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The more I read about Professor Gold, the more I like him. He's a pure thinker who doesn't give a fuck what orthodox academia says:
"Thomas Gold, 1968, in the laboratory of the Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. His 1955 prediction -- that lunar explorers would find a layer of fine rock dust on the moon -- was about to be tested by Apollo 11 astronauts. Cornell University Photography Copyright hahaha169; Cornell University Click on the image for a high-resolution version (1302 x 1908 pixels, 1454K)
Indeed, despite the intense opposition they often encountered, many of Gold's most outrageous -- and passionately held -- ideas had a curious habit of turning out to be right. For example, in 1946 as a graduate student in astrophysics at Cambridge University, Gold became intrigued by a problem that was perplexing auditory physiologists at the time: Why is the human ear so good at discriminating between different musical notes? Prevailing thought held that the structures of the ear were too weak and flabby to resonate and that it was the brain -- not the ear -- that was responsible for detecting the pitch of a note. Gold disagreed and designed an elegant experiment to prove his theory that the ear was indeed capable of resonating.
His research was largely ignored until nearly 30 years later, when physiologists, armed with more refined tools, began to uncover evidence for the existence of natural amplifiers: tiny hair cells that provide feedback to vibrating membranes in the ear, enabling them to resonate. Another of Gold's ideas that encountered initial resistance was his 1967 theory about the nature of pulsars, objects in deep space that produce regularly pulsing radio waves. Gold's explanation, that pulsars are neutron stars emitting radio waves as they spin, was considered so implausible that he was not even allowed to defend it at a conference. However, the discovery of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula led to the theory's universal acceptance. "
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