• observations showing that extragalactic redshifts are NOT caused by an expanding universe

• An empirical picture of the birth and evolution of quasars and galaxies

• Accounts of crucial observations ignored and suppressed

A recognized expert observer of quasars and galaxies, Arp is the author of the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and numerous scholarly publications. Consequently, he has hundreds of galaxies named after him. With Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies and this book he is now famous for being the new Galileo of astronomy with his redshift findings. He has been awarded the Helen B. Warner prize of the American Astronomical Society and the Newcomb Cleveland award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1980 to 1983 and received the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1884. He is currently at the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, Germany.

The present book is sure to outrage many academic scientists. Many of my professional friends will be greatly pained. Why then do I write it? First, everyone has to tell the truth as they see it, especially about important things. The fact that the majority of professionals are intolerant of even opinions which are discordant makes change a necessity. Those friends of mine who also struggle to get the mainstream of astronomy back on track mostly feel that presenting evidence and championing new theories is sufficient to cause change, and that it is improper to criticize an enterprise to which they belong and value highly. I disagree, in that I think if we do not understand why science is failing to self-correct, it will not be possible to fix it.

Arp says, "I suppose my view is that science never matured through the "age of enlightenment." When society at long last learned that major decisions were too important to be left in the hands of kings and generals, a more democratic process was evolved. But science always insisted that only those who possessed arcane knowledge were capable of deciding what was true and what was not true in the world of natural phenomena.

"Now we have a situation where new facts are judged by whether they fit old theories. If they do not, they are condemned with the judgment:

'There is no way of explaining these observations, so they cannot be true.'

"That encourages the dissident to come up with an explanation of how it could be true. It disagrees with convention. Then the jaws of the trap spring shut and the theory labeled:

'....prima facie evidence that the proponent is a crackpot and the evidence is false.'

"This, then, is the crisis for the reasonable members of the profession. With so many alternative, contradictory theories, many of them fitting the evidence very badly, abandoning the accepted theory is a frightening step into chaos. At this point, I believe we must look for salvation from the non-specialists, amateurs and interdisciplinary thinkers—those who form judgments on the general thrust of the evidence, those who are skeptical about any explanation, particularly official ones, and above all are tolerant of other people's theories. (When the complete answer is not known, in a sense every-one is a crackpot—Gasp!).

"The only hope I see is for the more ethical professionals and the more attentive, open-minded non professionals to combine their efforts to form a more  democratic science with better judgment, and slowly transform the subject into an enlightened, more useful activity of society. This is the deeper reason I wrote this book and, although it will cause distress, I believe a painfully honest debate is the only exercise capable of galvanizing meaningful change."

The lectures purpose is to establish that high redshift quasars emerge from the active nuclei of nearby galaxies, and that the major component of redshift values do not have to relate to recessional velocity, and
therefore distance in the Big Bang paradigm.

The pictures tell the story. One can look at some of the key pictures and simply understand by analogy with everyday experience the important aspects of how objects are related to each other in distance, and how they must develop with time. In fact, the whole issue could be reduced to a few pictures in which a person's ability to recognize patterns and sequences would convey most of the meaningful information. If individuals have confidence in what they "see," they can live serenely with the knowledge that they do not yet have ultimate understanding.