Jason Arday: a question of academic standards

Amid much attention to Jason Arday’s plagiarism and advanced Walter Mittyfication, the gobbledygook of his writing style has been largely overlooked, not least by the professorial electors at Cambridge and the PhD examiners at Liverpool John Moores University. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects traveling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject