I had a telling experience venturing into academic knowledge that involved, of all things, physics.

I had been doing some abstract painting, experimenting with color admixtures, and decided to check the physics texts in a local library to learn more about the interplay of colors and light. 

Unfortunately, I found the material in the texts not only incomprehensible, but to my way of thinking, just plain wrong-headed.

This was, of course, physics, and I obviously wasn't a physicist, so it seemed more than a little odd to challenge it.   On the other hand, what I read just didn’t have the ring of truth to it.   It reminded me of the overly complex explanations that my college geology course had given of the origins of Earth's continents, in the days before continental drift was well understood and accepted.

The apparent over-complexity of the physics textbooks' descriptions also put me in mind of those fantastic Baroque curlicues that pre-Copernican astronomers drew to explain the movements of heavenly bodies "around" the Earth, in the days before we realized that something simpler was going on.