I'm currently reading (almost finished, in fact), Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. Despite having most of a master's in mathematics, I found his comment ear

I'm currently reading (almost finished, in fact), Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. Despite having most of a master's in mathematics, I found his comment early on about trying to keep the mathematics accessible to be a bit laughable. Modern mathematics can get abstruse very quickly. It's likely that a typical HN reader could read the abstract of a PhD dissertation in just about any field except mathematics and have an idea of what the dissertation is doing. For mathematics, it's possible that even with a PhD if the dissertation is outside their specialty they might not know what it's about.