Sir Fred Hoyle

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:30

Our Castaway has been described as the maverick genius of British science and one of the most gifted astronomers and mathematicians of our times. He is also a prolific writer, having published thirty-one scientific books, fifteen novels, four volumes of children's stories, a pantomime, a libretto for an opera, and two television series. He is Sir Fred Hoyle.

Presenter0:50

So, Fred, did music play a a big part, a significant part, in your childhood?

Presenter0:54

Yeah.

Sir Fred Hoyle0:54

Well, it did because my mother was trained as a musician and so from the very earliest times, uh I suppose when I was a few months old, but certainly by the time I was one or two, I must have been listening to music on pretty considerable scale, because she would play the piano maybe three hours every day that I can remember, or all the years of her life. I never thought to

Presenter1:17

Yeah, I know.

Sir Fred Hoyle1:18

become a musician because I think it must have been intuitively clear to me that I didn't have the talents for it.

Presenter1:24

What kind of music do you remember her playing?

Sir Fred Hoyle1:27

Oh, it would be Beethoven, almost surely. Uh that was her chief love and and so it would almost certainly be the Beethoven sonatas. She would sing a lot to Handel and so forth because that also was one of the things that she did professionally. She also played in a cinema, didn't she? That was during the war when the wives of men at the front I think were paid five P a day. We're talking about the First World War. First World War indeed, yes. And so she thought to augment this five P a day by doing what she could. She g I would be about two years old and uh she went out at night and played in the silent cinemas.

Presenter2:02

What kind of music does she accompany?

Sir Fred Hoyle2:04

Oh, she'd it would undoubtedly be Beethoven. She'd uh thundering away into the uh terrible sort of techniques they had in nineteen seventeen cinema techniques, but uh it would be Beethoven, she'd be playing. Let's then have a first choice of music. Well, my first choice is not actually Beethoven, it's Haydn.

Sir Fred Hoyle2:22

And the reason is that uh Haydn had um his relations with women were very unfortunate.

Sir Fred Hoyle2:30

The girl he was very keen on had been promised to the church.

Sir Fred Hoyle2:35

And Haydn had the terrible experience as a young fellow of seventeen of having to play the organ at the time she took the veil, so she was lost to him. Then he was unhappily married for the n next forty years. Eventually he came to England and he met a woman called Anne Hunter.

Sir Fred Hoyle2:52

and they got on very well but had Haydn still not been married, had he been free, clearly that he would have married her. It was a very sad parting when he went back to Vienna.

Sir Fred Hoyle3:03

And uh she wrote the words of the song I have chosen to begin with, O Tuneful Voice, and it's sung by Ellie Amelie.

Speaker 23:17

I still

Speaker 23:26

I accents voice magic.

Speaker 23:32

Which for

Speaker 23:54

I've seen the floor to the wall.

Speaker 23:59

Divine greats, divine great love, my heart divine great love.

Presenter4:11

Sir Fred, you were born in Yorkshire in 1915. Your mum was a musician, but what did your dad do?

Sir Fred Hoyle4:17

He had a business in Bradford, and his business was of the following nature. He would know people who

Sir Fred Hoyle4:25

were the foremen and so forth in the big cloth weaving companies, firms, factories and whenever the looms went wrong, as they quite frequently did in those days, the cloth would have a sort of minor fault.

Sir Fred Hoyle4:40

And the factory would sell this off at a fraction of the price it would charge to a Bond Street tailor.

Speaker 24:46

Yeah.

Sir Fred Hoyle4:46

So my father would buy these. He'd build a stock of seconds, as they were called, and then he would act as a sort of distributor to people who wanted to buy it. There would be the Jewish tailors from Leeds, and I remember on one occasion him exporting cloth even as far away as China. That basically w was what he did. Was it a comfortable channel?

Sir Fred Hoyle5:06

It was very variable. There were good years and there were bad years. And uh my father was very sensible that when the depression was coming he uh he quit. He realized it was coming and his colleagues who continued in Bradford mostly went bust. There were a tremendous number of bankruptcies, but he wisely got out at just about the right time. But even so through the twenties, there were ups and downs.

Presenter5:29

Reading the the memoir you've done of your of your childhood of that time, you mentioned that you had a great-grandfather who was a poet. Yorkshire poet. Yes. One of the last in fact.

Sir Fred Hoyle5:37

One of the last. Yes, already by my time a knowledge of the dialect was really almost vanishing. Ours was a sort of crude memory of what the rich original dialect which I suppose is derivative from Anglo-Saxon, this is really where it came from. I think it was Bernard Miles who on one occasion said there are three surviving points in the Yorkshire dialect and he named them without realizing uh that one of his names was my great-grandfather.

Sir Fred Hoyle6:04

Let's have another choice of record. Well, my next one is a little connected with the first one. It's a composer who made a remark on one time that I've used all through my life. It's Schubert.

Sir Fred Hoyle6:13

And Juart was asked how he managed to write so much, and he replied, Well, it's really very easy indeed. I just finish one thing and then start another.

Sir Fred Hoyle6:21

And the thing is that when I was young I used to wonder what it was that made a melody. I'd heard so many and I used to try to invent melodies for myself on the piano. I never found one. I invented hundreds and I wrote them down. Not one of them was any good. And I've come to think it's something in a very subtle relation of rhythm.

Sir Fred Hoyle6:42

and of the ordering of the notes, of the the melody. And so I've chosen Lizzie Schubert.

Sir Fred Hoyle6:47

A bit from his famous song The Shepherd on the Rock with the clarinet, and again it's sung by Eli Ameling.

Speaker 27:05

So.

Speaker 27:33

And let's turn ahead see it we do

Presenter7:51

Reading about your background, your childhood, Sophia, I think it could be uh said of you that you were a bit of a handful.

Presenter7:57

As a child. I mean, you played truant from school, didn't you? Terribly, yes. Yes. Why was that?

Sir Fred Hoyle8:03

Well, I think it's fairly characteristic of my whole life. If I get bored, I just want to opt out. I I go somewhere else, do something else. And um it didn't take long at some schools for me to get very bored. I was very ill balanced in my interests. I was quite good at sums as we called them and uh usually I wasn't given things that were as I regarded as interesting and I'd be called on to do other things I didn't want to do.

Sir Fred Hoyle8:31

I thought I was doing much better for myself, and I think I was, in just letting the other kids go to school and and going and watching the looms working. And I used to go and watch the boats coming through the locks on the local canal, very famous locks. This is marvelous and I think I really learnt quite a lot about hydrostatics from watching that uh performance. So

Sir Fred Hoyle8:52

I don't uh regret it in any way at all. I did pretty well out of my truancy.

Presenter8:57

But how old were you when you decided that you were going to leave school, this particular school ago?

Sir Fred Hoyle9:00

Well, I was determined really from I didn't go till the age of six, I managed to ward it off to six. Then I had a few sparrings with schools over odd months. And I managed until I was through the ages of seven and eight to nine to almost keep it down to an occasional month. And so it wasn't really until I was nine that I began to uh go to school at all systematically. And then mostly because my parents kept telling me that the whole family would be in court and so forth if I didn't go to school, if I was not delivered like a sack of coal at the school every morning.

Presenter9:35

Yeah.

Sir Fred Hoyle9:35

Yeah.

Presenter9:35

You taught yourself to read everything I'm right in saying when you were actually in a bout of truancy, didn't you?

Sir Fred Hoyle9:40

Yes, I had something wrong with my eyes. They don't scan properly. It was a question of focusing and and so I had a lot of trouble and uh being given a small type on a book wasn't very good for me. So when I was playing Truancy I occasionally got a penny and I went to the local cinema into the bug hole for which you paid a penny and of course in those days they had subtitles that are silent thing which are printed large. And quite suddenly I found that I was scanning the line properly and could do it because it was large and uh then I suppose within a week once you got the trick it's the neck as we used to say for any anything like that and then I could read a book.

Presenter10:17

When did you first start indulging in scientific experiments?

Presenter10:21

How young were you?

Sir Fred Hoyle10:22

It must have been in the region of eight or nine. My father had bits of chemistry equipment, and fortunately he was out all day at work and uh my mother seems, as you said, to be very indulgent and so she allowed me to play around with these things. In retrospect it was really quite dangerous stuff, you know. What were you doing?

Presenter10:40

What were you doing?

Sir Fred Hoyle10:41

Oh, uh I had a strong leaning to highly oxidized reagents so that uh

Sir Fred Hoyle10:47

Doing anything that was spectacular. And by the time I

Sir Fred Hoyle10:52

was uh ten, I'd worked my way through uh

Sir Fred Hoyle10:55

a book of chemistry that my father had had doing the experiments, and that stood me in very, very good stead all my life. It

Sir Fred Hoyle11:02

In an indirect way, I think it helped to get my scholarship to the grammar school. It certainly helped enormously to get me admission to Cambridge. And in my later research, it's played a part very considerably. So undoubtedly, I profited enormously due to the path I was perhaps fortunate to take of just not permitting the educational system to educate me. I I have to stress uh t to reject the educational system is not a good reason for doing nothing. One has to replace it by something, but as long as one's serious about what one's replacing it, um

Speaker 211:33

Nothing.

Sir Fred Hoyle11:40

Let's have another

Presenter11:42

Let's have another choice of record.

Sir Fred Hoyle11:43

Well, my third one is the Aria Have Mercy Upon Me, O Lord, sung by Janet Baker with the Munich Bach Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter, and it's from Bach St Matthew Pasch.

Speaker 212:31

He's gonna give away.

Presenter12:52

Sir Fred, when did your fascinations start with astronomy?

Sir Fred Hoyle12:56

I was quite fascinated when I was young. I had a little telescope of my own, but there's a chap uh in a village about six or seven miles away who had a much, much larger one, and my goodness, I envied my neighbour's goods, I can tell you. I used to walk there because he permitted me to use it. I'd be now seven, fourteen or fifteen at that time. But uh when I got to eighteen, nineteen, twenty uh I was writing among the professional mathematicians, physicists, so I rather forgot my astronomy.

Sir Fred Hoyle13:27

And it wasn't until I was twenty three or twenty four that I returned to it. And I returned to it basically.

Sir Fred Hoyle13:33

Because the problems in the field in which I'd become educated, theoretical physics, were really running out, the exciting problems. There have been tremendous things happen over the preceding ten years, but it was uh we're in decline. So it was a question really of turning one's knowledge to something else. And then I remembered my early fascination with astronomy, and that's how it happened.

Presenter13:56

But what what is the fascination? I mean what was that first fascination? What was

Sir Fred Hoyle14:00

Well, my first fascination I think I can actually date it. I was eight years old, I think, at the time, and we used to play out is in the country, no street lights, of course, and uh we'd go into the woods and fields, we had roving games after dark, and one very fine I think it must have been in October night, the star was absolutely powdering the sky from horizon to horizon. And I remember climbing walls, which we often did, and standing on the top of the wall and looking up into the sky, thinking, This is just amazing. I'm really going to find out what those fellows are up there and uh find out what it's all about. And I remember that quite clearly. But it wasn't, as I say, until the age of twenty-four that something of that feeling returned.

Presenter14:43

Let's go back briefly to this point where we left off the narrative of your story, where you've gone to school now, you've actually you've taken the examinations, you're now faced with the university. It must have been a a very difficult step for you to take, not academically, I mean financially in every other way, because

Presenter14:57

Well, it costs money to go to university and uh one assumes you weren't that well off in those days.

Sir Fred Hoyle15:01

I was not well off at all, but the point was I was lucky to be born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where the educational facilities were were terrific.

Sir Fred Hoyle15:11

That from the time I had taken what we call Matrek, they call it O-level nowadays.

Sir Fred Hoyle15:18

I was supported in the sense that the county gave me fifteen pounds a year, which was quite a sum in those days for a poor boy. It relieved me of any pressure on my parents for things like clothes and so forth. And then um they had a special arrangement that if you got up to a certain standard they would pay all the fees at Cambridge.

Sir Fred Hoyle15:39

Let's

Presenter15:40

Let's then have another choice of record.

Sir Fred Hoyle15:41

I'm afraid my choices are not what you call in the pop music line at all. There's only one time I've ever been able to accommodate myself to jazz, and you'd hardly believe it, but it was in a tell where I was grounded for three days in Fiji.

Presenter15:47

There's only one time

Sir Fred Hoyle15:57

There were three Fijians there playing non standard instruments, and their jazz beat was so wonderful and so varied that I used to go and listen to them by the hour. But I suppose they were never recorded because it was too delicate. If it had got commercialized, it wouldn't have.

Sir Fred Hoyle16:11

So what I've chosen is the sequedilla from Bizet's Carmen sung by Maria Callas. That's about as far as I go towards pop music, I'm afraid.

Speaker 116:34

Father.

Speaker 116:39

If it is

Speaker 216:58

Mona Murr, lead it to the yogurt. Select Mise La Bastier!

Presenter17:13

Uh

Presenter17:21

Sir Fred, we're at the point in your career where you're at university and war's looming.

Presenter17:25

I was interested uh in your book to read about an encounter you had with Bertrand Russell.

Sir Fred Hoyle17:29

Oh yes.

Presenter17:30

What did you make of him?

Sir Fred Hoyle17:31

Well, of course he was just what I was not. He was patrician, uh sort of

Sir Fred Hoyle17:37

Aquiline nose, all the appearance that one expect of a

Sir Fred Hoyle17:42

distinguished member of a distinguished family but our subjects were similar.

Sir Fred Hoyle17:47

We in subsequent years used to eye each other from a distance, realizing we were very different kinds of animals. But the occasion I remember most was in Trinity. It must have been in the spring of nineteen thirty nine, with war.

Sir Fred Hoyle18:00

at least on the horizon then, and he

Sir Fred Hoyle18:04

gave a talk in which he said we mustn't have war because all our cities will be mutually destroyed.

Sir Fred Hoyle18:10

It was the philosophy of deterrence that we have now in the days of nuclear weapons. Russell had seen that this was a logical possibility, but I believed him at the time. I thought maybe he's right. But of course, as soon as the war was started

Speaker 118:21

Alright.

Sir Fred Hoyle18:24

He was entirely wrong and um I just don't know how you get the confidence to make wrong statements with the supreme ease with which Russell made it. I suppose it comes from being patrician.

Presenter18:39

Now all that that that we've talked about now leading up to the war is is contained uh in in your autobiography and you you finished it there. Now the great and glittering career is after that. Are you at work on the second part there for of your memoirs or?

Sir Fred Hoyle18:52

I'm doing a little. I've got the facts together. That's the hard part in a sense. But, um

Sir Fred Hoyle18:58

I think one has to bring oneself to a psychological state of mind where one writes out of interest without feeling.

Sir Fred Hoyle19:08

And that can be very difficult, especially to a scientist who for many, many years was immersed in uh science politics, which is pretty violent stuff, I can tell you. I mean I mean it's probably as bad as real politics. And uh I think one has to get all that out of one's system before one writes. If you've got to see it as a bit of a joke and feel it as a bit of a joke, then when I reach that stage I I'll probably write about it. But I've got all the facts, so that won't be so difficult.

Presenter19:34

And also of course the the problem of being that a lot of the your protagonists would be in fact alive still one imagined.

Sir Fred Hoyle19:40

Yes, uh and of course the law of libel is very rigorous, you know. It isn't just a a matter of what you say being true. That isn't sufficient. So um there are problems there.

Presenter19:51

Or we await the book with eagerness. Let's have another choice of records.

Sir Fred Hoyle19:55

Well this is a quiz. I won't announce what it is, but it's from a work which is now very popular, but is a terrible failure in its own day, to such an extent that the composer said

Sir Fred Hoyle20:06

That it was poor stuff, and he'd really done it because he needed the money. So here is the quiz: What is this?

Presenter21:10

Now what was that?

Sir Fred Hoyle21:11

That was Russian Dance from Swan Lake, and it was played by Ida Hendel with the London Symphony conducted by Andrei Previn.

Presenter21:18

Now, as I mentioned, you're a man of science, and yet you you're also apart from publishing scientific books, thirty one in all, you've done fifteen novels so far, four volumes of children's stories, a pantomime, the libretto for an opera,

Presenter21:31

And two television series. First question is, of course, I mean, where do you find the time to do that?

Presenter21:36

Doesn't take very long.

Sir Fred Hoyle21:37

Uh

Presenter21:38

Yeah.

Sir Fred Hoyle21:38

As long as one's uh in a mood for it, I find uh I have to get in a mood for it and I have to set aside a block of time. I I can't sort of pick up a bit of writing and then do something else and go away for a couple of days and come back. I have to know, say I'm gonna get ten days or maybe preferably two or three weeks. What I do is I start the first day and I I maybe only write uh a couple of pages. The next day I'll write four pages, the next day it will be eight.

Sir Fred Hoyle22:06

And uh so on until I work up to about four thousand words a day, and at that rate one soon through any book.

Sir Fred Hoyle22:13

But I have to keep it going. If I ever break it, then I have to go back to the business of starting slow and building up again. So that's why I don't like to break.

Sir Fred Hoyle22:21

I also find uh the hardest thing psychologically is I know I always have to throw my first chapter away. I try terribly to get it right the first time, but the opening o is always wrong. And what about the opera that you wrote? I mean, when did you write that? Well, I didn't write the music. I real musician at all.

Presenter22:37

The retrieval.

Sir Fred Hoyle22:39

I I just wrote the words and I wrote it together with a friend who was an American composer and um we we made terrible mistakes. Uh I suppose I should blame him. He was scored for far too large an orchestra so it's very difficult to get performances. What we found is that people like to be able to tour with operas and then they don't want to have to carry an orchestra of sixty around. That was a terrible, terrible error.

Sir Fred Hoyle23:02

And uh also my friend, who is highly professional, his family were professional orchestral players.

Sir Fred Hoyle23:09

He had the feeling that he wanted to write the parts so they'd be interesting to the very best artists, and that surely is a mistake. Handel, when he wrote for any choir, was on the right lines. I used to remonstrate with my friend and say, You're making the tender part far too difficult, Leo. No, he said we shall get good tenderists sing it, but that is that isn't quite the way it worked out. It was a chapter of errors.

Presenter23:32

Let's have another choice of breakfast.

Sir Fred Hoyle23:33

Well, my next one is It Has to Come Sooner or Later, and It Must Be Mozart.

Sir Fred Hoyle23:37

And this is from the Requiem Mass, it's the Lacri Mosa.

Sir Fred Hoyle23:42

Leipzig Radio Chorus and the Dresden State Orchestra conducted by Peter Schreier, and these, I believe, as I understand it, are the very last bars that Mozart wrote, and among the most precious in music.

Presenter24:56

Sir Fred, you're renowned as a scientist with controversial and unorthodox views on on many things. One that I think fascinates me is this um idea you have that there is life on on other planets. Could you explain to me exactly what you believe in that?

Sir Fred Hoyle25:11

Well, it's a longish story. It started in the early sixties when I had a research student, Chandra Wickram asinger, and we started to investigate the nature of the particles, the small particles that lie between the stars in very large numbers. And it seemed a relatively easy problem to find out what they were, because we had a lot of um

Sir Fred Hoyle25:31

information, measurements, and so forth.

Sir Fred Hoyle25:34

But we tried for a very long time and we didn't get anywhere in getting really precise. Of course you can get rough agreements with the observations, but to get anything that really good, getting accurate values, we we couldn't be successful. We eventually got round to the idea that by about 1972 and ten years later that the particles were more likely to be organic than just bits of household dust, that kind of thing.

Sir Fred Hoyle26:01

And eventually an amazing thought occurred to us that they might be biological. As soon as that idea occurred, we were able to check it. There are certain ways of checking it, and it worked within a week perfectly. So we've been trying for fifteen years or more without real success, and within a week we were successful. Then we began to look at many other things since, even down to the recent approach of Comet Halley, where we again got the same result that Comet Halley on the 30th of March put out 10 million tons of dust exactly like bacteria, like small things. So we have come from this to the view that the universe is pretty well saturated with basic biological components. And what happens when you get a planet like the Earth is that the components come together, so it's rather like an assembly factory where the components are there and the kit is there and they

Speaker 226:21

Yeah.

Speaker 126:21

Good.

Sir Fred Hoyle26:51

The product is a living organism, a plant or an animal, and that's what we are.

Presenter26:55

Is it possible then with this this theory that that there is uh human life as we know it on on other planets?

Sir Fred Hoyle27:01

I think

Presenter27:01

Thanks.

Sir Fred Hoyle27:01

Oh, yes. Uh I mean for example the eye.

Sir Fred Hoyle27:05

is just about as well constructed as the best man-made optical device. There's no way that we can see that uh the eye can have arisen by the so-called evolutionary processes that uh biologists have accustomed themselves to over the last hundred years. That means the components for the eye, in our view, already exist and reach the earth in that form, and that surely means there are going to be eyes elsewhere.

Sir Fred Hoyle27:33

And indeed, even on our own planet, we know there are two other eyes that are not connected with ours, but they work similarly, and that is the eye of the octopus and the eye of an insect. They work in the same way, even though there's been no evolutionary connection. So it's a case of fitting the same components. So you you're going to get eyes, you're going to get nerves. Each place will sieve out what is suited to itself, depending on the temperature and the size of the planet, the strength of gravity. You might have a planet where gravity was a little less and then uh the nature of birds will be different. The balance of the birds would be different if gravity were a little little change, things like that. But you can get just the same things, yes.

Presenter28:13

Record.

Sir Fred Hoyle28:13

Yes, well my next one is from the Elysian Fields. Beethoven in his later years when he became

Sir Fred Hoyle28:21

almost totally deaf, so that he could hear almost nothing.

Sir Fred Hoyle28:24

amazingly uh found his way, as I think no other human has done, and literally to the Elysian fields, to some uh state of mind that none of us have realized. It's a little hard to show these because they're they're very long. When Beethoven gets there, he doesn't quit them very easily, but

Sir Fred Hoyle28:42

The example I've chosen is uh from the string quartet in F, the Opus 135, pretty well his last work, The Third Movement, the Lento, and it's played by the Italian quartet.

Presenter29:54

So, Fred, you've achieved a remarkable amount in the 71 years that you've been with us. What's left undone for you? Too much.

Presenter30:02

Too much.

Sir Fred Hoyle30:03

all sorts of things. I seem to be on a divergent path. That's to say, I seem to be getting uh more things to do than I uh I've time to do it. So that um

Speaker 130:13

Uh

Speaker 230:13

Yeah.

Sir Fred Hoyle30:16

I'm beginning to um

Sir Fred Hoyle30:19

be very mean about the way I spend my time, very careful to try to make it pay off.

Sir Fred Hoyle30:25

I'm appalled when I look back over my life how profligate I've been in the way I've wasted my time. Nonsense. I really want to see the answer to various puzzles. It's it's really a question, I suppose, of curiosity.

Presenter30:38

Uh

Sir Fred Hoyle30:38

Yeah.

Presenter30:38

Let's have a final choice of records.

Sir Fred Hoyle30:40

Well, it's twentieth century. I have to come into the twentieth century, but musicians will think I'm avoiding the question because it's Sibelius. And uh he's a very curious composer. If you live in the north, where life in the spring and the early summer pulses more strongly than anywhere else on the earth, then you understand Sebalius. But if you live towards the tropics or the Mediterranean, it's very hard to understand.

Sir Fred Hoyle31:04

But I haven't chosen typical Sebillis, this is from his first symphony.

Sir Fred Hoyle31:10

He was a young provincial at a time when Finland was a province of Russia, and this is the strength with which he went in as the young provincial into the Russian capital.

Sir Fred Hoyle31:24

It's played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davies and it's from the fourth movement, it's the peroration of the symphony.

Presenter32:31

Sophia, do you think you might enjoy this uh stay of yours on the desert island?

Sir Fred Hoyle32:35

Well, I'd do my best. I can't say I would enjoy it, but I'd try. Try to escape.

Presenter32:40

Yeah, just a

Sir Fred Hoyle32:40

Uh

Sir Fred Hoyle32:41

Oh, yes, if there's a chance. But I I wouldn't set too much store by it, because I think if you got too anxious it might weigh on one's mind. I think you just wait for the opportunity and seize it if it comes.

Presenter32:51

All the records you've taken are the eight, seven are washed away, one left, which was. Oh, it has to be the Beethoven. The Beethoven.

Sir Fred Hoyle32:56

Yeah.

Sir Fred Hoyle32:58

Book you would take?

Sir Fred Hoyle32:59

Well, I'm afraid that is uh a rather trite choice. You see, I do a lot of calculation, but I do it in my head. So even if I didn't have any paper or a pencil, it wouldn't worry me. I solve mathematical equations mostly in my head these days.

Sir Fred Hoyle33:15

But I do need what in physics we call physical constants, just to keep me honest so that I'm using the right numbers in my calculations, so I would take a big hand book of physics.

Presenter33:26

Um what about the luxury object?

Sir Fred Hoyle33:29

I would take, I think, a portable telescope.

Sir Fred Hoyle33:32

If that's okay. You might think I was looking for ships on the horizon, but we could always have an eyepiece that turned everything upside down. But just for observing the stars, I would like the telescope.

Presenter33:42

Granted. Sir Fred Hall, thank you very much indeed.

Speaker 133:51

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.