Many years ago, when DD was in high school, Stephen Hawking came to Seattle. One item on his itinerary was giving a talk at the Seattle Opera house. DD was able to get extra credit for a class by attending and doing a paper on his talk. So the two of us went together.
He gave his "talk" and then there was a Q&A afterwards. I put "talk" in parentheses because he could not speak, so it was recorded. And during the Q&A, after a question was asked it would take him awhile to respond, as he had to transcribe his answer, and then put it through a voice synthesizer.
The process was interesting, but what amazed me was his ability to take highly theoretical concepts and put them into understandable terms. I recall that one topic that he addressed in his talk was whether black holes offered the ability to travel to through space and time. I remember that his answer was theoretically "yes" but in practice probably "no".
I no longer remember the details of his analysis, but I do remember that it came down to whether in space and time the black hole was a local maximum point, like the peak of a mountain where both the x- and y-values reach a maximum, or a saddle point, like a mountain pass where the x-values reach a local maximum, while the y-values reach a local minimum. If it was a saddle point time travel was not possible, and, while not conclusive, available information suggested that black holes were saddle points.
All I remember now is that conclusion, but at the time I was able to follow the thought process leading to the conclusion. And I thought it was pretty amazing to be able to present that type of analysis in a way that a person with only general scientific literacy, and no training in advanced physics, would be able to follow along.