| DATE: |
2006-02-15 16:00 - 17:00 |
| PLACE: |
3goukan Seminar Hall |
| TITLE: |
Building Bridges Between Research Science and the Public |
| CONTACT: |
Youhei Morita x6047 |
| SPEAKER: |
Ilan Chabay (Chalmers University of Technology and Gothenburg University / The New Curiosity Shop) |
| LANGUAGE: |
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| ABSTRACT: |
It has become increasingly important for scientists to engage with the public about the nature, process, and content of science. There are compelling reasons that it is no longer sufficient for scientists to remain in their laboratories and allow others to interpret their work for the public. But if scientists must become involved in public communication of science, what should they do and how should they do it?
I will discuss the reasons for engaging the public, strategies for doing so effectively, and reasons that problems of communication arise not only between scientists and the public, but also between members of the scientific community themselves.
Two key strategies for communicating about science are creating metaphors that connect the known to the new and building context around ideas to help people understand the significance and relevance of the ideas to themselves and the world. The challenges of creating metaphors for understanding science and establishing a context for making it relevant are particularly difficult in fields such as high energy physics.
I will use two specific examples to illustrate key points. One is a project that emphasized context and access to educational materials for NASA and the other is a new initiative, called the World Initiative in Molecular Science (WIMS), that is an example of an effort to facilitate communication simultaneously among scientists working in diverse fields and between scientists and the public. |
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