The Myth of Gravity
fqxi.org
fqxi.org
Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the scientists?
I believe that this is exactly what the web is for.
In short, I contest that these articles, though this one is WAY better than most since it is not written for the public at large, aren't actually engaging the public in science.
(I feel like your username is actually really relevant too, but I can't quite put my finger on the reason. I hope that my post is cromulent enough to embiggen our discourse on the subject, though.)
[Wow, that sentence was long.]
It's not a matter of having an intermediary, it's a matter of listening to scientists who are trying to educate rather than promote their own theories to a public that doesn't have any hope of understanding them. It's like if you saw Steve Jobs stand in front of an audience of eight-year-olds and tell them they should grow up to learn Obj-C instead of Flash.
The public has an absurd fetish for shiny, new science while the theories of a hundred years ago would keep them scratching their heads for years. Older science is better not only because it's a necessary foundation for understanding modern science, but because it's more likely to be true. Somehow we've turned the reliability of our sources into an embarrassing flaw, and we get all our information from the dark corners that science isn't sure about yet.
Whether you like the role the media play or not (and here it is definitely the scientific media), it is not a new phenomena. News == news.
Other scientists. Promoting a scientific idea should only be okay if you have a complete technical understanding of it. I haven't yet seen any scientist blogger (never mind journalist) who actually completely understands Verlinde's ideas. So they should all shut up.
Smolin, a long term proponent of loop quantum gravity (LQG), believes that Verlinde’s work is not only compatible with LQG, it could even help to explain how familiar Newtonian gravity might emerge in this picture. According to LQG, spacetime isn’t the smooth fabric that Einstein envisioned; rather, if you zoom down to scales of 10^-33 cm, the fabric turns out to be woven from quantum threads. The key point for Smolin is that the holographic principle is also valid in this framework, allowing him to apply a version of Verlinde’s argument to demonstrate directly for the first time that loop quantum gravity has a limit that yields Newtonian gravity."
Fail.
A decade ago a physicist who would say something like this would have been dubbed a "crackpot" by his colleagues.