nrqed said:
I personally am always happy to see an effort from publications for the general public to report on fundamental research, even if they are not rigorous. I think that it's much much better for the general public to have some sense of what is done in basic research and to get some sense of what excites and intrigues researchers than to keep things to "ourselves" and to tell the general public that they can't understand thebasic ideas of what we are doing because they don't know enough maths! That would be so self-righteous!
I want to take that even further. Nobody on Earth has read enough to claim having the total knowledge necessary to demonstrate everything belonging to
e.g. string theory, even
e.g. Ed Witten. One embarquing on studying, at a technical level, a new subject, can gather only a limited quantity of references, or would spend his entire life only doing systematic bibliographies. At some point, one decides he has been deep enough in the successive layers of articles piling up, has gotten sufficient background to start tackle new problems, and in a few years, one can actually become a woldwide acknowledged specialist.
So ? There is nothing wrong about this (well, I am not going into the specific debate of string theory and
Not Even Wrong. The same process applies to all science today.). Knowing some maths enables to communicate in an unambiguous manner. But a long time ago when I was a (pre-)teenager, reading unrigorous books aiming at satisfying elementary curiosity has wet my appetite to go further. It was very important. Then I learned the maths at school, decided to go into physics, and am now ready to learn by myslef when I need more. Even today, being able
in principle to understand
e.g. all QCD, I have
in practice ommited a lot of proofs when building my cultural luggage. I trust peer reviewed journals, and have no time to re-do everything on ArXiv !
So when I want to choose which next subject I am going to put my nose on, there is always a level at which I content myself with the author, even though a stricter rigor would require me to continue in depth instead of expanding in width. It kills all creativity to be too rigourous. Everybody does that today. We read something at a certain level, and we can go deeper, or we can go sideways, but going deeper and deeper can take forever.
For the case at hand I still do not see what is wrong with the content of what I saw. Astronuc's link is supposed to be read from the beginning to the end. It is unfair to take one single slide and claim "this specific sentence is ambiguous". The original content seems to me to be well suited for the audience.
Astronuc said:
I cringe when I read articles about nuclear energy and particle physics.
Sure, it happens to me too very often, and at some point Zz started a thread on this. I agree that scientific communication is difficult and frustrating, but then also, one should respect the efforts when there is nothing wrong to reproach an article with.
and particle physics. 
