David Kipping

And so as a scientist, we have to be so guarded against our own egos.

You see the lights in your eyes of a Nobel Prize or the fame and fortune and being remembered in the history books.

And we all

grew up in our training learning about Newton and Einstein, these giants of the field, Feynman, Maxwell.

And you get the idea of these individual contributions which get immortalized for all time.

And that's seductive.

It's why many of us with the skill set to go into maybe banking instead decided,

Actually, there's something about the idea of being immortalized and contributing towards society in a permanent way that is more attractive than the financial reward of applying my skills elsewhere.

So to some degree, that ego can be a benefit because it brings in skillful people into our field who might otherwise be tempted by money elsewhere.

But

On the other hand, the closer you get towards when you start flirting with that Nobel Prize in your eyes, or you think you're on the verge of seeing something, you can lose objectivity.

A very famous example of this is Barnard's star.

There was a planet claimed there by Pieter van de Kamp, I think it was in 1968-69.

At the time, it would have been the first ever exoplanet ever claimed.

He felt assured that this planet was there.

He was actually using the wobbling star method, but using the positions of the stars to see them to claim this exoplanet.

It turned out that this planet was not there.

Subsequent analyses by both dynamicists and theorists and those looking at the instrumental data established fairly unanimously that there was no way this planet was really there.

But Peter van der Kamp insisted it was there despite overwhelming evidence that was accruing against him.

And even to the day he died, which was I think in the early 90s, he was still insisting this planet was there, even when we were starting to make the first genuine exoplanet discoveries.