Scientific Engagement Quotes

People don't learn science in movies. You don't go to the movies thinking, 'I hope I learn some quantum mechanics this afternoon.' But on the other hand, movies are instrumental and influential in getting young people interested in science.

We read to our kids at bedtime because we want to have literacy, but what are we doing to make sure kids are equally fascinated by science?

It is so stimulating for young children to hear someone who does science talking about it. It can be so exciting and inspiring. It is easy to get younger school children enthused about science.

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.

Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.

It's one of the things I want people to understand about science... You don't have to be the best person in the world at it. But you can be good, and there are so many different opportunities in science.

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.

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.

My general impression about people like Steve Gould and Carl Sagan and so on is that when they disappear as individuals and are no longer appearing on the stage and they are no longer writing, that their lifetime of acknowledgement by the general reading public is not very long... There were many people in the 19th century who were equally famous people who gave working man's lectures, supporters of Darwin, we as scholars know their names but the general public never heard of them.

There's no shortage of people that we can put on, because science touches us all.

I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.

Scientific knowledge scarcely exists amongst the higher classes of society. The discussion in the Houses of Lords or of Commons, which arise on the occurrence of any subjects connected with science, sufficiently prove this fact.

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.