At the time of the meeting, Halton Arp had been a keen observer of strange galaxies for some forty years. His conclusion that supposedly remote quasars are actually connected to nearby galaxies by observable streams of gas, saw him branded a heretic and exiled from academia in the USA. This also implies that redshift is not an indicator of velocity, quasars are not the brightest and most remote objects in the universe but are nearby, and hence the reasoning regarding redshifts and the Big Bang hypothesis immediately collapses. He is now an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in West Germany. His earliest published work was the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (1963) - his latest is Seeing Red.

The Electric Universe model forms a coherent new Big Picture of the universe. It highlights repeated electrical patterns at all scales that enable laboratory experiments to explain the strange energetic events seen, for example, in deep space, on the Sun and on Jupiter's moon, Io. The model follows Hannes Alfvén's entreaty for scientists to work backward in time using observations rather than forward from some idealised theoretical beginning. The Electric Universe takes full account of the basic electrical nature of atoms and their interactions. In conventional cosmology, it is the weaker magnetism and the almost infinitely weak force of gravity which rule the cosmos.

The Electric Universe grew out of an interdisciplinary approach to science and the realization that a new plasma cosmology and an understanding of electrical phenomena in space could illuminate work being done in comparative mythology. By using information from a wide span of human existence and knowledge, the Electric Universe can provide answers to many questions that seem unrelated. For example, records of the prehistoric sky can help unravel the recent history of the planets. And the planets bear witness with pristine scars of cosmic encounters. The result is an exciting "Big Picture" that emphasizes our dramatic prehistory and essential connection with the universe.

             Solar Magnetic Arcade