Greg Graffin Quotes

I think science is a foreign land for many people, so I think of my role as an ambassador's job.

The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.

Anything that promotes a kernel of science, even though it's exaggerated and hyped by Hollywood, I think is a step forward. We in the ivory tower ultimately have to realize that in some sense we have to sing for our supper.

Somehow we must reintegrate the scientific with the popular and reconnect the future to the present. This is less a job for scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators and more a job for novelists, moviemakers, popularizers, and politicians.

I'd love to present a popular science programme because it's something I feel very passionate about.

The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.

With science becoming far more accessible to all of us, I've become a pretty avid reader and devourer of it. One of the objectives that I had working with Fringe was to get more people talking about it because it's such fun.

We really think it is a good thing for scientists to spend a little bit of their time either in the community or in schools or helping to train high school teachers.

Science is you! It's your head, it's your dog, it's your iPhone - it's the world. How do you see that as boring? If it's boring, it's because you're learning it from a textbook.

Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science.

I'm a great believer that scientists should spend as much time as possible explaining, and you do explain in the process of teaching.

Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media.

One of the great problems of the world today is undoubtedly this problem of not being able to talk to scientists, because we don't understand science; they can't talk to us because they don't understand anything else, poor dears.

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

Sometimes I worry that science communication is just preaching to the choir, speaking to the converted. Social media gives us an amazing opportunity to reach new people.

We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.

We have to change the way people look at scientists. Today, they are the nerds, the geeks. Instead, we want some of the cool kids to say, 'Hey, this is all right.'

We have been talking about public engagement for a decade. For me it is about recognising that the mission of science has to be embedded within our culture - the direction in which science is going has to be determined by all of us, and so we need a dialogue with the public.

As far as I'm concerned, raising the bar or encouraging kids in large numbers to be interested in science, I can't think of anything I'd rather see happen.

One of the best and most responsible things a scientist can do is to write for the popular press.

We need to make science cool again.

Science literacy consists in the ability and the desire to follow reports of new scientific advances, throughout your whole life.

One of the things that really worries me, in part about Mexico, in part about Latin America, and in part about the Hispanic population in the U.S. and Canada. It's the lack of awareness of this whole science world.

I'm not a scientist, I was not a good science student, I felt effectively alienated from science throughout my young life, and it was only when I became an adult that I began to really appreciate from a completely different angle the power of science.

Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.