[Maro]

I respect your point of view, but I don't really agree.

A popular science understanding of BHs, BB, QM is not really an understanding. It's just some fairy tale level understanding. To be clear, I'm not being elitist, using QM as an example, I think it was Feynman who said nobody really understands it, at best we can make calculations/predictions ("shut up and calculate").

For example, ask a lay person about BB and they will tell you it's an explosion, in the classical sense (it's not). Or, I don't think you can "understand" QM without understanding the significance of unitary linear operators for time evolution, or self-adjoint linear operators for measurements. If you would "allow" non-linearities, the world would be different.

[dempseye]

> It's just some fairy tale level understanding.

This has value in itself, as the first step towards greater understanding. I bet most people who study physics had their interest piqued by such fairytales. Maybe you did too.

[Maro]

> I bet most people who study physics had their interest piqued by such fairytales.

Okay, but that's the education use-case for young people. For them, a 300+ page book that talks about the arrow of time and costs $25 is not the right thing, in my opinion.

If you look at Feynman's stuff, those are good examples, that's what got me hooked as a student. I pirated the Feynman Lectures on Physics mp3s and pdfs and chewed through it, after being initially inspired by Surely You're Joking.

[hansen]

> For example, ask a lay person about BB and they will tell you it's an explosion, in the classical sense

Give her Weinberg’s book to read and she’ll come to a different conclusion. Of course those books won’t give you a deep understanding of cosmology but that doesn’t mean they have to be completely wrong. Stephen Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes is my favorite example of pop-sci done right.

[Maro]

My initial comment was probably too much gut-reaction.

There is good popular science that is useful.

For example, maybe the designers of Mario Kart read about QCD and the strong force: this is a weird force, which---unlike electromagnetism and gravity---gets stronger (not weaker) with distance, like the pull on a rubber band. Maybe they read that, and that's how they came up with the game's rubber band mechanics.

But I do think a lot of the highly publicised stuff is unfortunate, because they deal with highly speculative stuff (ST) and/or give the reader a false sense of understanding (BB), and in general writing 300+ pages of high-level hand wavy explanations is of questionable use to me; I'd make it shorter and give it away for free.