Science & Tech Quote by Greg Egan

Pop science is a kind of intellectual weather: sudden gusts of hype, a pressure system of TED-friendly “breakthroughs,” then the inevitable shift to the next shiny front. Greg Egan’s line works because it refuses the usual scientist’s posture of aloof correction and instead admits complicity. “Flying off” is doing a lot of work here. It suggests not just error but lift: pop science doesn’t merely mislead; it makes ideas feel airborne, inevitable, socially rewarded. Fashionable directions aren’t wrong in the way a bad calculation is wrong. They’re wrong in the way a trend is wrong: persuasive, sticky, and optimized for attention rather than truth.

The target isn’t science communication per se; it’s the feedback loop between cultural appetite and speculative storytelling. SF writers “dragged” by pop science is a sly inversion of the genre’s self-mythology. Science fiction likes to imagine itself as a forward scout for real science, but Egan implies it can just as easily become an amplifier for whatever the moment wants to believe about brains, quantum anything, or evolution-as-personality-test. The subtext is editorial: readers reward the illusion of rigor, and writers learn to launder big claims through a few buzzwords and a confident tone.

Then comes the quietest flex: “I’ve been led astray… myself.” It’s humility, but also a warning from someone who actually understands the math. If even Egan can be seduced by a good narrative in a lab coat, the rest of us should treat scientific fashion the way we treat political polling: interesting, not authoritative, and always shaped by incentives.