Robyn Williams talks on communicating science to the public, 2008

Transcript of the recording

The public is a very big thing - young and old, expert, inexpert and so on – and the way that the public often thinks of these things is as if they're still at school. So they think that there's kind of a body of knowledge and here you are, taking an exam again, whereas in truth every single job in this 21st century requires some background culture in science. You can't think of anything, frankly, in any major job ... imagine you're a lawyer and you've never heard of forensic evidence or DNA ... imagine if you're a farmer working on the land and you've never heard of ecological or environmental questions or GM crops, or things like that ... imagine that you work in business and you're not aware of the latest in the business technologies which of course have transformed the way that commercial activities take place, especially with speed these days ... so for the public, what they need to understand is that it interests them from the beginning.

I remember a physicist from the New York City University, talked about young people especially who complain 'Well, what's science got to do with my life'. And he said 'Well, frankly, everything'. But I'm afraid that the encouragement of the modern media is to have instant reactions rather than something that requires a great deal of thought and so that's been one of the big problems these days.

And there is also woeful ignorance. Now, we've seen a number of surveys recently which show that if you ask people about problems with global warming, they will very quickly associate that with holes in the ozone layer, which, you know, [is] nothing much to do with it at all. There's a tremendous confusion and similarly with some of the other broad questions. You find that things are lumped together, things are kind of teased out in ways that don't make sense, and I think that's a huge problem we've got to deal with because if you want to tackle the public understanding of science, then you've got to start from somewhere. There's got to be a basic grounding in things, and I think the modern education methods where you tick boxes and have instant one-line replies, instead of thinking through, for instance as I had to do with the writing of essays, you know, to make a case, to deal with ideas.

So if you really want to encourage public understanding of science we have to try not to get submerged in information and think of ideas instead.