... Or, alternatively, you've simply put so much effort into refusing to question modern science that you've at this point cultivated your own inability to distinguish well-formed from malformed challenges.
I'm doubtful from this quote below that you've actually understood what Arp is claiming:
"The redshift of a quasar comes from the galaxy redshift, so even if the supermassive black hole had been ejected, it would still be as distant as the galaxy is. Being ejected from a galaxy will not instantaneously make the black hole substantially closer."
Arp is arguing for an inherent redshift component. He makes this argument by showing bridges connecting objects of very different redshifts; in some cases quasars in front of galactic bulges; with statistics showing that quasars appear next to "foreground" galaxies far too often than they should; and he also points to an anomalous periodicity in redshift datasets.
"When Hubble made his great discovery, it was for galaxies like our own Milky Way galaxy, and they all followed the same rule that the fainter they are, the larger their redshift - in other words, the faster they are moving away from us. This is known as the Hubble Law, and directly led to the expanding universe theories. But in the 1960's, there was a new discovery: the quasi-stellar objects, often referred to as quasars. They appear as star-like points on the sky frequently blue in color, and they have very, very large redshifts - implying that they are at huge distances from the Earth, at the very boundaries of the observable universe. Some astronomers soon found that a vast number of these strange new objects populated the regions around spiral galaxies, and were not only observable with radio telescopes - but were optical and x-ray sources as well. There were two properties of the quasars that were difficult for astronomers to understand using the expanding univere theory. The first was that if one plotted their apparent brightness against their redshifts as one does for galaxies, one gets an unexpected scatter on the diagram instead of the smooth curve made by the same plot done for galaxies. This seems to indicate that the quasars do not follow the Hubble Law, as do most other objects, and that there is no direct indication that they are actually at their proposed redshift distances. In fact, it is argued that if Hubble had first been given the plots for quasars, he and other astronomers would never have concluded that the universe was expanding."
Re: "Otherwise I might ask why you're not looking for "invisible pink unicorns galloping on a straight line kicking the galaxies in alignment". Because the data is equally suggesting that..."
It bears reminding that there are only two possible forces to work with at the intergalactic scale - gravitational and electric - so there is nothing at all extraordinary about checking to see if concepts related to electric discharges which are valid in the plasma laboratory are also present in astronomical imagery. The same exact process of reasoning is at play when astrophysicists invoke mechanical processes we've learned about here on Earth in astronomical imagery - e.g. astronomical bow shocks inferred from ships moving through water and redshifts inferred from the Doppler effect heard from a moving train.
Re: "Show me the simulations..."
You've set up a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario here: The works of Arp and the EU are dismissed, so there are not enough people learning these models. So, these simulations you expect to see before you will start paying attention do not yet exist. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop which actually deprives you of the information you need to formulate a meaningful opinion.
Is it possible to create a universe that looks like our observations, such that the largest scales are composed of electric circuits? We are left with the situation that science simply refuses to ask this fundamental question. Instead of focusing upon the creation of models which are rooted in the laboratory behaviors of the 99.999% of the universe that they can see (the cosmic plasma), they insist that they already know the answer of which force dominates at the largest scales (even though no test exists to confirm this, and even though the hypothesis leads us to a universe dominated by dark forces and matters). Cosmologists instead decide to spend their time trying to find the 95% of stuff that their models inform them must be there, but which the brightest minds have failed to find after considerable expenditure and time looking. If there exists any analogy to be made about looking for pink unicorns, it is much better suited to this existing search for dark matter.
Cosmology can spin its wheels like this for many decades - certainly well beyond the ends of the lifetimes of both you and me. What is missing from this approach is hedging. The lack of any hedging on this question leads to the situation where the field now builds a huge theoretical structure on top of a weak theoretical foundation. The price for the insistence that they already know the answer to a question that they have historically refused to ask is that all of this theoretical structure can one day be revealed to be a colossal waste of human resources.
When you go online to vocalize your support of their refusal to hedge, even though there are really only two possible answers here, you leave the impression that this risk-taking is normal. It's not. The public expects scientists to be rigorous. Ignoring one of the two fundamental forces at the largest scales is not rigorous. In fact, it reveals a systemic problem in our graduate programs: We are not teaching the method of multiple working hypotheses. This philosophical framework needs to be added into these programs.
Fortunately, it seems to me, this difficulty can be removed by the use of a second great intellectual invention, the "method of multiple hypotheses," which is what was needed to round out the Baconian scheme. This is a method that was put forward by T. C. Chamberlin, a geologist at Chicago at the turn of the century who is best known for his contribution to the Chamberlin-Moulton hypothesis of the origin of the solar system.
Chamberlin says our trouble is that when we make a single hypothesis, we become attached to it. "The moment one has offered an original explanation for
The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer
Hilton Ratcliffe (2nd Ed, 2008)
"In May 2006, Arp, Burbidge, and Carosati submitted a paper to the European journal Astronomy & Astrophysics laying out the results of their comprehensive statistical analysis of alignments around the highly active, dual-nucleus galaxy NGC 4410 [44]. It was rejected, and the editors sent an unusually detailed rejection note to Dr. Arp. Because it so clearly revealed editorial bias against his work, he appended the note to his paper and published both together on the online scientific archive arXiv. Dr. Arp followed this with a letter of protest to the directors of A&A, and we patiently await their response.
Dr. Arp and I had some correspondence about the NGC 4410 paper at the time, and initially I didn't get the especial significance of that particular publication. At first, it struck me as merely a statistical review of archived material, and as such, lent no more than numerical weight to the arguments that Arp and his colleagues were constantly putting forward. In the light of his protest letter to A&A, however, I decided to revisit the paper, and it's just as well I did. The saga of NGC 4410 gave me a stark reminder that there is something crucially important about redshifts and quasars that I haven't told you, and that is an unforgivable oversight on my part. I'm sorry. Let me remedy the situation immediately.
In 1967, the Doctors Burbidge noticed something interesting: Their study of the redshifts of quasars produced a quirky statistic, that there was a particular redshift that was more popular with quasars than any other they had noticed. Quasars seemed to prefer a redshift of z = 1.95. This on its own is no more than a curiosity, and certainly not enough to prompt a rewrite of the Principia, but it got the mental juices of one K.G. Karlsson working overtime. In 1971, by which time the study of quasars and their characteristic redshifts comprised an extensive database, Karlsson had deduced that quasar redshifts are indeed quantised, and tend to have preferred values given by the simple formula (1 + z)/(1 + z) = 1.23. Have a look at a sample batch of quasars, measure their redshifts, and you will be astonished as I was to find that the values fall invariably into the series z = 0.061, 0.30, 0.60, 0.91, 1.41, 1.96... n. Note that the last value shown here is as close as makes no difference to the preferred redshift discovered by the Burbidges 4 years earlier. This was a truly astounding discovery, and strems of subsequent measurements soon indisputably verified it. In March 2006, M.B. Bell and D. McDiarmid of the National Research Council of Canada published an analysis of 46,400 (that's right -- forty six thousand!) quasar redshifts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They conclude, 'The peak found corresponds to a redshift period of z = ~0.70. Not only is a distinct power peak observed, the locations of the peaks in the redshift distributions are in agreement with the preferred redshifts predicted by the intrinsic redshift equation. [45]"
[44] H. Arp, E.M. Burbidge, and D. Carosati, Quasars and Galaxy Clusters Paired Across NGC4410 (arXiv: astro-ph/0605453)
[45] M.B. Bell and D. McDiarmid, Six Peaks Visible in Redshift Distribution of 46,400 SDSS Quasars... Intrinsic Redshift Model (arXiv:astro-ph/0603169 v1 7 Mar 2006).
It's also important to understand that nobody woke up one day and decided, "Hey, I'm going to go find periodicity in my quasar dataset." It was not expected when it was observed - so the fact that it has been witnessed by so many astronomers at this point should actually mean something.
The only reason for invoking creationists there was to point out that critiques of dating techniques are not taken seriously because the people pointing them out are not taken seriously. This is important to understand because the creationists can of course be wrong about their understanding of the universe in many ways, and yet still be right about their critiques of radiocarbon dating. Not that anybody here has done so, but we should try to ask these questions about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating without framing them as just another part of the creationist debate.
You're conflating concepts between the mathematical map ("a singular point") and the actual territory ("The average density of the observable universe is about 6 protons per cubic meter, and you can get a looooot of protons in a cubic meter."), in order to appear as though no scientific principle is being violated.
Re: "So nowhere are they claiming that there is any actual proper motion going on."
There appears to be a brief mention of these structure-induced errors here:
recent observations (Taris et al. 2011; Porcas 2009; Kovalev et al. 2008) of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and theoretical studies (Popovic et al. 2012) indicate that variability in the accretion disk and dusty torus surrounding the central black hole can cause photocentre shifts of up to the milliarcsec level...
However, you might not be seeing one of the problems presented by the paper I originally pointed to. Figure 2 in that paper shows that there is no real trend in the apparent proper motion versus redshift. Under Big Bang Theory assumptions, there should be a clear trend that with higher redshift, the proper motion should diminish to zero. What is seen instead is that quasars seem to have similar proper motions at both low and high redshift. Even if the dataset is small or contains some errors, the lack of such a trend for the entire dataset is sufficiently anomalous that everybody should be tracking this issue over time. Most astronomers today simply assume that quasars exhibit no apparent motion - and they use this assumption to guide their own observational activities.
Re: "Lemaitre's idea was that all the matter in the observable universe would have started from a singular point. Nobody said anything about creation-from-nothing, although there are some unproven quantum theories that would allow this... Time and space might not have existed before the moment of Big Bang, and in that case the question about what existed 'before' that moment would be simply invalid. The universe would simply have existed forever."
Okay, which accepted scientific principles permit all of the observable universe's matter to originate from a singular point?
Re: "All these things are far more likely than what you're proposing."
It's easy to propose a rebuttal to something that you've not taken the time to actually look at. The mind is much more free to wander about to all sorts of imagined possibilities. But we should all take care that we have not encased ourselves into ideological bubbles of our own making. The social networks and science journalists are doing the legwork of that for you such that the information bubble itself can become imperceptible.
"Einstein was an Einstein denier. He came from the crackpot community. He couldn't get a job. After graduating, he almost starved to death until somebody took pity on him. He had a talk with somebody at the patent office.
So, here's this unknown crackpot submitting papers. He's not associated with any academic group. And they actually took him seriously. Things were different back at the turn of the century.
But, if you have somebody working a day job, who has nothing to do with physics, and sending in physics papers, and they're in the miracle year... Today, would any of them be accepted? They're not on university letterhead, so Einstein was from the crackpot community. But, nobody ever says that. So, after the fact, he's redefined to always have been a scientist all along. So, that way they can say that the crackpot community will never ever produce anything, because anyone who does produce anything, well they were a scientist who was hiding in the crackpot community.
The same thing had happened with the Wright brothers. They were bicycle company owners; they don't have any connection with any academia. And they do the breakthrough which brings up human flight and controls aircraft. So, now they're defined as always having been scientists -- that they build the first wind tunnel and were doing rigorous testing. So, they weren't crackpots along with all the thousands of other flying machine crackpots at the time that were being horrendously ridiculed.
The Wright brothers couldn't make any headway in the United States, and their breakthrough actually came, not at Kitty Hawk, but when they took their flying machine to France, and flew it at a crackpot flying machine convention. They had people that actually had machines that were sort of like the leather bat wing steam powered thing, that would fly in a straight line. And the Wright brothers came and flew rings around them, literally. I think that's probably where the expression comes from.
But, no longer crackpots. They must have been scientists all along!"
Re: "Slashdot should do better to not allow posters to insert their crackpot ideas into the submission of what is actually a really interesting article."
All that you've done here is to summarize the textbook theory, the content of the article, and the point I made about the reporting. But to what extent are you actually thinking about the things which you are reading about? What you seem to be suggesting is that Slashdot should never cover any idea which deviates from mainstream scientific thought - even if doing so would actually help people to think at a higher level through a process of engaging multiple competing scientific frameworks.
Re: "There is a crap-ton of evidence placing quasars at cosmological distances. Arp's idea is one of the DISCARDED ideas about what quasars are for really good reasons.
Re: "Starting with - why are there no BLUE shifted quasars? If they are ejected from galaxies, we should should see ones coming at us as well as receding from us."
The fact that you made the suggestion points to a process for arguing against Arp which does not actually involve learning his model. Had you learned his model, you would know why this doesn't make any sense. I explain the situation here.
Re: "We have images of gravitationally lensed quasars while necessarily places them FURTHER AWAY than the galaxies acting as lenses. We've even witnessed time delayed changes in the multiple images from those lenses."
It's unlikely that all lensing claims will end up being validated over time as lenses. Arp himself commented that
"The sudden revival of gravitational lensing to the huge industry it is today is simply due to the quasars"
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
"Prior to the 1950's Fritz Zwicky, the Swiss astronomer who had an illustrious and turbulent career in California, was aware that strong gravitational fields had been shown to bend light rays -- as in the famous eclipse observations of the displacement of positions of stars observed at a grazing angle to the sun's limb. At that time he started looking for an extragalactic object which might be directly behind another, and thus have its outer light rays bent inward by the gravitational field of the foreground object so that it formed a ring or halo. Some 'ring galaxies' were found, but they all seemed to be physical rings around the galaxy and not magnified background objects.
The more common situation to be expected was when the background object was not exactly centered and the gravitational ring collapsed into a one sided arc. But no striking examples of that were found either, so the subject had gone dormant. The sudden revival of gravitational lensing to the huge industry it is today is simply due to the quasars. In the 1960's and 70's I started finding high densities of quasars concentrated around nearby, low-redshift galaxies. Because of their high redshifts, it was felt that they could not be associated with low-redshift galaxies...
The Einstein Cross...
... When it was first discovered it caused a panic because it was essentially a high redshift quasar in the nucleus of a low redshift galaxy... Gravitational galaxy lensing had to be invoked for this one...
'We put the slit of the spectrograph between quasars A and B in the Einstein Cross and we registered a broad Lyman alpha emission in each quasar. But between them we found a narrow Lyman alpha line -- it looks like there is some low density gas at the same redshift as the quasars between them.'
A jolt ran through me and I looked at him to try to read the expression on his face. As usual in such situations, his eyes avoided mine. The point was, of course, that a line between quasar A and B passed directly between the nucleus of the galaxy and quasar D. On the face of it high redshift gas was indicated near the nucleus of the low redshift galaxy. But what I knew, and what anyone can know looking at the Lyman alpha centered photograph in Color Plate 7-7, is that there is a putative Lyman alpha filament connecting quasar D to the galaxy nucleus. What the spectrum had confirmed was that this indeed was a low density, excited hydrogen filament connecting the two objects of vastly different redshift.
Arp is arguing that there is an inherent redshift component to the total. Quasars appear to start, at the moment of ejection, at something like z = 2 - 4. So, it would not necessarily be a disproof to not see blue-shifted objects since the doppler effect component to redshift would add to that inherent value to produce the total. There is something about new matter that makes it redshifted at birth (and people should be allowed to disagree, for now, about what that actually is).
Then, over time, the redshift equalizes w the surrounding environment. Apparently, this can in some cases happen very quickly - a fact which Arp does not directly address, but which can be better understood if the objects are not actually at their inferred distances. Even with that distance correction, there may still be more theory required to explain the unexpectedly quick rate at which quasars can apparently "shut off". I provide Wal Thornhill's explanation in order to illustrate that point:
"Like the atom itself, the constituents of each atom—the protons, neutrons and electrons—can be viewed as resonant systems of charge, capable of exchanging electromagnetic energy for quantum jumps between stable resonant states. The quantum jumps over time to lower redshift values occur as electrons from the parent galaxy’s jet arrive at the quasar and increase the quasars’ charge polarization. As its mass increases, according to E-MOND, the quasar slows from its high ejection speed at ‘birth,’ due to conservation of momentum. When the intrinsic redshift value gets down to around z = 0.3, the quasar starts to look like a small galaxy or BL Lac object and begins to fall back toward its parent, while continuing to decrease in redshift. Eventually it becomes a companion galaxy. Arp has photos and diagrams of many such family groupings. Many can be traced to three and four generations of ejecting objects."
Markarian 205 was reported by Weedman as a Seyfert nucleus appearing within the arms of the lower-redshift spiral galaxy NGC 4319. Most of the argument here has centered on whether or not there is a visible connection between the two. Pictures were published with and without a bridge (Arp once said that he had pictures that showed no bridge as well, and didn't want to be thought lacking in observational skill). There was some early discussion of photographic proximity effects creating false bridges between bright objects, but it doesn't go away with linear detectors. Various reports were given by Arp 1971 (ApLett 9,1), Lynds and Millikan 1972 (ApJLett 176, L5), Stockton et al 1979 (ApJ 231, 673), and Sulentic 1983 (ApJLett 265, L49). Cecil and Stockton (1985 ApJ 288, 201) used CCD data from Mauna Kea to show that there is definitely some kind of luminous object between Mkn 205 and NGC 4319, stating that "Arp was correct in his insistence that his broad-band plates showed luminous intervening material. The opposite conclusions of his critics were - depending on their degree of qualification - either wrong, misleading, or irrelevant."
"We realized that... the people who had been processing the pictures and released it must have known that the bridge was there, and yet they chose to try to convince the public that... in fact it wasn't there, and that everything was right with the current expanding universe paradigm."
Realize that they could have argued that the radio filament was a background object, a "chance" observation. They didn't. They literally said that the filament is not there. But, the filament clearly shows up on CCD imagery - just not the optical.
Guys, I am just one person. There is also a maverick philosopher with expertise in aether, electrical cosmology and Relativity named Juan Calsiano. He has sometimes showed up on request to supplement my own comments. He lives in Argentina, and he's working on a philosophy book. We are two different people. Nobody is tricking you.
I once encountered a cosmic filament expert on Twitter. He agreed that the EU idea was actually a scientific hypothesis, but similar to what you've stated above, he said that if it was true that the many plasma filaments we observe are electric currents, then we should see large magnetic fields and even synchrotron emissions associated with them. He presented a detailed conceptual rebuttal - a short two-page explanation. That interaction was a great example of how people should be discussing these issues - in a calm, rational manner where we are comparing the idea against known observations. People pay attention to different things, so these discussions can bring to light important, missed details when everybody seeks to approach the subject in a scientific manner.
That exchange helped me to see that he was assuming a simple transmission line model. Birkeland currents are not bound to this simple transmission line model now that we can see that they can form into more complex coaxial (Bessel function) configurations. The coaxial configuration of the Birkeland current - known more formally as the "force-free field-aligned Birkeland current" - has two remarkable implications:
1. The coaxial configuration will make it difficult to observe the electric current's magnetic field signature. That part should be fairly straightforward to anybody with a modest EE background or even just familiarity with the right-hand rule.
2. Considerably less obvious is that there would also not necessarily be any synchrotron emissions.
From Section 8 of Scott's paper:
"At every point in the plasma, j and B are collinear."
In technical terms, this means that such charged matter has zero radial acceleration, meaning zero synchrotron emission.
What was interesting about the exchange was that it had very little impact upon the filament experts' approach and mindset. I've since witnessed him purchase a novelty plasma globe, but that's it!
"An interesting concept which sort of guided me - especially after the book, The End of Science - that if we're in the end times of science, and there's no... revolutionary discoveries possible, well you look around and there aren't many revolutions that you see coming along. And there's articles about why are there no new Einsteins?
Suppose you met a time traveler from 50 or 100 years in the future, who said:
'You guys are crazy; you didn't discover X or Y or Z'
... that all of physics is this tiny little bit of progress compared to these giant discoveries that are going to happen in 20 years, and everyone's complaining that there's not any new Einsteins. Well, they're all sort of being crushed. Anyone that comes up with something weird can't get funding.
So, if you think that you're in the end times, you end up being in the end times because the certainty that you're in the end times puts you in the end times...
You come up to sort of an asymptote, or stasis, where there's no more progress.
Everyone's convinced that there's no more progress, so anything that looks like progress doesn't get funded. Since there's no progress possible, everything that looks like progress is actually crackpotism and heresy. There's nothing up there to explore, so anyone that wants to go up there is crazy, and you don't fund crazy people.
But, it's a closed loop of belief causing reality and reality causing belief. If everyone thought that we were at the lowest end of the great exponential curve of physics discovery, then you'd have little kids making giant discoveries, and people taking them seriously when they find their website that they are the new Einstein. So, it's possible that there are many new Einsteins, and they're all in the crackpot community publishing on the web cause no journal would ever take their papers. You might have people that have flying cars and time machines that really work, but they've never built them because you can't do this stuff as an individual. You need your money for almost anything. At least you have to be able to quit your day job to work full-time.
So, funding controls what happens. If you fund bold leaps out into the unknown, you start boldly leaping out into the unknown. And if you only fund small intermittent progress, then that's what everything ends up being."
What was your process for coming to this conclusion? Did you ever take the time to learn the historical debates? For example, are you familiar with Dingle's Paradox? Thinking at the deepest level about these questions means not settling for the first explanation you encounter; you have to keep searching until you find the best, most persuasive challenge to orthodoxy. Dingle's Paradox perfectly illustrates this issue. Most of the explanations do not properly convey the seriousness of the paradox, but this one does:
"In 1955 Dingle precipitated the most famous of his controversies when he objected to a statement made in a book written by George Thompson The Foreseeable Future regarding the famous twins paradox. The ensuing controversy was one of the most famous disputes in 20th century physics. The controversy caused Dingle to investigate the mathematical and physical foundations of the special theory of relativity and this caused him to doubt its validity. Eventually he discovered mathematical demonstrations which he interpreted as proof of flaws in or inconsistencies in the theory. The debate and discussion of these eventually led him to disown relativity as a valid scientific theory and produced his long campaign to establish his refutation of relativity as scientifically valid, which remained his main goal for the rest of his life.
What Dingle discovered in this controversy is different from what the establishment critics of Dingle say about it. They claim that he was wrong, but that claim can not, and has not, been proved, despite the fact that they claim it is not true. Dingle asserted that there must be a flaw in the theory. This claim was mitigated by an additional assertion on his part that the mathematics was correct. This has been the source of considerable confusion and controversy. Clearly Dingle did not mean that all the mathematics was correct, because he used the established mathematics to present a logical contradiction. What he meant was that assuming that the mathematics was correct, we deduce a logical contradiction — Dingle politely called this an inconsistency – which must be the result of a flaw within the theory. According to Dingle this flaw was within the logical structure and not within the mathematical structure.
To illustrate this, consider Dingle’s 1962 letter to Nature which claimed an inconsistency. In this letter, Dingle showed that by the method used by Einstein, it was just as valid to conclude that moving clocks run fast as to conclude that they run slow. Although Dingle called it an inconsistency, it was really an logical or mathematical contradiction, similar to the other inconsistencies which were labeled as paradoxes in the theory of relativity. Succinctly put, Dingle had discovered another paradox. But it was essentially the same as the clock paradox, which had been discovered much earlier, but it was a more precise statement of it.
To understand this clock paradox problem, and how the Dingle paradox were related, consider the following. The clock paradox arises from [Einstein’s] 1905 paper where he states that if a synchronized clock is moved from some location to another one in the same reference frame, its motion causes it to [lag] behind the clocks... in the same frame that do not move. This conclusion, however, implies a contradiction of the principle of relativity, which asserts an equivalence of reference frames. Hence, it is not logically possible to say that one clock was the one that moved and not the opposite one in the other frame. Hence, it was not possible [to] say which clock, if any, actually lagged in time after being moved. Dingle’s paradox asserted that given any clock being moved, [it] was not possible to say whether the motion caused it to lag behind or to accelerate ahead of the rest clock to which it is compa
The best emerging plot line is the living universe concept. This topic elicits really interesting reactions from people. Michael Clarage's presentation offers a good introduction to it if you start at the 5:14 timestamp, but I think there are many more arguments which could be put forward on this.
Follow through on the implications of that strange concept: We can see that there is life which exists inside of our own bodies at multiple scales of existence: we can have parasites, which in turn have bacteria, etc. So, what if we are simply a middle rung of this larger living structure, and the features we are witnessing with telescopes are actually pieces of a larger living creature? If that was true, then what if that creature possesses an immune system?
Imagine that humans are colonizing space and we are getting a bit too casual with our electromagnetic emissions, or that we've sent a probe to some distant place, which then triggers an immune response? I suspect that the immune system would be misinterpreted by people as aliens, but you could somehow slowly reveal the "truth" of the science as the book nears its conclusion.
Re: "Dark matter is absolutely needed to explain the structure of the universe at the largest scales. Supercomputer simulations of the evolution of the visible universe only produce anything that resembles the large scale structure of the universe when using Lambda-CDM (i.e. cold dark matter) models. Those same models also produces the elements in the abundances we see today."
Notice that you completely ignored the fact that the jets we observe connected to AGN's exhibit this peculiar counter-rotation. These are cylinders of moving charge which contain yet more cylinders of charge moving in the opposite direction. How in the world are you going to explain concentric counter-rotating, counter-flowing electric currents with a gravitationally-driven source?
A 2014 Science article adds additional weight to that claim by noticing that the energy of the AGN jets appears to be around 10x the energy which the accretion disc could provide:
Plotting the luminosity of the accretion disks against the gamma ray power of their jets, the team reports online today in Nature that there is a clear linear relationship between the two. The brighter the disk, the more powerful the jets—cementing the idea that accretion disks and jets are linked. But in terms of total power being beamed out into space, Ghisellini says, most of the jets were producing 10 times that of their accretion disks. “There must be another engine, not just the gravitational energy [of accreting matter falling toward the black hole].”
So, is there a gravitational "black hole" driving each of these electromagnetic jets, or are the jets forming a network which then along certain points along the transmission line spin up galaxies?
That latter possibility is the question you refuse to ask even though the data is suggesting it.
In most of these cases, cosmologists and science journalists point the public to ad hoc extensions of the Big Bang. Yet, their original model did not predict these observations.
"The first odd thing we noticed was that some of the quasars’ rotation axes were aligned with each other -- despite the fact that these quasars are separated by billions of light-years"
2. Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
Markarian 205 was reported by Weedman as a Seyfert nucleus appearing within the arms of the lower-redshift spiral galaxy NGC 4319. Most of the argument here has centered on whether or not there is a visible connection between the two. Pictures were published with and without a bridge (Arp once said that he had pictures that showed no bridge as well, and didn't want to be thought lacking in observational skill). There was some early discussion of photographic proximity effects creating false bridges between bright objects, but it doesn't go away with linear detectors. Various reports were given by Arp 1971 (ApLett 9,1), Lynds and Millikan 1972 (ApJLett 176, L5), Stockton et al 1979 (ApJ 231, 673), and Sulentic 1983 (ApJLett 265, L49). Cecil and Stockton (1985 ApJ 288, 201) used CCD data from Mauna Kea to show that there is definitely some kind of luminous object between Mkn 205 and NGC 4319, stating that "Arp was correct in his insistence that his broad-band plates showed luminous intervening material. The opposite conclusions of his critics were - depending on their degree of qualification - either wrong, misleading, or irrelevant."
"We realized that... the people who had been processing the pictures and released it must have known that the bridge was there, and yet they chose to try to convince the public that... in fact it wasn't there, and that everything was right with the current expanding universe paradigm."
3. Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, by Halton Arp (1987)
"To summarize this initial chapter, I would emphasize that with the known densities with which quasars of different apparent brightness are distributed over the sky, one can compute what are the chances of finding by accident a quasar at a c
Re: "So for example, when I hear the lay-person's explanation of carbon dating (that the relative abundance of radioactive isotopes in a sample indicates how long ago that carbon was incorporated from the atmosphere when the sample was a living organism), I always ask myself 'doesn't that assume that the relative abundance of those isotopes in the atmosphere is constant - or at least, that scientists have some way of knowing how that ratio has changed over time?'"
Well done, Rob Y. Your suspicions are dead-on. You've stumbled onto another scientific controversy.
I cover the numerous assumptions which must be valid for radiocarbon to be accurate here
I cover the historical cherry-picking of radiocarbon dates in order to support the preferred chronology here. Many of these quotes surprisingly come from lab operators.
I cover an unusual, convenient shift in the dataset that Willard Libby uses to get the Nobel here.
Science journalists don't really cover these subjects, and their omission is noticeable. These appear to be culturally taboo topics, since the only people who tend to question the dating techniques belong to ostracized groups - like the creationists.
Re: "His background or your feelings about it are irrelevant. Unlike you, we scientists deal in facts...What matters is his idea
Which part of the creation-from-nothing idea most persuades you as a scientist?
Re: "Until you provide a model that explains all of the observations equally or better, the leading models will have the consensus."
We can actually see high redshift quasars moving. They exhibit proper motion. How much more reason do you really need in order to ask the question of whether or not there exists an inherent redshift component?
If quasar redshifts are due to velocity, they should be so incredibly distant that proper motion is undetectable.
We know this to be the case due to published remarks by Maarten Schmidt in a 1963 Nature article titled "3C 273: A Star-like Object with Large Red-Shift":
"Only the detection of an irrefutable proper motion of parallax would definitely establish 3C 273 as an object within our Galaxy."
M. Schmidt, “3C 273: A Star-like Object with Large Red-Shift,” Nature 197 (March 16, 1963), p. 1040.
Now, consider the exemplary journalism below within the context of that quote:
"... Quasar 3C 279 is one of the brightest gamma ray objects in the sky. And with a redshift of.536 z as listed in NED it is assumed to be quite distant at almost 6.9 billion light-years away using a so-called Hubble Constant value of 55 (km/s)/Mpc. However, accepting such a distance would make this object one of the most energetic and powerful radiation emitters in the known Universe by many orders of magnitude.
3C 273 is the first celestial object ever identified as a quasar. It is also assumed to be one of the closest to Earth with a redshift of.158 z which supposedly places it at a distance of 2.5 billion light-years when using the same Hubble Constant. 3C 273 is the brightest quasar in the night sky with an apparent magnitude of 12.9 which makes it visible to even amateur astronomers’ telescopes. At its accepted distance this brightness equates to an absolute magnitude of 26.7 which also makes this quasar one of the most luminous in the known Universe.
The radio source 3C 278 is associated with the galaxy NGC 4782 and its companion NGC 4783. NGC 4782 is the host of 3C 278 and has a redshift of.013 z which gives it an assumed distance of 234 million light-years. NGC 4783 is the northern galaxy in most images of the pair and has a redshift of.154 z which would place it 270 million light-years distant. However both objects are themselves connected by a bridge of material and appear less than 40 arcseconds apart.
Quasar 3C 275 has a large redshift of.480 z which presumably puts it at a distance of 6.3 billion light-years away. Again, as with all the aforementioned 3C radio sources, distances were calculated using a Hubble’s 'Constant' of 55 (km/s)/Mpc.
How can such widely separated objects be bridged with such a highly energetic field of material on such an enormous scale? According to their accepted distances 3C 279 and 273 alone are roughly 1 billion light-years apart in the sky and over 4 / billion light-years apart in distance from Earth. There are over 6 billion light-years separating the closest objects from the furthest objects in this group. There is no real conceivable way such a body of mass and energy could exist in the Universe unless it was actually much closer to us than had previously been assumed. Greatly reducing the actual distances to these bright radio sources also resolves a very surprising discovery made when observing the cores of the two brightest objects, 3C 279 and 273 using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and other radio telescopes.
I try not to criticize stuff unless I'm really confident and familiar with the idea. So, when I am learning something, I just read and go along with it, and I try to think through its relationship with observations. Are there reasons that this could be true?
It's tempting to think about reasons to disbelieve. I don't recommend focusing on the negatives in the beginning. Your mind is lazier than you imagine. It wants a reason to stop looking because thinking takes effort - and we might not like the answers. Stereotypes and narratives are much easier and safer.
You have to accept that a lot of the ideas you will learn will not be correct. It could be a big ratio - like 10:1 wrong-to-right. But, if you are thorough and systematic, then you will probably run into some suppressed worthwhile innovations. It's more common than you might imagine. And then you have special knowledge which is not widely known which you can use to make predictions about where the field should go.
I think people don't quite get that the effect of learning about those rare correct ideas makes learning the wrong ideas completely worth it. It's a net win once you're not bothered by the realities of the situation. The important part is the tracking - which is how you check to see which ones are performing in the light of new - especially unexpected - observations. That is the only true way to differentiate legitimate groundbreaking science claims from fake pseudoscience; placing faith in somebody else's pre-packaged set of answers is not really the answer. You have to actually think.
Arp is arguing that there is an inherent redshift component to the total. Quasars appear to start, at the moment of ejection, at something like z = 2 - 4. So, it would not necessarily be a disproof to not see blue-shifted objects since the doppler effect component to redshift would add to that inherent value to produce the total. There is something about new matter that makes it redshifted at birth (and people should be allowed to disagree, for now, about what that actually is).
Then, over time, the redshift equalizes w the surrounding environment. Apparently, this can in some cases happen very quickly.
I've run into a number of histories which seem to leave the "wrong" lesson, and so even though they carry with them important lessons, these stories are not widely told. The story of the invention of the rocket is probably the best example. The beginning of that story is like kryptonite for a lot of people, so nobody ever tells it. People should learn that part. It's like we are culturally trying to block it out - like it didn't happen.
It looks like there is a plasma physics aspect to quantization that Arp did not realize. Active galactic nuclei have been compared by some plasma physicists to plasma focus devices. If that is true, the inherent redshift component could represent matter of a lower mass (perhaps it is electron deficient). Then, as the ejection moves away from the active center, it would go through a sequence of regions with different densities. Electrons might rapidly rush in. His suggestion in the theory section of his Intrinsic Redshift video is that the preferred redshift values result from the quasar interacting with these different environments (the galactic "hierarchy").
Or, a person could even reason their way to quantum effects happening at very large scales. Either way, it is important to learn what the plasma focus device is. Once you witness the resultant complexity of this simple plasma device, you should start to witness the risk that astrophysicists take when they completely ignore laboratory plasma observations. A person cannot just reason their way to the behavior of the plasma focus, yet it's not a very complex device:
The Big Bang Never Happened
Eric Lerner
"My conflict with conventional physics started when I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the mid-sixties. Physics itself interested me, learning why things happen as they do -- mathematics was merely a tool to understand and test the underlying physical concepts. That was not the way physics was taught; instead, mathematical techniques were emphasized. This is almost exclusively what students are still tested on, and obviously what they study the most.
I went on to graduate work in physics at the University of Maryland, intending to get a doctorate. But after a year, I left. I couldn't reconcile myself with the mathematical approach, which seemed sterile and abstract -- especially in particle physics, in which I had considered specializing. After leaving school in 1970 I began to work as a science writer -- first for Collier's Encyclopedia and then freelance, writing technical reports and magazine articles. This kept me in touch with the latest developments in astrophysics, controlled fusion, and particle physics, among other things; my work was an opportunity to complete my education in physics. I especially learned about plasma physics, which had not been touched on at Columbia or Maryland.
The seventies were the heyday of the Big Bang cosmology, but I was skeptical of it and the associated developments in high-energy physics. I knew from my Columbia days that there were fundamental contradictions in particle theory which had been swept under the rug (see Chapter Eight). The Big Bang's universe, wound up in the beginning and steadily running down, seemed wildly unscientific and I knew that its theorists had never resolved the fundamental problem of the initial source of energy. It seemed far more likely to me that the universe had always existed, its evolution accelerating over the aeons.
I thought a great deal about problems that interested me in physics and cosmology, but I was busy earning a living. So it was not until 1981 that I actually began serious scientific research. The origin of that first project dated back to 1974, when I met Winston Bostick while we worked with a group advocating greater funds for controlled-fusion research.
Bostick's research centered on a fusion device called the plasma focus. It was the inspiration for my first astrophysical theories. The focus -- invented independently in the early sixties by a Soviet, N. V. Filippov, and an American, Joseph Mather -- is extremely simple, in contrast to the huge and complex tokamak, a large magnetic device that has long dominated fusion research. The focus consisted of two conducting copper cylinders, several centimeters across, nested inside each other (Fig. 6.12). When a large current is discharged across the cylinder, a remarkable sequence of events ens
Slashdot Mirror
Re: ... Such a passionate defense of nothing ...
... Or, alternatively, you've simply put so much effort into refusing to question modern science that you've at this point cultivated your own inability to distinguish well-formed from malformed challenges.
I'm doubtful from this quote below that you've actually understood what Arp is claiming:
Arp is arguing for an inherent redshift component. He makes this argument by showing bridges connecting objects of very different redshifts; in some cases quasars in front of galactic bulges; with statistics showing that quasars appear next to "foreground" galaxies far too often than they should; and he also points to an anomalous periodicity in redshift datasets.
You've not done anything within your post here to argue against any of the observations he points to to justify his claims. The idea that redshift can only result from a Doppler-like effect is an assumption which followed from the order in which the observations historically occurred:
Re: "Otherwise I might ask why you're not looking for "invisible pink unicorns galloping on a straight line kicking the galaxies in alignment". Because the data is equally suggesting that..."
It bears reminding that there are only two possible forces to work with at the intergalactic scale - gravitational and electric - so there is nothing at all extraordinary about checking to see if concepts related to electric discharges which are valid in the plasma laboratory are also present in astronomical imagery. The same exact process of reasoning is at play when astrophysicists invoke mechanical processes we've learned about here on Earth in astronomical imagery - e.g. astronomical bow shocks inferred from ships moving through water and redshifts inferred from the Doppler effect heard from a moving train.
Re: "Show me the simulations ..."
You've set up a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario here: The works of Arp and the EU are dismissed, so there are not enough people learning these models. So, these simulations you expect to see before you will start paying attention do not yet exist. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop which actually deprives you of the information you need to formulate a meaningful opinion.
Is it possible to create a universe that looks like our observations, such that the largest scales are composed of electric circuits? We are left with the situation that science simply refuses to ask this fundamental question. Instead of focusing upon the creation of models which are rooted in the laboratory behaviors of the 99.999% of the universe that they can see (the cosmic plasma), they insist that they already know the answer of which force dominates at the largest scales (even though no test exists to confirm this, and even though the hypothesis leads us to a universe dominated by dark forces and matters). Cosmologists instead decide to spend their time trying to find the 95% of stuff that their models inform them must be there, but which the brightest minds have failed to find after considerable expenditure and time looking. If there exists any analogy to be made about looking for pink unicorns, it is much better suited to this existing search for dark matter.
Cosmology can spin its wheels like this for many decades - certainly well beyond the ends of the lifetimes of both you and me. What is missing from this approach is hedging. The lack of any hedging on this question leads to the situation where the field now builds a huge theoretical structure on top of a weak theoretical foundation. The price for the insistence that they already know the answer to a question that they have historically refused to ask is that all of this theoretical structure can one day be revealed to be a colossal waste of human resources.
When you go online to vocalize your support of their refusal to hedge, even though there are really only two possible answers here, you leave the impression that this risk-taking is normal. It's not. The public expects scientists to be rigorous. Ignoring one of the two fundamental forces at the largest scales is not rigorous. In fact, it reveals a systemic problem in our graduate programs: We are not teaching the method of multiple working hypotheses. This philosophical framework needs to be added into these programs.
The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer
Hilton Ratcliffe (2nd Ed, 2008)
[44] H. Arp, E.M. Burbidge, and D. Carosati, Quasars and Galaxy Clusters Paired Across NGC4410 (arXiv: astro-ph/0605453)
[45] M.B. Bell and D. McDiarmid, Six Peaks Visible in Redshift Distribution of 46,400 SDSS Quasars ... Intrinsic Redshift Model (arXiv:astro-ph/0603169 v1 7 Mar 2006).
It's easy for people to not realize - since it's not been reported by science journalists - just how many papers have been published on this topic.
It's also important to understand that nobody woke up one day and decided, "Hey, I'm going to go find periodicity in my quasar dataset." It was not expected when it was observed - so the fact that it has been witnessed by so many astronomers at this point should actually mean something.
The only reason for invoking creationists there was to point out that critiques of dating techniques are not taken seriously because the people pointing them out are not taken seriously. This is important to understand because the creationists can of course be wrong about their understanding of the universe in many ways, and yet still be right about their critiques of radiocarbon dating. Not that anybody here has done so, but we should try to ask these questions about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating without framing them as just another part of the creationist debate.
You're conflating concepts between the mathematical map ("a singular point") and the actual territory ("The average density of the observable universe is about 6 protons per cubic meter, and you can get a looooot of protons in a cubic meter."), in order to appear as though no scientific principle is being violated.
Re: "So nowhere are they claiming that there is any actual proper motion going on."
There appears to be a brief mention of these structure-induced errors here:
However, you might not be seeing one of the problems presented by the paper I originally pointed to. Figure 2 in that paper shows that there is no real trend in the apparent proper motion versus redshift. Under Big Bang Theory assumptions, there should be a clear trend that with higher redshift, the proper motion should diminish to zero. What is seen instead is that quasars seem to have similar proper motions at both low and high redshift. Even if the dataset is small or contains some errors, the lack of such a trend for the entire dataset is sufficiently anomalous that everybody should be tracking this issue over time. Most astronomers today simply assume that quasars exhibit no apparent motion - and they use this assumption to guide their own observational activities.
Re: "Lemaitre's idea was that all the matter in the observable universe would have started from a singular point. Nobody said anything about creation-from-nothing, although there are some unproven quantum theories that would allow this ... Time and space might not have existed before the moment of Big Bang, and in that case the question about what existed 'before' that moment would be simply invalid. The universe would simply have existed forever."
Okay, which accepted scientific principles permit all of the observable universe's matter to originate from a singular point?
Re: "All these things are far more likely than what you're proposing."
It's easy to propose a rebuttal to something that you've not taken the time to actually look at. The mind is much more free to wander about to all sorts of imagined possibilities. But we should all take care that we have not encased ourselves into ideological bubbles of our own making. The social networks and science journalists are doing the legwork of that for you such that the information bubble itself can become imperceptible.
Re: "Slashdot should do better to not allow posters to insert their crackpot ideas into the submission of what is actually a really interesting article."
All that you've done here is to summarize the textbook theory, the content of the article, and the point I made about the reporting. But to what extent are you actually thinking about the things which you are reading about? What you seem to be suggesting is that Slashdot should never cover any idea which deviates from mainstream scientific thought - even if doing so would actually help people to think at a higher level through a process of engaging multiple competing scientific frameworks.
Re: "There is a crap-ton of evidence placing quasars at cosmological distances. Arp's idea is one of the DISCARDED ideas about what quasars are for really good reasons.
I've already shown why this is not the case here.
Re: "Starting with - why are there no BLUE shifted quasars? If they are ejected from galaxies, we should should see ones coming at us as well as receding from us."
The fact that you made the suggestion points to a process for arguing against Arp which does not actually involve learning his model. Had you learned his model, you would know why this doesn't make any sense. I explain the situation here.
Re: "We have images of gravitationally lensed quasars while necessarily places them FURTHER AWAY than the galaxies acting as lenses. We've even witnessed time delayed changes in the multiple images from those lenses."
It's unlikely that all lensing claims will end up being validated over time as lenses. Arp himself commented that
Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Halton Arp
Arp is arguing that there is an inherent redshift component to the total. Quasars appear to start, at the moment of ejection, at something like z = 2 - 4. So, it would not necessarily be a disproof to not see blue-shifted objects since the doppler effect component to redshift would add to that inherent value to produce the total. There is something about new matter that makes it redshifted at birth (and people should be allowed to disagree, for now, about what that actually is).
Then, over time, the redshift equalizes w the surrounding environment. Apparently, this can in some cases happen very quickly - a fact which Arp does not directly address, but which can be better understood if the objects are not actually at their inferred distances. Even with that distance correction, there may still be more theory required to explain the unexpectedly quick rate at which quasars can apparently "shut off". I provide Wal Thornhill's explanation in order to illustrate that point:
Of particular interest is the press release by the Space Telescope Science Institute - the research arm of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - promoting the claim that NGC 4319 is not connected by a filament to Markarian 205, the object next to it. These press releases appear to be a case of scientific fraud insofar as they point the readers to visible light photographs from the Hubble instead of the far more radio-deep imagery produced on much less expensive, even amateur, CCD telescopes.
Arp commented:
Realize that they could have argued that the radio filament was a background object, a "chance" observation. They didn't. They literally said that the filament is not there. But, the filament clearly shows up on CCD imagery - just not the optical.
The public needs to think more clearly about what has happened here. I was able to even get Ethan Siegal, one of the world's most vocal proponents of the Big Bang, to agree with me that something is not right about this particular situation.
Guys, I am just one person. There is also a maverick philosopher with expertise in aether, electrical cosmology and Relativity named Juan Calsiano. He has sometimes showed up on request to supplement my own comments. He lives in Argentina, and he's working on a philosophy book. We are two different people. Nobody is tricking you.
I once encountered a cosmic filament expert on Twitter. He agreed that the EU idea was actually a scientific hypothesis, but similar to what you've stated above, he said that if it was true that the many plasma filaments we observe are electric currents, then we should see large magnetic fields and even synchrotron emissions associated with them. He presented a detailed conceptual rebuttal - a short two-page explanation. That interaction was a great example of how people should be discussing these issues - in a calm, rational manner where we are comparing the idea against known observations. People pay attention to different things, so these discussions can bring to light important, missed details when everybody seeks to approach the subject in a scientific manner.
That exchange helped me to see that he was assuming a simple transmission line model. Birkeland currents are not bound to this simple transmission line model now that we can see that they can form into more complex coaxial (Bessel function) configurations. The coaxial configuration of the Birkeland current - known more formally as the "force-free field-aligned Birkeland current" - has two remarkable implications:
1. The coaxial configuration will make it difficult to observe the electric current's magnetic field signature. That part should be fairly straightforward to anybody with a modest EE background or even just familiarity with the right-hand rule.
2. Considerably less obvious is that there would also not necessarily be any synchrotron emissions. From Section 8 of Scott's paper:
In technical terms, this means that such charged matter has zero radial acceleration, meaning zero synchrotron emission.
What was interesting about the exchange was that it had very little impact upon the filament experts' approach and mindset. I've since witnessed him purchase a novelty plasma globe, but that's it!
Bill Beaty - Doing Science Outside the Mainstream - Part 1 - YouTube
What was your process for coming to this conclusion? Did you ever take the time to learn the historical debates? For example, are you familiar with Dingle's Paradox? Thinking at the deepest level about these questions means not settling for the first explanation you encounter; you have to keep searching until you find the best, most persuasive challenge to orthodoxy. Dingle's Paradox perfectly illustrates this issue. Most of the explanations do not properly convey the seriousness of the paradox, but this one does:
The best emerging plot line is the living universe concept. This topic elicits really interesting reactions from people. Michael Clarage's presentation offers a good introduction to it if you start at the 5:14 timestamp, but I think there are many more arguments which could be put forward on this.
Follow through on the implications of that strange concept: We can see that there is life which exists inside of our own bodies at multiple scales of existence: we can have parasites, which in turn have bacteria, etc. So, what if we are simply a middle rung of this larger living structure, and the features we are witnessing with telescopes are actually pieces of a larger living creature? If that was true, then what if that creature possesses an immune system?
Imagine that humans are colonizing space and we are getting a bit too casual with our electromagnetic emissions, or that we've sent a probe to some distant place, which then triggers an immune response? I suspect that the immune system would be misinterpreted by people as aliens, but you could somehow slowly reveal the "truth" of the science as the book nears its conclusion.
Re: "Dark matter is absolutely needed to explain the structure of the universe at the largest scales. Supercomputer simulations of the evolution of the visible universe only produce anything that resembles the large scale structure of the universe when using Lambda-CDM (i.e. cold dark matter) models. Those same models also produces the elements in the abundances we see today."
Notice that you completely ignored the fact that the jets we observe connected to AGN's exhibit this peculiar counter-rotation. These are cylinders of moving charge which contain yet more cylinders of charge moving in the opposite direction. How in the world are you going to explain concentric counter-rotating, counter-flowing electric currents with a gravitationally-driven source?
A 2014 Science article adds additional weight to that claim by noticing that the energy of the AGN jets appears to be around 10x the energy which the accretion disc could provide:
So, is there a gravitational "black hole" driving each of these electromagnetic jets, or are the jets forming a network which then along certain points along the transmission line spin up galaxies?
That latter possibility is the question you refuse to ask even though the data is suggesting it.
A list of vindications for Halton Arp:
In most of these cases, cosmologists and science journalists point the public to ad hoc extensions of the Big Bang. Yet, their original model did not predict these observations.
1. Alignment of quasar minor axes (vindication of Arp ejection model)
2. Numerous apparent interactions of objects of wildly different redshifts (not possible with Big Bang, vindication of Arp)
For example, NGC 7603, NGC 4319 and NGC 3628, just to name three. There are many, many more at this point. See the first part of the Universe: Cosmology Quest documentary and Arp's Intrinsic Redshift lecture for a more thorough treatment.
Of particular interest is the press release by the Space Telescope Science Institute - the research arm of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope - promoting the claim that NGC 4319 is not connected by a filament to Markarian 205, the object next to it. These press releases appear to be a case of scientific fraud insofar as they point the readers to visible light photographs from the Hubble instead of the far more radio-deep imagery produced on much less expensive, even amateur, CCD telescopes.
Arp commented:
3. Numerous instances where high-redshift quasars appear aligned with the axes of low-redshift "foreground" galaxies (statistics indicate this occurs far too often for a strict recession velocity interpretation of redshift)
Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, by Halton Arp (1987)
Re: "So for example, when I hear the lay-person's explanation of carbon dating (that the relative abundance of radioactive isotopes in a sample indicates how long ago that carbon was incorporated from the atmosphere when the sample was a living organism), I always ask myself 'doesn't that assume that the relative abundance of those isotopes in the atmosphere is constant - or at least, that scientists have some way of knowing how that ratio has changed over time?'"
Well done, Rob Y. Your suspicions are dead-on. You've stumbled onto another scientific controversy.
I cover the numerous assumptions which must be valid for radiocarbon to be accurate here
I cover the historical cherry-picking of radiocarbon dates in order to support the preferred chronology here. Many of these quotes surprisingly come from lab operators.
I cover an unusual, convenient shift in the dataset that Willard Libby uses to get the Nobel here.
Science journalists don't really cover these subjects, and their omission is noticeable. These appear to be culturally taboo topics, since the only people who tend to question the dating techniques belong to ostracized groups - like the creationists.
Re: "His background or your feelings about it are irrelevant. Unlike you, we scientists deal in facts...What matters is his idea
Which part of the creation-from-nothing idea most persuades you as a scientist?
Re: "Until you provide a model that explains all of the observations equally or better, the leading models will have the consensus."
We can actually see high redshift quasars moving. They exhibit proper motion. How much more reason do you really need in order to ask the question of whether or not there exists an inherent redshift component?
If quasar redshifts are due to velocity, they should be so incredibly distant that proper motion is undetectable.
We know this to be the case due to published remarks by Maarten Schmidt in a 1963 Nature article titled "3C 273: A Star-like Object with Large Red-Shift":
M. Schmidt, “3C 273: A Star-like Object with Large Red-Shift,” Nature 197 (March 16, 1963), p. 1040.
Now, consider the exemplary journalism below within the context of that quote:
I try not to criticize stuff unless I'm really confident and familiar with the idea. So, when I am learning something, I just read and go along with it, and I try to think through its relationship with observations. Are there reasons that this could be true?
It's tempting to think about reasons to disbelieve. I don't recommend focusing on the negatives in the beginning. Your mind is lazier than you imagine. It wants a reason to stop looking because thinking takes effort - and we might not like the answers. Stereotypes and narratives are much easier and safer.
You have to accept that a lot of the ideas you will learn will not be correct. It could be a big ratio - like 10:1 wrong-to-right. But, if you are thorough and systematic, then you will probably run into some suppressed worthwhile innovations. It's more common than you might imagine. And then you have special knowledge which is not widely known which you can use to make predictions about where the field should go.
I think people don't quite get that the effect of learning about those rare correct ideas makes learning the wrong ideas completely worth it. It's a net win once you're not bothered by the realities of the situation. The important part is the tracking - which is how you check to see which ones are performing in the light of new - especially unexpected - observations. That is the only true way to differentiate legitimate groundbreaking science claims from fake pseudoscience; placing faith in somebody else's pre-packaged set of answers is not really the answer. You have to actually think.
Arp is arguing that there is an inherent redshift component to the total. Quasars appear to start, at the moment of ejection, at something like z = 2 - 4. So, it would not necessarily be a disproof to not see blue-shifted objects since the doppler effect component to redshift would add to that inherent value to produce the total. There is something about new matter that makes it redshifted at birth (and people should be allowed to disagree, for now, about what that actually is).
Then, over time, the redshift equalizes w the surrounding environment. Apparently, this can in some cases happen very quickly.
I've run into a number of histories which seem to leave the "wrong" lesson, and so even though they carry with them important lessons, these stories are not widely told. The story of the invention of the rocket is probably the best example. The beginning of that story is like kryptonite for a lot of people, so nobody ever tells it. People should learn that part. It's like we are culturally trying to block it out - like it didn't happen.
It looks like there is a plasma physics aspect to quantization that Arp did not realize. Active galactic nuclei have been compared by some plasma physicists to plasma focus devices. If that is true, the inherent redshift component could represent matter of a lower mass (perhaps it is electron deficient). Then, as the ejection moves away from the active center, it would go through a sequence of regions with different densities. Electrons might rapidly rush in. His suggestion in the theory section of his Intrinsic Redshift video is that the preferred redshift values result from the quasar interacting with these different environments (the galactic "hierarchy").
Or, a person could even reason their way to quantum effects happening at very large scales. Either way, it is important to learn what the plasma focus device is. Once you witness the resultant complexity of this simple plasma device, you should start to witness the risk that astrophysicists take when they completely ignore laboratory plasma observations. A person cannot just reason their way to the behavior of the plasma focus, yet it's not a very complex device:
The Big Bang Never Happened
Eric Lerner