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I would say that Gold was as right as the others were -- and both sides were misrepresented. The truth was the middle. It's a deep layer of dust with other rocks on the moon, and as we've seen with Eros the dust may levitate exactly as he predicted. The facts from Eros are still being looked at.

You can say whatever you want to, but that doesn't make it correct.

Before Apollo, Gold claimed: a) the Moon had accreted from cold, primitive nebular debris and subsequently never melted or differentiated; b) fine dust produced by micrometeorite bombardment was levitated by electrostatic forces and, under gravity, collected into thick pools, which we saw as the maria.

Nothing in that scenario is correct! The Moon did NOT accrete from primitive material, but rather, from material thrown into Earth orbit during a giant collision. He cannot be blamed for not knowing that, but he CAN be blamed for totally ignoring 30 years of careful scientific work that's shown that after the Moon formed, it melted globally, was battered by impact, and then re-surfaced by volcanic lava flows, which have a different composition than the highlands (in contrast to Gold's model prediction). Then, the surface regolith formed by micrometeorite bombardment. If electrostatic levitation occurs (and there is some evidence that it does), it is in no way comparable to the process that Gold was proposing for the origin of the Moon's observable surface features.

It's no sin to be wrong in science -- it IS a sin to continually falsify the historical record and ignore decades of careful work. Gold does both, on this topic of the Moon and the topic of petroleum geology.

I do not care what you believe, but this stuff is junk science as surely as man-made, global warming. Billions of dollars of engineering has been invested in the "geological" paradigm of the origin of petroleum -- an investment that's generated trillions of dollars of new wealth. What's Gold's model generated, except for a bunch of google-eyed press stories?

Notice how you didn't challenge what I said you replaced it with something else. I never said anything about the evolution of the moon, it's the surface that was in question. And he was at least partially right in stating (unlike others who mocked him) that it was covered in a thick layer of dust. So why should he admit he was wrong about it when he wasn't wrong?

And what has Gold's petroleum geology model generated? How about saving us billions of dollars due to current low oil prices? They're as low as they are because Russia, using Gold's theories, is drilling oil from basement rock like crazy and refusing to stop for OPEC. And with a pipeline across Afghanistan we will be swimming in oil.

And decades of "careful work" by boneheaded scientists is no reason to believe anything (for instance man-made global warming) when a few hours of careful thought can put the lie to group-think conventional wisdom. Remember, just last week thinking that global warming being caused by the sun and not man was a conspiracy theory for cranks according to "experts."

"Gee Verne, think the sun might heat the earth up? No way Homer, it's you and me. We've done decades of "careful work" to prove it." What a joke!