>Who else dislikes this sort of pop-science writing?
I love pop science writing. The thing is that this easy imagination helps a lot of people access hitherto unknowable principles of science. If you are science oriented or enquiry minded but do not have a background in the extreme detail required to access the specific subject/topic, you would have very likely never learnt anything about it given the arcane approach road to it. Popular science writing makes those spaces accessible, marks the roads, explains the possibilities and allows one to think through those abstractions. Then if you are sufficiently interested, you actually get into the hairy details of the actual science. But for most of us who are actually just traveling and understanding, this sort of writing gives us a grip of the "lay of the land."
I look at such writing as maps of knowledge, not the actual thing, but sufficiently detailed and made interesting to give people a sense of where they are. It's a jungle gym for the thinking mind.
I love pop science writing. The thing is that this easy imagination helps a lot of people access hitherto unknowable principles of science. If you are science oriented or enquiry minded but do not have a background in the extreme detail required to access the specific subject/topic, you would have very likely never learnt anything about it given the arcane approach road to it. Popular science writing makes those spaces accessible, marks the roads, explains the possibilities and allows one to think through those abstractions. Then if you are sufficiently interested, you actually get into the hairy details of the actual science. But for most of us who are actually just traveling and understanding, this sort of writing gives us a grip of the "lay of the land."
I look at such writing as maps of knowledge, not the actual thing, but sufficiently detailed and made interesting to give people a sense of where they are. It's a jungle gym for the thinking mind.