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Thank you for your post!

I am still very much an "inflationary universe" "Big Bang" kind of gal, but I am also troubled by the out-of-hand dismissal of some original thinking.

Truly, no mortal being has all the answers and even the greatest minds blunder now and again, e.g. Einstein's cosmological constant. I suspect some may start with a great idea and then become too enthused to "make it so" causing the idea to be "back-burnered."

Why isn't the Lyman Alpha Forest quantized?

You might find this interesting:

Observational Cosmology - Students for the Exploration and Development of Space:

High-redshift quasars with a substantial Lyman-alpha forest can be used to investigate the existence of a redshift quantization (if any) in the Lyman-alpha lines.

For lurkers interested in Tifft etc.: Redshift Quantization and Quantum Cosmology

In case y'all are interested in the harmonics aspect (or if any lurkers are following) - here are some interesting links:

Physics News 481, April 27, 2000

BEST MAP YET OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND (CMB). The CMB is a redshifted picture of the universe at the moment photons and newly formed hydrogen atoms parted company roughly 300,000 years after the big bang. First detected in the 1960s, the CMB appeared to be utterly uniform until, eight years ago, the COBE satellite provided the first hint of slight temperature variations, on a coarse scale, with an angular resolution of about 7 degrees….

The 36-member, international "Boomerang" (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics) collaboration, led by Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, confirms that a plot of CMB strength peaks at a multipole value of about 197 (corresponding to CMB patches about one degree in angular spread), very close to what theorists had predicted for a cosmology in which the universe's overall curvature is zero and the existence of cold dark matter is invoked. The absence of any noticeable subsidiary peaks (higher harmonics) in the data, however, was not in accord with theory.

The shape of the observed pattern of temperature variations suggests that a disturbance very like a sound wave moving through air passed through the high- density primordial fluid and that the CMB map can be can be thought of as a sort of sonogram of the infant universe. (de Bernardis et al., Nature, 27 April 2000.)

Big Bang Evidence Found – May 2, 2001

"The early universe is full of sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet," explained Paolo deBernardis of the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the members of the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERanG) team. "For the first time the new data show clearly the harmonics of these waves." Harmonics In The Early Universe: The CMB Power Spectrum June 5, 2001

The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the "harmonic proportions" of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.

The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution "power spectra" show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.

Cosmological Parameters and Galaxy Biasing – May 22, 2002

Because this information fits nicely with my "take" on origins, I'm also posting it to the Freeper View on Origins thread.