Nontrivial pursuit of straight talk

Matt Landreman’s Opinion piece (Physics Today, March 2005, page 52) and the letters responding to it (September 2005, page 13) bring to mind the comment made in the 1830s by Nathaniel Bowditch, in regard to his translation of Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics : “Whenever I meet in La Place with the words ‘thus it plainly appears,’ I am sure that hours, and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover HOW it plainly appears.” Fortunately, Bowditch’s footnotes to his translation preserve for posterity his many discoveries of “how it plainly appears.”