Peter Macinnis is a science communicator and writer who works for various publishers including Webster Publishing, as well as contributing to ABC radio and ABC online.

I am a science writer/science communicator: I chase all of the sweet science that is happening and write it up for our encyclopaedia (WebsterWorld). I also do books, both for children (through Puffin/Penguin) and for a more general and adult audience through Allen and Unwin. I also do radio talks, especially Ockham's Razor on ABC, and I have just done my second essay for The Slab, the ABC's online science site.

I trained as a botanist, but I have to be as at home with quantum computing, the fine structure constant or Martian plate tectonics as I am with the inner workings of a bryophyte. That mainly requires a good general background knowledge of the sciences, and the ability to get to grips with the intricacies -- or to know somebody who can clarify it. I tend to use one particular e-mail list as a sounding board-cum-question place -- though most of the questions are asked by others.

I think I have always assumed I would be a writer of some sort, but originally, I planned to write technically precise science fiction -- but I was born too late for that. So I turned to explaining science.

It found me, really. I was dabbling a bit, but I was planning a rather different sort of school text, based on the actual work of scientists, described so that the experiments they did could be repeated or at least analysed, and I found a bit of fraud that is on the Web (see Fraudo the Frog?) -- two chemists had faked their data, it seemed. I phoned Robyn Williams, expecting him to interview me, but he asked me to write it -- and if the length was right, he would use it on "Ockham's Razor", otherwise on the "Science Show".

Now back then, a few people were communicating about science, but it wasn't a career, so I was an education bureaucrat, but I decided to join the Powerhouse Museum which was about to open, because I was groping my way to doing something abou the public understanding of science, as it used to be called.

Ah, yes, education. Well, I completed ten first-year courses before I graduated, and took seven years to get there -- I did lots of reading during that time, and I used to read "New Scientist" and "Scientific American" -- they used to take months to arrive then, and I read lots of books, but that was for fun and information.

I'm not at all sure I have the qualifications now -- it is partly a matter of getting the material, partly a matter of acting like a journalist to find an interesting slant, and part of it is staying on top of what is happening -- plus keeping up a network of contacts who will tell me what is happening. Sadly, only three and a half Australian universities do a good job of that. The rest think public relations is getting the Vice-chancellor or the Chancellor on the front page (or off it).

What's a typical day? I often say that if I went to school now, I would be diagnosed as ADHD -- I spent a number of years as a teacher, and I have tried to be the sort of teacher to kids like me that some of my better teachers were to me. I need to have five things going on at once, so when I get bored, I switch.

I may find myself e-mailing somebody whose work has just appeared in "Nature" or "Science", or requesting a paper on geophysics, or reading one -- I like to get two or three stories done each day, but on a good day, I might generate as many as a dozen stories, averaging about 600 words, and generally each has several cross-references to other stories. Or I might go off on a tangent -- I am creating a massive online poetry collection, and an even bigger prose collection -- all those classic scenes from literature like "Oliver asks for more", excerpts from Pepys' diary or Banks' journal, key letters from famous scientists, or anything that seems to fit. Or I may find myself burrowing in the innards of JavaScript, trying to fix an error, editing some pictures I took at the Eureka Awards last night (August 13), and getting them all online.

Spotting what is interesting or sweet science, stuff that paradigms may one day be made of, clever ruses to tackle cancer (OK, most of them will fail), but they illustrate how people solve problems like using cold germs that are engineered to fight cancer.

Most of all, I use my BS-detector to dodge the press releases that are dodgy or have a high bovine excreta quotient, and I always demand a copy of the paper, which will come as a PDF so I can read what was actually said. That aside, it is a matter of telling a complex tale in simple words, and linking it. I get 200-300 e-mails a day, of which I give good attention to maybe 50 or 100, so skip-reading is a DEFINITE must.

Finding out what is REALLY going on, and getting the news out correctly before the print media. I rather hope that I am setting some sort of a pattern that others may, in the future, be constrained to follow, actually getting the science right.

I rather hope that one will be seen to have happened in the past couple of weeks, but I won't know until Friday, when we hear what happened with Hyshot 2. If the scramjet worked, that was the equivalent of the Wright Brothers in 1903, or Goddard's Auburn rocket in 1926, the world's first liquid-fuel rocket -- and I was there to see the launch.

Just as I refuse to admit to any more than advanced middle age, so I refuse to admit to "the highlight" -- but in the past, I have done several delightful fraud investigations that are in the public domain (Dulong and Petit's Law, the high-power low-morals marketing of the PLATO computer-based education system, which I blew out of the water), and one other which is confidential. I enjoy nailing crooks by analysing the data and showing that something does not compute.

Probably the chance to get the real scientists opening up about their work. Sadly, many of them clam up when they hear there is a journalist is around. I am not formally trained as a journo, and my role is often more like that of a reference librarian, so I tend to call myself a science writer.

Not having enough time to do all the stories.

I have a delightful story about how the Delphic oracle used to get high on volcanic gases seeping through a fissure, and when that closed, the oracle stopped operating. I will get around to writing that story one day, but it has been waiting six months now, and there are about a hundred more like it.

Teaching science, computing or mathematics, writing bad limericks, being a paperweight for small pieces of paper.

The sheer joy of being able to drive the enquiries in a direction that suit me. Like I said, any mundane judge would class me as ADHD.

None that I can see

I like to think I have encouraged some scientists by my interest, and I may well have got a few people interested in science. It is guess work, but I expect that I am winning on that one.

By the hoped-for contributions listed above. But as I indicated earlier, I am working at the pointy edge of a new technology -- we don't know where it will go, but I hope we are raising the bar a bit -- right now, our Australian CD-ROMs are the second best sellers in America, and we are trampling on Encarta's heels. If we force them to change (and we have already done that to some of the others), then we have certainly been of benefit.

The "Renaissance Man" may no longer exist, but renaissance people can exist if knowledge and information can be packaged in such a way that people may get wisdom and insight from it.

Probably doing much the same thing, perhaps dropping the day job to three days a week, because there are LOTS of books I want to write.

If you wish to ask Peter for additional information, you can email UniServe Science and we will contact Peter for you. Make sure you include Peter's name and occupation in the Subject line.

You can find out more about Peter from

• Peter Macinnis, word herder

and his other interests and activities from

• Science Playwiths
• Science fair projects
• Australian Science Communicators
• The Communicator - the quarterly newsletter of the Australian Science Communicators of which Peter is the editor
• Scramjets at Woomera - an article on the ABC science page

Find out more about other Science Communicators

• Rob Morrison - Science Broadcaster and Author - from Australian Science Comunicators
• Liz Tynan - Sydney Correspondent, New Scientist - from Australian Science Comunicators
• Bob Beale - Author and Science Journalist - from Australian Science Comunicators
• Darren Osborne - science communicator - from Heinemann Interactive
• Careers interview: Science communicator . - an online interview with Alison Boyle in Plus online magazine
• Career interview: Science communicator - an online interview with Jenni Barker (astrophysicist) in Plus online magazine
• Meet Tracy Crago: Marine Science Communicator - from marinecareers.net

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