.. _cpr:

==============
 Colin Rourke
==============

January 1st 1943 - December 18th 2024.


I first met Professor Colin Rourke in 1981, as an undergraduate at
Warwick University.  He was part of a wonderful mathematics department
that :ref:`Christopher Zeeman` had put together and I had the good fortune to
have him as my personal tutor.   It was not until over thirty years
later before I realised how fortunate I had been.

At the time I was in awe of Professor Rourke explaining the world of
curves and spaces, seemingly off the top of his head.  As an
undergraduate, I had little contact with Professor Rourke, other than
letting him know where I was living each year.

By the time I graduated it seemed all the big questions in mathematics
had been answered, or studied so thoroughly that progress would
require an immense amount of work.

Then, in 2017 Professor Rourke published, "A new paradigm for the
Universe".  It was a first edition, republished in 2021 as
:ref:`gotu`.

Here was a mathematician, for whom I had immense respect, publishing a
book with a central theme that the Big Bang theory was likely to be a
colossal mistake.

As Rourke explains, the crux of the matter is a proper understanding
of redshift.

The conventional theory assumes all redshift is cosmological, in other
words there is an exact Hubble law. This allows us to convert redshift to
distance.  With the Big Bang assumption, redshift also tells us the
time since the Big Bang.

There is an ironic situation whereby the erroneous assumption that all
redshift is cosmological, leads to misunderstandings of what we are
seeing, which in turn is taken as evidence that the universe has
looked different at different ages, hence re-enforcing the erroneous
assumption of a Big Bang.

Rourke explains how the twin ideas of de Sitter Space and the Sciama
Principle allow for an essentially static universe, a universe that
obeys the Perfect Copernican Principle, that there are no special
times or places in the Universe.   Further, such a universe has
natural explanations for many of the puzzles of the conventional Big
Bang theory.

I said above that there could be no greater gift than the book that
Professor Rourke wrote, but I was wrong.  Back in 2017 I started to
correspond with Professor Rourke about his work. 

He has shown immense patience, reading my long and confused emails and
replying with a few words of wisdom to guide me, or a reference to a
particular page of the book.

It has been a period of unprecedented new observations of the
universe, from both space and earth based observatories.  There has
been no shortage of fascinating puzzles to explain:

* Hubble tension
* Dark matter
* Dark energy
* Inflationary period
* The green valley

Rourke's work provides natural explanations for all of these.

It was the last of these, the Green Valley, which was the subject of
my last message to Colin.  Like many of my communications I was
excited at the possibility of solving a puzzle with one of his ideas
and sent off a hurried message.

I had thought that de Sitter Space alone explained the green
valley, but subsequent experiments, see :ref:`birch`, have shown
things are more complex.

As always, Rourke provides the other key idea necessary to explain the
green valley: the gravitational redshift of the quasar-galaxy
spectrum.

It was with great sadness that I learnt that Professor Colin Rourke
passed away on 18th December 2024.  The goals of this project remain
the same, to create a wider audience for his ideas and to ensure he
gets the credit he deserves for this remarkable work.

It's a task which will be made all the more challenging without his
guiding wisdom.


References
==========

https://celebratio.org/Rourke_CP/cover/1048/

`Emeritus Professor
<https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/people/staff/colin_rourke/>`__
of Mathematics at Warwick University and author of  ref:`gotu`

A visit to his `homepage <https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~masaw/>`__
is highly recommended.

You can find an earlier edition of the book on arxiv, published under
the title, `A new paradigm for the universe
<https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0311033>`__

There is an excellent summary of the book written by Robert MacKay, who
was a co-author of all the key papers behind the ideas in :ref:`gotu`:

https://celebratio.org/Rourke_CP/article/1112/