Hilton Ratcliffe

Hilton Ratcliffe is a South African astrophysicist and mathematician. He holds a number of unorthodox views which are at odds with current mainstream science, though he claims reception of his work has been largely positive.

According to his website, he has 'garnered a great deal of respect amongst the global scientific community for his strictly classical approach to space science'. By his own words, he bases everything he does on observation rather than 'esoteric' theories. He is a denier of anthropogenic global warming and has written a book in support of a static (non-expanding) universe, which is generally considered to be an obsolete theory among the scientific community.

Ratcliffe makes much of his friendship with Patrick Moore who did, indeed, write the foreward to The Static Universe, going as far as to call it a "collaboration". However, this appeal to authority falls a trifle flat when it is noted that Moore, in the foreword, is careful to distance himself from Ratcliffe's claims, noting only that "It is easy to see that a tremendous amount of research has gone into the book" and "before rejecting them the reader must surely examine them very carefully indeed."

Books

 * The Virtue of Heresy: Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer (2008), ISBN 978-1419695568
 * The Static Universe: Exploding the Myth of Cosmic Expansion (2010), ISBN 978-0986492624