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.