At the invitation of Eric Krieg, I spoke today to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking on the subject of "Classical Quantum Mechanics", a "theory" by Randell Mills, MD, which purports to revolutionise physics (and at the same time allow his company, BlackLight Power, to tap into a hitherto undiscovered source of atomic energy).

A copy of my slides for the talk is up on the site now.

The talk was filmed... I don't really know what for but I was okay with it.

One of the sponsors of the talk and a member of PhACT is Dr. David Cattell, chair of the physics department at the Community College of Philadelphia. Apparently whenever there is a physics related talk he would give extra credit to students who show up. So interspersed among the PhACT members were a few physics students. I have the feeling that the talk went over the heads of many of them, but a few seemed to follow fine.

Lesson learned: talking to the general public about math and physics is hard. Especially when I have to limit it to 45 minutes. The same material I can probably present to my officemates in 20 minutes or less, because they would often forestall what I would say by being too insightful. And when only a handful of people raised their hands when I asked whether people know about the Dirac delta function, I realized that I overdid the technical part. Hopefully the audience still got something out of it from my non-technical summaries.

Overall, a fun experience. Eric couldn't make it, so he gave a virtual introduction by way of a short video clip. I thought that rather cute.