 in Astronomy from Harvard University (1954), and Ph.D. in Astronomy from the California Institute of Technology (1958) where he wrote his dissertation on photoelectric photometry.Based on observations of nearby galaxies, Tifft proposed that the redshifts of galaxies are quantized, or that they occur preferentially as multiples of a set number.These findings on redshift quantization were originally published in 1976 and 1977 in the Astrophysical Journal.