woe betide the heretic ...

On the subject of heresies, as I tuck into a slice of
deep-fried Bob Bakker (geologist's joke), I wonder what Halton Arp is
up to these days? Still asking awkward questions about quasars?

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Written at Fri, 09 Dec 2005 13:29 GMT

Aidan Karley .group
wrote in :

I wonder what Halton Arp is
up to these days?

http://www.haltonarp.com/

--
Colin J Denman
N 51º 54' 38" W 00º 29' 45" Elev: 125m
email: -- use my first name
home: http://www.cjdenman.freeserve.co.uk

In message , Aidan Karley
.group writes
On the subject of heresies, as I tuck into a slice of
deep-fried Bob Bakker (geologist's joke), I wonder what Halton Arp is
up to these days? Still asking awkward questions about quasars?


According to his web site http://www.haltonarp.com/ he's got a brand
new paper in Progress In Physics - "Observational Cosmology: From High
Redshift Galaxies to the Blue Pacific" and he's now at the Max Planck
Institute in Germany, so things are more comfortable for heretics than
in Giordano Bruno's time.
But shouldn't Bob Bakker be served raw and at about 38 Celsius, like
Klingon wine? (saying "blood heat" doesn't sound right in this context
:-)

Aidan Karley .group wrote:
I wonder what Halton Arp is
up to these days? Still asking awkward questions about quasars?

Yup. A quick astro-ph search turns up (for example)
astro-ph/0510815
astro-ph/0504237
astro-ph/0501090
astro-ph/0401103
There's also plenty of material on his web page (http://www.haltonarp.com).

[See William Keel's "Galaxies and the Universe" course lecture on
Arp and the quasar-redshift controversy,
http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/arp.html
for a good synopsis of why most astrophysicists don't agree with Arp.]

ciao,

--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply"
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut),
Golm, Germany, "Old Europe" http://www.aei.mpg.de/~jthorn/home.html
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
-- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam

Aidan Karley wrote:

On the subject of heresies, as I tuck into a slice of
deep-fried Bob Bakker (geologist's joke), I wonder what Halton Arp is
up to these days? Still asking awkward questions about quasars?

Yup. If you search on ADS for articles written by
"Arp, H", you'll see several in the past few years.
The most recent one is

The Discovery of a High-Redshift X-Ray-Emitting QSO Very Close to the
Nucleus of NGC 7319

in ApJ 620, 88, 2005.

His affiliation is listed as the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics,
so I guess he is still working at that institution. A pretty nice job,
at a respected and prestigious institution. I'm not sure that
the title "heretic" fits him. He just seems to be asking questions
that don't interest many other astronomers. (For good reason, I would
add, but that doesn't make it wrong to ask them)


Michael Richmond

In article , Jonathan
Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply wrote:
[See William Keel's "Galaxies and the Universe" course lecture on
Arp and the quasar-redshift controversy,
http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/arp.html
for a good synopsis of why most astrophysicists don't agree with Arp.]

Ah, so we're definitely not following the "Bruno" school of
heretic management (at the moment - would chaining someone to USENET for
a day be equivalent to showing them the instruments of torture?).
Hmmm, the cited link has a broken link to a picture of Stephan's
Quintet. I think the file he's pointing at is likely to be one of the 3
on
http://www.spacetelescope.org/goodie...s_quintet.html

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Written at Mon, 12 Dec 2005 12:28 GMT

Aidan Karley .group wrote:
In article , Jonathan
Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply wrote:
[See William Keel's "Galaxies and the Universe" course lecture on
Arp and the quasar-redshift controversy,
http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/galaxies/arp.html
for a good synopsis of why most astrophysicists don't agree with Arp.]

Ah, so we're definitely not following the "Bruno" school of
heretic management (at the moment - would chaining someone to USENET for
a day be equivalent to showing them the instruments of torture?).
Hmmm, the cited link has a broken link to a picture of Stephan's
Quintet. I think the file he's pointing at is likely to be one of the 3
on
http://www.spacetelescope.org/goodie...s_quintet.html

Thanks for pointing that out - I've updated the link. I've been
blindsided when both STScI and the ST-ECF reorganized their sites,
and both now refuse to work with the Irix machine that I do most
of my work on. I got quite a rude email from the STScI webmaster
about that (not mych more polite than "contract requires me to support
only the top 95% in market share, so you're an idiot and probably not
even smart enough to upgrade"). That stung, considering as how I've
contributed several of the color composite images they refuse to send my
machine...

The "Galaxies and the Universe" site may be updated more systematically
next fall, depending on how our course schedule works out.

Bill Keel

In article , William C.
Keel wrote:
I've been
blindsided when both STScI and the ST-ECF reorganized their sites,
and both now refuse to work with the Irix machine that I do most
of my work on.

I take it that means that they've switched to using something
Windoze only, like Active Server Pages? ... Hmmm, no, looks like
normal-ish CSS-ified HTML which shouldn't cause too much problems for
anything reasonably recent. A little bit of JavaScript, but that's been
fairly well tied down and decently behaved for the last few years -
even Hotmail's website works more or less with non-Microsoft browsers
(we can expect that to change!). I don't see anything too horrible in
there.
What browser(s) are you using on your Irix box(-es)?

[Mod. note: this might be wandering off-topic slightly, please take to
e-mail if it's going to be exclusively technical... -- mjh]

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: +57d10' , -02d09' (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
Written at Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:45 GMT

In article ,
"Stupendous_Man" writes:

His affiliation is listed as the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics,
so I guess he is still working at that institution. A pretty nice job,
at a respected and prestigious institution.

I remember reading one of his books (probably QUASARS, REDSHIFTS AND
CONTROVERSIES) where he talks a lot about how he has been discriminated
against by the astrononomical community etc. Then I get to the end of
the book, and the back jacket flap says "he is currently on the staff of
the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching". I know many
astronomers who wouldn't mind that sort of "discrimination".

I don't know precisely what type of position he holds, or held, there,
nor whether it was paid. It is of course easier to get a "guest
scientist" position than a real paid position. (Not that this is
necessarily bad; Bernhard Schmidt, of Schmidt camera fame, never had a
paid position in astronomy, though he worked for a long time as a
volunteer at the Hamburg Observatory. He also only had one
refereed-journal paper. He is one of the handful of people who
revolutionised observational astronomy.)