About Thomas Gold
Thomas Gold was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, who also held British and American citizenship. He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in 1948 proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed boundaries of academic and scientific disciplines, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics. Later, however, researchers discovered that Gold's hypothesis had been correct. The theory was widely disputed, until American scientists in 1957 discovered that Gold's theory held up to mathematical scrutiny by conducting a simulation using a shock tube. He then began working at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory to help construct the world's largest magnetron, a device invented by two British scientists in 1940 that generated intense microwaves for radar.
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