I have long found it an interesting dynamic whereby an alleged expert on any given subject will make a statement that may or may not be entirely accurate, which then gets generally picked up by others and is automatically legitimized based upon the autority of the expert rather than any independent tests. History is replete with so-called experts who made statements of the future which were, clearly, not accurate.
The reason for the lenghthy introduction to this post is we have often talked here about the common misbelief that the fully armored knight was a slow-moving, tortoise-like behemoth that, if knocked flat, was trapped under the weight of his own armor. While Hans Delbruck, well-known German military historian of the early 20th century, is not responsible for that misbelief, he is one of those experts who helped perpetuate an untruth. I found this passge in a modern translation of his History of the Art of War: Medieval Warfare, here refering to the armored knight of the late Middle Ages:
"...the heavy armor rendered him useless for many of the activities necessary in war. On foot, he could fight only with a certain awkwardness, with little movement away from a fixed position; it was difficult for him to mount up, to dismount, and to get up when he was unseated."
While there is little doubt Delbruck was cetainly an "expert" in his field to a certain degree, its also fairly obvious he never actually experimented with what he talked about. This teaches us two important lessons: One, experiment with things for ourselves before we take information as a given; two, question even the so-called experts until we do so, because there is a chance they don't really know about what they are talking.
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