The problem with popular science books (the non-fiction kind) is that the authors are usually scientists who deal with other scientists all the time. They rarely see a Dull Normal, let alone have to explain the subtleties of the laws of thermodynamics to them. So when they write their books, they write them as if their audience already knows all the background knowledge that someone with a university-freshman-level science education knows. So they leave out things like the explanation of the Ideal Gas Law (‘Everyone learned that in high school!’), or the definition of an integral (‘It’s a Riemann sum and you should have learned that in kindergarten!’), making the text utterly incoherent to anyone who decided to pursue accounting as a career.

The result is that from outside the field science starts looking more and more like gibberish disguised as magic. People start to see science less like a well-defined set of rules by which the Universe works and more like a bunch of half-assed, wildly speculative theories that aren’t any more coherent than what your buddies Jack, Nate and Tino came up with last New Year’s Eve when they were stoned out of their minds!

It doesn’t help that nary a science book is well-written. Even my writing, which was considered ‘good’ and ‘clear’ by my peers, is actually a garbled mess. I used to get my mom to proof read all my papers (including my Master’s thesis) to make sure that what I wrote actually followed and made sense. Most of the time my papers ‹ like this hastily-written piece you are currently reading -- had to be completely rewritten because they were jumbled messes of ideas that had no flow. Thanks to my mom’s proof reading, my Master’s thesis was totally short and totally readable. I ended up getting back a tonne of complaints that my thesis wasn’t written ‘formally’ enough.

At this point, you’re trying to figure out what I’m getting at and, frankly, so am I. But don’t worry: I have a point.

My point is that a formal, University-level science education teaches its students to be jargon-spewing, grammatical felons with no sense of writing style. And I believe this is deliberately done to make scientific ideas difficult to access so that scientists can feel like Big Smug Guys because They Understand and You Don’t.
And this is all because they were really bad at sports.

Ok, no. I’ve made all this up. But really, there are some serious ego issues at work in the scientific community and I swear that they like the fact that no one understands when they speak. They feel like Big Strong Men because what they explained is so complicated that it can’t be simplified and you’re a Big Giant Dull Normal ‹ with a job, pshaw! ‹ who doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever understanding these concepts.

Except that almost everything in science can be explained to a three year old with a couple of wooden blocks and a puppet show.

But if everyone knew that, then more people would go into the sciences and scientists wouldn’t be special anymore.

Oh, and my use of ‘guy’ and ‘men’ when referring to scientists is deliberate; I don’t have a big enough sample size to talk about women scientists.

I’m going to end this now and go back to making my brain explode.

Sandra "Snad" Polifroni is a disgruntled Computer Scientist who's currently on leave from a PhD. She has a degree in Physics which helps her make fun of "science" shows on cable channels. Snad loves to complain and has been told that no one complains as well as
she does. Snad's taken her love of complaining and created an on-line journal chronicling her exciting adventures through her PhD
and a page full of reviews of restaurants she's been to in the GTA (and beyond!)