Transcriber: Anna Trela
Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good afternoon. As you are 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 physicist friend of mine at MIT.
He was struggling
to explain something to me.
A beautiful experiment,
that uses lasers to cool down matter.
He confused me from the very start,
because light does not cool things down.
It makes it hotter.
It is happening right now.
The reason that you can see me
standing here
is because this room is filled with
more than one hundered quintillion photons.
And they are moving randomly through the space,
near the speed of light.
All of them are different colours.
They are rippling
with different frequencies.
And they are bouncing off every surface,
including me.
Some of those are flying
directly into your eyes,
and that is why your brain
is forming an image of me standing here.
Now, laser is different.
It also uses photons,
but they are all synchronized.
If you focus them into a beam
what you have
is an incredibly useful tool!
The control of the laser is so precise,
that you can peform 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,
that 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 a 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 a superfluid,
it is able to slow photons
down to 60 km/h.
Another spooky property is that it flows
with absolutely no viscosity or friction,
so if you were to take the lid of that bottle
it won't stay inside.
A thin film will creep up the inside wall,
flow over the top
and right out to the outside.
Now, of course, at the moment
that it does at the outside environment
and its temperature rises
by even a fraction of a degree,
it immediately turns back
into normal matter.
Superfluids 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 knowlege 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 you'd 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 a dance."
Of course, there never seem to be
any dancers around when you need them.
Now, the idea is not
as crazy as it sounds.
I started a contest four years ago
called "Dance Your PhD".
Instead of explaining the research with words,
scientists have to explain it with dance.
Suprisingly, 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 "Dance Your PhD".
There are hundreds of dancing scientists
waiting for you.
The most suprising thing that I 've learnt
while running the contest,
is that some scientists are now working directly
with dancers on their research.
For example, at the University of Minnesota
there is a biomedical engineer
named David Odde, 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 ooze along
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 fibres.
And those fibres are constantly falling apart.
But just as quickly as they explode, more proteins
attach to their ends and grow them longer.
So it's constanlty changing,
just to remain exactly the same.
David builds mathematical models of this,
and then he tests those in a lab,
but before he does that,
he works with dancers to figure out
what kinds of models
to build in the first place.
It is 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.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
It does depend on how
you measure it, of course,
but one estimate has put the drain
at 250 million dollars per day.
Now that assumes half hour presentation
for an average audience of four people
with salaries of 35.000 dollars.
And it conservatively assumes that about a quarter
of the presentations are complete waste of time.
And given 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 competence,
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 programme would immediately reduce
the national debt by about 0.011%.
One certainly cannot 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
propery values in urban neighbourhoods.
All of this could wipe out the savings
we are 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 perishable of their kind,
prone to injury and very slow to heal
due to our health care system.
(Laughter)
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'd sure help.
Of course some day, 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)
(Applause)