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I have a model with two kinds of knowledge: sexy knowledge and homely knowledge. I think the internet and mass media era in general have massively endorsed and empowered the projects and acquisition of sexy knowledge. If it doesn't garner attention rapidly on a large scale, then it doesn't go on TV. The problem is that most of the real projects of science and industry are about homely knowledge. It's the little boring things like washing your hands that prevent catastrophic hospital deaths. But that's not superficially interesting, or fun, and it doesn't provide the knowledge bearer with any kind of moral or intellectual superiority by which they can affect pretensions of enlightenment. Quackery has always been a thing, but I think sexy knowledge lies somewhere before the frontier of quackery. It's true, or plausibly true, information, but it is dramatically overvalued in our time and culture.

I would argue that most scientists in general pursue their field of study in the pursuit of sexy knowledge itself. If there's no wonder to motivate, what are people working towards?

I also would like to argue that it doesn't have to "garner attention rapidly on a large scale" to be recognized by the masses, but rather just spark their imaginations in general.

> I would argue that most scientists in general pursue their field of study in the pursuit of sexy knowledge itself. If there's no wonder to motivate, what are people working towards?

I disagree. My opinion on whether you might get the impression is that you need to argue with "sexy knowledge" in research proposals.

For the record I'm not saying that sexy knowledge is bad. I'm saying that it has the potential to devalue homely knowledge and crowd it out of mindshare. That isn't to say that fascinating and flashy theories aren't valuable, just that they may have an adverse effect because we overvalue it.

Mass and speed are proportional (are they? For sake of tve argument, mass begets gravity begets accelleration). But the masses don't want massive bulks of data. They want quick information. Like, your new phone can show 4k vids whatever, and some even care that that's due to advances in nano materials and quantum optics, but to most, the physical side is uninteresting and something inherently theoretical like black holes, LIGO or LHC is only really mass compatible if broken down to show the kind of action, i.e. research, that is happens on this very planet - time travel, ripples in the fabric of space, or theosophy (god particle), respectively.

The whole quantum mechanics philosophy crossover is a huge messy confusion as a result of this (many worlds shroedingers cat) - and that even affects even many physicists.

> "11 dimensions", "string theory", or "time dilation"

One of these things is not like the others...

To the average pop reader's digest human experience, they are pretty close. Sure, it's interesting to know that GPS is affected by time dilation, but the hours spent on thought experiments on intergalactic travel are a distraction from all the things one can learn about their everyday life.

> all the things one can learn about their everyday life

I'm curious what topics you have in mind? My everyday life is like 90% Newtonian mechanics, 9% thermodynamics, and 1% fluid mechanics (percentages completely made up). Or are you thinking like E&M for phones and stuff?

Yeah, the frequency shift "time dialation" of Radar & Lidar for traffic tickets and even Time-of-Flight imaging for your FaceID all involve the constant speed of light or special relativity... but yes, all of magnetism can be derived as a special relativistic case of electro-statics (relativistically moving charges).

For me, the more annoying aspect to this is that the "it's all relative man" has infected even more techincal discussions to the point where engineering and settled science is treated as just more "woo woo" by people who could know better.

The derivative of time in the spacetime* tensor is just 1. There's no speed up, locally, which is what counts. The rest is just an effect of observation.

*I do not remember nor care what it's called. I'm sure you know what I mean anyway.

Why is it that whenever a lay person wants to talk about physics they talk about

Because those things sound exotic and interesting. Just like (statistically) nobody goes to the natural history museum to look at chicken-sized dinosaurs.

Hm. Perhaps you're on to something: our museums tend to present things in their true scale. However, this is not always desirable. For instance, consider the use of macro photography for inspection of the brilliant detailing of small things.

Physically scaling up small things may indeed be problematic, but with the assistance of VR or AR, one might be able to digitally scale it up. [Here I'm remembering my love of The Magic Schoolbus series.]

Another is that it dodges the reality check of math. I recall reading a bit of advice to authors of popular science articles: each equation in the text cuts your audience in half.

I'd go the other direction. I think if you taught every single 16 year old a basic class in surface-level understanding of time dilation/length contraction, gravity as a facet of spacetime, the two slit experiment, the twin paradox, relativistic star ships, so forth and so on - you'd see the number of astronomers/physicists skyrocket. They likely would not be able to follow the math and reasons behind, but that's not necessarily the point. Just understanding how absurd our universe really is, is something that I think is really kind of encouraging. It gives perspective as to the wonder and discoveries that await outside of the everyday bickering that people are exposed to 24/7 since the internet became ubiquitous.

Even less exciting things like seeing how the doppler effect led almost directly to the concept of the big bang is something that seems critical. That it's not (or, hopefully was not) a normal part of curricula seems odd. Even things like the mind boggling implications of the various conservation laws are just incredible. That topic is at least covered in lower education, but rarely if ever in such a way as to really elucidate how incredible these rules are, and all that can be derived from them.

I think you’d find that half or more would be completely unable to grasp the Twin Paradox, or double-slit even in principle, without the math. Probably the number would be closer to three-quarters, or even more if you factor in just how disinterested many would be. I like the idea of a world in which all 16 year olds are both capable of understanding your syllabus, and exposed to it, but I have doubts that we live in that world.

I do think that everyone should have access to such a syllabus though. More realistic if less transformative might be a program of teaching people very basic critical thinking skills. Use advertisements and Instagram posts to analyze deceptive languages and images. Show people that the world they think they live in, that’s projected all of their screens isn’t a very accurate representation of reality. Drive map-territory relations into them via the medium of political, corporate, and interpersonal deception they experience multiple times every day. Maybe half of them would get that, if it was made interesting enough to hold their attention.

Because the psychological appeal of physics for a wider audience is the same as the appeal for sci-fi: the feeling/emotion of wonder.

So you can get still get the wonder by dropping the rigor, and you end up with What the bleep or The secret

Although I can see the utility in setting the right expectations for people beginning their study in physics, surely it does more good than harm to get more people interested in the field itself via exposure to the most eye-catching ideas in physics, even if speculative?

It's kind of the same way that more people would be interested in computer science because of strong AI rather than binary search trees.

I think this is still fair.

I mean when you study Physics you learn to use apparently confusing tools - theoretical or experimental - with confidence. Sometimes in areas that only few people find interesting/appealing, like for instance complex problems in classical mechanics or thermodynamics. Only 1% of the studies is about crazy, absolutely counter-intuitive stuff that sounds like Sci-Fi. But isn't that what differentiates the amateur from the Pro? ;)

I mean if people want to do actual Research Physics, they must either go to a University (offline or online) or be mega disciplined. In the latter case they need a few more books though/adjust them also to personal taste.

The holographic universe is another popular one. We have some similar things in mathematics (e.g. anything to do with Godel).

I think, though, that if you want to understand physics, it probably makes sense to devote some of your time to understanding what physicists are excited about.

I have a feeling (and this is heavy speculation) that a lot of strong physicists were fed on pop physics and science fiction before they learned the hard science. This helps approach the subject with an inborn curiosity, which can focus your attention when learning technical subjects.

Pop physics books may not be the ideal way to do this, but it's probably better than nothing at all.

> Pop physics books may not be the ideal way to do this, but it's probably better than nothing at all.

On the other hand, they are very harmful to serious, but "boring" research proposals.

> all this crazy complicated and far-fetched ideas, rather than simple and beautiful principles to understand reality

Would you mind giving some examples of what kind of "simple and beautiful principles" you have in mind?

Depends on the level (and I am just giving some examples):

- Advanced high school: You can use conservation of energy or other "conservation laws" as a guiding principle. This lets you solve a problem with just a couple of lines of simple algebra. On the other hand, using the "naive" approach of studying the forces that act on the system would require heavy algebra and some calculus.

- College: Instead of calculating the path of a ray of light through some inhomogeneous piece of transparent matter by doing some form of raytracing, you can use Fermat's "minimization principle". They are equivalent, but a rigorous definition of the minimization principle is a single sentence, while the other approach takes a lot of work to express clearly.

- Advanced college: Conservation laws are actually consequences of symmetries. Instead of thinking in terms of a complicated expression for energies and momenta, you can say that they are consequences of the fact that the laws of the universe do not change from today to tomorrow.

Yes, the more simple and beautiful a principle is, the more abstract it is. However, the simplicity and ease of working with it makes the abstraction worth it.

Just like in C you can have your own weird struct that implements objects and higher order functions, but using a functional or object oriented language makes everything safer and easier and more readable.

> Conservation laws are actually consequences of symmetries.

For those unfamiliar, this is essentially the content of Noether's Theorem[0]. One of many beautiful contributions of Emmy Noether.

I've heard several physicists describe it as one of the most beautiful theorems in physics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem

Conservation of energy and conservation of vector momentum directly explain the phenomenon of coastal rip currents, a mortal danger to beach-goers. Whereas if you go by the usual public sources, they're as mysterious as sun spots.

Pretty much anything in thermodynamics. Phase changes, energy, entropy, symmetry, action principles, degrees of freedom, fluctuation-dissipation theorem, equipartition theorem, etc..

Non native speaker here. Can anybody explain what "books are speculative' means ?

What books would you choose?

> Well I disagree with many of the book choices

what would u recommend in its place?

> talk about the real physics we know exists

I have some bad news for Susan.