cosmologist Ralph Asher Alpher wrote a letter to Nature three months later in response to this suggestion heavily criticizing the approach, "No generally accepted physical mechanism has been proposed for this loss." Still, until the so-called "Age of Precision Cosmology" was ushered in with results from the WMAP space probe and modern redshift surveys, tired light models could occasionally get published in the mainstream journals, including one that was published in the February 1979 edition of Nature proposing "photon decay" in a curved spacetime that was five months later criticized in the same journal as being wholly inconsistent with observations of the gravitational redshift observed in the solar limb. In 1986 a paper claiming tired light theories explained redshift better than cosmic expansion was published in the Astrophysical Journal, but ten months later, in the same journal, such tired light models were shown to be inconsistent with extant observations. As cosmological measurements became more precise and the statistics in cosmological data sets improved, tired light proposals ended up being falsified, to the extent that the theory was described in 2001 by science writer Charles Seife as being "firmly on the fringe of physics 30 years ago; still, scientists sought more direct proofs of the expansion of the cosmos". See also Dispersion (optics) References Physical cosmology Fringe physics Light Obsolete theories in physics