People don't talk about science much because the newtonian mechanics/basic genetics/simple chemistry/germ theory/fundamental climate science that the average interested citizen walking around needs to understand their world has been pretty well hammered out. More than that, the cutting-edge science/technology necessary to make their world work is at a level where they need to read at least an article or two to grasp why relativistic time dilation makes GPS work or how nuclear resonance gives you fMRI. The Higgs boson got popular because 1) Atom smashers are stupid expensive and the theoretical physics community had watched what happens when you don't give the public an easily digestible reason for science 2) "God particle" has a great ring to it even if it's totally inaccurate 3) crazy cranks got popular by claiming the apocalypse; scientists got popular by debunking crazy cranks The Mars Rover was a big deal because NASA did a full-court publicity press, something they somehow forgot between Apollo 17 and the Mars Rover. The original proposals for the Apollo project had Morse Code for communication, as I recall; putting movie cameras on the booster and stuff was a PR move to justify the crazy expense of it. That, and, you know. Landing a volkswagen on another planet has some nice basic excitement to it. Unseen to most people because it's hard to digest it into a 15-second soundbite are the sweeping changes going on in cosmology, for example. It isn't just about the Higgs; cosmological discoveries are largely made through data-mining. There's also a big push right now into ginormous telescopes; between the TMT, the EELT, the GMT and the Webb there's gonna be a shit-ton of big glass pointed out within the next decade. But the stuff it's gonna show isn't gonna be that much more spectacular than the Hubble so we're kind of acclimatized. The TMT is 1.5 billion dollars worth of big bitchin' glass that nobody gets to look through for another ten years. That's hard to keep in the news. The anti-vax debate? They shut down a daycare five miles away for measles. You can bet we caught the kid up on her immunizations right quick (she's been kinda sick so we were a little behind). It's pure self-interest but it's also true to say that the vaccine debate has a lot more immediate effect on the average person.
Texan here. Still bitter. Also, when people bitch about James Webb being just sooooo overbudget, I acknowledge their arguments, but putting a price tag on the science we're going to get from that thing just seems so petty... Source: Totally unbiased space industry worker.link to SSC wiki article
Friend's dad was chief administrator on one of two collectors. I feel ya. It basically came down to "space station" or "skookum atom smasher." The senators whose districts benefitted from aerospace won against... Texas. A lot easier to scatter the pork around when you aren't earthbound to Waxahatchie. He's "the dude" for the TMT now, but... yeah. Totally lame.