chrisbhanlon

Superintellect I eventually settled on as the purest concept to cling to, when forced to cast about during my time of hardest thinking immediately following the dramatic and unexpected nature of these events. It was a true foundation that you could build a house around if only you knew how, but without the tenuous added arrivals of gods that fly in like dreams from all corners, griffins unravelling from history onto the parapets of my attempted sturdy steps of logic and exploration. Superintellect was Fred Hoyle’s word. He was the astrophysicist who had made his science knockabout and intelligible using the everyman touch in popular post war radio broadcasts. He was to discover that most elements were not formed at the beginning of the universe but rather hundreds of millions of years later in star furnaces after the immensely unlikely bonding and clustering of matter to form these stars and galaxies. Carbon itself he found was miraculously cooked inside these giant stars as a result of quantum collisions, however it should have been so rarely produced as to exclude the beginnings of life. He theorized while peering along his typically backward gaze through the eons, that only a very rare value in a particular ‘excitation’ level in the quantum structure of the carbon atom, would have allowed the required collisions of quantum matter to produce carbon in any quantity. The precise value of this necessary ‘excitation’ he was able to calculate theoretically. To the immense shock of peers, who at that time were mostly under the belief that the universe was randomly formed rather than as a result of a deliberate act, this value was exactly correct when tested by others in experiments. Hoyle stared down these unambiguous results and took them on board personally as well as scientifically. He also stared down the florid imaginations of various priests and dogmatizers who sought to attach themselves to his discovery assuming they had stumbled across a natual ally. Hoyle managed to remain an unflinching life long atheist and only in this most minimalist of ways was a believer. He said that a “common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature”.