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it as an astronomer. You wouldn’t have guessed it by looking at his résumé: undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy from UCLA; Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz; postdoctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories, in Pasadena, California—the same prestigious institution where Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe, and where countless other astronomical superstars have worked.

    Geoff Marcy
(C. Rose)
    But that was the trouble. Marcy’s sense of self-doubt had begun in graduate school, where some senior astronomers had criticized his dissertation on magnetic fields in stars. “I didn’t have any confidence in my own ideas,” he recalled during a conversation in the mid-1990s. “I was in a depression. I was convinced I was an imposter, that I didn’t belong with all of these high-powered people.” At Carnegie, which took only the very best of the best, they were even more high powered. They’d taken him as well, of course, but Marcy was sure they’d made a huge mistake. Everyone around him was brilliant, he could see that easily enough. But it was clear to him that he simply wasn’t smart enough to be an astronomer.
    One morning, Marcy hit bottom. Here’s how I described it in my 1998 book,
Other Worlds
:
    Marcy dragged himself out of bed and into the shower as usual, but instead of turning off the water when he was finished, he just stood there thinking. He knew he had to get himself out of what had become a perpetual depression. “I’m not Einstein,” he thought. “I’m never going to be. So what am I going to do—beat myself up over it for the rest of my life?” He recalled how as a kid he had had posters of the planets plastered on the walls of his bedroom and hadstayed up half the night for the pure joy of exploring the universe through his telescope and then he sat glued to the television to watch humans take the first steps on the Moon in July 1969. If he could somehow reconnect with the sense of wonder he had felt back then, he might be able to get excited about astronomy again. “I have to find something to work on,” he told himself, “that addresses a question I care about at a gut level.” It also had to be something difficult to do. There wouldn’t be much satisfaction or self-respect in solving an easy problem.
    All of this went through his mind while the hot water poured down his back, and while it seems a bit too romantically tragic to be true—and while Marcy does have a flair for the dramatic—I believe it. He had no inkling of what Bill Borucki was doing at just about the same time at the Ames Research Center, several hundred miles to the north. But Marcy decided to take on the identical challenge. He knew, as Borucki did, that the question of whether other worlds existed out among the stars had held the imaginations of philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. Reconnecting with his sense of wonder would not be a problem.
    The search for distant worlds would also meet his other requirement: It would be extraordinarily difficult to do. Like Borucki, he knew about astrometry—measuring the back and forth wobbles an orbiting planet would impose on its host star. His instinct was the same as Borucki’s: Those measurements would be so hard, and the technology required so complex and expensive, that it might be decades before it ever happened, ifit happened at all. Unlike Borucki, however, Marcy didn’t choose to look for the dimming of stars as planets transited in front of them. In fact, he told me nearly thirty years later, “Transits never even occurred to me. I never thought about them at all.”
    That’s not especially surprising. Borucki was an expert in measuring light, so he decided to search for planets with a technique that required high-precision light measurements. Marcy’s career had had mostly to do with breaking