What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)
> Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors.I think she should replace "science writers" with physicists. In my experience, it's when physicists give overflowing and superfluous explanations of things that cause the most trouble, because they are viewed as authorities. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, PBS Space Time, and many others. It's interesting, because I once read an interview with Brian Green, and the question was: what career would you have chosen if you weren't a physicist? His answer was both surprising and unsurprising: a Baptist preacher. One should note that he actually has the speaking style of one.It brings up an interesting point in that physics at the highest level sounds almost like what ill-informed amateurs produce. I have degrees in mathematics and some understanding of physics, but I've watched a few lectures of Ed Witten before, and he might as well be just making it all up. I know, it can all be backed out such that it all follows from known mathematics and physics, but one does have to marvel at the similarity, and I think this is what so-called cranks get emboldened by. It makes it worse when physicists use words like "believe".I think physicists have done a poor job explaining that what they do is model building. The models are not reality. What reality is currently lies in the realm of philosophy. The models physicists build are simply our best descriptions based on what we observe (string theory aside). The article gets at this a bit with mentioning metaphors, but it still doesn't drive home the point because she's referring to metaphors of metaphors (i.e., metaphors for the physical models). Once you understanding that physics is about building models that describes what we observe in physical reality, it lowers the barrier of "authority". In that, in some sense, the entire point of physics is often to find out how we're wrong just as much as it is to clarify where we're right. I think many don't understand that when "is" is used in physics, it really means "is modeled by" (or something to that effect).I'm reminded of this scene from one of my favorite movies, A Serious Man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI