Sure, but not being able to explain it in layman’s terms doesn’t mean you don’t understand what you’re working on and in fact the majority of scientists and engineers and programmers and highly specialized individuals aren’t very good at vulgarization for the simple reason that they don’t need to do it when they’re accomplishing the work and outside of that they’re not required to explain their work to laymen since there are people specialized in doing just that.
I also disagree with the original comment you replied to. I was just responding to the part I quoted. I agree most specialists in a field don’t know how to explain things to non-specialists and I agree it’s important to have people who know how to explain things in layman terms, I jusy don’t think it’s relevant if those people are also the ones doing the research or not.
