I don&#x27;t understand how something, that anyone understands, can be this cryptic.  Someone some time ago mentioned that all of Einstein&#x27;s major papers on special and general relativitiy can be covered in a semester or two.<p>Isn&#x27;t the hard part discovering this stuff?<p>How can anyone discover mathematical proofs but it is so impossible to communicate them that nobody in the world can follow your train of thought?  I mean people are really, really good at communicating.  It&#x27;s kind of what we do.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how anyone can publish proofs that don&#x27;t succumb easily to understanding by experts who concentrate on them for a long time, perhaps with tiny hints by the author.<p>It&#x27;s not as though we&#x27;re looking at fragments written in a long-lost language we have no access to, from a culture nobody has access to, on unknown subjects, and with the authors dead hundreds of years ago!  The author is right there.  The subject isn&#x27;t even art (like poetry criticism or something), it&#x27;s fully rigorous.<p>Understanding someone&#x27;s proof (for devoted experts) should be easy, right?  What gives?