Saves time. Here:
As a physics professor working in a secular university in Australia, and publishing in scientific journals, and knowing the importance of communicating one’s science to the wider community, I have had many opportunities to see how the system works. Outside of the experts in your field the details do not matter, but a good story does.
As an illustration of this let me relate a story from early 2013. At that time I published a cosmology paper,3 which included an interesting concept. I found that using an alternative cosmology in a finite bounded expanding universe, with a unique centre and an edge, one could get the same physical description of the large-scale structure of the universe, which fit the observed data well. But this was without the need for the inclusion of ‘Dark Energy’ or ‘Dark Matter’ fudge factors, as is necessarily assumed in the standard big bang cosmology with no centre and no edge.
It was only a theory paper published in a lower ranked journal, so I didn’t really think much about it. But then I received a call from someone in the publicity department at my university who wanted to speak with me because she wanted to write a press release on it. She asked me what I felt was important about the paper. I told her that the paper was consistent with the notion that our galaxy could be located in a privileged location in the universe. This was contrary to the oft quoted cosmological principle which states that there are no privileged locations—that our location is purely random and the universe has no centre or edge. My paper suggested that that is not necessarily so.
Once she understood what I was saying, her facial expression told me everything. And she said: “I don’t think we can do anything with this.” And I never heard from her again. I had published the science, passing peer-review, but the real story could not be told. Silence was preferred.
Modern day cosmology has developed a ‘good’ story. The general public knows it very well. But they have absolutely no knowledge of the details, nor if they were presented to them could very many of them even comprehend them.
So we’ve heard. What matters in most cases isn’t science but pop science.