer that was intent on controlling Earth. But having worked on my
Thinknet project I find algorithmic looping a far too primitive a notion for a real thinking machine.
NOTE:
This proved to be an interesting article in the Guardian:
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