What the bleep do we know!?

At the last minute, I booked myself a seat to see Fred Alan Wolf give a 3 hour talk at the University of Queensland here in Brisbane yesterday. He has a very charismatic, yoda-like appearance and has written a gammut of interesting books. He was also in the movie What the bleep do we know!?. That's quite a resume!

The title of the talk was "The Spiritual Universe - How Quantum Physics Proves the Existence of the Soul". He started out by spending about an hour asking a series of questions like "who am I?", "why am I here?", "what is the soul?" and "what happens after death?". He could easily have condensed this hour into a half hour and entered the nitty gritty of answering the questions much quicker and thus spend more time going into more detailed answers. His lecture style is okay and reminded me of some of my uni lecturers (naturally) but he does have an engaging style none the less. Making friends with the audience by spending time before he commenced e.g. shaking hands randomly with them was great to see.

What detracted from his presentation was the plethora of badly put together slides in his deck with animations and sound bites. His presentation relies on hundreds of slides which generally lack actual content. In fact, I found the content to be only interesting when he was not reading from the slides and actually addressing the audience with his real persona. The presentation is really a narrated slide deck....it is not a lecture as you might think!

The fact is, he is smart enough and engaging enough to not need any props whatsoever but he clearly hasn't realised this fact or been told. This fact was made really obvious at the end when we were given the chance of q+a and it was clear to see that he knows a thing or two about some of the most interesting and important subjects one could ever discuss. My advice to him would be to reduce the slide deck to what is actually needed and employ a media company to make the content look slick and professional.

The other thing is I wish Fred was a good friend of mine so we could hang out and chew the fat over quantum mechanics ;)