[extropy-chat] Obituary: Thomas Gold

Terry W. Colvin fortean1 at mindspring.com
Sat Jun 11 00:30:32 UTC 2005


*FT* 196, June 2005

Necrolog

Controversial physicist Thomas Gold was worthy of fortean respect.
Bob Rickard celebrates the life of this important 'contrarian'.

Thomas Gold

Thomas Gold was that rare thing; a fortean among scientists, attracted to
anomalies in the conventional wisdom and not afraid to research them beyond
the confines of his scientific disciplines.

Gold came to Cambridge University from Austria just before World War II.
Despite spending a year in a British internment camp as a suspected enemy
alien, he returned to study astronomy at Trinity College, Cambridge, and to
help develop radar for the British Admiralty.  While he was at Cambridge,
he made friends with Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi (whom he met in the
internment camp) and Francis Crick, among many other now famous names
in science.

Gold went on to teach at Cornell, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and
Princeton; was Chief Assistant to Britain's Astronomer Royal and for
seven years was a member of the US President's Space Science Panel;
and gave prestigious lectures to the Royal Astronomical Society and
NASA.  He became Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Cornell
University and for 20 years directed the Cornell Center for
Radiophysics and Space Research which he founded.  He even
oversaw the construction of the world's largest radio telescope, in
Arecibo, Puerto Rico.  Among his honours were Fellowships of the
Royal Society, the American Geophysical Union, and Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he took his original doctorate.

Gold quickly gained a reputation as one of the 20th century's greatest
'contrarians' as his fresh and incisive analyses would lead to provocative
ideas--ranging from the cosmological to the geophysical--that, more often
than not, brought the disapproval of his more traditional colleagues.  His
earliest success came in 1946; while at Cambridge he developed a new
theory of hearing, proposing a mechanism by which the tiny hair cells
act as amplifiers in the inner ear.  This was not confirmed until the 1970s.

In 1948, reprising the team that worked on radar for the Admiralty, Gold
joined Hoyle and Bondi to develop the 'steady-state' theory, which held
that the Universe was under constant construction with no beginning or end.
It became the dominant view in cosmology until the 1960s, when the
discoveries of quasars (in late 1950s) and microwave background
radiation (in 1965) reinforced the 'big bang' explanation that the
Universe is expanding from an original singularity.

Gold was disappointed, but characteristically unfazed, moving on to other
work.  In 1968, he correctly identified pulsars as rapidly rotating neutron
stars with strong magnetic fields.  He also coined the term 'magnetosphere'
for the envelope of Earth's magnetic fields.

Gold sparked controversy again in 1955, when he was designing the stereo
camera used on the lunar surface by the US astronauts.  At that time, the
lunar plains were believed to be of volcanic lava, but Gold suggested that
the surface could be covered with a deep layer of fine rock powder.  His
enemies seized on this, ridiculing him for predicting that the lunar
astronauts and lander would sink out of sight into the dust.  Interviewed
before his death, Gold was still angry about this "slander", pointing out
the obvious: that time and the action of cosmic rays would tend to harden
the dust.  He was vindicated in 1969, when the Apollo 11 crew brought
the first samples of lunar soil back to Earth.

Perhaps his most heretical theory challenged the prevailing ideas concerning
the origin of oil, coal and natural gas.  He proposed that in the depths 
of the
Earth's crust was a second realm of life, a "deep hot biosphere" in which
archaic bacteria thrived in temperatures well above 100 degrees Celsius,
living off methane and other hydrocarbons six to 10 km (3.7-6.2 miles)
down.  This theory was launched in a 1992 paper in the *Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences* and expanded in his 1998 book _The Deep
Hot Biosphere_.  "I'd submitted it to *Nature* in 1988, but they wouldn't
publish it," he said later.

In the traditional view, oil, coal and natural gas are the residue of dead
plants and creatures from swamps and seabeds, 'cooked' under great
geological pressure over vast spans of time.  In any case, surface life
was not supposed to have penetrated the Earth more than a few hundred
metres.  Gold, however, maintained that oil, coal and natural gas were
incorporated into the Earth at great depths during its early formation,
possibly from meteoric impact as icy meteors are known to contain
masses of hydrocarbons.  Instead of dead creatures turning into
hydrocarbons when buried, Gold says the hydrocarbons are fuel on which
the deep creatures live.

Most Western geologist and petrologists consider Gold's ideas hugely
controversial, insisting that the biogenic theory of fossil fuel formation
adequately explains all observed fossil fuel deposits.  However, recent
discoveries of life on the ocean floors, making use of the normally toxic
chemicals from volcanic vents, and of archaic bacteria found in deep
holes from the Columbia River basalts of Washington to the oil wells
of the North Sea and South African gold mines, all seem to confirm
the basis of Gold's revisions.

Gold firmly believed that his theory accounted for a range of anomalies,
such as the presence of helium in oil (although it has no affinity with
organic material) and the presence of magnetite in oil.  Magnetite is a
chemically reduced form of iron oxide--evidence, says Gold, that
microbes have used its oxygen as they live off the oil, leaving behind
tiny grains of magnetite.  Another anomaly that puzzled Gold was
obvious in retrospect: that all over the world oil is being drilled in
sediments that vary region to region, differing in age and composition.
There is no sedimentary material that is uniform to all oilfields and yet
oil is fairly consistent whatever its provenance.  These led him to the
conclusion that oil might not be derived from organic matter but might
have a single, more consistent and therefore much older origin.

Between 1986 and 1993, Gold's ideas were tested by deep drilling in a
meteoric crater in Sweden called the Siljan Ring (*FT* correspondent
Sven Rosen was quick to tell us that this perfectly circular formation
had dragon legends associated with it.)  Below the crater, at a depth of
5-7km (3-4.3 miles) were solid granite beds.  They had crystallised out
of molten lava and therefore should not contain any organic remains, yet
they yielded 80 barrels of natural oil.  Detractors claimed the oil must
have seeped down from higher levels--yet, as Gold answered, the shale
beds of that area "were nowhere deeper than 300 meters, [984ft] while
I was down at 6.7 kilometers [4.2 miles]".

Gold says the first core samples reached him in Mallorca at a weekend
when all the facilities were shut and he had to improvise a test.  Using
hot water and kitchen detergent as a solvent and kitchen tissue roll as a
'chromatogram', he separated metallic solids from the sludge.  To test
for iron he unscrewed the catches off a kitchen cabinet to hold under
some aluminum foil holding liquid sludge.  The grains of magnetite
formed in a magnetic field.

Since then, Russian petroleum geologists have reported finding oil in wells
drilled more than 5km (3 miles) deep in the central part of the crystalline
Baltic Shield and they have credited Gold with inspiring them to look there.
More than 300 deep wells are under way in Russian Tartarstan and others
in Vietnam's giant offshore White Tiger field, all reported to be 
productive.

One important consequence of Gold's deep hot biosphere is still 
reverberating
in the realm of oil production and international finance.  The biogenic 
theory
of oil production and international finance.  The biogenic theory of oil 
led to
the belief that it would eventually 'run out', which is what is keeping oil
prices artificially high.  If Gold is correct, the reserves of deep natural
oil are vastly in excess of the 'normal' quantities estimated by the gas and
petroleum industry.  But Gold has more good news: in a recent interview he
claimed that "some geologists agree that fields are refilling themselves,
though they won't openly admit it."  Gold believes that his can only be
because the reduction in pressure in the higher reservoir is drawing more up
from deeper layers.

Gold's theory of an active deep biosphere has yet other, wider-ranging
implications for the prevalence of life, or at least, its basic building 
blocks,
in the Universe.  Recent astronomical observations have detected large
amounts of hydrocarbons on various planetary bodies in the Solar System.

In 1996, when the analysis of the so-called 'meteorite from Mars'--
designated ALH84001--revealed the presence of small traces of magnetite,
sulphides, oil and calcite cement in close proximity, Gold immediately
noticed that his combination was typical of borehole shale.  Not only did
this imply that Mars could contain deep oil but that Martian bacteria must
have lived off it to produce the magnetite residue.  To Gold, it was clear
that a lifeless surface need not have a lifeless interior.

Gold thought the Moon, too, has a deep biosphere--as may many of the other
satellites in our Solar System, such as Triton, Pluto and Charon.  He 
not only
endorsed the idea that meteors and meteorites play a part in transmitting
primitive life-forms through the Universe, but predicted that life could 
also
be spread by a new kind of wandering planet, travelling between star systems
and even galaxies, that was not formed within any planetary system and not
tied to a star by gravity.  It was natural, he argued, for a physicist to
gravitate towards questions about the origins of life and how it works.
As for the life on Earth, he said: "If life developed down below, it could
later crawl up to the surface and invent photosynthesis."


British astronomer and physicist, born Vienna, Austria, 22 May 1920; died
Ithaca, NY, 22 June 2004, aged 84.


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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