I don't disagree with the posters of this thread. I did see something today that illustrates the problem to a sad degree. It was a Yahoo article about "careers for people who hate math". Right at the top of the list was Public Relations. We hire gatekeepers of public knowledge who can't stand the best tools for expressing knowledge, which is math. There is a reason the scientists speak to each other in a local dialect of English. The words they are using have a precise meaning that is different from popular usage and may not even be among the list of definitions in the dictionary. This is not unique to science. When a plumber talks about a "condenser" it is different from what an electrician means. All technical endeavors require a list of words where the meaning is unambiguous. Outsiders have to penetrate this if they want to know what is being said. They need to learn enough to come up to speed if they want to talk to understand what the scientists are saying. Eventually the words fail completely and you need to resort to math. But the gatekeepers, who think they are speaking for and to the "common man" are busy dumbing down the words and removing the last vestiges of math from the message. Image you needed to know the time and all the dial clocks were removed because they are "too technical" and the simple four digit number with a colon is gone because it looks like "math". What you are left with is a dumbed down message like "Mickey's big hand is on the four and his little hand is on the seven". That's what it's like trying to learn something from the popular media about the subject of science. DT