- #1
ergospherical
- 1,072
- 1,365
Few things are disparaged so militantly on this forum as popsci: scientific literature written for a general audience.
"It's entertainment, not real science."
"They won't teach you any actual physics."
Such remarks are all too common - and, in my opinion, they are utterly misguided. I won't argue that these remarks are rooted in hubris, because I don't think that's true in most cases. I'd instead suggest that said views reflect a failure to understand the merit of a holistic, non-dogmatic attitude toward learning physics.
Books such as Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes" and Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" are superbly-written expositions of cosmology which offer not only a solid conceptual grounding in the subject for a newcomer but also novel insights for a practising student of physics. It is at best ignorant, and at worst downright heretic, to declare that one cannot learn anything from such masters in their fields merely due to the informal nature of the prose. Penrose's "Road to Reality" flirts with some considerably sophisticated mathematics - perhaps casting a degree of doubt on its popsci affiliation - but its conversational style helps to convey some really very abstract concepts (fibre bundles and gauge connections, anyone?) in an easy-to-understand way. And the usual suspects of Jim-Al-Khalili (see: "Paradox"), Brian Cox (see: "Why does E = mc2"), Simon Singh (see: "Fermat's Last Theorem"), etc. all have produced their fair share of thought-provoking material which serve, for example, as outstanding preparatory reading at the pre-university level.
There's a plethora of great audio-visual media, too. Sean Carroll's "Mindscape" and Brian Cox/Robin Ince's "Infinite Monkey Cage" podcasts come to mind first. The former values deep-dives into complex subject areas whilst the latter explores a varied selection of scientific topics through a somewhat more comedic lens, but both are thoroughly informative and feature well-renowned, expert guests.
A common complaint is that popsci sometimes, in its attempt to present the material as simple as possible, lends itself to inaccurate explanations. I've never found this to be much of an issue - the worst it really gets amongst reputable authors are mentions of, say, relativistic mass, or tenuous analogies which one can easily ignore, or whatever. But moreover, this issue is most-definitely not confined to popsci! On several occasions I've read through official, textbook-style materials chock-full with misconceptions and inaccuracies (especially at secondary-school level). Even reputable, advanced-level textbooks are known to contain severe conceptual errors, e.g. Goldstein's treatment of Lagrange's equation with non-holonomic constraints.
For the physics student: textbooks exist to provide rigour and hands-on practice through exercises; popsci is an informal avenue for intellectual enrichment and provides all-important context to the subject - not merely to "entertain". Consuming a wide-variety of physics-related media is critical for a rich physics education. In short: write off popsci to your detriment!
"It's entertainment, not real science."
"They won't teach you any actual physics."
Such remarks are all too common - and, in my opinion, they are utterly misguided. I won't argue that these remarks are rooted in hubris, because I don't think that's true in most cases. I'd instead suggest that said views reflect a failure to understand the merit of a holistic, non-dogmatic attitude toward learning physics.
Books such as Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes" and Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" are superbly-written expositions of cosmology which offer not only a solid conceptual grounding in the subject for a newcomer but also novel insights for a practising student of physics. It is at best ignorant, and at worst downright heretic, to declare that one cannot learn anything from such masters in their fields merely due to the informal nature of the prose. Penrose's "Road to Reality" flirts with some considerably sophisticated mathematics - perhaps casting a degree of doubt on its popsci affiliation - but its conversational style helps to convey some really very abstract concepts (fibre bundles and gauge connections, anyone?) in an easy-to-understand way. And the usual suspects of Jim-Al-Khalili (see: "Paradox"), Brian Cox (see: "Why does E = mc2"), Simon Singh (see: "Fermat's Last Theorem"), etc. all have produced their fair share of thought-provoking material which serve, for example, as outstanding preparatory reading at the pre-university level.
There's a plethora of great audio-visual media, too. Sean Carroll's "Mindscape" and Brian Cox/Robin Ince's "Infinite Monkey Cage" podcasts come to mind first. The former values deep-dives into complex subject areas whilst the latter explores a varied selection of scientific topics through a somewhat more comedic lens, but both are thoroughly informative and feature well-renowned, expert guests.
A common complaint is that popsci sometimes, in its attempt to present the material as simple as possible, lends itself to inaccurate explanations. I've never found this to be much of an issue - the worst it really gets amongst reputable authors are mentions of, say, relativistic mass, or tenuous analogies which one can easily ignore, or whatever. But moreover, this issue is most-definitely not confined to popsci! On several occasions I've read through official, textbook-style materials chock-full with misconceptions and inaccuracies (especially at secondary-school level). Even reputable, advanced-level textbooks are known to contain severe conceptual errors, e.g. Goldstein's treatment of Lagrange's equation with non-holonomic constraints.
For the physics student: textbooks exist to provide rigour and hands-on practice through exercises; popsci is an informal avenue for intellectual enrichment and provides all-important context to the subject - not merely to "entertain". Consuming a wide-variety of physics-related media is critical for a rich physics education. In short: write off popsci to your detriment!
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