First Light Quotes

“Tonight the controls of the Big Eye belonged to a man who had once been a barber in San Antonio and Pecos, Texas, himself no astronomer, because nobody in their right mind would let an astronomer touch the controls of one of the most powerful telescopes on earth.”
― Richard Preston, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

“The thing about nonfiction writing is that a book’s characters go on developing after the book is finished. This can be disturbing to the book’s author. I have always envied novelists for the way they can maintain control over their characters. If necessary, they can get rid of them by killing them or sending them to Tibet. The nonfiction writer does not enjoy such luxuries. You can’t control your characters. Therefore you can’t shape the plot. This gives you an unpleasant feeling that your book is out of control. Even so, one of the secrets of nonfiction narrative is its unpredictability, for this gives the book a convincing reality, the fractal surprise of unfolding life. I have always found it difficult to finish writing a nonfiction book, or rather to let the story go, because there always seems to be more to write about, and as you reach the end of the book you begin to perceive that the story will never end. The book must end, but the story flows along like a stream, until it meets other stories of other lives, and they touch and run along together, and merge into the headwaters of history.”
― Richard Preston, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

“I was surprised to see how chaotic, amusing, and passionate science is. Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks. It is about wasting time, getting burned, and failing. It is like trying to crack a monstrous safe that has a complicated, secret lock designed by God. Some of God’s safes are harder to open than others. The questions may be so difficult to answer, the safe so hard to crack, that you may spend a lifetime playing the tumblers and finally die with the door still firmly locked. Science is therefore about obsession. Sometimes there is a faint clicking sound, and the door pulls wide open, and you walk in.”
― Richard Preston, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

“One night, writing notes by touch in total darkness and in bitter cold, I accidentally turned my notebook upside down. Then I started turning the pages in the opposite direction, unaware that I was writing over my notes. Thus I ended up with two sets of notes in that notebook, one set written on top of the other, running in the opposite direction and upside down. I never was able to read that particular notebook.”
― Richard Preston, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe