![]() He noticed that one of the existing processes would be made a billion times more productive if the carbon-12 nucleus had a resonance at 7.7 MeV, but the nuclear physicists did not list such a one. He also formed a group at Cambridge exploring stellar nucleosynthesis in ordinary stars and was bothered by the paucity of stellar carbon production in existing models. He had an intuition at the time "I will make a name for myself if this works out." Eventually (1954) his prescient and ground breaking paper came out. On one trip to the US, he learned about supernovae at Caltech and Mount Palomar and, in Canada, the nuclear physics of plutonium implosion and explosion, noticed some similarity between the two and started thinking about supernova nucleosynthesis. The radar work paid for a couple of trips to North America, where he took the opportunity to visit astronomers. Two colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had many and deep discussions on cosmology. Britain's radar project employed more personnel than the Manhattan project, and was probably the inspiration for the large British project in Hoyle's novel The Black Cloud. He was also put in charge of countermeasures against the radar guided guns found on the Graf Spee. ![]() In late 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research, for example devising a method to get the altitude of the incoming aeroplanes. In 1936, he won the Mayhew Prize (jointly with George Stanley Rushbrooke). In his youth, he sung in the choir at the local Anglican church. Hoyle was educated at Bingley Grammar School and read mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College of Music in London and later worked as a cinema pianist. His father, Ben Hoyle, who was a violinist and worked in the wool trade in Bradford, served as a machine gunner in the First World War. ![]() Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Riding of Yorkshire, England.
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