The contents of this email informed a new direction, or at least another facet to consider, for our entire project. Neil degrasee Tyson suggested that contrary to our original understanding that people don't care as much, and that we should try to inspire them, the truth is really that people simply don't know. If the information was there for them to understand and absorb they would learn more simply because humans are intuitive.
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This makes our job a lot easier. We don't necessarily need to convince people that science is important, but rather just put it out there in a palatable manner for them to understand. The next job is to spread it through social media and public avenues so that more people can be exposed to it.
With this in mind, and the intension to create not a science network, but rather a hub that connects existing networks, we decided to look at the way other people have tried to communicate science in an easy-to-understand way for the general public.
We came across such resources as:
Scishow
Scishow is a youtube channel that publishes short videos on science topics that are not only visually engaging but speak in plain terms so that people can get the basic gist of a topic without needing to learn too much. The narrator is funny and charismatic making him a suitable spokesperson for this sort of media.
How Stuff Works
How Stuff Works is a website developed in the early 2000s that explains in a few shorts pages how something works; from nuclear bombs to toasters. If you want to learn about the basic mechanisms that keep our world ticking this is the website for you. It touches on the applications of science and how they're used in every life making it a really useful and engaging source of information for people who don't already know too much about science. Another useful thing this website does is that throughout their articles, they include hyperlinks on keywords that might be prerequisite knowledge for a topic, so that if you don't already know about something, you can quickly jump to another link, and get a basic understanding.
The Theoretical Minimum
This is a book I was recommended by the PhD candidate I'm collaborating with. It's a bit more mathematically demanding, but with high school maths you can cruise through this book and learn some more complicated ideas that will help you better understand the more intricate topics that scientists talk about. It's a stepping stone that most people can take to get from knowing nothing to feeling like they can join a conversation about Black Holes.
Nick has a few other resources such as books which have "public-friendly" counterparts, which have been "translated" for the general public. he is using them as tools to understand how we can take any information we find, provided we understand it ourselves, and turn it into something easier to understand for the general public.
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