Gribbin, John. "Halton Arp out on a limb" [Review of] , 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 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 s and cross a few 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 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. *************************************** This file originates from: Origins Talk RBBS * (314) 821-1078 Missouri Association for Creation, Inc. 405 North Sappington Road Glendale, MO 63122-4729 (314) 821-1234 Also call: Students for Origins Research CREVO BBS (719) 528-1363