I ran across this cartoon [Link]
yesterday and it gave me pause to think about the whole expound/explain-science-to-the-public thing. The word “appreciate” in the last frame set this off.
I recall when I was studying General Relativity and the story was related about some journalist asking Sir Arthur Eddington, Knight about the “three people who understood the theory” and he mused on who the third could be beside he and Einstein. Of course, in this case even Einstein wrote a general consumption/popularization of his relativity work. I seem to also recall something similar with quantum mechanics. And I have seen a “Dummy” book on string theory.
One of the problems with these efforts is that they end up whacking, if not breaking, the science. I have tried a couple of times to read the “Dummy” book on string theory and keep breaking down in the first couple of chapters over things in them that are just not accurate. Of course, the public, a synonym for the not-scientist or even not-this-discipline folk, do not know that they are being feed swill although we have to know that the intelligent among them, at least, know they are being fed pablum and the substance is in the missing structure.
Part of it is the limitation of human capacity. The day when the brightest of the bright could learn everything is centuries in the past. Now we do good to learn a subset of just one discipline and maybe enough to get through life – or enough to get through life and almost nothing else substantive. We look down from our cloistered towers and bemoan how the public wastes its time and brains on the transient, non-stationary information that lets one lead a common life, quite forgetting, too often, that that is what survival is about at its root.
We need to accommodate ourselves to the idea that the more we get to know as a group the less any individual can know. [Link]
