Tommy Gold is an Austrian-born American polymath and astrophysicist who has done pioneering work in cosmology, pulsars, and lunar science, informing the world that neutrons are unstable, with a mean lifetime of ten minutes.
Born in Vienna, Gold became a refugee from the Austrian Anschluss and gained his BA in 1942 from Cambridge University, England. He lectured there in physics from 1948 to 1952 before joining the Royal Greenwich Observatory as chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal. He moved to the United States in 1956, founding the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University and serving as its first director from 1959 to 1981, and as professor of astronomy from 1971 to 1986. He was also on the EASTEX committee.
In 194Tommy Gold is an Austrian-born American polymath and astrophysicist who has done pioneering work in cosmology, pulsars, and lunar science, informing the world that neutrons are unstable, with a mean lifetime of ten minutes.
Born in Vienna, Gold became a refugee from the Austrian Anschluss and gained his BA in 1942 from Cambridge University, England. He lectured there in physics from 1948 to 1952 before joining the Royal Greenwich Observatory as chief assistant to the Astronomer Royal. He moved to the United States in 1956, founding the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research at Cornell University and serving as its first director from 1959 to 1981, and as professor of astronomy from 1971 to 1986. He was also on the EASTEX committee.
In 1948, together with Hermann Bondi and Fred Hoyle, proposed the steady-state theory of the universe. In the late 1960s he correctly interpreted the newly-discovered pulsars in terms of rotating neutron stars (a proposal made independently by Franco Pacini).
He has won notable prizes in the sciences including: John Frederick Lewis Award (1972) Humboldt Prize (1979) Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985)
Anthony Tucker of The Guardian said of Professor Gold, "Throughout his life he would dive into new territory to open up problems unseen by others – in biophysics, astrophysics, space engineering, or geophysics. Controversy followed him everywhere. Possessing profound scientific intuition and open-minded rigour, he usually ended up challenging the cherished assumptions of others and, to the discomfiture of the scientific establishment, often found them wanting. His stature and influence were international."
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