Remembering Cornell's Tommy Gold: big thinker, bigger personality

By David Brand

"And here," said Yervant Terzian, "is a picture of Tommy at a very young age, trying to tell you that you are wrong."

The pictures of Cornell's legendary polymath astronomer Thomas "Tommy" Gold that were flashed on a screen at Barnes Hall on Oct. 13 were part of a more-than-two-hour memorial tribute, both humorous and heartfelt, to Gold, who died on June 22. The anecdotes and remembrances by family, colleagues and friends gave proof to the essential character of Gold: an original and protean thinker, a generous father and a fiercely competitive sportsman.

Sir Hermann Bondi of the University of Cambridge reminisces about Tommy Gold, his late friend and collaborator, at a memorial service for Gold in Barnes Hall on Oct. 13. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

As Terzian, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences, who was hired by Gold in 1965, noted: "Whatever he undertook, he always did with enthusiasm and confidence." He added, "Tommy was a star, and everybody knew that."

Gold retired in 1987 after nearly three decades on campus, during which time he rebuilt the astronomy department, built the Space Sciences Building and helped establish the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. He also explored a host of research areas, from the instability of the Earth's axis of rotation, dust on the lunar surface and cosmic rays from the sun, to the arrow of time, the nature of pulsars and terrestrial sources of hydrocarbons.

Cornell President Emeritus Dale Corson recalled that he hired Gold in 1959 because "we liked the torrent of ideas that flowed from him." Steven Soter, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said his former mentor and collaborator had "courage combined with genius that allowed him to accomplish so much."

But amid the many stories of accomplishment and legend, there were also reminiscences that were both personal and nostalgic. Two of Gold's daughters, Lauren Gold and Tanya Vanasse, spoke of a father who would at once would lecture them on relativity theory and then teach them to ski, both on water and snow. And two of Gold's oldest colleagues, Sir Hermann Bondi of the University of Cambridge and Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., looked back over six decades to the early years of World War II when Gold had been released by the British from internment as an enemy alien to work for the British Admiralty Signals Establishment designing radar detection systems.

Bondi, like Gold, a native of Vienna who had gone to England in the late 1930s, related how he, Gold and colleague Fred Hoyle (also to become a distinguished astronomer) were working for the British war effort and living in a rented farmhouse in Surrey, outside London. The three collaborated until 1949, and together developed the now disproved steady state theory of the expansion of the universe. Gold, said Bondi, was a "phenomenon."

Dyson met Gold at Cambridge in 1946 when "Tommy" was developing a model of a positive feedback mechanism in the inner ear to explain his theory of hearing, a theory that was for many years soundly rejected. Said Dyson: "It took about 30 years before the audio-physiological community admitted that he was right, and they were wrong."