One is led to attribute to quasars very many mysterious properties if one assumes the redshift hypothesis to be correct. A patient analysis of the data on quasars over the years led the author to the conclusion that the real source of the trouble is in the assumption that the spectra of quasars have redshifts. In 1973 the author proposed a radically different explanation of the spectra of quasars. In this paper we give the salient features of this theory and compare it to the cosmological redshift hypothesis. For the sake of clarity we shall confine ourselves to quasars in this paper.
There is an HTML version of this paper.