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Eh, I suspect part of the reason is that once a topic crosses a certain level of difficulty, trying to convey an exact explanation for it in a reasonable amount of time becomes impossible and experts just fall back on analogies and hand-waving.

I'm a physicist, and if you asked me to explain Newton's laws or classical thermodynamics to someone, I could probably give them a reasonably complete overview in a few hours. And in doing so I'd probably introduce and explain some jargon (entropy, derivatives, etc) along the way to make it easier.

On the otherhand, if you asked me to explain Quantum Field Theory or General Relativity in the same time, I'd basically just give up and throw out some friendly but inexact analogies about stretched rubber sheets and the like, and hope the walked away with some vague sense of the outlines of the subject.



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