James Murdoch Quotes

If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

I want to get across that science is something that we all have ownership of and we can all take an interest in. We don't all have to understand complex theories, but we should have a working knowledge, like knowing your way round the engine of your car.

If scientists can't communicate with the public, with policy makers, with one another, the future is going to be held back. We're not going to have the future that we could have.

People are interested in science, but they don't always know they're interested in science, and so I try to find a way to get them interested.

The people who work in the scientific field, they need help to convey what it's about.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

Unfortunately, science cannot be reduced to short, catchy phrases. And if this is all that the general public can comprehend, it's no wonder that we spend so much of our time in the interminable debate about belief in God, or lack thereof.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

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

I like to believe that science is becoming mainstream. It should have never been something that sort of geeky people do and no one else thinks about. Whether or not, it will always be what geeky people do. It should, as a minimum, be what everybody thinks about because science is all around us.

Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow's problems flow.

General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.

Science isn't just for scientists - it's not just a training for careers.

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him …

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don't have a very high level of scientific literacy.

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

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

If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.

I recognize that there's an appetite that I'm now serving, and I'm happy to do so. I think it means quite a bit that science has achieved this level of public interest and access. And so I'm simultaneously astonished every day upon recognizing this, and I think it's a good sign for the country and possibly for the world.

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

I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.