Astronomy & Geophysics


	Obituaries

Astronomy & Geophysics 46 (1) 1.38

Thomas Gold 1920–2004

Gold medalist of the RAS, pioneering astronomer, cosmologist and broad scientific thinker but, above all, an iconoclast.
Thomas Gold died in Ithaca, New York, on 22 June 2004 from heart complications. He was Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University. In 1959 Gold was the founder and first Director of Cornell's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, a position he held for 20 years. A Fellow of the Royal Society in the UK, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Tommy was a theoretical astrophysicist and one of the great original thinkers of the 20th century. His imaginative ideas frequently challenged established explanations. He had a vast physical intuition and worked on subjects as diverse as the nature of pulsating radio sources, the lunar surface, the origin of solar flares, the dynamics of planetary rings, interstellar dust and theories of the universe.

He was born in Vienna, Austria, on 22 May 1920, and moved with his family to Berlin, Germany, when he was 13 years old; soon afterwards the family moved to London. Tommy was sent to boarding school in Zuoz, Switzerland, and in 1938 he became a mechanical engineering student at Cambridge University. Soon the Second World War started and Tommy, being an Austrian citizen, was sent to a camp in Canada as an enemy alien. During this time he met his lifelong friend Hermann Bondi. When released he was sent back to England and was appointed to the British Admiralty, where he designed radar detection systems for the war. During this period he worked with Bondi and Fred Hoyle. Shortly after the war the three of them developed the Steady State Theory of the universe, according to which the universe has no beginning and no end and remains always about the same by creating small amounts of matter to compensate the observed cosmic expansion. Their “Perfect Cosmological Principle” suggested that the universe was homogenous and isotropic in space as well as in time. Later observations did not support this elegant theory.

In 1957 Tommy left England and accepted a professorship at Harvard University. He moved to Cornell University in 1959 where he founded the modern department of astronomy. In 1971 he was appointed to the John L Wetherill Endowed Professorship. He retired from Cornell University in 1986. Tommy earned his BA and MA degrees in 1942 and 1946 respectively, from Cambridge University, and was awarded a DSc degree in 1969, also from Cambridge. During the 1960s he supervised the Arecibo Observatory and guided its research, particularly in radio astronomy.

Broad interests

His scientific interests were broad. While in Cambridge, England, after the war, he developed a model of a positive feedback mechanism in the inner ear. He worked on the properties of the lunar soil and devised a stereoscopic camera that the Apollo astronauts used to take close-up pictures of the lunar surface. Soon after the discovery of the enigmatic pulsating radio sources in 1967 he presented their correct explanation as rapidly rotating magnetized neutron stars. Tommy also made important contributions to studies of the thermodynamic “arrow of time”, the alignment of interstellar grains, the nature of quasars, plasmas and magnetic fields in the solar system, the origin of solar flares, interstellar molecular masers, the instability of the Earth's axis of rotation, the dynamics of narrow planetary rings and resonances in the solar system. Many times he questioned established theory and thus stimulated many scientists to think more carefully about accepted paradigms. Though he worked closely with NASA during the Apollo Moon missions, he was opposed to human space flights and argued that robotic missions were more effective.

In the last 20 years of his life he explored the possibility that primordial methane and other hydrocarbons are working their way up through the Earth's mantle. He wrote two books on this subject: Power from the Earth and The Deep Hot Biosphere which, as Tommy expected, created controversy but created a large interest in this topic.

He was the author or co-author of more than 200 publications and had received many honors, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Tommy was a competitive sportsman who excelled in snow and water skiing, and he was a master carpenter.

Yervant Terzian

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