I am in my first year of a PhD in France. I recently attended a competition of best presentation by PhD students. It was a 15 minutes visual presentation and 7 minutes of questions. After the presentation, one of the members of review committee openly stated the following;
Since we have an audience from diverse areas of science, mathematics and technology the presentations should have been simple so that a layman can understand. I quote A. Einstein, "if you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough."
Even though this communicates an obvious message, I feel layman bear a high level of ambiguity with it. The following questions crops up in my mind.
- How much can you laymanize a particular research topic say, from theoretical physics, for example Non local wavefunction collapse?
The topic is chosen as random but for those who don't have exposure in basic quantum mechanics may not understand the technical terms.
- Is it advisable to prepare such a presentation in assumption that the audience are completely nescient?
If I oversimplify the presentation, leaving all the technical terms, I highly doubt that there will not be any material for those who actually knows the subject.
One approach is to try to satisfy both the extremes, first explain the technical terms in detail and then move on to subject core which I found is difficult if not impossible to fit into the time limit.