Thomas Gold. Portrait of the Austrian-American astronomer Thomas Gold (1920-2004). Gold was born in Austria but emigrated to England, where he studied at Cambridge and later worked at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In 1948, along with Bondi and Hoyle, he proposed the steady state theory of cosmology. This states that the universe looks the same at all times, has unchanging density, and that matter is created spontaneously from empty space as the universe expands. The theory proposes no beginning or end of time, unlike the more strongly favoured 'Big Bang' theory. In 1956 he emigrated to the USA.