Seeing Red

Book by Halton Arp

One useful aspect of the present book is that it illustrates what can develop from one simple assumption, such as the nature of extragalactic redshifts. Both sides in the dispute have complex, rather fully worked out views which they believe to be empirically supported and logically required. Yet one side must be completely and catastrophically wrong. It makes one wonder, perhaps with profit, whether there are other uncertain assumptions on which much of our lives are built, but of which we are innocently overconfident...

It is currently believed that rigorous cosmology started in the early 1920’s after Einstein wrote down the equations of general relativity. These essentially represented the conservation of mass, energy, momentum, etc. in the most general possible coordinate system. In 1922, the Russian mathematician, A. Friedmann, “solved” these equations, i.e., showed how the system would behave in time. It is interesting to note that at first, Einstein felt this solution was incorrect. Later he said it was correct, but of no consequence. Finally he accepted the validity of this solution, but was so unhappy with the fact that it was not a stable solution, i.e., it either collapsed or expanded, that he retained the cosmological constant he had earlier introduced in order to keep the universe static. (This constant was later referred to as the cosmological fudge factor.)

In 1924, Hubble persuaded the world that the “white nebulae” were really extragalactic, and a few years later announced that the redshifts of their spectral lines increased as they became fainter. This redshift-apparent magnitude relation for galaxies became known as the Hubble law (through lack of rigor, often referred to as the redshift-distance relation). At this point Einstein dropped his cosmological constant as a great mistake, and adopted the view that his equations had been telling him all along, that the universe was expanding. Thus was born the Big Bang theory, according to which the entire universe was created instantaneously out of nothing 15 billion years ago.

This really is the entirety of the theory on which our whole concept of cosmology has rested for the last 75 years. It is interesting to note, however, that Hubble, the observer, even up to his final lecture before the Royal Society, always held open the possibility that the redshift did not mean velocity of recession but might be caused by something else...

I think it is a supreme and delicious piece of irony that 85 years after the Director at Lick Observatory announced the K effect Margaret Burbidge, a senior professor at the University of California, went up Mount Hamilton on a winter night to that same Lick Observatory. She observed two quasars that all the biggest and most advanced telescopes in the world had deliberately refused to look at, and in so doing, solved the riddle of the K effect—and at the same time laid the last flower on the grave of Big Bang cosmology.

Looking back now... we can see that if the relativists had heeded the published observations, going back a decade before their theoretical revelations, perhaps they would have decided that the universe was not necessarily exploding away from us in all directions...

My career at the Observatories in Pasadena slightly overlapped Edwin Hubble’s. He personally gave me my first job: to aid in determining the crucial distance scale in cosmology...

The greatly publicized theory is black holes where everything falls in. But the observations show everything falling out!..