I unwisely agreed to cover the first class for one of my colleagues with a late-arriving flight back from break before finding out when the class met, which was 8:00 this morning. As a result, my whole morning blog routine was disrupted.
I’m saved from having the site go completely dark, though, by an email from a colleague who’s teaching a course on science fiction, asking if I’d be interested in doing a guest lecture. I’m open to the idea, but I don’t know what I would talk about. So, here are two Dorky Poll questions, one very specific:
1) If I were to do one guest lecture for a class on SF, what should I talk about?
and one more general:
2) If you had the chance to give one guest lecture to an audience of college students on any topic of your choosing, what would you talk about?
My answers:
1) I would probably lean toward either “portrayal of scientists in SF” or “New Space Opera” as a topic. It kind of depends on what they’re reading for the class, though, and I didn’t get to pick that.
2) Bose-Einstein Condensation. This is a bit of a cheat, as I have a “simulated lecture” that I do for a summer program for disadvantaged kids, so I already have the slides. (I also cribbed most of it from Bill Phillips’s public talks…). It’s a great topic, though, full of weird quantum stuff.
What would you talk about?