here's a question for you guys. i notice that popsci has some sort of middle-range preference. what i mean by this is that you never see popsci articles on new developments in hydrodynamics (though there are people doing ongoing research like this) and you almost never see articles on new developments in string theory or QCD (and plenty of people research this stuff).

there seems to be a window of what journalists want to communicate to normies. the window excludes most of classical physics and most of nonrelativistic quantum physics (these two being arguably the most relevant things to real-world applications, like e.g. space flight, planetary science, semiconductor physics, materials science). the window also excludes stuff that is too out-there, like what is going on with polytopes and jackiw-titelboim gravity and super-yang-mills theory.

however some sweet spot exists where the media eats it up. if it has to do with black holes or the big bang or the "god particle" then the normies eat it up.

why? is it because of science journalists being retarded, or because scientists are bad at publicity and they have a very inconsistent model for publicizing things, or is it just because physics is hard and normies latch onto things they think sound cool using zero understanding such that the subset of things that get latched onto are basically arbitrary? or what?