Dance vs. PowerPoint a modest proposal John Bohannon

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good afternoon as you’re all aware we

face difficult economic times I come to

you with a modest proposal for easing

the financial burden this idea came to

me while talking to a physicists friend

of mine at MIT he was struggling to

explain something to me a beautiful

experiment that uses lasers to cool down

matter now he confused me from the very

start because light doesn’t cool things

down it makes it hotter it’s happening

right now the reason that you can see me

standing here is because this room is

filled with more than 100 quintillion

photons and they’re moving randomly

through the space near the speed of

light all of them are different colors

they’re rippling with different

frequencies and they’re bouncing off

every surface including me and some of

those are flying directly into your eyes

and that’s why your brain is forming an

image of me standing here now a laser is

different it also uses photons but

they’re all synchronized and if you

focus them into a beam what you have is

an incredibly useful tool the control of

a laser is so precise that you can

perform surgery inside of an eye you can

use it to store massive amounts of data

and you can use it for this beautiful

experiment that my friend was struggling

to explain first you trap atoms in a

special bottle it uses electromagnetic

fields to isolate the atoms from the

noise of the environment and the atoms

themselves are quite violent but if you

fire lasers that are precisely tuned to

the right frequency an atom will briefly

absorb those photons and tend to slow

down little by little it gets colder

until eventually it approaches absolute

zero now if you use the right kind of

atoms and you get them cold enough

something truly bizarre happens it’s no

longer a solid a liquid or gas it enters

a new state of matter called a

superfluid the atoms lose their

individual identity and the rules from

the quantum world take over and that’s

what gives superfluid such spooky

properties for example if you shine

light through

super fluid it is able to slow photons

down to 60 kilometers per hour

another spooky property is that it flows

with absolutely no viscosity or friction

so if you were to take the lid off that

bottle

it won’t stay inside a thin film will

creep up the inside wall flow over the

top and right out the outside now of

course the moment that it does hit the

outside environment and its temperature

rises by even a fraction of a degree it

immediately turns back into normal

matter super fluids are one of the most

fragile things we’ve ever discovered and

this is the great pleasure of science

the defeat of our intuition through

experimentation but the experiment is

not the end of the story because you

still have to transmit that knowledge to

other people I have a PhD in molecular

biology I still barely understand what

most scientists are talking about

so as my friend was trying to explain

that experiment it seemed like the more

he said the less I understood because if

you’re trying to give someone the big

picture of a complex idea to really

capture its essence the fewer words use

the better in fact the ideal may be to

use no words at all I remember thinking

my friend could have explained that

entire experiment with the dance of

course there never seemed to be any

dances around when you need them now the

idea is that as crazy as it sounds I

started a contest four years ago called

dancer PhD instead of explaining their

research with words scientists have to

explain it with dance now surprisingly

it seems to work dance really can make

science easier to understand but don’t

take my word for it go on the internet

and search for dancer PhD there are

hundreds of dancing scientists waiting

for you the most surprising thing that

I’ve learned while running this contest

is that some scientists are now working

directly with dancers on their research

for example at the University of

Minnesota there’s a biomedical engineer

named David Odie and he works with

dancers to study how cells move they do

it by changing their shape when a

chemical signal washes up on one side it

triggers the cell to expand its shape on

that side because the cell is constantly

touching and tugging at the environment

so that allows cells to

in the right directions but what seems

so slow and graceful from the outside is

really more like chaos inside because

cells control their shape with a

skeleton of rigid protein fibers and

those fibers are constantly falling

apart but just as quickly as they

explode more proteins attach to the ends

and grow them longer so it’s constantly

changing just to remain exactly the same

now david builds mathematical models of

this and then he tests those in the lab

but before he does that he works with

dancers to figure out what kinds of

models to build in the first place it’s

basically efficient brainstorming and

when I visited David to learn about his

research he used dancers to explain it

to me rather than the usual method

PowerPoint and this brings me to my

modest proposal I think that bad

PowerPoint presentations are a serious

threat to the global economy

now

it does depends on how you measure it of

course but one estimate has put the

drain at 250 million dollars per day now

that assumes half our presentations for

an average audience of four people with

salaries of $35,000 and it

conservatively assumes that about a

quarter of the presentations are a

complete waste of time and even that

there are some apparently 30 million

PowerPoint presentations created every

day that would indeed add up to an

annual waste of a hundred billion

dollars of course that’s just the time

we’re losing sitting through

presentations there are other costs

because PowerPoint is a tool and like

any tool it can and will be abused to

borrow a concept from my country’s CIA

it helps you to soften up your audience

it distracts them with pretty pictures

irrelevant data it allows you to create

the illusion of confidence the illusion

of simplicity and most destructively the

illusion of understanding so now my

country is 15 trillion dollars in debt

our leaders are working tirelessly to

try and find ways to save money one idea

is to drastically reduce public support

for the Arts for example our National

Endowment for the Arts with its 150

million dollar budget slashing that

program would immediately reduce the

national debt by about one one

thousandth of a percent one certainly

can’t argue with those numbers however

once we eliminate public funding for the

Arts there will be some drawbacks the

artists on the street will swell the

ranks of the unemployed many will turn

to drug abuse and prostitution and that

will inevitably lower property values in

urban neighborhoods all of this could

wipe out the savings were hope to make

hoping to make in the first place I

shall now therefore humbly propose my

own thoughts which I hope will not be

liable to the least objection once we

eliminate public funding for the artists

let’s put them back to work by using

them instead of PowerPoint as a test

case I propose we start with American

dancers after all they are the most

parish

they’re kind prone to injury and very

slow to heal due to our healthcare

system rather than dancing our PhDs we

should use dance to explain all of our

complex problems imagine our politicians

using dance to explain why we must

invade a foreign country or bail out an

investment bank it’s sure to help of

course someday in the deep future a

technology of persuasion even more

powerful than PowerPoint may be invented

rendering dancers unnecessary as tools

of rhetoric however I trust that by that

day we shall have passed this present

financial calamity perhaps by then we

will be able to afford the luxury of

just sitting in an audience with no

other purpose than to witness the human

form in motion

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you