“in one area as they walked along, they sank in between five and eight inches”
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Thomas Gold
Thomas Gold was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, who also held British and American citizenship. He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in 1948 proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work cro…
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science · Austrian astrophysicist (1920–2004) · astronomer · military flight engineer · astrophysicist · engineer · physicist · university teacher · biophysicist · geophysicist · academic · also Thomas Gold, Gold
Born 22 May 1920 · Died 22 June 2004 · Q93562
38 published statements · 0 followers
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2026· 1 entry
2024· 2 entries
NASA launched the first spacecraft, Europa Clipper, to study and sample whether one of the moons of an outer planet that Gold had pointed to as a prospect for deep life (Europa, a moon of Jupiter) might indeed harbor the
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“In retrospect, it is not hard to understand why the scientific community has typically sought only surface life in the heavens. Scientists have been hindered by a sort of”
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2019· 1 entry
A study of gases and secondary carbonate minerals revealed that long-term microbial methanogenesis has occurred in situ deep within the fracture system of the crater (for at least 80 million years) and with an obvious sp
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2004· 3 entries
Died 2004-06-22.
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"Ignored for over 30 years, his research was rediscovered in the 1970s when physiologists discovered the tiny hair cells that act as amplifiers in the inner ear
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Obituaries laying out the breadth of his scientific inquiries appeared in a number of scientific journals
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1999· 1 entry
Which expanded on the arguments in his 1992 paper and included speculations on the origin of life and on horizontal gene transfer
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1996· 1 entry
A paper published in the journal Social Studies of Science was titled, "Which Came First, the Fossil or the Fuel
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1989· 1 entry
“It was not coming up at a rate at which you could sell it, but it showed there was oil down there.”
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1987· 1 entry
Approximately 900 barrels (140 m3) of drilling lubricant disappeared nearly 20,000 feet (6,100 m) into the ground, leading Gold to believe that the lubricant had fallen into a methane reservoir
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1985· 2 entries
Won Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985).
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Gold won the prestigious 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 Alfvén and Albert Einst
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1972· 1 entry
For his paper "The Nature of the Lunar Surface: Recent Evidence" and the Humboldt Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1979
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1971· 1 entry
And had recently concluded another faculty collaboration at Cornell: working with Carl Sagan in the writing of the television series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
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1969· 1 entry
And brought back the first samples of lunar rocks, researchers found that lunar soil was in fact powdery
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1968· 1 entry
A Cambridge radio astronomy postgraduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her doctoral adviser Antony Hewish discovered a pulsing radio source with a period of 1
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1965· 1 entry
Which was predicted by the Big Bang theory
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1962· 2 entries
Awarded Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1962).
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Awarded Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award (1962).
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1960· 2 entries
Gold suggested a "garbage theory" for the origin of life, thus constituting a kind of "accidental panspermia"
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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
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1959· 1 entry
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
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1957· 1 entry
Discovered that Gold's theory held up to mathematical scrutiny by conducting a simulation using a shock tube
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1956· 1 entry
Where he served as Professor of Astronomy (1957–1958) and Robert Wheeler Wilson Professor of Applied Astronomy (1958–1959) at Harvard University
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1955· 1 entry
Predicted that the Moon was covered by a layer of fine rock powder stemming from "the ceaseless bombardment of its surface by Solar System debris"
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1952· 1 entry
To become the chief assistant to Astronomer Royal Harold Spencer Jones at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Herstmonceux, Sussex, England
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1951· 1 entry
At a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, 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
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1948· 3 entries
Discussing the "steady-state theory" as an alternative to the Big Bang: one by Hermann Bondi and Gold, the other by Fred Hoyle
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Published two papers on his results; one described the theory and the other reporting the experimental results
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Proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe
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1946· 1 entry
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
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1940· 1 entry
That generated intense microwaves for radar
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1938· 1 entry
And fled with his family to England after the German invasion of Austria in early 1938
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1933· 1 entry
Gold and his family left Germany because of his father's heritage
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1931· 1 entry
And later advanced by George Gamow, which suggested that the universe expanded from an extremely dense and hot state and continues to expand today
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1920· 2 entries
Born 1920-05-22.
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In Vienna, Austria, to Max Gold, a wealthy Jewish industrialist (pre-war) who ran one of Austria's largest mining and metal fabrication companies, and German former actress Josefine Martin
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