The Farce of Phyics

by Bryan G. Wallace

Chapter 2

Pathological Physics

There is a very interesting article published in the October 1989 issue of Physics Today. [86] The article is titled “Pathological Science” and the abstract reads:

Certain symptoms seen in studies of ‘N rays’ and other elusive phenomena characterize ‘the science of things that aren’t so.’

The introduction to the article starts:

Irving Langmuir spent many productive years pursuing Nobel-caliber research (see the photo on the opposite page). Over the years, he also explored the subject of what he called “pathological science.” Although he never published his investigations in this area, on 18 December 1953 at General Electric’s Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, he gave a colloquium on the subject that will long be remembered by those in his audience. This talk was a colorful account of a particular kind of pitfall into which scientists may stumble.

Langmuir begins his presentation with:

The thing started in this way. On 23 April 1929, Professor Bergen Davis from Columbia University came up and gave a colloquium in this Laboratory, in the old building, and it was very interesting...

Langmuir then gives the details of the Davis and Barnes controversial experiment that produced a beam of alpha rays from polonium in a vacuum tube with a hot cathode electron emitter and a microscope for counting alpha induced scintillations on a zinc sulfide screen. Then Langmuir described the results of a visit he and a colleague, C. W. Hewlett, made to Davis’s laboratory at Columbia University. With regard to the experiment Langmuir states:

And then I played a dirty trick. I wrote out on a card of paper ten different sequences of V and 0. I meant to put on a certain voltage and then take it off again. Later I realized that [trick wouldn’t quite work] because when Hull took off the voltage, he sat back in his chair — there was nothing to regulate at zero so he didn’t. Well, of course, Barnes saw him whenever he sat back in his chair. Although the light wasn’t very bright, he could see whether [Hull] was sitting back in his chair or not, so he knew the voltage wasn’t on, and the result was that he got a corresponding result. So later I whispered, “Don’t let him know that you’re not reading,” and I asked him to change the voltage from 325 down to 320 so he’d have something to regulate. I said, “Regulate it just as carefully as if you were sitting on a peak.” So he played the part from that time on, and from that time on Barnes’s readings had nothing whatever to do with the voltages that were applied. Whether the voltage was at one value or another didn’t make the slightest difference. After that he took 12 readings, of which about half were right and the other half were wrong, which was about what you would expect out of two sets of values.

I said: “You’re through. You’re not measuring anything at all. You never have measured anything at all.”

“Well,” he said, “the tube was gassy. The temperature has changed and therefore the nickel plates must have deformed themselves so that the electrodes are no longer lined up properly.”

“Well,” I said, “isn’t this the tube in which Davis said he got the same results when the filament was turned off completely?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “but we always made blanks to check ourselves, with and without the voltage on.”

He immediately — without giving any thought to it — he immediately had an excuse. He had a reason for not paying any attention to any wrong results. It just was built into him. He just had worked that way all along and always would. There is no question but [that] he is honest: He believed these things, absolutely...

At the end of that section, Langmuir states:

To me, [it’s] extremely interesting that men, perfectly honest, enthusiastic over their work, can so completely fool themselves. Now what was it about that work that made it so easy for them to do that? Well, I began thinking of other things. I had seen R. W. Wood and told him about this phenomenon because he’s a good experimenter and doesn’t make such mistakes himself very often if at all. [Wood was a physicist from Johns Hopkins University.] And he told me about the N rays that he had an experience with back in 1904. So I looked up the data on N rays. [87]

Then Langmuir gave a detailed account of N rays, and how they were discovered in 1903 by a respected French physicist, René-Prosper Blondlot, at the University of Nancy. The N-rays were supposed to be generated by a hot wire inside an iron tube that has an 1/8 inch aluminum window in it, and the rays are detected by a calcium sulfide screen which gave out a very faint glow in a dark room. One of the experiments involved a large prism of aluminum with a 60 degree angle. Wood visited Blondlot’s lab and Langmuir recounts the following trick Wood played on Blondlot:

Well, Wood asked him to repeat some of these measurements, which he was only too glad to do. But in the meantime, the room, being very dark, R. W. Wood put the prism in his pocket and the results checked perfectly with what [Blondlot] had before. Well, Wood rather cruelly published that. [88] And that was the end of Blondlot.

Langmuir next deals with the 1923 mitogenetic ray experiments of Prof. Alexander Gurwitsch at the First State University of Moscow. [89] After the mitogenetic ray section, Langmuir presents the following section, which is the heart of his article:

Symptoms of sick science

The Davis-Barnes experiment and the N rays and the mitogenetic rays all have things in common. These are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published on them. Sometimes they have lasted for 15 or 20 years and then gradually have died away. Now here are the characteristic rules:

In an evaluation of modern physics based on Langmuir’s arguments, we find that many of the dominant theories should be classed as pathological science. For example, starting with his first characteristic rule “The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity.”; we find that Einstein’s special relativity theory which is generally acknowledged as the foundation of the rest of the dominant theories of 20th century physics, is based on the fact that the Michelson-Morley experiment could not detect the motion of the earth through the ether! As I have shown in Chapter 3 “Mathematical Magic”, Einstein believed that the ether sea exists but that it is invisible and can’t be detected by experiments.

As a second example of the spectrum of modern theories that should be classed as pathological, we have the particle physicists that argue that invisible quarks exist inside of the detectable protons and neutrons. [64] Actually, their arguments have expanded over the years to include a whole zoo of invisible particles that come in different colors and flavors, the zoo contains, quarks, gluons, gravitrons, Higgs bosons, etc. All of these particles are detectable only by using very elaborate “Mathematical Magic” to analyze the particles that are detected. On this question, Werner Heisenberg, one of the most prominent physicists of this century, makes the following remarks in his article [90] titled “The nature of elementary particles”:

...Before this time it was assumed that there were two fundamental kinds of particles, electrons and protons, which, unlike most other particles, were immutable. Therefore their number was fixed and they were referred to as “elementary” particles. Matter was seen as being ultimately constructed of electrons and protons. The experiments of Anderson and Blackett provided definite proof that this hypothesis was wrong. Electrons can be created and annihilated; their number is not constant; they are not “elementary” in the original meaning of the word... A proton could be obtained from a neutron and a pion, or a hyperon and a kaon, or from two nucleons and one antinucleon, and so on. Could we therefore simply say a proton consists of continuous matter?... This development convincingly suggests the following analogy: Let us compare the so-called “elementary” particles with the stationary states of an atom or a molecule. We may think of these as various states of one single molecule or as the many different molecules of chemistry. One may therefore speak simply of the “spectrum of matter.”...

My intention, however, is not to deal with philosophy but with physics. Therefore I will now discuss that development of theoretical particle physics that, I believe, begins with the wrong questions. First of all there is the thesis that the observed particles such as the proton, the pion, the hyperon consist of smaller particles: quarks, partons, gluons, charmed particles or whatever else, none of which have been observed. Apparently here the question was asked: “What does a proton consist of?” But the questioners appear to have forgotten the phrase “consist of” has a tolerably clear meaning only if the particle can be divided into pieces with a small amount of energy, much smaller than the rest mass of the particle itself. ...In the same way I am afraid that the quark hypothesis is not really taken seriously today by its proponents. Questions dealing with the statistics of quarks, the forces that keep them together, the reason why the quarks are never seen as free particles, the creation of pairs of quarks inside an elementary particle, are all left more or less undefined. If the quark hypothesis is really to be taken seriously it is necessary to formulate precise mathematical assumptions for the quarks and for the forces that keep them together and to show, at least qualitatively, that all these assumptions reproduce the known features of particle physics...

Therefore this article can be concluded with a more optimistic view of those developments in particle physics that promise success. New experimental results are always valuable, even if they only enlarge the data table; but they are especially interesting if they answer critical questions of the theory. In the theory one should try to make precise assumptions concerning the dynamics of matter, without any philosophical prejudices. The dynamics must be taken seriously, and we should not be content with vaguely defined hypotheses that leave essential points open. Everything outside of the dynamics is just a verbal description of the table of data, and even then the data table probably yields more information than the verbal description can. The particle spectrum can be understood only if the underlying dynamics of matter is known; dynamics is the central problem.

In 1977, in collaboration with Prof. Wilbur Block and Prof. Richard Rhodes II, I submitted a research proposal through Eckerd College to the National Science Foundation. The proposal was for $159,512, of which $99,655 was to go for a high-performance Harris computer. We intended to use computer methods to attack the difficult mathematics of the underlying dynamics of matter as outlined in Heisenberg’s article. The February 1978 rejection letter from Dr. Barry R. Holstein, Program Officer for Theoretical Physics, stated the proposal was declined because their reviewers had an overwhelming feeling that there is no reason to abandon the conventional and remarkably successful theories of electron and quark interactions in favor of our model. The letter supplied the motivation for my campaign to discredit the quark theorists. The campaign involved for the most part, attacking prominent quark theorists at the American Physical Society meetings, and to add insult to injury, I published the following letter [91] in Physics Today:

Heisenberg and QCD

I would like to comment on Gerald E. Brown’s and Mannque Rho’s recent paper “The structure of the nucleon” (February, page 24). At the APS 1982 Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C., Brown gave an invited paper entitled “Structure of the Nucleons.” [92] After he delivered his paper, I challenged Brown to defend his QCD arguments. I stated that Werner Heisenberg had argued [90] that he was afraid that the quark hypothesis was not really taken seriously by its proponents. He pointed out that they do not deal with the mass dynamics of the transformation of mass from energy to the particle spectrum, and that it was irrational to speculate on the division of quarks into subparticles because it would take many times the rest energy of the particles to produce them. I asked him how he would challenge Heisenberg’s arguments. He stated that he could not, and that it would be best to ask this of others since he was a nuclear physicist.

In answer to Brown’s comment, I have asked other QCD theorists and their supporters how they would challenge Heisenberg’s arguments. One prominent particle theorist who presented an invited paper at the same Spring Meeting shouted “No Way!” before I could even finish pronouncing Heisenberg’s name. In general, this question has had the same sort of devastating effect on all the physicists I’ve asked it of. Considering Heisenberg’s status, it’s no wonder that few physicists are willing to challenge his arguments...

In the April 1982 issue of Physics Today, [93] there appeared an article titled “Instant fame and small fortune” which states:

At the San Francisco APS meeting in January, Arthur Schawlow announced the results of a contest he initiated last year (PHYSICS TODAY,March 1981, page 75). In his retiring presidential address he said, “This year, I have sponsored a contest for APS members to propose the best way to publicize their own contributed papers. The contest has been judged by a distinguished panel of graduate students and secretaries, who will remain anonymous for their own safety.

“First prize of ten dollars goes to...

“Second prize of, five dollars, goes to...

“Third prize, a copy of my latest paper, goes to...

“Fourth prize, a copy of my two latest papers, goes to Bryan G. Wallace of Eckerd College, who pointed out that the abstracts are reproduced photographically, and so he had been able to use tricks like italics and extra heavy type to make his abstracts stand out...

Actually, the full text of my entry concerned more than dark italic type, and goes as follows:

Dear Art:

With reference to your open letter that accompanied the 1982 renewal invoice, I would like to enter your “Instant Fame and (small) Fortune contest. We have had a major problem with QCD theorists acting as referees in trying to obtain funding and publication for our mass dynamics research. As an example, one of our NSF proposals was declined because “There was an overwhelming feeling that there is no reason to abandon the conventional and remarkably successful theories of electron and quark interactions in favor of your model which is beset with a number of fatal conceptual difficulties.” In order to compensate for this problem we have adopted a policy of presenting current research results in the form of a contributed paper annually, with abstracts published in the Bulletin making an archival record. Since the APS Spring Meeting is traditionally held at or near Washington D.C. we felt we could get the most bang per buck from it.

I have devised a number of methods of publicizing the contributed papers. To begin with, I use my trusty old Sears typewriter that has large Italic type, use a new ribbon, and set it for maximum impact to type the published abstract. Enclosed you will find a copy of the abstracts published to date. They stand out like a sore thumb from the other abstracts, and are real eye grabbers. The next tactic is to attend the Spring Meeting symposiums where the QCD super stars are giving their invited papers. The idea is to present short, high impact commercials, our brand (Mass Dynamics) versus the other brand (QCD). Where a TV commercial might use a well known movie or television star to help sell their product, I use statements made by Werner Heisenberg, who of course is a physics super duper star. The statements come from Heisenberg’s article “The nature of elementary particles” in the March 1976 issue of “Physics Today.” Heisenberg had some nice things to say about mass dynamics and some very nasty things to say about QCD type theories. His statements have made effective stones for the sling of this modern day David. As two examples of what I consider to be the best shots fired to date:

At the 1979 HA Special Session To Celebrate The Hundredth Anniversary Of Dr. Albert Einstein’s Birth before a packed room of perhaps 1000 physicists, Steven Weinberg presented a talk entitled “Unification of the Forces of Nature.” Peter Bergmann who was presiding the session gave me Weinberg’s throat mike, we were all standing by the overhead projector. I stated that Heisenberg published a paper on the nature of elementary particles a few years ago in Physics Today, and that in the paper he made the contention that Quark theories are little more than a verbal description of the data table and that we will not understand the nature of the particle spectrum until we invent a theory of the dynamics of matter, then I asked him to comment on this. He was flustered and stated that of course this was a legitimate point of view and there are many problems with trying to develop the mass dynamics of quark theories, then he threw up his hands and in an emotional voice shouted that he just believed in them!

At the 1981 JA Symposium “High-Energy Facilities of the Future,” Leon Lederman gave a talk on “Future Facilities at Fermilab.” I was the first to comment and said that Heisenberg has argued that QCD theories are nothing more than a verbal description of the data and that we would not understand the nature of the particle spectrum until we developed theories of the mass dynamics, and here he was basing his arguments for more funding on theories that were mere verbal descriptions of the data. Perhaps the large accelerators are the SSTs of modern physics and we should let the Europeans waste their money on them and we could spend ours on more important things like physicist’s salaries and computers. He answered that of course he would not want to argue with Heisenberg, and that I had a good point and he would like to get with me later and talk about it. After the session, he came over and asked “Why me? Why me? Why didn’t you pick on any of the others?” I said he was the first to use QCD to support his argument for more funding. He stated that he felt that if Heisenberg were still alive, he probably would support QCD, look at the Nobel prize, the large number of theorists that support it. I asked him if he had read Heisenberg’s article, he said no, but now he was going to make a point to read it. At the end of our conversation, I gave him 2 cents and said it was my share of the money he needed and that I had nothing against accelerators, only quarks.

In a 1985 Physics Today article [94] titled “The SSC: A machine for the nineties,” Dr. Sheldon L. Glashow and Dr. Leon M. Lederman present the following argument:

True, the Standard Model does explain a very great deal. Nevertheless it is not yet a proper theory, principally because it does not satisfy the physicists naive faith in elegance and simplicity. It involves some 17 allegedly fundamental particles and the same number of arbitrary and tunable parameters, such as the fine-structure constants, the muon-electron mass ratio and the various mysterious mixing angles (Cabibbo, Weinberg, Kobayashi-Maskawa). Surely the Creator did not twiddle 17 dials on his black box before initiating the Big Bang, and its glorious sequela, mankind. Our present theory is incomplete, insufficient and inelegant, though it may be long remembered as a significant turning point. It remains for history to record whether, on the threshold of a major synthesis, we chose to turn our backs or to thrust onward. The choice is upon us with the still-hypothetical SSC.

In effect, Glashow and Lederman are arguing that after spending billions of dollars on particle accelerators, all we have to show for it is a bunch of worthless mathematics, or what Heisenberg calls using the language of mathematics to produce “a verbal description of the table of data.” They want us to spend many more billions of dollars to build the SSC, a machine that is up to 112 miles in circumference and that can accelerate protons to 40 trillion electron volts of energy. They offer the slim hope that if we explore the short-lived trash at the high end of the particle spectrum at energies far beyond that of the stable particles of the everyday world, we might have some additional insight into a unified theory! The 1985 APS retirement address of the particle physicist Dr. Robert R. Wilson that I quoted in Chapter 4, and the above reply to my NSF proposal tends to indicate that the average particle physicist is opposed to a unified theory along the lines presented by Einstein and Heisenberg, and that funding of the SSC could very likely hamper the development of a realistic unified theory that would bring enormous benefits for mankind. At the 1985 APS Spring Meeting, the Nobel prize winning particle physicist Dr. Carlo Rubbia gave a talk in which he indicated a major problem in separating the data from the artifacts of machine operation. The only way to be certain of the results, was when different accelerators gave consistent data at the same energies. During the comment and question session following his talk, I asked him if the current accelerators had reached the point of diminishing returns, and he answered “Yes.” So we face the prospect of spending many billions of dollars for a machine that will produce uncertain results, of marginal value, a real “white elephant.” The following excerpts from the letter published in the July 1988 issue of Physics Today, [95] by Dr. John F. Waymouth of GTE that is titled “WHAT PRICE FUNDING THE SUPER COLLIDER?” brings to bear some interesting arguments on this question:

I am an R&D director in industry whose own work is almost entirely company funded. I nevertheless believe that government funding of long-range research in the physical sciences is essential to the future health of the US economy.

I am, however, extremely distressed by the direction that recent proposals for such funding are taking — toward hundreds of millions, ultimately billions of dollars for a gigantic particle accelerator to explore physical phenomena in the tera-electron-volt range. At the same time, I see from my perspective as an eventual “customer” of university-based low-energy plasma, atomic, molecular, electron and optical physics research, and as a former member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Physics, that these areas are being severely constrained by inadequate funding. I believe that this allocation of priorities in funding of the physical sciences would be in error, for the reasons outlined in the following...

This line of reasoning leads me to the conclusion that the only satisfactory argument justifying society’s support of physics research over the long term is the fourth one: that physics research in the past has led to a cornucopia of new products, industries and jobs and thereby to the wealth and quality of life that we now enjoy; failure on our part to provide the same kind of support will deprive our children, and our children’s children, of similar benefits in the future...

As I reflect back on what physics research has provided to society in the past, I am struck by the fact that not all physics research is uniformly productive of economic benefits. In my own mind, I have divided physics into three basic areas: electron-volt physics, in which energy exchanges on an atomic, molecular or electronic scale are less than 100 000 volts; MeV-GeV physics, which primarily involves nuclear and subnuclear particles; and high-energy physics, covering GeV to TeV and up, involving the structure of subnuclear matter.

Out of Ev physics have come electricity and magnetism, telegraphy, telephony, the electric light and power industry, stationary and propulsion electric motors, radio, television, lasers, radar and microwave ovens, to name just a few. In short, it is the core science of the modern world.

X rays and the resulting medical physics industry were the high-energy physics of their day, but fall within my definition of Ev physics. Digital computers arose from the computational needs of MeV physics, but the technology for satisfying those needs came entirely out of Ev physics; microminiaturization of those computers for space exploration was accomplished also by Ev physics, resulting in the capability to put computing power undreamed of by John von Neumann in the hands of an elementary school child.

Moreover, Ev physics has been the core science in the training of generations of engineers who have invented, developed and improved products in all of the above areas. It is, in addition, the core science in the extremely exciting development of understanding of the detailed processes involved in chemical reactions, and the ultimate understanding of biological reactions and the life process itself. Every single member of our society has been touched in very substantial ways by the accomplishments of Ev physics, and many of them are fully aware of it.

MeV-GeV physics has given us radioisotope analysis, a substantial portion of medical physics, and nuclear energy (which a significant, vocal minority of our society regards as an unmitigated curse instead of a blessing). High-energy physics has to date given us nothing...

In my opinion, there is another interpretation. Electron-volt physics is the science of things that happen on Earth; MeV-GeV physics is the science of things that happen in the Sun, the stars and the Galaxy; TeV physics has not happened anywhere in the universe since the first few milliseconds of the Big Bang (except possibly inside black holes, which are by definition unknowable).

Consequently, it should come as no surprise that items useful on Earth will come primarily from the branch of physics that deals with what happens here on Earth, with lesser contributions from the science of what happens in the nearby Sun and the intervening space. I firmly believe that this situation is quite fundamental, and that despite the best efforts of many dedicated TeV physicists, the probability that economic benefit to society in the future will result from their activities is very remote: in the phraseology of the research director justifying his budget, “a high-risk, longshot gamble.”

Waymouth’s above article presented the currently popular argument for the justification of funding the SSC, that it will shed light on the phenomena that happened in the first few milliseconds of the Big Bang creation of the entire universe. In examination of this argument we should consider the fact that there is ample evidence that Big Bang creation theories are pathological science at its very worst. Some interesting insight into the development of the Big Bang type of theories is contained in the following excerpts from a recent Physics Today article [96] titled “EDWIN P. HUBBLE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF COSMOLOGY”:

...It is now usual to trace the idea of an expanding universe, at least in the mathematical sense, to two papers [97] published by the Russian mathematician and meteorologist Alexander Friedmann in 1922 and 1924. Friedmann’s starting point was the field equations of general relativity that Einstein had developed in 1917,... Rather, the first person to join theory and observation in a way that would come to be widely seen as physically meaningful within the general framework of the expanding universe was, as Helge Kragh has argued convincingly, [98] a 33-year-old Belgian abbé and professor at the University of Louvain, Georges Lemaître.

In 1927 Lemaître published what would later be recognized as the seminal paper on the expanding universe. [99] But for a brief time, Lemaître’s work drew no interest. Even Einstein told Lemaître, at the fifth Solvay conference in 1927, that he did not accept the notion of the expanding universe or the physics underpinning the paper...

Hubble was always careful in print to avoid definitely interpreting the redshifts as Doppler shifts. But the writings of Eddington and others soon meshed the calculations of Lemaître and various theorists with Hubble’s observational research on the redshift-distance relation. The notion of the expanding universe was swiftly accepted by many, and the linear relationship between redshift and distance was later widely accepted as Hubble’s law.

...But Eddington explicitly rejected the notion of a creation of the universe, as seemed to be implied by a universe with more mass than the Einstein universe, because “it seems to require a sudden and peculiar beginning of things.”...

During the early 1930s several people, including a sometime collaborator of Hubble’s, the Caltech mathematical physicist Richard C. Tolman, examined possible physical mechanisms to explain the expansion. Of course an alternative explanation of the expansion was that it really did start with the beginning of the entire universe, and it was Lemaître who introduced this concept into the cosmological practice of the 1930s. In 1931 he suggested the first detailed example of what later became known as Big Bang cosmology. But unlike the universe of modern Big Bang theories, Lemaître’s universe did not evolve from a true singularity but from a material pre-universe, what Lemaître referred to as the “primeval atom”. [98]

Additional insight into Hubble’s views of this matter comes from the following material taken from a 1986 article [100] by Dr. Barry Parker of the Idaho State University, titled “Discovery of the Expanding Universe”:

It was evident by now, however, that Hubble’s attitude had changed. He no longer referred to his graph as a velocity-distance relation, though still confident that his distance scale was reasonably accurate. The interpretation of redshifts as velocities bothered him, and he now referred to “apparent velocity displacements.” This wording implied there were other possibilities, and indeed there were...

Lemaitre’s theory also predicted an expanding universe, so in itself it probably did not bother Hubble. However, a paper published the same year by his Mount Wilson colleague Fritz Zwicky apparently did. Zwicky was convinced that the redshift did not necessarily indicate motion; he was sure that the extremely large speeds recently obtained by Humason were impossible.

As an alternative, Zwicky introduced the idea that the redshifts were due to an interaction between light and matter in space. The light gradually lost energy, which shifted it, and the spectral lines, to redder wavelengths. The farther away an object, the more its light would “tire” during the trip to Earth... He was now very close to the limit of the 100-inch telescope, but there was a new one on the horizon, the 200-inch. He was confident that this instrument would enable astronomers to resolve, once and for all, most of the major cosmological problems...

With regard to Hubble’s expectation that the 200-inch would resolve the problem, the following information taken from a recent article [101] published in THE ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL by Dr. Paul A. LaViolette, and titled “IS THE UNIVERSE REALLY EXPANDING”, shows that the current evidence supports the Zwicky tired-light model. The abstract of the article reads:

The no-evolution, tired-light model and the no-evolution, q(o) = 0, expanding universe cosmology are compared against observational data on four kinds of cosmological tests. On all four tests the tired-light model is found to make the better fit to the data without requiring the ad hoc introduction of assumptions about rapid galaxy evolution. The data may be interpreted in the simplest fashion if space is assumed to be Euclidean, galaxies cosmologically static, evolutionary effects relatively insignificant, and photon energy nonconserved, with photons losing about 5%-7% of their energy for every 109 light years of distance traveled through intergalactic space. The observation that redshifts are quantized may be accommodated by a version of the tired-light model in which photon energy decreases occur incrementally in a stepwise fashion.

The introduction of the article starts with:

The notion that the cosmological redshift is a non-Doppler phenomenon in which photons continuously undergo an energy depletion or “aging” effect is not new. This idea was first suggested by Zwicky (1929). Later, Hubble and Tolman (1935) discussed this alternative, postulating that photon energy was depleted in a linear fashion with increasing photon travel distance. Hubble (1936) claimed that his galaxy number count results strongly supported the linear energy depletion hypothesis...

On the 2nd page of the article LaViolette writes:

The performance of the tired-light and expanding universe comologies are evaluated on four cosmological tests: the angular size-redshift test, the Hubble diagram test, the galaxy number-count-magnitude test, and the number-count-flux density test (log dN/dS-log S test). It is determined that on all four tests the tired-light model exhibits superior performance. That is, it makes the best fit to the data with the fewest number of assumptions. Finally, the redshift quantization phenomenon is briefly discussed. Although not a cosmological test per se, this phenomenon is something that any candidate cosmology must somehow address. It is shown that redshift quantization is quite compatible with the tired-light model. On the other hand, when the expanding universe hypothesis is adhered to, ad hoc assumptions must be introduced about the possible existence of macroscopic dynamical quantization in the universe’s expanding motion.

In the CONCLUSION LaViolette states:

...It is concluded that the tired-light model makes a better fit on all four data sets. The expanding universe hypothesis may be considered plausible only if it is modified to include specific assumptions regarding the evolution of galaxy cluster size, galaxy radio lobe size, galaxy luminosity, and galaxy number density. In addition, if the redshift quantization effect is also to be accounted for, special assumptions must be introduced regarding the operation of dynamical quantization on a cosmological scale. But the required assumptions are numerous. Consequently, the tired-light model is preferred on the basis of simplicity. Presently available observational data, therefore, appear to favor a cosmology in which the universe is conceived of as being stationary, Euclidean, and slowly evolving, and which photons lose a small fraction of their total energy for every distance increment they cover on their journey through space.

In a recent review [102] of a book [103] titled “QUASARS, REDSHIFTS, AND CONTROVERSIES” published by Dr. Halton Arp, the world-renowned astrophysicist Dr. Geoffrey Burbidge, writes:

Chip Arp started with impeccable credentials. Educated at Harvard and Caltech, after a short spell at Indiana he was appointed to a staff position at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, where he remained for 29 years. A little more than 20 years ago Arp began to devote all his time to extragalactic astronomy. At first he compiled the marvelous Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Then he started to find what he believed were physical associations between some of these galaxies and previously identified powerful radio sources. Soon he found many cases of apparent associations between galaxies and quasi-stellar objects, or quasars.

All of this would have been completely acceptable if the associated objects had the same redshifts, but they did not. Yet Arp believed in the reality of the associations, and, after struggles with referees, his papers were published. Others were finding similar results, and soon the terms “nonvelocity redshifts” (those not associated with the expansion of the universe) and “local” (as distinct from distant, or “cosmological”) quasars entered the literature. Arp’s ranking in the “Association of Astronomy Professionals” plunged from within the first 20 to below 200. As he continued to claim that not all galaxy redshifts were due to the expansion of the universe, his ranking dropped further.

About four years ago came the final blow: his whole field of research was deemed unacceptable by the telescope-allocation committee in Pasadena. Both directors (of Mount Wilson and Las Campanas, and Palomar, observatories) endorsed the censure. Since Arp refused to work in a more conventional field, he was given no more telescope time. After abortive appeals all the way up to the trustees of the Carnegie Institution, he took early retirement and moved to West Germany. Earlier, Fritz Zwicky had also been frequently criticized by his colleagues in Pasadena (by coincidence?). Zwicky remained a staff member at Mount Wilson and Palomar until he retired, but much of his work continued to be ignored or derided until some years after his death.

Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies contains Arp’s account of his own work and that of others leading, in his mind, to the conclusion that redshifts are not always correlated with distances. It also contains his personal view of the way he has been treated. When he is critical of others, he omits their names. Zwicky was more blunt in his Morphological Astronomy...

The other part of this learning process has been unpleasant, probably because I have a strong instinct for fair play. It may be argued that this is no substitute for good judgement. But neither are the tactics that have been used by those who want to maintain the status quo. These include interminable refereeing, blackballing of speakers at meetings, distortion and misquotation of the written word, rewriting of history, and worst of all, the denial of telescope time to those who are investigating what some believe are the wrong things. Thus, for both scientific and sociological reasons, I am sympathetic to Arp...

In my view the best evidence for the existence of noncosmological redshifts is the following: the three quasars within 2 arc minutes of the center of NGC 1073, each have a redshift at a peak in the distribution found earlier; the low-redshift quasar Markarian 205 joined to NGC 4319; the pair of galaxies NGC 7603 and its companion, which are connected by a luminous bridge but have very different redshifts; and the statistical evidence relating many quasars to bright — not faint — galaxies...

One of the most fascinating chapters describes the idea that the alignments of objects with different redshifts are not accidental, but real, implying that galaxies can eject objects, up to and including other galaxies...

Dr. I. E. Segal of M.I.T. has published an article [104] that examines the claim that the cosmic background radiation is evidence in support of the Big Bang theories. In the last sentence of the article, he states:

...Unless it can be shown that a temporally homogeneous universe is not physically sustainable, and this has not been possible even in the specific, nonparametric case of the chronometric cosmology, a claim for the big bang theory that it is the natural or logical explanation for the CBR and its apparently Planck law spectrum would appear untenable.

With regard to the current evidence on the radiation, a recent article [134] titled “Background radiation deepens the confusion for big bang theorists” states:

THE LATEST results from NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite are continuing to mystify astronomers. They show that the matter of the early Universe was spread so smoothly that it is difficult to understand how galaxies and clusters of galaxies could have formed (New Scientist,Science, 19 December).

Astronomers presented the results last week at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington DC. Although the results confirm those released earlier, they are from observations of the whole sky rather than from just a small portion (This Week,20 January).

COBE was launched earlier this year to observe the cosmic background radiation, the remnant radiation of the big bang in which the Universe was born 15 billion years ago. The radiation was created a mere 300 000 years after the big bang. By determining how smoothly that radiation is distributed across the sky we can learn how smoothly matter was distributed at that epoch.

“These measurements are more and more puzzling,” says Michael Hauser of the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. The COBE data show that 300 000 years after the big bang, the matter of the Universe had a density uniform to one part in 10,000.

Many of the scientists at the meeting expressed concern that many accepted theories of galaxy formation will have to go if the data build up and continue to show there is no variation in the background radiation. Galaxies could only have condensed from the stuff of the big bang if it was lumpy.

“We will be surprised if we don’t start seeing wiggles at the level of one part in 100 000 of accuracy,” said David Wilkinson of Princeton University. “If COBE gets to [one part in a million] and still sees things smooth big bang theories will be in a lot of trouble.”

According to George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley, the data from COBE are really more accurate than one part in 10,000, but the scientists are not revealing these data until they have a chance to correct for any systematic errors. They hinted, however, that they have found nothing even at this level of detail.

There was a 1/3/91 article in my local St. Petersburg Times newspaper that was reprinted from The New York Times. The title of the article was Big Bang theory turning out to be big bust and the abstract states:

Satellite research casts doubt on a key part of the widely held theory of how the universe was formed.

Two paragraphs in the middle of the article state:

In a report published today in the journal Nature, they said the theory in its present form must be abandoned.

The journal noted that the report by Dr. Will Saunders of Oxford University and colleagues “is all the more remarkable for coming from a group of authors that includes some of the theory’s long time supporters.”

The Big Bang theories fit all of Langmuir’s rules for pathological science, but in particular, they fit his 4th one of “Fantastic theories contrary to experience.” For example, the following is the sort of fantastic arguments one finds in most modern text books on this matter:

...These new theories are call Grand Unified Theories or GUTs.

Studies of GUTs suggest that the universe expanded and cooled until about 10^-35 seconds after the big bang, at which time it became so cool that the forces of nature began to separate from each other. This released tremendous amounts of energy, which suddenly inflated the universe by a factor between 10^20 and 10^30. At that time the part of the universe that we can see now, the entire observable universe, was no larger than the volume of an atom, but it suddenly inflated to the volume of a cherry pit and then continued its slower expansion to its present extent... [8 p.325]

As another example of the fantastic type of arguments one finds in scientific journals, the following was taken from a article [105] titled “The Inflationary Universe” that was published in the prestigious journal Scientific American:

From a historical point of view probably the most revolutionary aspect of the inflationary model is the notion that all matter and energy in the observable universe may have emerged from almost nothing. This claim stands in marked contrast to centuries of scientific tradition in which it was believed that something cannot come from nothing.