I'm Not Convinced

Why Science Needs to Stop Telling Me Obscure Things.

 Many people in the scientific community are often concerned with the seeming inability of laypeople to understand science. This ranges from things like homeopathy to the difference between mass and weight (how many people you know can elucidate the difference between a kilogram and a Newton?).
 Recently, an article I was reading was bemoaning the deterioration of the "original" Kilogram.
 All metric measurements, at least initially, were based on something physically real. There was an actual, defined "meter" at one point in time; a brass bar that was... well, a meter long.
 Over the years, we've gotten rid of the physical artefacts for everything except the Kilogram, which is a small metal cylinder that sits in a jar in Paris, doing very little except weighing a set amount. I'm not sure what else it does, although it may well be on Twitter.
 ["Kilogram01: Still sat here. Can anyone else smell onions? LOL"]
 Due to complicated atmospheric reasons, there is now a discrepancy between this original, master Kilogram and some of the other kilograms minted at the same time. (Basically, as I understand it, every time they're touched by human hands, their mass alters very very slightly, and this is throwing off some calculations at the quantum level.)
 This brings me to my point: How can science expect the public to get on-side when we're dealing with something so abstract?
 Let's look at it chonologically: Somebody in a Victorian steel mill made a cylinder. That cylinder was defined as the "master" Kilogram, from which all other kilograms would be decided.
 How did they decide what it weighed?!
 If someone at the steel mill, or smelting plant, or whatever it was, was feeling fruity, how do we know he didn't change the weight slightly before pressing?
 How do we know a kilo isn't ten times heavier than we think it is, and that they pressed the wrong button on the day and then bluffed it to save face?! Nobody would know.
 Following this, the magic cylinder that we're assured is a kilogram "because someone in France said so" has started to imperceptibly change mass. According to the BBC, the amount of change is equivalent to a single grain in a bag of sugar.
 A bag of sugar that weighs a kilogram.
 Unless it doesn't. Because it might not be a kilogram, it might just weigh the same as a cylinder that someone made a hundred years ago and SAID was a kilogram and everyone believed them. Except it won't weigh the same as that, because that kilogram's different now anyway. But not by much.
 You could go crazy thinking about these things.
 This, in short, is why people have trouble with science. You can only ask so many questions before someone in a lab coat throws up his hands (and probably some test tubes or something) and shouts "because it just fucking IS, alright?!"
 The meter I have less trouble with - it's now defined as the distance light travels in a tiny sliver of a second. That's okay, I trust light, I see it all the time.
 But another distance really starts to agitate me. "Planck's Length", named after German physicist Max Planck, is the smallest known distance.
 That's just made up, isn't it?! That's not a thing. Some German gets to go down in history for naming "the smallest possible distance" ?! Fine, I'll have a go. I've invented a new distance, "Haines' Distance", it's half a Planck's length.
 See?! That was easy.
 How's it's defined, you ask?! Well, however you define a Planck Length, divided by two.
 It's the same as when someone tells me that the universe is meant to be shaped like a saddle.
 I have literally no use for this information. None. It would only prove important if I were somehow transformed into a colossal, Galactus-like entity whose form spanned a trillion galaxies, and I was looking for something to put on my space-horse.
 I'm not convinced it's real information at all. Someone could have just had a slow day editing "Science" or "Nature" and just decided to throw these things out there, safe in the knowledge that nobody would call bullshit.
 Science has fallen out of favour with the public in direct proportion to how much use we can see it being in day to day life. This is not to say it has no use in day-to-day life; hospitals, transport, TV, radio, internet, agricultural methods - all figured out by science. But, with the possible exception of medicine, all figured out a while back.
 A poster might tell you that the new Toyota has lower emissions than any previous model, but that's sort of hard to get excited about. The man on the street isn't getting excited about parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere; he's thinking "yeah, but it's 2011, shouldn't they be able to make it fly by now?!"
 Tiny, incremental advances in science are being made all the time, but none of it involves the big, showy stuff like putting a man on the moon. Of all the disciplines, only biology seems to have had the right idea in recent years, with some of the genetic stuff. Sticking an ear on the back of a mouse and cloning a sheep and whatnot. Admittedly, all sheep look alike, so this could have been another example of bluffing by someone at a press conference, but the mouse with the ear on it's back definitely got people talking. (The mouse itself could hear everything that was being said for sixty miles in any direction, and was apparently quite embarassed about it all.)
 Perhaps biology has it easier than the rest of the disciplines; physics is notoriously complicated, mathematics has no appeal to people who aren't good with numbers, both rely heavily on algebra, astronomy asks us to care about things that are ocurring unimaginable distances away, often millions of years ago, and so it goes on. Human beings are at least biological entities, so that one's a smidge easier to grasp.
 What science really needs to do with any discovery in any discipline is explain to people why it's important. The public has lost touch with science, and needs to be sat down and talked to honestly about it.
 Take the technological singularity -  the point in time where we hypothetically invent a machine that's as smart as a person, or smarter. From that point, computers can re-invent themselves, improving their own flaws, getting smarter with every generation, until within a staggeringly short space of time, machines are near-omniscient.
 That's exciting. And not just exciting. It's pants-shittingly terrifying.If we invent a human-level artificial intelligence in January, by summer we could have SKYNET on our hands. Household appliances would be much, much more intelligent than you are, and the worst part is, they'd know it.
 The public, by and large, don't care about this potential crisis because they're unaware.
 So the next time someone makes a breakthrough in logic gates or programming, and scientists gather round to congratulate one of their own, maybe it should be explained in different terms to the public.
 "SCIENTIST FINDS WAY TO STOP YOUR SUPER-INTELLIGENT TOASTER MURDERING YOU", for example. Then people would sit up and take notice, because it's immediately obvious how it can directly affect them, and to a lesser extent, toast. The little advances benefit us, we just don't appreciate how without being told.
 Every so often, wrong-headed attempts are made. Recently, a nano-guitar was produced; an infinitismally tiny guitar with moving strings, about the size of a single cell of human blood.
 This clearly served no purpose except to illustrate what can be done with nanotechnology these days, but nobody I know was impressed. It's a guitar. You can't play it, or hear it. Or even see it, because it's so small.
This isn't the way to get people excited about nanotech.
 Build a swarm of nanobots that can devour a horse like pirahna; then people will start talking. Doesn't even have to be a horse. Start small, with a bee or an ant or a wasp. Make it a wasp. Nobody likes wasps.
 Make a swarm of nanobots that can devour a wasp like a shoal of pirahna, and everyone will be a) impressed and b) thinking about how that could eliminate the need to run around flapping their arms when a wasp is nearby.
 I appreciate that science isn't supposed to be big and showy. It's staid and resolute and dogged, and that's what makes it work.
 But once in a while, how about showing people why it's important instead of discussing what are often perceived as hypotheticals?


[I looked up what makes a kilogram, incidentally. It's a thousand grams, a gram being defined as the weight of a cubic centimetre of water. Before you ask, a centimetre is one-hundredth of a metre, which is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.]