http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp

Simultaneously highly respected and highly controversial.

He left the USA, probably because his refusal to accept the Big Bang led him to being denied telescope observing time in his native country. He worked from the Max Planck Institut in Germany, with a small cadre of fellow rebels.

Although I don't accept his ideas, I do feel he was treated shabbily by the US astrophysics community. He was sort of the Timothy Leary of Cosmology.

His monumental Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a standard reference work available in every University Library, and online.

Arp is the quintessential outlier, a man of solid education, undeniable accomplishments, credentials and reputation who stills rejects the orthodoxy of his field. Is he right or wrong? I am certainly not qualified to comment on it, although I know enough astronomy to know he was practically an outcast among his colleagues because of his views. His arguments sound very convincing to me. He may be wrong, but he's not a crank.

He is the ultimate example of how even in a hard science like astrophysics, truth is determined by consensus and general agreement among the practitioners. I.e., peer review.

You cannot "prove" or "disprove" anything. For some reason, this perfectly competent scientist simply cannot see what everyone else sees. He interprets the data differently. Or alternatively, everyone is dead wrong except him (don't laugh, that happens just often enough in science that we can't dismiss it out of hand).

RIP.