The public is more ignorent and scared than you think it is.

I had a statistics lecture course for the last 2 days, which made me quite sleepy. In addition we went to the St Mungo's (patron saint of Glasgow, no peer-reviewed publications) public lecture about lasers. Well, a bit public it was mostly civic dignitaries and suchlike, a bunch of students from the SUPA stats course, and academics from the surrounding universities (the guys giving the lecture were apparently quite good)

Explaining lasers to the layman is like explaining it to scientists, except you skip 3 slides and talk through the others very quickly.
They went on about the practical money-making uses and medical applications (the audience was, as I implyed, old and rich), as well as ludicrusly esoteric things like gravitational wave detection (none have been detected yet, which given the sensitivity of the devices, means that somthing interesting is happening to some neutron stars)

There were questions at the end. These started quite well with questions about their careers and what had been very exciting for them (non-liner optics).
Then some woman asked if the lasers in supermarket checkouts were dangerous.
The correct answer is of course, "Yes, if you inject them. Rubbing them into the gums isn't good either".

Are you scared of some Science? Can I help?