Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
- 1 What's wrong with this Lagrangean, April 1988
- 2 What's wrong with this library, August 1988
- 3 What's wrong with these prizes, January 1989
- 4 What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
- 5 What's wrong with this prose, May 1989
- 6 What's wrong with these equations, October 1989
- 7 What's wrong with these elements of reality, June 1990
- 8 What's wrong with these reviews, August 1990
- 9 What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
- 10 Publishing in Computopia, May 1991
- 11 What's wrong with those grants, June 1991
- 12 What's wrong in Computopia, April 1992
- 13 What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
- 14 Two lectures on the wave–particle duality, January 1993
- 15 A quarrel we can settle, December 1993
- 16 What's wrong with this temptation, June 1994
- 17 What's wrong with this sustaining myth, March 1996
- 18 The golemization of relativity, April 1996
- 19 Diary of a Nobel guest, March 1997
- 20 What's wrong with this reading, October 1997
- 21 How not to create tigers, August 1999
- 22 What's wrong with this elegance, March 2000
- 23 The contemplation of quantum computation, July 2000
- 24 What's wrong with these questions, February 2001
- 25 What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004
- 26 Could Feynman have said this? May 2004
- 27 My life with Einstein, December 2005
- 28 What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring? April 2007
- 29 Some curious facts about quantum factoring, October 2007
- 30 What's bad about this habit, May 2009
- Part Two Shedding Bad Habits
- Part Three More from Professor Mozart
- Part Four More to be Said
- Part Five Some People I've Known
- Part Six Summing it Up
- Index
13 - What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
from Part One - Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Part One Reference Frame Columns, Physics Today 1988–2009
- 1 What's wrong with this Lagrangean, April 1988
- 2 What's wrong with this library, August 1988
- 3 What's wrong with these prizes, January 1989
- 4 What's wrong with this pillow, April 1989
- 5 What's wrong with this prose, May 1989
- 6 What's wrong with these equations, October 1989
- 7 What's wrong with these elements of reality, June 1990
- 8 What's wrong with these reviews, August 1990
- 9 What's wrong with those epochs, November 1990
- 10 Publishing in Computopia, May 1991
- 11 What's wrong with those grants, June 1991
- 12 What's wrong in Computopia, April 1992
- 13 What's wrong with those talks, November 1992
- 14 Two lectures on the wave–particle duality, January 1993
- 15 A quarrel we can settle, December 1993
- 16 What's wrong with this temptation, June 1994
- 17 What's wrong with this sustaining myth, March 1996
- 18 The golemization of relativity, April 1996
- 19 Diary of a Nobel guest, March 1997
- 20 What's wrong with this reading, October 1997
- 21 How not to create tigers, August 1999
- 22 What's wrong with this elegance, March 2000
- 23 The contemplation of quantum computation, July 2000
- 24 What's wrong with these questions, February 2001
- 25 What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004
- 26 Could Feynman have said this? May 2004
- 27 My life with Einstein, December 2005
- 28 What has quantum mechanics to do with factoring? April 2007
- 29 Some curious facts about quantum factoring, October 2007
- 30 What's bad about this habit, May 2009
- Part Two Shedding Bad Habits
- Part Three More from Professor Mozart
- Part Four More to be Said
- Part Five Some People I've Known
- Part Six Summing it Up
- Index
Summary
My friend Professor Mozart recently ran across some advice to young physicists on how to give talks. He came to me seething with indignation. “What's the problem, W. A.?” I asked. “I thought Jim Garland spelled out concisely and effectively just about everything the novice ought to take into consideration.”
“As you say,” he snarled, “it was a precise recipe for how to produce a contemporary physics talk—an almost perfect codification of all the ingredients.”
“Well what more could you ask?”
He gave me a look of withering scorn. “The contemporary physics talk is a disaster,” he proclaimed. “The only pleasure it affords is the relief that washes over you as you realize, finally, that perhaps the end is in sight. To assemble a respectable audience you have to bribe people with cookies and muffins. You must offer gallons of coffee to those honorable enough not to take the food and run, to help them maintain consciousness during the next hour. The article in Physics Today did a masterful job of passing on to future generations everything necessary to maintain this dreary art form.”
“You're unfair,” I reprimanded him. “There are too many things about lecturing that you, an experienced speaker, simply take for granted. If you think the article gave young physicists bad advice, have you anything better to offer?”
“They were not given bad advice. They were given excellent advice for making the best of an inherently hopeless situation. But pretending that the standard physics talk of today is an acceptable form of communication breeds hypocrisy in the old and experienced, and nurtures self-doubt in the young and innocent, who not only have to undergo the wretched experience of attending physics talks but also torture themselves worrying why they're not enjoying the ordeal. I would have urged speakers to get to the root of the problem.”
“And just what might that be?”
Without another word he thrust into my hands a battered handwritten manuscript covered with coffee stains and smeared with muffin crumbs, evidently labored over during many hours of intolerably dull seminars and colloquia. Then he walked off in a huff.
Though appalled by some of the opinions expressed in the document he handed me, I reproduce it below in its entirety as a counterbalance to the conventional wisdom.
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- Why Quark Rhymes with PorkAnd Other Scientific Diversions, pp. 90 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016