DR HELEN CZERSKI

Physicist and BBC science presenter whose most recent series was Colour: The Spectrum Of Science.

I was given A Brief History Of Time when I was young, about 11 or 12. What was interesting about having read it at that age is that it was so clear. All these ideas that are intuitively quite weird and difficult just made sense. I think when I was growing up I never thought these things about time dilation and gravitational weirdnesses that you get in General Relativity seemed strange, because the first time I’d come across them they’d been so clearly explained that they never became weird, which is a huge start in a lot of ways. I think possibly the book had an influence on a lot of physicists because it set the ideas up as part of your world, instead of being something weird and outside it. Because the explanation was so clear, you couldn’t miss what it was saying.

Not all good scientists have been good communicators, not all great scientists have been great communicators. But there is a very strong history that started in places like the Royal Institution where people stood up and said what they thought. He was part of the tradition. There’s a long list of people who thought so clearly that communication was straightforward. I think that’s the key. The key to great science is the same as the key to great communication, which is thinking clearly about what you are doing and being able to prioritise ideas. When those two things go together, you have something powerful. Hawking’s was an important voice. There has been a perception that science is somehow separate from society, and he showed clearly that this is not the case.