The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You

The first symposium on gravitational collapse and other aspects of relativistic astrophysics (Texas 1, in retrospect) was inspired by one idea—gravitational collapse of massive objects as an energy source—and one observational discovery—the large red shifts of optical counterparts of the quasistellar radiosources (soon quasars, even when radio quiet). Since that time, there has been fierce interplay at Symposia 2–26 between new ideas, new observations (or experiments if you are a physicist) and old ideas given new life. The talk and this paper explore a subset of the interactions. Texas has typically been a broad church, admitting nonstandard ideas and disputed data. Very approximately, half are still part of our universe of discourse.