In article ,
"Alan Holmes" writes:
|
| From my contacts with professors over the years, most of them are so bound
| up with their own importance, they have absolutely no idea of what real life
| is about.

That is a trifle unfair. The number that are so self-important that
they bullshit about their own field is relatively small, though not
unfortunately negligible.

But that is largely irrelevant to this situation, which is that of
a Guardian reporter mangling a complex and subtle scientific problem
and that of a naive layman mangling it considerably further and
then claiming that his misunderstanding is what was stated by the
original expert. In this case, don't blame the professor :-)


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.