Dance vs. PowerPoint a modest proposal John Bohannon
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
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
[Music]
you