Experts

Two months ago this weekend, I slipped on the ice on my driveway and broke five bones in my left ankle.

Too late to help me, experts at the University of Amsterdam have just discovered why ice is slippery.

While physicists previously believed that ice is slippery due to a layer of water on the ice's surface, it turns out "vibrating molecules" on the surface act as a lubricant that counteracts friction, causing ass-over-teakettle spills like mine.

That settles that. Thank heaven for ice experts.

How do experts become experts, anyway?

According to "expert on experts" Roger Kneebone, no matter their specialties, experts progress through the same "guild system" around during the Middle Ages.

"As an apprentice you start by knowing nothing, so you spend years in someone’s workshop, doing what they tell you in the way they prescribe," he says. 

"As a journeyman you go out into the world to ply your trade as an independent craftsman. 

"In the final stage, as a master, you establish your workshop with apprentices of your own, and the wheel comes full circle."

If you want to be called an expert, Kneebone says, there's no escaping years of tedium, followed by years of self-reliance, followed by years of responsibility for others' work.

A six-week online course doesn't cut it.

Experts, moreover, never call themselves that, because they know full mastery of their chosen fields is impossible, Kneebone says.

Only chumps call themselves "experts."