Was Halton Arp hard done by? Need some clarification. some pictures

[Chronos]

The big picture, as noted by Chalnoth and two-fish, is not that complicated, trickydick. Unless you are fact challenged, and a crackpot advocate, you would already realize that. Read some credible papers on cosmology.

 

[Chronos]

Indeed! But the poor man is not yet rendered into dead meat. Will a final stake be thrust through his heart? Or will he linger like some tormented ghost in the haunted castle of astronomy?

Wouldn't the humane and merciful thing to do be to lock the thread and put "Arp" on the taboo list? Or is it plain just too much fun to klck the man in the teeth?

Arp has cried foul for decades - deprived of scope time nor taken seriously - he has responded by appealing to popular opinion to blast 'mainstream' scientists as high priests of the new order - oblivious and hard wired to dogmatic views. Brilliant.

 

[TrickyDicky]

It's a matter of getting the facts right. I assert that cosmologists believe X and not Y, and I can give you the names of the specific cosmologists that I've known that believe X and not Y. Since I've mentioned that I've been at MIT and UTexas Austin, you can look at their web pages for the people I've run into.

You say that cosmologists believe Y. I don't think it would be too much to ask to ask you to name one cosmologist that you think believes Y. Once I have a name, then we can continue the discussion. Also, there are a lot of scientists in this forum, and if anyone of them says twofish, you are wrong, and some cosmologists do believe Y, we can also continue the discussion.

Well, I wouldn't make this debate a question of who knows more about what cosmologists think, probably you know more about that.
I just gave my opinion about why Arp was or wasn't mistreated and what degree of responsability he had on that.
And I innocently derived a logic pattern from a sentence you wrote, not exactly from what I believe cosmologists think. You assure me that is not a pattern followed by the majority of cosmologists, ok, that is your informed opinion, and it might be so. OTOH it might be an unconsciously followed pattern. But this is more sociology or psychology and therefore likely to be outside the scope of a physics forum.
The OP, in the way the initial question was formulated ("was Halton har done by?"" had a sociological side anyway.
In the more physical side I agreed from the beginning that the "bridge" appearance of most of the famous Arp photos could be explained by optical perspective effects and unless one has a very powerful model that accommodates the "bridge" explanation one should stick to the cosmological redshift measured for the quasars.

The problem that you have is that in the areas we are talking about, the physics is well known.

It wouldn't hurt to leave open the possibility that maybe something of the physics we think is so well known is not so well known. It's just a suggestion.

 

[Chronos]

That suggestion has not been taken seriously for decades. Are we talking about abandoning GR or brushing aside observational evidence from the last ten years? That is not progress, IMO. Current modeling is very good and came at the price of very expensive telescope time. That is why people like Arp are denied scope time - it is too precious to waste on fairies. Had Arp merely claimed to be doing galactic surveys, or some similarly productive research, he might still have scope priveleges. But, no, he insisted on chasing fairies. He is not the only cosmologist with 'out there' ideas, just one of the stubborn few who can't seem to blend them in with legitimate research proposals.

 

[twofish-quant]

But this is more sociology or psychology and therefore likely to be outside the scope of a physics forum.

Sociology and psychology is really important in science. One thing that people really *do* worry about in grant proposal review is the question of whether or not the review process does discourage people from being bold.

Also, I think that in physics education, sociology and psychology is really important. It's likely that most of the facts that I learned when I did my Ph.D. could be wrong, but the point of graduate education is to teach a culture.

The OP, in the way the initial question was formulated ("was Halton har done by?"" had a sociological side anyway.

Sure.

In the more physical side I agreed from the beginning that the "bridge" appearance of most of the famous Arp photos could be explained by optical perspective effects and unless one has a very powerful model that accommodates the "bridge" explanation one should stick to the cosmological redshift measured for the quasars.

And I strongly disagreed with you. It's not a model, but rather coming up with other observations that suggest that quasars really are far away. If you just have those pictures, then quasars *could* be close by. That's where we were in 1965. It's not where we are now. Something that wouldn't be terribly difficult to do with those pictures is to look at the spectrum for a Lyman-alpha forest.

Also one thing that I very much try to do with theories is to avoid the term "believe". I state the theories and state the evidence that supports them. If the evidence changes then things change.

It wouldn't hurt to leave open the possibility that maybe something of the physics we think is so well known is not so well known. It's just a suggestion.

"The physics is well known" means "we've already considered the possibility that we are wrong, we've looked at the evidence, and it doesn't seem likely so let's try something else." If you are going to look for bigfoot, it is more likely that you'll find him in some remote region no one has seen before, rather than in Time Square.

Lets for example, consider the possibility that hydrogen-helium gas causes some redshift. OK. We take hydrogen-helium, shine a laser, no redshift, and we get the same result now the millions of times we've done the experiment before. A lot of cosmology is like that.

Also, if you are getting your science from textbooks, you are getting a seriously distorted version of how science works. The textbooks just tell you about what works, they don't spend that much time going through all of the things that didn't work and why they didn't work.

 

[twofish-quant]

That suggestion has not been taken seriously for decades. Are we talking about abandoning GR or brushing aside observational evidence from the last ten years?

More like the last forty years.

Also there is an entire industry with papers that argue that GR is wrong, but most of them start with the fact that GR seems to work for a lot of things, so the way those papers work is to come up with a theory that looks like GR in places that we've done experiments and are different (sometimes wildly different) in places that aren't.

One other curious thing is that changing gravity theories makes less difference in cosmological models than you may first think.

Had Arp merely claimed to be doing galactic surveys, or some similarly productive research, he might still have scope privileges.

Part of the issue is that you want to have something useful *even if you are wrong*. People will be more tolerant of your looking for fairies, if you can convince them that you'll get something useful done even if you don't find them.