American Copernicus – Grote Reber and the Big Bang

Written by William Walter Kay BA LL B on May 29, 2019. Posted in Current News

There is no beginning or ending. The material universe extends beyond the greatest distances we can observe optically or by radio means. It is boundless. (G. Reber)

The 20^th century’s two keenest astronomers haled from Wheaton, Illinois. Edwin Hubble moved to Wheaton in 1900, age 10. Grote Reber (pictured) was born there in 1911.

Hubble’s junior high teacher, Miss Grote, was Reber’s mother and namesake. Reber considered himself Hubble’s pupil. The two met once, in 1952. Their chat began on the topic of Miss Grote.

In 1933 Reber earned his electrical engineering degree from Illinois Institute of Technology where he excelled at electronics, not math. For the next 18 years Reber designed receivers for the Chicago-based Stewart-Warner and Belmont Radio corporations.

A ham radio buff and amateur astronomer, Reber was fascinated by a 1933 New York Times article about Karl Jansky’s discovery of radio waves emanating from the Sagittarius Constellation. Reber contacted Jansky about a collaborative project. The Depression squelched many such proposals.

In 1937 Reber expended $1,600 and much sweat constructing the world’s first radio telescope. He covered his 10-meter-diameter parabolic dish with sheet metal. Radio waves reflected onto an antenna propped 8 meters above the dish’s center. The dish rotated north-south. Earth’s rotation provided the east-west scan. The apparatus filled the vacant lot behind his mom’s house.

Daytime automobile traffic interrupted reception. Hence, for several years Reber’s weekdays consisted of coming home from Stewart-Warner, eating supper, and going to bed. He rose at midnight to scan the sky for radio waves; writing down detector readings every minute. Then he grabbed breakfast and drove to Chicago. On weekends he systemized data. Such was life for Earth’s only radio astronomer.

By 1944 Reber had mapped the Milky Way; identifying its center behind Sagittarius. Later, when asked why he neglected doing pioneering research on solar radio emissions, Reber said he had a day job. (He did patent a radio sextant allowing astronomers to “shoot the Sun” on cloudy days.)

Radio astronomy boomed post-WWII, partly due to surplus radar dishes. The trend was toward higher frequencies with greater angular resolution. To Reber: “the science seemed to be in good hands.” Thus, he decided to ply the sky at hectometer (100 meter) wavelengths. For this, Research Corporation of America provided funding.

At hectometer wavelengths the ionosphere becomes problematic. To radio waves this atmospheric layer, especially at 200 to 300 kilometer altitudes, is like a mirror silvered on both sides. Human-made radio waves reflect downward, allowing for communications around Earth’s curvature. Star-born radio waves bounce back into space.

As the ionosphere thins at 40 to 50 degrees latitude (north and south) Reber had to choose between Lake Superior’s north shore and Tasmania for his hectometer observatory. Earth tumbles sideways with its North Pole pointing toward the Milky Way’s sparsely starred periphery and its South Pole pointing to a densely starred center. Reber chose Tasmania’s view.

In 1954 Reber shipped 10 crates of radio gear to an abandoned ionosphere research station in Tasmania’s midlands. Here he discovered that while at wavelengths of 1 meter and shorter the radio sky resembles the optical sky; at hectometer wavelengths the Milky Way’s background becomes opaquely bright. Galaxies vanish in the glare. He attributed this to intergalactic gas energised by starlight. These revelations afforded Reber grander opportunities.

Tasmania provided both a window through the ionosphere and an Equator-to-South Pole scan. Reber revelled in Tasmania’s dearth of radio interference. Thus, in 1961 he returned to plant his “antenna farm.” This consisted of 192 wooden poles each extending 20 meters above ground and each capped with dipole (e.g. rabbit’s ears) antennae. He erected these antennae in a square kilometre array across a donated sheep pasture.

Reber first published in 1940. The journal editor couldn’t find reviewers but, trusting intuition, published anyway. Overall, Reber published 88 pieces, mostly peer-reviewed papers in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers which after 1963 became one of many “Transactions” of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Reber also published in: Transactions in Military Electronics, Journal of Geophysical Research, Astrophysics Journal, Science, Nature, Scientific American, Sky and Telescope and Physics Today.

Reber received several awards including one from the Royal Astronomical Society. A replica of Reber’s first radio telescope adorns National Radio Astronomy Observatory grounds at Green Bank, West Virginia.

A Grote Reber Museum adjoins University of Tasmania’s Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory. NASA honoured Reber in 1985 when Space Shuttle Challenger fired-off 200 kg of fuel over Tasmania to create the hole through which 176 meter wavelengths were first detected. Reber’s ashes accompany memorial plaques at 17 radio observatories in India, Russia, Holland etc. An asteroid bears his name (Grote 6886).

Reber’s greatest testaments are the world’s 100 radio telescopes. Many feature designs remarkably similar to his original. His ultimate tribute comes from a consortium led by the International Union of Radio Scientists and International Astronomical Union. They are spending $2 billion mainly to plant the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope observatory across a Western Australia sheep pasture. However, they spare not a word for the man whose idea they’re borrowing; not in their “History of the SKA Project” nor in their “What is Radio Astronomy?” (which eulogises several pioneers).

Official science purged Reber for trashing Big Bang Creationism from 1976 until his 2002 death. In lectures, papers, articles and letters Reber denounced the Big Bang as: “bunk”, “voodoo”, “hocus–pocus”, “ignorant humbug”, “modern mysticism”, “a mental disease”, “a religious myth” and “a peculiar mental aberration.”

Reber’s Cosmology

Christian Doppler articulated the acoustical Doppler Effect in 1842. This sound modification results from relative motion between a sound’s source and listener. When source and listener are approaching, the sound’s wavelength shortens. When they separate, the wavelength lengthens.

After spectroscopy turned its prisms skyward, a Doppler Effect in light was observed in the Sun’s rotating fringes in 1871 (confirmed in laboratory using mirrors in 1901). When a light beam’s source and viewer approach one another, the rainbow spectra created by that beam’s passage through a prism shifts to the blue side. When source and viewer are separating the spectra shifts red-ward.

Circa 1900 astronomers spotted numerous star couplets waltzing about common center-points. Spectroscopes showed the star moving toward Earth to be blueshifted while an equal opposite redshift came from its receding partner. Astronomers soon grasped other stellar spectral shifts.

Stars float in a vortex around the Milky Way’s center. The Sun orbits at a 30,000 lightyear distance from this center at 828,000 kilometers per hour. Stars orbiting closer to the center, travel faster. Peripheral stars, move slower. Stars on the fast inside track, yet behind the Sun, are closing the distance on the Sun, hence their spectra is blueshifted.

Stars on the inside track, but in front of the Sun, are pulling away from us. They’re receding, hence redshifted. Stars in the slow outside lane, in front of the Sun, are being overtaken by the Sun, hence are blueshifted. Peripheral stars in our rear-view mirrors are being left in the stardust. They’re receding, hence redshifted.

Cosmically speaking, these stars are extremely nearby. Spectral analysis of distant galaxies required recalibration. First, galaxies had to be discovered.

*

Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) grew annoyed at fuzzy white objects that looked like comets but upon investigation proved stationary. He catalogued these duds as a courtesy to fellow comet hunters. Speculation grew that Messier’s white nebulae might be distant stellar populations, distinct from our own.

In 1920 Mount Wilson Observatory’s George Hale organised, for the National Academy of Sciences, the Great Shapley-Curtis Debate on the Universe’s size and the nature of nebulae. No winner emerged.

In 1924 Mount Wilson’s Edwin Hubble gauged the remoteness of Cepheid stars in the Andromeda nebula. Hubble proved Andromeda to be a separate stellar system located unheard of distances from our own. “Galaxy” and “Milky Way” entered our vocabulary.

*

In 1935 Milton Humason completed spectral analyses on 150 galaxies. All were redshifted; none blueshifted. Some redshifts corresponded to “symbolic” velocities of 40,000 kilometers per second. This contrasted starkly with intra-galactic stellar recession speeds of 2 to 60 kps.

To Reber:

“The results were startling because of the magnitude of the phenomenon, but partly because no blueshifts were found. Clearly, the interpretation of these spectral shifts as representing relative motion is dubious.”

(100 blueshift galaxies have since been confirmed. All orbit alongside the Milky Way around the Virgo Cluster. Of the million-plus galaxies analysed outside our locale, all exhibit redshifts.)

Humason cautioned:

“It is not at all certain the redshifts observed in the spectra are to be interpreted as Doppler Effects.”

In his opus magnum, The Observational Approach to Cosmology (Oxford, 1937), Hubble insisted it was a “sheer assumption” that galactic redshift indicated velocity. Hubble and Humason believed redshifts indicated distance not velocity. Leading astronomers Zwicky, Hale and Struve doubted galactic redshift represented recessional velocity. Reber reminds:

“During the 1930s, the cause of redshifts was still an open question. Big Bang cosmology had not yet become enshrined as a creed of religious dogma...”

The belief that galactic redshift meant recessional velocity resulted from: “an earlier background assumption, rarely mentioned or even implied, that intergalactic space is empty, a void.”

After Big Bangers sleighted the intergalactic medium, nothing was left, save relative motion, to explain redshifts. This imaginary motion underpinned the expanding Universe fallacy. But for the “worrisome assumption that intergalactic space is a void” the Big Bang would never have entered textbooks. This assumption defies elementary physics:

“Light cannot interact with a void. By making this assumption, the door is closed to all physical phenomenon.”

Reber studied radio waves. A wave is a disturbance of a medium. Waves without mediums, waves in voids, are inconceivable. Reber added that if intergalactic space was a vacuum, galaxies would disperse into it.

Many leading astronomers rejected the space-void postulate. A 1957 paper by Fritz Zwicky poured acidic commentary on theories presuming space was empty. Hubble concurred:

“The fact that we have not been able to detect matter in inter-nebular space does not necessarily exclude its existence, even in considerable quantity.”

*

The misappropriation of Hubble’s legacy was a chief Reber grievance. “Hubble’s Constant” – used to depict the Universe’s alleged expansion by implying a direct relationship between galactic distance and recessional velocity – was neither concocted nor accepted by Hubble.

“Hubble’s Constant” was concocted by Roman Catholic theological supremo Monseigneur Georges Lemaitre (later Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ President). To Hubble, Lemaitre’s ideas harboured monstrous incongruities. Here’s Hubble 1937:

“The disturbing features are all introduced by the recession factor, by the assumption that redshifts are velocity shifts. The departure from the linear law of redshifts, the departure from uniform distribution, the curvature necessary to restore homogeneity, the excess material demanded by the curvature; each of these is merely the recession factor in another form… the restrictions in time-scale, the limitations of the spatial dimension… is each equivalent to the recession factor.

On the other hand, if the recession factor is dropped, if the redshifts are not primarily velocity shifts, the picture is simpler and plausible. There is no evidence of expansion and no restriction of time-scale, no trace of spatial curvature and limit of spatial dimension.”

Hubble mocked Big Banger efforts to rescue their slap-dash chronology with claims about a fast-motion early Universe:

“Others suggest that in the crowded jostling days of yesterdays, the rhythm of events was faster than the rhythm of the spacious universe of today, evolution proceeded apace, and into faint surviving traces we now misread the evidence of a great antiquity. Our knowledge is too meagre to estimate the value of such speculations, but they sound like special pleading, like forced solutions of the difficulty.”

Hubble referenced “tired light” 8 times in his opus. This hypothesis of Zwicky’s presumes intergalactic space is filled by a medium. Light waves lose momentum as they press through this medium. After billions of lightyears this energy loss materialises in redshifts. Thus redshifts may gauge Earth-to-galaxy distances; but galactic speedometers they’re not.

*

In his 1977 “Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe” lecture Reber describes the intergalactic medium as an “electron gas.” The transcript possesses caveats about containing undeveloped thoughts. Reber later deemed it simplistic but remained adamant:

“Light must be exposed to some kind of interaction with matter in intergalactic space.”

He later configured this medium as primitive “invisible mass.” Like Zwicky he believed less than 1% of universal matter was visible.

In a 1986 paper Reber envisioned intergalactic space filled with a “plasma” i.e. a diffuse neutral hydrogen gas possessing one electron-proton pair per 100 cubic cm. He adds:

“…light tires as it travels through the intergalactic space. Such is manifest by a shift in spectral lines toward the red proportional to distance. There is no need for an expanding universe.”

A 1989 paper recommends two catalogues detailing hundreds of intergalactic redshift phenomena that can’t be Doppler Effects. Reber then broaches the intergalactic medium’s refractive index.

As demonstrated by a pencil’s apparent bending in a glass of water; all transparent media redirect/slow (refract) light waves. Water’s refractive index is 1.3. Crown glass’s is 1.5. Diamond’s is 2.4. Air’s refractive index is 1.00027. The intergalactic medium possesses a refractive index. It redirects/slows (redshifts) light.

Reber’s final (1995) paper visualises galaxies enveloped by “haloes of plasma” lacking definite boundaries and increasing in density near galactic centers. This plasma is the medium through which light travels. It’s the dark matter constraining galactic vortices.

*

Aged 65 Reber embraced activism. His Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s bumper-stickers read: “The Big Bang is an exploding myth.” His letters to the editor became combative. This passage appeared in Physics Today (1982):

“Biblical creationism is in the news. Another type of creationism, known as Big Bang Cosmology is rampant in the scientific community. Its date of creation is 5 to 20 billion years ago depending on the preferences of the devotee. This creationism has the same weaknesses as the biblical brand. Big Bang Cosmology is truly a religion requiring large amounts of blind faith from its followers.”

His 1988 article in 21^st Century magazine begins:

“The whole business of Big Bang Creationism is very shaky and based on dubious assumptions. The underlying questions have become lost in the sands of time and are no longer taught even in astronomy schools. Lately, the Big Bang Creationists have far overplayed their hand, making themselves look like fools. However, because the old-line scientific trade journals are also dominated by reactionary fuddy-duddies, there is not much opportunity for readers to examine the underlying issues.”

Reber’s ‘Big Bang is Bunk’ tour entertained audiences across the Anglosphere, and attracted hecklers. Nonplussed, Reber recalls a disruption of a dinner speech given during a Denver astrophysicist conference:

“A few young punks from the University of Colorado tried to make interjections. They were booed down by the audience. I poured on the ridicule and sarcasm. Everyone had a wonderful time.”

Ever the optimist, Reber ambled to the crematorium convinced:

“A hundred years from now, people will look back at Big Bang Creationists and their antics with laughter, much as we laugh at those who argued over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!”

Sources

Feldman, Paul. Grote Reber: Yesterday and Today; Sky and Telescope, July 1988.

http://jump2.nrao.edu/dbtw-wpd/Textbase/Documents/grncr071988b.pdf

Kellermann, Kenneth. Grote Reber Obituary; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, No 5, December 2003.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003BAAS…35.1472K

Marmet, Paul & Reber, Grote. Cosmic Matter in the Non-expanding Universe; IEEE Transactions in Plasma Science, May 1989.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3162867_Cosmic_Matter_and_the_Nonexpanding_Universe

National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s List of Reber’s Publications

https://www.nrao.edu/archives/Reber/reber_publist.shtml

Reber, Grote. Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe; University of Tasmania, Occasional Paper 9, December 1977.

https://bazaarmodel.net/Onderwerpen/Endless-Boundless-Stable-Universe/

Reber, Grote. Inflationary Universe; Physics Today; 36, 10, 122 (1983).

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2915303

Reber, Grote. Intergalactic Plasma, Astrophysics and Space Science, 1995, 227:93.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00678069

Reber, Grote. Intergalactic Plasma, IEEE Transactions in Plasma Science (Vol. 14, Issue 6, December 1986)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4316618

Reber, Grote. Big Bang Creationism, Physics Today; March, 1982

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2914825

Reber, Grote. The Big Bang is Bunk; 21^st Century, March-April 1989.

https://21sci-tech.com/Articles_2011/BigBang_Bunk.pdf

Blueshift Galaxies

https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae384.cfm

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/blue-shifted-galaxies.93240/

Square Kilometre Array

https://www.skatelescope.org/skadesign/

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