I fear popular science. If you want to teach what scientific method can do, show people how it works, make them do science. For instance let kids study how to g

I fear popular science. If you want to teach what scientific method can do, show people how it works, make them do science. For instance let kids study how to grow beans in different soils, take measures of stem diameter, height, quantify things, check hypotheses, make experiments! Instead of teaching the method and providing a reasonable introductory education what popular science usually does is tell people not to worry, because there are scientists who already know not only the answers but the relevant questions through some magical hand-waving called Science that involves a lot of CGI. So people can relax and be intellectually lazy because Science. This is wrong. Big Science is demanding, slow, hard, and can't be indefinitely simplified without turning it into a lie. But science is a method, why don't you show how it works? There is a famous Feynman piece called "Cargo Cult Science" in which he tells a story about experiments with rats that gives the gist of it all: "All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using, not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science." Instead of that popular science gets you an authoritative figure feeding the audience with multiverses as if they were a matter of fact. Well, they're not.