echidna

Well I ran a few searches & couldn’t find anything substantial refuting the claim that red-shifted light is quantised. Because to my understanding, either …
1) we are close to the centre of the universe (which flies in the face of conventional BB models), or
2) light is not behaving as we would expect, or
3) red-shifted light is not quantised into 2.67 km/s levels

However I did find several sites (non-religious) supporting the quantisation claim which has been around since the 1970’s, and seems to be growing.

What’s going on here ?

Can anyone provide a concrete refutation of such quantisation ? It would seem a relatively easy measurement to make.

Autonemesis

<a href="http://www.ldolphin.org/setterfield/vacuum.html" target="_blank">THE VACUUM, LIGHT SPEED, AND THE REDSHIFT</a>

That's not a refutation, but an explanation of how quantised redshift arises. Judge for yourself whether <a href="http://www.ldolphin.org/setterfield/" target="_blank">Barry Setterfield</a> is a YEC or not.

<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/cygnusx1/cdecay/cdecay.pdf" target="_blank">Here's</a> a refutation of Setterfield's paper. It's PDF, but <a href="http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:uop82ChxLG4C:homepage.mac.com/cygnusx1/cdecay/cdecay.pdf+%22BARRY+SETTERFIELD%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8" target="_blank">Google</a> has a HTML version minus diagrams.

echidna

Yes, that’s the article I posted yesterday in S&S. It takes the quantisation as a given & then seeks to explain it.

If I read correctly it proposes amongst other things c-decay as well as “This model assumes each quantum change occurs instantaneously throughout the cosmos. Yet a finite time is taken for light emitted by atomic processes to reach the observer. Consequently, the observed redshift will appear to be quantised in spherical shells centred about any observer anywhere in the universe. All objects that emit light within that shell will have the same redshift.”

Now, I still don’t see a definite explanation of the quantisation of red-shifted light. As such the earth-centric proposal, as counter-intuitive as it seems, still seems equally solid.

echidna

So here’s the beauty of science. We have data which seems to contradict this statement. If we accept the data (which seems to be accurate), then either the statement is wrong or the model must be reliably revised (not arbitrarily).

As painful as it might be, maybe we need to be cautious on this statement. Unless we plan to have “faith” in the BB.

Sadly until either is objectively done, we might have to put up with some “nutters” drawing their own conclusions.

Morat

I had to do a bit of research on another board for it. As best I can tell, the mainstream consensus is that the quantinization is an artifact of poor sampling techniques. A study using the Large Bright Quasar Survey found no evidence of quantinization of redshift. The papers referenced where as follows (and if anyone has access to them, feel free to double check me):
It's on T.O's request for FAQ's, and few cosmologists take it seriously besides Arp and Tifft, so there's little literature on it.

beausoleil

You can get most of the papers from ADS

<a href="http://adsabs.harvard.edu/journals_service.html" target="_blank">http://adsabs.harvard.edu/journals_service.html</a>

Coragyps

A comment from an astronomer that I read on some discussion group (somewhere!) was that the appearance of quantized red shifts is a natural consequence of having only "pencil-beam" surveys to get your data from. The universe is pretty well known to look like a "foam" with sheets of galaxies as the bubble walls and nothing much in between - so if you look along any single line of sight, you'll see galaxies at discrete distances, with gaps, and redshifts will follow the same pattern.
The huge redshift surveys that are in progress currently are wide-area in scope, as well as hell-for-"deep", and should provide far better data to test Tifft's ideas.

Coragyps

Then there's <a href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0208117" target="_blank">this paper</a>which finds "no evidence for a periodicity" in quasar redshifts in the 2dF survey, one of those big, deep surveys I couldn't remember the acronym for.

Valentine Pontifex

I was just reading what Sverker Johansson had to say in the talk.origins newgroups and I rushed to post what he said and I find I have been scooped. :-)

Briefly looking at the text, I notice that the article was done by somone who was not involved in the controversy. Basically when the new database came into existance of high enough quality to show or falsify quantized red-shifts, one of the proponents (pro side) realized that it would be best if a truely independent person did the analysis of the data. He approached the authors of the paper linked to above and asked them to do it. He gave his prediction and told them what to look for, and let them do the work.

Unless there is some problem with the data analysis or collection, it looks to my non-professional eyes that quantized red-shifts are now dead.

tgamble

I wonder how many fundies have defended the bible's inerrancy by claiming that it really doesn't say the earth is the center of the universe....?