Celebrating the Life of Tommy Gold

A few months ago, I was at Cornell University celebrating the

life of

Tommy Gold, a famous astronomer who died at a ripe old

age.

He was famous as a heretic, promoting unpopular ideas that

usually turned out to be right.

Long ago, I was a guinea pig in Tommy's experiments

on human hearing.

He had a heretical idea that the human ear discriminates

pitch by means of a set of tuned resonators with

active electromechanical feedback.

The experts in auditory physiology ignored his work because he

didn't have a degree in physiology.

Many years later, the experts discovered the two kinds of

hair cells in the

inner ear that actually do the feedback as Tommy had

predicted.

It took the experts forty years to admit that he was right.

Of course, I knew he was right because I'd seen him do the

experiments.

Later in his life, he promoted another heretical idea

that the oil and natural gas in the ground come up from deep in the mantle of

the Earth and have nothing to do with biology.

Again, the experts are sure he is wrong, and he didn't live long

enough to change their minds.

But just a few months ago, some chemists at the Carnegie Institution

in

Washington did a beautiful experiment in a diamond anvil cell.

They mixed together tiny quantities of three things that we know

exist in the mantle of the Earth and observed them at the pressure and

temperature appropriate to the mantle about two hundred kilometers down.

The three things were calcium carbonate, which is sedimentary rock,

iron oxide, which is a component of igneous rock,

and water.

Those three things are certainly present when a slab of

subducted ocean floor descends from a deep ocean trench into

the mantle.

The experiment shows that they react quickly to produce lots of

methane, which is natural gas.

So big quantities of natural gas certainly exist in the mantle.

The chemist sent an email to Tommy Gold to tell him their result

and got back a message that he had died three days earlier.

Now that he's dead, we need more heretics to take his place.