Forget the politics, if you can, and remember that, at the cutting edge of discovery, scientists are no more certain about what's really going on than men or women in the street. When a new finding is really surprising it falls outside the scope of existing curricula. There are neither textbooks nor highly trained people around, to be aloof in their specialist expertise. In such cases the discoverers sometimes short-circuit the academic process and take their discoveries to the general public as quickly and as directly as possible. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein all did that. They flattered their readers' intelligence as well as enlightening them, and let them make up their own minds about whether to believe the new stories.

- Nigel Calder