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Editorial

Nature Physics 5, 613 (1 September 2009) | doi:10.1038/nphys1378

Take it on trust?

In the preface to his 1923 play Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw asserts, “In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true..