 I guess it seems so odd that an actor and a writer should be this interested in science, but I always have been starting with the most childish view of what science was. I used to try to mix things together when I was six years old to try to get them to blow up. But that to me was science, you know? But then after I got out of college, I started reading science avidly. And I read everything I could and I still was hungry for more. And I really began to get an education in science when I was interviewing hundreds of scientists on a television show called Scientific American Frontiers. And it's from that that I got the idea that it would be a great thing if scientists could learn to communicate with the same kind of ease and familiarity and comfort that they did on the program. Because what they had there was the advantage of somebody like me who was curious and drawing it out of them in a personal way. So that's when I thought it would be a good idea to try to start the Center for Communicating Science. And now here we are partnering up with this wonderful institution, the Center for Public Awareness of Science. Science communication is about, in my opinion, about as important as science itself, because I don't think you can have science without communication. I mean, in its most basic way, when a scientist in a lab discovers something, the very next thing the scientist does is write it up. So other scientists can not just learn about it, but can see if they can replicate it. That's the essence of science, testing it out. Getting it known by other people, getting it understood. Then there's the very existence of science that depends on the public understanding the science and therefore policymakers funding it. You can't do it if it's not funded. And then when you want to bring together collaborators from different disciplines, they have to be able to speak the same language. They can't speak their own specialized language and expect to make as much progress as fast. So I don't think it's exaggerating to say communication is of the essence of science. I think any group of people develops a lingo, a jargon, a point of view that's their own. It saves time, there are many good reasons to develop jargon, but it doesn't save time when you're talking to somebody who doesn't speak the language. You have to understand that a lot of the concepts that you are familiar with over decades of studying your discipline, those concepts aren't belong, they don't belong to everyone. We haven't been spending that same amount of time getting used to it the way you have. You have to introduce us to it. You have to respect our ignorance, but more importantly our curiosities. And if we don't have enough curiosity and all we have is ignorance, you have to get us curious. Everybody's too ignorant about science. That's what science is about. Science is satisfying the ignorance that we all naturally possess, but the public needs to know what they need to know. They need to be pointed and have their curiosity ignited sometimes. I mean, we don't even know what's valuable to be curious about. You have to realize that when we look up in the sky and we see what we see, science can see things in the sky that we can't even begin to ask questions about until we get introduced to some of the elements of what's up there. This is our first international partnership and we couldn't find a better collaborator because you've been doing here at the Center for the Public Awareness of Science. You've been doing things for 20 years or more that we can benefit from so profoundly. You understand the history of communication, the communication of science. You understand the theory of the communication of science. You're constantly making new inroads in this. And we have something to offer you, which is our innovations in teaching the skills of communication. Together it's very exciting. It's probably no better place to begin cooperating across the ocean than here. I didn't know about the work being done here until Will Grant from here came to one of our summer institutes. People come from universities around the United States to find out what we're doing to take part in a workshop and learn the special approach we have to communication. Will was one of the people who came from overseas and he came a pretty long distance and I was so impressed that he came and then even more impressed that he wanted to merge our two interests. And there's so much we can contribute to one another. I'm very excited about the things you do here and I think we have some really interesting innovative ways to teach communicating science that you can make yourself, some of which you may have already been doing, but we can show you our version of it.