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by hansen
2920 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.