Science Communication

Even the most brilliant scientific discovery remains useless if it is not communicated in a comprehensive and thoughtful manner. The importance of good science communication is beyond question – whether it’s papers, posters or presentations at conferences, meetings with project partners or when your grandma asks what your work is about. 

At the same time, general trust in and interest for science and research is high, as the Science Barometer has shown every year since its introduction. Good communication is needed to do justice to the trust placed in you and to satisfy this interest.

It is up to us to raise the awareness of the importance and power of high quality communication. Both, within science – when experts speak to other experts – as well as within the public at large. Our society relies on scientific findings for solutions to the broad diversity of burning issues of the time to promote the further macrosocial development. As scientists we all are at the same time science communicators and therefore it is worth to understand better its opportunities and threads. 

Today we are faced with enormous challenges and their complexity can only be mastered by mobilising all our forces. In the course of our history we have accumulated an increasingly unmanageable amount of expertise. Each discipline has its own stack, neatly separated from the others. Now we are called upon to link these stacks together, to join forces, to look beyond the edges of our own plates, to broaden our perspectives and to join forces in order to actually lead us as a society into the best of all possible worlds. 

In the perspective we owe to specialisation, the arts in particular appear to be mutually exclusive to the natural sciences. But to an ever increasing extent, the coexistence of scientific and artistic perception of the world on the way to a holistic view of the world shows the potential of new possibilities for dialogue and the resulting change in perspective.

As Jacob Bronowski said: «Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind».