Back in year 2000, Halton Arp held this lecture on his career as an astronomer, and his findings related to the redshift of Quasars. Of the many things he discovered and recorded back in the 1970s, two things stand out. One was the fact that some Quasars are visibly in front of objects that should be closer to us based on redshift calculations. The other thing he noted was that redshifts aren't uniformly distributed. Some redshifts are more common than others. I.e. redshifts are quantized phenomena.
These findings flew in the face of accepted theory at the time, which held that redshift is uniformly distributed and directly linked to speeds. These assumptions formed in turn the basis for the Big Bang theory, as well as many assumptions related to Black Holes. If Halton Arp's observations were to be accepted as facts, all of this would have to be reconsidered.
This was too much for many theorists to accept, so they made Halton Arp a persona non grata. Instead of considering the evidence collected by Mr. Arp, they ignored it. But the cat was out of the bag and evidence in support of Halton Arp's findings are piling up.
I was reminded of this by one of my readers (cilo) who made a comment about this on my previous post. According to him, the James Webb Space Telescope has collected more data in support of Halton Arp's findings. It appears that the phenomenon of redshift quantization is becoming increasingly difficult to deny.
This means that there's something profound about the universe that current theory isn't able to explain. If we stick to the idea that redshift is purely speed related, we get that some speeds are more common than other speeds. In the context of an expanding universe, we get some distances less likely to contain objects than other distances. The universe around us becomes layered, and this is not what current theory stipulates.
Alternatively, we'll have to accept that not all redshifts are speed related, in which case we have to consider alternative hypothesises of which there are two: One is the tired light hypothesis that suggests that light becomes redder over time due to loss of energy. The other hypothesis, suggested by Halton Arp, is that matter grows more massive over time. Halton Arp called this intrinsic redshift because it says something about the age of the objects observed rather than their distance. I.e. redshifts are intrinsic to objects without regards to distances or speeds.
It should be noted that we don't have to choose one redshift or another. They may all exist together in which case we get a complex mix of factors rather than the clean sterility of conventional astrophysics where only a few variables play a role.
Having established that speed related redshifts can only be quantized if speed itself is quantized, or if matter in an expanding universe is distributed in layers around us, we can go on to consider the tired light hypothesis.
For light to tire without scatter, we require some highly fluid low energy substance to fill the universe, and since no such substance is currently considered to exist in conventional theory, tired light has been dismissed as an impossibility. But if we allow for an aether of zero-point particles we get that light may fade in energy without being scattered. We also get that the light will fade in discrete steps due to the particle nature of the aether. However, these steps are likely to be too small to be the cause of redshift quantization.
The tired light hypothesis is also unable to explain Halton Arp's observation that redshift seems to be independent of distance. Only Halton Arp's intrinsic redshift can explain this part of the puzzle. Objects become redder over time due to mass condensing onto them. But why would mass condensation happen in discrete steps sufficiently large to be noticed by astronomers?
I've proposed in my physics that mass condensation is due to a hypothesized ability of protons to absorb photons. If this is a straight forward process, a proton will grow in mass by a photon every now and again. However, this would show up as a fairly uniform process with many tiny steps. It wouldn't be the relatively large steps that have been observed, so it appears that mass condensation must be something more complex. It may be that photons build up on the surface of protons without making them noticeable larger before some threshold is reached where the photons rearrange themselves into the fabric of the protons. But here, I'm only speculating.
There's plenty of room for speculation at this point, and I'm not going to pretend I have an answer to what may be going on. However, one thing is becoming increasingly clear. Redshift isn't as straight forward a subject as many have made it out to be. Observations don't fit theory, and this gap between observations and theory has been around for some fifty years.
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| Halton Arp |
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