Science in the Public Sphere: Pitfalls and Possibilities

I will relate two themes in this talk. One will concern my own experience writing about physics and adjacent fields in magazines, newspapers, and books directed at a general audience. The other will concern some of the ideas I discuss in my most recent book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, where I discuss the role that scientists sometimes play in the persistence and spread of false belief. The moral will be that public outreach is an important and attractive part of science -- but one that needs to be approached carefully, lest one contribute to serious and potentially dangerous misunderstandings about how science works.