Both of them are beyond excellent from a story telling and visual prospective: highly entertaining, motivating, and fun.

However the “physicists will stop talking to you” bit just comes from the fact that professionals typically prefer rigorous discussions to handwaving; as handwaving will sometimes leads to reasonable, yet completely nonsensical results. And over-fantasization of a topic can cause student burnouts quite quickly, when they discovered the field is completely different from what they imagined. Finally many physicist just don’t enjoy string theory. String theory describes a universe that is fundamentally different from ours, and they just keeps making up more math to fix unrealized predictions; Feynman famously puts it: “string theorists don’t make predictions, they make excuses.”

But certainly my bits are exaggerating the tension between profession scientists and pop science. Many physicist do enjoy the presentation of Greene.

In general, I think the Brain Greene do benefit both the field physics and the general public, by bringing many talented students to physics. And I believe many teachers and professors can learn a lot about storytelling and visualization from pop sciences.