[FPSPACE] FW: Moon dust - Oxford DNB Life of the Day

[LARRY KLAES]

>From: oxforddnb-lotd at OUP.COM
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>To: ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L at webber.uk.oup.com
>Subject: Moon dust - Oxford DNB Life of the Day
>Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 12:00:00 +0100
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>The latest update to the Oxford DNB is published on 22 May.
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>Gold,  Thomas  [Tommy]  (1920-2004), astrophysicist, was born on 22 May 
>1920 in Vienna, Austria, the son of Max Gold, a wealthy industrialist and a 
>director of Austria's largest mining company, and his wife, Josefine, nee 
>Martin, a former child actress. His early childhood was spent in a 
>privileged environment, and it seemed natural that he would follow his 
>father into business. However, the steep economic downturn in Europe at the 
>end of the 1920s threatened the mining industry, so the family moved to 
>Berlin, where his father took a more secure position as a metals trader. In 
>1933, after Hitler's rise to power, the family left Germany, Gold's father 
>being Jewish, to spend four years travelling through Europe before settling 
>in England in 1937. Gold was educated at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in 
>Switzerland, where he boarded. He then moved to England, where he spent one 
>year learning Latin so that he could matriculate at the University of 
>Cambridge. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1939 to read 
>mechanical sciences, but received little teaching because within weeks the 
>university was drained of its academic staff, who had been swiftly drafted 
>into war work.
>
>Hitler's rapid advance in Belgium and France in May 1940 led on 12 May to 
>the internment of all men of German or Austrian descent who were resident 
>in eastern England. Thus it was that Tommy Gold and Hermann Bondi (who had 
>also fled Vienna) met behind barbed wire on a concrete floor, and 
>immediately became good friends. They were transferred to a camp in Canada 
>for several months, then released to return to Cambridge in 1941, where 
>Gold completed his engineering degree, gaining a miserable result, an 
>ordinary degree, in June 1942. By this stage Bondi had joined Fred Hoyle on 
>radar research for the Royal Navy. Bondi pressed Hoyle to hire Gold as a 
>practically minded member of Hoyle's theory group. Thereafter Hoyle, Bondi, 
>and Gold shared a rented house where they whiled away their evenings 
>working speculatively in astrophysics. An unlikely chain of events that had 
>commenced in 1933 led to Gold becoming an innovative scientist, rather than 
>the entrepreneur his father had intended.
>
>Gold quickly became an indispensable member of Hoyle's group, working on 
>how the state of the sea affected the radar visibility for aircraft-mounted 
>radar. He then solved the problem of how a large number of landing craft 
>could accurately navigate by radar to their correct landing spots on D-day. 
>His greatest contribution to the naval intelligence service was his 
>discovery in early 1944 that the German navy was fitting snorkels to many 
>of its submarines, enabling them to recharge their batteries without 
>surfacing. He worked in naval intelligence until 1947, when he returned to 
>Cambridge as a junior research fellow at Trinity College. The same year he 
>married Merle Eleanor Tuberg, an American astrophysicist; they had three 
>daughters, Linda, Lucy, and Tanya. That marriage was dissolved, and in 1972 
>he married Carvel B. Beyer, with whom he had a fourth daughter, Lauren.
>
>In 1948 Gold, Bondi, and Hoyle proposed a new theory about the origin of 
>the universe, which they named steady-state cosmology. Gold's contribution 
>was in the setting of an intellectual puzzle: what properties would the 
>universe need to have if its overall appearance were to remain 
>approximately the same in all locations and at all epochs? Gold knew that 
>such a model would require the continuous creation of matter in order to 
>fill the voids left by the expansion of the universe. In the UK this 
>steady-state cosmology seized the imagination of the general public, 
>although it was never taken seriously in professional circles, despite the 
>vociferous advocacy of its three proponents. With the discovery, in 1963, 
>of cosmic microwave background radiation the rival big bang theory became 
>the consensus cosmology, despite which Gold never lost his faith in 
>steady-state cosmology.
>
>Gold's interests always ranged widely, encompassing physiology, astronomy, 
>geophysics, and engineering. The department of physics at Cambridge found 
>this broad spectrum attractive, and had appointed him a demonstrator in 
>1949. This brought him into direct contact with Martin Ryle, head of the 
>radio group at Cambridge, with whom Hoyle was already conducting furious 
>public arguments. Gold rather unwisely joined the fray on Hoyle's side, 
>loudly criticizing Ryle for the latter's belief that cosmic radio sources 
>are stars in the Milky Way, rather than extragalactic objects. Gold's 
>undisciplined behaviour led to his modest appointment not being renewed, 
>and his future did not look promising. Nevertheless his luck changed 
>remarkably when the astronomer royal, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, offered him 
>the prestigious post of chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, 
>which had moved out of London to Herstmonceux on the Sussex coast. There 
>Gold was given a free hand, and he moved into the new field of space 
>research. He took the first steps in subject areas that would hold his 
>attention: the nature of the lunar surface, and solar-terrestrial 
>relations. An opportunity to organize an expedition to watch an eclipse 
>deepened his interest in the action of magnetic fields in space, and the 
>ejection of high-energy particles in solar flares. In 1959 he coined the 
>expression 'magnetosphere' for the region above the ionosphere in which the 
>magnetic field of the earth has a dominant control over the motions of gas 
>and fast charged particles.
>
>Gold resigned abruptly from the Royal Observatory in 1956, on finding that 
>he could not work with the new astronomer royal, Richard Woolley. He had 
>earlier taken the precaution of visiting several centres for astronomical 
>research in the USA, which led to an invitation to spend a semester at 
>Cornell. Consequently Gold and his wife left England for good in 1956. 
>Harvard offered him a chair in radio astronomy in 1957. However, he and his 
>family could not settle in Massachusetts, so when, in 1959, Cornell offered 
>him the headship of its department of astronomy he accepted. This was his 
>final move. At Cornell he founded, and directed for twenty-two years, the 
>Center for Radio Physics and Space Research, the world's first institute 
>dedicated to space research. He and his Cornell colleagues persuaded the US 
>Defense Department to fund the construction of a giant radio telescope to 
>observe the ionosphere. First operated in 1963, this instrument, located 
>near Arecibo in Puerto Rico, was the world's largest single-dish radio 
>telescope.
>
>During preparations in the late 1960s for a lunar landing Gold became 
>embroiled in controversy by asserting that a thick layer of dust on the 
>lunar surface could pose a threat to astronauts. He had made no detailed 
>calculations, but incautiously remarked that the dust could be several 
>metres thick. This caused panic at NASA: a robotic craft was dispatched to 
>check that the risk was small in the designated landing zone. Relations 
>between NASA and Gold subsequently improved, and he served with distinction 
>on NASA's science advisory committee. He strenuously opposed manned space 
>flight programmes, and the development of the shuttle, on the grounds that 
>robotic instruments could deliver the science at much lower cost.
>
>The discovery of pulsars by the radio astronomy group at Cambridge in 1968 
>excited worldwide interest: what were these extraordinary objects? 
>Ironically, when opposing Ryle seventeen years earlier, Gold had worked on 
>the properties of small stars with very strong magnetic fields, and had 
>suggested they would emit intense radiation. For him it was a small step to 
>suggest that a pulsar is a rotating neutron star, an object the properties 
>of which he had already predicted. His paper on this model was refused at 
>the first international conference on pulsars, but the journal Nature 
>published it immediately. Gold predicted that radio astronomers should be 
>able to detect pulsars with shorter periods than when first discovered, and 
>he concluded that a pulsar would slow down over time as it loses its 
>rotational energy. Both predictions were quickly confirmed by the Arecibo 
>telescope, with the discovery of a pulsar with a period of 0.033 seconds in 
>the Crab nebula. Gold's success encouraged theorists, most notably Stephen 
>Hawking, to work on even more extreme objects, black holes.
>
>Gold became deeply fascinated by the origin of petroleum, a topic he had 
>first pondered in the early 1950s, when he suggested a possible abiogenic 
>cause. In 1980 he speculated that fossil fuels are not fossil at all, but 
>rather that they are the result of the constant upwelling of hydrocarbons 
>from deep below the earth's surface, where they have been trapped since our 
>planet's formation 4.5 billion years ago. His conclusion was that the human 
>race could meet its energy needs for thousands of years by the simple 
>expedient of drilling ever more deeply. These speculations earned him the 
>derision of geophysicists. Nevertheless he remained convinced, and in 1999 
>he elaborated further by suggesting that the biological markers present in 
>petroleum have arisen from biological action on primordial methane, and 
>that they are not evidence for a biological origin for petroleum.
>
>Gold's many honours included being made a fellow of the Royal Society 
>(1964), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974), and a 
>member of the National Academy of Sciences (1974), and he was a recipient 
>of the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985). He suffered a 
>heart attack in 1985, and officially retired the following year. He died on 
>22 June 2004 at Cayuga Medical Center, Ithaca, New York, of heart disease, 
>and was survived by his wife, Carvel, and his four daughters.
>
>Simon Mitton
>
>Sources  Cornell University press release, 22 June 2004 + The Guardian (24 
>June 2004) + Daily Telegraph (25 June 2004) + The Scotsman (26 June 2004) + 
>The Times (28 June 2004) + The Independent (29 June 2004) + Nature, 
>430/6998 (22 July 2004), 415 + Y. Terzian, 'Thomas Gold, 1920-2004', 
>Astronomy and Geophysics, 46/1 (Feb 2005), 38 + H. Bondi, Memoirs FRS, 52 
>(2006), 117-35 + WW (2004) + personal knowledge (2008) + private 
>information (2008)
>Archives  FILM BFI NFTVA, documentary footage SOUND BL NSA, Scientifically 
>Speaking, interview with J. Maddox
>Likenesses  obituary photographs · photograph, Cornell University [see 
>illus.]
>
>
ÿ
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