The Pioneer Detectives Quotes

“Sometimes the gap between wrong and right is so negligible that we ignore it altogether. We pretend that the length of a day is 24 hours and that the ground beneath our feet is steady, when in fact the length of the day changes and Earth’s axis wobbles constantly as we hurtle around the sun at about 66,000 miles per hour and the sun moves around the center of the galaxy at about 500,000 miles per hour.”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong?

“[T]he craft of science . . . is an oral tradition as much as a written one.”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives

“Five or six billion years from now, when the sun expands into a red giant, destroying Earth and any traces that might remain of the Air and Space Museum, or indeed of Washington, D.C., Pioneers 10 and 11 will continue, intact.”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong?

“Earth’s axis wobbles constantly as we hurtle around the sun at about 66,000 miles per hour and the sun moves around the center of the galaxy at about 500,000 miles per hour.”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong?

“Jupiter radiates more heat into space than it absorbs from the sun.”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong?

“The textbook version is simple: experimenters find out things in the world, either by seeing them or by making them happen. Theorists try to explain these things. And when an experiment produces results theories can’t explain, someone comes up with a better theory.”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong?

“By 2003, 31 years after it was launched, Pioneer 10 was 200,000 miles short of where every calculation said it should be. The “Pioneer Anomaly,” as it has come to be called, represented only 0.002 percent of the total distance the probe had traveled at the time. Then again, that’s also eight trips around Earth’s equator, or almost the distance from Earth to the moon. A difference of such magnitude between prediction and observation has the potential to reshape what we know, or think we know, about the universe.   ”
― Konstantin Kakaes, The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong?