Popular media is an unspoken yet ever-present element of the physics landscape and a tool we can use in our teaching.1 It is also well understood that students enter the physics classroom with a host of conceptions learned from the world at large.2,3 It stands to reason, then, to suspect that media coverage may be a major contributing factor to students’ views on physical phenomena and the nature of science4—one whose influence will only grow amid the 21st-century digital age. Yet the role of the media in shaping physics teaching and learning has remained largely unexplored in the physics education research (PER) literature so far.

Here, we explore the phenomenon of media hype from a theoretical and practical perspective: how media rhetoric of current topics in science and technology evolves, and how it affects students and instructors. We argue that media hype of cutting-edge science can...

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