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Forwarded from the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]:
Subject: Unlimited Oil from Earth's Core?
A Scientific Heretic Delves Beneath the Surface
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/A3196-1999Oct31.html
By Ken Ringle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 1, 1999; Page C1
Computers used to cost millions. Now they're being given away. The
country was rapidly going broke. Now we've got a $115 billion budget
surplus. Butter was bad for us. Now we're not so sure. We're being
forced to reexamine all our old assumptions on millennial eve,
right?
So maybe we should finally pay attention to Thomas Gold. He says the
world has an endless supply of oil and gas.
Gold, a Vienna-born physicist, cosmologist and general scientific
heavy lifter, founded and for many years directed the Cornell Center
for Radiophysics and Space Research. In his 79 years he's authored
more than 280 scholarly papers on subjects ranging from astronomy to
zoology.
He's also a full-time heretic, periodically parachuting into some
new scientific field and infuriating academic plodders there with
some outlandishly bold new theory. More annoying, his theories
usually turn out to be right. Worst of all, he thinks the orthodox
have so gummed up the gates of knowledge that they were more open to
breakthroughs 50 years ago. Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould has
labeled Gold "one of America's most iconoclastic scientists." Says
Gold himself: "In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being
timid ... [but] I clearly would have been burned at the stake in
another age."
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In 1947, fresh from pioneering wartime work on the development of
radar, he used his research into high-frequency receptors to publish
an entire new theory of mammalian hearing. Physiologists shrugged it
off for 30 years. Until auditory technology evolved enough to prove
him correct.
In 1959, when everybody thought the surface of the moon was frozen
lava, Gold decided it was covered with dust from meteor impacts.
Footprints of the Apollo astronauts will testify eternally that he
was was right about that, too.
In 1967 astronomers trashed his suggestion that energy pulsating in
the distant universe was the signature of collapsing stars. The
subsequent observation of pulsars won two other scientists a Nobel
Prize. And proved Gold correct.
In 1992 he predicted that Martian meteorites might contain
fossilized microbes. Four years later NASA announced the same thing.
Now in a new book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Gold says the origin
and bulk of biological life is not on the surface of the Earth where
the birds and bunnies are, but deep within it. Moreover, that
microscopic life force is fueled by an inexhaustible supply of
petroleum constantly migrating outward from our planet's volcanic
core.
Eight years ago, when Gold was still developing his theory, some
geologists were so incensed by it they petitioned to have the
government remove all mention of it from the nation's libraries.
"It was an effort at book-burning, pure and simple," Gold says,
shuffling around a computer-buzzing, paper-littered attic study as
energetically unkempt as he is. Most petroleum geologists, he says,
"simply have no concept of the laws of physics at work" beneath the
Earth's crust.
People need to understand, he says, that the long-held assumption
that oil comes from the millennial composting of dinosaurs and
ancient swamps has always been dubious, whatever school science
books may say. His theory of a deep, hot biosphere doesn't just
solve its contradictions, it sorts out in the process such minor
matters as the origin of all earthly life and its relationship with
the rest of the universe.
Is there any wonder it makes people nervous?
Way Outside the Box
What's unique about Thomas Gold, says astronomer Steve Maran of the
American Astronomical Society, is that unlike most scientists who
are content to "pursue the advancement of knowledge in small,
incremental steps," Gold "comes up with new ideas by starting from
the original principles" in some field where others have labored for
years.
When that happens, he's often "treated like a curiosity that can't
be taken seriously," Maran says. "But he always shakes things up in
a useful way, often opens up entire new areas of thought. Some
denounce him even as they profit from the push he's given their
thinking."
"Gold's style is in turn charming, intriguing and exasperating:
short on details (where the Devil lies) and long on fiats and
suppositions," sighed eminent geochemist Harmon Craig of Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, reviewing Gold's book in Eos, the
journal of the American Geophysical Union.
But if Gold is right about subterranean microbes being the seeds of
all life, and if they survive the Earth's next asteroid collision to
restart evolution, he adds, "Let us hope that when new humans
finally emerge and invent science they will have another Tom Gold to
delight and exasperate them with his theories."
On this particular day the heretic himself is stopping by the local
techno-emporium to pick up a new computer. It's a Macintosh, and
with its blue-and-white neon tones and "Star Trek" design it looks
like something morphed from one of his theories. It's unclear just
why his former computer succumbed. It was only a year old, but he
may have made it think too much.
"Supposedly all my files have been transferred into this one," he
says skeptically, accepting only a modicum of help lugging it
through the garage and up to his study. "But of course, you never
really know."
Gold says his curiosity has been getting him in trouble ever since
his father gave him a watch when he was little and he took it apart.
He's worked at reassembling things ever since.
One of his boldest constructs was the steady-state theory of the
universe, which is now regarded, says Craig, as "beautiful but
untrue." Still, as cosmologist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton says, if Gold hadn't put forward the
steady-state theory, astronomers might not have been inspired enough
to dream up the Big Bang theory, which replaced it.
We probably shouldn't be too hard on Gold for not quite figuring out
the universe on his first try. After all, he rushed through
Cambridge in only two years (there was a war on) and his degree was
in engineering.
But his mind had impressed his friend Hermann Bundi, one of
Cambridge's famous wartime coterie of mathematical geniuses, who
suggested Gold would be useful on a highly classified war project.
There was only one problem: Gold was interned at the time as an
enemy alien. He and his parents were Austrian citizens, and despite
being refugees from Hitler (his father was Jewish), they had been
technically classified as Germans by the British after war broke out
in 1939.
"I was probably the first person to go right from internment as an
enemy to work on an ultra-secret project like radar," he muses.
After the war he went back to Cambridge where, impressed with his
brilliance, administrators presented him with a prized four-year
fellowship to do anything he wanted.
"I told them I would like to teach advanced physics," Gold
remembers. "They said that was fine. But since I had never studied
any physics, I had to learn it myself night by night, before each
lecture."
In the process, he read widely on all sides of the subject and
became convinced all physics was related. From that he published his
steady-state theory, which held that whatever had happened once in
the universe must be occurring someplace in the universe today.
That made a big splash in scientific circles and, says Gold, "I'm
still not entirely sure it's wrong." From there he moved on in 1953
to become assistant to Britain's astronomer royal, who heads the
Greenwich Observatory and holds one of the country's most
prestigious intellectual posts.
There he says he accidentally discovered the ultrasound phenomenon
now used to check out unborn babies. But his boss decided it had
nothing to do with astronomy and tore down his laboratory, so Gold
left for the United States.
He landed in Harvard in 1955, "either the youngest or the second
youngest full professor on the faculty. I forget which." But he
refused to live in Boston and detested commuting from the suburbs,
so within four years he had migrated to a "much more livable"
environment at Cornell.
He's been here causing trouble ever since.
Fueling Passion
Gold, who holds prestigious appointments to the National Academy of
Sciences and the Royal Society of London, turned his attention to
petroleum during the energy crisis of the late 1970s. He has not
been universally welcomed by industry geologists. Gold's hypothesis
on the origin of petroleum amid deep hot life "is not very well
defended," sniffed geoscientist Alton Brown of Atlantic Richfield in
a review of "The Deep Hot Biosphere" in American Scientist last
July. "We ... know too much about the subsurface and about petroleum
geochemistry to seriously consider these ideas."
But Gold is used to being dissed. While scientists like Brown have
traditionally sought to explain petroleum by looking in the ground,
Gold says, he developed his theory by looking in the other
direction.
Far from being an earthly substance, he says, petroleum and its
component hydrocarbons are present throughout the universe. You find
them in meteorites. You find them in captured interplanetary dust.
You can detect them quite abundantly on one of the moons of Saturn.
About all this there is no scientific argument.
As an astronomer and geophysicist, he says, "it always seemed absurd
to me to see petroleum hydrocarbons on other planets, where there
was obviously never any vegetation, even as we insist that on Earth
they must be biological in origin."
Yet wherever earthly petroleum is found, even miles below ground,
oil always contains biological material, such as the wreckage of
old, dead cells. If "fossil fuel" wasn't formed from ancient plants
and animals, how did that material get there?
Another puzzle bothered Gold, though he says it seems to concern few
others: the gas helium. Helium is one of the essential elements of
the universe, present in trace amounts everywhere in nature. As a
so-called "noble" gas, it stays chemically aloof from other
elements, never combining like, say, hydrogen and oxygen do to form
a third substance like water. Yet the only place on Earth helium is
ever found in abundance is with pools of petroleum underground.
What, Gold wondered, could explain that?
Then in 1977 a tiny research submarine probing deep beneath the
Pacific Ocean near the Galapagos Islands discovered something that
revolutionized our understanding of life.
More than 1 1/2 miles down on an ocean floor made otherwise barren
by darkness and crushing pressure, the sub's floodlights revealed
entirely new ecosystems living amid the scalding 600-degree heat and
mineral-rich eruptions of subsea volcanic vents. On subsequent
expeditions, scientists were astounded to find an entire food chain
at the vents--blood red giant tube worms, albino crabs and other
creatures--thriving on previously unknown forms of heat-loving
microbes where no possibility of life was thought to exist.
That got Gold thinking.
Last year, in his book "Consilience," Harvard entomologist E.O.
Wilson, a polymathic heretic like Gold, stirred the scientific pot
by arguing that all forms of human knowledge are really branches of
biology, and serve an evolutionary goal. But Gold goes further than
that.
"Perhaps biology is just a branch of thermodynamics," he has
written, and the history of life is just "a gradual systematic
development toward more efficient ways of degrading energy. ... The
chemical energy available inside a planetary body is then more
likely to have been the first energy source, and surface
creatures--like elephants and ... people--which feed indirectly on
solar energy--are just a [much later] adaptation of that life to ...
circumstances on the surface of our planet."
Endless Oil?
Working from that hypothesis, Gold's theory goes like this: Oil and
gas were born out of the Big Bang and trapped in the Earth 4.5
billion years ago in randomly dispersed molecular form. But the
intense heat of the Earth's volcanic core "sweats them out" of the
rocks that contain them, sending them migrating outward through the
porous deep Earth because they are more fluid and weigh less. In a
region between 10 and 300 kilometers deep, the hydrocarbons nourish
vast colonies of microbes where all of earthly life began, and where
today there's a vastly greater mass of living things than exist on
the surface of the planet. The migrating oil and gas "sweep up" the
biological wreckage of this life as they percolate upward, together
with molecules of helium, all of which eventually get trapped and
concentrated for periods in near-surface reservoirs where oil is
usually found.
As far out as all this may sound, in the years since Gold first
noised the outlines of his theory, researchers throughout the world
have documented extensively the presence of active microbes in the
deep Earth under conditions of heat and pressure once thought
impossible to sustain life.
Furthermore, some oil reservoirs long thought exhausted now appear
to be mysteriously refilling. Gold considers the best proof of his
program the extraction of 12 tons of crude oil in 1990 from a
6-kilometer-deep well drilled in the long-presumed oil-free granite
of central Sweden.
Chris Flavin of World Watch Institute says he's found many elements
of Gold's theory "pretty persuasive" in the light of such
discoveries, and says there's much to cheer environmentalists. If
Gold is right, he says, the greatest abundance of accessible
hydrocarbons will be found in the form of natural gas. Gas is not
only the cleanest-burning energy source right now, it promises "to
be the bridge to the hydrogen economy in the future" which will be
cleaner still, he says.
But skeptics remain.
"We know there's carbon deep within the Earth because that's where
we find diamonds," says Nick Woodward, a geoscience program manager
with the Energy Department. "And we know there's water, at least in
small amounts, which, since it's hydrogen and oxygen, gives us the
building blocks for petroleum hydrocarbons. ... "But whether that
therefore means the source of all hydrocarbons is in the deep Earth,
I think that's highly questionable."
\
Gold shrugs off such unbelievers. The scientific world, allegedly
searching for truth, is really little more hospitable to it than
when Galileo fell afoul of the Inquisition, he says.
"You know, I am very lucky that I received recognition and honors
early in my career, so that by the time I started making real waves
I already had stature," he says. "Even with my record I've had a
terrible time getting some of these papers published. Without it
nobody would touch me. ...
"The problem is this system of peer review" wherein established
scholars in a field pass judgment on new papers before publication,
he says. "That rewards small steps but discourages bold ideas and
the very sort of cross-discipline thinking that can provide the
greatest breakthroughs. I don't think there's any question that we
produced more great ideas in the first half of the 20th century than
we have in the second"--when peer review has ruled.
Nevertheless, Gold soldiers on. He's presently writing his memoirs
of a lifetime of heresy. Chosen title: "Getting the Back Off the
Watch."
1999 The Washington Post
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