Passage 2 

Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don 't want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work. 

In a way, you can 't really blame scientists for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance, ” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience. ” All the more reason it 's so refreshing that readers of science stories don 't seem to mind a bit of confusion. Every Science writer I know has had the experience of readers coming up to them any saying: “Gee, that was fascinating; I didn 't understand it, but I 've been thinking about it all day. ” Readers often inquire about books where they can read further on a subject, or even primary sources. 

Editors, however, seem to absorb difficulty differently. If they don 't understand something, they often think it can 't be right—or that it 's not worth writing about. Either the writers aren 't being clear, or the scientists don 't know what they 're talking about. Why the difference? May theory is that editors are not just ordinary fork. They tend to be very accomplished people. They 're used to being the smartest guys in the room. So science makes them feel uncomfortable. And because they can 't bear to feel dumb, science coverage suffers.

So what is it about science that makes them uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it 's hard to understand things that aren 't yet understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relatively and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they 're correct because they 've been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don 't make sense. 

On the other hand, what should they? The fact that we have learned to understand what the universe was doing back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn 't care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn 't speak our language, so there 's no reason it should “make sense” . That 's why science depends on evidence. It 's essential to know not only what scientists know, but also what they know they don 't know. This is an unfamiliar concept to editors used to dealing with politics or sports. 

For all these reasons and more, good science journalists know that if they 're not dealing with subject matter that makes them dizzy, they 're probably not doing their jobs. The best editors understand all this.