Constraining the last 7 billion years of galaxy evolution in semi-analytic models

Constraining the last 7 billion years of galaxy evolution in semi-analytic models.  
Simon J. Mutch, Gregory B. Poole, and Darren J. Croton
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.3356.pdf

I chose this text for obvious reasons: I know nothing about astrophysics, so I was pretty sure I would not understand anything.  Interestingly, I could understand a little.  That is, I understood that astrophysicists use computer modeling to understand how the galaxy evolves.  Which you can pretty much get from the title.  You don't have to slog through much of the actual paper to understand that much.

I found that my most obvious difficulty was with vocabulary that I didn't know.  There are 135 words in the introductory paragraph, 6 of which I had no clue about.  This gap in knowledge affected me so much that I had a hard time comprehending any of the paragraph.  I even had problems resolving basic reference within the text.  The unknown terms threw me off so much that I had to read the paragraph several times to be able to use my usual reading strategies.

In McCormick's terms, the literary repertoire of the text was not much of a problem, I think.  I'm familiar with scientific papers, so I was able to use that knowledge to get some basic information: specifically, the title and the abstract at the beginning of the paper were very useful.  The general repertoire of the text was what got me.  The terms I could not understand were not explained anywhere in the text, and it was assumed that I, the reader, would know what they meant.  The clash between my general repertoire and that of the text, or in other words, the gaps in my knowledge pertaining to astrophysics, really made it difficult to comprehend the paper.

This was useful just because it has been a long time since I read something so difficult.  I understand my students' tendency to spend more time in a dictionary than in a difficult text. 

I think I could come to some understanding of this paper if I spent a lot of time looking up terms online.  If I had only a paper dictionary, it would be very time consuming.  I also have an old friend who studied astrophysics.  I could arrange to meet him and have him explain things to me, but I might be embarrassed doing that, because he would have to explain so many things to me that we would probably be sitting at Starbucks for hours.