One of the most enduring quotes in popular science is Carl Sagan’s ‘We are made of starstuff.’ It’s a beautiful sentence, highlighting the sheer sense of wonder contemplating the cosmos engenders. But the point Sagan was making was also a very scientific one: that every single element in all life on earth (or anywhere else, for that matter) originally came from the heart of a star.
It’s ideas like this that first grabbed my attention and steered me for a long while into the world of popular science. Carl Sagan was, of course, a master in this genre, but there have been several others who have shown how simply complex science can be explained without dumbing it down so much that it loses its significance. Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are all towering names in the scientific community, but they’re also stalwarts in the attempt to make science accessible.