Preparing Presentations

Abstract

During World War II, Niels Bohr gained an audience with Winston Churchill to warn him about the dangers of atomic weapons. Bohr realized that after the war an atomic weapons race would begin, and he wanted all countries to establish guidelines for containing these weapons. Despite the importance of the information that Bohr had to convey, Churchill broke off the meeting after only fifteen minutes. The reason? Bohr was such a poor speaker that Churchill lost patience trying to understand him.

On Monday and Wednesday, my mother was nervous and agitated from the time she got up…My mother had been teaching for twenty-five years, yet every time she had to appear in the little amphitheater before twenty or thirty pupils who rose in unison at her entrance she unquestionably had “stage fright.”

—Eve Curie