I can see why the author had difficulty publishing the article. If I didn't realise that he was talking about compactness I would have thought that he wasn't ma

I can see why the author had difficulty publishing the article. If I didn't realise that he was talking about compactness I would have thought that he wasn't making sense. The target audience is a nontrivial subset of people and it's difficult to optimise for everyone in the target audience. In any case I think that the real interesting thing here is not what lead to his observation. (Mathematicians have a tradition of not telling people what lead to their observations, for better or worse.) Rather, I think the mathematics behind this should be taken much further. I guess it's off to the references.