Actually, I find that the really great scientists - Hawking, Feynmann, Gerzon etc. - can give at least some sense of what these things are about in words that the 'layman' to understand.
Indeed. Hence the popularity some of their books have. But not enough to actually make someone really understand and actually do something useful with the science or make a valid argument about which experiment / theorist or paper is correct.
For that you need to either use the model to make predictions, make observations, do experiments to test predictions or come up with modifications to current theory to explain discrepancies.
So you are making precisely my point. Any buffoon can read Black holes and baby universes or Brief history and (mis)understand it. I did that, I'm sure from the sales figures a lot more did, although I suspect more copies went unread. Give the ones that fancy they understand it, a copy of Hawking / Ellis the Large scale structure of space-time and ask them if it's correct.
For Feynman it's not even worth bothering with someone who claims to understand it, unless they're well on their way towards their own Nobel Prize.
If some layman claims to understand Feynman, they are claiming to be better than Feynman did himself. In truth, they probably can't spell his name properly.
But of course, those videos on the web
https://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 are worth watching because physics and science in general is a fascinating subject for scientists and laymen alike.
Once something is known - or is the currently accepted pov, as you note, it's easy to explain, in layman terms, what was done and what it means, in prose. This is as profound as saying, once a proof is known in maths you can google for it or even, the more perverse, that maths is easy. Of course maths is relatively easy when someone else has figured it all out for us.
This is the equiv to that IQ test where you keep resending your answers until you get top marks, or have someone else point out the pattern - then it's easy - of course it is. The tricky part is getting top marks yourself, and then coming up with something new, where you can't check your answers against the teachers sheet, or on a website, at the end.
It's like Feynman's story of Fritz Houtermans telling his girlfriend he knew why stars shine - at the time that was something - he was the only one that did. The other day at the OU someone explained it, in precisely the layman terms you make with your point, to my 8 year old. Yes it's kid's stuff.
The QI effect works too. This is that pretty much everything everyone knows is, in fact, not actually the case. For example, Hawking talks in his popular books / lectures about an expanding universe [mentioning Einstein and his cosmological constant / steady state mistake along the way], but not one where the expansion is accelerating [because at the time that wasn't known]
Now, whatever conclusions / experiments and theories will advance from this observation about the expansion is science. That's what makes the subject fascinating and interesting from a layman pov - the work of scientists. Some will soon know all about it, and how easy the maths is, because they they know about google and wikipedia. You see scientists aren't as computer literate as them
