Wow, this is painful. None of the student or the advisors thought about getting in touch with the author during the whole PhD? How come? I went through a PhD.

Wow, this is painful. None of the student or the advisors thought about getting in touch with the author during the whole PhD? How come? I went through a PhD. Should I have worked on an hypothesis that could be tested just by sending a mail, this would have been about the first thing I would have tried to do I think. You know, just to be sure. And I would not have missed the occasion to communicate with Douglas Adams, of course, at least to make this PhD more worth it! edit: at least, a multi year effort to produce hundreds of pages filled with absurdity was not completely unfamiliar to Douglas, I guess.