Thomas Gold (1920–2004)

In his youth Gold never envisaged becoming a scientist, surprisingly so given the imaginativeness and variety of his later contributions. Evidently it was his experiences during the Second World War that brought science to the forefront of his thinking. He and I lived together in 1940 (in a British internment camp) and again (voluntarily) in 1942–45. In 1942, first I, then Gold, joined Fred Hoyle at the naval radar research establishment, working for the British Admiralty. From 1943, Hoyle, Gold and I spent many evenings together, and Hoyle's enthusiasm for astrophysics soon infected us both.

After the war, again in Cambridge, the three of us resumed our conversations. One of our subjects was cosmology. The main difficulty then was the discrepancy between the timescale of our neighbourhood (the ages of the Earth and the Sun) and that of the rate at which distant galaxies are receding, as determined by Edwin Hubble. This was so serious that such distinguished scientists as Paul Dirac, Edward Milne and Arthur Eddington proposed theories involving major secular changes to the laws of physics. This made us feel that one should first consider a stationary Universe. But the observed Hubble expansion was incompatible with the constant density of matter required for a stationary Universe.