>>10061091Define pop-science.
We have something like Sixty Symbols, which is a pretty popular YT channel, where actual professors explain actual physics to physics enthusiasts.
That's great, we need more of that.
We also have a wide variety of faggots pretending to be scientists to push an agenda and fool people into believing things like homeopathy.
That's bad, and I don't think anyone would argue with that. But those are a dime a dozen, most of them don't have any audience.
Popular doesn't mean bad, and vice-versa.
I think when most people think about problems with this stuff, they're talking about cosmology and quantum physics. Those topics are incredibly counter-intuitive for someone who only knows classical physics, and you can't explain them in a few words without oversimplifying things. You can say that entropy is about disorder, but that's actually wrong. You can say that electrons circle around the core, but that's VERY wrong. But if you get into antibonding molecular orbitals and wave functions, or talk about entropy in terms of energy - you will lose the audience (and you need that audience to pay for your research). So you have to oversimplify things.
But then the audience runs with those oversimplifications, and does shit like explaining their bullshit spirituality with quantum entanglement. That's where the issues begin.
How do we combat these issues? Come up with better analogies, I guess. But then again, in a battle with stupidity you will always lose.
