[1] It attempts to intimidate the audience into simply accepting the result without evidence by appealing to their ignorance or lack of understanding.
[3] A proof by intimidation is often associated with phrases such as: Outside mathematics, "proof by intimidation" is also cited by critics of junk science, to describe cases in which scientific evidence is thrown aside in favour of dubious arguments—such as those presented to the public by articulate advocates who pose as experts in their field.
[7] Whenever I meet in La Place with the words "Thus it plainly appears," I am sure that hours, and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.In a memoir, Gian-Carlo Rota claimed that the expression "proof by intimidation" was coined by Mark Kac, to describe a technique used by William Feller in his lectures: He took umbrage when someone interrupted his lecturing by pointing out some glaring mistake.
During a Feller lecture, the hearer was made to feel privy to some wondrous secret, one that often vanished by magic as he walked out of the classroom at the end of the period.
Like many great teachers, Feller was a bit of a con man.Newton’s astonishing grasp of the entire problem of planetary perturbations and the power of his insight are clearly apparent, this part of the Principia is also among the most difficult to grasp because of the paucity of any real explanation and an apparent attempt to conceal details by recourse, too often, to phrases like “hence it comes to pass”, “by like reasoning”, and “it is manifest that” at crucial points of the argument.