The Mysterious Quasars

Abstract

Dallas, Texas, December 1963. It was just a few weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy. We were meeting in a conference hall only a few hundred metres from the scene of the tragedy. Robert J. Oppen-heimer, well-known for his part in the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, was presiding over the conference, to which astrophysicists from all over the world had been invited. The aim was to discuss a sensational discovery, in which Californian astronomers had once more played an important part.

It was, I believe, chiefly Hoyle’s genius which produced the extremely attractive idea that here we have a case ... that the relativists with their sophisticated work were not only magnificent cultural ornaments but might actually be useful to science !... What a shame it would be if we had to go and dismiss all the relativists again.

Thomas Gold, after-dinner speech on the occasion of the First Texas Conference, 1963