Harry Kroto Quotes

I believe scientists have a duty to share the excitement and pleasure of their work with the general public, and I enjoy the challenge of presenting difficult ideas in an understandable way.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

I enjoy popularisation and I think I'm reasonably good at it. I also think it's a duty. It's just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.

Science is not finished until it is communicated.

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 you publish a scientific paper it is very hard to start a nationwide debate about something. If you do this in a movie, you can start a debate. We like to create a bridge between those two worlds - film and 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.

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

I'm the know-nothing. I'm curious, I try to be entertaining, I try to translate the techno jargon, but in the end I'm the audience's representative.

Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.

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?

If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.

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

The world is too complicated to have scientists only talking to scientists.

For the Vice President’s benefit, I’ll make sure I use small words.

Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.

It is understandable that people want to know how it affects them. But as a scientist, I would hope society would be equally interested in fundamental science.

It is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.

The general public doesn't know and probably doesn't care about punctuated equilibria nor indeed should they, or the greenhouse effect on some other planet - they barely have the ability to cope with the greenhouse effect on their own planet. So I think you have to distinguish between the broad visibility of a scientist when he or she is speaking to a general public and trying to address general issues and the continued position that a scientist may have into the history of a particular subject.

No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.

It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.

Oh, rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.