Sometimes when an unexpected discovery happens, the most important thing is the lessons that are learned from it.
This is how Rupali Chandar is thinking about the recent return of photographs of deep space from the James Webb Space Telescope, which will inform the subject matter of her talk at TEDxToledo, which returns Thursday.
“My theme is going to be getting comfortable with being wrong,” said Ms. Chandar, the associate chair of the University of Toledo’s astronomy and physics department. “These images will 100 percent show us that some of our working ideas are wrong. It will be a different kind of talk. It is not a lecture, but I am going to weave more human elements and science together. I think some of the lessons are so important for society right now and for scientists.”
After two years in the pandemic-forced virtual woods, TEDxToledo is returning to an in-person format with a full slate of speakers highlighting the variety of intellect that Toledoans have to offer.
Since its founding in 2012 by local tech business figure Will Lucas, TEDxToledo has brought in local names from fields like law, media, human rights, and the visual arts to speak to the inquisitive minds of the city. TED is a non-profit standing for Technology Entertainment and Design, which exists for the purpose of spreading ideas, now hosting lectures and talks of 18 minutes or less in more than 100 languages.
TEDx gives communities an opportunity to use the TED model in their backyard.
This year’s TEDx Toledo event will be hosted from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at TolHouse, the social club Mr. Lucas founded last year at 1447 N. Summit St in Toledo. He sees the idea to bring TED to Toledo and the idea behind TolHouse as very similar, which made it an easy choice for the venue for this year.
There are six planned speakers, including Ms. Chandar, wildlife biologist Tim Schetter, dermatologist Dr. Hope Mitchell, Premier Bank director of community development Reginald Temple, Web3 expert Darren Moore and transportation specialist Neil Greenberg.
Ms. Chandar said she wanted to participate in TED this year because it is near perfect timing, and the astronomy field is buzzing.
“It is one of the best times in the history of the world to be an astrophysicist,” she said.
She owed this excitement to the great success of the Webb Telescope, launched last December, which is just now returning to Earth pictures of planets, universes, and galaxies that humans have never seen before.
“The technology and engineering that went into this is unprecedented,” she said. “It is almost beyond the building of the pyramids in Egypt. The views we are getting of the universe are beyond what we could have imagined.”
Ms. Chandar regularly lectures during the school year and at conferences among colleagues but said that for this TED talk she had to take a different approach in crafting her speech, making sure to make it identifiable and relatable to the general public.
In this way, she said, talking about the value in being wrong is the right subject because it goes beyond science to everyday life in a time when people on social media feel like they always have to be right.
It is this spirit of teaching and starting a conversation that drove Mr. Lucas to bring TEDx to Toledo in the first place.
“TEDX was started because I had the idea to raise the level of conversation in Toledo,” Mr. Lucas told The Blade. “I wanted to bring people together who were, in whatever they were doing, pushing the city forward.”
Sam Melden, city councilman for Toledo’s District 5 and a volunteer organizer for TEDx, said the event’s six speakers were chosen for their variety in areas of expertise, Mr. Melden said, mentioning that this year, in particular, each speaker brings something very different and unique to the table.
“We have a real nice mix. We get recommendations from past speakers, which if you think about how many years we have been doing this is a lot of past speakers,” he said. “We also look at different people we have come to know over the last year or so that are working on a cool project or are involved in something in the community that would make for a compelling talk. We try our best to make them all really interesting and compelling.”
Tickets for the event are $35 and can be purchased at tedxtoledo.org.
First Published September 13, 2022, 9:52 p.m.
