I'll really make this like I'm talking to a child.” I think people can tell when they're being condescended to. People really struggle with this, because they'll say, “Okay, well, I'll really dumb this down. But it's hard to do that without being condescending.
And that's true anywhere-whether it's to other scientists or people who aren't scientists. You want to talk in the language that people will understand. Sometimes scientists will use language that’s really tricky or specialized without realizing that not everyone knows, for example, what an oxidizer is. It’s like a Magic Eye picture or an optical illusion: You can look at it for a while, and you don’t see it and you don’t see it-and then you see it.
It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of the people you’re trying to talk to. One of the trickiest things about talking to people about something cool that you've learned how to do, or that you've learned about-whether it's science or something else-is that it’s hard to remember what it's like to not know something.
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