William G. Tifft is Emeritus Professor/Astronomer at the University of Arizona

University of Arizona

The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...

. His main interests are in galaxies

Galaxy

A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias , literally "milky", a...

, superclusters and what Tifft calls redshift problems (see redshift quantization

Redshift quantization

Redshift quantization is the hypothesis that the redshifts of cosmologically distant objects tend to cluster around multiples of some particular value...

). He was influential in the development of the first redshift survey

Redshift survey

In astronomy, a redshift survey, or galaxy survey, is a survey of a section of the sky to measure the redshift of astronomical objects. Using Hubble's law, the redshift can be used to calculate the distance of an object from Earth. By combining redshift with angular position data, a redshift...

s http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~thompson/void.html and was an early proponent of manned space astronomy, conducted at a proposed moon base for example. In retirement, he is a principal scientist with the The Scientific Association for the Study of Time in Physics and Cosmology (SASTPC).http://sastpc.org/members.php

He has an A.B. in Astronomy from Harvard University (1954), and Ph.D. in Astronomy from the California Institute of Technology (1958) where he wrote his dissertation on photoelectric photometry

Photometry (astronomy)

Photometry is a technique of astronomy concerned with measuring the flux, or intensity of an astronomical object's electromagnetic radiation...

, a copy of which is available online.

Redshift quantization

Based on observations of nearby galaxies, Tifft has put forward the idea that the redshift

Redshift

In physics , redshift happens when light seen coming from an object is proportionally increased in wavelength, or shifted to the red end of the spectrum...

s of galaxies are quantized, or that they occur preferentially as multiples of a set number. These findings on redshift quantization

Redshift quantization

Redshift quantization is the hypothesis that the redshifts of cosmologically distant objects tend to cluster around multiples of some particular value...

 were originally published in 1976 and 1977 in the Astrophysical Journal

Astrophysical Journal

The Astrophysical Journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering astronomy and astrophysics. It was founded in 1895 by the American astronomers George Ellery Hale and James Edward Keeler. It publishes three 500-page issues per month....

. The ideas were controversial when originally proposed; the editors of the Astrophysical Journal included a note in one of the papers stating that they could neither find errors within the analysis nor endorse the analysis. Subsequently Tifft and Cocke put forward a theory to try to explain the quantization. Tifft's results have been largely replicated by Croasdale and later Napier and Guthrie. Croasdale did a comprehensive analysis of the statistical significance and confirmed the special frame in which quantization is found to be the same over the whole sky. Since the initial publication of these results, Tifft’s findings have been used by others, such as Halton Arp

Halton Arp

Halton Christian Arp is an American astronomer. He is known for his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, which catalogues many examples of interacting and merging galaxies...

, in making an alternative explanation to the Big Bang Theory, which states that galaxies are redshifted because the universe is expanding. However, Tifft himself, when interviewed for the popular science magazine Discover in 1993, stated that he was not necessarily claiming that the universe was not expanding.

External links

• http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?db_key=AST&qform=AST&sim_query=YES&ned_query=YES&aut_logic=OR&obj_logic=OR&author=tifft%2C+w&object=&start_mon=&start_year=&end_mon=&end_year=&ttl_logic=OR&title=&txt_logic=OR&text=&nr_to_return=100&start_nr=1&jou_pick=ALL&ref_stems=&data_and=ALL&group_and=ALL&start_entry_day=&start_entry_mon=&start_entry_year=&end_entry_day=&end_entry_mon=&end_entry_year=&min_score=&sort=SCORE&data_type=SHORT&aut_syn=YES&ttl_syn=YES&txt_syn=YES&aut_wt=1.0&obj_wt=1.0&ttl_wt=0.3&txt_wt=3.0&aut_wgt=YES&obj_wgt=YES&ttl_wgt=YES&txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1Tifft Articles at the NASA ADS Database] | (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-abs_connect?db_key=AST&qform=AST&sim_query=YES&ned_query=YES&aut_logic=OR&obj_logic=OR&author=tifft%2C+w&object=&start_mon=&start_year=&end_mon=&end_year=&ttl_logic=OR&title=&txt_logic=OR&text=&nr_to_return=100&start_nr=1&jou_pick=ALL&ref_stems=&data_and=ALL&group_and=ALL&start_entry_day=&start_entry_mon=&start_entry_year=&end_entry_day=&end_entry_mon=&end_entry_year=&min_score=&sort=SCORE&data_type=SHORT&aut_syn=YES&ttl_syn=YES&txt_syn=YES&aut_wt=1.0&obj_wt=1.0&ttl_wt=0.3&txt_wt=3.0&aut_wgt=YES&obj_wgt=YES&ttl_wgt=YES&txt_wgt=YES&ttl_sco=YES&txt_sco=YES&version=1Full text])

Clicking on this link does a search for all articles by Tifft at the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System. The full text of the articles is available in some cases.