I sat next to person on a flight a few weeks ago who, upon talking about physics, said she thought the movie Interstellar was "amazing" and "scientific". I agreed with her, thinking she was talking about the realistic black hole simulations. No, she was talking about scenes where the main character reaches back in time as a ghost to influence his daughter.
This person was a first-year Ph.D. student in medicine.
So yes, even when science fiction is done relatively carefully, some people will take as "scientific" the parts which have been stretched for better storytelling.
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