From: metares@well.sf.ca.us (Tom Van Flandern)
Subject: Progress with New Cosmologies (& discrete redshifts)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 15:34:05 GMT


     The following meeting report is reprinted from the Sept. 15, 1992 issue
of the Meta Research Bulletin, for which I serve as editor.

     Many of the world's expert cosmologists who dispute the Big Bang met in
Lodz, Poland during the week of September 7-12, 1992 to discuss "Progress
with new cosmologies".  The following is a brief report on the highlights of
the meeting.  About 60 scientists and students were in attendance.

     Jack Selentic, University of Alabama, gave a review talk about compact
groups (CG) of galaxies.  These are small groups of typically 4-5 close
galaxies which are grouped more densely on the sky than the general field by
a factor of a hundred or more, yet are not part of any recognized cluster of
galaxies.  The most famous example is Stephan's Quintet.  But these CG's
present many challenges to cosmologists.  For example, their calculated
stability is low, with predicted collapse in just a few times 10^8 years.
There is an excess of discordant redshift members (defined as a velocity
difference of more than 2000 km/s), with far more of them present in CG's
than chance will allow.  Various lines of argument can effectively rule out
the possibilities that most CG's are 1) chance unrelated optical
configurations; 2) chance loose optical associations; 3) transient unbound
cores in loose groups; or 4) recently collapsed from larger groups.  Present
data suggest that CG's were either always compact, or were recently formed as
is.  Neither possibility is easily reconciled with Big Bang expectations.  It
was noted that CG's would be more stable (have longer predicted lifetimes) if
gravity were proportional to 1/r instead of 1/r^2 on the large scale.  Three
other talks presented various theoretical models implying or requiring just
that.

     Halton Arp, Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, spoke about his
"Variable Mass" cosmology.  His ideas attempt to explain why quasar redshifts
cluster near 0.3, 0.6, ..., with the grouping just below z = 1.2 dominating
all others; and why certain classes of stars have significant excess
redshifts.  He also pointed out the inconsistency that local galaxy groups
seem to have velocity dispersions of less than 100 km/s, while distant groups
seem to have members with dispersions up to 1000 km/s from the cluster mean.

     Eric Lerner, author of "The Big Bang Never Happened", discussed BB
element abundance predictions.  He pointed out that, in the case of each
prediction, an observational contradiction exists.  He then discussed the
various ways in which BB cosmologists propose to "fix" these problems.  One
is increased deuterium destruction.  But this overproduces energy (the galaxy
gets too bright), as well as He4, He3, and CNO.  Another "fix" is the
inhomogenous Big Bang; but among other problems, the lithium abundance is
still not right.  Moreover large scale structure implies an age for the
universe of greater than 63 Gyr (billion years).  Invoking a large
cosmological constant to solve this problem is observationally contradicted
by the scarcity of gravitational lenses.  Another "fix" is to invoke matter-
antimatter annihilation at about two seconds after the BB.  But this limits
the baryon density to a small fraction of what is observed.  Finally, the
angular size versus redshift relationship is *far* below the BB predicted
lower limit.  This is true for galaxies, clusters, and radio lobes.  Lerner
then discussed how PC (plasma cosmology) might deal with some of these
problems.

     William Napier, Royal Observatory, presented an independent verification
of Tifft's puzzling periodicity in ordinary galaxy redshifts (which has been
much discussed lately in sci.physics).  A completely new sample of galaxies
was chosen, with careful anti-biasing considerations.  Their goal was to show
that the "impossible" anomaly would vanish.  But their results showed a
strong, definite periodicity in galaxy redshifts out to the sample limit of
2000 km/s.  Redshifts which are integer multiples of 37.5 km/s, after
corrections for the sun's galactocentric motion, appear more often than can
be explained by chance or biased sampling.  This finding was taken as
confirmation of Tifft's results from a decade ago, which have been largely
ignored because they are so difficult to explain.  Among many other problems,
this result implies that intrinsic, motion-based redshifts of galaxies must
be quite small compared to 37.5 km/s, since otherwise the periodicity would
be lost by superimposing motion redshifts on the periodic values.  Small
intrinsic galaxy motions would eliminate the need to invoke dark matter to
bind galactic clusters together, but introduces many new intractable
problems, especially for the Big Bang.  Essentially, anything which threatens
the Doppler (motion) interpretation of galaxy redshifts threatens the
underpinnings of the whole Big Bang theory.

     In a second talk, Jack Sulentic spoke about multiple redshifts seen in
some quasars and AGN's.  Line profiles come in all types: symmetric, double-
peaked, and asymmetric.  Relative shifts are both toward the red and the
blue.  Arguments against an accretion-disk/black-hole model were reviewed.
What is apparently needed is a non-Doppler redshift-blueshift mechanism.  For
example, one broad H-line (in 1404+28) shifts back and forth by 1000 km/s
relative to another narrow H-line, with an average offset of 2000 km/s.
These shifts correlate perfectly with intensity.

     Amitabha Ghosh, Indian Institute of Technology, presented data on white
dwarf redshifts.  The gravitational redshift portion is measurable from line
profile widths, and can be separated from any Doppler shift.  Based on masses
from binary star cases, and radii from the Boltzmann law, the implied surface
gravity tells us that a typically white dwarf gravitational redshifts should
be 60-70 km/s.  But profiles are on average about 40 km/s wider than that.
This is a known, but unsolved, problem for those working on redshift
mechanisms, and for the Big Bang.

     Andre Assis, State University of Campinas, noted that Eddington (1926;
reprinted 1986; "Internal Constitution of Stars", Ch. 13, "temperature of
space is 3 degrees"), Nerst (1937), and Regener (1933) all predicted a three-
degree blackbody microwave radiation based on the equilibrium temperature of
interstellar and intergalactic photons.  But Peebles (incorrect) prediction
that the Big Bang fireball would leave a background remnant at 30 degrees
Kelvin got all the press when the microwave radiation was discovered in 1964.

     My own talk was a preview of the Meta Model, the new cosmology derived
from first principles, parts of which have been debated in sci.astro over
this past summer.  The model details are scheduled to appear in a book in
about four months (announcement later).  -|Tom|-

-- 
Tom Van Flandern / Washington, DC / metares@well.sf.ca.us
Meta Research was founded to foster research into ideas not otherwise
supported because they conflict with mainstream theories in Astronomy.
Newsgroups: sci.astro