This talk was a lot funnier before I saw Julia this morning in her closet. Now not so much. And I apologize. I’m actually not here to talk to you about our Crossroads project, though we thoroughly enjoyed performing at the other night, but certainly connected, as you’ll see. So in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was an instant sensation, eventually becoming the best-selling novel of the 19th century. The story also inspired myriad theatrical adaptations, including musicals, that called Traveling Tom shows that blanketed the nation in the 1850s. And looking back, many regard Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of America’s defining moments on slavery, a seminal event that pushed an entire nation past the water’s edge. It’s the kind of moment many of us in this room would love to create for our audiences. So what exactly is this defining moment, and how are they created? My own interest in this question stems from my own efforts on humanity’s looming crises of unsustainability. And I began this work more than a decade ago, tightly focused on climate change. But as I waited in, this rising tide steadily swelled around me so many aspects to this topic. The climate system and energy systems, yes. But as a physicist, I felt relatively well equipped to handle those. But there was also food systems, economic systems, social systems, political systems, the science of impacts, the science of mitigation, the science of adaptation, just so many dots intricately connected. I needed an approach to convey complexity. And so at this point, I should mention that before my life in science communication, I was an experimental physicist playing with lasers in basement laboratories, exploring things like the fundamental nature of light and information. Yes, I’ve seen that look before. Thank you. And so perhaps not surprising that my approach to storytelling has some roots in my former life of playing with lasers. It turns out both endeavors involve the beauty and the intricacy of how complex signals find their way forward. And so it is my intention before returning to MISTO to inflict upon you a brief detour into the world of quantum optics. And this detour, there are two stops. On the nature of waves, and on the nature of the physical media, where water, even solid rock, in which waves propagate. Oh, and here a note to my physics colleagues, should anybody ever see this, violence will be done to this topic. It’s the cost of clarity and brevity. You’ve all done worse to your freshman physics students than we all know it. So physicists generally speak of communication as a process of sending and receiving signals. And one way to talk about signals is as waves, disturbances of some medium propagating through the medium and facilitating interaction, announcing something over here to something over there. Ripples on a pond, for example, conveying to a fish where the water bug sits, a crack of sound in the air announcing a lightning strike. Now all waves have a fundamental structure. It’s a repeating pattern of disturbance displacing a medium away from an equilibrium. And this pattern can be simple in its form or complex. And it turns out, roughly speaking, the complexity of the wave form is tied to the complexity of the information that it carries. So simple message, simple wave. But if we wish to embed nuance and detail, timbre, gradation, overtone, a simple wave just won’t do it. They need to be more complex. But it also turns out that one can build any signal no matter how messy, no matter how complex, with the right collection of simple signals, simple waves. So take a simple wave, throw in another simple wave, two hands tapping on a pond at different grades, for example. And what you actually see is a more complex wave, a more complicated wave form, where the two constituent waves, where the highs overlap, we see higher highs, where the lows overlap, we see lower lows, and where high overlaps low, something in between. And we are guaranteed, a la misce de fourier, that no matter how complicated the signal we want to create, no matter how much information and nuance we want to embed, we can always create it with the right combination of simple waves. With one important caveat, it doesn’t work if the constituent waves are created randomly. Rather, they have to be coordinated, as physicists would say, apparently generated. So the bottom line, information at any level of complexity can be communicated by combining simple coordinated signals. So that’s the way. But creating the most exquisitely constructed complex signal does us little good if it will not propagate through the media, because not all signals propagate through all media. Visible light, apologies, I’m a little bit behind here. I’m going to give it just a moment for our complex wave to generate itself. Yes, thank you very much. You have no idea how much time one can waste putting something like that together. So not all signals propagate through all media. Visible light, for example, moves secretly electromagnetic waves, moves easily through glass, not so much through steel. And so a question, what to do when the necessary signal just won’t penetrate the media? We could consider changing our signal, of course, adjusting the message, but this has its limits. In terms of paraphrasing Einstein, everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler. Fortunately, there’s another crucial part of the system that we can consider, and that is the medium itself. And for our purposes, the atoms and molecules inside. Weather light will propagate through the medium depends on two things. First, the nature of the light, roughly speaking, the color and the brightness. Secretly, this is the size of the waves. And second, and some colors just won’t propagate through some media, while others will. Okay. Second, also critical are the states of the atoms comprising the medium. And this is the way each atom has arranged itself internally. We could think of it as moods of the atom, sometimes relaxed and sometimes excited. And this atomic quantum behavior that induces atoms to respond strongly to some colors, weakly to others, and to some colors, just not at all. And so in the field of quantum optics, physicists have found that different flavors of light can be used to pave the way for others, changing the medium by changing the moods of the atoms and molecules within. So that a signal previously unable to penetrate can, excuse me, with a series of preparatory signals passed through. We can prepare the medium to have a new resonance and thus cause it to respond in a fundamentally different way. It’s also interesting to note that not every atom need resonate. Rather, changing the state of just a relatively few can be enough to change the collective state or mood of the whole medium. In a nutshell then, complex signals can be built from simple signals, and these simple signals when cleverly coordinated can be made to resonate previously unresponsive media, allowing whatever complex signal we like to penetrate. Right. So how does all of this find its way back to storytelling? For me, it has helped me better define and contextualize my role. We deal with complex issues in this room, and our stories have to do so much. We need to capture people’s attention, and we need to capture their imagination. We need to scare the crap out of people, and we need to inspire the crap out of people as well. We need to move people with personal stories, connect them viscerally to abstract information, and we need to offer meaningful responses. But each of us, each of our stories need not do all of these things. We are not alone as storytellers, but rather reside in an ecosystem of storytelling. Our strength is in our community of effort, if we design our efforts to overlap and amplify one another. We connect the dots, others aren’t connecting, yes, but we don’t need to paint, recreate the pictures, others have already painted. Let’s point to the galleries. So each of us prepares our society with a signal, and if we do so, aware of the other signals, eventually our society will begin to resonate with the messages we need to convey. I have Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Anderson, Alice Bose, John Cook communicating detailed climate science, projects like Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously connecting us to the stories of real people on climate. Dan Barber, Michael Pollan, Mark Bitman, Joel Salatan telling the stories of sustainable food. Aemary Lovens and Elon Musk telling the stories of sustainable energy. Herman Daly and Robert Reich on sustainable and equitable economy. Tim DeChristopher, Majora Carter on social justice. Catherine Hayhoe is connecting all of these stories to evangelicals. Bob Inglis to conservatives and Naomi Klein to progressives. It is an army of people, reporters, musicians, actors, farmers, professors, architects, entrepreneurs, all of them pulsing, all of them pulsing our society. I get my pulse here. There we go. Every day from an enormous pallet and all of their messages are connecting to and serving my message. And so how do we then create defining moments? I don’t believe they are created but rather emerge from a layering of many moments of overlapping signals. Each epiphany examined under a magnifying glass is this entire anthology of experience moving us forward bit by bit. All of the baskets, not just the one at the buzzer, win the game. And no one can leap into the water until we’ve arrived at the water’s edge. Hilo was able to have the impact she did because of decades of abolitionist work that came before. Myriad pulses had prepared the nation for a resonance from newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, The Legal Arguments of Linesander Spooner, The Tireless Efforts of Fredris Douglas, and so many, many more. Many messages from many messengers in many directions. And we saw how this play out just yesterday in places like Venezuela and Ireland. So our task individually is not so much creating defining moments in my view but the sea of moments from which they emerge. Our task is creating paths to the water’s edge and then we jump in joining all who’ve come before in a rising tide. Thank you. Thank you.