“If you can’t explain a topic to a six year old, you really don’t understand it yourself”. Professor Dawn Bazely mentioned this quote in the podcast “The People Behind the Science”
http://www.peoplebehindthescience.com/dr-dawn-bazely/ (13:40) where she was being interviewed by Mary McNeely, the host of the podcast.
We, as science students, come across, and memorize a lot of scientific terms over the years. We memorize entire sentences and repeat them when asked about a certain topic in our classrooms, but do we really understand the concepts we have memorized? I sometimes “teach” myself a particularly complex concept in my own words make sure that I have a grasp of it, and when doing that, I tend to simplify it. To communicate the scientific concepts that we have understood to people without science background, or our younger siblings, or our grandparents, we may have to “translate” the concepts even further. For example, I have been in heated discussion with friends on a particularly cold winter’s day about global warming being real, despite that day not feeling like it. Their question was “why is it so cold if global warming is real?” I told them that despite that day feeling especially nippy, aver temperatures have been steadily increasing over the years, and that is causing ice sheets in the poles, and glaciers in the Himalayas to recede. And there was enough solid proof available without having to toil through scientific papers. There are temperature records, pictures of glaciers that have retreated, and satellite photos of reduced polar ice caps over the years.
Here’s a link to NASA’s visualization of arctic ice cover from 1979 to 2020:
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 