I don't think it actually is particularly easy to explain quantum physics, which is why the vast majority of lay people who think they understand it don't I don't even mean in the sense that the explanation they got was non-rigorous, I mean they remember the explanation wrong
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Like, God bless Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc for trying I guess but it's not easy to explain and even if you use small words people fuck it up I don't think I understand it all that well myself but I understand enough to know what they don't understand
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Like ALL THE TIME I hear people repeat stuff like "Einstein thought you can't go past the speed of light, but quantum physics says you can, you can use entanglement to send messages FTL" Which is 100% completely wrong, but is the basis of whole "hard" SF settings
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Anyway Even if you were right about that, why the fuck would that be weird Of course the hardest thing for human beings to talk about is ourselves We're trying to talk about the process of talking, understand the process of understanding
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It's a logical paradox, trying to turn your eyes all the way around so they can see themselves, like a snake eating its own tail The difficulty of true introspection has been discussed for thousands of years
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One specific reason that some humanities scholars give for the use of jargon, which you are free to disagree with but is hard to dismiss out of hand, is that it's *necessary* to use difficult, big words to get you to actually *think* about what is being said
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That the very danger of trying to translate ideas into "plain speech" is when you're talking about something emotionally fraught that you already have many deep kneejerk assumptions about, you'll just translate it into what you already want to hear
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This honesty is what I find missing whenever I talk to people in this field. I understand your reasoning, just know that this obfuscation also has the side effect of people not taking it seriously.
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Specialized terms of art are not "obfuscation" Again, this is a form of devaluing the work being done in the field People working out ideas with their peers aren't obligated to do it as a performance for a lay audience, it wouldn't help them with their work
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personally i find the use of differential equations hard to follow, anyone who tries to use them when talking about physics is just being obfuscatory for no reason like if they can't explain it in plain language is it even real, that's just common sense
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Hawking notoriously fought bitterly with his publisher over the use of equations in A Brief History of Time Hawking saying it was impossible to *really* explain anything he was talking about without equations and the publisher saying every equation was a 50% loss in sales
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof and
They eventually negotiated a compromise where he could have *one* equation, on the grounds it was an equation everyone had seen before but had no idea what it meant (E=mc^2) But he wasn't happy
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