I think a few things contribute to this in a big way: 1) Explanations of science (or the findings of science, anyway) in school are often awful and/or wrong, a

I think a few things contribute to this in a big way: 1) Explanations of science (or the findings of science, anyway) in school are often awful and/or wrong, and not always for any good reason. See: how airplane wings work, for an exceptionally bad one. Finding this out for one thing after another as one grows up paints all of science as kinda bullshitty. 2) People who (apparently) know what's going on often have trouble explaining why something that seems like it ought to have a decent intuitive explanation works other than "the math says it does, so it does". See, for an example: basically any place online where several seemingly-knowledgable people try to explain how/why the Oberth effect works. Also the talk section for the wikipedia page about how airplane wings work :-( 3) Most people (I'd guess) are looking for satisfying answers to "why" in science, and often science actually does run out of answers to that question beyond "because the math says so" or "because we've observed that this happens, for whatever reason", and sometimes surprisingly far from the edge of our knowledge on a topic. These spaces are often filled with fairy tales, which may be tossed about as if they're "real", confusing laypersons. This obscures where the satisfying-to-a-layperson part of a given topic ends and where here-be-dragons-and-magic-and-mostly-just-math begins. 4) Common words overloaded to serve as highly specific scientific terminology are incredibly difficult to parse as a layperson, and they're all over in science. It's easy to get fairly deep into a topic before realizing that a term like this is barely mapped to any common meaning, if it is at all. Doubly so if the reason the term was originally used turns out to be wrong, but the term remains in use for whatever phenomenon/term it was describing just because all the experts are used to it. Physics is extremely bad about this, to the point that it comes off as intentional. Given those things (among others), no wonder non-experts have trouble sorting BS from legit science. [edit] "there" to "where"