"The are hosts of dopes here, and it is not good for my blood pressure: such
inane things are said and seriously discussed that I get into arguments
outside the formal sessions whenever anyone asks me a question or starts to
tell me about his "work." The "work" is always: (1) completely
un-understandable, (2) vague and indefinite, (3) something correct that is
obvious and self-evident, but worked out by a long and difficult analysis,
and presented as an important discovery, (4) a claim based on the stupidity
of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for
years, is, in fact, false (these are the worst, no argument will convince
the idiot), (5) an attempt to do something probably impossible, but
certainly of no utility, which, it is finally revealed at the end, fails, or
(6) just plain wrong. There is a great deal of "activity in the field" these
days, but this "activity" is mainly in showing that the previous "activity"
of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in something
promising. It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by
crawling all over each other."
-- Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) (to his wife)
