Passing on knowledge is a true art

If you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. A. Einstein.

Ready, stage, go! The past few weeks I was very happy to be able to give four talks on my passion for Astronomy! The topics were related to "life in the Universe ". Full of enthusiasm (and also a bit stage fright), I stood in front of four different groups and told them about my research. Two of them took place in a classroom, one on a pop stage and the last one even in a pub! But what does all of this have to do with Albert Einstein's quote in the title of this blog?

The quote describes very well what my approach is when I want to explain something, how I prepare for different talks and how I decide on what exactly I am going to talk about. I am always sure to be able to answer the following questions: "What am I excited about at the moment?", "How long do I have to talk about this subject?", "What does my audience know about this subject?", but mainly: "What will be my take-home message?".

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" said A. Einstein.¹ Sometimes I am listening to a presentation and all the information goes into one ear and out the other one. At the end of the talk, I then ask a question and get an answer that is even more confusing than the presentation. For me personally, the art of transferring information is always to make things as simple as possible without losing or affecting the essence. At the end of my talk, I want to have passed on some of my knowledge to the audience. As a scientist, I dare to say that a great fear of some scientists is that when a difficult theory is simplified too much, whatever you are telling is no longer exactly accurate. There is also the fear that you will come across as 'less clever' than you actually are, because everything you say is 'simple'. For example, after a presentation, a student came up to me and told me that he/she would never study astronomy because it was too easy for him/her. This taught me that it is very important to have the perfect balance where the audience understands your presentation however, the presentation is not too simple. This concept is crucial.

While preparing the talks, I came across a splendid theory, which made me think about Einstein's quote again. This theory is also known as the "Iceberg Theory".
The power of elimination - Iceberg Theory • The density of ice is about 10% smaller than the density of water. This is why icebergs (partly) float on the water. The largest part of the iceberg lies below the water. Therefore, we only see a small part of the ice. The American writer Ernest Hemingway described his writing with this principle of an iceberg.

Ernest says that although as a reader you can only see the tip of the iceberg, you also know that there is still a lot of ice (knowledge) supporting the tip. He mentions that when a writer lowers the tip of the iceberg into the water a tiny bit deeper, the iceberg gets an even firmer support. Only when a writer leaves out some information because he doesn't have the knowledge, there is a gap in the foundation which doesn't help the story.

I dare to compare my way of presenting with this iceberg theory. When I give a presentation to an audience, I also only show the tip of the iceberg. For me it is important that when I talk about a subject I can also expose the ice beneath the water (the knowledge) when I get questions on the topic. So in other words, I have my own variation on Ernest's iceberg theory.

Important lesson 5: Before making a presentation, think about how big "the iceberg" is that you want to present. Only when you have a clear picture of the whole iceberg can you start thinking about what the tip of the iceberg is going to be like.

¹ This quote by Albert Einstein has been discussed several times. Scientists are not sure whether he said it exactly in this way. It is believed that it was an interpreted summary of one of the statements in his 1933 lecture. There he mentioned that "it can hardly be denied that the highest aim of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to give up the adequate representation of a single fact of experience". Quite a mouthful, isn't it!