The lay public (of which I am undoubtedly one member), AKA "the marks", really haven't a clue as to how to decipher press releases by Public Information Officers. So long as science news does not affect their bottom line or interfere with sports and entertainment shows, the attitude is "no harm; no foul". We love our sports analogies.
But big science and small, most of it is supported by the lay public's taxes, and science should be seen as (as well as actually be) the dynamic and exciting enterprise that it could be if so much were not claimed to be "settled science". That smacks of "proven, and finalized" in the average person's view. No more questions here. Move on; move on. Settled science is an oxymoron. We know so little, compared with how much there is remaining yet to learn, that it simply sends the wrong message to report that this or that is "settled science".
I support the EU idea set because it is based on logic and available science, and does not seem to have to make up new explanations or invent new reasons for this or that observation, because the evidence says "that must be the only explanation". It also links numerous disciplines and areas of human enquiry; the very definition of a paradigm. Not yet a theory, in toto, but off to a promising start. It is exciting because it stresses that it is continuously new, and expanding and synthesizing its findings and methods into more and more areas all the time.
We should work harder at planting these ideas into the forefront of the public consciousness. The missteps and costly blind-alley blunders might start getting a little more scrutiny if people started looking closely at graphs of watts delivered (to the national power grid by fusion power experiments modeled on a theory about the Sun) versus watts (or dollars) expended over time. Even a public more interested in shows like E.R. or Gray's Anatomy should be able to recognize a flat line when they see it.
Loved the cartoon.
Jim
