Thomas Gold | Biography

Born in Vienna, Austria, on May 22, 1920, Thomas Gold emigrated to England, where he attended Cambridge University, graduating in 1942. He received a master's degree three years later. In 1956 he came to the United States, worked for a year at Harvard University, and finally settled down at Cornell University. Gold was interested in a subfield of astronomy called cosmology, which deals with the structure and evolution of the universe.

Cosmologists hold that if we hope to understand the cosmos, we must make some assumptions about it. First and foremost, cosmologists assume that the universe is homogeneous--that is, it is nearly the same everywhere. The view of the sky as seen from the Milky Way galaxy shouldn't be radically different than the view from an entirely different galaxy. This assumption is called the cosmological principle.

In the 1920s, Edwin Powell Hubble observed that the universe appears to be expanding; galaxies are hurling themselves farther and farther apart. Scientists proposed that a big bang set them into motion aeons ago, but a few astronomers, Gold among them, felt that the cosmological principle should be consistent with regard to time as well as space. In other words, the universe should look the same not only from all locations, but at all times--past, present, and future.

Gold's concept, introduced in 1948, was called the steady state theory. To account for the apparent expansion of the universe, he suggested that as the galaxies spread apart, new matter was created in the empty space. This new matter evolved into new galaxies. Ultimately the more far-flung galaxies would disappear from view, but they would be replaced by the new members. Hence the view of the galaxies, as well as the overall density, remained the same.

According to the theory, new matter was being "continuously created" out of nothing. If this was occurring, the movement of all the galaxies away from each other should be increasing smoothly. In addition, there should be galaxies comprised of very old stars as well as galaxies containing mostly new ones.

Many astronomers, such as Fred Hoyle, appreciated the simplicity and symmetry offered by the theory. On the other side of the fence were astronomers like George Gamow, who held to the big bang theory proposed by Georges Henri Lemaître. Neither theory prevailed until Maartin Schmidt's (1929- ) discovery of quasars in 1963 and the discovery of background microwave radiation by Arno Penzias and Wilson provided evidence for the big bang and dealt a severe blow to steady state cosmology.

On a matter unrelated to the cosmological fracas, when objects called pulsars were first detected by Antony Hewish, Gold made the suggestion that they were neutron stars and that their regular pulses should be decreasing slowly but measurably. In this he was proven correct.

Recent Updates

June 22, 2004: Gold died on June 22, 2004, in Ithaca, New York, of heart disease. He was 84. Source: New York Times, June 24, 2004, p. A21(L).