63 Facts About Thomas Gold

Thomas Gold was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, who held British and American citizenship.

Thomas Gold was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Thomas Gold's work crossed boundaries of academic and scientific disciplines, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.

Thomas Gold was born on May 22,1920, in Vienna, Austria, to Max Thomas Gold, a wealthy Jewish industrialist who ran one of Austria's largest mining and metal fabrication companies, and German former actress Josefine Martin.

Thomas Gold attended boarding school at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in Zuoz, Switzerland, where he quickly proved to be a clever, competitive and physically and mentally aggressive individual.

Thomas Gold finished his schooling at Zuoz in 1938, and fled with his family to England after the German invasion of Austria in early 1938.

Thomas Gold entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939 and began studying mechanical sciences.

In May 1940, just as Hitler was commencing his advance in Belgium and France, Thomas Gold was sent into internment as an enemy alien by the British government.

Thomas Gold spent most of his nearly 15 months of internment in a camp in Canada, after which he returned to England and reentered Cambridge University, where he abandoned his study of mechanical sciences for physics.

Thomas Gold determined how landing craft could use radar to navigate to the appropriate landing spot on D-Day and discovered that the German navy had fitted snorkels to its U-boats, making them operable underwater while still taking in air from above the surface.

Immediately after the war, Hoyle and Bondi returned to Cambridge, while Thomas Gold stayed with naval research until 1947.

Thomas Gold then began working at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory to help construct the world's largest magnetron, a device invented by two British scientists in 1940 that generated intense microwaves for radar.

Via simple experimentation in 1946, Thomas Gold found that the degree of resonance observed in the cochlea was not in accordance with the level of damping that would be expected from the viscosity of the watery liquid that fills the inner ear.

Thomas Gold's theory was that the ear operates instead in the same way as does a "regenerative radio receiver" by adding energy at the same frequency it is trying to detect.

Later researchers discovered that Thomas Gold's hypothesis had been correct.

Thomas Gold began discussing problems in physics with Hoyle and Bondi again, centering on the issues over redshift and Hubble's law.

Thomas Gold even supported Hoyle's modified steady-state theory; however, by 1998 he started to express some doubts about the theory, but maintained that despite its faults, the theory helped improve understanding regarding the origin of the universe.

In 1951, at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, Thomas Gold proposed that the source of recent radio signals detected from space was outside the Milky Way galaxy, much to the derision of radio astronomer Martin Ryle and several mathematical cosmologists.

However, a year later, a distant source was identified and Thomas Gold announced at an International Astronomical Union meeting in Rome that his theory had been proven.

Thomas Gold left Cambridge in 1952 to become the chief assistant to Astronomer Royal Harold Spencer Jones at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Herstmonceux, Sussex, England.

The theory was widely disputed, until American scientists in 1957 discovered that Thomas Gold's theory held up to mathematical scrutiny by conducting a simulation using a shock tube.

Thomas Gold resigned from the Royal Observatory following Spencer-Jones's retirement and moved to the United States in 1956, where he served as Professor of Astronomy and Robert Wheeler Wilson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard University.

Thomas Gold would serve as director of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research until 1981, establishing Cornell as a leading hub of scientific research.

In 1959, Thomas Gold expanded on his previous prediction of a collisionless shock wave, arguing that solar flares would eject material into magnetic clouds to produce a shock front that would result in geomagnetic storms.

In 1960, Thomas Gold collaborated again with Fred Hoyle to show that magnetic energy fueled solar flares and that flares were triggered when opposite magnetic loops interact and release their stored energy.

In 1960, Thomas Gold suggested a "garbage theory" for the origin of life, thus constituting a kind of "accidental panspermia".

Thomas Gold proposed that these objects were rapidly rotating neutron stars.

Thomas Gold argued that due to their strong magnetic fields and high rotational speed, pulsars would emit radiation similar to a rotating beacon.

Thomas Gold's conclusion was initially not well received by the scientific community; in fact, he was refused permission to present his theory at the first international conference on pulsars.

However, Thomas Gold's theory became widely accepted following the discovery of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula using the Arecibo radio telescope, opening the door for future advancements in solid-state physics and astronomy.

Anthony Tucker of The Guardian remarked that Thomas Gold's discovery paved the way for Stephen Hawking's groundbreaking research into black holes.

Thomas Gold initially suggested that astronauts would sink into the dust, but upon later analysis of impact craters and electrostatic fields, he determined that the astronauts' boots would sink only three centimeters into the Moon's surface.

Thomas Gold was ridiculed by fellow scientists, not only for his hypothesis, but for the approach he took in communicating NASA's concerns to the American public; in particular, some experts were infuriated with his usage of the term "Moon dust" in reference to lunar regolith.

Thomas Gold said the findings were consistent with his hypothesis, noting that "in one area as they walked along, they sank in between five and eight inches".

However, Thomas Gold received little credit for his correct prediction, and was even criticized for his original prediction of a deep layer of lunar dust.

Thomas Gold had contributed to the Apollo program by designing the Apollo Lunar Surface Closeup Camera used on the Apollo 11,12, and 14 missions.

Thomas Gold ignored the warning and testified before a Congressional committee headed by Senator Walter Mondale.

Thomas Gold first became interested in the origins of petroleum in the 1950s, postulating a theory on the abiogenic formation of fossil fuels.

Thomas Gold engaged in thorough discussion on the matter with Fred Hoyle, who even included a chapter on "Thomas Gold's Pore Theory" in his 1955 book Frontiers in Astronomy.

Thomas Gold maintains that these deposits are not fossil fuels in the normal sense, but the products of primordial hydrocarbons dating from the time of the Earth's formation.

Thomas Gold pointed to the abundance of helium in oil and gas reserves as evidence for "a deep source of the hydrocarbons".

In later publications, Thomas Gold emphasized that the immense amounts of helium gas that surges upward during commercial petroleum production at some sites is proof in itself that substantial lightweight gases have indeed persisted at depth since the amalgamation of cosmic debris into planet Earth during the birth of this solar system.

In 1987, approximately 900 barrels of drilling lubricant disappeared nearly 20,000 feet into the ground, leading Thomas Gold to believe that the lubricant had fallen into a methane reservoir.

Thomas Gold claimed that the sludge contained both oil and remnants of archaebacteria.

Thomas Gold argued that "it suggests there is an enormous sphere of life, of biology, at deeper levels in the ground than we have had any knowledge of previously" and that this evidence would "destroy the orthodox argument that since oil contains biological molecules, oil reserves must have derived from biological material".

The announcement of Thomas Gold's findings was met with mixed reactions, ranging from "furious incredulity" to "deep skepticism".

Critics dismissed Thomas Gold's archaebacteria finding, stating that "since micro-organisms cannot survive at such depth, the bacteria prove that the well has been contaminated from the surface".

Thomas Gold reasoned that oil had migrated from the shale down to the granite deep in the ground.

In light of the controversy surrounding the sludge and possible drill contamination, Thomas Gold abandoned the project at Gravberg-1, calling it a "complete fiasco", and redesigned the experiment by replacing his oil-based drilling lubricant with a water-based one.

Thomas Gold wrote in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year that the solar system might harbor at least 10 deep biospheres.

Thomas Gold published a book of the same title, The Deep Hot Biosphere, in 1999, which expanded on the arguments in his 1992 paper and included speculations on the origin of life and on horizontal gene transfer.

In short, Thomas Gold said about the origin of natural hydrocarbons : Hydrocarbons are not biology reworked by geology, but rather geology reworked by biology.

The pioneering ideas proposed by Thomas Gold inspired a generation of researchers in the field of geobiology to dive deeper into the possibilities of subsurface life, spawning hundreds of relevant publications.

Thomas Gold was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Astronautical Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the International Academy of Astronautics, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Thomas Gold won the John Frederick Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society in 1972 for his paper "The Nature of the Lunar Surface: Recent Evidence" and the Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1979.

In 1985, Thomas Gold won the prestigious Thomas Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, an award whose recipients include Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, Martin Ryle, Edwin Hubble, James Van Allen, Fritz Zwicky, Hannes Alfven and Albert Einstein.

Thomas Gold did not earn a doctorate, but received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Cambridge University in 1969.

Thomas Gold was unusual in working mainly theoretically, but using little mathematics, relying instead on his profound intuitive understanding of physics.

Thomas Gold will be remembered as one of the most interesting, dynamic and influential scientists of his generation.

Thomas Gold married his first wife, Merle Eleanor Tuberg, an American astrophysicist who had worked with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, in Cambridge in 1947.

Thomas Gold died at the age of 84 from complications due to heart disease, at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, New York.

Thomas Gold was buried in the Pleasant Grove Cemetery in Ithaca.

Thomas Gold was survived by his wife, four daughters, and six grandchildren.