Top 10 science and technology writers

2. Richard Dawkins
Shaun Nichols: Just about the only person who irks the modern conservative Christian more than Charles Darwin is Richard Dawkins, and with good reason.

Dawson's works in genetics have been hugely beneficial to science, while his biting criticisms of creationism have sent fundamentalist heads spinning faster than a Black Sabbath greatest hits album.

Dawkins also unwittingly played a key role in the development of internet culture. In his 1976 work The Selfish Gene, Dawkins described shared cultural phenomena and practices with the term 'meme'.

Decades later, when searching for a term to describe a collection of jokes which spreads across the web, the term 'internet meme' was introduced. I guess it does sound better than 'crappy joke that irritating people re-hash over and over again'.

Iain Thomson: Dawkins's early work is everything good science writing should be: elegant, succinct and utterly persuasive. He's done a huge amount to make evolution understandable

The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable are masterpieces of their genre and have done much to increase the public understanding of science and evidential processes.

However, it is his writing on science and religion that have gained him notoriety among some sections of the population in more recent years.

The God Delusion was a multimillion bestseller and has earned him praise and condemnation for his militant atheism. As a non-believer myself I can't help feeling he crosses a line into fundamental atheism at times; no-one likes to be called a fool and Dawkins can be very stupid with his cleverness at times.

1. Stephen Hawking
Iain Thomson: Hawking really wasn't my first choice to be honest. I mean, who's actually finished A Brief History of Time and actually felt they understood it?

I asked this of Shaun and he admitted that he'd certainly started it. I've finished it, and read the pass notes and simple version and I still don't feel I've understood it all. So why the great writer status?

Well, I don't think you can blame him for the subject matter being incredibly difficult to understand. He's dealing in concepts that are so huge, and require so many internal data points, that there's probably only a few thousand people in the world who can properly grasp everything that he talks about.

But he inspired millions to give it a go and there's already a generation of young scientists inspired by his writing making guesses of their own.

Hawking's achievements are all the more remarkable because of his disability. Unable to speak normally since a tracheotomy in 1985, Hawking has instead relied on computer technology to get his message across.

His famous synthetic voice has become one of the most famous on the planet, and there aren't any other physicists I can think of who have had a star turn on The Simpsons.

Shaun Nichols: Apparently I'm not the only one who digs The Hawk. The book was a best seller for 237 straight weeks. Granted, more than a few of those copies were bought to place on a book shelf and make the owner look smart, but I digress.

Hawking is brilliant at communicating his ideas with the written word, partially by necessity. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has left him unable to speak for a large portion of his life.

A Brief History of Time may not be the easiest read, but seeing as it is describing advanced astrophysics and cutting-edge theory, that Hawking could make it even remotely comprehensible is a testament to his writing style.

And the man did not stop there. He has written a number of other books, and recently launched a new programme for the Discovery channel mixing his explanations of physics and his own thoughts and opinions on the universe. We hope he'll be doing this for a long time to come.