Scientists ≠ communicators
But most geneticists are too busy mining nuggets of intellectual gold from the laboratory to give up their time to explaining their science to the public. So it falls to commentators like me to try to translate the arcane stories of genes into something more like entertainment than education.
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Borrowing ideas & unique combination
This book is crammed with original ideas – very few of them my own. Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book better than I. My consolation is that few could have written all the chapters.
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My role has been to connect the patches of others’ research together into a quilt. But I remain deeply indebted and grateful to all those whose minds I raided.
Challenge of being abstract
- Abstracted, indirect, inferred, Intuition, multiple layers away
- Discoveries often come not from what we see, but from what we infer, making them harder to communicate
- E.g. spectroscopy
Astrophysics educators face a pedagogical challenge of the highest rank. Astrophysics researchers deduce nearly all knowledge about the structure, formation, and evolution of things in the universe from the study of spectra. But the analysis of spectra is removed by several levels of inference from the things being studied. Analogies and metaphors help, by linking a complex, somewhat abstract idea to a simpler, more tangible one.
Link to originalThat is why the public hardly ever hears about the role of spectra in cosmic discovery—it’s just too far removed from the objects themselves to explain efficiently or with ease.
Link to original- Seeing beautiful picture gets you nowhere nearer to understanding Mechanistic Explanation
The problem here is that after you view such exhibits, you leave waxing poetic about the beauty of the universe yet you are no closer than before to understanding how it all works. To really know the universe requires forays into levels 3, 4, and 5.
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- Seeing beautiful picture gets you nowhere nearer to understanding Mechanistic Explanation