A scientist’s grandmother 👵
The creative art of explaining science to her non-scientifically
An anonymous (No, there is no proof that Albert Einstein said it) quote says, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
While I was writing my PhD Thesis, a colleague of mine read its Introduction and asked me, “Will your parents go beyond the first page?”. I followed his advice and made sure that my parents understand, at least, the very first page of my several years of research.
Communication is the key
Often, academicians, while working on specialized topics overlook the fact that once the work is finished/published, it will be mostly others but them who will read or use their work. It, therefore, becomes extremely crucial that we present the most complex of ideas in the most simplistic manner equally to a fellow scientist and our family members. The art of effective communication comes handy not just in your business sphere but also in your day-to-day lives. Even if you can’t personify/simplify every single technical detail, it’s the overall gist of the problem that matters.
If communication is the key, you need to be one hell of a goldsmith!
How to forge this 🔑, though?
Real-life examples, simple stories, analogies, etc. make things easy to explain and remember. For exactly this reason, we still remember most of the motivational, moral, and inspirational stories we read in schools, although we forget where exactly the Andes or the Alps or the Urals lie on a physical map, which amendments our Constitution has, and which chain of events led different kingdoms to sign different treaties several hundred years ago.
I used the same philosophy to explain science to my grandmother.
1. I made her some tea! ☕
During my PhD in material science, I was designing multicomponent alloys for aerospace applications. My grandmother, alien to the technical jargon such as host material, alloying species, heat treatments, etc. asked me the meaning and the purpose of alloying. I resorted to the example of making tea as she was a tea addict.
Hot water being the starting material, akin to the base alloy, would hardly possess any taste. You add tea leaves to it; that resembles your second specie/element, the alloying element. Now your tea tastes different and probably, slightly better than the hot water, thereby resembling a binary alloy (two elements).
She still didn’t like the binary tea ☕ 😞 Uff!
Do you still want to improve it? Let’s add some honey/sugar to it. It now tastes sweet and much better than before, resembling a ternary alloy with different (and possibly better) properties. Now, stir the tea with a spoon for some time to allow the sugar/honey to mix throughout the whole cup.
Voila! 😍 You just performed something similar to a heat treatment🔥 and homogenized your ternary tea.
Do you want more? Let’s add some ginger and cardamom to it to fight your seasonal cold, bringing you closer to drinking something like a multi-component alloy. That’s pretty much it! Like you chose the right amount of ingredients for your tea to get the best taste, I, as a materials scientist, try to choose the right alloying amount of materials, heat treatments, and other methods to design the optimum alloy for my desired purpose.
Let me share another example.
2. Let’s jump around in a room full of people!
A colleague of mine once asked me,
“How would you explain ‘kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm’ to your grandmother?
This was my impromptu answer after a pause of a few seconds:
Imagine a room with some people, randomly standing throughout the room at fixed positions, equally apart from each other. They all have different professions, age groups, nationalities, and hobbies. They can’t move from their positions. They are trapped! 😤 The moment you enter the room, you notice that everyone is sad and unhappy because of the people they are standing with (their neighbors). They want to be with other people in the room; maybe of similar age, or profession or nationality.
Now, as a savior, you come to the rescue and put Aladdin’s magic carpet somewhere in the room.
What’s so special about Aladdin’s carpet?
If a person is standing next to Aladdin’s carpet, he/she can swap positions with it (↔️). That person just got some independence, some freedom to move. Yay!
What next? 🤔
You choose the guys only standing immediately next to the carpet. Suppose there are four such people. All four have different built; some very strong, some very lazy/tired, some very young and some very old. You then measure the stamina/energy of these four that they need to jump and swap position with the carpet. Of course, the person with the highest energy 💪 will have the highest motivation to jump and will have to put in the least effort (least barrier for him/her to jump). Next, you randomly choose one out of these four and ask him/her to jump. The fact is that your random decision to choose one out of four guys will be influenced by your knowledge of how lazy/quick one is. Of course, you don’t want to disrespect the magic carpet and waste its precious time.
Come on Grandma, trust your basic instincts and find the right Aladdin!
Once the chosen person jumps, his/her position in the room is changed. Now he/she is standing where the carpet was before the jump. Likewise, the carpet is now at this person’s original position. Congrats! You just did the very first change of neighbors/positions in the room. That’s pretty much an extremely simplified version of the very first step of a kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm. Now you just have to keep choosing people and make them jump until everyone is happy and the overall atmosphere of the room is at its very best.
3. Eigenvalue equation of Donald’s family
The most beautiful equation I have ever seen is Schrödinger’s equation — the soul of quantum mechanics — for the formulation of which, Erwin Schrödinger received the Nobel Prize in 1933. In the above equation, H is the Hamiltonian operator, ψ is the wavefunction (the eigenvector — the same on both the sides but you can’t simply cancel it out from left and right and say H = E) and E is the energy, also known as the eigenvalue.
In an informal meetup once, the guy studying linguistics sitting across the table, on being told I study quantum mechanics, asked me how eigenvalue equation works. To explain the concept of operators, transformations, eigenvectors, and eigenvalues, I took the example of a father and a son.
Imagine a spoilt, unattended son, Tom, performing superbad in the math exam. His teacher approached his father, Donald, and asked him to pay attention to Tom’s performance. The disappointed Donald decided to teach the importance of math to Tom. He sat together with him and gave an hour of a motivational counseling session. At times, Tom refused to pay heed to his advice 🤷♂️. At times, Donald had to be louder and stricter in his tone 🗣️. The counseling session got over. A couple of more similar counseling sessions took place. A few days later, Tom wrote the math exam again, and, to Donald’s surprise 😮, he scored an A+.
Whatever just happened above is in a sense similar to an eigenvalue equation. Donald’s advice (H) here played a role similar to an operator (H), that helped transform his son, Tom, to score good grades. Tom’s physical form, size, shape, hands, heart, all stayed the same, both before the very first counseling and after the very last counseling, just like the Eigenvector stays the same on both sides of the Eigenequation. The son (wavefunction, ψ), Tom, here was no different than an eigenvector (wavefunction, ψ). The only observable output was the A+ grade that came out as a result of those counseling; the action of the Donald Operator on the Tom Eigenvector. This A+ grade is nothing else but kind of the eigenvalue (E) of this Donald-Tom’s father-son Eigenequation.
Finally, with such analogies, I was able to explain to laymen, on three different occasions, what some of the things that I do mean at the simplest level without having to worry about the intricate technicalities.
So, what’s next?
The opening quote still holds. Regardless of what you do, be it quantum field theory, gene manipulation, general relativity, string theory, artificial intelligence, rocket science, whatever; if you can’t explain the gist of your work to a layman, you haven’t understood it well enough.
Go home, prepare a tea, think of what you did today at work and ask yourself,
