from DragonScience Website

Halton Arp is to the 21^st century what Galileo was to the 17^th. Both were respected scientists, popular leaders in their field. Both made observations which contradicted the accepted theories. Seventeenth century academics felt threatened by Galileo’s observations and so, backed by ecclesiastical authority, they ordered him to stop looking. Twentieth century astronomers felt threatened by Arp’s observations and so, backed by institutional authority, they ordered him to stop looking.

Both refused. Both published works geared to the non-specialist when specialists would no longer take note. Galileo’s paper, "A Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World", favored a heliocentric model of the solar system and undermined the accepted geocentric model. Arp’s books, "Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies" and "Seeing Red" favor a
steady-state model of the universe and undermine the accepted big bang model.

The Church responded by placing Galileo under house arrest: his peers would not even look through his telescope and journals refused to publish his results. The modern astronomical community responded similarly to Arp. Observatory officials cancelled his telescope time and astronomical journals refused to publish his research.
 

How did these men create such a furor?
 

Galileo introduced a simple new concept that changed the universe as it was known then. Arp introduces a simple new concept that will change the universe as we know it now.
 

Seventeenth Century educators taught that the Earth was the center of the universe. The Sun, the moon, the planets and the stars revolved around it. Galileo confronted his contemporaries with a universe centered around the sun. If you had lived in Galileo’s time, would you have been willing to examine his work?

Today’s educators teach that the universe started from a big bang 15 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. Galaxies and quasars are scattered according to their redshift. Arp confronts us with a universe of ejected galactic families. You live in Arp’s time: are you willing to examine his work?


STATE OF THE UNIVERSE 2002

THE BIG BANG is dead.

It’s a theory based on a theory based on an assumption made nearly 75 years ago, that THE ONLY CAUSE OF REDSHIFT IS RECESSIONAL VELOCITY. And that assumption was wrong. Observations in 1911 of intrinsic redshift in young stars crippled the recessional redshift of galaxies before it was imagined. Halton Arp’s identification of physical connections between high-redshift quasars and low-redshift active galaxies in the late 60’s dealt the mortal blow. The discovery of quantization of redshifts signed the death certificate.

Still the Big Bang rises, vampire-like, to haunt the night, sapping the vitality and the integrity of astronomy. Photos are cropped between active galaxies and their ejected quasars. Dark matter spawns dark energy.

Unquestioned superstitions and ritual mathematics adorn a conceptual graveyard into which are interred billions of dollars of public funds.

An intrinsic interpretation of the redshift will imply a much different universe. For example, in the middle of the constellation of Virgo, the brightest galaxies, the brightest quasars and brightest clusters of galaxies are connected by the strongest radio and x-ray fields in the sky. The expanding universe assumption - that redshift equals velocity equals distance - separates these objects by billions of light-years, and assumes their side-by-side position is coincidental. But it’s not coincidence. These objects belong together. They make up an evolving galactic family whose genealogy can be traced through four generations.

We’ll never "see" this universe as long as we remain captive in the coffin of the Big Bang viewpoint. The assumption that redshift can only be caused by recessional velocity predetermines a distorted understanding of the shape, age, size, and physical characteristics of most of the extragalactic universe. A different - intrinsic - interpretation of the redshift will imply a much different universe. Even the meaning of the terms we use to describe that universe will have to change.

Take, for example, the term, "galactic cluster." That term is currently defined by the yardstick of Big Bang expansion: at least 30 galaxies (in addition to the brightest two) within a range of 2 magnitudes and approximately the same redshift. According to this definition, there are 4,073 clusters (listed in the revised northern and southern Abell Catalogue.)

Now let’s look at a galactic cluster in the non-Big Bang universe. Let’s assume (as Halton Arp’s observations seem to suggest) that a galactic cluster is a family of galaxies and quasars and gaseous clouds of varying redshifts. At the center, we find a dominant galaxy - it’s usually the largest galaxy, and the galaxy with the lowest redshift of the cluster. This dominant galaxy is surrounded by low-to-medium redshift galaxies, and toward the edges of the cluster we find the highest redshift galaxies, HII regions, BL Lac objects and quasars.

If we try to force this configuration into a redshift-equals-velocity-equals-distance relationship, as Big Bang cosmologists do, the cluster will be distorted. What was once a sphere becomes an elongated bubble. The central dominant galaxy drops to the front of the bubble, followed by a spike of low-to-medium redshift galaxies stretching away from the earth (see illustrations: "Seeing Red..", pp. 69 and 71). Every cluster in the sky does this, like starfish arms pointed away from the earth in every direction. Because we used redshift distance as the criteria for determining which galaxies belong in the cluster, we then draw an arbitrary line where the redshift gets higher than a predetermined level and, voila, everything beyond that line becomes BO: background objects. The Big Bang vampire has amputated the majority of galaxies from our original cluster.

Now compare this to an actual plot of Virgo Cluster members set at their assumed velocity-redshift distance. You can see the spike (in fact, there are two of them, associated with two generations of the galactic family), long, narrow fingers pointing directly at the earth.

You can see the front end of the bubble spreading out. What you don’t see in this Virgo Cluster plot, because of the arbitrary assumption that higher redshift objects are too far away to belong to the cluster, are the sides and the back of the bubble, where young groups of galaxies are artificially clumped into background clusters on the basis of their redshifts. The highest-redshift objects, the quasars, are also stretched out of this picture. Yet, when observed through our earth-based telescopes, they are "coincidentally" embedded in nearby hydrogen clouds, at the exact centers of x-ray fields and lined up in pairs across the spin axes of active foreground galaxies.

Copernicus knew the Earth wasn’t the center of anything. But this diagram, based on Big Bang assumptions, says the Earth is the center of the universe! The AAO newsletter of August 1996 shows this diagram for all galaxies, not only the Virgo cluster. They remark on the "Finger of God" nature of the plot. But the obvious question - doesn’t this mean that the Earth is the center of the Universe? - eludes them.

The Big Bang universe will be restructured by intrinsic redshift into an entirely different form. Instead of a finite 12 billion light-year radius sphere centered on the earth, the limits of the intrinsic redshift universe are undefined, possibly infinite. But the extent of what we have observed is smaller, probably organized into two superclusters a few hundred megaparsecs across. Beyond that lie unknown amounts of extragalactica incognito.

In this new paradigm, the collapsing concepts of the Big Bang fall into entirely different places. Here’s a sample glossary from the Intrinsic Redshift Universe:

1. When speaking of extragalactic objects, the term “high redshift” means “young”. It does not imply “far away”, “high velocity” or “expanding universe.” 

2. Background objects probably aren’t.

3. Our local cluster of galaxies has more members than presently believed. Before Arp, only objects with redshifts below 300 km/sec were admitted to the local cluster. From Arp’s observations, higher- redshift dwarf galaxies and galaxies interacting with local-group nebulosity are also part of the local group. Even quasar-like 3C 120, with its superluminal (faster-than-light) ejections, becomes a local group member. Corollary of 3) The superluminal expansion of 3C 120 no longer needs an ad hoc explanation. If it is a member of the local cluster, then it is nearby, not at the edge of the universe, and its ejections become normal sub-lightspeed ejections.

4. The oft-invoked concept “colliding galaxies” (or “merging galaxies”) is a fake. It’s especially misleading when called upon to explain a priori assumptions, for example “quasar activity is induced in host galaxies by galactic collisions.” In most cases, it is accurate to replace the randomly occurring “colliding galaxy” with the evolutionary process “ejecting galaxy.”

5. The concept of black holes, mass so tightly packed that everything falls in, is a poor explanation for an active galactic nucleus, where observations show that everything appears to be falling out.

6. Cannibalistic black holes ambushing passing galaxies are Big Bang fantasies. When we see galaxies tangled together in a high-energy mass, we’re witnessing the birth of a new generation of quasars, galactic groups and companion galaxies.

7. The unobservable and undetectable “missing mass” that Big Bang theory claims makes up 99% of the universe isn’t “missing”. It simply isn’t there.

8. The age of the universe can no longer be counted by retrocalculating an expanding universe back to a singularity.

9. Distances, masses and luminosities of high-redshift quasars, galaxies and clusters need to be recomputed as a function of something other than their redshift. Corollaries of 9) Quasars are not the “brightest objects in the universe” - their magnitude is brighter than stars, but not as bright as most galaxies. Gamma Ray Bursters don’t “release more energy than the Big Bang”. When placed at their proper close-by distance, their energy output becomes more reasonable.

10. So-called “gravitational lensing” of background quasars and galaxies becomes ejection phenomena. This is especially true in the most notorious case of gravitational lensing, the “Einstein cross”: Supposedly, four images of the same quasar wrap around the nucleus of a low-redshift galaxy. However, a bridge of high redshift hydrogen connects two of the “quasar images” and crosses in front of a lobe of the low-redshift galaxy. This proves conclusively that these images are not the same quasar, nor are they background objects.
     

THE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE -- 2001

The universe as we understand it is badly in need of repair and re-evaluation. Observations do not support the theoretical constructs and mathematical ad hoccery of expanding universe/Big Bang cosmology. The time has come to take off our doppler-colored glasses and reexamine the pin-points of light beyond the Milky Way.