Memorial for Tommy Gold, CU's audacious thinker, Oct. 13

A memorial service for Thomas "Tommy" Gold, the Cornell astronomer, protean scientific explorer and audacious thinker who died June 22, will be held Oct. 13 at 3 p.m. in Barnes Hall. All members of the Cornell community are invited to attend.

Gold

After the service, all attendees are invited to a reception at the A.D.White House.

Yervant Terzian, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences who was hired by Gold in 1965, said that many of Gold's former students, colleagues and friends from Europe, Australia and the United States will be attending the service. They are coming, he said, to honor "a scientist with a love of life."

"Tommy was an extraordinary man, and by any definition he was a genius," Terzian said.

Among Gold's former colleagues speaking at the memorial service will be Sir Hermann Bondi of the University of Cambridge, who, with Gold and Sir Fred Hoyle, postulated the now-discredited steady state theory of the expansion of the universe in 1948. Bondi was possibly Gold's oldest colleague, the two sharing a common heritage -- both were born in Austria -- and the common experience of being briefly interned in Canada by the British during World War II.

Another speaker will be Gold's longtime friend and collaborator Stirling Colgate of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The day before the memorial, on Oct. 12, Colgate will give a talk in honor of Gold, titled "Our Magnetized Universe," at 12:15 p.m. in 622 Space Sciences Building.

Also speaking at the memorial service will be Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a scientist who, like Gold, worked for the British war effort during World War II, Dyson for the Royal Air Force and Gold for the Admiralty.

Coming from Australia to speak at the service will be Harry Messel, former head of the physics department at the University of Sydney. During the 1960s, Messel and Gold formed the Cornell/Sydney Astronomy Center for the study of radio physics.

Elizabeth Bilson, who worked closely with Gold as a research associate from 1969 to 1983, remembers Gold as "an extremely considerate individual who took care of people -- he had a soft heart." However, she recalls, when it came to dealing with officialdom, "he could be very feisty." Perhaps the most notable example of this was his heated disagreement with NASA over space exploration. Gold argued that robots could do the job at a small fraction of the cost of sending humans into space. In addition, he worried about accidents putting the lives of astronauts at risk.

Gold became a commanding figure on the Cornell campus from the time he arrived here from Harvard University in 1959 to found the modern astronomy department. It was Gold who won the funds for the construction of the Space Sciences Building and who, in 1968, hired renowned popularizer of astronomy Carl Sagan. During his early years at Cornell, Gold supervised the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and guided its research in radio astronomy. He retired in 1987.

The breadth of his work was immense, ranging from the development of a model of a positive feedback mechanism in the inner ear to his identification, in 1967, of pulsars as rapidly rotating magnetized neutron stars. His last great success came with his book The Deep Hot Biosphere, exploring his theory that primordial methane and other hydrocarbons are working their way up through the Earth's mantle.

"He was very enthusiastic about his ideas, and they just poured out of him," Terzian said.