I tweeted this on an impulse:
What is the one concept in science that you really think should be explained better to a wide audience?
At least 140 characters restricts people to really only suggesting one thing. But I don’t want to leave the blog readers out, so have a go. See if you can stick to just one!
Uncertainty in measurements.The table is not “exactly” five feet wide – if you measured it again you might get a slightly different number, and that’s NOT because you suck at measuring or because the table (or ruler) changed size. Reality has error bars, and they are meaningful.
Runner-up: the metric system. So that people know what a kilometer is in their gut like they know what a mile is. I still struggle with this, and I’ve been working in kilometers (okay, centimeters because I’m an astronomer and we’re partial to cgs) for years.
I also wholeheartedly support the above “scale of the universe” idea.
What the hell is the weak force? All the other forces transmit attraction (or repulsion) between other particles. But W and Z bosons seem to exist solely for the purposes of decaying into other things. Where is the force?
I’m with viggen and Dan here. A lot of people first need to know what science is and how it is done before delving into any particular topic.
Statistical significance of potential trends in complex multivariate data.
Quantum scale. What the hell is going on in there ?
Many people tend to mention the one thing they themselves don’t really understand. If I did that I couldn’t limit myself to one thing, since I understand basically nothing. (And not even that.) But the question was what the one concept in science was that should be explained better to a wide audience.
I think what Dan [#16] mentions is in the right direction. It is very important for every member of any advanced civilization to understand this concept properly. But there is a snag. You can expect at least one or several persons in a wide enough audience to come up with difficult questions about string theory (or other examples) : is it science or not? Do we have to admit that it is technically not science, but actually in some yet to be properly defined way it is? Or should we accept there to be a grey area between what is science and what is not science?
If not careful this will take you right away to the intricacies of the demarcation problem and the philosophy of science and you probably don’t want to enter this terrain. But you probably don’t want to leave this problem entirely unanswered either.
I’m with Dan, but I don’t envy the teacher.
Comparative advantage
Renormilization group and effective qft. A good touchy feely description of how qft respects symmetries.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Nothing makes more people quit Physics and Science in general than Indeterminacy taught poorly by Physics professors who lack educational skills, or disbelief in the subject itself, or worst, both.
I’m not exactly sure what is the best way to teach this simple but vital concept, myself, but I’d suggest starting with the Mathematics of Inequalities, with the Cauchy–Bunyakovsky–Schwarz inequality, and move forward through Planck’s constant until you hit the year 1927 running!
After that, Quantum Tunneling and Quantum Entanglement.
Black body radiation. But first, explaining how science works.
That a negative result to a test is neither a failure of science, nor a waste of time, money or effort.
Price Equation
Broadly speaking, I don’t think scientists need to do a better job explaining scientific concepts. I turn it around, and say that people need to do a better job *learning* scientific concepts. Too many lazy consumers sitting on their fat arses spending their time on mindless pursuits leads to an unhealthy society.
That said, a few scientific concepts could be better explained. My favourite is “Olber’s paradox”, which is usually poorly or even incorrectly taught. See Harrison’s “Cosmology: The Science of the Universe” for a proper elucidation.
Cognition, particularly the difference between what we think we know, and what we know, with attention to cognitive biases, particularly the power of anecdotal evidence, and the social and biological bases of learning. You can’t appreciate what you don’t know until you know why you don’t know it.
The only thing we should explain better is the following:
“Why should the public keep paying physicists and spending money on research.”
Everything else (theories, models, data) is irrelevant (to the public).
Cheers
The concept of time.
I have verry hard times to understand how that can change if you do stuff with lightspeed.
That the universe and all its constituent parts are basically information processors, and that every process costs time and resources.
I think it is very important that the general public understands how scientific knowledge is established and in particular that scientific theories can vary greatly in their reliability.
The credibility of scientific disciplines is derived from empirical evidence and empirical evidence only. Different scientific (sub)disciplines have very different access to empirical evidence and therefore their reliability also varies greatly.
Those aspects of scientific knowledge which can be tested in cheap and easy to interpret scientific experiments/observations are extremely reliable. Those aspects which are gleaned from few indirect observations or a limited number of hard to control experiments are much more suspect and should not be relied upon too much. Finally theories supported by no empirical evidence at all are just pure speculation – completely unreliable.
This is the reason why disciplines like classical physics or chemistry – already tested by countless scientists and engineers all over the world – are so much more reliable then social sciences where controlled experiments are very hard to perform and interpret.
One thing: that a theory can be a testable fact (as in “evolution is both a fact and a theory”).
What is the difference aside from scale, pray tell? A theory, which is a conglomerate of hypotheses, can be as much ad hoc as an isolated hypothesis.
how investment in basic research by taxpayers actual translates into jobs
So typical that the first comment on explaining science is a blatant religious agnostic claim which has absolutely nothing to do with science! Makes you sad for humanity.
[It is elementary rejected too.
For example, no zombies have ever been observed, nor believed to be possible for basic biological reasons. So no Jebus zombie. Thus Jebus religions goes against scientific fact.
“No overlap”, indeed, such a silly claim, and you hear it from people who should know better.]
Gravity, Magnetism or Quantum entanglement – Those “at a distance”/”without a medium” subjects are what I find fascinating, and wish I understood more
The scientific method is on the top of my list
Truth matters !!!
antennas are fuckin’ miracles. sure, it’s about waves in air resonating with waves in a material with different epsilon and mu, but like, if you’ve ever tried to design one, they’re incomprehensible.