The popularisation of important concepts in 20th century physics has lead to a lot of widespread trivialisation, and the spouting of incredible amounts of innacurate, misleading, or plain totally-out-of-the-ballpark explanations and analogies. Schrodinger's famous feline thought-experiment, Einstein's Relativity, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and E=mc2 are frequently yanked into unrelated discussions to prove that "everything's relative", "nothing is ever certain", "the world is full of cosmic energies", and/or "physics is flawed".
One (non-scientist!) author who actually managed to draw a good metaphor with modern physics is Salman Rushdie, in his recent novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet:
"Scientists get angry when laymen misunderstand, for example, the uncertainty principle. In an age of great uncertainties it is easy to mistake science for banality, to believe that Heisenberg is merely saying, gee, guys, we just can't be sure of anything, it's all so darn uncertain, but isn't that, like, beautiful? Whereas he's actually telling us the exact opposite: that if you know what you're doing you can pin down the exact quantum of uncertainty in in any experiment, any process. To knowledge and mystery we can now ascribe percentage points. A principle of uncertainty is also a measure of certainty. It's not a lament about shifting sands but a gauge of the solidity of the ground."