{"id":28851,"date":"2025-06-02T09:01:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T09:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=28851"},"modified":"2025-06-02T09:25:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T09:25:04","slug":"scientific-dreams-in-the-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=28851","title":{"rendered":"Scientific Dreams in the Balance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One of the joys of science journalism is in seeing dreams come true \u2014 watching scientists push their career chips across the table, on behalf of a vision or a mission that will take years to achieve, and finally win. Their stories are sagas of passion, curiosity and sacrifice.<\/p>\n

William Borucki, a space scientist who didn\u2019t have a Ph.D., and his collaborator, David Koch, spent 20 years trying to convince NASA that a space telescope could find planets by detecting their shadows on other stars. NASA rejected their proposal five times until ultimately relenting. \u201cIt\u2019s a wonderful thing to have someone tell you over and over again everything that is wrong with your experiment,\u201d Mr. Borucki once said.<\/p>\n

He changed the galaxy: The Kepler satellite, launched in 2009, discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets in a small patch of the Milky Way, suggesting that there were as many as 40 billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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William Borucki at a 2009 news conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the scientific observations coming from the Kepler spacecraft.<\/span>Paul E. Alers\/NASA<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Using NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers discovered the first Earthsize planet orbiting a star in the \u201chabitable zone\u201d of Kepler-186f in 2014.<\/span>NASA Ames\/JPL-Caltech, T. Pyle<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Scientists involved in the effort to detect the space-time ripples known as gravitational waves tell a similar story. In the 1970s and 80s, when Rainer Weiss, a physicist at M.I.T., and Kip Thorne of Caltech started talking to the National Science Foundation about the possibility of observing these waves, \u201ceverybody thought we were out of our minds,\u201d Dr. Weiss once said.<\/p>\n

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One of the joys of science journalism is in seeing dreams come true \u2014 watching scientists push their career chips across the table, on behalf of a vision or a mission that will take years to achieve, and finally win. Their stories are sagas of passion, curiosity and sacrifice.William Borucki, a space scientist who didn\u2019t have a Ph.D., and his collaborator, David Koch, spent 20 years trying to convince NASA that a space telescope could find planets by detecting their shadows on other stars. NASA rejected their proposal five times until ultimately relenting. \u201cIt\u2019s a wonderful thing to have someone tell you over and over again everything that is wrong with your experiment,\u201d Mr. Borucki once said.He changed the galaxy: The Kepler satellite, launched in 2009, discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets in a small patch of the Milky Way, suggesting that there were as many as 40 billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way alone.William Borucki at a 2009 news conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the scientific observations coming from the Kepler spacecraft.Paul E. Alers\/NASAUsing NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers discovered the first Earthsize planet orbiting a star in the \u201chabitable zone\u201d of Kepler-186f in 2014.NASA Ames\/JPL-Caltech, T. PyleScientists involved in the effort to detect the space-time ripples known as gravitational waves tell a similar story. In the 1970s and 80s, when Rainer Weiss, a physicist at M.I.T., and Kip Thorne of Caltech started talking to the National Science Foundation about the possibility of observing these waves, \u201ceverybody thought we were out of our minds,\u201d Dr. Weiss once said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28853,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28851"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28854,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28851\/revisions\/28854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}