[8] After graduating with a pass (Ordinary) degree in June 1942, Gold worked briefly as an agricultural labourer and lumberjack in northern England before joining Bondi and Fred Hoyle on naval research into radar ground clutter near Dunsfold, Surrey.

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.

Soon after, Gold joined R. J. Pumphrey, a zoologist at the Cambridge Zoology Laboratory who had served as the deputy head of radar naval research during the war, to study the effect of resonance on the human ear.

Via simple experimentation in 1946, Gold found that the degree of resonance observed in the cochlea was not in accordance with the level of damping that would be expected from the viscosity of the watery liquid that fills the inner ear.

As reported in one of the science obituaries published about Gold in 2004, "Ignored for over 30 years, his research was rediscovered in the 1970s when physiologists discovered the tiny hair cells that act as amplifiers in the inner ear.

As recounted in a 1978 interview with physicist and historian Spencer R. Weart, Gold believed that there was reason to think that the creation of matter was "done all the time and then none of the problems about fleeting moments arise.

[22] In early 1959, he accepted an appointment at Cornell University, which had offered him the opportunity to set up an interdisciplinary unit for radiophysics and space research, and take charge of the Department of Astronomy.

During his tenure, Gold hired famed astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, helped establish the world's largest radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Cornell-Sydney University Astronomy Center with Harry Messel.

However, Gold's theory became widely accepted following the discovery of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula using the Arecibo radio telescope, opening the door for future advancements in solid-state physics and astronomy.

Gold was ridiculed by fellow scientists, not only for his hypothesis, but for the approach he took in communicating NASA's concerns to the American public; in particular, some experts were infuriated with his usage of the term "Moon dust" in reference to lunar regolith.

[26][41] In the 1970s and 1980s, Gold was a vocal critic of NASA's Space Shuttle program, deriding claims that the agency could fly 50 missions a year or that it could have low budget costs.

Thus, Thomas Gold was credited with the idea in the United States when current events prompted him to submit an opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal in June 1977 titled, "Rethinking the origins of oil and gas.

[47] Science communicator Paul Davies explained Gold's theory in this way: "Conventional wisdom has it that oil and coal are remnants of ancient surface life that became buried and subjected to extremes of temperature and pressure.

He claims that over the aeons the volatile gases migrate towards the surface through cracks in the crust, and either leak into the atmosphere as methane, become trapped in sub-surface gas fields, or are robbed of their hydrogen to become oil, tar or carbonaceous material like coal.

Soter had received his PhD in astronomy in 1971 and had recently concluded another faculty collaboration at Cornell: working with Carl Sagan in the writing of the television series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

Gold and Soter teamed up to investigate the knowns and unknowns about earthquakes from the standpoint of plausible causation by or regular co-occurrence with sudden escape of large volumes of methane gas.

[51] Their 1980 article in Scientific American was titled "The Deep-Earth-Gas Hypothesis" and the explanatory value of the idea was presented as, providing "a unified basis for explaining a number of otherwise rather puzzling phenomena that either give warning of earthquakes or accompany them.

Several oil-rich regions, such as Alaska, Texas, the Caribbean, Mexico, Venezuela, the Persian Gulf, the Urals, Siberia, and Southeast Asia, were shown to be lying on major earthquake belts.

[55][56] In later publications, Gold emphasized that the immense amounts of helium gas that surges upward during commercial petroleum production at some sites is proof in itself that substantial lightweight gases have indeed persisted at depth since the amalgamation of cosmic debris into planet Earth during the birth of this solar system.

[62] Geochemist Geoffrey P. Glasby speculated that the sludge could have been formed from the Fischer–Tropsch process, a catalyzed chemical reaction in which synthesis gas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, is converted into liquid hydrocarbons.

I mean, such complete absurdity: you can imagine sitting there with five feet of soil and six kilometres underneath of dense granitic rock, and that methane produced up there has crawled all the way down in preference to water.

Both sides employed novel rhetorical strategies in order to impute interests, to contest expertise, to recruit allies from peripheral disciplines, and to claim the mantle of scientific method; and both managed to construct plausible interpretations of the available data.The author reported that even the Siljan drilling results had not been sufficient to fully resolve the long-standing dispute about origins, although Gold's hypothesis is favored by only a very slim minority.

In a 1992 paper, "The Deep, Hot Biosphere",[70] Gold first suggested that microbial life is widespread in the porosity of the crust of the Earth, down to depths of several kilometers, where rising temperatures finally set a limit.

A 1993 article by journalist William Broad, published in The New York Times and titled "Strange New Microbes Hint at a Vast Subterranean World," carried Gold's thesis to public attention.

'"[71] Gold also published a book of the same title, The Deep Hot Biosphere,[72] in 1999, which expanded on the arguments in his 1992 paper and included speculations on the origin of life and on horizontal gene transfer.

According to Gold, bacteria feeding on the oil accounts for the presence of biological debris in hydrocarbon fuels, obviating the need to resort to a biogenic theory for the origin of the latter.

However, it is only at great depth where naturally occurring geochemical processes induced by intense heat and pressure produce elemental hydrogen and carbon dioxide upon which novel metabolisms of life (especially among the primitive Archaea) could have evolved.

Titled "The Deep, Hot Biosphere: Twenty-five years of retrospection,"[69] the authors conclude: The pioneering ideas proposed by Thomas Gold inspired a generation of researchers in the field of geobiology to dive deeper into the possibilities of subsurface life, spawning hundreds of relevant publications....

"[81] The obituary in Physics Today included a listing of topics he delved into: "the alignment of galactic dust, the instability of Earth’s axis of rotation, the dusty lunar surface, the Sun's cosmic rays, and plasmas and magnetic fields in the solar system ... the origin of solar flares, the nature of time, molecules and masers in the interstellar medium, rotating neutron stars and the nature of pulsars, terrestrial sources of hydrocarbons, and the deep Earth biosphere.

In reality, he was an iconoclast whose strength was in penetrating analysis of the assumptions on which some of our most important theories are based.... Tommy's paradigm-changing ideas in astronomy and planetary science, while original and bold, were also highly controversial.