Science is hard

In a random sort of musing about "stuff" that I seem to spend most of my life doing, I was thinking about the whole idea of popular science and how it is promoted, And what occurred to me was that when I was studying, (maths, physics and economics) what appealed was how hard they were (OK not economics clearly), not how accessible they were.

Maths and Physics were great because they were difficult and not everyone could do them. How great is that!

Now we seem to spend a lot of time trying to make a lot of complex stuff accessible to everyone,but to do so we have to dumb stuff down so much that they are not true or useful.

I have just read Richard Dawkins (in general a good guy) explaining atoms using the Rutherford/Bohr model of electrons circling a nucleus. This not only misses the beauty of science, but puts a false image in peoples minds.

What we should be doing is, instead of trying to make everything "easy", recognise that some stuff is dead hard, and celebrate it, challenge people and reward success.

As JFK said, "we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard". And hard is good.