You and a few others here remind me of this comment of C.P.Snow's, from the Wikipedia piece about him:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of:
Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by
mass, or
acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying,
Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern
physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the
western world have about as much insight into it as their
neolithic ancestors would have had.