Lee Cronin’s interview on Lex Fridman podcast

Dr. Lee was crying when being asked about 5 years of rejection by Nature editors for his new theory. In academia, when grand theory is proposed, people want to be very careful about supporting it. People afraid to support a bummer.

I come up with grand and bummer ideas sometimes. Those are fun times, because I thought I might be able to change the way a lot of people thinking about a certain topic. And then it turned out the idea was wrong, or it is actually not novel.

The scientific review process is something that sits among a lot of pressure, and people involved get a lot of pressure too.