Lessons from Descartes, part 1: Communicating science We owe many things to René Descartes, besides his major contributions in philosophy and work on scientific method. His book “Discourse on the Method”, that was published in 1637 in Leiden (well…to be exact full name was “Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences”), also contained one long phrase about communication. Let me go through it. “If I were faithfully to communicate to the public the little that I should myself have discovered…”, he starts with a (false) modesty. “…and to beg all well-inclined persons to proceed further by contributing, each one according to his own inclination and ability, to the experiments that must be made…”, he continues. Cooperation and collaboration? Multi-disciplinarity? Importance of including results of experiments a # #communication #science nd evaluation in a scientific communication? “…and then to communicate to the public all the things they might discover, in order that the last should commence where the preceding had left off, and thus by joining together the lives and labors of many…”, this part sounds like “do not forget to include relevant work and the analyses of state of the art in your communications”. “…we should collectively proceed much further than any one in particular could succeed in doing”. Descartes lived long before social networks and “make noise” type of communication. Scientific communication, or what todays would be addressed as dissemination, was having smaller target audience. He also missed “elevator pitch” type of communication, that moved from start-up and venture capital arena to the project asset presentations.? And you? Do you have some good examples or best practices for scientific communication?
