Scientist, author and husband of the Lord President of Gallifrey, Richard Dawkins, wrote about his Law of Conservation of Difficulty. The jist of it is that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Quantum Electrodynamics, for example, is a genuinely difficult subject. Other, perhaps less challenging, disciplines - and let's not name them here - conceal their lack of content behind a smokescreen of deliberate...