Last weekend, I was talking with Ethan Zuckerman at a party, and we talked a little bit about the TED conferences and similar things. A few days later, there was an editorial in Nature suggesting that scientists could learn a lot from TED:
[P]erhaps the most critical key to success is the style of the talks. And here, those scientists wishing to inspire public audiences could take a few tips from the speakers in Oxford who addressed themes as various as biomimicry (Janine Benyus), the neuroscience of other people’s rational and moral judgements (Rebecca Saxe) and supermassive black holes (Andrea Ghez). Their videos and many others should become available over the next few weeks.
The talks have a strict time limit of 18 minutes — no interaction with the audience, and no questions except the informal ones asked in the extended conversation breaks. Academics used to talking for 30 to 45 minutes might imagine this to be severely constraining. But TED demonstrates that, for a general audience, 18 minutes is plenty for getting across context and key issues, while still forcing each speaker to focus on a message — whether it be advocacy or the celebration of new knowledge.
There is also a welcome absence of PowerPoint presentations. Instead there are plenty of images — but precious few professional scientific diagrams, which can quickly lose the audience’s attention. This forces speakers to craft talks that can engage sophisticated but scientifically untutored listeners at their level. And it also encourages speakers to try for a freely flowing, relaxed presentation style, without notes. This can take hours of practice, and indeed it should — the YouTube postings of these talks offer a potential audience of millions.
The combination of these got me thinking about what I would do for such a talk. Which in turn led to the thought that this would be a good blog topic. So:
You have eighteen minutes to talk to a general audience about something you find fascinating, and you can’t use PowerPoint. What do you talk about?
I think I have an idea that would work.
If I were going to do this, I think I would talk about decoherence in quantum mechanics, and how it works to either separate the many “worlds” of the many-worlds interpretation or select out the classical outcomes in a “collapse” interpretation. The only visual that it would really need is maybe a couple of Mach-Zehnder pictures, though if forced to do without those, I could probably manage. I think I even see how to spin it in the usual way that TED talks seem to– namely “You may ask why everyday objects don’t behave like quantum mechanics says they should. The answer is that they do, you just can’t see it.”
I think it would be tricky to do well, but it would be an interesting challenge. It’d be a lot harder than putting together a PowerPoint presentation, which I can pretty much do in my sleep at this point.
So, if you were going to do a talk in this style, what would you talk about?