What You Wrote Is Not What They Understood

Here's a clear example of what you write and intended is not what the general public understood. Even with something that has received numerous publicity and magazine/newspaper coverage, and with numerous articles being written about it, the LHC at CERN can still be severely misunderstood, and we're not talking about crackpot "blackhole will destroy our universe" type of misunderstanding.

I'm guessing that this article is simply a light-hearted, amusing news column. Still, it reveals what someone untrained in physics understood out of one of the many articles on the LHC. There are many strange and erroneous statements and understanding here:

When this carnival ride is cranked up, it will only operate when slightly above absolute zero, the temperature of way, way out deep space.
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Remember, it all started with the atom, a unit of energy, and following every disintegrating blast, the shed energy particles got smaller—so small they are only theories.
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Now, we’re down to the boson particle, named after a guy named Higgs who thinks the boson could be the base particle of all particles.
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We have Nobel Prize winners who think this little spark is how it all began. If you have come this far, you have to take my explanations as simplified by ignorance, and very possibly incorrect, but like the blasting for bosons, I’ll keep theorizing.
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The sneaky side deal in particle physics is chasing the single-deity, creation theory. The proof of a single spark theory could suggest a finite universe conclusion, putting pressure on the infinity argument.
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If the Hadron Collider operates in its own curvilinear body, moving energy and particles to form new bodies and release energy, those creations diffuse in spherical fields, suggesting infinity to me.

etc.

Note that I'm not criticizing the author here. He understood what he understood. And he can only understand things based on the "frame" that he knows. That's how we all learn, i.e. we process information that we received based on the ideas that we had already built and understood. This author understood the concept of the atom, and that's why he thinks that's the "unit of energy" and everything starts from there.

What is important here is the need to realize, especially by those writing science articles to the general public, that the public often understands things differently than what is written and intended. I've seen this happens to many times that it is no longer funny. Just because there are numerous information on something, doesn't mean that they all could convey the accurate information to the recipients. The LHC had tons of articles written and mentioned about it, yet one can still understand it incorrectly.

Helen Quinn's essay on the plea about language is more relevant and appropriate here. A careful consideration of what is being mentioned is imperative, and a very thorough consideration of the level of understanding of the target audience must done. Scientists and science writers must not just pat themselves on their backs after presenting some science ideas to the general public. This, by no means, implies that they general public received the intended message. As we can see here, what goes in does not necessarily be the same thing that sticks and stays in.

Zz.