Thomas "Tommy" Gold was born in Vienna, Austria on May 22, 1920 to Jewish parents. In 1933, his family left Germany because of the Nazi party's rise to power. He was studying mechanical sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK at the start of World War II and was sent to an internment camp by the British government. He returned to Cambridge 15 months later and graduated with a degree in physics in June 1942.
Gold then worked for the British Navy doing research into the use of radar. There he met Fred Hoyle and together with a friend from his internment days Hermann Bondi, began discussions in cosmology, mathematics and astrophysics that led the trio to develop the Steady-State Model of the universe as an alternative to Georges Lemaître's Big Bang model. The Steady-State Model gained wide acceptance until, in 1965, the cosmic microwave background radiation was detected by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson confirming the Big Bang Model.
As a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University, Thomas Gold was the driving force behind constructing the world's largest radio telescope at Arecibo, PR. The Arecibo Observatory made Cornell the leading institution in the world for radio astronomy. Also, under Gold's tenure Carl Sagan was invited to join the astronomy faculty at Cornell.
Thomas Gold is famous for his contrarian and controversial hypotheses. He proposed that life on earth arose from an accidental transfer of extraterrestrials' waste, the so called "garbage theory". In his book The Deep Hot Biosphere he proposed that life began deep in the earth's crust and used chemical reactions, and not photosynthesis, as a source of energy. He also proposed a bacterial origin for the formation of oil.
During his career Thomas Gold received many honors. He was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (1948), the Royal Society (1964), the American Geophysical Union (1962), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1974), the American Astronautical Society, the American Philosophical Society (1972), the United States National Academy of Sciences (1974), and the International Academy of Astronautics. He was also an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1986) and President of the New York Astronomical Society from 1981 to 1986.
Gold received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Cambridge University in 1969. He won the John Frederick Lewis Prize from the American Philosophical Society (1972), the Humboldt Prize (1979), Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985) the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985).
Thomas Gold died on June 22, 2004 and is buried in Pleasant Grove Cemetery in Ithaca, NY.