Presentation of the 2011 Sagnac Award to Halton C. Arp
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Presentation of the 2011 Sagnac Award to Halton C. Arp |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Peter Marquardt, Halton C Arp |
| Keywords | Sagnac Award, Halton Arp, intrinsic redshift, quasars, Big Bang criticism, dissident science |
| Published | 2011 |
| No. of pages | 27 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
We have gathered here at the occasion of the presentation of the 2011 Sagnac Award to Halton "Chip" Arp. This reward is particularly close to Chip's heart because, while the other prizes recognize results or new ideas or new observations, the Sagnac Award recognizes and honors Freedom and Courage. Indeed, for Chip, a strong sense of freedom was required. Freedom to undertake new types of observations, critically examine current dogma, challenge common thinking, not giving in to the scientific social pressure.
This is, I imagine, one aspect of the freedom that the new Bundespraesident , Mr. Joachim Gauck, would like to see spreading widely throughout the society.
I would like to end by quoting the 6th paragraph of the preamble of the Swiss Constitution : Free is only the one who uses his freedom.
Overview
This document is not a research paper but the collected proceedings of a ceremony. On 31 March 2012, ten days after Halton "Chip" Arp's 85th birthday, the Natural Philosophy Alliance presented him with its 2011 Sagnac Award at a gathering held in his honour in Munich, where he had lived and worked since 1984. Arp could not attend NPA 18 in person, so the award was carried to him. The twenty-seven pages assembled by Peter Marquardt reproduce the contributions in the order in which they were given: a welcome by Arp's wife Marie-Hélène, an introductory talk by the composer and film-maker Randall Meyers, Marquardt's own account of the award's origins and rationale, and greeting addresses read out on behalf of colleagues who could not be present.
What holds the collection together is a single argument advanced from several directions: that the association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies which Arp documented photographically is a genuine observational result, and that the profession's response to it — cancelling his telescope time, refusing his papers — is the behaviour of a belief system rather than of a science. The Sagnac Award is explicitly framed as an award for the "unsung hero," a lifetime award for "outstanding work outside the beaten paths," named for a physicist whose own decisive experiment is, in Marquardt's phrase, "rather avoided in textbooks."
The contributions
Welcome: Marie-Hélène Arp
The opening address makes the distinction on which the whole occasion turns. Other prizes "recognize results or new ideas or new observations"; the Sagnac Award "recognizes and honors Freedom and Courage." For Arp, she says, freedom was not an abstraction but a working requirement — freedom "to undertake new types of observations, critically examine current dogma, challenge common thinking, not giving in to the scientific social pressure." She closes with the preamble of the Swiss Constitution: "Free is only the one who uses his freedom."
Introduction: Randall Meyers, "Home is in the Virgo Cluster"
Meyers, who collaborated with Arp for thirteen years on a biography-by-interviews and on a documentary film, takes his title from a remark of Arp's own. He conducts a short photographic tour of the Virgo cluster at about 60 million light-years — M87 (Arp 152) with its 25-arcsecond jet, whose embedded plasma knots Arp argued were "proto-quasars" moving at relativistic velocities; the starburst galaxy M82; and NGC 4438 and NGC 4435, Arp 120, "The Eyes."
The framing device is a passage from Galileo's Dialogo of 1632, in which Salviati corrects Simplicio: everyone knows that the effect is called gravity, but no one knows its essence. Meyers generalises the point — "We have learnt something about how it works but nothing about what it is" — and applies it to redshift: our understanding of quasar redshifts and the Big Bang universe are, he suspects, "one and the same belief-system fossilized in the labyrinth of blind assumption." He recounts contacting Arp from Italy after reading Seeing Red, expecting a Don Quixote and finding instead a courteous and humorous professional, and concludes that media, not journals, was the only route past the blockage.
Peter Marquardt: the background of the Award
Marquardt takes four terms in order — NPA, Sagnac, the 2011 Sagnac Award, and Arp himself. The NPA, founded in San Francisco in 1994, was approaching 300 members worldwide as of that date, with annual meetings documented in Proceedings since 2004 and weekly video conferences.
On Sagnac: the 1913 rotating-platform experiment, in which two counter-propagating beams are folded by four mirrors and made to interfere, yields "an undisputed fringe shift in proportion to the area enclosed by the light beams and the rotation frequency" — unlike the Michelson-Morley Experiment. Marquardt notes that Michelson himself proposed the experiment, that Max von Laue discussed it in his book on special relativity, and that von Laue is also the source for Franz Harress, who performed a similar experiment between 1909 and 1911. He refers readers to Evert Jan Post's 1967 review in Reviews of Modern Physics 39, 475. Relativists, he writes, "if they bother to mention the Sagnac effect at all, are not bothered by it — but they should be." The award's design, by David de Hilster and Greg Volk, uses three interlocking rings evoking the ring model of the electron proposed by Alfred Parson and Arthur Compton and revived at off-mainstream workshops by David Bergman, J. Paul Wesley and Bill Lucas.
The critique of cosmology is compressed and blunt. Cosmology is "the biggest laboratory ever" and should teach modesty; instead it has been "subdued to an anthropocentric view," with Lemaître at the origin of a finite universe with a definite beginning. Claiming knowledge of events within the Planck time, some 10-43 s, "is not exactly a sign of modesty." The message of the critics is given as a single line: it is not all Doppler that reddens in astronomy. Marquardt then reviews Seeing Red at length as a model textbook — impeccable content, critique where needed, anecdote, satire, and an insider's chapter on Academia — quoting Arp on science "failing to be self-correcting" and on editors who violate the two obvious principles of scientific communication. He observes pointedly that the Nobel Prize awarded shortly before, for the accelerating expansion inferred from distant supernovae, "exactly demonstrates why your work is so important."
Greeting addresses
Mel Acheson contributes a satirical parable: Paleolithic astronomers deduce a "redface–distance relationship" from hunters running across a plain, and are wiped out by pygmies who paint their faces dark red; modern astronomers, having found that fainter galaxies are more redshifted, proclaim the redshift–distance relationship "without bothering to test it" and go out to celebrate, locking Arp out when he calls after them. Amy Acheson's 2005 nomination of Arp as "the Galileo of the 21st century" is read: both were respected leaders ordered to stop looking, both refused, both published for non-specialists when specialists would no longer listen. Wallace Thornhill writes that Arp will be vindicated for showing "that the visible universe is not expanding and is of unknown age and extent," and links the galactic genealogy to the Electric Universe. Thomas E Phipps, the 2010 laureate, says Arp "wore no man's collar."
Roy Keys, Arp's publisher, supplies the longest tribute and the most biographical detail: Harvard, then Caltech under Edwin Hubble on the M31 nova search, from whom "some of his mentor's scepticism about the Doppler interpretation of redshifts may have rubbed off"; 28 years at Mount Wilson and Palomar; the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies; the thirty-year collaboration with Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar; the loss of US telescope access around 1980 and the Humboldt award that took him to the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, where MPE X-ray images proved decisive in confirming the associations found optically. Keys recounts the workshop organised by Toivo Jaakkola, at which Arp and his host disagreed civilly — Jaakkola, a student of Jean-Claude Pecker and Jean-Pierre Vigier, held to Tired Light, while Arp followed Hoyle's age-dependent mass variation — and a visit to Paul Marmet in Ottawa where they met Gerhard Herzberg, discoverer in 1941 of the 2.3 K excitation of interstellar cyanogen. The citation itself honours "the discovery of intrinsic redshift in numerous galaxies," the cataloguing of galaxy types, and their explanation "in terms of solar ejections and plasma behaviors."
Assessment
As a document this is a tribute, and should be read as one: it is advocacy, and it is not shy about saying so. Its value lies in what it preserves. Very little of the social history of the redshift controversy is recorded anywhere by the participants themselves, and here five people who worked with Arp — a publisher, a film-maker, a physicist, two writers — set down first-hand detail that is not in the journals: how the collaboration with Hoyle and Narlikar began, how the X-ray plates from Garching settled questions the optical plates had left open, when and how telescope access was withdrawn. Keys's tribute in particular is a compact and accurate biography. Marquardt's history of the Sagnac experiment is also careful and correctly sourced, including the acknowledgement of Harress's priority and of von Laue's role, which partisan accounts often omit.
The weaknesses are those of the genre. The polemical passages assert rather than argue. Calling the Big Bang "a religious type dogma" and cosmology since the 1950s "pseudo-science" does no work that the observational case does not do better, and it invites the reader to dismiss the observational case along with the rhetoric. The claim that the Big Bang "threw physics way back before Copernicus" is a figure of speech, not a proposition that can be examined. Meyers's Galileo analogy is doing heavy lifting throughout the volume, and it cuts both ways: Galileo was right, which is precisely what is at issue.
More substantively, the physics is gestured at rather than set out. The distinctive core of Arp's position — that redshift has a large intrinsic, age-dependent component arising from Hoyle–Narlikar variable particle masses, so that young ejected matter is redshifted without recession — is mentioned by Keys in a single clause and never developed. No statistical case for the associations is presented here, and the counter-argument that has to be met, that quasar–galaxy alignments can be produced by selection and by chance projection at the surface densities involved, is not addressed at all. Nor is the evidence that the intrinsic-redshift picture must accommodate: the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, the blackbody spectrum and acoustic peak structure of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the observed evolution of source populations with redshift. Marquardt's aside that Herzberg's 1941 cyanogen measurement might have "taken cosmology in a very different course" is the closest the volume comes, and it is left as a hint. Readers wanting the argument itself must go to Seeing Red and Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, which this document exists to point them towards.
Judged by what it set out to do — mark an 85th birthday, honour a career, and place on record why a group of dissenting researchers thought that career mattered — it succeeds, and the personal recollections make it worth keeping.