For instance, instead of: "There’s this substance, like a soup, that fills the universe; that’s the Higgs field. As objects move through it, the soup slows them

For instance, instead of: "There’s this substance, like a soup, that fills the universe; that’s the Higgs field. As objects move through it, the soup slows them down, and that’s how they get mass." Say: "You know how, if you push your potato bit around in your soup, it starts to slow and eventually stops when you stop pushing it? We could plot the speed of the potato bit over time, and we'd notice that as soon as we stopped pushing, the potato bit's speed drops to zero. The Higgs field has a similar effect on an object's acceleration as the soup has on the potato bit's speed. How much the field affects the object's acceleration apparently defines the object's mass. I say "apparently", because the exact way the mass is defined is incompatible with this simplistic analogy. But as we can see with the potato bit in the soup, the effective 'soup mass' of the potato bit is a complicated function of the things around it, as well as the bit's intrinsic characteristics." ... As a physicist by training, who once held ambitions to teach this stuff, I'm frequently very frustrated by people criticizing how physics is taught through (frequently very flawed) analogies, or via toy models. And part of my frustration is that the people who make these criticisms never had to try to teach the information to anyone who needed to know it. Its very easy to give a technically correct, fantastically nuanced, and perfectly incoherent-to-the-layman account of just about anything in physics. While a sufficiently focused student can derive all of known electromagnetic theory (including relativistic phenomena) just from Maxwell's equations, the standard graduate-level textbook on electrodynamics weighs more than 3 pounds, because that simplicity of expression is deeply misleading. Part of why Feynman's elementary physics lectures were so popular amongst his peers was because he had a way of picking analogies that cast light into the shadows created by the biases from their own years of study. But if you aren't already inculcated to the vagaries of physics nomenclature, even Feynman, the most celebrated physics educator of the modern era, is hard to parse. You MUST develop the intuitions of a physicist to understand what makes his introductory lectures so insightful. So when Feynman says "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.", it's less an expression of how poorly he understands it, but rather an expression of how "can I explain this in under an hour to a disinterested 19 year old?" is a really poor a metric of understanding. Granted, there's a ton of background knowledge baked into the observation that "spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics" (in that incident that caused the quote). Its ultimately a pretty trivial calculation, once you understand how statistical mechanics is derived, but getting to that point is not at all trivial.