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Truly, anything is possible in the universe known as TED. You might see flatscreen TV with no wires, no plug, nothing – one of the first public demonstrations of wireless electricity by Eric Giler. Or a British inventor, Michael Pritchard, turning sewage water into drinking water with a simple plastic bottle which he claims could save two-and-a-half million children’s lives a year. Or you could be queuing up to get into the talk on nuclear fusion (coming to a reactor near you by 2030, according to the British physicist Steven Cowley), and Meg Ryan will step on your toe.
Strange and very confusing, then. Because TED isn’t named after a US football jock, it actually stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design, which was the meat of its business when it was set up, in California in 1984 – heady days which saw the unveiling of the first Macintosh computer. Now, however, it has a far wider, more implausible remit. It aims to bring together ideas that it hopes might just change the world.