> This is an unsolvable problem. [...] it can't get popular because it's technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose one.

I'm reminded of education research of the form "We tried to teach topic T to students in grade G. We taught it really, really badly. Surprisingly, that didn't work! We draw the obvious conclusion... students in grade G are developmentally unready to understand topic T."

So yes, it might truly be unsolvable. It's certainly difficult. Non-interactive defusing of misconceptions is dauntingly hard - even harder than remedial filling of foundational gaps. Then you add constraints on article length, and the medium may just not be adequate.

But I would be more comfortable with such an argument, if there was wider recognition of how wretched our current science education content is, and how badly it's failing students. How poor the stories we tell about the physical world. If your five-year old wants to know what finger-paint color to use for the Sun, don't ask first-tier astronomy graduate students - there's a wide-spread misconception, so they'll mostly get it wrong. On HN a few days back, there was something like a 'best 2019 astronomy books for children'... and the books were something vaguely like 0 of 10 on getting it right. We're just not set up to teach misconception-free transferable broad understanding.

Seeing research talks, I frequently think "Oh nifty - that concept/description/graphic/video is awesome: accessible and clarifyingly insightful. It should be part of every introduction to this topic. Down to primary school even." ... and won't be any year soon. The pipeline from researcher conversation, to talk, to paper and professional tome, down and down to education and popular content, is regrettably also a gradient from accessible/insightful/transferable/correct to confused/superficial/unusable/nonsense. There just hasn't been the incentives and infrastructure to do better.

In another comment you mention intro physics and olympiads. So take friction. We now know how friction works, down to nanoscale. But last I saw, we don't even try to teach that. Instead it's the decades-old plug-and-chug on Amontons' Laws of large objects sliding on pig fat. Sure, there's some nice training on system decomposition. But if we cared about actual understanding of the physical world, rather than the educational artifact of "Introductory Physics", our teaching focus would need to be different. Similarly, professors complain about PhD candidates lacking a rough quantitative feel for the field, and the current educational focus is far from fixing that. But, perhaps I'm out of date, and things are more-recently improving? Fermi problems are becoming much more common, for instance.

Ending on an upbeat note. An MIT project to create introductory cell-biology VR, obtained domain expertise by pulling in and interviewing researchers. One challenge was apparently... getting them to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. Suggesting that if infrastructure has the right shape, the massive and scarce expertise needed for better content might actually be plausibly obtained. And personalized education via XR might be sufficient, and sufficiently disruptive, to deliver it. So perhaps there's hope to do transformatively better than we have been.