Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Wednesday coffee break: Tyson and Dawkins on teaching about science

Posted by Jason Smith at 9:01 AM
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1 comment:

Susan said...

I've seen this clip before, and that New Scientist quote actually comes to my mind pretty often when I'm writing, editing, and reading articles about science research. I'm interested in science and I read about it voluntarily. On the other hand, I'll be honest, there's stuff out there that bores me. For example: chemistry that's not well grounded in the context of explaining some higher-order problem. Sometimes I wish I found everything having to do with science interesting, but then again, it might be harder to write for a general audience if I were thinking, "This stuff is just obviously interesting. How could anyone disagree??"

There's definitely a balance out there of being unapologetic about writing science while understanding that most people aren't going to read through to the end of an article just because, hey, it's science, and science rocks!

By the way, I was surprised to hear Richard Dawkins criticized in that way, because I think of him as being a genius at bringing the interesting stuff to the surface when he's writing science.

July 8, 2009 at 10:37 AM

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