> WTF do you know about me or anyone else to judge their choices?
I don't, and did not claim to. And yes, one can and usually does judge at some level. I don't need to know much about someone to have an opinion that intentionally touching random strangers' private parts in public is problematic.
Try not to be so sensitive. My comment was not a criticism of anyone.
> Your ignorance of the need for direct knowledge of things shines through.
Now who is making assumptions without knowing me?
I spent years being paid to do research at academic institutions, so it's not a random person on the Internet saying it. Sometimes the primary source is fantastic. More often it's inferior to better written pieces.
The reason journals like Rev Modern Physics have a high impact factor is precisely due to the fact that distillations can be superior to primary sources. It's a journal where a highly influential person in the field writes a (lengthy) journal article that is basically a well written, accessible tutorial of the whole field.
Have you tried reading Maxwell's original works? Do you not think there's a good reason pretty much every EM textbook teaches Maxwell's equations in a very different form from what he proposed?
Thanks for your explanations. It would be lovely if primary sources and data were some kind of ground truth with a capital T. But no: they are often messy first pass experiments. If we knew what we were doing it would not be research ;-) A dose of Ian Hacking or Paul Feyerabend or Nancy Cartwright could be curative.
I don't, and did not claim to. And yes, one can and usually does judge at some level. I don't need to know much about someone to have an opinion that intentionally touching random strangers' private parts in public is problematic.
Try not to be so sensitive. My comment was not a criticism of anyone.
> Your ignorance of the need for direct knowledge of things shines through.
Now who is making assumptions without knowing me?
I spent years being paid to do research at academic institutions, so it's not a random person on the Internet saying it. Sometimes the primary source is fantastic. More often it's inferior to better written pieces.
The reason journals like Rev Modern Physics have a high impact factor is precisely due to the fact that distillations can be superior to primary sources. It's a journal where a highly influential person in the field writes a (lengthy) journal article that is basically a well written, accessible tutorial of the whole field.
Have you tried reading Maxwell's original works? Do you not think there's a good reason pretty much every EM textbook teaches Maxwell's equations in a very different form from what he proposed?