Most Physics texts are wrong

It's really hard to write accurate scientific explanations of stuff. It takes lots of time to think up ways of explaining things in such a way that lots of people will understand. If it's something like physics, most teachers and professors give up and use analogies or just plain falsehoods to try and get part of the idea across. There are especially great examples of this when it comes to quantum physics. Most text books and teachers give up trying to make real sense of what is going on and so present non-sense and then if someone objects how the explanation doesn't make sense they respond with more non-sense like "you can't ask that question" or "that's just the way it is".

A great example is the concept of "quantum jumps" used to explain how light is produced. If you want to find out how, for example, a fluorescent tube produces the light that it does, don't expect to find the actual explanation easily. You will find really bad approximations to the truth. The reason they are out there is because you can write a poor approximation to the truth in a few paragraphs. But to explain properly what's happening takes more effort - on the part of the author and of the reader. Most people can't be bothered.

But let's say you're actually interested in some particular question (like how is light generated by fluorescent tubes?) then it can be really hard to get to the best explanation we have without studying for a long time and figuring out why the bad explanations are just that: bad. The people who understand it best often don't write the introductory text books or webpages - and even when they do, they do what their teachers and texts did: dumb it down. And that results in nonsense. So I've tried with a simpler example: why does a candle flame shine? The whole explanation would be even longer than what I have written - but here's my first modest attempt at explaining why most explanations of this phenomena are just plain wrong.