If I only learned and experienced things that would be 'helpful' or 'relevant' it would be a very dull life.
I partially agree with the first comment that it isn’t really helpful to popularize highly speculative – and thus probably false – ideas. But well established but still “weird” discoveries like GR & QM are interesting on their own and have huge implications on our understanding of nature. You don’t need a science degree to be fascinated by black holes, the big bang and quantum weirdness.
I think the biggest problem that is faced today (it hasn't really changed in centuries) is that people do not like to be considered ignorant, especially those who delve into such matters at a professional level. We actually know so little of the universe around us, but as humans, we do not like to acknowledge that we don't know.
The fact that we don't know and that our current suite of theories is incomplete and hence could very well be wrong in both minor and major ways should be driving us onward into understanding the universe around us. It really is not a problem if we don't understand. It should mean that we strive to learn more.
However, far too often, I find that the supposed knowledgeable ones exhibit an attitude of superiority that effectively closes them to a better understanding. There are those of course who are humble enough to say that they actually have little understanding even though they are at the very top of their respective fields.
Being able to be honest and say that one doesn't know is the first step on the road to acquiring some semblance of understanding. Being able to explain to someone else what the current understanding is in a simple enough manner is a good step on the way to increasing one's own knowledge.
Huh? I have more the impression that Λ-CDM & SM are working just too damn good. I’m not aware of any observation that hints that we need something completely different than GR & local QFT.
But “settled” and “well established” doesn’t mean that humans will never find a more fundamental theory. Classical mechanics is settled, well established and correct as it was in Newtons times. Now we just better understand its limits and when to use different models.
GR, QM & QFT are correct and won’t go away. At some point in the future we will have a better understanding of their limits too. But that won’t make them wrong.
> The fact that we don't know and that our current suite of theories is incomplete and hence could very well be wrong in both minor and major ways should be driving us onward into understanding the universe around us. It really is not a problem if we don't understand. It should mean that we strive to learn more.
I’m not objecting exploring new speculative models. I’m worried about presenting highly speculative ideas as facts or probable solutions to the public. A lot of the pop-sci articles you read these days are very misleading. And IMHO Rovelli, Green, Susskind, Smolin and the like aren’t doing anyone a favor with their pop-sci books.
Be pragmatic and keep in mind that wonderful phrase - "All theories are wrong, but some are useful."
The problem I see is that it is a common activity to present "settled" and "well established" as fact. Often without ever highlighting the anomalies that have been found and that we only have a "belief" that it is useful.
One of the best examples is the case for "dark matter". It has never been established in any way that such "dark matter" exists. It only arises because the observed motion within galaxies does not accord with "settled" and "well established" theory. So to keep this "settled" and "well established" theory, some additional "theoretical entity" has been added to allow the observations to fit the "settled" and "well established" theory.
Now, that addition of a new "theoretical entity" is, in itself, not a problem. What becomes the problem is when every experiment fails to show that "theoretical entity". At this point, one should be saying that mayhaps the "settled" and "well established" theory is not so settled and not so well established. Mayhaps there is a problem that we then need to be looking at.
My point here is that we do not, in fact, have any real or clear understanding of the universe about us. We have models and theories that work within a limited range but they are not global. The simplest of these is that "chestnut" between general relativity and quantum mechanics (the large and the small). The funny thing here is that we can make devices that are macroscopic which exhibit, under certain circumstances, the effects we see at microscopic levels. Why? What is happening here? What are we missing in this crossover realm? Why do we see things in the laboratory and see similar things at extra-solar distances, yet the explanations of these effects do not accord with the "settled" and "well established" theory we use at those massive sizes?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.