I tweeted this on an impulse:
What is the one concept in science that you really think should be explained better to a wide audience?
At least 140 characters restricts people to really only suggesting one thing. But I don’t want to leave the blog readers out, so have a go. See if you can stick to just one!
Statistics.
Everyone reads them and, consciously or not, is affected by them. But they are rarely understood correctly.
The skill of sharpening a question to the point where it could actually have an answer.
Further to #22, how gravity works according to General Relativity. Physicists don’t understand this, or if they do, they don’t internalize it the way biologists have internalized evolution or geologists have internalized plate tectonics.
Age-old stumper: Where do socks go when you put them in the dryer???
Ocean Tides! The moon doesn’t pull water away from the Earth! Everyone knows what tides are, but very, very few know how they work. Most physicists even explain this badly (ok my sample size is about two 🙂 Why are tides difficult to understand – because they are complicated 🙂
Conservation of Energy: under what conditions is it observed and how can a universe pop up out of “nothing” and not break it?
Free will.
The scientific method. Following that, evolution by natural selection, and following that, statistics.
Hmm … why pooping in your kitchen is not a good idea?
Perturbative renormalization and the fact that it conceptually has nothing to do with the canceling of ultraviolet divergences should really be explained better.
Another vote for basic statistics. Or even, just correlation vs causation.
Likewise, the laws of thermodynamics.
And magnets.
The benefits of extracting truth from reality via the scientific method, i.e., objectivity, discredited theories, critical thinking, open mindedness, etc.
emergence
We are all terrible at predicting what makes us happy. Even professors of behavioural economics. So maybe happiness isn’t the goal of life.
The answer, of course, is in the question. What should be explained is the “the concept of science” itself.
What is the arrow of time?
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That “scientific proof” is an oxymoron.
The opposite of comment #1.
Why climate!=weather. If we get that one across we might be still in a position where all the rest (important as they are) can be dealt with.
Hypotheses are testable.
The curvature of space: every analogy we use is curving something from n dimensions into n+1 dimensional space. But apparently that’s not how it works.
At the risk of giving a non-socially-charged answer…
Gears. Like in cars and bikes. How shifting gears is helpful. I ‘understand’ the concept, but it took me a while and I’m not sure I have it right.
Hmm, didn’t really want to comment twice, but my comment (#1) seems to be misunderstood. Or not. So apparently my comment “should be explained better”.
I’m tired of the whole “religion vs. science” debate. I want it to stop. Mainly because it’s unproductive (nay, counterproductive!) to do so, but also because it’s meaningless to begin with. Religions try to answer why we exist. And because most religions tend to precede scientific enlightenment, they also tend to include an account of “how”. It’s only natural to do so, given the absence of other (satisfactory) theories at the time. But that’s a side effect. The main reason why religion exists is to offer reliability, strength and a sense of community. None of which are objectives of science. So no overlap, at least fundamentally.
If it matters: I’m a physicist and an agnostic. For all I care, people can believe in the flying spaghetti monster or the second coming of Newton. I’d just like everybody to drop the holier-than-thou attitude and stop wasting time on fruitless discussion.
Bell’s Theorem, Higg’s boson, Vacuum energy