Archive for speaking
Summer teaching
This weekend I will be fine-tuning teaching notes for next week’s classes.
At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the summer term is starting. I’m teaching third-year courses: Technical Report Writing and Advanced Professional Communications. I’ve made a couple small changes in the curriculum to streamline my students’ efforts (I hope). This will be the first semester since spring 2020 I’ll be meeting students face-to-face in a classroom. I doubt my mask will conceal my real excitement. I am truly thrilled.
On Monday I will be visiting, via Skype, a classroom at Brooklyn College. The class: “Parapsychology: A Critical Examination” (PSYC 3585). I’ve been an invited guest to this class since 2017. I discuss what it was like to be part of organizations that promoted skeptical interpretations of paranormal and psychic phenomena back in the 1980s and 1990s. The students and I always have really wonderful back-and-forth discussions.
I am blessed to have my gig.
Larry King
Back in 1988 I appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live! to debate the topic of Near Death Experiences (NDE’s). I was given the role of the skeptic. To me that meant I was there to offer explanations for this very real-feeling sensation that were neither paranormal nor religious. My goal was to “save” the experience rather than “debunk” it, offering a more scientifically sound way of describing the NDE.
The woman sharing the split-screen with me here is Barbara Harris-Whitfield. Considering how pointed my remarks were on that show, she was very forbearing and generous with me. Indeed, after our appearance on Larry King she asked producers of other shows to ask me on to be her debating foil. (We even travelled to Cincinnati to be on an early version of The Jerry Springer Show, which was not the gong-show it would become but which nonetheless sure did encourage ill manners.) Barbara showed me how to be somewhat kinder to others when I argued with them, and she taught me that lesson without embarrassing me. I think of her often, with gratitude.
A word about Larry King. Back in the eighties, the discussion on Larry King’s show could be a good deal more elevated than what people saw in his later years at CNN; there were fewer commercial interruptions as well. To me, though, King’s finest years as an interviewer came when he was on the radio at night in the seventies. He knew everything and everyone and the conversations could really spread out. His curiosity was unquenchable, and he alleviated the isolations of insomnia among his listeners. It seemed he never failed at that. RIP, Mr. King.
If you can’t exaggerate …
The renowned and divisive Hungarian-American physicist Edward Teller would tell this little story about an exchange he had with the great Niels Bohr:
Some of us, including Bohr, were having a discussion about the spectrum and states of molecular oxygen. Bohr had some opinions, the details of which I have now forgotten, but which were in obvious conflict with the facts that were known. In this special detailed case, I knew the situation and tried to explain it. Unfortunately I could not do so to Bohr’s satisfaction.
He began his objection: “Teller, of course, knows a hundred times more about this than I.” With a lack of politeness occasionally seen among twenty-year-olds, I interrupted (with some difficulty): “That is an exaggeration.”
Bohr instantly stopped and stared at me. After a pause, he declared, “Teller says I am exaggerating. Teller does not want me to exaggerate. If I cannot exaggerate, I cannot talk. All right. You are right, Teller. You know only ninety-nine times more than I do.” He then proceeded with his original argument having dispensed with any possibility of further interruption.
I have never forgotten, nor have I often neglected to mention, Bohr’s wisdom: *If you cannot exaggerate, you cannot talk.*
This is one of my favourite stories. (I’m with Bohr, surprise.)
- from Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, edited by A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy, Harvard U. Press, 1985.
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