I've just been reading through the late Halton Arp's book 'Seeing Red' and I have loved it. He was a rare astronomer who was able to look at data with fresh eyes, and think about it without trying to shoe-horn it into standard theories. As an introduction to what he concluded in his decades of observing, I can show you this plot of NGC3516Arp, which is one of many similar examples.
The figure shows a Seyfert galaxy (NGC3516) in the centre with various x-ray sources (quasars) surrounding it (measured by Y. Chu). The Seyfert galaxy has a low red shift. The quasars have high redshifts (see the numbers). Redshift? All atoms emit radiation when electrons in them change energy level. If you look at hydrogen in deep space you can see the radiation emitted is due to the known energy levels, as in a lab on Earth. If the photons are red-shifted though, it could mean that the object was moving away from us and the photon has been Doppler shifted into the red. So, it has been assumed by mainstream astronomers that the high redshift-ness of these sources means that they are moving away from us at a great speed. Hence there has arisen the Big Bang Model where the universe is still expanding from an initial explosion so further regions are receding from us faster. In astronomy redshift is used as a proxy for distance.
However, Arp pointed out repeatedly over decades that these high redshift galaxies are often near low redshift galaxies, sometimes being connected with tendrils to them. So, they may not be far off at all! Also, these high redshift objects usually appear along the minor axes of the normal galaxies, as in this case, as if they have been ejected along the spin axis. Further, quasars closer to their parent galaxy have a higher redshift, whereas those further way have a lower redshift. Finally, these redshifts are quantised into the values of: 2, 1.4, 0.95, 0.6, 0.3, 0.06..!
However, Arp pointed out repeatedly over decades that these high redshift galaxies are often near low redshift galaxies, sometimes being connected with tendrils to them. So, they may not be far off at all! Also, these high redshift objects usually appear along the minor axes of the normal galaxies, as in this case, as if they have been ejected along the spin axis. Further, quasars closer to their parent galaxy have a higher redshift, whereas those further way have a lower redshift. Finally, these redshifts are quantised into the values of: 2, 1.4, 0.95, 0.6, 0.3, 0.06..!
Arp's own judgement here was that a Steady State theory by Hoyle & Narlikar (1964) might explain some of these observations. This theory also has similarities to the theory of Dicke (who I have also been reading about lately in a book 'Einstein's Lost Key' by A. Unzicker). In Hoyle and Narlikar's theory the mass of objects depends on the surface area of the sphere that they could be aware of given the finite speed of light. New matter, then (produced from energy, and information in QI) can only be aware of a tiny region of space, since it has not had time to collect information from anywhere else, and so new matter has lower mass. Therefore, the new electrons have lower mass and so when they make the transition between atomic energy levels the photons given off have less energy than expected - their emissions are red-shifted. Therefore light coming off the quasars newly ejected from the galaxy, have high redshifts, and redshifts decline as they move away. This also means that high redshift should be common in the early universe so the redshifted objects we see far away are not necessarily moving away, and therefore there is no need for a big bang. Hoyle and Narlikar's theory can not explain the quantisation - but quantised inertia can.
Of course, Arp's observations enjoyed about the same popularity in astrophysics as Galileo did in his tour of the Vatican since, if they are true, the big bang theory & all of modern cosmology, with its distance measures, is reduced to a pile of expensive rubble. His accounts of the bizarre lengths the mainstream community went through to silence him are tragic but also hilarious (I would recommend the book for entertainment as well as for information).
Arp's observations are music to my ears because they sound like quantised inertia. Arp states that his observations demand a theory with the following characteristics. It requires inertial mass to increase with cosmic time (as predicted by Steady State theories and QI). It requires inertial mass to be quantised (quantised inertia!). It has matter being ejected from the spin axes of galaxies (as QI predicts). It is a Machian theory in which the mass of an object is determined by the amount of matter the object could have been in contact with in its history, which links to Hoyle and Narlikar and QI in which the mass of objects is determined by the size of the cosmos they perceive. Note that in this new approach the cosmic boundary is still there, but is not caused by objects moving away at the speed of light, but because we have not had time to collect data from behind this boundary.
It is my instinct that raw anomalous observations are the key to truth. Halton Arp, despite being dead, has just proven in my opinion to be hugely more incisive than modern 'theory-first' cosmology and I hope this will provide the inspiration to finally complete QI which may be a quantum-enabled cousin of a whole range of early classical theories by Hoyle, Dicke, Narlikar..etc that were blown up by the big bang freight train. I can email Narlikar too - he's still around.
References
F. Hoyle; J. V. Narlikar (1964). "A New Theory of Gravitation" (PDF). Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 282 (1389): 191–207. http://ayuba.fr/mach_effect/hoyle-narlikar1964.pdf
Unzicker, A., 2015. Einstein's Lost Key. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Einsteins-Lost-Key-Overlooked-Century/dp/1519473435
