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Comment by wallfacer120 | Hacker News Reader

For those popular science communicators that you mentioned, do you feel that they are misinforming their audience by oversimplifying? Or by leaving them with genuinely wrong ideas?

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For people who can study physics (such as students) it's confusing and misleading, and harms their efforts to understand the real material. (Source: studied physics in college, and had a hard time dislodging the nonsense metaphors about things like "virtual particles".)

For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?

Physics is mathematical models + experimental data. Good physical intiution comes from familiarity bred of working through math problems and observing experiments. Bad intuition comes from metaphors.

The 'virtual particle' non-sense (or very limited sense as artefacts of pertubation theory) goes very deep. Ask and 9 out of 10 physicists will tell you there are such thing (otherwise how do you explain Casimir effect), even at a reputable high energy lab the 'reason' for the range of interaction was given by Heisenbergs uncertainty applied to the creation of (massive) interactive virtual particles.

If it is interesting: from 10:00 onwards discussion about the reality of individual terms of the pertubation series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72us6pnbEvE&t=1367s

"For people who can, it's just fairy tales, so what's the point of instilling a false sense of understanding?"

I think this statement is worth examining a little bit. This statement implies that, unless you are going to develop a working knowledge of the math and become a practicing physicist, then you shouldn't bother reading anything about it.

All of the above for the three names I mentioned.

They definitely misinform their audience for money.

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