Oral Transcript of Halton Arp Interview

This transcript is virtually unknown to big bang believers. I think astronomy went in another direction back in the 1950's, but people wouldn't know this if they did not pay attention or dig into history.

http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4490.html


It is worth a read, as well it is not something you will ever see in any propagandized science industry where only the Big Bang Creationists get the time and money.

Here is my favorite part of the interview:

Arp:

Yeah, I was just in Jodrell Bank giving a talk there and Sir Bernard Lovell was there. He was at that Solvay Conference 1957, he reminded me of that situation which I already knew. The situation again, the Solvay Conference is a very top level conference, where in the past they have had Einstein, Planck, Bohr and all these people down through the years. So they’d run it in astronomy down through the years also. They’d invited the top people at the Solvay Conference, also there were Oort, and Lovell and Hoyle, all the top astronomers. And they decided for some reason that they had to get a representative from the Soviet Union and they figured well, they heard about this Ambartsumian. They invited him from the Soviet Union and he came, nobody knew him. He came and gave this paper which nobody understood. What they thought was complete trash and they thought it was so crazy. Bernard Lovell was telling me that they were embarrassed because it was so bad. They didn’t want to be rude to this representative of the Soviet Union, so they didn’t say much but they were really embarrassed by the paper.

But then they went on about the important business and this paper was published in the proceedings. That was in 1957. Well, about eight, nine, ten years later it began to appear that the things Ambartsumian had said in his paper, that far from being crazy, were, in fact, quite true and as time goes on his paper got more and more prophetic, more and more far reaching and insightful. When I was with him at the Brighton IAU, the IAU before Australia, six years ago, and I was sitting next to Oort, and Oort said to me, “it turned out that Ambartsumian was right.” And so it was generally concluded, I still don’t think they realized how right he was. I mean, I still, I’m sure, my opinion, contemporary astronomers really have not grasped the extent to which he is right.

Wright:

What was the essence of this paper? 
Arp:

Well, he just looked at galaxies on the Palomar Sky Survey. He said, well, galaxies eject other galaxies, free galactic material and they form other galaxies. And you see that the implication of that was to rock the whole foundation of our ideas of where galaxies come from. The whole idea is just the Big Bang, diffuse medium, galaxies condensed, clouds form, that’s how galaxies are formed. Ambartsumian was saying something completely different. He was saying that the material comes from inside of galaxies, goes out and forms other galaxies. And if you carry forward the implications, if you believe that, then you begin asking yourself questions like, was the Big Bang really like this generally assumed or maybe started out with one body which had successive fragmentation, or maybe the universe is turning itself inside out from inside. You see this way raises really unsettling questions which contemporary astronomers are not prepared or willing to face at all, despite what I think is the beginning of an enormous amount of evidence piling up in this direction. That’s where it is nowadays.