Twenty years ago, as a young reporter, I trekked out to the Badlands Observatory in South Dakota. Ron Dyvig, an amateur astronomer, had built the facility to help NASA spot and track killer asteroids like the one that blotted out the dinosaurs. Dyvig welcomed me into the building and then cranked its dome open to the cold night sky to chill his telescope. Warm equipment, he explained, leads to blurry views by creating a thermal disturbance in the air. “That’s what causes the stars to twinkle at night,” he told me. “It’s great for romance, but it’s not very good for astronomy.”
A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.