Learn the Complex, Speak the Accessible
As I dug deeper and deeper into the “rabbit hole” of theoretical physics, I gradually realized that being able to talk about my research in accessible words is as important as learning all those sophisticated terms. I’ll admit, I used to think that physics and math are just for the few brightest minds, that the extent the general public could understand about cutting edge research is highly limited. Despite to what degree you may believe these statements, the importance of science communication, the effort to communicate science to the general public, cannot be overlooked.
I am attracted to theoretical physics and math precisely because of the complex-sounding terms and intricate ideas. It is fun, for me, to learn about what “chirality” means and how tensors transform. I admire the elegance of the mathematical representation of physical theory, and the esoteric terms, to me, are the language I must master to appreciate such beauty. I do realize that most people do not hold the same attitude that I do. When I get comments like “ah, theoretical physics, must be really hard to understand”, I usually just smile and let it go. I used to think, if they can’t understand it anyway, then why bother to explain? It’s not like I would get any valuable feedback or anything.
My perceptions of scientific communication started to change after I attended some public talks organized by the University of Michigan physics department. The Ta-You Wu Lecture series consecutively hosted two Nobel laureates in physics in past two years, featuring Kip Thorne (we got him before he won the Nobel), who won the Nobel for gravitational waves (he also constructed the wormhole in the movie Interstellar, much cooler, right?), and F. Duncan Haldane, who won for topological matter (don’t worry about what this is). (By the way, this year’s lecturer is also a Nobel laureate, and it’s a she, Donna Strickland. See more info here if you’re interested!) You would expect to understand very little about the subject because they are Nobel laureates, after all, and they talk in the most complicated possible terms. That was exactly what I thought too, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. I understood most of what they were talking about, and despite the accessible language they used, I was able to fully appreciate their admirable contribution. The audience was not only composed of physics people either; there were students from other fields, university staff and professors, and even families in the local area with their 5-year-olds. And I was certain that they all learned something, and that was amazing. That was when I started wondering, how can I reach a wider range of audience and share with them the excitement and thrill I feel towards what I do? If the work of the Nobel laureates can be explained to me with such ease, surely I can explain my work to almost everyone.
I experimented with a friend majoring in the humanities. We were at a Starbucks just chatting, and this idea suddenly came to me that I could talk about my research with her. Normally when we meet up, I would at most talk about the funny moments between me and my advisor or colleagues, and that’s the level of my research experience I felt comfortable communicating with someone outside of physics. That day I proposed to tell her about the scientific essence of my research and she was excited to hear about it, so I eagerly gave a 15-minute lecture on axion and the strong CP problem and solving the equations of motion of the axion-photon system. I didn’t even realize that the sparkles of interest in her eyes had transformed into confusion a long time ago, until I finished explaining integrating the flux from axion-induced photons from the Andromeda Galaxy.
Turns out, this translation is harder than I though it would be. Even if I intentionally skipped a lot of details already, the recipient of my trial “public outreach” was still totally bombarded by the terms I subconsciously threw out without explanation. I also wasn’t giving my friend a clear image of the big picture, because I have focused on the specifics so much and so often that I forgot the importance of my effort is not obvious to others. It was the fault of mine that I totally ignored my audience’s reactions to my speech, and did not improvise the content of my talk to deal with the reactions.
Indeed, it is very easy to misjudge what language is considered “accessible” by the general public, especially since in research I deal with the complex terms everyday that they already become commonplace to me. In fact, with all the considerations of what word to use and what details to omit, I often find preparing for a public talk more intimidating than preparing a professional talk to give at conferences. Furthermore, intriguing and cohesive speeches do not just come naturally out of me, especially it concerns a subject that I myself am still learning about. I sometimes get confused about the “why” question as well, and the struggle to link everything together in a meaningful way is real.
All this is to emphasize the non-trivial effort in producing a successful science communication case that engages the general public. However, I do find a few techniques helpful with my own struggle to produce an engaging and accessible public talk. I write these down as a way to share and to remind myself, because clearly I still have a lot to improve upon.
1. Use Visual Aid
This might be a trivial tip. But it is important, so I have to say it. Especially if you are using slides, make sure there’s as little text (or equations, for me) as possible and replace every paragraph with appropriate visual representations. Cartoons for hard concepts, videos for illustration, etc. These are extremely helpful at helping the audience comprehend your ideas, and needless to say pictures always engage people more than texts. Who would read your paragraphs on a slide when you’re there talking?
As an example, a cartoon that I always like to show in my presentation is this one about the axions, the theoretical particles my research focuses on. I think of axions in many ways, such as its creation from the broken symmetry in quantum chromodynamics and how Peccei and Quinn cleverly used it to solve the strong CP problem. But really, that’s not relevant to the central idea of my work. I only care about the axions’ characteristic interaction with photons (particles of light), and that is exactly what this cartoon is showing. It then allows me to present the Feynman diagram (physicists’ drawing of interactions between particles) of that interaction with ease. With this aid, the audience is more likely to incorporate what I mean when I say “axions can be converted to photons and thus be detected”.
2. Refer to Everyday Concepts
This technique allows the speaker to communicate with the audience better, because hearing about something familiar makes the listener more comfortable and then more likely to accept what is going to be presented next.
Explain your terminologies with the easiest words you can use, as in the parentheses I used in the last paragraph. Photons are “particles of light,” and Feynman diagrams are “physicists’ drawing of interactions between particles.” Galaxies are “collection of millions of stars,” and neutron stars are “a super dense kind of star that exists in every galaxy.”
Use metaphors and analogies; even though in science sometimes they may not be fully accurate, most of your audience would appreciate the parallels you draw between your high-level concepts and their daily experience. (You have to admit the disadvantage of inaccurate or vague analogies, as it leaves the more advanced portion of the audience unsatisfied, but remember that you can always explain more in depth when it comes up as a question or in a private conversation.) The famous example is how the universe expands like a balloon, so the distance between any two points on the balloon’s surface is increasing.
Try explaining something not by giving a definition but describe what it does and where it exists. For example, after realizing that not even every college student knows what a magnetic field is, I started describing it as “what magnets produce to make them attract nails.” Similarly this works well when the concept is familiar to people but may not be the right perspective. Acknowledging that radio waves are what makes car radio music stations possible does not undermine my explanation that it is just a specific frequency range of photons. I could even make the statement that in principle you can “listen to” the signal I’m looking for using your car radio (which I thought was funny), but it’s just to weak to be heard, and that’s why we need big and sensitive radio telescope like the Effelsberg Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope.
3. Pace and Repeat Yourself when necessary
Remember that even if you explain your terminology in simple words as they come up, you should not expect your audience to remember what they mean right away. So refer to previously introduced terminologies and concepts with explanation several times to allow your audience to get comfortable.
I found doing this by re-showing the picture of main concept most helpful. Pictures fresh up people’s memory the most efficiently. For my presentation, I would constantly go back to the diagram (with the cartoon) explaining the conversion from axions to photons, re-emphasizing the important ingredients — axions, external magnetic field, photons, and the factor of interaction strength— but not necessarily give a full explanation as when I first introduce it to avoid being redundant. This diagram serves as the logical link between the different sections I discuss later: I prefer strong magnetic field, so I bring in neutron stars; I look for the photons in the radio range, so I need a radio telescope; the discovery of a signal signifies the discovery of an axion, and the lack of a signal allows me to put constraints on this factor of interaction. Although the links between these parts are obvious to me, my audience might be completely lost without the help of the repetitive showing of this diagram.
4. Don’t Forget the Big Picture
I usually start and end both with the more general concept of dark matter. I recognize that probably everyone in the audience of my public talk takes much more interest in dark matter (if they have heard of it) than this theoretical particle with the weird name “axion.” So I talk about how we see the stars at night because they emit light, and how there is actually something called “dark matter” that we cannot see because they do not interact with anything else except through gravity, and how we discovered the existence of dark matter because we were actually observing luminous matter. Then I introduce the axions when the interest of the audience is raised by this mysterious dark matter thing, presenting that we might have a solution to the problem. I also emphasize that in fact 85% of matter in the universe is dark, showing how little we know and thus implying the importance of finding an answer to this problem, making my dark-matter-hunting research meaningful.
This can be summarized to be “talking about the importance of your research that relates to everyone’s life.” Well, for some areas this is easier to figure out than others, but there must be something there for you to talk about, or else why are you doing it? Moreover, this also relates you to your listeners better. The big picture is also where I found the most interesting questions being raised about. Despite the fact that the big picture is the easiest to understand, it is also often times the most intriguing to most people. It also allows a greater degree of freedom for questions, some of which you may even find hard to answer yourself!
5. Think Like Your Audience
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, and you may find it easier to see what they want to know and what they need explanations for, and what makes the most sense to them.
Think back to when you are new to your research subject. What did you know back then and what did you need to learn the most? How did you comprehend these complicated ideas? How did you progress with your subject? Answering these questions may be hard because they may be from a long time ago, but give them some thoughts would help you in a lot of ways.
If you have a big project with several different parts such as mine, thinking about how it progressed to generate these different parts and what is the underlying logic between them will aid you in constructing your presentation. Ask yourself about the motivation to go from the end of one part to the beginning of the other part if they were in linear sequence, or about the connection to the central idea if they were more in a diverging structure. This can go beyond the general “hypothesis — method s— conclusion” structure. The more story-like you make it, the more appealing it is to the general public.
The points above I wrote with more of a slide-aided presentation in mind, but for shorter, conversational communications, they are still helpful exercise to go through. Once you have something coherent and presentable, it is an easier business to shrink it down to shorter conversational talks. One exercise that I have done and found helpful is to time yourself and cut that time down gradually. This game was given an interesting name called “half-life,” where you cut down your time by a half every time. Practicing with others, especially those who are not familiar with your project, definitely works better than talking to yourself over and over again, and it provides you useful feedbacks.
No matter if you’re preparing for a speech with slides, or just a short interesting discussion to have at casual chats, think about the big picture often, and draw lots of parallels to commonplace concepts. Don’t be too afraid to use those big words that you love so much, just explain them and explain them several times. You can also attend public talks by scientists in your area. Trust me, you will learn something about your area that you didn’t know before even if they are in the accessible level. At the least you’ll learn their speaking techniques and employ their analogies. The University of Michigan Physics department hosts the Saturday Morning Physics speech series, which is completely for the general public. I watched the talk given by my advisor (it was such a great talk) while making my own presentation, and stole some ideas on how to describe the axions.
And PRACTICE. Have a family member or a friend as your trial audience. Ask them to give feedback and ask questions. Ask them to summarize and repeat your central ideas back to you (they often do better than you if you have explained everything clearly, and if they are not on point at all, you know you’re doing a bad job). Plus, this allows them to learn about your mysterious science research project that you’re always too uncomfortable to talk about, right?
Theoretical physics, and any science for that matter, needs not to be formidable to the general public. The effort is for you to make, however, to make it fun and accessible. I hope my suggestions help a little. Go spread the joy of science!
All photos are provided by pixabay.com unless otherwise stated.
P.S. Come to the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History on Sat. 9/7 and Sun. 9/22 at 2 pm, for my public talk in the Scientist Forum about axion dark matter and how we might look for it!
