It is claimed that there are no rival theories. That is not true, but they are not seriously investigated except by a small minority. Ideas that explain the redshift as not being expansion but being actually a change in mass of particles over time have been put forward by Narlikar, Hoyle, Arp, Burbidge and others. I arrived at the idea of mass change in particles independantly and via a very different route than these other gentleman. That is always a good sign. These ideas have the possibility to explain many observations that have been swept under the carpet until now. Such as Tifft's and others observations of periodicities in redshifts. Although the word "quantised" is often used regarding redshift, it is a wrong choice of word. There are many different periods and so no compulsion to be quantised, just a tendency.
Those that believe in the big bang say that no other theory accounts for the observations such as CMBR and the redshift. Actually, the CMBR is expected on the grounds of thermalisation of starlight. The whole meaning of a black body is that matter at some temperature gives off a characteristic spectrum. If you compute the average temperature of Hydrogen gas between the galaxies from the radiation of star light falling on it then the correct answer is as close as we can tell to 2.7 K. Such gas will bring all radiation gradually to that black body temperature. No big bang is required to do that. Furthermore, the temperature of space was deduced as 3 K before the big bang was invented, and the original big bang predictions was 50 K, so we can see that other alternatives are actually to be preferred.
However all these things are not necessary to prove. All that needs to be proved to show that the big bang is bung, is to show that:
some quasars or galaxies are not at the cosmological distance implied by their redshift
Ever since quasars or QSOs were discovered, there has been doubt about their distance. Their redshifts were so large that if they were at that distance then they must be exceedingly powerfull sources of energy. And they were so small at the same time. And they seemed to have moving parts that indicated that they must be a lot closer than that. Ways were found to ignore all the objections and keep on believing that they were extremely far away. Is this justified, or is there some evidence that conclusively proves that they are not that far away?
In his 1978 article in the Astrophysical Jouirnal 223:747-757, "The Nature of QSO Redshifts", Alan Stockton demonstrated that some quasars are at the same distance as galaxies with the same redshift. This is a very important result and the method will be described below. He then argued, not very convincingly, that there was no reason to believe in two types of quasars and so all quasars were at cosmological distances.
The method is based on expected statistics concerning objects that share a common line of sight. If two objects are close in the sky, we have no definite way of knowing whether they are near to each other or just in the same direction. If they have the same redshift as well as the same direction, then by far the most reasonable conclusion is that they are at very near the same distance. But for different redshifts it is an act of faith that redshift measures distance accurately.
For galaxies, we know that redshift does measure distance reasonably accurately most of the time, and so it is a good working basis. We know this because for galaxies we have other ways of measuring their distance, and many different ways give similar results. It is not my intention to survey these methods. However, although galaxy redshift is closely related to brightness of galaxies the same is not true for quasars. The graph of brightness versus redshift for quasars has many times as much scatter as it does for galaxies. This is another argument for redshifts for quasars being unreliable as a distance indicator, but instead it is taken as evidence that quasars have enormous range of brightness. Well, it is possible, but if some method could get a less scattered diagram for quasars it would be a big advance.
So what Stockton did, was to look at quasars and galaxies which were very close in the sky. He found that in such pairs there were quite a few which had very nearly the same redshift. If quasar redshifts were not cosmological this should not happen. Therefore any logical person must accept that some quasars are at the cosmological distance of their redshift. For the other close pairs he did not look further but accepted them as coincidental line of sight pairs, actually quite unrelated in distance.
In 1990, the Astrophysical Journal supplement series published "Associations between Quasi-stellar Objects and Galaxies" by G Burbidge, A Hewitt, J V Narlikar and P Das Gupta. They did the same sort of thing as Stockton, but in the intervening 12 years the sky had been considerably better surveyed for quasars and galaxies. They found many more such close pairs. They also looked at another aspect of the data that had not been examined by Stockton. That was because they believed that the big bang was wrong.
In close line of sight pairs which had very different redshifts, they looked for a way to detect that the two objects really were at the same distance. If quasars are actually ejected by galaxies as Halton Arp has argued, then there might be a typical distance apart that they tend to lie. That distance might be about the same as the distance of the Magellanic clouds from the Milky Way because Arp had identified many such arrangements in the sky. However, if the two objects are really together and not just sharing a line of sight, then if they are at a roughly constant distance, they will appear closer if the are far away and further apart if they are closer. This is simply a matter of perspective.
So they looked at the non-matching redshifts, both for Stockton's sample and also for the much bigger sample that they collected from various sources. Here are the results:
 |
 |
The results are quite clear. Both samples, Stockton's in 3a on the left and their own data in 3b on the right show that the further away the galaxy is, the less is the line of sight separation. Close galaxies have greater apparent distance of quasars, far away galaxies have nearer apparent distance of quasars. This is in perfect agreement with the results expected if these galaxies and these quasars are really physically associated and the quasar redshifts are therefore a very unreliable measure of distance. There is no other reasonable explanation. If the objects at different redshifts really are at vastly different distances, then there is absolutely no reason why there separations should vary over four orders of magnitude in step with the distance of only one of the objects, the galaxy.
These two diagrams have been added 28-May-2005, because it was clear that people really didn't get the point. Above the situation where quasar redshifts are unreliable, and they really are near to the galaxies that they are seen to be in the same direction as. In that case there is a good explanation for the variation of angle with the distance of the galaxy. In this case we can also deduce that quasars form at a typical distance of 50,000 parsecs from galaxies. This situation fits the observations very well. It also fits the descriptions given by Halton Arp over the last several decades.
Below is the situation that must exist if the redshift is a reliable measure of distance for quasars as well as galaxies. All the apparent pairs are produced by line of sight coincidences. In that case there is no reason why the angle of separation should depend in any way on the galaxy or the quasar. It is just a chance event depending on the exact direction that we look from. This is the situation that must exist if the big bang theory is correct and redshift is related to distance. It does not agree with the observations. Therefore we can safely say that the theory should be abandoned. Redshift is unrelated to distance for many quasars. The big bang is bung.
| I have noticed one more thing in the diagram of separation versus redshift which was not mentioned in the article. Another thing that would be expected if the quasars are physically associated with these galaxies is that at low redshifts the random velocity component (as distinct from any Hubble expansion) of the galaxy relative to us makes up a large percentage of the redshift, whereas at high redshift for the galaxy, the random motion is negligable. Therefore, the scatter of the redshift should be greater for pairs that are near to us. This is easily seen in the diagrams, but to make it even clearer I have marked a point at redshift 0.01 and angular separation 200" where a sudden change occurs - the redshifts at higher separations (meaning they are closer) has much more scatter than at the larger distances. These values correspond to a distance of around 40 megaparsecs and a separation of about 40,000 parsecs. The actual average separation would be more like 50,000 parsecs because sometimes we see the pair at an angle. That is just about the same distance as the LMC (large magellanic cloud) from our galaxy. Also, the 0.01 redshift is 3000 km/s, which is not unreasonable for the typical real velocity of a galaxy. It means that at a Hubble redshift of 0.005, the random component will cause the much wider spread seen in the diagram. |  |
These results prove conclusively that although some quasars are at the distance implied by their redshifts, others are at very much smaller distances. The scale of quasar distances used by big bang believers is totally destroyed. The other peculiar results are now made easy to explain. Some quasars appear to move very fast because they are very near to us. The wide variation in quasar brightness relative to distance is purely the result of erroneous distance assumption. The apparent physical associations observed by Arp are no longer in need of dismissal as weird. The redshift is not a thoroughly reliable measure. Even for galaxies there is evidence of redshift not being reliable. Once the rule is broken, everything is up for questioning again.
If some redshifts are not just related to Hubble flow, then we need a new theory that explains what these redshifts mean. The only theory that fits the known facts is a variable particle mass theory. One of the important facts to fit is the periodicity of redshifts. It is much easier to understand periodicity in time than in space. If we have periodicity in space then we live at the centre of concentric spheres of galaxies - a result that is unpalatable to scientists on both sides of the argument. However if the mass of particles change in little steps in time, then the whole periodicity structure can happen with no strange arrangements in space. There is still periodicity in space, but not centred on us.
What do big bang believers say about this? I would like to know.
Once the notion is accepted that particle masses must vary to account for an "internal" component to redshift, then the idea of Hubble velocity becomes entirely unnecessary. All redshifts share in common a single cause, which is that particle masses vary with time. As explained by Arp, Narlikar, Hoyle, Burbidge and the others, the mass of particles is determined by the volume of space that the "particle" waves have come into contact with, which is a shell expanding at the speed of light. Quite clearly, as most space is empty, this expanding shell will suddenly come into contact with a lot of matter when it reaches nearby galaxies. That will cause the steps in the redshift that we observe, especially if galaxies have quantised periodicities in their distances and masses.
When the dust has settled it is clear that what remains is forever different. The redshift is due to changing mass of particles over time. It is not velocity related. Therefore there is no Hubble flow and no start to time. No big bang. No age of the universe problem because some things in the universe seem older than the universe itself. No time problem in forming galaxy clusters and galaxies. No period of time in which the parts of the universe were not in speed of light communication. No Problem with large structures at periodic intervals. All the time in the world for these patterns to slowly build up structure.
This idea of waves in and out of particles was first put forward by de Broglie. Later Wheeler and Feynman almost got to the right answer. They had in and out waves called advance and retarded waves. These ideas are central to the variable particle mass idea promoted by Narlikar, Hoyle and Arp. Wheeler and Feynman just got confused about how a wave knew how to converge on the right location for an event and felt that they needed "waves going back in time" to make it work. Still they accepted this weirdness and went ahead. The correct result is clear and requires no backwards time travelling waves. Physics has to change to accomodate this very clear evidence from cosmology. Particles are just processes and not things. They are no more absolute than anything else in the universe. All particles are standing waves. A standing wave does not have to know where to converge. The "particle" is where the waves converge. It moves about as the point of convergence moves about. There is nothing else than the waves converging. But that is another story.