The Virtue of Heresy
Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer
by
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It was while observing with the 200-inch telescope at Palomar in 1963 or thereabouts that Arp began a serious study of galactic evolution. He was interested in establishing the mechanism whereby galaxies are formed (aren’t we all!), and he studied the animal by observing its behaviour. His attention was drawn to examples that were behaving oddly, galaxies displaying great inner turmoil with frenetic, hyperactive nuclei. In 1966 he published his classic Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, and it was there that he noticed that across the most disturbed galaxies lay pairs of radio sources. The pictures told the story; when the X-ray and radio images were overlaid, the isophotes took on a distinctive and familiar pattern. They circled the “hot spots” at the centre and at the outlying radio sources, and traced the tentacle-like limbs of ejected material that joined the elements into a cohesive, dynamic system. This shocked Dr Arp. The outrigger radio sources were clearly quasars, and it was well established that the galaxies to which they were attached were relatively close to us.
There was an anomaly here—the quasars had extremely high redshifts, yet the galaxies lying between them had low redshifts consistent with their relative proximity. Nevertheless, the evidence was clear and irrefutable: Objects had been observed at the same distance from Earth with hugely varying redshifts. No argument. Redshift is not always proportional to recessional velocity or distance. Since it was equally clear from analysis that the satellite quasars had been ejected from the parent galaxy, astronomers engaged in the study could make the concrete deduction that radiant objects were being born all over the sky with extremely high redshift. The redshift in these examples had nothing at all to do with either their position or motion relative to observers on Earth. It was intrinsic redshift.
I’m sorry. Did I just give you the impression that the case was closed and that everyone who had previously thought that redshift unarguably proved their pet theories about an expanding Universe was knocked out by Arp’s discoveries? Good heavens, no! They squealed like stuck pigs. The quasars just couldn’t be joined to the central galaxies, they cried, it must be an illusion. The matter bridges are ghosts caused by optical aberrations in his telescope. He doesn’t understand gravity. He doesn’t understand relativity. He doesn’t understand anything! It wasn’t a surprising response. In fact, it’s all too typical. But the time came when Dr Arp and his colleagues brought upon an auditorium full of these critics a pregnant and telling silence. At the meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Texas in 2004, Professor Margaret Burbidge presented a paper that she had co-authored with Arp and several other leading astronomers, including her husband. It detailed the discovery of a high redshift quasar close to a low redshift galaxy. This time though, the alignment was different in a very significant way. This time, no one could argue. You see, the high redshift quasar lay in front of the galaxy NGC 7319! There was no longer occasion to debate the veracity of matter bridges. The quasar was in the foreground. In that impressive gathering of astronomy’s who’s who, you could have heard a pin drop. It was a deafening silence.
The significance of this discovery is huge. We have direct, irrefutable empirical evidence that the Hubble law stands on feet of clay, that the observational justification of an expanding Universe is fatally flawed, and therefore that all the work of all those people who used these assumptions to build the theory of Big Bang Cosmology over a period of more than 70 years could well have been a gigantic waste of time and energy. Would I be exaggerating if I suggested that Big Bang cosmologists did not welcome the discovery of intrinsic redshift, the observed presence of quasars in relatively nearby systems, the consequent downscaling of quasar brightness, and the revealing role played by quasars in the eternal propagation of galaxies?
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About the Book
Heresy: The declaration of opinions contrary to prevailing doctrine; opposition to dogma; unorthodox approach to science; method employed by one’s intellectual enemy; individual behaviour often attracting the label “crank”. In the course of using essential theories of science in my decades-long attempt to demystify the heavens, I became increasingly frustrated by ideas that just didn’t harmonise. If we were uncovering the truth, I reasoned, then the component parts devised by disparate specialists should dovetail neatly together. But they don’t. Classical Newtonian mechanics doesn’t see eye-to-eye with Einstein’s relativity; both are sneered at by quantum mechanics. Theories highly successful in their own right seemed when compared with one another to be describing different universes. I decided that it was scientific methodology that had gone horribly wrong. I was convinced that some of the fundamental hypotheses upon which I based my enquiry were by strict analysis utterly invalid. They did not describe reality. That was a train-smash, both for me and for the progress of science, as I understood it. This book is an account of that crisis. But fear not, this is not a high-tech science report for über-geeks. It’s a storybook filled with myth and adventure. It’s science unplugged.
About the Author
Hilton Ratcliffe is a South African-born physicist, mathematician, and astronomer. He is a member of both the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He is prominently opposed to the stranglehold that Big Bang theory has on astronomical research and funding, and to this end became a founding member of the Alternative Cosmology Group (an association of some 400 leading scientists from all corners of the globe), which conducted its inaugural international conference in Portugal in 2005. Hilton has been frequently interviewed in the press and on radio, and has also authored a number of papers for scientific journals. He writes a monthly astrophysical column for Ndaba, newsletter of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa. He is best known in formal science as co-discoverer, together with eminent nuclear chemist Professor Oliver Manuel and solar physicist Michael Mozina, of the CNO nuclear fusion cycle on the surface of the Sun, some 65 years after it was first predicted. In his capacity as a Fellow of the (British) Institute of Physics, he involves himself in addressing the decline in student interest in physical sciences at both high school and university level, and particularly likes to encourage the reading of books.