Quotes from Mike Brown

Travel light and trust in serendipity.

For a successful strategy session, keep the food light, the lights bright, and drink caffeine all night.

Help the stranger for it might be God, Jesus, or the Devil. If the devil is mad at you where else do you have to go?

Pluto is dead.

Finding out that something you have just discovered is considered all but impossible is one of the joys of science.

Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.

Words simply mean what people think they mean when they say them.

Enough, woman who needs no sleep! It is past my bedtime! But I will ponder your suggestions in the morning when I wake up, which will be long after you've already risen.

I had a hunch. Officially, scientists don't work on hunches. We work on hypotheses and observations and plenty of evidence. Hunches don't get you research funding, tenure at your university, or access to the world's largest telescopes. But a hunch was all I had.

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, a thoroughly dedicated rocket town. The father of everyone I knew—mine included—was some sort of engineer working to build the Apollo rockets to send men to the moon. For a while as a child, I thought that when you grew up you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl; few other options in the world appeared to exist.

The word planet should be reserved for the small number of truly important things in the solar system.

It was becoming more and more clear that if the asteroids were the schools of minnows swimming among the pod of whales, then Pluto and the Kuiper belt objects were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea.

I was teaching introductory geology at Caltech for the first time. I'm not a geologist. I've never taken a single class in geology. If you gave me a handful of different types of rocks, chances are I could identify only a small number of them. I still get confused by the meanings of strike and dip. Luckily, most of my students didn't realize this.

In 1997 I began working as an assistant professor at Caltech, and I realized that I didn't really know what I was doing.

Her real name will come later, but her current code name is Petunia.

Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moon of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters. For this type of object in the Kuiper belt, the rules said that the name had to be a creation deity in a mythology

But as I had learned earlier, the trick was not to figure out how not to be stupid, the trick was to be smart instead.

After 'cat', Lilah next learned 'flower'. Flowers (scrunch up nose as if sniffing) were everywhere, first only outside on plants, but soon she generalized to flowers on her clothes or her shoes, or in pictures in books and magazines. I wanted to hook up wires and do experiments and comparisons and studies to understand it all. 'You want to do what?' Diane would say. But really, who wouldn't?

felt that antagonistic indignation that can be pulled off particularly well on the Internet.

Your brain doesn't work very well in the sudden oxygen deprivation of 14,000 feet. Combine that with lack of sleep, and efficient work is extremely hard.

Chapter Seven RAINING = POURING

Finding something spherical in space indicates that you have found a place where gravity has taken over.

But figuring out where to point the telescopes in the first place and why you're doing it is much harder.