I think that people seem to be turning away from science and the scientific mindset, and the more that the scientific community engages with the public, the better.
Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the scientists?
I believe that this is exactly what the web is for.
"Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the scientists?"
It's not a matter of having an intermediary, it's a matter of listening to scientists who are trying to educate rather than promote their own theories to a public that doesn't have any hope of understanding them. It's like if you saw Steve Jobs stand in front of an audience of eight-year-olds and tell them they should grow up to learn Obj-C instead of Flash.
The public has an absurd fetish for shiny, new science while the theories of a hundred years ago would keep them scratching their heads for years. Older science is better not only because it's a necessary foundation for understanding modern science, but because it's more likely to be true. Somehow we've turned the reliability of our sources into an embarrassing flaw, and we get all our information from the dark corners that science isn't sure about yet.
cousin_it doesn't like the "sold directly". So, I'm asking about how he/she would like to do it indirectly, or how you would suppress reports of new theories from reaching the public until they are proven.
Whether you like the role the media play or not (and here it is definitely the scientific media), it is not a new phenomena. News == news.
It depends on what "engaging with the public" means. I think what the parent to your reply was driving at was that there are a lot of pop-articles that are constantly trying to have the most far-out, crazy idea about our universe. Often the articles aren't "This is what happened" but instead have a form like, "This weird thing might be true but we aren't even close to knowing for sure, yet." They are going for the "Whoa!" reaction. One of the comments a user left on the article's page used the phrase "theoretical one-upmanship," which I think kinda fits.
In short, I contest that these articles, though this one is WAY better than most since it is not written for the public at large, aren't actually engaging the public in science.
(I feel like your username is actually really relevant too, but I can't quite put my finger on the reason. I hope that my post is cromulent enough to embiggen our discourse on the subject, though.)
Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the scientists?
Other scientists. Promoting a scientific idea should only be okay if you have a complete technical understanding of it. I haven't yet seen any scientist blogger (never mind journalist) who actually completely understands Verlinde's ideas. So they should all shut up.
I can see that their could be a problem in that hypotheses/theories which might more quickly have dissipated in the past now could hang around because they have been marketed better to the public and so the proponents win more public funding because their work seems more important to laymen when the scientific establishment have largely rejected it.
It's the same "problem" as with Internet-age privacy—information just tends to be stickier and longer-lived now. It's not really a "problem" in the sense that it's solvable, though; it's just a fact of life, now. If we want scientific positivism to continue to march forward, we're going to have to find some workarounds for the high memetic potency of protoscience.
"but the approach implies that gravity is nothing more than the result of a system maximising its entropy, or disorder.
...
Smolin, a long term proponent of loop quantum gravity (LQG), believes that Verlinde’s work is not only compatible with LQG, it could even help to explain how familiar Newtonian gravity might emerge in this picture. According to LQG, spacetime isn’t the smooth fabric that Einstein envisioned; rather, if you zoom down to scales of 10^-33 cm, the fabric turns out to be woven from quantum threads. The key point for Smolin is that the holographic principle is also valid in this framework, allowing him to apply a version of Verlinde’s argument to demonstrate directly for the first time that loop quantum gravity has a limit that yields Newtonian gravity."
Ooooh! My wife (trained as a chemist) gets upset when I equate information entropy and thermodynamic entropy. I can't wait to antagonize her with this.
Newton told us that apples fall towards Earth with an acceleration that depends on the Earth’s mass, the apple’s mass, and its distance from the centre of the Earth,
