“I think the next century will be the century of complexity.”
(Stephen Hawking, 2000)
Stefan Thurner receives award for outstanding science communication
Since Monday noon, the telephone rings without cease, and the mailboxes flow over: congratulation, congratulation, interview request, interview request, congratulations, interview request…
Stefan Thurner, the Hub’s president, is Austrian “scientist of the year”! Big celebration at the Hub!
With the award the Austrian Association of Education and Science Journalists honors every year a researcher for the outstanding and comprehensible communication of his or her research field.
And this is what Stefan always struggles for, complex as it may be: “When you can’t explain to a child what you do, you did not understand it yourself”, is his credo. Science journalists have noticed and appreciate it. Since many years Stefan’s work has been covered by Austrian media – have a look at our press section for articles published since the foundation of the Hub.
We cannot build on fake news!
But the actual publicity is not only a reward for Stefan’s continous effort in science communication. He sees the price as a mandate: on the one hand a mandate to further enhance the knowledge about complexity research in Austria.
But even more as a mandate to communicate, in close co-operation with science journalists, the importance of science as a whole. “In many countries, like Hungary, Turkey or even present USA, science gets more and more under pressure by the producers of fake news”, he said at the press conference on Monday. “We as scientists are challenged to communicate the importance of the scientific approach as the one and only source of truth we can trust in.”
And off he is [today] … to Oxford.