Avi Loeb

Now they don't want to hear from you.

Well, no, if I were to publish papers, and I do, on conventional themes, on things that everyone is doing, along the same lines that everyone is addressing those topics, my papers are still acceptable publication very easily.

But as soon as I deviate from the expected transcript a little bit,

Let me give you an example.

I wrote, as soon as 3i Atlas was discovered, I wrote a paper and I said, well, back then it was thought that it's 20 kilometers in diameter based on the reflected sunlight.

And I said, if it's that big, then we have a problem because there isn't enough material in interstellar space to deliver one object like it.

per five years of the survey of that mass.

There is just not enough material.

Right, we shouldn't have seen something so big so soon, right?

Yeah, and I said one possible explanation is either the object is much smaller or that, in fact, it had a purpose for visiting the inner solar system.

Oh, they don't like that.

And that was in the concluding sentence, just one sentence.

So the editor said...

I will accept this paper for publication as long as you remove that sentence.

So I removed that sentence, otherwise the paper will not be published.

But I have a pre-print version of the paper that was still on the archive.

So I wrote, accepted for publication.

And then the editor wrote to me and said, you are not allowed to write accepted for publication on the version that you put in the archive that has this last sentence.

It's one sentence out of a paper.

And I said, well, but it's the same paper.