>I don't know a single physicist who wouldn't dearly have loved to be able to explain this stuff to laypeople more easily. People are scared to use metaphors or other rough answers.
Feynman managed to do this with quantum electrodynamics, in "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." That layperson book shows an inefficient yet accurate way to calculate path integrals of Feynman diagrams without any calculus, and uses the exact analogy of a clock spinning for phase. I understood it without any background in the math.
There's also four lectures on QED for grad students, which is the "formal" version of pretty much the same content, featuring math.
Why can't someone take the QED approach for the whole standard model? Symmetry groups can be explained visually. I think the physicists just can't be bothered, and/or they underestimate the intelligence of uninformed but curious laypeople.
Roger Penrose is another example of a physicist who does this right, in Cycles of Time for instance.
I think many people think soft skills are not real -- that if you are good at a hard skill such as theoretical calculations, you are automatically good at soft skills such as explaining it to a lay audience.
Feynman had a rare talent for explanation, which few physicists have. This talent is just as real as his talent for physics.
It's also not really part of your job description: You're supposed to advance the state of the art of theoretical physics, not "waste time" trying to come up with better explanations for the layperson.
Feynman managed to do this with quantum electrodynamics, in "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter." That layperson book shows an inefficient yet accurate way to calculate path integrals of Feynman diagrams without any calculus, and uses the exact analogy of a clock spinning for phase. I understood it without any background in the math.
There's also four lectures on QED for grad students, which is the "formal" version of pretty much the same content, featuring math.
Why can't someone take the QED approach for the whole standard model? Symmetry groups can be explained visually. I think the physicists just can't be bothered, and/or they underestimate the intelligence of uninformed but curious laypeople.
Roger Penrose is another example of a physicist who does this right, in Cycles of Time for instance.