The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer

The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer
Author	Hilton Ratcliffe
Published	2007 (2nd ed. 2008)
Publisher	AuthorHouse
Pages	428
ISBN	1434307271

The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer (2007) is the first book by the South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe. It is at once a critique of Big Bang cosmology, an argument for a static universe, and — as its subtitle promises — a personal confession: the account of how a working astronomer came to disbelieve the theory he had been trained to apply.

The second edition of 2008 carried the blunter subtitle a daring exposé of cosmology's dark secrets.

The crisis behind the book

Ratcliffe's starting point is not a particular observation but a structural complaint, and he states it in the book's own words:

In the course of using essential theories of science in my decades-long attempt to demystify the heavens, I became increasingly frustrated by ideas that just didn't harmonise. If we were uncovering the truth, I reasoned, then the component parts devised by disparate specialists should dovetail neatly together. But they don't. Classical Newtonian mechanics doesn't see eye-to-eye with Einstein's relativity; both are sneered at by quantum mechanics. Theories highly successful in their own right seemed when compared with one another to be describing different universes.
— Hilton Ratcliffe, The Virtue of Heresy

The conclusion he draws from that observation is the book's real thesis, and it is a strong one:

I decided that it was scientific methodology that had gone horribly wrong. I was convinced that some of the fundamental hypotheses upon which I based my enquiry were by strict analysis utterly invalid. They did not describe reality. That was a train-smash, both for me and for the progress of science, as I understood it. This book is an account of that crisis.
— Hilton Ratcliffe, The Virtue of Heresy

The move is worth marking. Ratcliffe does not argue that one theory is mistaken and another should replace it. He argues that the mutual incompatibility of physics' most successful theories is itself the evidence — that a discipline whose best accounts cannot be reconciled has a problem with its method, not merely with its results, and that the profession's willingness to live with the contradiction is the symptom to be explained.

The title

The book opens by reclaiming the word in its title, which Ratcliffe defines as:

The declaration of opinions contrary to prevailing doctrine; opposition to dogma; unorthodox approach to science; method employed by one's intellectual enemy; individual behaviour often attracting the label "crank".
— Hilton Ratcliffe, The Virtue of Heresy

The last clause carries the argument. Ratcliffe's point is that "crank" functions in modern science as "heretic" once did in theology — as a label that ends discussion rather than one that follows from having examined a claim and found it wanting. Calling heresy a virtue is a deliberate inversion: the dissenting position is presented not as an unfortunate necessity but as the condition of science remaining self-correcting at all.

Haquar: the book as story

The book's most distinctive feature is its form. Rather than write a technical monograph, Ratcliffe frames much of the argument around Haquar, an imagined alien space-shuttle driver who carries the reader on a journey through space and time. The device appears in the early chapters and returns periodically across the book's twelve chapters.

Ratcliffe is explicit that this is a choice about audience:

But fear not, this is not a high-tech science report for über-geeks. It's a storybook filled with myth and adventure. It's science unplugged.
— Hilton Ratcliffe, The Virtue of Heresy

The device does real argumentative work as well as narrative work. A traveller who actually goes to the places cosmology describes is a way of asking, repeatedly, what is observed as against what is inferred — which is precisely the distinction Ratcliffe accuses Big Bang cosmology of blurring.

The cosmological argument

The substantive case is against cosmic expansion and for a universe that is static, and it develops the themes Ratcliffe would pursue for the rest of his career: the interpretation of redshift, the growth of unobserved entities invoked to keep the standard model solvent, and the case for bringing electrical and plasma phenomena into cosmology in place of a gravity-only account.

This last is the constructive half of the book, and connects it to the plasma cosmology and electric universe traditions documented on this wiki. Ratcliffe developed the static-universe argument at full technical length three years later in The Static Universe: Exploding the Myth of Cosmic Expansion (2010), and returned to the sociological theme — how belief contaminates scientific judgement — in Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks (2014). The three books are best read as one project: the diagnosis, the astrophysics, and the epistemology.

Reception

The book was reviewed for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada by the Canadian astronomer Alan H. Batten — a notable fact in itself, since dissident cosmology is more often ignored by professional journals than engaged with.

Batten opened by recalling a conversation with Grote Reber, the amateur who took Karl Jansky's detection of galactic radio noise seriously when the professionals did not, and who became with Jansky a founder of radio astronomy. The two had agreed that words like "heresy" and "orthodoxy" have no place in the vocabulary of science — while acknowledging that the concepts are nonetheless alive and well in the scientific community, enforced through granting councils denying funds, time-allocation committees denying access to instruments, and editors and referees delaying or preventing publication.

That concession, from a mainstream astronomer reviewing in a mainstream journal, is the most valuable thing said about the book. It grants Ratcliffe's central sociological claim — that orthodoxy in science is enforced by control of money, telescope time and print — while declining his cosmology.

Other reviewers have found the book's arguments substantial but its manner uneven, judging that Ratcliffe achieves his aims "though in an unusual and somewhat 'rambling' style", and that his criticisms of Big Bang cosmology and his case for a static universe contain "many good arguments, which should be carefully evaluated". Readers have rated it highly, if in small numbers.

The book's mixed form is the recurring complaint. A work that is part memoir, part popular astronomy and part science fiction is harder to answer point by point than a monograph would be — which is a cost of the accessibility Ratcliffe was deliberately buying.

Related work on this wiki

The Virtue of Heresy belongs to the substantial body of Big Bang criticism catalogued here. Compare:

Halton C Arp on quasars, intrinsic redshifts and discordant associations — the observational case Ratcliffe draws on
Eric J Lerner, whose The Big Bang Never Happened makes the plasma-cosmology case at length
Plasma Cosmology and Electric Universe — the constructive alternatives
Non-standard cosmology and Big Bang — the wider debate as documented on this wiki
Redshift — the observation on which the whole dispute turns

Ratcliffe was a founding member of the Alternative Cosmology Group, served on the organising committee of the Second Crisis in Cosmology Conference (Port Angeles, 2008), and joined the Natural Philosophy Alliance in 2008.

Links to Purchase Book

The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer (1st edition, 2007)
Second edition, revised and updated (2008)