[fsloth]

It's not actually an appeal to authority as such - authority implies (usually) institutional accreditation, whereas here we are pointing out the situation is so complex opinions without years of study are more or less pointless.

Then, when we have two e.g. physicists, who both know quite well what they are discussing, and one of them is more famous and potentially through their prestige succeed in ridiculing their less recognized colleague, we are at the "appeal to auhority" position.

One famous example is that of Ernst Mach who was was positivist (i.e. did not respect theory whose constituents you could not directly measure) and ridiculed Boltzmanns kinetic theory of gases because Mach did not believe in atom theory (!). Boltzmann's theory was effectively attacked precisely from position of authority.

So, if a layman and a physicist argue what is possible, it is very likely while both of them may be wrong, the layman likely does not have any understanding what their position implies.

So in my opinion, you can have a pathological appeal to authority sort of situation only when two equally skilled persons have an argument an the institutional prestige of one of them is used as an appeal for them.