It looks like a lot of people are convinced of quantized redshifts. This is part of an article I wrote for wikipedia:

Quantization of redshifts

Many in the fringe and completely outside of the scientific mainstream have made noise surrounding the idea that observed redshifts are quantized. A large percentage of these people explicitly reject the Big Bang model of the universe and try to explain the Hubble Law Expansion observed relationship that connects redshifts with distance as being due to alternative effects. Modern geocentricists have also joined in, hoping to use the quantization of redshifts as proof, not of an incorrect redshift-distance relation, but rather as an indication that our observing point is the center of the universe. As it stands now, there is no evidence for redshift quantization, so the enterprising geocentrist must look elsewhere for evidence that we are at the center of the universe.

The first claimed observations of quasar redshift quantization came in 1976 by astrophysicist Y.P. Varshni. He presented his data with three possible interpretations, one of which is that Earth was in the center of the universe. Varshni wrote (in Astrophysics and Space Science, 1976, 43:3)

... the quasars in the 57 groups ... are arranged on 57 spherical shells with the Earth as the center ... The cosmological interpretation of the red shift in the spectra of quasars leads to yet another paradoxical result: namely, that the Earth is the center of the universe. The arrangement of quasars on certain spherical shells is only with respect to the Earth. These shells would disappear if viewed from another galaxy or quasar
Varshni calculated the odds against a chance arrangement of 57 concentric spheres of quasars around the earth to be 3 x 1086 to 1. This, unfortunately, is an example of an eggregiously misleading miscalculation based on faulty Bayesian priors. Varshni ultimately attributed his results to an intragalactic (that is, non-cosmological) location of the quasars and a redshift resulting from a laser phenomenon rather than cosmological expansion.

In 1970, William G. Tifft, astronomer at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona showed that a few dozen galaxies were situated from Earth at specific redshifts, namely, in multiples of 72 km/sec in redshift values, as recorded in "Global Redshift Periodicities: Association with the Cosmic Background Radiation" Astrophysics and Space Science, 239, 35 (1996), and "Evidence for Quantized and Variable Redshifts in the CBR Rest Frame," Astrophysics and Space Science, 1997. Even today, Tift continues to insist on a quantization of local galaxies' redshifts. In 1992, Sky and Telescope magazine gave coverage to Tifft's ideas and extrapolated a possible geocentric interpretation to his fitted data ("Quantized Redshifts: What's Going on Here?" 84:128, 1992). At that time there was considerable controversy surrounding seeming contradictions that had arose in the Big Bang model which have since been resolved by the observational concordance of the Lambda-CDM model. Tift's work has subsequently been shown lacking in scope and in believability by the vast amounts of new data from galaxy surveys which show no statistical evidence for redshift periodicity of galaxies.

Other references to the same type of work on quantized quasar and galactic redshifts, are Tifft and Cocke writing of this phenomenon in Sky and Telescope, 73:19, in 1987 in the article "Quantized Galaxy Redshifts," as well as in New Scientist of June 22, 1985, in the article "Galaxy Redshifts Come in Clumps." Burbidge wrote about the same phenomenon in Mercury in the article "Quasars in the Balance," 17:136 in 1988. Halton Arp has provided the most information in his book "Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies." He and Burbidge wrote of their work in Physics Today, 37:17 (1984) in the article "Companion Galaxies Match Quasar Redshifts: The Debate Goes On." In 1991, astronomers Bruce N. G. Guthrie and William M. Napier of the Royal University at Edinburgh compared the redshifts from 89 single spiral galaxies and found a periodicity that was very close to Tifft's quantum multiple for this class of galaxies. At the time, 89 galaxies seemed like quite a lot, but it pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of galaxy redshifts measured as of today.

It happens that all of these analyses suffer from either poor data-fitting models or bad statistics. Currently, with today's collections of galaxy and quasar redshifts from galaxy surveys, there is absolutely no statistically detectable evidence found for quantization of redshifts. Sky and Telescope reported this finding conclusively in its 2002 issue ("No Quantized Redshifts" 104:28, 2002). The "controversy" has been laid to rest, and only a few hangers-on such as Halton Arp and William Tift continue to ignore the vast preponderance of the evidence from modern sky surveys. The most recent, most complete, and most accurate measurements of quasar redshifts do not support a distribution of galaxy and quasar "celestial spheres" centered on our location. Indeed, as galaxy surveys have been collecting more and more quasar counts, the quantization coincidences are not seen as model phenomena.

Then surely Tift was the first (as I have always understood).
Cheers Lyndon

Tift was the first for galactic redshifts and this came before quasar measurements.

Don't know much about quasars but would like to know more, but aren't the quantised 'bits' different for Galaxies and Quasars? That is, aren't Tifts and Guthries quantised redshift for distances but quasars for angles?
Cheers Lyndon

I'm not sure what you're refering to, but I'm pretty sure the ideas as I've seen them described are similar. I could be wrong, though.

Here's some more from wikipedia writings on non-standard cosmologies

Redshift, AGN, and Quasars
In the meantime, there are other issues that some non-standard cosmologists insist must also be considered. A good example is the observations made since the 1960s by the astronomer Halton Arp, which offer an alternative to the standard interpretation of quasar formation, redshift and Hubble's Law.

Arp has observed a handful of correlations between quasars (and more recently, X-ray sources from Chandra data) and AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) which he claims demonstrates that quasar redshifts are not entirely due to the expansion of the universe, but contain a local, or non-cosmological, component. Arp claims that clusters of quasars have been observed around many galaxies (examples include NGC 3516 (http://www.haltonarp.com/?Page=Images&Image=4) and NGC 5985 (http://www.haltonarp.com/?Page=Images&Image=5) as well as M51, NGC 7603, NGC 3370, NGC 4319, NGC 4235, NGC 4258) which all have some properties in common:

The active galaxy always has a lower redshift than any of its associated quasars.
The quasars tend to lie within a narrow conical zone centered about the minor (rotational) axis of the associated active galaxy.
Schematically, the quasars' redshifts are inversely proportional to their angular distances from the AGN, i.e. as apparent distance from the AGN increases, the redshift of the quasars decrease.
Some of the quasars occur as pairs on either side of an AGN, particularly the X-ray sources appearing in the Chandra data.
Some astrophysicists believe that gravitational lensing might responsible for some examples of quasars in the immediate vicinity of AGN, but Arp and others argue that gravitational lensing cannot account for the quasars' tendency to align along the host galaxies minor axis.

These observations indicate to Arp that a relationship may exist between quasars (or at least a certain type of quasar) and AGN. Arp claims that these quasars originate as very high redshift objects ejected from the nuclei of active galaxies, and gradually lose their non-cosmological redshift component as they evolve into galaxies.

The biggest problem with this analysis is that today there are tens of thousands of quasars with known redshifts discovered by various sky surveys. The vast majority of these quasars are not correlated in any way with nearby AGN. Indeed, with improved observing techniques, a number of host galaxies have been observed around quasars which indicates that those quasars at least really are at cosmological distances and are not the kind of objects Arp proposes. Arp's analysis, according to most scientists, suffers from being based on small number statistics and hunting for peculiar coincidences and odd associations. In a vast universe such as our own, peculiarities and oddities are bound to appear if one looks in enough places. Unbiased samples of sources, taken from numerous galaxy surveys of the sky show none of the proposed 'irregularities' nor any statistically significant correlations that Arp suggests exist.

In fact, the question of whether quasars are cosmological or not was an active controversy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but by the late 1970s most astronomers had considered the issue settled. The main argument against cosmological distances for quasars was that the energy required was far too high to be explainable by nuclear fusion, but this objection was removed by the proposal of gravity powered accretion disks.

In addition, it is not clear what mechanism would be responsible for such high initial redshifts, or indeed its gradual dissipation over time as the quasar evolves. It is also unclear why objects ejected from a galaxy should never seem to produce a blue shift. Moreover it is unclear how nearby quasars would explain some features in the spectrum of quasars which the standard model easily explains. In the standard cosmology, the clouds of neutral hydrogen between the quasar and the earth at different red shifts spikes between the quasar redshift and the rest frequency of Lyman alpha in a feature known as the Lyman-alpha forest. Moreover, in extreme quasars one can observe the absorbion of neutral hydrogen which has not yet been reionized in a feature known as the Gunn-Peterson trough. Most cosmologists see this missing theoretical work as sufficient reason to ignore the observations as either chance or error. Arp himself proposes Narlikar's variable mass hypothesis, which contains alternative explanations of various observed cosmological features, but it remains, at best, incomplete.

A consequence of Arp's proposed AGN-origin of quasars would be that quasars would be much closer, much larger, and much less luminous than currently supposed and their heavy element composition would no longer require primaeval Population III stars. Such a theory would predict that the heavy element composition of quasars would be similar to the associated AGN, though observed metal lines in quasars are notoriously weaker than AGN. Variable luminosity and absorption phenomena such as the Lyman-alpha forest would both be explained by as yet theoretically undeveloped "local means".

A further anomaly comes from the magnitude-redshift relation first discovered by Hubble. Plotting absolute galactic magnitudes against their redshift produces a clear linear relation, which in 1929 led Hubble to propose an expanding universe and Fritz Zwicky to propose the tired light hypothesis. However, quasars were discovered much later, and the same plot done using quasar data produces a much more diffuse scatter with no such clear linear relation. However, since the absolute magnitudes can only be calibrated using a size constraints from variability and an Eddington luminosity limit, it is likely that quasars are exhibbiting differing absolute luminosities that cannot neccessarily be derived from such simplistic first principles. Arp, Burbidge, and others maintain that the scatter in these plots further supports the idea that quasars have a non-cosmological component to their redshift, but nearly everyone else in the field accepts that quasars have variable luminosity.

You get fifty to seventy-five percent for this answer. Geocentrists should know by now they cannot trust the scientific community for information upon which to canonize a theory, because we are too often wrong.

If you are stating that the 'Tifft and Varshni hypotheses', that all quasars are local periodic events is false, this is also true. But the great galaxy surveys support the thesis there are periodic effects in the quasar population that can be badly misconstrued as evident of a geocentric universe.

There is a family of concentric observations that is completely supported by this expanded body of evidence:

The large studies have verified that when quasars are grouped by morphological type (AGN, RLBB, RQNB…) the distribution, (in types by redshift), peak in concentric intervals at redshifts between z ~ 0.8 and 2.0. The population of quasars then declines in look-back time after this 'epoch of quasars'. This is assumed to be evidence of evolution. But if a randomly varying portion of the redshift in each quasar is intrinsic, and we underestimate the attenuation of space, this creates an 'optical illusion', an artifact the explains both the dearth of quasars in “local” redshifted space, and appearance of concentric peaks.

Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that if a portion of the redshift we observe in quasars is intrinsic, and the distribution is in fact highly uniform, the local population will be displaced into a prior epic. Then as the intrinsic portion of the total redshift diminishes relative to the total redshift, bands of compressed quasar counts will appear for each morphological type at concentric distances. As the cosmic distance increases, the type of quasars found in the intrinsically redshifted, most local populations (who's magnitudes have been over estimated), Are attenunated faster than predicted, and the quasar count appears to fade.

This explanation makes more sense to me than the supposition that seven billion years after a ‘Big Bang’ event, a population of quasars gradually peaked, then disappeared completely.

The small body count statistics used by Arp’s early studies are certainly no longer applicable, but until the great surveys are analyzed for a correlation between each morphological type of quasars this claim is not justified.

For example, assume there are two very different types of quasars: Relatively small quasars in our local galactic cluster that are intrinsically redshifted; and much much larger quasar-like galactic cores that are not intrinsically redshifted. Assume these two types share similar spectroscopic traits and are difficult to tell apart.

In a field limited survey, the local events dominate: There is a statistical correlation between the local events and local galaxies. But as the data base is expanded to include many more of the much larger galactic cores, and the small intrinsically redshift quasars fade from view. The correlation all but disappears in this 'inverse Malmberg' selection effect. I am not saying this is the way it is, but this is an extreme example of what could be happening. We do not understand the nature of QSOs with enough certainty to say otherwise.

The controversy is very much alive, and as you have already found in your discussion with Dgruss, the numbers can still be interpreted in a variety of ways. The search is just beginning.

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

I disagree entirely. Tell me where your periodicity is here.

Cite? Sloan data? 2dF? What are you using to back this up?

Why?

You've got to be kidding me. You're saying that the uniform distribution of quasars is evidence for correlation with galaxies?

I find this very hard to understand.

Imagine if I said that green m&ms in a jar tended to hang out near red m&ms. You could only see about a few hundred m&ms total and were able to see some examples of this group clumping.

The incredulous argued that you were conveniently seeing clumping and then when the incredulous gave you a picture of a much larger portion of the jar and pointed out that the distributions were uncorrelated you suddenly claimed that it was this very "uncorrelated" effect that you would expect on a large scale if there was an association.

I find this very hard to accept.

Of course, if you disagree with redshift-distance relationship, you can do whatever you please, I guess.

Not in the community it isn't.

I would point out that there was an agreed upon test with 2dF survey to look for quasar-galaxy correlations. Arp and his cohorts agreed to the test and it came back completely uncorrelated. Yet no one who agreed to the test beforehand would accept the results.

I find that to be problematic indeed.

Meaning that we don't currently have any evidence that they are correlated, or that we have studied all these quasars and the nearby AGNs in detail so that we have evidence that they are not correlated?

I don't see why this conclusion can be drawn from the fact that host galaxies are seen. After all there are galaxies in local neighborhood, so just by seeing a galaxy doesn't tell much about it's distance.

But doesn't it feel strange that Arp (and others) finds these almost everywhere he looks. This is not a case where Arp has looked enough places to occasionally find one.

By the way, you forgot to include most convincing types of observations to your analysis, namely bridges between high and low redshift objects and high redshift objects silhouetted in front of low redshift objects.

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"Stupidity gets denser in a crowd" - Old Finnish saying. [My website] [Nimblebrain forums]

The reason that quasar controversies can't stay alive in the "community" is illustrated by a story that Grote Reber told me. Grote was good friends with John Kraus the radio astronomer from Ohio State. Grote attended a big bang seminar with Kraus and sat quietly in the back of the room. During the Q & A afterwards a grad student asked: "What happened before the big bang?". He got an answer somewhat along the lines of "That's a meaningless question, it's like asking what's north of the north pole." Or something along those lines. Instead of shutting up, the guy kept asking, I know that, but I mean what happened BEFORE the big bang.

Grote said, "That poor grad student bloke had no chance whatever of ever getting his PhD from that gang."
Questioning the status quo, like the Boulder High students in the library, won't get you a PhD. Wait 'til you've got it, then maybe you can at least try to learn to think again.

Here is what the SDSS reveals about quasar periodicity.

I am surprised you find this surprising. There are many studies based upon the Sloan Digital Survey that characterized redshift-dependant effects – this one http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0408578 is a good example: To make any sense at all of the eigenspectra, they had to first bin the quasars by redshift:

They go on to state:

So it is easy to write off the redshift dependence of the quasar survey as evolutionary effects. It is also easy for a geocentrist to insist this is evidence the earth is the center of everything. I think both conclusions are completely wrong. Why? Next sentence:

The Baldwin effect! The propensity for spectral line width to get smaller with increasing redshift distance. This effect is present is every reshift survey that is not comparing apples and oranges. Why should spectral line widths get smaller with increasing distance? Line widths should not evolve, even if luminosity does. They don’t.

Part of the data reduction package for analyzing distant spectra are the k corrections. These correct for chromatic aberration caused by lenses and shift the spectrum to the local reference frame. They also correct for chromatic dispersion inherent in Doppler redshifting. Remove the frequency dispersion term from the k corrections, and the Baldwin effect disappears (in fact, the line widths broaden, which is what should happen to light traveling for eons – Zeeman and related effects).

Removing the Doppler frequency dispersion term is valid if and only if most of the frequency shift is non-Doppler. This would mean the universe is not expanding.

[quote"Astronomer"]Imagine if I said that green m&ms in a jar tended to hang out near red m&ms…[/quote]
Good analogy, but to understand my point, we need a different one:
If I take my bag of M&Ms and look at a handful of them under a microscope, I might discover the tiny bugs like the green M&Ms better than the red ones, and conclude that maybe we should not eat the red M&Ms either. (Come to think of it, a better conclusion might be that we should not eat the green ones covered with bugs.)

Anyway, You decide to repeat my experiment by scattering a bag of M&Ms across an anthill. You might reasonably conclude the bugs do not give a damn about the color. We are both right in our conclusions, but wrong to draw inferences that stretch beyond our observational boundaries. The large surveys do not include the observational detail Arp is evaluating.

Why?
[/quote]
Because every time we have opened our eyes a little further, the bandwidth of ‘evolutionary’ trends is extended. One obvious example is red/blue galaxy ratios. A few decades ago, we could only see blue galaxies in extended space. It was quite reasonably assumed blue galaxies evolve into red ones.

With improved optics, it has become clear red galaxies extend into the past just as blue ones do, and another ‘geocentric’ effect is found, because eventually the red/blue count inverts again. This can also be explained as an artifact of a small intrinsic redshift component in blue galaxies:

Assume blue galaxies have an average an intrinsic redshift of ~0.16 with an SD ~ 0.06. Also assume the red/blue galaxy ratio is about 5/4. Finally assume blue galaxies are more likely to be centrally located in clusters. Now look what happens:

Almost all of the blue galaxies in our own galaxy cluster have intrinsic redshifts, so we assume they are more distant “field” galaxies not associated with any clusters. As we count galaxies just beyond our local cluster, we included the ‘field galaxies’ that are really redshift displaced members of our own cluster, so our count of blue galaxies is too high. Also, in the nearby galaxy clusters, the random intrinsic redshifts in the blue galaxy causes us to assume they are not located near the red shift centers of these clusters, so the centers appear to be dominated by red galaxies.

At increasing distances, the intrinsic redshift of the blue galaxies becomes less and less significant compared to the cosmic redshift factor. Now we observe the blue galaxies dominate the centers of clusters, but since we are no longer erroneously including a high percentage of misplaced ‘field’ galaxies, the ratio of red to blue galaxies increases.

I have just described the observation known as the Butcher-Oemler effect as an artifact, an optical illusion caused by the type of intrinsic redshifts that Russell has so carefully quantified. Can you tell me why blue galaxies would have dominated galaxy cores in the early universe, and then suddenly decided to leap out of cluster centers and become ‘field’ galaxies?

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

I know that you will all accuse me of trying to hijack this thread but this was one of the very first things that started me off on my theory (so tuff!). My equivalent love to Physics is photography and i knew that things further away are always less distinct than things closer. In the seventies which I remember too well (60's as well if we are honest) there were always these pictures of redshifts (Kibbles book or something like that??) and the absorption lines were always more distinct the further away the galaxy!
So, what gets better the bigger the sample? Statistics thats what. I explain redshifts in terms of photons being constantly absorbed and re-emitted. I work it out in terms of probabilities. The further away the galaxy, the more the collisions the more distinct the effect.
Sorry about this but I will keep quiet now (maybe).
Cheers Lyndon

You might have shot my explanation down! Are the spectral images you are talking about digital reductions, or unreduced spectral plates?

If the Balwin effects show up in unprocessed images at the same intensity as corrected images, the data reductions in the k corrections are immaterial. Can you elaborate on the data type? Do you know how the images were filtered, ect.?

You should always feel welcome to comment on any thread, as long as you are providing relavent supportive or contradicting evidence.

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jwj

It's ok not to know.

No. As we all know the observational constraints are very stringent. Any tweaking of the distance modulus has instant repercussions for other piles of data. It is not easy to find plausible solutions outside of the BB framework.

The community needs to quit parroting the gurus and ask hard questions.

A good one to start with is: What do you mean 99% of the universe is not anything we know anything about?

Come to think of it, I had a Sunday School teacher explain the universe to me the same way.

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jwj

It's ok not to know.