Scans_Daily

Oh, definitely. Although someone like Holmes is particularly hard to write because he's supposed to be a genius about everyday events--the reader expects to be able to follow his reasoning once it's explained. It's a bit easier when you're writing an expert in some area where outsiders don't always even understand what's being discussed.

One thing to do is make sure you've got the jargon down. If Otto was blathering about gauge symmetries and axions and resonances and uncountably infinite families of solutions…okay, it still wouldn't actually make sense to an expert (which isn't me, btw), but it would sound physicsy. "Building blocks of the universe" and "a small facet of their infinite potential" are pop-science-philosophy phrases; you wouldn't expect to hear them from physicists talking technically, or even from physics students discussing something they expect to get graded on.

Plus, even if you have no scientific training, it's not that hard to get a vague idea of how scientists establish their genius credentials. Why is Einstein worshipped? Well, because he came up with some awesome theory that explained/predicted a lot of stuff about the world, and came up with clever ways you could test it, and he wrote papers about it, and people read them and found them elegant and facutally and mathematically accurate, and then they went and did the experiments and they worked. That's a lengthy process. Saying a few pithy sentences and dashing off an equation or two (I hope that's what Otto's doing on the iPad, instead of just pointing at stuff) wouldn't convince anyone of anything. We need to at least see him proving some sort of awesome theorem or something, or pulling up one of Peter's research results, and then Anna can take twenty minutes to pore over it and then comprehend its elegance and be properly amazed.

What Otto's doing here...it's like you wanted to demonstrate that a character was the smartest football coach of all time, so you have him write a really moving haiku about field goals.

Morrison, Robinson, Waid and Ellis are all pretty good at writing science-dialogue that doesn't ring horribly false, IMO. It's not about being an expert in the field, it's about mimicking the speech styles of people who are experts.