I Don’t Believe It

Can We Really Trust the Experts?

There’s something unsettling about the way science is explained to the public. We’re told to trust the experts—to take their word as gospel because they wear the badge of authority. But what happens when the very people we’re supposed to trust get the fundamentals wrong?

Take Professor Brian Cox, a well-known physicist and science communicator. On the surface, he seems the ideal guide to the cosmos: intelligent, articulate, and enthusiastic. But scratch beneath the surface, and cracks begin to appear—not in his credentials, but in his explanations.

For instance, Cox once claimed that the Pauli Exclusion Principle—the rule that no two identical fermions can occupy the same quantum state—applies across the entire universe. That would mean two electrons, separated by billions of light-years, somehow "know" not to share a state. It sounds dramatic. It also sounds absurd. In reality, the exclusion principle has practical consequences only when particles' wavefunctions overlap—that is, when they're close enough for quantum effects to matter. Technically, the rule still applies universally, but if there’s no interaction, there’s no exclusion. Presenting it otherwise is misleading.

And then there’s special relativity. Cox often describes time dilation and length contraction as if they are absolute—that a moving clock really ticks more slowly, or a travelling object truly shrinks. But this strips out the central idea of relativity: there is no absolute frame of reference. From one perspective, your clock is slow; from another, theirs is. It’s symmetric. It’s subtle. And it’s beautiful—if you bother to tell the truth about it.

But that's the problem. These explanations are aimed at what Cox seems to think is a simple-minded audience, one that must be entertained with confident-sounding half-truths. There’s rarely any warning: “What I’m about to say is a metaphor, not the full picture.” Instead, the presentation is slick, the conclusions confident, and the result is confusion for anyone actually trying to think.

This is not just a matter of style. For people who genuinely want to understand, misleading simplifications are worse than no explanation at all. They don’t just block learning—they undermine trust. And that’s the real danger. Once you realize the experts are leaving out important details—or worse, getting it wrong entirely—you start to question everything. Rightly so.

Because it’s not the public who lack intelligence. It’s the experts who often lack respect—for the audience, for the subject, and for the complexity of truth. The best communicators don’t pretend things are simpler than they are. They guide you through the difficulty, not around it.

So, can we really trust the experts? Sometimes. But only if they’re honest enough to admit when they’re oversimplifying—and humble enough to speak not down to the public, but with them.

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References

• Pauli Exclusion Principle – Encyclopedia Britannica
• Fermions and Quantum States – UC San Diego: Quantum Mechanics Lecture Notes
• Special Relativity Overview – Einstein Online: Special Relativity
• Brian Cox explaining relativity (criticized for oversimplification) – BBC Wonders of the Universe – Time
• Detailed critique of pop-science relativity explanations – Sean Carroll: The Misconceptions of Special Relativity
• On Twin Paradox and Reference Frames – John Baez’s Physics FAQ: The Twin Paradox