As mentioned in the first chapter, after 1966, a number of investigations built up the evidence that quasars were associated with nearby galaxies. One of the first systematic investigations of quasars over the sky was an analysis I published in 1970. I was still a faculty member at Caltech at the time, and I remember well the custom of astronomy luncheons at the Faculty Club every Friday. I would bring in new examples of quasars falling improbably close to galaxies and share these photographs with my colleagues. Finally, the consensus was communicated to me that they believed these to be specially selected cases and that as scientists they could only accept the effect if a full statistical test were performed on a complete sample. I thereupon took about six months away from normal activities, enlisted the aid of Fritz Bartlett, a radio astronomer, to program the large IBM computer which Caltech then relied upon, and proceeded to analyze the position of all the then-known 3CR quasars (Third Cambridge Catalog Revised Survey of Strong Radio Sources) with respect to all the galaxies listed in the Shapley-Ames Catalog of Bright Galaxies.

Figure 2-1 shows the striking result of those computations. It shows how the separations on the sky between a set of radio quasars and cataloged galaxies steadily decreases as brighter and brighter galaxies are considered—that is, the association with these quasars is stronger as galaxies closer to us in space are considered.