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Jan. Sammer
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560 Riverside Drive Apartment 3Q
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New York NY
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10027
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February 21,1986
Dear Dewey:
I have looked up the reports on the “fifth force” in New Scientist, Nature, and The Economist, as well as the original article in Physical Review Letters. I am going to write to all four, and maybe to others as they come up.
Thank you for proofreading the “Dimensions of Motion” article; I apologize for the large number of typos.
I have some inclination for scientific work also, and in casting about for something I could handle, I hit upon a catalogue of quasars. I have begun doing a spreadsheet using some of the data in that catalogue; basically, the idea is to do the kind of tabulations you have done in The Universe of Motion, but this time with the entire population of known quasars. This should not be as difficult as it may sound, because the U-B and B-V values for most of the quasars listed are unknown, and therefore they have to be omitted from the survey. I have had some trouble finding the data for the 178 MHz radio flux, though I did find a lot of observations at 1.41 GHz; the catalogue I am using lists radio flux densities observed at 6 and 11 cm (recorded in ‘Jy’ — does that mean flux units?). If I cannot find the 178 MHz values, I will have to try to redo your demonstration of the two classes of quasars using the radio observations at 6 and 11 cm.
Enclosed is a very preliminary sample of the kind of work I intend to do: it lists the total redshift, broken down into the q and z components, as well as the U-B and B-V values. I had some trouble with the formula, but finally figured out that if
| Z = z+3.5z½ |
( 1 )
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then
| z=[(Z+3.065)½ -1.75]² |
( 2 )
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You may find this discovery trivial, but it took me two days to figure out. In any case, it enabled me to plug the formula into the spreadsheet, so that the calculations could be done automatically. The resulting table shows the values for 75 quasars; the total listing will include several hundred of them (the radio flux values will come later). Eventually I would also like to test the quasar-galaxy associations and see in how many cases q/z½ is a fixed ratio, i.e., basically replicating your work on pp. 293-296 of UM, but with a larger sample.
If you have any suggestions for the kind of statistics I am intending to do, please let me know.
Regards,
