McMullen said:
On second thought, maybe it's best that you just don't report on science stories at all. You fail physics forever.
I was wondering how long it'd take to illicit this reaction.
Technically, you're correct (the best kind of correct), but you seem to be missing the point that the key aspect of reporting on scientific results is not to explicitly illustrate every detail, but is instead to break the concept down into terms which are more easily understood by the general public.
I could have penned a report that explained exactly how an antimatter weapon might work, but it would take days and clock in at tens of thousands of words. Who is going to read that?
As for your rebuttal to my succinct description, again, you're technically correct, but at the same time you're letting your semantics get in the way of the realization that without anything left to observe (and no one to even conceive of any observable elements), an antimatter weapon would, effectively, destroy reality.
(If you'd like, I can also convincingly argue my point philosophically via incredibly pretentious allusions to Soren Kierkegaard, but again, who wants to read ten thousand words that really only function as evidence that I'm very, very bright?)
Oh, and the same goes for your thing about "theories," though let's substitute "importance of using layman's terms" with "importance of using the common, if technically incorrect vernacular that the English language has naturally evolved toward."
Happy?
