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(Music)

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Good afternoon.

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As you're all aware, we face difficult economic times.

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I come to you with a modest proposal

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for easing the financial burden.

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This idea came to me while talking to

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a physicist friend of mine at MIT.

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He was struggling to explain something to me:

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a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter.

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Now he confused me from the very start,

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because light doesn't cool things down.

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It makes it hotter. It's happening right now.

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The reason that you can see me standing here is because

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this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons,

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and they're moving randomly through the space, near the speed of light.

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All of them are different colors,

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they're rippling with different frequencies,

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and they're bouncing off every surface, including me,

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and some of those are flying directly into your eyes,

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and that's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here.

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Now a laser is different.

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It also uses photons, but they're all synchronized,

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and if you focus them into a beam,

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what you have is an incredibly useful tool.

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The control of a laser is so precise

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that you can perform surgery inside of an eye,

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you can use it to store massive amounts of data,

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and you can use it for this beautiful experiment

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that my friend was struggling to explain.

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First you trap atoms in a special bottle.

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It uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms

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from the noise of the environment.

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And the atoms themselves are quite violent,

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but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency,

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an atom will briefly absorb those photons

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and tend to slow down.

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Little by little it gets colder

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until eventually it approaches absolute zero.

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Now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough,

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something truly bizarre happens.

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It's no longer a solid, a liquid or a gas.

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It enters a new state of matter called a superfluid.

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The atoms lose their individual identity,

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and the rules from the quantum world take over,

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and that's what gives superfluids such spooky properties.

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For example, if you shine light through a superfluid,

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it is able to slow photons down

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to 60 kilometers per hour.

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Another spooky property is that it flows

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with absolutely no viscosity or friction,

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so if you were to take the lid off that bottle,

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it won't stay inside.

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A thin film will creep up the inside wall,

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flow over the top and right out the outside.

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Now of course, the moment that it does hit the outside environment,

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and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree,

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it immediately turns back into normal matter.

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Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we've ever discovered.

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And this is the great pleasure of science:

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the defeat of our intuition through experimentation.

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But the experiment is not the end of the story,

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because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people.

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I have a Ph.D in molecular biology.

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I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about.

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So as my friend was trying to explain that experiment,

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it seemed like the more he said,

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the less I understood.

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Because if you're trying to give someone the big picture

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of a complex idea, to really capture its essence,

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the fewer words you use, the better.

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In fact, the ideal may be to use no words at all.

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I remember thinking, my friend could have explained

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that entire experiment with a dance.

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Of course, there never seem to be any dancers around when you need them.

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Now, the idea is not as crazy as it sounds.

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I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D.

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Instead of explaining their research with words,

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scientists have to explain it with dance.

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Now surprisingly, it seems to work.

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Dance really can make science easier to understand.

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But don't take my word for it.

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Go on the Internet and search for "Dance Your Ph.D."

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There are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you.

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The most surprising thing that I've learned while running this contest

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is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research.

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For example, at the University of Minnesota,

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there's a biomedical engineer named David Odde,

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and he works with dancers to study how cells move.

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They do it by changing their shape.

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When a chemical signal washes up on one side,

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it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side,

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because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment.

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So that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions.

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But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside

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is really more like chaos inside,

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because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers,

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and those fibers are constantly falling apart.

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But just as quickly as they explode,

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more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer,

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so it's constantly changing

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just to remain exactly the same.

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Now, David builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab,

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but before he does that, he works with dancers

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to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place.

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It's basically efficient brainstorming,

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and when I visited David to learn about his research,

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he used dancers to explain it to me

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rather than the usual method: PowerPoint.

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And this brings me to my modest proposal.

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I think that bad PowerPoint presentations

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are a serious threat to the global economy.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Now it does depend on how you measure it, of course,

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but one estimate has put the drain at 250 million dollars per day.

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Now that assumes half-hour presentations

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for an average audience of four people

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with salaries of 35,000 dollars,

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and it conservatively assumes that

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about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time,

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and given that there are some apparently

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30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day,

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that would indeed add up to an annual waste

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of 100 billion dollars.

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Of course, that's just the time we're losing

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sitting through presentations.

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There are other costs, because PowerPoint is a tool,

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and like any tool, it can and will be abused.

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To borrow a concept from my country's CIA,

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it helps you to soften up your audience.

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It distracts them with pretty pictures, irrelevant data.

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It allows you to create the illusion of competence,

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the illusion of simplicity,

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and most destructively, the illusion of understanding.

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So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt.

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Our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money.

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One idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts.

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For example, our National Endowment for the Arts,

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with its $150 million budget,

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slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt

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by about one one-thousandth of a percent.

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One certainly can't argue with those numbers.

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However, once we eliminate public funding for the arts,

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there will be some drawbacks.

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The artists on the street will swell the ranks of the unemployed.

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Many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution,

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and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods.

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All of this could wipe out the savings we're hoping to make in the first place.

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I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts,

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which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

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Once we eliminate public funding for the artists,

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let's put them back to work

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by using them instead of PowerPoint.

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As a test case, I propose we start with American dancers.

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After all, they are the most perishable of their kind,

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prone to injury and very slow to heal

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due to our health care system.

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Rather than dancing our Ph.Ds,

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we should use dance to explain all of our complex problems.

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Imagine our politicians using dance

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to explain why we must invade a foreign country

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or bail out an investment bank.

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It's sure to help.

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Of course someday, in the deep future,

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a technology of persuasion

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even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented,

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rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric.

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However, I trust that by that day,

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we shall have passed this present financial calamity.

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Perhaps by then we will be able to afford the luxury

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of just sitting in an audience

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with no other purpose

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than to witness the human form in motion.

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(Music)

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(Applause)