I'm a new BSG fan. I never saw the original series (and haven't heard anything about it that would make want to). The new series is surprisingly good, however, just as a story, and it's refreshing that they've suppressed the "technobabble" so effectively, and made such an effort to create engaging characters. I almost always come away from watching an episode with questions, however, and found the Battlestar wiki while while trying to find out where people went to talk about Galatica online.
In case it's of any interest to anyone, I'm a theoretical chemist by training, but work as a software engineer with a computational chemistry software company in Manhattan (New York).