That's a pretty amazing comment to me. Perhaps I am biased because of all the blood sweat tears and life I spent publishing papers in academia. Generally, with the exception of certain low quality publication venues, certain fringe areas of humanities, and of course review papers, each academic paper is a new contribution to science that has never been made before. Heating and cooling something to unjam it? That's been done since the dawn of modern engineering. A neat story (and I mean it), but hardly an astounding level of innovation and creativity.
Are you seriously claiming almost every academic paper in a prestigious journal demonstrates more innovation and creativity than that displayed by the deployment of the Voyager spacecraft? I strongly disagree.
Remember also that a large fraction if not a majority of the Voyager team almost certainly had PhDs or even came from academia. I think we can appreciate innovation and creativity everywhere without having to make it into a genital measuring contest.
I was responding to a comment about a story that was specifically about the unjamming by heating/cooling; a phenomenon which everyone above the age of six knows about. My comment was not a genital measuring context, nor did it have anything to do with the innovation and creativity displayed by the deployment of the Voyager space craft.
This is clearly about more than just unjamming a part, but the work that was put into building the probe, sending it to the edge of the solar system, and the fact that it's still functional today.
