Biographical Memoirs Volume 88 (2006) / Chapter Skim
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Thomas Gold
Thomas Gold
Pages 144-157
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Tommy left Zuoz in 1937. In 1938, at the Anschluss, Germany invaded Austria and occupied it, and Gold and his family went to England with stateless papers.
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It was during this internment that he met his close friend Hermann Bondi. Gold went back to Cambridge University in 1942, having lost about a year, and began to realize that he much preferred physics to mechanical sciences.
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Gold's discouragement at this response led him to move into other fields, in particular, into astrophysics. On the basis of his radar work and a Trinity fellowship, Gold finally obtained a junior lectureship (a demonstratorship)
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This was the basis of the idea that led Bondi and Gold to publish their paper on the steady state cosmology derived from what they called the "perfect cosmological principle," and Hoyle to publish separately on the steady state, basing his analysis on a field theoretical approach. Both papers appeared in 1948 and generated tremendous interest and a good deal of controversy.
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But by 1952 the first distant source had been identified, and at an International Astronomical Union meeting in Rome, Gold was able to get up and show that he was right, and that Ryle had been wrong. By the early 1960s the apparent discovery2 of the microwave background radiation, the black body radiation, led nearly everyone to believe that there must have been a beginning -- a big bang.
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national committees and as a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In the run-up to the manned space program and the lunar landing, there was much debate and confusion about the nature of the surface of the moon.
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This was a major conclusion reached by Gold, and it is now considered to be the correct explanation. Because of the strong magnetic field and the high rotation speed, relativistic velocities will be set up in any plasma in the surrounding magnetosphere, leading to radiation in the pattern of a rotating beacon.
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From page 152... ...
Small deep boreholes put down in the 1980s by the Swedish government to test Gold's hypothesis yielded only a small flow of methane, but it seemed to be ancient and to continue to flow. Gold modified his original hypothesis to propose a "deep hot biosphere" of methane-producing organisms.
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PERSONAL Gold was married twice. In 1947 he married Merle Tuberg, an American theoretical astrophysicist who had worked with S
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Nature 163:513. 1951 The origin of cosmic radio noise.
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Rotating neutron stars as the origin of the pulsating radio source. Nature 218:731.
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From page 156... ...
In 1983 International Gas Research Confer ence Proceedings, ed.
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