Professor Didier Queloz of Cambridge University at a press conference in London after, along with ... [+]
Not all great discoveries are lauded, nor are all scientists and creators showered with praise. In fact, history is replete with great minds who were doubted, sometimes ferociously.
In a recent conversation I had with Nobel Prize-winning astronomer Didier Queloz, Ph.D., he shared the "soft insanity" that's often required to persevere in the face of intense resistance and skepticism.
First, a little background: In 2019, Queloz and Michel Mayor, Ph.D., were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. The idea of planets outside our Solar System orbiting a star like our Sun has long been common in science fiction; Star Wars would hardly exist without the idea of exoplanets (that's the term for these types of planets). The existence of these exoplanets had long been assumed, but it wasn't until 1995 that two Swiss astronomers, Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor, provided testable proof.
But science-fiction notwithstanding, prior to 1995, astronomers who asserted the discovery of an exoplanet were dismissed and often attacked. Noted Canadian astronomer Gordon Walker has said that "It is quite hard nowadays to realize the atmosphere of skepticism and indifference in the 1980s to proposed searches for exoplanets." He's even told the story of a distinguished astronomer standing up and striding out of the room when he started a talk about searching for planets. Princeton astronomer Josh Winn describes the search for exoplanets as taking place in an "atmosphere of skepticism bordering on hostility."
"It seems like it should be easy to find a planet," notes Queloz. "You take a telescope, point to a star, and find a planet. But this is not effective because the star is extremely bright; you really don't see the planet. So you have to use tricks and machinery that helps you to see better. And the trick we have been using is to try to detect not the planet itself, but the effect the planet is making on the star. You look at the star to find something that tells you there is a planet. In our case, we were looking for a tiny change of speed, called the radial velocity of the star."
While Queloz did, in 1995, detect a change in speed, it was so rapid that he worried he had made a mistake. Without delving too much into physics, he had discovered a planet roughly the size of Jupiter (i.e., more than ten times bigger than Earth) that was far closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun. Again, oversimplifying a deep physics explanation, it was accepted at the time that really large planets had to be far away from the star, not close like Queloz's planet.
Queloz told me, "When I first saw the data, my reaction was, 'It must be wrong somewhere. There is something wrong.' And it was a kind of a panic moment for me because I was in the last mile of my Ph.D. I was a little bit ashamed to communicate this potential error to my supervisor, Michel Mayor, because I thought I had made a mistake somewhere. So I really worked quite hard on that until the point in my mind where everything I've tried failed to remove the effect. I had to come to the conclusion that the effect must be real."
Even after working with Mayor, Queloz continued to wrestle with the discovery. "I came to this conclusion after more than four months of battling with the data," he says. "It didn't come in a day. I identified the object, and I was battling with myself. One part of my brain said, "No, this isn't possible,' while the other part is saying, 'Well, it's strange because I do see something.' And then you do something which we're taught not do in science, and that is we have to start considering that the prevailing theory is wrong."
Notwithstanding his and Mayor's thoroughness, much of the scientific community at the time was skeptical. Some critics alleged overreading of the data, while other attacks were more insidious, asserting that this wasn't a new kind of planet but rather some unknown effect.
The skepticism wasn't always easy to take. "I must admit that for a couple of years, it was not an easy position to be in when you believe you are doing something right, but much of the community doesn't trust," Queloz told me.
How did he survive those years? This is where his "soft insanity" comes in. Rather than becoming embittered, ruminating about his critics, and dwelling on the past, he pressed on. He's noted that when people ask him to name his best or favorite planet, his response is "the best one is the next one."
"This is what I call the 'soft insanity of success'," he told me. "It's like a drug; it's an addiction to the novelty, to seeing a bit further, to be the first one to see something that nobody else has seen. It's an emotional drug, and when you've experienced that, you want to experience it again."
Queloz's insights mirror recent research on employee engagement. For example, a Leadership IQ study found that people who find something interesting in every task or project are significantly more engaged than their less-interested peers. And people who are always learning new things are 10 times more likely to be inspired at work.
Queloz's advice isn't just for Nobel Laureates. "Most of us have something that we want to do," he said in our conversation. "We feel good by doing it, because it brings us this positive energy that helps us to continue and to try to do something more."
Whether your favorite thing is discovering the next planet or, like Tom Brady, your favorite Super Bowl is the next one, a great many successful people exhibit some version of Queloz's "soft insanity." The past is lovely and builds a nice resume, but it's looking forward that drives true success.
It took more than two decades for Queloz to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his 1995 discovery. It's easy to imagine a less resilient person lingering on that past achievement, stewing about the skeptics, resentful of the subsequent 5,000-plus planets discovered following his initial discovery. But with his forward-looking "soft insanity," great scientists and innovators like Queloz keep moving forward, regardless of doubt, skepticism and resistance.
