| | Gribbin, John. "Halton Arp out on a limb" [Review of]
Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies,
New Scientist, 29 October l987, p. 65.
[John Gribbin is a staff writer for New Scientist.]
For 20 years or so, Halton Arp has been a thorn in
the side of establishment astronomy. He is a
superb observational astronomer, who chose to
devote his skills to obtaining photographic records
of "peculiar" galaxies and associations between
galaxies and quasars. Almost from the day quasars
were first identified, in the late 1960s, Arp has
been accumulating evidence that very many quasars
are physically associated with galaxies. That
wouldn't be so bad, but the galaxy-quasar
associations Arp has found almost invariably
involve objects with different redshifts.
That strikes at the foundation stone of received
cosmological wisdom. Redshift--the displacement of
spectral lines in the light from galaxies and
quasars, compared with spectra in the laboratory--
is interpreted as a measure of distance in the
expanding Universe. If a galaxy and a quasar are
physically connected, but have different redshifts,
something definitely is wrong.
Over the years that Arp has been gathering his
evidence that, indeed, something <is> wrong, the
standard big-bang cosmology, built upon the
standard redshift-distance relation and ignoring
Arp entirely, has been refined into a thing of
beauty, which purports to explain everything since
the moment of creation, 15 billion years ago.
Like many astronomers, I love the standard big-bang
theory, and regard it as a triumph of scientific
acheivement. But I also worry, occasionally, that
we may be in the position of late 19th-century
scientists, convinced that nothing remained but to
dot a few <i>s and cross a few <t>s, unprepared for
the revolutionary developments in quantum physics
and relativity. Could we all be barking up the
wrong tree?
Arp says we are, and has enough evidence that he
ought to be worrying a lot more people than
actually acknowledge the significance of his
findings. Indeed, over the years he has roused
open hostility to his claims, culminating in the
scandalous decision to deny him further access to
the large telescopes in California and South
America. He is now on the staff of the Max Planck
Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich.
With bridges burned behind him, he has felt the
time is ripe to present all his evidence for
discrepant redshifts in book form, and, along the
way, to detail some of the ways in which scientists
maintain closed minds to anything that does not fit
their preferred, preconceived picture of the world.
The result is a book which is of major importance,
whether or not Arp's ideas eventually turn out to
be well-founded. Science should be open-minded,
analytical and self critical. Many case studies
now enshrined in history show that it is not.
Arp's observations do not fit established theories,
and models tailored to fit the observations bring
in concepts with which many scientists are uneasy,
including white holes, quantisation of redshifts,
and variations on the steady state cosmology
developed by Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar in the
1960s. The thought that both Hoyle <and> Arp might
one day be proved right seems to cause real
physical pain to some of their peers.
When observation and theory conflict, which are we
to give the greater credence? Some of those who
oppose Arp so vehemently might do well to remember
the words of Aristotle: "Credit must be given to
observation rather than theories, and to theories
only insofar as they are confirmed by the observed
facts." I hope--I wish--that the standard big-bang
model is correct. I fear that it is at the very
least incomplete. This book will tell you why, in
clear, intelligible language; and it will make you
think twice about the objective image of scientists
portrayed in the official histories.
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