Science Talk

I'm currently working on a keynote address (this sucker is going on my resume) for a conference for middle school girls, aimed at getting them interested in science, math and engineering. I don't want to be boring so I plan on lighting a few things on fire, maybe using a leaf blower and possibly adding in volcanoes somehow. And stars. I think there's going to be a couple of pictures of stars.

But I'm having trouble thinking of how to start out the thing, or where to go. I figured it might not be a terrible idea to talk about how I got interested in science, though I'm pretty sure it's a happenstance journey of odd complexity. I know that I got interested in the idea of space-time and the ways we could theoretically travel through it when I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle (who, by the way, is a liberal Christian and put some themes from her faith into her works, making me feel like my whole life is a set up). I love the idea of a tesseract as a method of transportation, though it's not a correct use of the word by any means (though they are really fun to watch as transformations). I had to google it to check and be sure, though, and I came across the wikipedia page for a wormhole and it just made me want to shut down. Seriously. Go look at it. My favorite mental cringe-inducing statement is:

Wormholes which could actually be crossed, known as traversable wormholes, would only be possible if exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them. (Many physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, and others believe that the Casimir effect is evidence that negative energy densities are possible in nature.)

At this point, I started to sputter and the words, "What even" came to mind. I quickly restored my mental state by playing a couple of levels of Super Mario Brothers (on my Super Nintendo, because I'm that awesome) and then thought about what I had been thinking about. I'm actually interested in this kind of stuff? The answer is, of course, yes, I do, for the challenge of understanding them and for the wonderful possibilities that come out of these ideas. But I definitely can't talk to a group of middle school girls about an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. So how do I talk about how interesting science is when the understanding of it is so complex? And how can I respect myself as an educator if all I do is blow stuff up?

Of course I wouldn't do that and of course I'll find a good balance between content and exciting things and it's only 20 minutes out of these girls' lives, but think about it. What if these 20 minutes could actually get one, maybe two of these girls honestly thinking about science and engineering? What if it actually made a difference in one of their lives and they went on to make a difference in someone else's life or many people's lives? I don't just want to disregard it. I mean, I can't dream their dreams for them, but maybe I can give them a reason to dream.

Or, you know, maybe I shouldn't stress this much over it. I mean, it's not like every second of every day is an opportunity to change the world or anything.