The scientist who revolutionized geology and practically demonstrated the inexhaustibility of oil and natural gas

Thomas Gold was an astrophysicist Originally from Austria born in Vienna in 1920, his family moved to Berlin in 1930 but, given the Jewish ancestry of his father, they decided to escape from Nazi Germany in 1933 to settle in London. Despite his Jewish origin at the beginning of World War II he was considered an enemy alien and confined in a Canadian internment camp. Once released, he worked with Bondi and Fred Hoyle in 1942, when Hoyle was made responsible for a naval radar station, one of many that Churchill had set up to prevent the population of London from numerous air raids by the Nazi Luftwaffe. . Thus began a friendship and collaboration that would last for many years.

In particular, from that friendship already installed in Cambridge emerged one of the unorthodox theories about the nature of the cosmos.

At that time he devoted himself to the subject of the human ear. …Then the excellent frequency discrimination of our sense of hearing could not be explained. Gold saw the similarity of the problem to the design of receivers for radio, radar, and television, where sensitivity must be restricted to a narrow band of frequencies to avoid "crosstalk." This is achieved through the use of positive feedback. Gold proposed that the same principle applies to the human ear. Prevailing thinking held that the structures of the ear were too weak and flabby to resonate and that it was the brain, not the ear, that was responsible for detecting the pitch of a note. Gold disagreed and devised an elegant experiment to test his theory that the ear was capable of resonating. He studied the subject in depth supported by a scholarship from Trinity college confirming his initial hypothesis. Physiologists took 30 years to accept his theory..

He along with Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi while he was a graduate student at Cambridge. There these three scientists developed a theory to explain the evolution of the universe, the Steady State theory, that is, the idea of ​​a universe in a steady state that has no beginning or end and in which matter is constantly being created,

Another of Gold's ideas that met with initial resistance but was proven true was his 1967 theory about the nature of pulsars, objects in deep space that produce regularly pulsating radio waves. Gold's explanation, that pulsars are neutron stars that emit radio waves as they spin, was considered so implausible that he wasn't even allowed to defend it at a conference. However, the discovery of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula led to universal acceptance of the theory.

In a different scientific field Gold developed an integrated theory about the mineral origin of coal, oil and natural gas. Which he presented in the book The deep hot biosphere. This theory supports and in my opinion effectively demonstrates that oil and gas are of mineral origin. And on the other hand, it also shows that many of the metallic mineral deposits have an organic origin produced by hyperthermobacteria bacteria with a metabolism based on the oxidation of methane and that at the same time, when reducing the sulfates due to their oxygen consumption, they transform them into metallic sulfides. such as galena, pyrite, chalcopyrite, blende and many others..

And finally, I come to the scientific and philosophical approach that human beings are surface beings and as such have difficulties in understanding the true essence of life in the universe that is fundamentally related to chemical reactions in the crusts and depths of the planetary stars. The photosynthetic function that is the basis of life on the Earth's surface is an exception. According to Gold there is more living organic mass in the depths of the Earth than on the surface and of course in other stars subterranean life is generally the only one that exists.

Said Joseph Veverka, chair of the Department of Astronomy at Cornell and a longtime colleague, "Tommy will be fondly remembered by all of us for his incisive and provocative ideas, his sincere dedication to his colleagues, as well as his extensive contribution to the Physics and astronomy cover topics as varied as the steady-state theory of the universe, pulsars, the lunar regolith, and geochemistry.

Famous for stirring up conflict and controversy, Gold was variously described as a "contrary", a "maverick", and a "world-class contrarian". Gold, however, saw his deviations from conventional wisdom as simply doing his job as a scientist. "I don't enjoy my role as a heretic," he once told an ABC News reporter. "It's annoying." But in any case, what became very clear was that he was a heretic of science and that is precisely, I think, his greatest value.