Hm.. this is the second time today that I posted a comment based on a misreading (see the correction above). Makes me wonder about the quality of the work I did during the rest of the day.
Regarding the pop-science approach to physics, I read a lot of such books as a teenager. Since then, I've studied several areas of physics with real mathematical rigor, some in university courses and others just out of curiosity, and in retrospect I must say that the popular books had failed to give me any accurate understanding whatsoever. All I got was either confusion or a somewhat coherent but in fact completely misleading picture of the real thing.
The only cases where physical theories can be explained with some accuracy in layman non-mathematical terms are those that deal with people's everyday experiences, and don't involve any phenomena that are outside of that. When it comes to relativity, quantum theory, cosmology, let alone more advanced and esoteric areas of modern physics, to me it seems impossible to convey any accurate understanding without the mathematics. I have yet to see a pop-science book that would successfully do it, no matter how smart the reader. (I liked this recent LW comment made by a physics about this topic.)
If you subscribe to the view that an illusion of understanding is worse than nothing at all (as I do), it's really hard to find anything positive to say about pop-science physics books. Yet scientists will rarely criticize them, sometimes because they profit by writing them (or hope to do so one day), but more often because they raise the status of physicists and scientists in general in the eyes of the general public. Ultimately, these works allow readers to signal their smarts and sophistication, famous physicists to make lots of money, and other physicists to enjoy the high status brought this way to their profession, but certainly nobody gains any (scientific) knowledge in the process.
A couple of my own experiences. As a kid I devoured Lewis Carroll Epstein's Thinking Physics, which so easy and fun and filled with pictures it is like a comic book, and I devoured it like one (though I always - always - answered each puzzle before seeing his explanation). Talk about popularizations, this was a frickin comic book. I think it took a week of afternoons to get through. In retrospect I don't think it misled me. On the contrary, I think I learned a lot from it. My major as an undergraduate was mathematics but I took two semesters of physics alo...
I had an incredibly frustrating conversation this morning trying to explain the idea of quantum immortality to someone whose understanding of MWI begins and ends at pop sci fi movies. I think I've identified the main issue that I wasn't covering in enough depth (continuity of identity between near-identical realities) but I was wondering whether anyone has ever faced this problem before, and whether anyone has (or knows where to find) a canned 5 minute explanation of it.