Our work turned out to be some of the first analyses of carbon-13 within ancient terrestrial rocks, and though I was able to finish the lab work in less than two years, it ended up taking me six full years to interpret the data and finally publish my findings. Thus my early years as a professor were spent trying to persuade the world that I had used an unusual method on unorthodox samples to gain a surprising result via an untested interpretation. The whole thing had come out of left field, and I was naive in thinking that I could win over audiences who had decades more research credibility
...more
