Science is a belief in the ignorance of experts
–Richard Feynman
It’s been a helluva couple weeks, but I’ve been meaning to report on the January Dionysium.
Our theme was science, and Richard Feynman in particular. Right off the bat, Dr. Carl Feierabend gave us a brief history of action, from Aristotle to the present day. Then actor Jason Liebrecht read Richard Feynman’s 1974 Cal Tech commencement address, “Cargo Cult Science.” Fireworks followed as two physicists, Dr. Eamonn Healy and Dr. Todd Krause, debated whether God plays dice with the universe. Next came Dionysium President L.B. Deyo’s report on the new graphic biography, Feynman, and Lance Myers’s presentation of Céline Desrumaux’s Countdown cartoon - and look, you can skip my blather, but you really should watch the cartoon. It’s at the bottom of the post.
Exhibit one: visual learning aid courtesy of our fearless leader, L.B. Deyo.
In the spirit of my previous post and given my interest in edutainment, I’ve been thinking about how this event compares to a traditional lecture. One example that springs to mind is sound check, probably my favorite moment of the evening, when dueling physicists were accompanied by the Golden Arm Trio warming up – where else are you going to hear that?
Including “Cargo Cult Science” was my idea. I’m a huge fan of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and primary sources in general. Having a professional actor deliver the speech was a far better means of conveying information than when I, a rank amateur, used to read things aloud in class.
L.B. makes a groovy Flash slideshow for every part of the show – and Flash, by the way, is what he does for a living. Same goes for the cartoon and the music: Lance is a professional cartoonist and the members of the Golden Arm Trio make music for a living. And of course, the two physicists present were professionals and it’s not unusual to see academics duking it out – but both were mindful of the debate as performance. They weren’t just physics experts, they were teaching/performance professionals.
So, instead of the one-man-show model that dominates traditional teaching, our event was an abstraction on the theme of science, incorporating the talents of many people. I suppose it’s not proper education in that you couldn’t use a standardized test to measure the results – but that’s sort of the point. And I’m not saying it’s feasible to include the talents of so many professionals in every single classroom lecture, of course. I am saying, however, that online classes, which claim to have an edge in multimedia mental stimulation, do just that. And we should recognize that it’s ludicrous to ask already-busy educators to magically absorb the all the skills needed for a good presentation.
We always end with a cartoon (a bit of honey to make the medicine go down) and Lance always curates really cool stuff from around of the world. Even if you couldn’t be there, you can do the next best thing and end with the cartoon. In reality, Blastoff is itself a curation of touchstone images from the history of space travel and the cartoon has been covered in the Atlantic. See how many you recognize, and contemplate the act of visual citation and improvisation.
Countdown – HD from Desrumaux Celine on Vimeo.