Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet of Science Blogs debuted in the pages of the journal Science this week, arguing in a one-page policy note that scientists fail to sell their ideas to the public because they misunderstand how the public approaches news. Instead of responding to antiscience attacks with rhetoric--Fight fire with fire!--they revert to technical explanations of why their opponents are wrong. These technical retorts are ignored by the public, who, naturally, read material that they already agree with, rather than thinking through the arcane details of scientific evidence. No argument there.

The question is, What are we to do about it?

I suppose for me the best answer is what I have had to do. Scientific communication to the public is generally so dense, that a couple of years ago, I felt I should try to take a whack at translating science, writ large, into public discourse. My life at the moment is something of an unscientific experiment in answering that question. I'm writing a book for Walker Books that explains abstract scientific ideas in an engaging, easy to understand narrative. Over the past three years I have interviewed hundreds of people, read at least 1,000 journal articles and many books by science-writers and writer-scientists. It's an ambitious project, bordering on insane, as my wife will tell you, but the end result is an argument for how to unite seemingly disparate problems under a single, simplified rubric.

Last year about this time, I left my post as TIME magazine's science and technology correspondent in Washington, DC, to find a new way to frame public discussion of science. My going hypothesis is that there is no reason whatsoever for lay people to understand science the way that scientists do. There are ways to represent science that are engaging, and accurate, that incite curiosity, but that have nothing to do with the way scientists organize their departments, college textbooks and conferences. Once you are applying for graduate school, you should know the difference between biochemistry, geochemistry, biogeochemistry and paleobiogeochemistry and bioinformatics. But for your average professional who itches his or her scalp in curiosity while reading the Tuesday Science Times, the categories need to be fewer and less complex. Shed categories.

In fact, on a level even larger than diurnal policy fights, bad categories obscure obvious answers to pressing 21st century problems. Our administrative and intellectual categories are legacies of 18th century university departments-at the latest. The old categories we divide experience into no longer comport with our understanding of the world. Much simpler would be to build a common substrate, a simple one that busts open confining administrative and intellectual rubrics, such as "energy," "climate," "health" and "materials," and adds dynamism to our everyday understanding of the world. Energy, climate, health and materials are all just chemistry, the central science. Understand chemistry and everything else suddenly makes sense.

Now that my manuscript is coming together (due July 1), I feel freer to talk about my motivations for this book, and will do so on writing breaks. I haven't felt that these comments are pointed enough, partly because I'm half-asleep. I'll repost my arguments in this blog later in the week, when it's not 4 a.m., after a day of around-the-clock scribbling.