Originally Posted by Nereid

This question provides a succinct summary of what, IMHO, is a common misunderstanding of what this ATM section of BAUT is 'for'.If you, VanderL, or iantresman, or dgruss23, or turbo-1, or ATKINS, or TomT, or any other BAUT member wishes to argue the idea that quasar redshifts are quantised, or that the observational data is consistent with "an ejection model", or any other ATM idea, then you are welcome to do so.

Other BAUT members are then welcome to attack your ideas, as presented.

If you are not presenting, and then arguing and defending an ATM idea, then surely there is nothing to discuss?

But, since you asked, there is a specificity about this case which warrants comment.

As you know, the EU thread was recently closed. It was, and still is, the largest thread, by far, here in the ATM section.

Yet it is also spectacularly devoid of any meat*; in fact, AFAIK, the only quantitative analyses presented in that thread came from challengers.

As dgruss23 (in the Arp et al. thread), and Tim Thompson (in several threads), have pointed out, it takes considerable time and effort present good cases, and good challenges - one can really only challenge an idea well if one first understands what it is.

In this thread, iantresman asked a straight-forward question (about the Tang and Zhang paper, and the Bell and McDiarmid paper), and I answered it in a straight-forward way. iantresman was not making any claims.Fair comment.

On the surface, you claimed a summary of Bell and McDiarmid paper - are you prepared to stand by you claim (that it is a (good) summary of that paper)?

However, you did not state your claim as a mere summary of parts of the article in your own words - your assertion was absolute ("The resulting peaks are strongly supporting Bell's (and Burbidge's) equation that was beased on a specific example of 14 QSO's around NGC 1068." - interestingly, the Bell and McDiarmid paper doesn't seem to make this claim.)

If your (ATM) claim is merely a summary of a paper, then what is there to challenge (other than the accuracy of your summary)?

So, let's be clear about this: are you prepared to defend the claims made in the Bell and McDiarmid paper? Specifically, are you prepared to show that their analyses of selection effects; the statistical tools, techniques, and results are sound (and more robust than those used by Tang and Zhang)? That their derivations of the likely observations signal, assuming the DIR model, is consistent with the data?

If you are not, then what is there for anyone to challenge?

*It it to be hoped that the much more focussed threads that will now be started, on EU ideas, will, at last, contain some real meat.