Faulkner admitted that he himself was puzzled by Hoyle’s unyielding position toward the big bang. In his opinion, Hoyle “went off the rails a bit, having developed a love for his brainchild [the steady state theory] and not wanting to give it up.” He made another interesting comment that by the late 1960s, Hoyle’s interest in what one might call “normative science” decayed, giving way to a more maverick path.

Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal for Britain, succeeded Hoyle both as Plumian Professor and as director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. He remembers Hoyle fondly as being always supportive, in spite of the fact that some of Rees’s own work on the cosmic microwave background and on quasars helped bring about the collapse of the steady state theory. Rees still holds Hoyle in the highest regard—a photograph of Hoyle hangs on the wall of Rees’s office at the Institute of Astronomy. Rees offered two tantalizing potential causes for Hoyle’s dissidence. First, he emphasized the negative effects of scientific isolation. He explained that from about the mid-1960s on, Hoyle talked about science almost exclusively with his close collaborators: a very small group that included Jayant Narlikar, Chandra Wickramasinghe, and the Burbidges. Since these scientists rarely if ever disagreed with Hoyle, this was clearly not a good recipe for changing one’s views. To my surprise, Rees told me that even though Hoyle had always been very generous and encouraging, he almost never discussed science with him. In fact, Hoyle did not compare notes about new scientific discoveries with any young cosmologists outside his circle of supporters.

Rees made a second interesting observation, which was reminiscent of one of Faulkner’s remarks. He noted that in the late stages of their working lives, some scientists lose interest in the routine, incremental advances that normally characterize long stretches of scientific efforts, and they turn their attention to completely new branches of science, sometimes even outside their area of expertise. Rees pointed to Linus Pauling’s almost obsessive preoccupation with vitamin C late in his career as an example of this phenomenon, and he held Hoyle’s misguided endeavors regarding the origin of life on Earth in a similar light.

There is no doubt that the factors suggested by Rees, Eggleton, and Faulkner played roles in Hoyle’s stubbornness. 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 prehistory, 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.