Comment by gsf_emergency_4
Comment by gsf_emergency_4 2 days ago
Sorry: gauge-field.
It's poetic and you can pardon the french but the combination is alien.
Poetry is hard: a poetic way to say "co-ordinate transformation" or "tensors" could help students to calculate with them. I'd suggest "shear-squeezing-your-xray-lens" for everything but I fear the backlash from teachers because that would take a doctorate (or more) to unpack!
The problem you run into is that laypeople operate with modified Aristotelian physics. They might "know" that the speed of light is a speed limit, and they might "know" that quantum mechanics says you can't measure anything.
They also believe that objects keep moving after you push them because they retain a memory of your push, and when that force runs out the objects come to rest*
You are not, will not, cannot teach them how to do a meaningful modern calculation in a single conversation**. Hell, Feynman's lectures were a failure: they didn't serve the audience he was supposed to be teaching (first year students).
So are you talking to students? Or is this a cocktail conversation? Because those are two very different settings.
*&**) These points are extensively documented in the PER literature. SciComm is really important and really useful, but it's not the same as effective pedagogy.