CALL ME SNAKE

One of my astronomy articles came out last week that made me nervous. The crux of the story was that a paper that came out last year, which grabbed a lot of headlines, might have been wrong. Or at least overreached in its claims. I don’t do a lot of articles like this where you’re basically taking the biggest discovery of someone’s career and shooting it down. Or at least casting serious doubt on it. On the other hand, I felt it was an important story to do on a subject that was pretty interesting in itself. So how could I pass it up? Especially at a time when I can use a bit of revenue.

Still I was worried about how the guy whose work was being challenged was going to take it. To make matters worse, he said he couldn’t get a copy of the article and wanted me to send it to him as a pdf. So now I not only had to write the bad news but deliver it. (Don’t shoot the messenger!) He had  trouble reading the first file, so I was off the hook temporarily. I tried sending it another way and received a note back from him soon. I expected to see something like: How could you betray me after making nice to me over the phone? But instead he said: “This time it worked. Thanks a lot.”