Does Theory Advance with Technology?

Extract

Observational technology in astronomy moves ahead. We can see a thousand times fainter and ten to a hundred times more detail than 40 years ago. But does our application to research match the engineering progress? Most of us make the easy assumption that theory is right at the cutting edge, waiting to gobble up each new fact into an even deeper, more detailed insight into the universe. But humans frequently misunderstand the real problems and misapply technology - making everything worse for agonizingly long times.

Is it possible that extragalactic astronomy has serious misconceptions? The key point to appreciate is that its whole structure rests on the belief that we know the distances to objects in the universe. The simple shift to the red of the spectrum of any observed object is assumed to measure its distance. But for 25 years evidence has been increasing that drastically incorrect distances can result. Unfortunately, not only quasar distances but the distances to the vast majority of galaxies also depend on redshifts.