Originally a comment by Coel on Most don’t have a grounding.

One reason science papers are inaccessible is the language of science requires a vocabulary most people don’t have. [iknklast]

Agreed, and to add to this, it is not just a matter of using different words (as if they were using every-day concepts, but talking in German rather than English). Rather, each of these jargon words represents a concept that is not present in everyday life.

Thus someone could be familiar with the car-mechanic’s word “carburettor”, but still not understand how a carburettor combines with other components into an engine. Imagine explaining that term to an intelligent and educated person from the 14th century.

There are physicists writing books purportedly for lay people, but as someone who has taken physics and read a lot of physics, I can tell you I wouldn’t give most of the books to anyone outside the sciences to read and expect they’d understand it.

Yes, agreed again. The problem here is that modern physics has progressed so far beyond everyday life, that it’s not just unfamiliar concepts. It’s that each of those concepts builds on a layer of other concepts that are also unfamiliar, and each of those concepts then builds on a further layer, and there are 4 or 5 layers of concepts between cutting-edge theoretical physics and everyday life.

Now, each of steps can be explained, but even if a lay person can follow the explanation of each step, being able to follow multiple layers of unfamiliar concepts is something that human brains basically cannot do (without vast amounts of work assimilating each step until it is familiar), even for intelligent people.

So take something like “the Higgs Boson was predicted as being necessary to complete the standard-model of particle physics, by then expaining why the other particles have mass”, and then ask how the Higgs gives mass to the other particles.

You can attempt to answer that with an imaginative analogy (which is a highly worthwhile thing to do), or, to do anything approaching a proper job, would take a whole book. Sean Carroll did indeed write a whole book that attempts to explain this. But, as you say, unless the reader is both interested in science and fairly capable of following physics-y concepts, they are going to struggle to assimilate it. Again, the problem is that the novel concepts come in layers upon layers.

And that means that — unfortunately — research papers in physics are never going to be accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a strong background in physics.