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While I appreciate your point, and while I really like the “codec” analogy, I think there are good popular and semi-popular science writers out there. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan were two; both, of course, were trained as scientists while the latter was an active, practicing researcher. Among the people still active, Larry Gonick, James Gleick and Carl Zimmer spring to mind. On the more mathy side are John Allen Paulos and Ian Stewart. (These are just people whose books I’ve found, read and liked. It’s not an exhaustive list.) Like anything else worth doing, explaining what you mean is a skill that takes effort to learn, and it’s not in exactly the same skill-set as the one taught to up-and-coming scientists. Also, the “raw communication” in journal articles, textbooks and so forth often loses important information like historical perspectives (what motivated person X to apply equation Y to experiment Z?).

When they do their job properly, the popularizers are more like recording engineers and record producers than P2P users encoding with lossy codecs. They can arrange, edit and orchestrate the raw output of the musicians themselves. Competent popularization can serve as a complement or a warm-up for the real thing. Over-stretching the musical analogy, perhaps one could say that studio albums can be a good introduction to a band, and later the listener goes on to appreciate the raw sensations of a live concert.

The problem of science popularization is tied up with that of science education. It’s not an easy problem, and usually, every aspect is tangled up with all the others. Of course, that also means it can be a whole lot of fun.

FWIW, this exact point you raise is why I never, ever, ever try to learn about science from science journalists or writers anymore – actual working scientists only. The writer has to use a metaphoric filter to learn the information, then another one to transmit their partial understanding. It is like compressing a high quality audio file twice at sequentially lower settings. The resulting output is not just degraded, lossy and compressed, it’s full of artifacts that distort the intended meaning.

One layer of lossy compression is bad enough. I’d like to read the original files, but my physics player lacks the codec.

The short answer is that I thought of the “joke” before I realized I could make a serious point, or rather that my serious point was sufficiently non-obvious to require some explication. Also, I personally find that quick jokes clearly labeled as such (with emoticons and the like) are less intrusive than long, crankish diatribes, which CV threads have in plenty. My guess is that a reader not deeply versed in the physics would be able to recognize a two-line joke, particularly if it has a smiley face attached, and say either “That’s funny” or “I don’t get it.” The same reader would have to work through a long rant for some considerable time before judging it, and even then they might not be able to detect the telltale signs of crackpottery.

My personal standards of what constitute “signal” and “noise” may, of course, not be the best ones possible.

I’m a mathematician and I don’t understand some of these people!

Off to communication courses with the lot of them.

Not trying to start a snarkfest, I’m geniunely curious.

I find this topic especially interesting as someone whose limitations inunderstanding physics are, specifcally, mathematical in nature. So I must rely on analogies built by those who can master the math, but then I find myself frustrated by the limitations imposed by them. Your point that the weakness is particularly troubling when it comes to drawing connections or comparisons is a very insightful one.