Ann Finkbeiner

Ann K. Finkbeiner (born 1943) is an American science journalist, known for the Finkbeiner test. Her book reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Nature. She has also written three books and contributed to Scientific American, Science, Hakai Magazine, Quanta Magazine, Discover, Sky & Telescope, and Astronomy. For two decades, she was a teacher and director for a graduate science-writing program at Johns Hopkins University.

Quotes

... Defense physics is generally applied research; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technology. The adjective applied, when used by physicists, is not a compliment. Academic physics is pure research; its direction is determined by what academics are curious about and can get funding for. It is, of all the sciences, the most fundamental; its questions are about matter's basic nature and the forces that govern the known universe. Moreover, pure research is considered innocent, neither moral nor immoral. Applied research, whose technologies have potential for harm, comes accompanied by difficult moral decisions.
- "Introduction: Jasons". The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite. Penguin. 2006. ISBN 1101201282.

The Hubble Space Telescope’s first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescope's political shepherd, John Bahcall, found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomers—Jill Knapp, Don Schneider, and particularly Jim Gunn—and since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescope's perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescope's principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirror's shape, the telescope couldn't focus, the problem was irrevocable.
…
NASA, of course, pulled off an ingenious fix, installed by astronauts dangling improbably over the telescope up in space.
- "Prologue: The Instrument Fairy". A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering. Simon & Schuster. 2010. ISBN 1439196478. leading paragraph concluding sentence

In the end, I learned two things about the long-term effects of losing a child. One is that a child's death is disorienting. The human mind is wired to find patterns and attach meanings, to associate things that are alike, to generalize from one example to another, in short, to make sense of things. Your mind could no more consciously stop doing this than your heart could consciously stop beating. But children's deaths make no sense, have no precedents, are part of no pattern; their deaths are unnatural and wrong. So parents fight their wiring, change their perspectives, and adjust to a reality that makes little sense.
The other thing I learned is that letting go of a child is impossible. ...
- "Introduction". After the Death of a Child: Living with the Loss Through the Years. Simon & Schuster. 2012. ISBN 1476725705.

Following the launch of NASA's planet-finding Kepler satellite in 2009, the number of possible exoplanets quickly multiplied into the thousands — enough to give astronomers their first meaningful statistics on other planetary systems, and to undermine the standard theory for good. Not only were there lots of exoplanet systems bearing no resemblance to ours, but the most commonly observed type of planet — a 'super-Earth' that falls between the sizes of our world and Neptune, which is four times bigger — does not even exist in our Solar System. Using our planetary family as a model, says astronomer Gregory Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, “has led to no success in extrapolating what's out there”.
- (2014). "Planets in chaos". Nature 511 (7507): 22–24. DOI:10.1038/511022a.

The fundamental necessity of space security is knowing where every satellite is and how it is behaving. Space Force’s June 2020 doctrine calls this “space domain awareness.” Officially that awareness comes via a global network of sensors on satellites and telescopes on the ground that covers all orbits all the time and tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters: 3,200 live satellites, as well as 24,000 nonfunctioning “zombies” and pieces of space debris that, in a collision with a satellite at 35,400 kilometers an hour, would cause a catastrophic breakup.
The information is sent to Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at the Combined Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Data on the secret satellites are set aside, and the rest go into a public, free, online catalog called Space-Track, from which “conjunction notifications” are issued when two satellites look like they might get too close.
- (November 2020)"Orbital Aggressive: How Do We Prevent War in Space?". Scientific American 323 (5): 50–57. DOI:10.1038/scientificamerican1120-50. (quote from p. 57)

Of the 100 or so scientists who have served on Jason, Finkbeiner has interviewed 36. A few spoke anonymously, and others refused to talk at all. That reticence is not surprising, given that as much as three-quarters of Jason's work has consisted of classified military projects, some of them morally questionable. Like Errol Morris's film "The Fog of War," in which Robert McNamara painfully revisits Vietnam, Finkbeiner's book shows how even the smartest people with the noblest intentions can end up committing shameful acts.
- John Horgan. (April 16, 2006)"Rent-a-Genius (review of The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner)". The New York Times.