Karl Ziemelis, now chief physical sciences editor at Nature, handled the paper as a rookie editor. He says it remains one of his favourites — and one of the har

Karl Ziemelis, now chief physical sciences editor at Nature, handled the paper as a rookie editor. He says it remains one of his favourites — and one of the hardest to get in. Editorial approval for the paper was far from unanimous, because it was not obviously describing something new. Lesson that the blinders of consensus rarely see what’s new. I love this example so much because the method was so new and spoke to a key truth. If methods are useful then mundane results are to be expected but still need to be tested. One mentor once said to me that the whole point of an experiment is to test what you think you know. Testing ground truths helps mitigate confirmation biases.