In our society, the implications of science share one characteristic with cosmic neutrinos: people are totally immersed in them but their detection and recognition are very difficult.
But while neutrinos don't care if they remain undetected, science in general, and particle physics in particular, is facing growing problems because of this invisibility. While proud to be at the vanguard of discovery, scientists are becoming increasingly aware of an ambivalent place in society. The SSC cancellation was a major signal, but similar difficulties are found everywhere.
The 20th century began as "the century of science", with great enthusiasm for scientific and technological progress, but this euphoria is now tempered by doubts and real fear. What will scientists do next... where are they taking us? Has science gone too far? The reasons for this change in attitude are not yet fully understood: surely it is related to the development of weapons of mass destruction and by industrial and ecological disasters, real or perceived. In part it also reflects a natural reaction by laymen to an unfortunate attitude of superiority and detachment shown by some scientists. There are also unfulfilled expectations, the disappointment following over-optimistic claims, and in some cases deliberate propaganda.
But a major reason is the scientific illiteracy and ignorance of the majority of otherwise educated people. This is due to science being excluded from specialized education, to irrational fears and to a dangerous revival of the occult. Such ignorance is one of the reasons behind the often exaggerated perceptions of health risks, one of the driving forces behind decisions on science and new technology.
Specific problems
Particle physics is a far from everyday experience, and research continually explores frontiers which are even more remote. Starting from commonsense notions, science observes and explores the world around us. In doing so it discovers apparent paradoxes and then reflects on how commonsense must be reappraised to explain these paradoxes. In turn these fresh ideas suggest new observations and more refined experiments. Thus scientific evidence and everyday experience move further apart. Particle physicists use concepts totally foreign to a layman: or for that matter even to chemists or biologists.
The paradox is that a branch of knowledge which in principle sets out to explore the most basic questions of all has become almost a closed field. We can be proud of the intellectual achievements of particle physics and the technological skills and ingenuity it demands, but from the point of view of the public and most intellectuals, these efforts are hidden behind an impenetrable curtain.
The American anthropologist Margaret Mead noted: "Scientists at the frontier, where the terminology and imagery are developed, speak mostly to other scientists at or near their own level of understanding... scientific language has escaped from the realm of 'natural language'."
Since Galileo, the language of physics has been mathematics, even less familiar than physics itself! Many "intellectuals" are not ashamed of their mathematical ignorance, which is not considered to be an educational deficiency or a handicap in understanding the surrounding world. Richard Feynman's suggestion to learn some mathematics and to use logic and reasoning to understand physics becomes instead an open invitation to many to give up trying to understand it.