Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
brian keating experimental physicist at
ussd and author of losing the nobel
prize and into the impossible
plus he's a host of the amazing podcast
of the same name called
into the impossible
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now here's my
conversation with brian
keating
as an experimental physicist what do you
think is the most amazing or maybe the
coolest measurement device
you've ever worked with or humans have
ever built maybe for now let's
exclude the background imaging of cosmic
galactic polarization instruments yeah
i'm slightly biased towards that
particular instrument but talk about
that in a little bit yeah but certainly
the telescope to me is is a lever that
has literally moved the earth uh
throughout history so the og telescope
og telescope yeah the one invented not
by galileo as most people think but by
this guy hans lipperche in uh in the
netherlands
and you know it was kind of interesting
because
in the 1600s 14 1500 1600s it was the
beginning of movable type and so people
for the first time in history
had a standard by which they could
appraise their eyesight so looking at a
printed word now we just take it for
granted 12 point font whatever and
that's what the eye charts are based on
they're just fixed height but back then
there were no there's no way to adjust
your eyesight if you didn't have uh you
know perfect vision and there was no way
to even tell if you had perfect vision
or not until the gutenberg bible and
movable type
and at that time people realized hey
wait i can't read this you know my
priest or my my friend over here he can
read it she can read it i can't read it
what's going on and that's when you know
these people in in venice and in the
netherlands saw that they could take
this kind of you know glass material and
hold it up and maybe put another piece
of glass material and it would make it
clearer
and what was so interesting is that
nobody thought to take that exact same
device you know two lenses and go like
let me go like this and look at that
bright thing in the sky over there uh
until galileo so galileo didn't invent
it but he
did something kind of amazing he
improved on it by a factor of 10. so he
10xed it which is almost as good as
going from zero to one is going from you
know one to ten
and
when he did that he really
transformed both how we
look at the universe and think about it
but also who we are as a as a species
because we're using tools not to get
food faster or to you know preserve you
know uh our our legacy for the for
future generations but actually to and
increase the benefit of to the human
mind
somebody mentioned this idea that uh
if humans weren't able to see the stars
maybe there was some some kind of
makeup of the atmosphere which
for the early humans made it impossible
to see the stars that we would never
develop human civilization or at least
raising the question of how important is
it to look up to the sky and wonder
what's out there as opposed to
um maybe this is an over romanticized
notion but like looking at the ground it
feels like a little bit too much focused
on survival not being eaten by a bear
slash lion
if you look up to the stars you start to
wonder what is my place in the universe
you think i think that's uh modern
humans romantic it's a little romantic
um because they also took the tribe
they took the same two lenses and they
looked inward right they looked at
bacteria they looked at you know hairs
and in other words they made the
microscope and we're still doing that
and so you know to have a telescope is
it serves a dual purpose it's it's not
only
a way of looking out it's looking in but
it's also looking back in time in other
words you can see a microscope you don't
say oh i'm seeing this thing as it was
you know one nanosecond ago light
travels one foot per nanosecond uh i'm
seeing it no you don't think about it
like that but when you see something
that's happening you know on jupiter the
moon andromeda galaxy you're seeing
things you know back when lucy was
walking around the serengeti plains and
for that i think that took then the
knowledge of you know relativity and
time travel and and so forth they took
that before we could really say oh we we
really unlocked some cheat codes in the
human brain so i think that might be a
little too much but but nevertheless i
mean what's better than having a time
machine you know it's like we can look
back in time we see things as they were
not as they are and that allows us to do
many things including speculate about
that but one of the coolest things i
don't know if you're familiar with
someone i'm a radio astronomer i don't
actually look through telescopes very
often except uh you know on rare
occasions when i when i take one out uh
to show the kids but
um but a radio telescope is even more
sort of visceral i mean it's much less
cool because you look at it you're like
all right looks cool it's kind of weird
shape thing looks like it belongs in
sci-fi it's going to blast you know
the death star or whatever but when you
when you realize that when you point a
radio telescope at a distant object if
that object fills up what's called the
beam which is basically the
field of view of a radio telescope is
called this beam if you fill up the beam
and you put a resistor just a simple
absorbing piece of material at the focus
of the radio telescope that resistor
will come to the exact same temperature
as the object that's looking at
which is pretty amazing it means you're
actually remotely measuring you're
taking the temperature of jupiter or
whatever in in effect and so it's it's
it's allowing you to basically teleport
and there's no other science that you
can really do that right if you're an
archaeologist you can let me get into my
you know my time machine and go back and
see what was lucy really like you know
it's not possible so this the same thing
happens this is where i learned about
this from march of the penguins when the
penguins huddle together
they uh you know the the body
temperature
arrives to the same place so you're
you're doing this remotely that's like
the march of the penguins but remote we
do it from antarctica too so there are
some penguins around when we do it
okay excellent you uh mentioned time
machine i think in your book losing the
nobel prize
you talk about
time machines so let me ask you the
question of uh
uh
take us back in time what happened at
the beginning of our universe ah okay
usually people preface this by saying i
have a simple question so uh you know is
this so you know what happened before
the universe began what happened
teaching me about comedy
i have a simple question for you let's
take two i have a simple question what
happened at the beginning of our
universe there you go all right good so
when we think about what what happened
it's more correct it's more logical it's
more uh practical to go back in time
starting from today so if you go back
uh
13.874 billion years from today that's
some day right i mean you could
translate into some day right so on that
day something happened uh earlier than
than you know than the the moment
exactly now let's say we're talking
around
one o'clock
so at some point during that day uh the
universe started to become a fusion
reactor it started to fuse light
elements and isotopes into heavier
elements and isotopes of those heavier
elements
um after that period of time you know
going forward back closer to today less
you know 10 minutes earlier 10 minutes
earlier
later rather coming towards us today we
know more and more about what the
universe was like and in fact all the
hydrogen you know it's a very good
approximation in the water molecules in
this bottle almost all of them were
produced during that first 20 minute
period
so i would say you know the actual
fusion
and production of the lightest elements
on the periodic table
occurred in a time period shorter than
the tv show the big bang theory well
done sir
you know most of those light elements
besides hydrogen aren't really used in
your you know in your encounter right we
don't encounter helium that often unless
you go to a lot of birthday parties or
pilot a blimp um you don't need lithium
hopefully uh you know but but other than
that those are the kind of things that
were produced during that moment the
question became how do the heavier
things like iron carbon nickel we can
get to that later and i brought some
samples
for us to discuss and how those came
from a very different type of process
called a different type of fusion
reactor and a different type of process
explosion as well called a supernova
however if you go back to the beyond
those first three minutes we really have
to say almost nothing because we are not
capable in other words going backwards
from the first three minutes as famous
stephen weinberg titled his book
we actually marks a point where
ignorance takes over in other words we
can't speculate on what happened three
minutes before the preponderance of
hydrogen was formed in our universe we
just don't know enough about that epoch
there are many people most people most
practicing card-carrying cosmologists
believe the universe began in what's
called the singularity
and we can certainly talk about that
however singularity is so far removed
from anything we can ever hope to prove
hope to confront or hope to observe as
evidence
and really only occurs in two
instantiations the big bang and the core
of a black hole neither of which is
observable um and so for that reason
there are now flourishing alternatives
that say you can actually for the first
time ask the question that day you know
tuesday you know in the first
moments of the our universe there was a
tuesday a week before that
24 hours time seven days before that
that has a perfectly well understood
meaning in models of cosmology promoted
by some of the more eminent of
cosmologists working today when i was in
grad school over 25 years ago no one
really considered anything besides that
big bang that there was a singularity
and people would have to say as i said
we just don't know
um but they would say some future in you
know incarnation of some experiment will
tell us the answer but now they're
people that are saying there is an
alternative to the big bang and it's not
really fringe science as it once was
50 80 years ago when these models by the
way the first cosmology in history was
not a singular universe the first
cosmology in history goes back to
akhenaten ra and and the temples of of
egypt in the third millennium bc and in
that they talked about cyclical
universes so i always joke you know that
guy akhenaten's court you know he'd have
a pretty high h index right about now
because people have been using that
cyclical model from penrose to paul
steinhardt and aegis and
right up until this very moment can you
maybe explore the
possible alternatives
to uh the big bang theory so there are
many alternatives um starting with so
the singularity quantum cosmologically
demanding singular
origin of the universe that stands in
contrast to these other models in which
time does not have a beginning
many of them feature cycles at least one
cycle possibly infinite number of cycles
um called by sir roger penrose and uh
they all have things in common these
alternatives as does the dominant
paradigm of cosmogenesis which is
inflation inflation is sort of can be
thought of as this a spark that ignites
the hot big bang that i said we
understood so it's an earlier condition
but it's still not an initial condition
in physics imagine imagine i i show you
a grandfather clock or pendulum swinging
back and forth you look away for a
second you know i can come into the room
pendulum swinging back and forth alex
tell me where did it start how how many
cycles is going to make before the er
you can't answer that question without
knowing the initial conditions in a very
simple system like a one dimensional
simple harmonic oscillator like a
pendulum think about understanding the
whole universe without understanding the
initial conditions it's a tremendous
lacunae gap that we have as scientists
that we may not be able to in the
inflationary cosmology
determine the quantitative physical
properties of the universe prior to
what's called the inflationary epoch so
you're saying for the pendulum in that
epoch we can't because uh you can infer
things about the panel before you show
up to the room
in our current epic correct right yeah
so if you look at it right now but if i
said well when will it stop oscillating
so that depends on how much energy it
got initially and you can measure its
dissipation its air resistance you had
infrared camera you can see it's getting
hotter maybe and you could do some
calculations but to know the two things
in physics to solve a partial
differential equation are the initial
conditions and the boundary conditions
battery conditions were here on earth
has a gravitational field it's not going
to excurse or you know make excursions
you know wildly beyond the length of the
pendulum it's not um you know it has
simple properties um so but and this is
like in other words you can't tell me
you know when did the solar system start
orbiting in the way that it does now in
other words when did the moon acquire
the exact angular momentum that it has
now
um now that's a pretty pedestrian
example but what i'm telling you is that
the inflationary epoch purports and is
successful at providing a lot of
explanations for how the universe
evolved after inflation took place and
ended but it says nothing about how it
itself took place and that's really what
you're asking me i mean you don't real
look what you care about like big bad
nucleosynthesis and the elements got
made and these fusion reactors and and
the whole universe was a fusion reaction
but like don't you really care about
what happened at the beginning of time
at the first moment of time and the
problem is we can't really answer that
in the context of the big bang we can't
answer that in the context of these
alternatives so you asked me about some
of the alternatives so one is aeon
theory the conformal cyclic cosmology of
sir roger penrose another one that's
that's um it was was really popular in
the 60s and 70s until the discovery of
the primary component of my research
field the cosmic microwave background
radiation or cmb the three kelvin
all-pervasive signal that astronomers
detected in 1965 that kind of spelled
the death knell in some sense to the
what was called the quasi-steady-state
universe
and
and then there was another
uh a model that kind of came out of that
you hear the word quasi so it's not
steady state steady state means always
existed that was a cosmology einstein
believed until hubble showed him
evidence for the expansion of the
universe um and most scientists believed
in that for you know millennia basically
the universe was eternal static
unchanging
um they couldn't believe that after
hubble so they had to
append onto it concatenate this uh this
new feature that it wasn't steady it was
quasi-steady so the universe was making
a certain amount of hydrogen every
century in a given volume of space and
that amount of hydrogen that was
produced was constant but because it was
producing more and more every century as
centuries pile up and the volume piles
up the universe could expand and so
that's how they develop slowly very
slowly and it doesn't match
observational evidence so but that is a
an alternative by the way did i say i
think the the the steady state universe
is infinite or finite do you know um
he i i would assume that he thought it
was infinite because there was really
you know if if something had a no
beginning in time then it'll be very
unlikely we're in like the center of it
or it's bounded or it has in that case a
finite edge to it i wonder what he
thought about infinity because that's
such an uncomfortable is this a silly
joke i'm sure you're familiar with a
silly joke right a silly joke was that
um there are only two things that are
infinite um the universe and human
stupidity and i'm not sure about the
universe so well me saying i'm not aware
of the joke is a good example of the
joke it's very meta
okay so uh
all right so sorry you were saying about
quasi
all the alternatives in the quasi-steady
state and and the most kind of promising
although i hate to say that you know
people say like what's your favorite you
know alternative right this is not
investment advice
inflation is not transitory it is quasi
permanent um so a very prominent sorry
to interrupt we're talking about cosmic
inflation so calm down cryptocurrency
folks that's right although the first
nobel prize uh and one of the first
nobel prizes in economics was awarded
for inflation not of the cosmological
kind uh so most people don't know that
inflation has already won a nobel prize
it's a good topic to work on if you want
a nobel prize doesn't matter the field
exactly it's time translation invariant
so when we look at um the alternative
that's called the bouncing or cyclic
cosmologies these have serious virtues
um according to some
one of the virtues to me just as a human
i'm just speaking uh you know as a human
um one of the founders of the new
version of the um of the cyclic
cosmology called called the bouncing
cosmology is paul steinhardt
he's the einstein professor of natural
sciences at princeton university you may
have heard of it
and he was one of the originators of
what was called new inflation
in other words he was one of the
founding fathers of inflation who now
not only has no belief or support for
inflation he actively claims that
inflation
is baroque pernicious dangerous
malevolent not to science not just to
cosmology but to society so here's a man
who created a theory that's captivated
the world or universe of cosmologists
such as it is not a huge universe but
they're more podcasters than
cosmologists uh some do both but uh but
this this man
created this this theory with
collaborators and now he's like i joke
i'm like paul you're denying paternity
like you're like a deadbeat dad now
you're saying like inflation's is is
bogus
oh and but he doesn't just attack see
this is what's very important about
um approaching things as an
experimentalist you got a lot of
theorists on and that's wonderful and i
think that's a huge service an
experimentalist has to say no
he or she has to be confident to say
like i don't care if i prove you right
or i prove your enemy wrong or whatever
we have to be like exterminators and
nobody likes the exterminator until they
need one right or the garbage collectors
right but it's vital that we be
completely kind of unpersuaded by the
beauty and the magnificence and the
symmetry and the simplicity of some idea
like inflation is a beautiful idea
but it also has consequences and what
paul claims i don't agree with him fully
on this point is that those consequences
are dangerous because they lead to
things like the multiverse which is
outside the purview of science and in
that sense i can
see support for what he does but none of
that detracts from my respect for a man
um you know imagine like you know elon
comes up with this like really great
idea you know space and then he's like
actually it's not it's not going to work
and you know but like here's this better
idea and he's like spacex is not going
to work but he's now creating an
alternative to it it's it's extremely
hard to do what paul has done doesn't
mean he's right doesn't mean i'm gonna
like have more and more attention paid
to it because he's my friend or because
i respect the idea or i respect the man
um and his colleague anna aegis who
works really hard with him
but nevertheless this has certain
attractions to it and what um what it
does most foremost is that it removes
the quantum gravity aspect from
cosmology
so it takes away
50 percent of the motivation for a
theory of quantum gravity
you've talked a lot about quantum
gravity uh you talk people eminent
people on the show always latent in
those conversations is sort of the
teleological expectation that there is a
theory of everything there is a theory
of quantum gravity but there's there's
no law that says we have to have a
theory of quantum gravity so that that
kind of uh implicit expectation has to
do ultimately with the inflationary
theory so in cosmic inflation so is that
at the core so okay uh maybe you can
speak to what is uh the negative impacts
on society
from
uh believing in in cosmic inflation so
you know one of the more kind of robust
predictions of inflation according to
its other two patriarchs you know
considered to be as patriarchs alan guth
at mit and andre linde at stanford um
although he was in the ussr when he came
up with these ideas um uh along with
paul steinhardt was that the universe
has to eventually get into a quantum
state uh it has to exist in this hilbert
space and the hebrew space has certain
features and those features are quantum
mechanical endowed with quantum
mechanical properties um and then it
becomes very difficult to turn inflation
off
so inflation can get started but then
it's it's like one of you know spacex
rockets it's hard to turn off a solid
rocket booster right it continues the
thrusting energy you need another
mechanism to douse the flames of the
inflationary expansion
which means that if inflation kicks off
somewhere it will kick off potentially
everywhere at all times including now
spawning an ever increasing
set of universes some will die stillborn
some will continue and flourish and this
is known as the multiverse paradigm it's
a robust seemingly robust consequence
not only of inflationary cosmology but
more and more we're seeing it in string
theory as well so that you know
sometimes two you know branches coming
to the same conclusion is you know taken
as evidence for its reality so one of
the negative consequences is it creates
phenomena that we can't uh that are
outside the reach of experimental
science yeah or is it that the
multiverse somehow
has a philosophical
negative effect on humanity like it
makes us um
maybe makes life seem more meaningless
is that is that is that where he's
getting at a little bit or is it not
reaching that far well no i think those
are both kind of perceptive
the answer is a little both because in
one sense it's meant
kind of to explain this fine-tuning
problem that we find ourselves in a
universe that's particularly fascine
that has features can com you know
consistent with our existence and how
could we be otherwise you know the sort
of weak anthropic principle um on the
other hand it a theory that predicts
everything literally everything um can
be said to predict nothing like if i say
lex you know you've been working out you
you look like you know yeah you have
been yeah that's great uh you look like
you're you know about somewhere under 10
000 kilograms like all right yeah you're
right but that's horribly imprecise so
what good is that that's meaningless i
don't contribute any what's called
surprise or reduction in entropy
or you know reduction of your ignorance
about the system you know exactly how
much you weigh
so me telling you that tells you nothing
in this case it's basically saying that
we're living in a universe because the
overwhelming odds of our existence
um dictate that we would exist there has
to be at least one place that we exist
but the problem is um it's a
manifestation of infinity so humans
and and i'm sure you know this from your
work with with ai and ml and everything
else um that humans
as far as we know really are the only
entities capable of contemplating
infinity but we do so very imperfectly
right so if i say to you like what's
bigger the number of you know water
molecules and and this thing or the
number of real numbers or if i say
what's bigger the number of real numbers
are rational numbers they're all
different classifications of the amount
of infinities that there could be
infinity to the infinity power you know
when you have kids someday they'll tell
you i love you infinity you have to come
back i love you infinity plus one right
so uh but the human brain can't really
contemplate infinity let me illustrate
that
they say in the singularity the universe
it had an infinite temperature
right so
let me ask you a question is there
anything that you can contemplate in the
observe you know einstein's little clip
aside that's infinite like a physical
property density pressure temperature um
energy that's infinite
and if you can think of such thing i'd
like to know it but if you can
how does it go to infinity minus one you
know the opposite direction i go with my
kids
how does it go from like the half of
infinity because that's still infinity
how did it cool down how did it get more
and more tenuous and rarefied so now
it's only infinity over two in terms of
past less infinite more infinite
yeah i mean it's uh that's one of the
biggest
troubling things to me about infinity is
uh you can't truly hold it inside our
minds it's a mathematical construct that
doesn't it feels like intuition fails
and but nevertheless we use it
nonchalantly and then
use like physicists they're incredible
intuition machines and then they'll play
with this infinity as if
they can play with it and the level of
intuition as opposed to the level of
math
you know yeah maybe something cyclical
you can imagine infinity just going
around the same um kind of like a mobius
strip situation
but then the question then arises how do
you make it more or less infinite uh
yeah all of that intuition fails
completely and i mean how do you
represent it in a computer right it's
either some placeholder for infinity or
it's one divided by a very the smallest
you know possible
um you know real number that you can
represent in the memory well that's
basically my undergraduate study in
computer science is how to represent a
floating point in a computer i think i
took 17 courses on this topic it was
very useful i came to the right place
but um but you know in terms of what a
physicist will mean you're right i mean
physicists will blindly nonchalantly
subtract infinity you know
renormalization and do things to get
finite answers and it's it's miraculous
but you know at a certain point you have
to ask well where what are the
consequences for the real world so one
of them you ask you know what what's the
problem does it make us more meaningless
they report many of the people that
support it like andre linde in fact
andre linde says you have a bias you lex
me brian you have a bias that you
believe in a universe
but shouldn't you believe in a in a
multiverse wha what evidence do you have
that there's not
so he turns it around whereas paul
steinhardt will say
no if anything can happen then there's
no predictive power within the theory
because you can always say well this
value of the inflationary field did not
pred produce sufficient uh gravitational
wave energy for us to detect it with
bicep or simon's observatory or whatever
but that doesn't mean that inflation
didn't happen and that's logically a
hundred percent correct but it's like
it's like kind of chewing you know
wonder wonder bread you know uh i
apologize if they're one of your
sponsors but you know
wonder bread slash flex dot com typhoon
code cleb right isn't it
it's my favorite russian word it's like
would you like a piece of wood
by the way even that uh that word clip
which means bread and russian as you say
it like you're jokingly saying it now
it made me hungry because it made me
remember how much i loved bread when i
was in the soviet union when you were
like hungry that was the sor that was
the things you dreamed about i don't
know you know what's amazing is how many
of the soviet scientists contributed to
so much of what we understand today
and they were completely in hiding like
there was no google they couldn't look
up on scholar they had nothing they had
to wait for journals to get approved by
the communist party to get approved and
then and then and only then if they
weren't a member of some class i'm sure
you know like jewish scientists you had
a passport that said jew on your
passport yeah and zeldovich the famous
um yaakov
he was the advisor one of my advisors
alexander palmer of um and
he had to only because he was like at a
nobel level and you know was one of the
fathers of the soviet atomic bomb
program could he even get his jewish
student he was jewish too but but only
by virtue of his standing of his
intellectual accomplishments would they
give him the dispensation to let his
student you know travel to georgia or
something and it makes what we complain
about and i complain about academia and
it's like oh well what can i talk about
we have no idea of how good it is and
that they were able to create things
like inflation completely isolated from
the west i mean some of these people
wouldn't didn't meet like people like
stephen hawking until you know he was
almost dead
and they just learned this thing through
smuggled in you know it's it's a work of
heroism especially in cosmology there's
so many cosmologists that worked
incredibly hard probably because they
were working the they could they could
pass off as well we're doing stuff for
the atomic bomb program as well which
they were at the same time there is uh
interesting uh incentives in the soviet
system that maybe you can take this
tangent uh for a brief moment
that
because there's a dictatorship
authoritarian regime throughout the the
history of the 20th century for the
soviet union
science was prioritized
and because the state prioritized it
through the propaganda machine to the
news and so on it actually was really
cool to be a scientist like you were
highly valued in society maybe that's a
better way to say it
and
i i would say you're saying like we have
it easy now in that sense
it was kind of um
beneficial to be a scientist in that
society because you were seen as a hero
as there's there's yeah there's hero of
the soviet republic and that you know
there's positives
to that i mean i'm not saying i would
take the
negatives or the positives but it is
interesting to see a world in which
science was highly prized
in um in the capitalist system or maybe
not capitalists let's just say the
american system the celebrities
are the the athletes the actors and
actresses maybe
business leaders musicians
uh
and you know the people we elect are
sort of
lawyers and
lawyers
so
it's interesting to think of a world
where science was highly prized but they
had to do that science
within the constraints of always having
big brother watching it's uh yeah the
same in germany germany had you know
highly prized i mean one of the most
famous tragic to me cases is fritz haber
who invented the you know hebrew bosch
process that allowed us to i don't know
have you eaten yet you look he looks i
mean i know you fast intermittent fast
every day and you do that you know i
said cleb and you got it's a little
drool but he says i'm lifting and i look
slim this is amazing i'm gonna clip this
out and put it on tinder i think that's
a website you gotta go swipe left or
right for that i don't know um but when
you think about like you know what he
did and created the fertilizer process
that we all enjoy and we eat from every
day
he was a german nationalist first and
foremost even though he was a jew
and he personally went to witness the
application of ammonia chlorine gas
applied during trench warfare in 1916 in
battles in brussels and whatever and he
was they had a whole conjure of nobel
laureates in chemistry and physics
you know that would go and witness these
atrocities but that was also they were
they were almost putting science above i
don't want to say human dignity but but
of like
who the fact that he would later be
suppressed and actually some of his um
relatives would die in auschwitz because
of the chemical that he invented also
called zyklon b
and so it's just it's just unbelievable
so i i feel like that does have
resonance today in this worship of of
science you know and listen to science
and follow the science which is more
like scientism um and there is still a
danger you know i always say
um just because you're an atheist
doesn't mean you don't have a religion
you know just because you you you know
and in my case in my books i i talk a
lot about the nobel prize it's kind of
like a kosher idol it's something that
you can worship you know it doesn't do
any harm and and we want those people
that are so significant in their
intellectual accomplishments because
there is a core of america and the
western world in general that does
worship and really look at science
predominantly because it gives us
technology um
but there's something really cool about
that and so for me it's hard to find
that balance point between um between
looking to science for wisdom which i
don't think it has they're two different
words um but but also recognizing how
much good and transformative power may
be our only hope comes from science
you open so many doors
because you also bring up our
ernest becker
in that book
so there there's a lot of elements of
religiosity to science and to the nobel
prize it's fascinating to explore and we
will
and we still haven't finished the
discussion of the beginning of the
of the universe which we'll return to
but now since you opened the book
wow pun unintended of uh losing the
nobel prize
can you uh tell me the story of bicep
the background imaging of cosmic
extra galactic polarization experiment
bicep one and bicep two and then maybe
you can talk about bicep three but the
the thing that you cover in your book
the human story of it yeah what happened
yeah that book is in contradiction in
the second book that's like a memoir
it's it's really a description
of uh of what it's like to feel what it
feels like to be a scientist and to come
up with the ignorance uncertainty
impostor syndrome which which i cover in
the later book in more detail but um to
really feel like you're doing something
uh and it's all you think about it it is
all-consuming and it's something i
couldn't have done now because i have
too many other you know wonderful
delightful demands of my time but to go
back to that moment when i was first
captivated by the night sky who was a 12
year old 13 year old and really
mixed together throughout my scientific
story has always been wanting to
approach the greatest mystery of all
which i think is the existence or
non-existence of god so i call myself a
practicing agnostic
i do things
that are that religious people do and i
don't do things that atheist people do
and i once had this conversation you
know with my first podcast guest
actually i shouldn't say oh i was just
just having a conversation with freeman
dyson but he was actually my first guest
yeah and i miss him name drop name drop
yes uh i'm sure there's going to be
plenty of comments so in case people
don't know brian keating is the host of
into the impossible podcast where he's
talked
to some of the greatest scientists in uh
history of science physicists especially
in the history of science
so when i talked to freeman i said you
know freeman you're like you call
yourself an agnostic too can you tell me
something like what what do you do on
saturday on sundays do you go to church
he's like no i don't go to church
and i'm like well imagine there was like
an intelligent alien and he was looking
down or she would
see i don't know thing was looking down
and i saw freeman and on sundays like a
group of people go to church but freeman
doesn't go to church and then there's
another group of people that don't go to
church and those are called atheists but
freeman calls himself an agnostic but he
does the things that the like richard
dawk he doesn't go to the same church
that richard dawkins doesn't go to right
so i said how would you distinguish
yourself if not practice so i'm a
behaviorist i believe you can change
your mentality you can you can influence
your mind view your bodily physical
actions so when i was a 12 year old i
got my first telescope i was actually an
altar boy in the catholic church it's
kind of strange for a jewish kid who
grew up in new york maybe we'll get into
that maybe not uh but um i was just
fascinated by these
these
can we get into it for a second okay
yeah all right let's go
all right let's go there all right
let's go to uh baby brian or young
young young brother brian the new sitcom
on cbs uh young brian born to two jewish
parents uh my father was a professor at
suny stoney brook he was a mathematician
eminent mathematician
and my mother was an eminent mom and a
brilliant um uh
english major etc
and they raised that but they were
secular and they think you know we'd go
to i always drop we'd go to we'd go to
synagogue you know two times a year on
christmas and easter no we would go uh
yeah yom kippur rosh hashanah right
that's the typical two-day year jews uh
and you know we'd have uh we'd have
matzahs once a year on pound passover uh
and that was about it and um for years i
was like that until my parents got
divorced my mother remarried and she
married an irish catholic man by the
name of ray keating my father's name is
james axe um so when she remarried ray
keating
i was immediately adopted i'm actually
adopted into the keating family
and he had nine brothers and sisters
and just warm and gregarious they you
know did christmas and easter
it was one of the most wonderful
experiences i had and i do things with
great gusto whatever i do i want to take
it all the way so to me that meant
really learning about christianity in
this case catholicism so i was baptized
confirmed and i said i want to go all
the way
i became an altar boy in the catholic
church
you're going to be the best altar boy
there ever was i had like serious skills
you passed that collection basket i
could push people and get them to 2x
their contributions um but in this case
uh i was 13. i don't know if you
remember you know when you were 13. but
if you extrapolate the next level up you
know it's like you go graduate student
postdoc professor the next level up from
you know confirmation altar boy is
priest and i don't know if you're aware
of this but priests are not entitled to
have relations with with women and as a
13 year old boy kind of like future
casting what life's going to be like for
myself if i continue on my path
um i found it maybe i the math net up
that's right there was a there was a
serious gap in uh in that future in that
future um and instead when i should have
been preparing for my bar mitzvah you
know as most jewish boys would be a 12
13 year old boy i actually got a
telescope and uh and became infatuated
with all the things you could see with
it it wasn't bigger than that one over
there that your hedgehog's looking
through is that a hedgehog that says
it's a hedgehog hedgehog and the fog
i should mention and we'll go one by one
these things you've given me some
incredible gifts maybe this is a good
place to ask about
the telescope that put some clamps on
and let the hedgehogs look
and uh using now you're officially an
experimental astrophysicist by the way
why experimentalist versus an engineer
because you assembled this telescope you
gave it a mount
and you connected it to uh to a very
yeah but there's no experiment going on
it's just engineering for show okay it's
very shallow so experimenters taking it
to the next level and actually achieving
something here i just built a thing for
show well that's always a joke people
say oh you're an experimental
cosmologist i'm like yeah i build a lot
of universes oh we actually most of my
time is putting clamps on things
soldering things you know it's not
actually doing the stroking of my
non-existent beard contemplating the
cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological
model yeah and just like uh most of
robotics is just using velcro for things
right yeah it's not like having dancing
dogs and whatever right so telescope yes
this telescope what's the what's the
story of this little telescope this
telescope's uh a very precious thing in
some ways a symbol uh of what got me
into you know what brought me all the
blessings i have my life came from a
telescope and i always advise parents or
even people for themselves you right
here wherever we are
the biggest city on earth manhattan
where i was growing up as a 12 year old
outside of manhattan
you can see the exact same craters on
the moon the same rings of saturn the
same moons of jupiter the same phases of
v you can see the andromeda galaxy lacks
two and a half million light years away
from earth you can do that with that
little thing over there one that's a
little more expensive get one that has a
mount and and you can attach now your
smartphone what the hell is that i
wouldn't have known what that was in
1984.
and with that you can do something that
no other science to my knowledge can
really replicate maybe biology in some
sense but you can experience
the physical sensation
that galileo experienced when he turned
a telescope like that to jupiter and saw
these four dots around it or that saturn
had ears as he called it or that the
moon was not crystalline polished smooth
and and made of this heavenly substance
the quintessent substance right
so where else can you be
viscerally connected with the first
person ever make that discovery try
doing that with the higgs boson you know
get yourself an lhc
and smash together you know high
luminosity you know call a parry cliff
and say you know i want to rep how did
you feel he didn't feel anything none of
them felt anything it took years to come
you can't do it but with this you can
feel the exact same emotions that's
fascinating it's almost like maybe maybe
there's uh another one like that is fire
yeah like when you build a bonfire like
can you actually get it see if you use a
lighter i think if you actually by
rubbing sticks together however you do
it without any of the modern tools
that's probably what that's like yeah
and then you get to experience the magic
of it
of what like early humans say feel what
og felt when he did it that first time
by the way is this a gift this is a gift
of course
is this you need a little bit of a swag
upgrade so i got you i will yeah this is
a i'm uh i'm pulling a putin mike asked
if this is a gift making a very
uncomfortable feed feeds
not really this is actually my childhood
tell us come here you know
but now i'm keeping it that's all right
so looking through this telescope was
when your love for science was first
born changed my life because not only
was i doing that i was replicating what
galileo did but i was and yeah i'm 100
not comparing myself to galileo galilei
okay if there's any confusion out there
but i did replicate exactly what he did
and i was like holy crap this is weird
let me write it down so it had another
effect which all good scientists budding
scientists should do and all parents
should do
get your kid a book a little notebook
tape a pencil to it write down what you
see what you hypothesize what you think
it's going to be not like in the high
school you know like hypothesis thesis
but just like wow how did i feel better
yet astronomy is a visual science sketch
what you see the lagoon nebula the
pleiades seven sisters you can see them
anywhere on earth and when you do that
again you're connecting two different
hemispheres of your brain as i
understand it and you're connecting them
through your fingertips you literally
have the knowledge in your fingertips in
your connection between what you see
what you observe and what you write down
then
you do research right
the goal of science is not to just
replicate what other people did is do
something new
and that's why we call it research and
not just like studying you know
wikipedia and in so doing you start to
train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks
it's unbelievable and now we can do even
better because you got share it on
instagram or whatever and you can by
doing so have an entree into the world
of what does it really mean to be a
scientist and do so viscerally you know
i often say i was taught this by my uh
english teacher mrs tompkins in ninth
grade that the word educate it doesn't
mean
to pour into let me pour in some facts
into lex and you know it's not like
machine learning you're just showing
like billions of cats or you know you're
not like forcing it in you're bringing
it out it means to pour out of in latin
educare and
what more could a teacher want than to
have something that the kid is just like
gushing no you're not going to see like
inspire the kid yes inspire yeah shout
out to mrs tompkins yeah mrs thompkins
she's watching yeah she's a big fan
me she doesn't care but you yeah
excellent
would take those who love for granted uh
this is in manhattan this is in
westchester county new york yeah got it
so okay so but then that's where the
dream is born yeah
but
then there is the pragmatic journey of a
scientist so going to university
graduate school
post-doc and all the way to where you
are today what's what's uh uh what's
that what are some notable moments in
that journey so i call that the academic
hunger games you know because it's like
you're competing against like these
people you know who are just getting
smarter all the time as you're getting
smarter all the time they're they want
to get into a fewer and fewer number of
slots like there's fewer slots to get
into college than not in high school
there's fewer slots in graduate school
there's sure very fewer slots to be a
postdoc and many many maybe
infinitesimal number you know we just
did a faculty search at uc san diego 400
applicants for one position it's almost
getting impossible like i almost can't
conceive of doing what these new
brilliant young people applying to
become a assistant professor at a state
university that they're doing like it
takes so much courage to do that um so i
went from you know this kid in new york
uh thinking i would never be a
professional astronomer a because i
didn't know any i'd never seen any i
didn't even know that they existed and i
thought who the hell's gonna pay me to
look at the stars like won't they pay me
to be like an ice cream taster like it's
just not something i could conceive of
getting paid to do even if i had the
brilliance to do it which i didn't feel
like did
and then i went to graduate school
and um and during graduate school i had
this kind of um on-again off-again
relationship with my father and i knew
that he was a mathematician i he had
left and gotten remarried himself and
moved across the country i didn't see
him for 15 years
and in that time i learned a lot about
him and i learned that he had gotten
very interested not in pure mathematics
which he had been a number theorist and
contributed seminal work on the fantine
equations which play a role in turing's
work you may have seen but anyway he had
become interested turned completely away
from that into the foundations of
quantum mechanics and relativity which
is physics and by that time i was at
brown university
and i was you know thinking uh maybe
i'll be condensed matter physicist or
experimentalist i never thought i'd be a
theorist and i'm not a theorist so it
was pretty prescient and um but it
always appealed to me like why not do
what made me happy as a 12 year old like
we often forget about like those you
know primitive things about us are
probably the most sustainable durable
and resilient attributes of our
character so with my own kids i look
like what are they interested now when
they're young and it doesn't mean that's
what they're going to do i mean some of
them want to play fortnite you know like
professional fortnite play which there
are
but you know the odds of that is less
than the odds of being a professor can i
ask you
is your father
still with us no
just in a small tangent yeah
do you miss him do you think about him
does his mathematical journey
reverberate through who you are oh yeah
absolutely i mean it it did in very many
ways and he's been gone for a long time
now thinking back to that time with him
he must have instilled some capacity for
me to only want to spend my time which
is a limited quantity i don't think it's
the most limited quantity maybe we'll
talk about that later but um but to go
into
um only the most challenging interesting
things with the limited time that we
have while we're alive and for him it
was the foundations of quantum mechanics
for me it was the foundations of the
universe and how did it come to be and i
felt like well people been trying since
einstein to outdo einstein really have
made great progress in the foundations
of quantum mechanics but this is an
exciting time the kobe satellite had
just released its data that the universe
had this anisotropy pattern stephen
hawking called it like looking at the
face of god and so forth
and so it seemed like this is a good
golden age for what i'm gonna do and
what i'm most interested in but always
throughout that i wanted to understand i
didn't want to be a wrench monkey no
offense to people that just do
experiment and no offense to monkeys no
offense to monkeys that's right this
little guy sorry man um but thinking
back to what animates me it's not doing
the engineering as much as it is
getting the data but there's a lot of
steps i want to be the guy
um understanding what made the universe
produce the signal that we saw so i
always joke with my theorist friends you
know call me a closeted theorist you
know like i want to be you know what
they call a guy who hangs out with
musicians
a drummer so i want to be like like that
for physics right like for theoretical
physics i want to be like the guy
doesn't do new theory but understands
the theory that the new theorists are
doing i love that formulation of a
theorist
is understanding
the source of the signal you're getting
like signal is primary like the the
thing you measure
is p