The incentive for this revision is that I changed my internet service provider (ISP) from the rather slow telephone modem connnection to a TV modem which, on paper, is four times faster: 220 kb per sec vs 56 kb per sec (and you're more likely to be near the maximum transmission rate on the TV cable, although both slow down during peak hours). In previous editions I've always been a little wary of the projected long download times via the slower transmission rate. Although I left most of the copy unchanged regarding downloads, that is much less of a concern now.

            And since I have a new ISP, then I also have a new URL address, the first change in five years.

            Periodically it's necessary to check whether the external links still work, and I did that this time.

            As you will see, quasars seem to have very unusual statistical behavior in the mid three range of red shifts. Since most quasars are discovered via the "ultraviolet excess" method, that method does not detect many quasars in this range. This is given as the most frequent reason why the number counts go down. But when quasars are found by radio techniques - without the bias in the optical part of the spectrum - that void in the mid-three range of red shifts seems to be there anyway. This "back and forth" argument is something I addressed (for the first time).

            In the last edition (July 2004) I used the NVSS data in the entire equatorial band (-40º to +40º) in the Counterimages file. However, most of the quasar surveys concentrate on regions near the galactic polar caps and ignore areas of the sky near the plane of the Milky Way. So it made sense to me to concentrate on the NVSS sources in galactic polar caps within that -40º to +40º band in celestial cooordinates. (And things get a little interesting when you do it this way.)

            In the previous update (below), I said in the opening paragraph that I might improve upon the diagrams on the next go-around. But I think they're still good enough to get the point across.

            If a picture is worth a thousand words, then there are the equivalent of 16,000 more words because I finally got around to including 16 simple diagrams. The list of diagrams is in the Table of Contents. While some of them are obviously not of professional quality - they're like something a teacher would draw on a blackboard - I believe (hope?) they make things a little clearer. (Improving the viewing quality of some of them is on the agenda for the next "edition", whenever that will be.)

            For years the primary source I have been using for quasars is the latest edition of the Veron quasar catalogue (currently in the 11th edition, with the editions coming out every two to three years). While I have no doubt about its reliability, it has always bothered me not to have another source to verify the statistical behavior of the quasars. But the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) came out with another catalogue recently (J/AJ/126/2579) which lists 16,713 quasars, of which 12,173 appear nowhere else. Although the new SDSS catalogue is not particularly emphasized, it is mentioned at the start of the Essay #5, Part I, and at the end of Essay #5, Part 2. While the format and the data differ slightly from what I have been working with, the catalogue also indicates the unusual statistical behavior of the quasars.

            Finally, there is the rather tedious process of checking to see if all the links to external sites still work, and they seem to be OK.

            There were three short "Reader's Digest Condensed Essays", but with the addition of a few simple diagrams, I thought I could get by with just two.

            There was some modest updating in the new Essay #8 on counterimages, even though the latest data do not add that much to the argument.

            Except for browsing through the Harvard Abstract Service for any unusual observations and checking the CDS site from time to time to see if any new catalogues have been added, this particular update should not have any major revisions for at least a few years, probably whenever the next 12th edition of the Veron quasar catalogue comes out.

1. There were two housecleaning chores:

   1. The early browsers of Internet Explorer and Netscape used different coding to represent the Greek letters. So any Greek letters, which are quite common in mathematics, physics, and astronomy, would be correct only on one browser. Later versions of both browsers display the Greek letters using common coding. The problem and how it is solved (I hope!) on your particular browser are explained in Appendix 11.

   2. I like paragraph indentations, but there is no easy way to do this in HTML. Netscape has a SPACER command that works tolerably well, but is not recognized by the Internet Explorer Browser. What I used for the past two years was a command that made room for a one-line image that wasn't there. When you viewed this on either browser as an HTML document, it worked OK. The problem was that if you printed anything you got obnoxious little horizontal boxes where the indents were supposed to be.

      But this problem is also resolved because both browsers accept the   command - as in "no break, space" - which adds a single space to the text. So I string 11 of those commands together
      
      

                 

      at the start of each paragraph to get an indent of 11 spaces. Unorthodox though it may be, this is accepted by both browsers and eliminates the boxes that were formerly on the print output.

2. I had used the best estimates for the Hubble parameter, the deceleration parameter, and the cosmological constant. But they have been refined within the last year. So I use the most accurate current values to construct the quasar tables.

3. The quasar tables were originally intended to give a graphic representation of how the quasars are behaving. It seems to me that they are less valuable today because the site I used to sort the data now features a way to plot any number of parameters graphically (and is discussed at the end of Essay #5: Part I). But I can do something the new plot utility cannot do: I can combine data from different tables from the same catalogue, which I did in my QSO Tables 1, 2, 5, and 6. And I do walk you through several examples of the new utility.

4. Several new catalogues are now "on line", including the NVSS survey. The data in the the most interesting red shift range is presented in a new Essay #8. But to make room for this new esay, I removed one on homogenity and density which I didn't think contributed that much to the discussion.

5. I originally placed the Essay #6 on anomalies before the discussion of quasars. But once you get an idea of how the quasars are behaving statistically, it makes sense to discuss the anomalies after the quasar discussion, rather than before it.

6. Essay #7 on absorbers is now more condensed.

7. On the last go around in the spring of 2003, there were eight quasar tables (accessible from the Table of Contents). Now there are ten. Table #5 is a new one, as is Table #10.

            However, I did work another short essay - but with a long title - that I included in the file entitled "Reader's Digest Condensed Version". There are now three short essays in this file. All say the same thing, but in slightly different ways.

1. Essay #6 on anomalies was not in any particular order. I found two more unusual observations - the unusually bright supernovae at z = 1.7 and a very high proper motion quasar at z = 3.7 - which I included in the growing list. The bright supernova (SN 1997ff) has been out there for some time, but it was only recently when I noticed it seems to be a good fit for the Riemannian model I think is correct.

   I thought it would be appropriate to show these unusual observations in increasing red shift. The last item - a short discussion on the absorbers - has been expanded a little so you get a flavor of just how unusual this class of objects is behaving. There is, of course, a longer discussion on the absorbers in Essay #8. [That segue is no longer necessary, as the essay on absorbers (#7) follows directly the essay on anomalies (#6).])

2. The Links file has also been rearranged. If you have, say, ten or less links, the order is not particularly important. If you get above that number, then it helps if you have some sort of order so that the reader. As there are several ideas about the character of that fourth spatial dimension - "small", "large", "medium", as explained in the Introduction - the links are arranged in the same order.

3. The essay on quasars was 150k in size. Most of the inordinate length was due to the coding necessary to get the tables to look tolerably decent. (You might have 50 to 100 characters of coding to get one character in a cell to show with a colored background, and that's a lot of coding for a medium to large HTML table.) The problem was the file took too much time to download, and so I divided it into two smaller parts, and removed the largest tables to other files. This helped, and the second part of Essay #7 in now just 65k, because there are still several tables in the file.

   [This is now a two-part Essay #5 in 2003: 91 k for the first part, and most of that is due to the table, and the second part is a 56k file.]

            The main reason why I reviewed everything this time around was that I thought I had a better way to present the Condensed Argument. Outside of this and a few minor changes, there are no substantial differences between this version and the last time I checked everything out, back in February 2002.

            Thus the text for February 2002 update follows.

When I published the first series of essays on the internet in the fall of 1997, the Veron Quasar Catalogue was in the 7th edition. In 1998 the 8th edition was placed on the web, and last March (2000) the 9th edition appeared on the internet. The absolute luminosity of quasars listed in the catalogue is critical because it will be affected by the curvature of space near the antipode, if there is one. In theory, the quasars will pass through a maximum in luminosity at the same time they are passing through a minimum in the number counts, if that intriguing antipode affects the quasar population at high red shifts.

Each subsequent edition of the Veron Quasar Catalogue has roughly 2,000 more quasars than the previous one, and the higher counts of quasars at large red shifts are particularly useful in trying to determine the approximate distance/red shift of the antipode (again, assuming it's there). Most people will probably find the quasar table at the beginning of Essay #7 (now Essay #5 in 2003) rather interesting, as I do. This table is updated each time there is a new edition of the Veron Quasar Catalogue. (It's a tedious process to tabulate the quasars by red shift, but yields a very fascinating table.)

            Well, I learning...

            The manual "tedious process" I referred to has been replaced by a modern spreadsheet and an infinitely more intelligent use of VizieR (a way to query thousands of catalogues).   And it is essential to have a more efficient way to analyze the quasars because the ninth edition of the Veron catalogue with over 10,000 quasars is now history; it has been superseded by the 10th edition last spring which has over 20,000 quasars.   (The dramatic increase is due to huge numbers of quasars discovered in two surveys.   That prediction of a dramatic increase from the two surveys were made in the Introduction to the 9th edition of the Veron catalogue in the above link.)    

            I probably spent at least 80% of my time on this go around working up a series of quasar tables. You may not agree with my interpretation of what I think they imply, but I believe you will agree that the data is presented in a way that's easy to comprehend.   One table of quasars at the highest red shifts is presented in Essay #7 (now Essay #5 in 2003), and there's a new appendix where I insert  several more tables of quasars so you can put what happens at the higher red shifts in better perspective.   

            Keeping in mind that I believe that the universe is a "closed cosmic hypersphere" with Riemannian space, here's something else that appeared in the last update in May 2000:

The intervening hydrogen clouds - called "absorbers" and discussed in Essay #8 - are also very interesting in this model.   They show up as absorption lines "blue-shifted" (closer) than the quasars which "illuminate" them.   The farther astronomers probe at higher red shifts, the larger these clouds seem to become.    The huge size is presenting a problem as these clouds  should not be anywhere near this large in the presumably smaller universe we probe into in deep space.

The "wiggle room" many astronomers give themselves is to assume they are seeing different parts of a long string like filamentary structure, whereas my hunch is that they are detecting  different parts of the same enlarged pancake cloud, whose size is exaggerated by the curvature of space near the antipode.

            That was not a bad call either, as you will see if you wade through this up to Essay #8.

            Finally, here's something pulled from a previous update in April 1999:

At the current moment, as more objections arise to the flat Friedmann model, it is beginning to lose its preeminent place among the models, and alternate cosmologies are being examined. For example, the December 29, 1998, issue of the New York Times had an article in the weekly science section discussing the matter necessary to bring the density up to the desired critical level. It referred to the January issue of Scientific American, and the following comments are from Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland at the close of his article:

"The standard cosmology of the 1980's, postulating a flat universe dominated by matter, is dead. The universe is either open or filled with an energy of an unknown origin. Although I believe the evidence in favor of the latter, either scenario will require a dramatic new understanding in physics."

            Five years ago, Einstein's "cosmological constant" was considered to be kooky idea, even by Einstein himself during his lifetime. Today, most realistic models have to assume it's there - it's that "negative energy" above - and this is the first time I've used a cosmological constant in the assumptions necessary to calculate what's going on with the quasars in Essay #7 (in August 2003, now Essay #5). And a link to an interesting site (Ned Wright's Javascript) which allows you to incorporate this idea into various other assumptions about the universe is given at the start of Essay #3.

            A few notes on esthetics and mechanics:

1. You'll notice something unusual in the text: the paragraphs are indented. There's a way to do this in Netscape with a "spacer" command, but that command is not recognized using the Internet Explorer browser. Both browsers recognize the "make room for an image" command (even if the one line image isn't there). Adding the paragraph indents was a good excuse for me to check the text one more time.

2. The Greek characters so common in mathematics and geometry are unfortunately handled differently on the two primary browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer). I tried to strike a happy compromise by providing frequent reminders of the problem and by switching between the two browsers from time to time. I also added Appendix 11 which displays the Greek characters correctly on each browser, so you know what they look like on the one you use.

3. Anytime there's a table or an appendix, I put the link to that file in the table of contents. So if there's link to an appendix from one of the main essays that you want to check out later, just go to the table of contents and chances are the title of the appendix will jog your memory.