Why popular science is evil...

Saturday the Erlangen Night of Science took place. Lots of Institutes, Factories etc where open to the public, showing their research to the interested. So was the physics institute, we got something like 2500 visitors. I was there to stand in front of some posters and explain what we are doing...

Basically you could divide the visitors into two categories. The interested who knew not much about physics and just came by to see what we are doing, and the more interested who read a lot of popular science books and watched a lot of TV science shows. The latter had the worst misconceptions on physics...

Most of the popular science bits explain stuff. Better, they give you the truth about stuff. What the usually fail to mention, all of the pictures they use to explain stuff, are, well, pictures. They are not reality. They are a story to ease the understanding. Which most of the time does not work. Quite often it seems, that these pictures provide a heavy misconception or just add to the confusion. Mostly this happens with pictures which seem to be easy, but the author has missed to mention some iportant point... And what stays in mind is the stuff which did confuse you most, so mostly the wrongest picture or the least understandable misconception.

Also popular science is about spectacular stuff like light waves surpassing the speed of light and therefore seem to violate the theory of relativity. Stuff which has deep philosophical implications. The only problem is: nobody really understands that stuff, not even the proper physicist doing the experiments. They have a theory, which might prove wrong. This is work in progress, a lot might happen. Combine this with people who are bad in communicating, trying to explain that to journalist who do not even know the terminology you end up in stuff like "Einstein was wrong" even when nobody ever said that. Science is not trivial. If everybody could understand it without work, there would be no need for scientists. Of course everybody should know something about it, most people actually have the ability to understand it, but you can't explain string theory in 30 minutes. You can maybe get some ideas across. Unfortunately you have to pass that to the viewer/reader as well (maybe have something like this scrolling along the screen "WARNING: THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH, THIS IS JUST A STORY WHICH MIGHT GIVE YOU AN IDEA...")