It’s pure coincidence that Ira Flatow, host of public radio show “Science Friday,” is coming here during the biggest scientific event in Hawaii’s recent history: the eruption and lava flows from Kilauea volcano. Flatow won’t even get to Hawaii island to see the eruptions; but never mind, he’ll undoubtably find something else of interest.

“I’m constantly stopping on a roadside or a vista or something and looking at stuff,” he said in a phone interview.

“I used to drive my kids crazy. I would stop the car at a road cut, and I’d point up and you’d see the gravel falling out, and I’d say, ‘Look, that’s the beach falling out of the ocean. This used to be below ground, 100 stories below us.’ And they’d say, ‘OK, dad. Try to give it a rest.’”

Flatow will bring that enthusiasm and curiosity for nature and all things scientific when he appears today at the Hawaii Theatre to tape a potential future episode of “Science Friday,” courtesy of Hawaii Public Radio, which broadcasts the syndicated show at 1 p.m. Fridays.

Three University of Hawaii-Manoa professors are guests: Kim Binsted, principal investigator for UH’s Hawaiʻi Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, which operates a Mars simulation mission on Mauna Loa; Melissa Price, an ecologist who headed up the recent “Symphony of the Hawaiian Birds” project with music composers, scientists and artists; and Malia Rivera, of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology, who has devised a Hawaii-based STEM curriculum.

Even without the volcanoes, there’s plenty of science going on here to get Flatow excited.

“That’s what makes Hawaii so great,” he said. “You have the water, you have the ground, and you have underground now. So you’ve got a lot of stuff to think about.”

FLATOW WAS a self-described “typical high school nerd” who would take apart and fix household appliances at home. While in high school, he joined his school’s news broadcast program, intrigued by the technology. He also got roped into trying out for the school play, which he said helped him “come out of my nerdy shell.”

As an engineering student in college in Buffalo, N.Y., he joined the college radio station, reporting on things like the Vietnam War protests, and through his connections there came to create “Science Friday,” which then was part of the public-radio news show “Talk of the Nation.”

Thanks to Flatow’s ability to sift through technical jargon and find clear, easy-to-understand explanations of complicated ideas, the show has become perhaps the most popular and informative program on science since Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”

“I wanted to make science the subject of conversation at the dinner table,” Flatow said.

“Science Friday” covers anything and everything related to science. Recent features include the evolution of whales, the adaptability of bee colonies to urban environment and the economics of immigration. Such variety and excellent presentation have earned Flatow awards from journalism groups and scientific and educational institutions.

The show has proven so popular that when “Talk of the Nation” was canceled, “Science Friday” was spun off as an independent production.

“The dirty little fact about science is everybody loves science,” Flatow said. “You hear ‘Everybody hates science; they can’t understand it.’ That’s not true. They may not understand it, but they want to talk about stuff. They want to talk about how things work. They want to talk about their body, about what the universe is made of.”

UNIVERSAL TOPICS like the Big Bang Theory (such is Flatow’s celebrity that he has appeared on the show of that name twice) draw a lot of attention, but Flatow also enjoys small, slice-of-life stories. One of them came when he was guest hosting “All Things Considered” and got a letter from a mother troubled over her children’s habit of going into a closet and chewing Wintergreen Lifesavers. They claimed that crunching the Lifesavers created sparks.

“I called the Lifesaver people and they denied knowing anything about it,” he said. “So I thought I better check this out, and I went into the bathroom and turned the lights off and looked in the mirror, and sure enough there was a little spark that came out.”

He turned to his audience for explanations as to why and was “flooded, flooded” with calls and mail about the phenomenon. “People had known about this for 300 years,” he said, “because when you crush a sugar crystal, it gives off very high voltage. It’s not a powerful one, and it lights up, but you can’t see it because it’s ultraviolet. It’s the Wintergreen impurity that makes it glow red.

“We got more mail on that for the next 10 years than any other story on ‘All Things Considered.’”

Another time, Flatow was interviewing Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, who was asked by a caller whether she thought there was an undiscovered species of primate out there. “She said, ‘Yes, I do.’”

Flatow said, “I had a flash — and I said, ‘Are you talking about Yeti, the abominable snowman?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I think it exists and we might it find it some day.’ And then we ran out of time.”

Guests have surprised Flatow in other ways, as well. He once had the famous neurologist Oliver Sachs on, and when Sachs learned that the next day’s guest would be an expert in giant squids, he asked if he could return to ask him a question or two, since that was his “favorite subject.”

“He showed up that Friday with his cephalopod T-shirt on, and had a squid in each hand, squeezing them, ready to go,” Flatow said. “That’s the great show about what we do, and live radio.”

Despite the popularity of his show, Flatow sees science as being undermined by the current political climate. “There’s science denialism, whether it’s climate change, whether it is about creation and evolution,” he said. “We’ve done this show for over 25 years, and I’ve never seen science come under such attack. Just the basic tenets of science, the facts. We don’t even talk about facts any more, because it seems like everyone has their own facts.”

Recent reports have suggested that government scientists need clearance to speak to the media, even education-oriented shows like his. The show was recently denied an interview with the new head of NASA, Jim Bridenstine.

Flatow said such tactics represent a missed opportunity for people on all sides of a scientific debate, since speakers are never edited on the show. “You get your 20, 30, 40 minutes to say what you like,” he said. “You’re not getting 8-second sound bites.”