Stop Educating Science, Start Entertaining It | Phil Dooley | TEDxReddam House North Shore Youth

Imagine you're a scientist and tonight's the night you're giving a lecture. You're on stage. You've polished your slides. This is something you've worked up to for years. It's a major discovery. But as you start talking, something's not right. There's someone on their phone. Someone else is yawning. Then someone gets up and walks out. A couple more people follow. By the end of your lecture, there's three people at the front and they're hanging off every word. They come up to you and say, that was great. That was the best lecture I've ever heard. I loved it so much. It's pretty confusing. You think, well, should I be disappointed? I guess if those three people really loved it, then maybe it's not a big deal. But I think it is a big deal because everyone we turn off science who walks away is important and we need them when it comes to the crunch. There are big decisions that need to be made about climate change or plastic in our waterways or vaccines. We want them to listen to evidence, not to listen to some Instagram influencer or a billionaire who don't really care whether what they say is right as long as it makes them a buck. I'm Phil Dooley. I'm a science communicator. I try to make science accessible for everybody. I used to be a scientist. When I was a kid, I loved astronomy. I wanted to be an astronomer. When I grew up, I ended up in laser physics and that guy making the big discoveries, that wasn't me. I had a pretty pedestrian science career. I remember my pretty much one and only conference paper, which was a poster session. I made the poster as beautiful as I could with lovely colours and logical narrative flow. I stuck it up and I stood by it and nobody talked to me. It was embarrassing and humiliating and I ran from science as fast as I could. It would be seven years before I would make a new beginning, which ironically came in my dad's funeral. My dad was a geophysicist, so maybe I emulated him by studying physics. As I listened to his colleagues talking about what a quiet, careful, meticulous scientist he was, I suddenly realised I'm not dad. Sure, I love physics, but I'm my mum. I'm an extrovert. I'm a connector. I'm a communicator. I realised I had to pursue science communication. The first thing I did was I enrolled in a journalism course, an evening course. It was a pretty hokey course. The teacher got fired for being too hungover, but he told me one very important thing, which is to entertain first, then inform. Because if you do it in the other order, what's going to happen? I've spent the rest of my career drawing from the entertainment industry to try and make my science communication better. The first thing I observed of the entertainment industry is that education is not entertainment. It's this kind of urge that scientists have that they want to educate everybody. If they just pour facts into people's brains, then suddenly they'll make sensible decisions. It's just not how it works. People decide things emotionally. Instead of teaching society about science, I've realised my job as a science communicator is to teach scientists about society. My first lesson for you scientists out there listening, the first thing we need to learn is that people don't want to learn. Not now. Sure, it's like eating vegetables. It's very worthwhile and I'll do it later, but it's not what you're going to choose to do for fun in your spare time, unless the vegetable in question is a potato and it's deep fried. I would like to delve into this because what I found, the entertainment industry is built on stories. I'd like to illustrate this with probably the biggest story that I worked on in my career. It's a huge discovery. No, it's not the discovery of the Higgs boson. Who's heard of a Higgs boson? Who hasn't heard of a Higgs boson? Who's just got a sore arm and they can't lift it? The discovery is gravitational waves. Who's heard of gravitational waves? Okay, a few, a few. Okay, so gravitational waves are really important to scientists because they're an entirely new way of observing the universe. Instead of looking at light from stars with a telescope, it's more like listening. If you're listening, then you can hear invisible things like black holes. We've never ever seen a black hole. You can't, but then we've discovered that there are black holes out there and they're colliding quite regularly and they're creating such violent explosions that they're sending ripples through space and time itself. This is a really, really exciting thing for scientists, but somehow it hasn't really connected with the public very much. It wasn't until I went to write a feature about this that I got an entirely different story. I sat down with Professor Hans Bachel. Now, Hans was one of the original scientists that got together in 1990. Here they are having a break, a scientist picnic. This is 75 years after Einstein predicted gravitational waves, but said they'd be too small for us to ever see. These guys said, 90s technology is awesome. Let's run the numbers and see what we can do. Everywhere they looked, the news was bad. The detectors were too weak. They were unstable. There's too much noise in the system. The lasers weren't powerful enough. The mirrors weren't flat enough. Not by a little bit. Orders of magnitude too short of what they needed. The scientists looked at each other and went, let's go for it. That's an amazing story to me. That is the hero's journey, which is the centrepiece of the entertainment industry I've subsequently discovered for all you scientists out there. All of our favourite people from fiction and the entertainment industry generally are following their hero's journey. Harry Potter, Ted Lasso, Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary. They're all ordinary people who get drawn into something much bigger than themselves. They have to answer some big call. They have to solve a great challenge. They have to make the world a better place. And to me, scientists are all heroes because they're all trying to make the world a better place. But the problem is, when they start like young Harry, they have no idea how to do this. And they fail and make mistakes. And that's the bit that scientists are very reluctant to tell. Doesn't sound like a great story, but it's actually the most compelling part. Because then they have to learn and grow and eventually they do prevail and work out how to kill Voldemort or fix the hole in the ozone layer or how to make a COVID vaccine faster than any vaccine before it. So this is my tip to you scientists out there. Tell the whole story, the challenges and the triumphs. So my next new beginning came 10 years later. I'd been in science communication for 10 years and I got asked by the Australian Institute of Physics to give a lecture. And I was very honoured. But I said no, because I didn't want to give a lecture. I said to them, can we try a new beginning or an experiment, as scientists call it? I would like to do this format that I've seen in England where you get eight minute slots only and you get eight scientists on stage and best of all, you do it in a pub. And they said yes. So I, of course, had to work out what I was going to do with my eight minutes. So I had a bunch of ideas. At that time, I was thinking about why the world is the colours that has the colours that it has. Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why is the sun yellow? And could it be different on a different world? But I had no way to string this set of facts together. And suddenly I realised for a story, I could just make one up. Scientists are so constrained by facts and the truth and here was this big enlightenment for me that I can just make something up. That's what arts and literature do all the time with so much powerful effect. So for my powerful effect, I wrote a fairy tale. I haven't got time to run the whole thing today but I'll just give you a little taste of it. It's the story of a handsome prince and I leaned into the art side of it. I got my wife, who's an artist, to help me with the backgrounds. I drew these cartoons and I also did some music. As you can tell, because music's my thing, as you can tell, I'm a classically trained pianist. Thank you, one person got it. It's the story of this prince and he loves the colours of the world but there's one problem in his life. He's lonely. So he decides to search for a partner who will make his life more colourful. So he puts it on the palace website. He did a TikTok about it. He was going to put it on LinkedIn but he's not really sure what LinkedIn was for and suitors came from all across the kingdom and some of them were pretty flaky. They had some pretty crazy ideas like the first one, Lorraine. She wanted to swap the yellow sun that we have for a blue giant, eight times hotter than our sun and the prince said, look, I don't think that's a great idea because it'll probably give out all this ultraviolet, it'll burn our skin and damage our eyes, boil off our oceans. So basically, Lorraine didn't get the gig and I guess you're probably wondering why I called her Lorraine. It was all so I could sing something. What am I going to do with this? Throw it on the ground, that'll do. Thanks, mate. So once she left, of course, and we knew that our skin and our eyes are out of danger, I can sing, I can see clearly now Lorraine has gone. He ends up with a plant geneticist called Elaine and the plant geneticist says to him, look, I'm fascinated by why grass is green. You see, it's green because the green light is reflected from the grass. The sun's light is made up of all of the spectrum and the blue and the red gets absorbed, the green bounces off. But that's just crazy because that's the middle of the spectrum, that's where the most power is. It's very badly designed and I propose to genetically modify grass so that it absorbs green but reflects blue and red. What does blue and red make? Grass will be purple. How about that, Prince? And he said, oh my goodness, I love it. Doesn't it go with my green tights and my yellow castle? So he fell in love instantly and he also said to her, if it's more efficient at capturing light, it's going to capture carbon more efficiently. Photosynthesis is only one or two percent efficient. So that means that we'll be able to reverse global warming. You are my hero, will you marry me? And they lived happily ever after. Now there's a new beginning, starting a science story once upon a time and finishing it with they lived happily ever after. And of course, you're wondering why I called her Elaine. Well, I think I can make it now, Elaine is here. All of her cool purple grass will soon appear. Hair is a rainbow I've been praying for. It's going to be a bright, bright, bright, bright coloured day. So the pub night was an absolute hoot. The Institute of Physics asked me back, we're doing year number 12 this year and I've also done it across the country in six other cities. I'm up to 57 or 58 gigs, had several hundred scientists on stage doing interesting things, trying things out and audience in the thousands. Myself, I've tried everything I could think of. I've done improv, I've done rap, I've done animations, I've done stand-up comedy, done classical piano. That one goes down very well in a pub, surprisingly. It's like ASMR. So I'd like to finish with probably the story that's been the most popular of all of the things that I've done. And it's a really interesting example because it's about how science corrects itself. When there's new evidence and an error, it becomes apparent an error has been made, then it corrects itself. It's about Pluto. Any fans of Pluto out there? Anybody a bit angry about how it got demoted? Oh yeah, there's a nerve. So let me tell you the whole story because it all began with this image in 2006, which subsequently became known as Eris. Eris is a planet that is bigger than Pluto and it's in the similar orbit. It's out beyond Neptune in what's called the Kuiper Belt. And with a few more months passing, suddenly a whole lot of dwarf planets were being discovered. So the scientists had to make a decision. Are we going to go and put all of these planets and face having a hundred, a thousand more planets in the solar system? And they thought, well, we actually need to make a decision about what really is the definition of a planet. The 2006 International Astronomical Union, they had a big argument, took them hours, but they came up with three criteria of what a planet needs to be. Firstly, it must make itself spherical under its own gravity, which Pluto does, pulls itself into a nice globe. Secondly, it must orbit the sun, not like our moon, which orbits us. And Pluto's pretty close on that. It does actually have a very big moon called Chiron, so they actually orbit each other. Technically, it's a binary system. And Pluto's orbit is also eccentric. It's long and skinny. And at some stages, it's actually closer than Neptune. And as you can see, it's at quite an angle. So, okay, Pluto, we'll give it to you. We'll give it to you. But the third criteria, which is you must clear the orbit. All the other planets, the big planets, have taken, have either absorbed or knocked out all the other bits of rubble. And you can see the Kuiper belt there is still full, and there's all of those other dwarf planets. So it's kind of like the asteroid belt. So Pluto has not cleared the orbit yet. Let's give it some encouragement. So help me give him some encouragement with what I see as the greatest piece of art in the world. Hey, Pluto, don't be annoyed. Take a spheroid and make it rounder. The minute you globulise your heart, then you can start to be a planet. Hey, Pluto, don't be afraid. Beat your mates up, just go and get them. Remember to make that orbit your own. Then we'll all know you're no dwarf planet. That rejection that you felt, take it out on the Kuiper belt. Just give all those tiny wells the shoulder. And when you're sure that it's just you, then Pluto will do. A planet must be a little bolder. That's a pianist guitar solo. Hey, Pluto, preps hit the gym. You know Eris makes you look puny. And Ceres in the asteroid belt. Well, she is quite built, but she's no planet. This long-term hook-up with Charon, some say it's a bit wrong. I know he's just someone to rotate with. But the entire Kuiper belt, God give me health. We can't have new planets by the thousand. Hey, Pluto, don't tell Neptune. You've been sneaking inside his orbit. Eccentric behaviour's hard to ignore. If we're to be sure that you're a planet, planet, planet, planet, planet, planet, yeah! Na na na, na na, na na na, Na na na, hey, Pluto. Hey, Pluto, Pluto, Pluto, Pluto, Pluto. Walala, walala! Hey, Pluto! Hey, Pluto! Lalala, lalala! Walalala! Hey, Pluto!