[Richard Dawkins] I think that is unfair.
I don't think that scientist as a group are bad
communicators. I think there are good communicators
and bad communicators in any field.
I do think that the scientific establishment
should recognize communication skills as a
virtue. It is said, I don't know with what
truth, that Carl Sagan was denied fellowship
in the National Academy of Sciences because
other scientists were jealous of his success
as a communicator. I hope that's not true.
But if it is, that would be an indication of
what could possible be wrong. It may be that
in the scientific culture there is value,
prestige, kudos, given to number of papers
published in Nature and Science rather than
say books selling well to the general public.
So there is a prestige mismatch between
what one would like to see
and what is actually there.
So maybe that organizations like the
National Academy of Sciences,
in Britain the Royal Society, and the grant
giving bodies should value communication
more because science does need public
support. That is ultimately where the money
comes from after all.
Scientists who really do bury themselves
in ivory towers are doing their subject
and themselves a disservice.
But actually if you go to conferences,
scientific conferences, listen to graduate
students presenting their research,
many of them are brilliant at communicating.
Really lucid, very clear, setting things out
in the right order. This is the problem
I am faced with, these are the methods,
using imagery, using good language.
There are plenty of excellent communicators
among young scientists and I think they just
need official encouraging to
get out there and communicate.
[Lawrence Krauss] Actually I want to
turn that around a little bit.
There is the large scale kudos one gets
when you are a professional,
but you've got to reach that point.
The interesting thing is I do think
we do a tremendous disservice to students
because we don't instill the notion of
communication. In fact, we don't explain
to them that a large part of succeeding as
a professional scientist is in fact your
ability to communicate.
I've seen, as chair of a physics department
for many years I've seen when we hire people
how people who are in some sense
equally able, one of the things that determines
whether we hire people are how well they
communicate to us about their ideas.
I was on committee at MIT a few years ago
which was trying to do something really
interesting. They were worried more about
engineering students but it works the same way.
We require them to take some writing course.
And the writing course is taught by some
bozo they have never heard of,
from their point of view.
We never, we don't, and we should start,
to impose the requirement of writing and
oral communication as a part of our
physics courses and our engineering courses
why? Because these students view that
professors of physics and engineering as
their mentors. Those are the people they
care about and it they are not telling them
how important communicating is,
then if they just have to take something
from column B to get their degree,
it doesn't matter. So what I really think
we do have to do in our educational system
is make students realize, and make it an
important part of all of the curriculum,
not just a writing part of a physics class
and an engineering class and a biology class
that oral and written communication
are incredibly important.
Because in fact, for engineers, it's really
true that their abilities to succeed as an
engineer are not so dependent upon their intrinsic abilities as an
engineer as later on when they work in
companies, how well they can convince their
colleagues, how well they can make
presentations. We really do a disservice to
our students not to indicate that their success
in their own field, in some ways relies as much
on communication as it does
on their other abilities.
[Applause]
[Dawkins] I think that one of the American grant giving bodies,
it may have been the National Science Foundation,
at one point introduced a rule that when they
gave money for a research grant, some proportion
of that grantee's time had to be given over
to communicating their research to the
general public. Was that the NSF?
[Krauss] The NSF but I actually again
I have some problems with that.
Because one of the things that was required is you
have young people at their very first grant
application. They are just starting.
They have never taught in their lives,
and they have to give their teaching
philosophy and they have to talk about
their outreach efforts and frankly they
have never done it. It's a good thing to do
but unfortunately I think what one finds
is that people tend to put in boiler plate and
it's probably too late, I mean it's a good place to do it,
but I think it's too late to start there. I really do.
[Moderator] Unfortunately it is 4 o'clock
and we have to stop. But I really wanted to
give a great round of applause for these two men,
[Applause]