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 primary and theory is just
the search of explaining um
how that signal originated but it's all
about the signal i mean i i see the same
search for the human mind and like
neuroscience in that same kind of way
is it's ultimately about the signal but
you kind of hope to understand
how that signal originated that's
fascinating that's uh that's such a
beautiful way to
to explain experimental physics
because it it ultimately at the end of
the day is
all about the signal yeah
yeah and maybe those two things the the
neuroscience and like cosmos uh not
getting too romantic but yeah maybe
they're linked in some fundamental way
some fundamental conscious cosmic
consciousness but um we're gonna get to
that yeah yeah no we definitely have to
do that
but getting back to yet so it's so my
origins so i always say like and i want
to try this on you you said you wouldn't
answer any of my questions but i'm going
to ask you some questions what's the
most important day on the calendar don't
tell me the date but what to you what is
your mo what's the most important day to
you
every year do i have to answer or do i
have to think about it no no answer like
you don't tell me the exact date of the
count it could be like your mistresses
you know a birthday or whatever but i
have so many i lose track
even though i'm single how does that
even make sense i know okay i'm sorry uh
so i uh a day
like like uh like a month and a day yeah
i mean for me it would be december 31st
yeah so i was going to say new year's
eve new year's day uh some people say
birthday anniversary kids birth they're
usually signif signifying beginnings and
ends right january means the portal
between the god was the portal between
the beginning and the end so you're
looking back maybe because you're
russian like the death side the light
side looking forward to january the
beginning right
so um
everybody's most important day
is usually some beginning or something
significant for me it was studying the
most significant thing of all it's like
when did the universe get born as i said
before and i didn't think there again i
didn't i just there was some mental
obstruction that i didn't realize
that i could get past because i didn't
think like anybody does it like i knew
astronomers knew these answers like the
universe at that time between 10 and 20
billion years old now we know it's
13.872 billion years old it's incredible
the five digits you know for significant
five what is it again 13.
13.872 billion years
872 million so is there a lot of plus or
minus on that is that what are the
errors for me i'm 50. so it would be the
equivalent of you looking at me and
telling me within 12 hours how old i am
yeah it's a half a percent percent level
accuracy there's the confidence behind
that oh yeah i mean there's the
significance yeah no it's extremely well
measured i mean it's one of the most
precise things that we have in contrast
to again 25 years ago we didn't know if
the universe was 10 billion or 20
billion years old but there were stars
in our galaxy that were believed to be
as they are about 12 billion years old
or in the universe that were 12 billion
so that would be like you being um older
than your father
it was embarrassing can we can we
actually take a tangent on the tangent
tension out of tangent
how old is the universe can you can you
dig in onto this number how do we know
currently with those i guess you said
five four or five uh
significant uh digits so we can come
about it from two different ways one uh
basically they rely on the most
important number in cosmology which is
called the hubble constant the hubble
constant is this weird number that has
the following units it has the units of
kilometers per second per megaparsec so
it's a speed per distance which means
you multiply it by distance and you get
a speed and what is the speed you're
measuring well you're measuring the
speed of a distant galaxy at many
megaparsecs away so a galaxy at one
megaparsec away this isn't actually
strictly true because of local
gravitational effects uh but if you go
out say one uh megaparsico i would say
that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers
per second away from you and every
galaxy except for the local very most
local group surrounding us maybe a half
a dozen galaxies out of 50 to sorry
sorry out of uh
500 billion galaxies to perhaps a
trillion galaxies so 12 out of that
number
are moving towards us the rest are
moving away from us
so
that number if you invert it
if you say well when did those things
last touch each other all those galaxies
now they're really far apart we know how
fast they're moving away it's a very
simple algebra problem to solve when
were they touching that's where you get
that number from so there's the local 12
and then the rest ignore the 12 yeah and
then ignore the 12 and then look at the
others and yeah the then solve the
algebra problem
uh how does the
and stuff in the beginning though the
mystery of that beginning epic changed
this calculation of very little because
actually we understand um how there's
some other ingredients that go into it
namely how much dark energy there is in
the universe how much dark matter there
is in the universe how much radiation
light neutrinos etcetera are and how
much ordinary matter like we're made up
of neutrons protons croutons
okay so
morons
it appears that the universe
is bigger than it is older
how does that make sense oh oh yeah so
you're talking about the fact that we
can actually see stuff in our observable
universe that's located at a distance
that is farther than the speed of light
times the age of the universe naively
you would say that the the yeah so
you're right if the universe were static
um if the universe came into existence
and you can conceive of this the
universe came into a big bang in a fixed
universe so the universe just
started off those galaxies were you know
they could be moving towards us away
from us who knows um that you could say
i can see a galaxy that's at a distance
of only
13.8 billion years times the speed of
light that would be true but the fact
that the light is expanding along with
the expansion of the universe so imagine
there was some very distant past but we
were near a galaxy it's going to produce
some light and that galaxy is going to
be moving away from us the light's going
to be getting more and more red shifted
as it's called it's going to be moving
farther and farther away from us
as time goes on there'll be some
acceleration as we get into the era of
dark energy
the light signals there'll be some cone
of acceptance if you will
from which which represents all the
events that we could have received
information from we can't currently
communicate with that galaxy it
sent us some light and now it's moving
away and it sent this some light and
because the space is also dragging the
photons with it if you like the photons
are being participating in the expansion
of the universe that's why they're
redshifting that we can see things to
out to where the universe first began
expanding not just when it began
existing and because the universe has
been expanding for 13.8 billion years
with no sign of slowing down yet which
is a huge uh surprise serendipitous
surprise
that we can see things approximately
three times the age of the universe away
from us so we can see if it's called the
age of the universe 15 billion years
just to make the math simple we see
things at 45 billion light years
distance in that direction and we see
things at 45 billion light years in that
direction just turning our telescopes
180 degrees away so that means we see
things that themselves are are 90
billion light years away from each other
that's sort of the diameter of the
observable universe is there another
universe beyond that we don't know some
conjecture there's not only one there's
an infinite number of them how are you
emotionally okay with the fact that our
universe is expanding so like it's gonna
be like annie hall like with alvi uh
singer uh i'll grow up in the soviet
union
we watched propaganda i realized that
you did yes uh so there's a family paul
is that some kind of what is this
movie with woody allen um certainly
cancelled but yeah but nevertheless back
when he was uh uh not cancelled yet uh
he made a movie called annie hall in
which as a self-depiction he's like a
larry david before larry david was larry
david neurotic typical neurotic young
jew he's in brooklyn and he all of a
sudden tells his mother he's not doing
his homework anymore he refuses to do
his homework his mother says why it goes
because the universe is expanding and it
keeps on expanding uh everything will
rip apart and no we'll never have
anything in contact and everything is
meaningless i assume these are some of
the topics we're going to get to
and she goes what are you talking about
we're in brooklyn brooklyn is not
expanding uh and that's true brooklyn is
not expanding the solar system is not
expanding
oftentimes they get asked what is the
universe expanding into that's one of my
favorite questions
what is it expanding into and i say it's
actually an easy question if you think
about it um you've seen your friend ilan
he goes on space he's got a rocket right
what's outside of the rocket if you take
if you take this bottle empty out this
bottle take the cap off it go outside
the rocket you know
sip in some tang
screw on the cover of it what's in there
is it empty
uh that's just semantics i guess uh
yeah no it's definitely not empty so you
step outside the rocket yeah you're in
the vacuum of space the quote-unquote
vacuum ups and there's no more liquid in
it there's no more liquid in it no it's
just just a container one cubic
centimeter let's just make it simple one
cubic centimeter of a box and you take
it out into space outside of the falcon
whatever right
um what's inside that box it's not empty
there's actually
i'm gonna say this is gonna set your
friends up there's 420
photons from the fusion of the light
elements that we call the cosmic
microwave background inside that box at
any second okay all right hold on a
second what
420 that's uh i've heard of that number
before all right let's it used to be 69
but then they changed
wow physics works in mysterious ways and
the millimeter box is 69. what what are
we talking about here what uh what's
inside what's what's in the box i'm
gonna get it that's right let's think
outside the box no we're thinking inside
the way so if you have every cubic
centimeter of our observable universe is
suffused with heat left over from the
big bang
dark matter particles there's a little
ordinary matter in the universe
and every cubic centimeter there's some
probability to find a proton a cosmic
ray an electron etc there's actually an
awful lot of neutrinos inside of that
cubic centimeter now just imagine how
many cubic centimeters there are in the
universe it's enormous that's why
there's enormous numbers of particles in
our universe it's a very rich universe
but now let's zoom in on that box so now
inside that box there might be you know
one let's let's say there might be one
ordinary matter like a proton or an
electron a baryon
a lepton there might be a couple some a
couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be
a couple hundred photons as i said four
hundred and twenty
what's between those guys
what's between the protons and the
neutrinos and the photons like just zoom
into a cubic micron now like imagine 420
things inside a box this big it's
actually pretty empty like they're
zipping around in there right so between
them there's a lot of empty space and
this is outside the kind of
physics-based models of fields and all
those kinds of things just like just
actually asking the question of like
what is this
particle content in the universe in
every cubic centimeter of the universe
outside of the 420 so you have the 420
420 they have they have some you know
they have some mass well they have
energy they don't matter photons
energy that's why they don't bring
suitcases you know that's true right
photons never bring suitcases with you
with them
because they're traveling light
see i don't even get a lesson
that's corny dad jokes okay you'll
appreciate something
pretty good it's just i'm laughing on
the inside what's in the box what's the
420 what's between
the photons that's what space is that's
what the universe is expanding into okay
that's not so that's
that's the notebook yeah on which the
photons are written
that's beautiful but still thank you uh
still
i i i understand this but it's still
uncomfortable that that if the uh the
universe is expanding that this thing is
expanding the the canvas is expanding
it's very strange
because like if we're just sitting there
still i guess if we're in brooklyn
nothing's expanding so our
cognition our
intuition about the world is based on
this local
fact that
we don't get to experience um
this kind of expansion
yeah and that intuition leads us astray
but you know that gravity is the weakest
of the so-called four fundamental forces
um and yet it has the longest range
pervasiveness gravity is you know we're
being pulled towards the andromeda
galaxy at some enormous rate of speed
because of its massive counter
gravitational force to the force we
exert on it uh so gravity is enormously
long range but incredibly weak
and because of that uh we can think
about these effects of expansion as the
relationship between the
as you said the no the grid lines on the
notebook right
gravity is a manifestation of the
interrelationship between those points
how far they are from each other and
those can change those point distances
can change over time because of the
force of gravity so it's weak and
what we experience is gravity
is the
um changing of those trajectories from
being rectilinear to curvilinear that's
what we experience is gravity well you
have this analogy when you talk to barry
barish about bowling ball and a
trampoline and uh that's almost right uh
because it's actually you have to
visualize that now in four dimensions
like wrapping a trampoline at every
point around the object including on the
sides and it becomes very hard to
visualize so a lot of people use that um
it's also fraught analogy because you're
using gravity like the notion of gravity
pulling something down to explain the
notion of gravity so it's a little
overburdening the analogy
but okay so you mentioned barry bearish
wrote the forward to your book yeah
how do gravitational waves fit into all
this how how do they on the emotional
level how do they make you feel that
they're just uh moving space time
yeah so gravitational waves were the
nobel prize for gravitational waves
discovery the first time you know it's
this this was discovered twice
indirectly by two uh men uh uh named
halsen taylor and that was given my
first year of graduate school the ia i
entered graduate school almost they they
announced these two guys one and the guy
who won it did the work that would later
win him the nobel prize when he was my
age is this in the 40s uh this was no
this is the 19th that was a joke
i got it i got it you know to a
cosmologist age it means nothing um and
to a tennis player not on tinder
that's right all right
sorry gravitational waves do fit in uh
because what we're trying to do now
is use the properties of gravitational
waves the analogous properties that they
have to photons that they travel at the
speed of light that they go through
everything they can go through
everything and that they're directly
detectable we're using them to try to
confirm
if or if not inflation occurred
so did inflation the spark that ignited
the fusion of the elements in the early
part of the universe and the expansion
the initial expansion of the universe
did that take place there's only one way
that cosmologists believe we could ever
see that through the imprint of these
primordial gravitational waves not these
old you know newcomers that barry
studies the ones that occurred a billion
light years uh away from us
uh a billion years ago but we're seeing
things that happened 13.82 billion years
ago during the inflationary
epoch however
those we cannot build a ligo and put it
at the big bang
so if you want to measure let's say you
have a the old-time
firecracker let's say there's a
firecracker and you want to see if it
went off in the building next door to
you you can't see it so you can't see
the imprint of it but you can hear it
and what we're trying to do is hear the
effect of gravitational waves from the
big bang not by using a camera or even
an interferometer like barry used and
his colleagues but instead using the cmb
the light the primordial ancient fossils
of the universe the oldest light in the
universe we're going to use that as a
film quote unquote
onto which gravitational waves get
exposed
and hope you can uh so what are the
challenges there to get enough accuracy
to to for the exposure so the the signal
as i said it's um so there's 420 of
these photons per cubic centimeter and
there's a lot of cubic centimeters in
the universe however what we're looking
for is not the brightness of the photon
how intense it is we're not looking for
its color what wavelength it is we're
looking for what its polarization is
and we'll go let me just ask are you
serious about the per cubic millimeter
of 420 is the number centimeter
but uh uh cubic centimeter 420 is the
number
uh i wonder if elon knows this and if he
doesn't he will truly enjoy this
yeah that's true oh okay funding
security excellent
um so i mean this takes us to this story
of heartbreak of triumph
of uh that you described and losing the
nobel prize so describe what uh
polarization is that you mentioned yeah
you can describe what bicep one and
bicep two are
bicep three
perhaps the instruments that uh can
detect this kind of polarization what
are the challenges
the the origin story the whole thing
yeah so well the origin story goes back
again to like a father-son rivalry it
really does my father won all these
prizes awards etc but he never won a
nobel prize and you know some parents in
america they compete with their kids you
know oh i was a football player in high
school i'll show you and whatever
wrestling whatever and some of us could
be healthy too um but
um with me and my dad it wasn't super
healthy like we would compete and and
you know he was much more of a pure
mathematician and i was an experimental
physicist so we had both different ideas
and what was worth prioritizing our time
but i knew for sure he didn't win the
nobel prize and i knew i could kind of
out do him so i feel pretty venal and
kind of you know minuscule kind of
character wise
the only reason you could outdo him is
because the fields medal is given every
four years and only if you're under 40
which he wasn't so he's working under
much more limited conditions
that's right so even if i had which you
know spoiler alert the book's called
losing the nobel prize so i didn't do it
um but i wanted to do something big and
i wanted to do something uh that would
really just unequivocally be realized as
in a discovery for the ages as in fact
it was when we made the premature
announcement that we had been successful
so you were from the beginning
reaching for the big questions that's
all i can so as an experimenter you were
swinging for the fences
that's all i wanted to do i felt like uh
if it's not you know if it's if it's
worth spending you know perhaps the rest
of my life on as assigned as a scientist
it better be damn well better be
interesting to me to carry me through to
give me the you know the you know i
always say passion is great when people
say oh follow your passion but it's not
enough passion is like the spark that
ignites the rocket but that's not enough
to get the rocket into space so then
you swung for the fences with bicep one
what is this so bicep one was born out
of um kind of interesting circumstances
so i had gone to a stanford university
for a postdoc so an academic hunger
games stand for stanford university yeah
it's this uh small little school it's
it's not like that technical college in
massachusetts that you're affiliated
with um but um as i went there i was
working for a new assistant professor
she had gotten there uh only a year
before i got there and she had her own
priorities the things that she wanted to
do but i kept thinking in my spare time
that i wanted to do something completely
different she was saying galaxies at
high red shift and i wanted to study the
origin of the universe using this this
type of technology
and uh i realized courtesy of a good
friend of mine who's now at johns
hopkins mark kaminkowski that we didn't
need this enormous hubble telescope we
didn't need a 30 meter diameter
telescope we needed a tiny refracting
telescope no bigger than my head you
know less than a foot across and that
telescope would have the same power as a
hubble telescope you know size telescope
could have because the signals that
we're looking for are enormous in
wavelength on the sky they're enormously
long large area signals on the sky and
if we could measure that it would be
proof effectively as close as you get to
proof there could be things that mimic
it but that we discovered the
inflationary epoch
inflation being the signal originally
conceived by alan guth to explain why
the universe had the large-scale
features that it does
namely that it has so-called flat
geometry so there's no there's no way to
make a triangle in space in our universe
that has three interior angles that do
not sum to 180 degrees
you can do that with spacecraft you can
do that with stars you can do that laser
beams you can do that with three
different galaxies all those galaxies no
matter how far you go have this geometry
it's remarkable but it's also unstable
it's very unlikely it's very seemingly
finely tuned and that was one of the
motivations that guth had to kind of
conceive of this new idea called
inflation 1979 when he was a postdoc
also at stanford slack
and uh he was trying to get a permanent
job i was trying to like make my name
for myself and uh so i realized i could
do this but i was also being paid by
this this professor at stanford to do a
job for her and i was kind of a crappy
employee to be honest with you
and then one day she couldn't take it
anymore because i was like sketching
notebooks and planning his experiments
and i just i wasn't no i had big ideas
in your mind you were planning big
experiments and that was uh difficult to
work with on a small scale for like a
postdoc type of situation yeah we have
to you know publish basic papers deliver
on some basic deadlines for a project
all those kinds of things support your
advisors paying actually
and so one day i came in and um and it
actually uh uh involved another friend
of mine an astronomer named jill tarter
one of the pioneers in the seti um
science uh business of detecting
extraterrestrials which i assume you'd
never like to talk about aliens so i'm
sure we won't get into aliens uh but
jill was visiting stanford and i was
like i really want to meet her can you
introduce me and she said no in fact
you're fired my my boss
so i was like
is this is possibly the best thing that
could ever happen to me i didn't know
where it would lead or what would happen
to it but getting fired from this ultra
prestigious university
turned out to be the path i mean
literally that brings me here today
in that
because of that i ended up working for
another person in caltech which is in
pasadena
and um and she my original boss sarah
church she got me the job with her
former advisor a man by the name andrew
lang
and andrew was like he was like this i
don't know like
um
it's like any steve jobs or elon you
know charismatic handsome uh persuasive
idea man not the guy always in the lab
you know doing everything but understood
the where things are going decades from
now and he had been involved in
experiment that actually measured the
universe was flat
very close to flat um along with a
preceding experiment done at princeton
by lyman page and other collaborators so
the shape of the universe is flat the
geometry of the universe is flat
how did he do that experiment so he used
the cosmic microwave background and so
what i said is you have to look for
triangles in the universe so you can
measure triangles on earth you can
actually it's hard to show that the
earth is curved but you can show the
earth is curved using triangles
mountaintops etc if you have an accurate
enough protractor allegedly yeah yeah
god you you're like auto cancelling this
is great um my ratings are going to go
up man this is going to be great uh if
you want actual signs go listen to brian
if you want all of these conspiracy
theories or aka the truth about flat
earth
uh so
he what he used was the following
triangle
there are um proto-galaxy sized objects
in the cmb
the cosmic microwave background has
these patches and so you can make a
triangle out of the diameter of one of
these uh blobs of primordial plasma the
soup that constitutes the early universe
it's just hydrogen it's very simple
material understand hydrogen electrons
and radiation very simple plasma
physicist sun understand it
the diameter is you know one base of the
triangle and then the distance to the
earth is the other two legs so he
measured along with his colleagues at
caltech and then university of rome and
that's other group at princeton
measured uh the angle
uh interior angle effectively very very
accurately and showed that it added up
to 180 degrees
can you localize accurately the patches
in the cmb
can you know like where they could like
trace them back location-wise you can
know where they are but more than that
there's so many of these patches they're
about one square degree on the sky the
sky you may know a sphere has about 44
000 square degrees and a sphere so
there's literally 44 000 of these size
patches over which he could do these
kind of measurements to build up very
good statistics that's not exactly how
they do it or how they did it on this
experiment called boomerang but they did
measure very accurately the uh what was
called the first doppler peak or
acoustic peak in the plasma the
primordial plasma that's fast so um
the sphere has 44 approximately 44
thousand thousand square degrees so to
cover a sphere
that's a it's a very kind of important
data collection thing when you're
sitting on a sphere and you're looking
out into the yeah into the observable
universe so there's a lot of
there's a lot of patches to work with
yeah and in fact a lot of the fast kind
of algorithmic decomposition of spheres
and and machine learning in the early
2000s still used today was created out
of this field by data analysts using
this thing called hierarchical equal
area
triangles called heel heel heel picks is
what it's called and just stitch all the
stuff together and that's
and stitch it together very accurately
yeah get high statistical significance
in order to reduce these statistical
errors very clean signal and uh
measurement device to produce the
systematic errors those are the two
predominant uh sources of error in any
measurement those that can be improved
by more and more measurement you know
you take more and more measurements of
this table you'll get slightly better
each time but you only win as the number
of the the one over the square root of
the number of measurements but the
square root of 44 000 is pretty big so
they were able to get a very accurate
measurement again it's not exactly how
they did it they also have to do a
fourier analysis decompose that do a
power spectrum filtration windows
there's a lot of work that goes into it
image analysis and then comparing that
with cosmological parameters very simple
model just six different numbers that go
into a model that made a prediction and
one of those is the geometry of the
universe pops out and that is the
universe has zero spatial curvature and
that was called boomerang so he had just
come off of this now let me remind you
who is the first person you know to
measure the curvature of the earth it's
a guy named aristophanes in the you know
whatever live around aristotle's time
his name is in the history book so this
guy andrew lang
i was like he's like the next aristotle
aristothe like i just wanted to work for
this guy you know he was clearly had
this brand he was about 40 at the time
california scientist of the year i i was
sure he was going to win a nobel prize
for that and i knew that he you know so
i went down to caltech to give my job
talk and he said you know i love it you
got a job and before i could even you
know before he finished the sentence i
said i'll take it you know like it was
too good to be true
and i started working there at caltech
and slowly but surely because caltech's
a rich private university
at that time run by a nobel prize winner
by the name of david baltimore
he just wrote us a check baltimore wrote
us a check and said get started on this
idea and so we started coming with the
idea for what i later named bicep by
background imaging cosmic extragalactic
polarization which is kind of ironic
because we ended up measuring galactic
polarization we'll get to that in a
minute um but along the way the idea was
very simple we're going to make the
simplest telescope you can possibly make
which is a refracting telescope your
eyes you have two refracting telescopes
in your head only way you know forward
is making things more complex right and
when you make things complex in science
you introduce the possibility for
systematic errors and so we want to
build the cleanest instrument turns out
a cleanest instrument you can build and
astronomy is a refracting telescope we
also had to unlike that telescope or
galileo's we had to use very sensitive
detectors
that were cooled less than 1 20th of the
temperature of the cosmic background
itself which is the coolest temperature
in the whole universe so we had to cool
these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees
kelvin above absolute zero
to do that we need to put it inside of a
huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the
air molecules and water molecules and
take it to a very very special place
called the south pole antarctica from
which i retrieved for you a patch there
it is over there
so when you go there you get these
bright red jackets
bright oh yeah
somebody was born in the soviet union we
obviously like to call it red united
states antarctic program
the national science foundation and the
base is called the amundsen scott south
polar station
so it's a little known fact of
geopolitics that whatever country
occupies a region
has ownership over it now there is a
treaty in antarctica you can't use it
for military purposes for mining etc etc
but i don't know if you know but about
12 years ago putin sent a submarine to
the north pole there's no land at this
at the north pole right so what did he
do he stuck it on the ocean underneath
but the south pole is on a continent
called antarctica which was first
reached about 110 years ago first time
in human history
um antarctica means the opposite of the
bear that means like no bears there
basically opposite of where polar bears
are arctic is i mean it's polar bear
that's where uh
i did not know that yeah fascinating so
antarctica means the opposite place of
that so humans never even saw it let
alone went to the south pole which is
kind of in the middle of that continent
we went to take this telescope somewhere
extremely dry
it turns out the sahara desert san diego
texas and there's no place like the
south pole or chile those are the two
premier places on earth of course you'd
like to go into space there's no water
in space so it's not about
um it's not about cold it's about dry
exactly so that's why for example you
can take this uh vodka and you could put
it in this cup right and we could take
it over to a microwave somewhere and
heat it up
after two minutes the water's three
minutes the water's boiling you can't
touch it take it from me don't touch it
but you can touch the mug and take it
out if you want to right why because the
mug is totally bone dry but the
microwaves get absorbed by the water
molecules because water molecules
resonate exactly at these microwave
frequencies so we don't want these
precious photons
420 of them traveling per cubic
centimeter from the big bang itself to
get absorbed in some water molecule in
the earth's atmosphere so you take it to
a place with the fewest number of water
molecules per per square centimeter of
surface area and that happens to be
either chile or my other project the
simon's observatory is located or you
take it to the south pole
we took it to the south pole and uh
spent a couple of uh months of my life
down there and it's like being on hoth
you know it's like it's a completely
otherworldly environment ice planer flat
as a pancake you
like and and the buildings are built up
on stilts
they're built up because the snow will
otherwise cover them over
the nearest medical facilities or 4 000
miles away if you have any issues with
your wisdom teeth they yank them before
you go down there
if you have any issues with your
appendix they'll cut it out of you
before you go down there the russians at
vostok base not too far away about 600
miles away the doctors there there's a
famous picture of one of them operating
on himself
taking out his own appendix in the
middle of winter by himself so harsh
conditions science in the harshest of
conditions on earth at least
and we go to those great lengths because
it's a pristine environment to observe
these precious photons and we built this
telescope and it weighs you know tens of
thousands of pounds and it had to scan
the sky almost like it's a robot i mean
it's scanning the sky almost unattended
it needed uh that we have a guy who
spends a year of his life down there a
girl who spends a year of their life
down there they're called winter overs
they arrive in sometimes as early as
november and they don't leave until the
following december and we always joke
we'll pay you 75 000 you just have to
work for one night of your life that's
that's all but
it's a long night
and what bicep is and uh i couldn't
bring my my polarized sunglasses here so
i brought these actual polarizers here
so if you take this and put in front of
your telescope there
you have now made a polarimeter you've
made a polarization sensitive telescope
now you may not be able to immediately
know how you would use such a thing but
one way to think about now take this guy
and look at a light look at a light
source put one up to your eye and now
put the other one in front of it
anywhere and now rotate them
what happens to the light source
it becomes brighter and dimmer and
brighter and dimmer yeah so it's called
a quadrupolar pattern right so it's
repeating it goes bright dim bright dim
uh
it double rotates twice in intensity for
every single physical rotation
and that's because of the property of
the photon the photon is a spin one
field but the polarization of light
is it's the axis at which its electric
field is oscillating its electric field
is marching straight up and straight
down and so therefore vertical
polarization is the same as
negative vertical polarization and so
you get the same pattern as you rotate
two times for every one physical
rotation so it's like a spin a spin two
object so now if you put that in front
of the telescope
you can do one of two things now you're
polarizing all the light that's going in
because you have one of the polarizers
and then you can analyze it as you
rotate the other one you can analyze it
and change the amount of polarization
or you can put this kind of very special
crystal in here there's a crystal it's
called calcite this is from lex luthor
not lex friedman
this crystal put it on top of your
printed notes there and tell me what
does it look like
there's uh
like i could see everything twice it's a
double image it's a double image that is
a special crystal that has two different
indices of refraction
so light emerging which is unpolarized
from the black ink comes out
and it splits into two different
directions and it could split even more
if i made the crystal give you my more
expensive crystal but that's all i have
what is the crystal with this kind of
property called it's called calcite this
is crystal it's called birefringent
crystal bi means two refrigerant means
refracting so this is a special type of
material that
separates light based on its
polarization pretty clean
by signal yeah it's it's cleanly
too
yeah see i'm seeing two very cleanly
it's very crisp right so that's that's
yours to keep with every time you host
me now take the polarizer underneath
your left hand uh yep put it on top of
the crystal
and kind of move it back and forth wow
this is incredible you can switch as you
rotate you switch from one
uh signal to the other so it's one of
the refractions to the other
whoa so that is now you are analyzing
the polarization you are confirming the
light comes out of the crystal two
different types of polarization
and effectively what we do is we have
those two things if you like but working
in the microwave so our detect that's
where this the cosmic photons are
brightest in the microwave regime in the
electromagnetic spectrum and we're
coupling that to a refracting telescope
but your eyes are refracting telescopes
so you are a polarimeter right now
the human eye can actually slightly
detect polarization um but otherwise it
mainly detects its intensity of light
and the color that's what we call color
and intensity brightness so you're
devising a
instrument that's very precisely
measuring that exactly and doing so in
the microwave region with detectors not
made of biological human eyes retina
cells but of superconductors and uh
things called balometers and and this
has to be done at temperatures close to
absolute zero under vacuum conditions
one billionth of the pressure we feel
here at sea level
so why is it that this the kind of
device could win a nobel prize
so
when the cmb was discovered it was
discovered serendipitously there were
two uh radio astronomers
working at the time at bell laboratories
now why would bell laboratories be
employing radio astronomers bell
laboratories is kind of like um
like apple or you know is it like a
think tank or you know it's google let's
say it was like google google has like
google x it has this thing on that thing
right um
so they were working there but imagine
if google was employing radio
astronomers like they were actively
recruiting why would they do that well
it turns out that was the beginning in
the 1960s was the first commercial
satellite launch for communication
and so
so bell labs which would later become
the telephone you know part of a t and
the tele early telephone company later
invent the first cell phone the year i
was born um and they would take that uh
1946 and they would take that uh
telescope technology that radio
astronomers had developed and they would
use that
to see if they could improve the signal
to noise of the satellites that they
were seeing and they found they couldn't
they found that they could not improve
the signal noise ratio of the first
telecommunications satellite it was like
the equivalent to one kilobit per second
modem and they were bouncing signals
from uh you know from the west coast up
to the satellite bouncing it down
landing it um uh in new jersey of all
places in northern uh northern new
jersey holmdale new jersey
and these radio stars couldn't get rid
of the signal so they said well new
jersey's not far from new york
let's see if the signal is coming from
new york nope not coming from new york
let's see if it changes with the year
maybe it's coming from the galaxy which
was also discovered there by janski in
1930 something so in the the not being
able to reduce the signal or increase
the signal to noise ratio the noise it
was
they knew the signal was right they
couldn't get rid of the noise and there
was excess noise over the model that had
not only been predicted by them but had
been measured by a previous guy a guy by
the name of edward ohm he measured the
same signal found that there was this
hiss of static of radio static that he
could not get rid of that had a value of
about three kelvin so you can translate
remember i said uh if you take a radio
telescope and you have pointed at an
object that's hot the radio telescope's
detector will get to the same
temperature as the object it's a
principle of radio thermodynamics so
it's a really interesting thing it's a
thermometer you can stick it into
jupiter from here on earth it's amazing
they were and so we in radio astronomy
characterize our signal not by its
intensity but by its temperature
so he found this guy edward um oh
there's this three kelvin signal i can't
get rid of it it must be i did my era
analysis wrong and i would give him an f
if he was one of my you know first-year
students um but he's just attributed to
lack of of understanding these other
guys penseus and wilson who are also
radio astronomers they said no let's
build another experiment put that inside
of our telescope
and do what's called calibration put
inject a known source of signal
every second that has a temperature of
about four kelvin because the signal
that they're trying to get rid of is
about three kelvin and you want to have
it as close as possible to the
pernicious signal as possible they did
that once a second so they got billions
of measurements millions of measurements
over the course of several months years
and even
by the end of millions of measurements
for sure
and they found they couldn't get rid of
it either but they measured it was
exactly 2.7265
you know degrees kelvin so uh how does
uh having a four kelvin
source how does the calibration work
just that it could be it could be larger
imagine like you're trying to calibrate
the microphone like you could do it with
like a really loud sound but the gain
would start to compress so there are
amplifiers downstream from the detector
in every experiment that i've ever
worked on and they only have a linear
region over a very small region and you
want to keep it as linear as possible
that means you want if you're trying to
get rid of you're trying to compare like
a voice and you're trying to compare
that to a jet engine it's not as it's
not going to be as as easy on the on the
amplifiers as getting you know a
slightly lo a gong or something you know
so the idea if the noise is present in
both
there's a noise present in both and you
get you measure what they did is they
made a separate measurement just to the
calibration system which they measured
exactly very well four kelvin is the
temperature of liquid helium that's a
temperature that's not going to change
and it's certainly not going to change
over the time scale of one second and so
they could compare unknown signal known
signal an unknown signal known signal
like a scale like a balance so another
way to think about it is like this
you've seen these libra kind of balances
where you put two weights in a pan right
what happens if you put like a one ounce
weight on one side and a 20 kilogram
weight and you don't get any measurement
right but you do get kind of a
measurement if they're close in weight
that's why they use four kelvin got it
but just to linger on the fact that
there's a romantic element to the fact
that you're
um arriving at the same temperature
that's kind of fascinating and you're
measuring stuff in terms of you're
measuring signal in terms of temperature
at the source yeah so you get to i mean
there's something about temperature
that's intimate yeah it's cool yeah
especially since you know
all life is basically you know
conversion of energy and trying to
control entropy which is then related to
thermodynamics exactly in that way and
this is um a very crucial
kind of thing to do in science because
they weren't looking for the signal they
found it accidentally these two
scientists penzias and wilson
and i like to think those kind of
discoveries are the purest in science
like when you see something isaac asimov
once said like the most important
reaction as a scientist is not eureka
which means in greek as you know i have
found it no he said no he said like
that's weird like that's a much better
reaction or that's freaking cool like
that's a scientist not like oh i found
one because surprise yeah yeah because
if you find what you're going to find
that's what
leads us susceptible to confirmation
bias which is deadly and so you know as
close to deadly as possible so how does
that take us to something that's
potentially worthy of a nobel prize ah
so penzis and wilson weren't looking for
a signal they ended up discovering the
heat left over from the fusion of uh
helium from hydrogen etc
and that was a serendipitous discovery
they won the nobel prize in 1978 it was
the first one ever a word in cosmology
my reasoning is what if you could
explain not only how the elements got
formed but how the whole universe got
formed and kill off every other model of
science so if that weren't enough every
scientist you know worth his or her salt
had told me and andrew lang and our
colleagues this is a slam dunk nobel
prize if you could do it because it was
really explaining again the stakes of
this science is different than like
super fluidity plasma physics when you
talk about the origin of the universe
it ties into everything it ties into
philosophy theology
you realize if paul steinhardt
is correct
that the bible can't be correct in other
words the bible's correct now it isn't
falsified if you like if you believe it
i'm not i never use the bible as a
science book obviously
but the bible speaks of a singular
beginning
what if you knew for sure the universe
was not singular it was it would be more
like the cosmology of akhenaten and
egyptians than the biblical torah old
testament if you will narrative
so in my mind the stakes could not be
higher and again it's not an effect
because we need plasma physics we need
we need every type of physics except
maybe biophysics and like we you
literally use every branch of physics
and thermodynamics superconductivity
quantum mechanic all that goes into our
understanding of the instrument and
even further if you want to understand
the theory that predicts the signal that
we purport to measure so i re i
rationalize that if pensions and wilson
won the nobel prize for this
if hulson taylor won the nobel prize for
indirectly detecting gravitational waves
this is decades before ligo
by me detecting gravitational waves
indirectly detecting the how the
universe began detecting the origin of
the input initial conditions for the big
bang nucleosynthesis which won the nobel
prize in 1983 these are like five nobel
prizes you know potentially for that
reason
it seemed as close as you could possibly
get to being a slam dunk to outdo what
my father did to do you know really this
impossible and at that time lex you know
again i'm
you know it sounds weird because people
like oh you wouldn't you know you you
don't really you know you still want the
nobel prize you're still like greedy and
look you wrote another book about um and
i always joke i'm like well if you want
to see if i'm a hypocrite just get them
to give me the nobel prize in literature
yeah and if i accept it then i'm a
hypocrite but um wait well we'll get to
your current feelings on the nobel prize
in terms of hippocrates and so on
but
so there's this ambition
let's say this device this kind of
signal could unlock many of the
mysteries about the early universe and
so there's excitement there
so let's take it then further i mean
there's a human story here of a bit of
heartbreak not only
was this possibly worth a nobel prize
if the nobel prize was given
you were excluded from the list of three
that would get the nobel prize
so
why were you excluded maybe that's the
place to tell the story of bicep 2. yeah
so bicep two like you know iphones or i
know you're an android fanboy but um you
know every year they get a little bit
better they get more megapixels they get
more optics triplex zoom whatever okay
right
we upgraded our detectors as well the
initial detectors were based on what are
called semiconductors they they have
certain properties that make them very
difficult to replicate at scale and we
wanted to make them into uh into
superconductors which had a virtue that
you could then mass produce them why
superconductors well again we're
measuring heat so one thing about a
superconductor is that it transitions
from some finite resistance to zero
resistance
over a very short span of temperature
range that means you can use that very
short span dependency as an accurate and
sensitive and precise thermometer
and so my brilliant colleagues around
the world in this case jamie pock and
nowadays suzanne stags at princeton um
they are just exquisitely making these
these sensors tens of thousands of them
the initial bicep one instrument of
course we just call the bicep uh that
only had 98 detectors
simon's observatory is going to have a
hundred times more just in one of our
four telescopes we're going to have 60
000 detectors operating full time at 0.1
degree above absolute zero in the
atacama desert we'll get there but
in the case of the getting back to what
bicep did we upgraded made bicep two
in january 2010
we had just installed in the exact same
uh
location at the south pole in the same
building which is ominously called the
dark sector laboratory dsl still
operating to this very day
we installed a new receiver on the same
platform as before very similar
identical optics cryogenics vacuum
everything except it went from 98
detectors to 512 detectors so almost an
order of magnitude very substantial
upgrade um and it had certain other
features that made it even more powerful
but then just a naive factor of five
and then we started observing with that
and we knew we'd have years to go and
maybe we'd never see anything again
we're looking for these tiny little
reverberations in the fabric of space
time produced close to the origin of the
universe as we could ever get to
so i was playing a role in that
obviously it had upgraded my
version of the original idea that i had
had for bicep uh with along with andrew
lang
and in january of 2010 uh we were i was
at a meeting at uc berkeley and i got a
call from andrew lang's uh or i was in a
meeting with andrew lang's thesis
advisor paul richards at uc berkeley
and he said that andrew was dead he had
taken his life by suicide
and this is a man and i had already lost
my father at this point
in 2010 but he was like a father figure
to me andrew he would give me
advice on marriage on like how i should
be with my kids and and um you know what
was the most important way to move
through the academic ladder again he was
pretty naturally suited to win the nobel
prize everyone always thought he would
win it he still you know if he were
alive he still could win it in fact his
wife or his ex-wife won it francis
arnold in uh 2018
and um you know his power couple
and it destroyed me for a long time
because you know he was uh he was just
this magical person i mean i couldn't
conceive of my career my life
um even like you know these these
aspects of raising kids and being
married without him
and to do it in that way
it felt like again i'm not you know he's
got kids and i feel terrible for for
them obviously but it did feel like a
betrayal i mean i'm just being honest
with you it felt like why didn't the f
did you not reach out you know i thought
we were close and i couldn't you know i
told him everything and i felt like he
had told me everything
and now he was gone and then inevitably
we had to keep running the instrument i
mean there's millions of dollars
invested careers at stake young people
working tremendously hard
and then here we were and like who's
going to take over the lead he was the
lead of the project at caltech and then
it turned out that the
other collaborators with whom i had been
working for years and shared a lot of
ups and downs with as well
they had you know decided to form a
collaboration in which i was no longer
the principal investigator i was no
longer one of the co-principal
investigators as i was on bicep 1. so i
continued on bicep 1 as the co-leader of
it
but not on bicep 2. and um
you know obviously that was pretty
painful this is all happening at the
same time as you
as you lose this father figure
now there's this kind of
just one betrayal in this in a way and
there isn't another or something that
feels like a betrayal yeah and he had
you know kind of been the one the only
one looking out for my interest in the
new experiment i had moved from caltech
to uc san diego and there were other
postdocs in the mix all of whom would
come there to work with him to get the
you know the approbation that would then
lead to their careers taking off as it
did for mine
and um you know so there was a
competition i mean science is not free
from egos and and uh and competition and
and desires rightfully or wrongfully for
credit and attribution was he the source
of strength and confidence for you as a
scientist as a man i mean
we're we're kind of alone in this world
as when you take on difficult things
we often kind of grasp but a few folks
that give us strength yeah
was he you're basically your only source
of strength in this whole journey like
primarily in terms of like this close
knit
as a scientist there were really two
there's one there's russian cosmologist
alexander polnarov who thankfully is
very much alive he's it was a queen mary
university now he's retired
he was kind of the theoretical you know
cosmological father to me and then
andrew was this counterpoint that was
teaching me
you need to have a brand as a scientist
every scientist has a brand and some of
them don't protect it some of them don't
burnish it
but some of the skills about being a
scientist we don't teach our students
involve how do you cultivate
a
scientific persona and he was the
exemplar for that in addition to being
the evonkular you know father figure
type character
that really you know was the person i
would talk to i had issues with
when i had issues with my own students
and he would tell me how those were and
he would tell me you know his misgivings
about
about people that he worked with or
things in his personal life and it was
it was it was devastating but again like
who the hell am i i'm that's kid you
know he lo his kids lost father you know
it's so i feel guilty talking about it
in that sense but it's just a reality
you know well there is something that's
not often talked about as people who
collaborate on scientific efforts
i mean that's
i don't again don't want to compare but
you know it's it's sometimes when the
collaborations are truly great it sounds
similar as when um
veterans talk about
their time serving together there's
there's a bond that's formed so like
comparing family and this kind of thing
is you know
it uh is not productive but
the depth of the bond is is nevertheless
um
real because you're taking on something
you're taking on the impossible
you're you're trying to achieve
something sort of like there's this
darkness this fog of mystery that we're
all surrounded by
which is um
what the human condition is and you are
like grasping at hope through the tools
of science and you're doing that
together
with like a confidence you probably
should not have
yeah but you're boldly pushing through
and then
for him to uh
to take his own life
it can ask you about this kind of moment
that combined
i don't want to say betrayal but perhaps
the feeling of betrayal that bicep 2
kind of goes on without you even though
you're part of it
you're not part of the leadership group
can you describe those low points did um
was there depression was there um
a crumbling of confidence yeah i mean it
was it was so wrapped up
with my identity as a person you know
like there's only a few different ways
to have identity and you know unless
you're unhealthy psychologically one of
them for scientists is often that
they're a scientist and that sometimes
is their primary identity now i've got
other husband and father
um but but you know at that time that
was my identity so to have that kind of
taken away
it you know what it reminded me of being
you know kind of adopted
in a sense like my like the one who
created me or that i had played you know
played a role in my life that he
abandoned me in a sense it felt like
these people are abandoning me and the
only thing i'd correct about the analogy
that you use is like in milit in the war
they're all working you know for common
good it's not like i want to be get the
most kills
i compare more to like a band like think
about the beatles you know and what they
did
and then they like you know they ripped
apart because of egos credit they had
solo careers they had you know
relations their intimates and and so
forth and and there it's not only for
the common good there is more of a
zero-sum aspect like i would say science
is not science is an infinite game you
can't win science you never get today oh
we won science and even the nobel prize
they don't feel like oh we're done they
feel like a lot of times they're
imposters even to that day
however science is made up of a lot of
lot a lot of finite games where there is
only one winner for tenure there is only
three winners are only three winners for
the nobel prize
and because of that i think it's
heterodox and it's very confusing
especially there's no guide i never got
a guide how to be a professor how to
teach how to lead a research group how
to deal with the death of an advisor how
to deal with an unreally graduate
student or two you know so we're all
like reinventing it which is kind of
ironic and insane if you think about it
because the academic system that i am a
part of and you are a part of is a
thousand years old dates back to bologna
northern italy 1088 or so first
universities were established
and you know
very little has changed there's some guy
or gal scratching a rock on another
piece of rock
and you know lecturing in front and
there's only one better aspect nowadays
is that back then
the students could go on strike if they
didn't like the professor and then he or
she wouldn't get paid probably mostly
was he's back then
nowadays that barbaric process has been
replaced by 10 years so i'm okay
but no it was a definite kind of uh
feeling of the rug getting pulled out
from underneath me because
you know here's he was like my
consigliori he was a guy i you know
sought counsel and counseled me and
he's dead and i felt like there is no
one who's gonna honor
the agreements that we had and he was a
very soulful person he was so much
better at being a scientist than i could
ever be
and just a loss for the cosmos it just
really hurt and you know i thought oh
like you know it's so sad because he
could have won the nobel prize
i don't think like that anymore first i
think about his kids
felt at first now there goes my chance
at winning a nobel prize and hence the
title of the book was like i knew i
would not win the nobel prize
it also means that there's parts of the
nobel prize that have to be done away
with it's a double entendre like we need
to lose aspects of the nobel prize to
help science out we can talk about that
a different time but
in the context of like now thinking back
on it
that was such a miniscule part of it
because
let's say he did win the nobel prize or
i did win or you know any of us did
would that have changed anything without
brought anything back it's so you know
we say it's like vanity it's futility
and and and i just you know for me the
nobel prize is like
it's i don't want to say it's like
insignificant because obviously it has a
lot of power and it has influence and
you know i went back i had neil degrasse
tyson on my show i'm going to name drop
okay
and uh he prepares he prepares like a
surgeon before doing surgery when he
goes on a talk show so you see him going
on colbert report you think oh they just
have a banter he's just naturally gifted
no he said no no no
you say that you're you're undermining
what he does what he does he goes back
he watches the last month of colbert
reports or whatever it's called late
show and he says how long does steven
pause between questions
how long in the news cycle does he go
back what topics has he talked about
with people similar to me so i took neil
and i did that for you and i look back
how many times does lex mention the
words nobel and prize and i put it into
google engram and out came
exactly the same number of times as show
notes show
episodes as of this moment so you've
said the words nobel prize over 240
times yeah i mean it is so strange as a
symbol
that kind of unites this whole
scientific journey right
like um
it's so it's both
sad and beautiful that
a little prize like a little award
a medal a little plaque they'll be most
likely forgotten by history completely
some silly list
um
it's somehow uh
a catalyst
for greatness it it resulted in you
doing your life's work yeah the dream of
it
would i have done it without the nobel
prize you know i i can't necessarily
counter factually state that that would
have happened so no it definitely has a
place
um
and for me you know it is valuable to
think about it but
the level of obsession that that
academics have about it is really i
think it is
almost unbalanced becoming unhealthy
and again i have no
i make no truck with the uh winners of
the nobel prize obviously i've you know
now i've had 11 on the show and to think
about you know like the one rule so by
the way
right after the denouement of the story
which i'll get to in a bit um you know
how our dreams went down to dust and
ashes
um i was asked by the royal swedish
academy of sciences to nominate the
winners of the 2015 nobel prize in
physics so like the one that i
theoretically could have been eligible
to win uh in in 2016 actually they asked
me to nominate now imagine if i ask you
lex you say brian you know instead of me
inviting myself on the show if if you
say brian would you like to come on the
lex friedman podcast i think you know
what lex um you know that guy rogan i
think he might have can you introduce
him to it to me you know like you
imagine how that would feel like you'd
be like after that you know i'm
humiliated so i was asked to nominate
the winners and the one rule that they
say of all the rules that alfred nobel
stipulated there's only one rule that
they maintained in other words he he
said one person can win it for something
they discovered in the preceding year
that had the greatest benefit to mankind
made the world better right
none of that was mentioned in the letter
it said many people can win it for work
done long ago they didn't mention
anything in the letter to me signed by
the secretary general nothing about
benefiting mankind they said just one
thing can't nominate yourself
so none of these guys nominated
themselves actually a little known fact
they sent that exact letter just to you
that rule was created just that's called
the keating correlation yes exactly just
to like good for them
rub it in that's i mean it's uh in this
particular case of course there's like
some weird technicality or whatever but
in this particular case it's kind of a
powerful
reminder yeah
no the nobel prize leaves a lot of
people behind yeah and there's stories
behind all of that yeah i mean here's a
good example again this is my friend
barry barrish he's become like a mentor
and a friend um he wrote the forward to
this uh my book into the about
he um he won the nobel prize because a
different guy died
and he admits it and he said it and
actually it's funny with him because
i've heard you talk you know very
rhapsodically and lovely and
romantically about with harry cliff and
a wonderful podcast with him by the way
um
about the lhc and how wonderful it is
and how in that you know we were about
to build this super conducting super
collider right here in texas and it
didn't get built and it got cancelled by
congress
and i'd say to barry that was the best
thing that ever happened to you and he's
like what the hell are you talking about
i'm like if that didn't get cancelled
first of all the um
even though it did get canceled the
europeans went on to build it themselves
saved the american taxpayers billions of
dollars and we didn't we wouldn't have
learned anything really substantially
new as proven by the fact that as you
and harry talked about nothing besides
the higgs particle of great note has
come out and actually he's had a recent
paper but it's been an upper limit along
with his collaborators an lhcb
experiment that i'm going to be talking
with him about but but the bottom line
is it was really built to detect the
higgs so the ssc for twice as much money
would have sucked up barry's career and
he would have been working on that maybe
not and then he would never have worked
on ligo and then he wouldn't have won
the nobel prize right so you look at
counterfactual history that's not
actually a big stretch right if the ssc
had still gone on he would have worked
out because he was one of the primary
leaders of that experiment
second thing if um imagine the following
thing had happened they won the nobel
prize because in september 2015
they detected unequivocal evidence for
the in-spiral collision of two massive
black holes each about 30 times the mass
of the sun leaving behind an object that
had just less than 60 solar masses
behind so one solar mass worth of matter
goku mask got converted to pure
gravitational energy no light was seen
by them
this particular date uh september 15th
september 14 2015. okay
um that explosion because of the miracle
of time travel that telescopes afford us
that actually took place
uh 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far
far away they actually don't know which
galaxy took place and still then they
never will okay
that if that collision between these two
things which have probably been orbiting
each other for maybe a million years or
more if that had occurred 15 days
earlier barry wouldn't have won the
nobel prize
because it's hilarious to think that
there's one human that won the nobel
prize because uh two giant things
collided
a billion 200 million years ago and if
it happened eight you know 18 days 20
days 30 because that was the deadline
for the nobel prize to be announced they
announced the findings in february but
you have to nominate the winners in
january so i could have nominated them
up until january 30th but they didn't
announce anything and there were just
rumors and so they he didn't he but the
reason that he wouldn't have won it
because there was another guy who was
still alive considered to be the founder
and father of three of the three fathers
ray weiss who did win it kip thorne who
did win it and the third gentleman at
caltech named ron drever who passed away
again he was alive in 2016. he died in
the middle of 2017 and then he wasn't
awarded the nobel prize and here we are
several billion of hairless apes that
strangely wear clothing
uh celebrated uh three
other clothed hairless apes
with a metal
with one
with one particular element
and then uh they made speeches in a
particular language that evolved you
know
to get those medals in front of another
guy
who wears even fancier clothes who is
the king of sweden and then they got
some free food afterwards some reindeer
meat that's right
okay excellent um
since you mentioned joe rogan in that
little example uh
what happened to you in terms of bicep
too
i want to kind of speak um
at a high level about a particular thing
i observed so i was a fan of joe rogan
uh since he started the podcast just
listening to the podcast i'm a huge fan
of podcasts in general yeah and
it also coincided with my entry into
grad school and this whole journey of
academia so grad school getting my phd
and going to mit and then google and
then just
looking at this whole world of research
what i
really loved about
how joe rogan approaches the world
is that he celebrates others
like he promotes them he gets like
genuinely and i now know this from just
being a friend privately he genuinely
gets excited by the success of others
and
the contrast of that
to how
folks in academia often behave was
always really disappointing to me
because the natural just on a basic
human level
there is
an excitement but the nature of that
excitement is more like
i'm happy for my friend
but i'm really jealous and i want to
even outdo them i want to celebrate them
but i want to do even better so even
that's even for friends yeah so there's
not a genuine pure excitement
for others and then uh to couple that
with just the you now as a as a host of
a popular podcast know this feeling
which is like there's not even a
willingness to celebrate publicly
the awesomeness of others
people in academia
are
often best equipped
technically in terms of language to
celebrate others they understand the
beauty
like the
the full richness of why the the cool
idea is as cool as it is and they're in
the best position to celebrate it and
yet there's a feeling that if i
celebrate
others they might end up on the cover of
nature whatever and not me
it's they turn it into zero-sum game
what i the reason why
i think uh
rogan has been inspiration to me and
many others is that it doesn't have to
be that yeah and and forget money and
all those kinds of things that
i think there's a narrative told
that
academics are this way
because there's a limited amount of
money and so they're fighting for this i
don't
think
that's the reason it's happening this
way i think
i think you
you can have a limited amount of money
the battle for money
happens in the space of proposal there's
networking there's private stuff
public celebration of others and all and
just actually just how you feel in the
privacy of your own heart is not have to
do anything with money it has to
do with you having a big ego not
humbling yourself to the beauty of the
journey that we are all on and there's
folks like joe rogan who in the comedian
circles is also rare but he inspired all
these other comedians to realize
you know what it's great to celebrate
each other we're promoting each other
and therefore the pie grows yeah because
everybody else gets excited about this
whole thing and the pie grows right now
the scientists by fighting like by not
celebrating each other are not growing
the pie and now
because of that sort of science becomes
less and less positive
and exactly no and i want to point out
two things one is that i remember you
went on joe's show maybe a couple of
years ago and um and then he gave you a
watch
he gave you like a rolex right yeah and
i tweeted to you and i think mega omega
sorry okay fine uh the watch that went
to the to the moon which we will get to
in a bit um i don't think he could give
you what i gave you though by the way um
and we'll get to what that final gift
package is for you and by the way i also
wanted to mention because when you said
joe i would not be upset and you should
definitely go on joe rogan and i we had
this conversation with him yeah
because i was like when i was
uh
uh so moving to austin
and i had a conversation like don't you
think it's weird like if we have the
same guests at the same time or whatever
he's like
that
i want you to be more successful than me
i want he he truly wants everybody like
especially people close to him to be
more successful like there's not even a
thought like but you know why he does
and this is what i tweeted to you and
one of the few things i think you have
retweeted that i sent you i said someday
you're going to give that to somebody
and today i wanted that to be me no no
joe's omega no but but the point is he
sees in you that same um you know
grandiosity that same genuine spirit
graciousness and i think that's true i
mean you do do something very rare i
don't turn this into too much of a love
fest but i do want to say even back to
andrew you know who i've almost been
hate hagiographic about you know just
treating him like a saint he said to me
the same thing and a moment of peak
said like
god damn it like i have to train these
guys and women that work for me
so that they can be better than me so
that they can go out and compete with me
for the same limited amount of funding
from the effing nsl you know
that wasn't his that wasn't who he was
um that was just an expression like i'm
doing something which is fundamentally
but you know what um
when you have kids hopefully you know
please god you will someday because i
think and i hope we can get to talk
about that later but
part of
investment and part of doing something
with when you have a kid like you can
get married
you can marry someone because she's rich
or he's rich you can marry someone
because they're good looking or he's
good look
you can marry for all these different
reasons that are ultimately selfish
there's no way you can have a kid and be
selfish nobody says like oh you know
what i really want this thing that's
three feet tall that doesn't speak
english it craps on my floor that wakes
me up all hours of the night that
interferes my love life you know nobody
says that because it doesn't benefit you
for months and months a friend of mine
who actually does the videos for me that
does a lot of my solo videos he's having
his first kid he's like what do i do
because it always gets stupid i'll catch
up on sleep now like yeah i'm gonna
store sleep in my sleep bank like i
don't think huberman and you talked
about that right you can't do that
that's stupid what you can do give the
kid a bath feed the baby let the mother
relax like in other words do the things
and and this really relates back to
aristotle once aristotle said why do
parents love kids more than kids love
parents
as much as you love your dad and your
mom
they still love you more
and because you love that what you
sacrifice for here's a proof
um i know a lot of families that have
kids with special needs some some with
severe uh my one of my uncles um the
keating side had uh severe what they
called mental retardation now it's
probably has a different name
that out of the nine other brothers and
sisters he was their favorite because
they had to sacrifice so much for him
and i think of that you know in the
small case like joe is kind of mentoring
you or whatever you're going to mentor
someone you love that which you
sacrifice for sacrifice is reduction of
entropy it's storing and investing and
you want to protect that and you know
that that to me really speaks to it so i
you know i don't hold it against but it
is true like scientists are you know
when they're described again they're
often said to be like children right
you've heard this description they're
inquisitive they're curious they're
passionate they love that i'm like yeah
and they don't play well with others
they're jealous they're petty they're
selfish they won't share their ball and
go home yeah we you can't there's no
such thing as a single-edged sword i
wish there were
you know because you we we need some
more of that because you gotta dull it
up but in this case he uh you know i i
think when when you have this
kind of investment in in science it's
going to be natural but that doesn't
mean we have to like you know feed the
flames of competition you know i'm like
really vendor if you go to the homepage
of the nsf or the department of energy
or the recently released national
academy of sciences future of science
for the
astronomical sciences for the next 25
years or more they talk about how many
nobel prizes these different science
things could win exoplanets life uh the
discovery of the cmb b mode polarization
then i study you know that's figured too
in this thing and i'm like what message
is that sent to kids like to young
people like that's what you should be
doing so you win this small as you said
this prize given out by one hairless ape
to another wearing a fancier costume and
using reindeer in the case of nobel
prize it's only currently given to three
people at most which was never one of
his stipulate he actually said one you
could only give it to one person so they
change it why do they change it i talk
about speculating by the way the book's
only three chapters out of 11 about the
nobel prize and it's its effect
but you know one of the things that's
been so interesting like um speaking
actually this coming up in december is
that the nobel prize is given out on the
day of alfred nobel's death
there's a lot of and and and they bring
in flowers not from his birthplace but
from his mausoleum which is in san
marino mourinho in italy
uh it's a lot of like death fascination
you know denial of death features
heavily in the nobel prize because it's
like what outlives a person well science
cannot live a person my father has a
theorem named after him it's still you
know in you know engraved in many places
around the world you or i we can go to
different places around the world people
know who we are based on our
publications we engrave things we want
to store things we want to compress
things and i think that's there's
something beautiful about that but there
is a notion of denial of death like
there is a notion of what will outlast
me
especially if you're among the many 90
something percent of members of the
national academy don't believe in an
active
faith you know and a creator and a god
and um and science can substitute for
that but it's not it's not ultimately as
fulfilling i just i don't believe it can
fulfill a person the way
even practicing but not believing in a
religion can fulfill a person
so it which is interesting because you
do bring up ernest becker in the denial
of death
in losing the nobel prize book
and there is a sense in which
that's probably in part at the core
of this especially later dream of the
nobel prize or a prize or recognition
i've interacted with a few um you know a
large number of scientists that are
getting up in age
and there is the feeling of real pride
of happiness in them from winning
awards and getting certain recognitions
and i probably at the core of that is a
kind of immortality or
um
a kind of desire for immortality
and that that was always off-putting to
me
as opposed to i mean i know
it sounds weird to say it's off-putting
but
it's just
rather than celebrating the pure joy of
uh
solving
the puzzles of the mysteries all around
us just the the the actual
the actual uh exploration
uh of the mysterious
sounds for its own sake yeah well that's
what i said you know it's like
a scientist should okay you have to be
careful and not have any you know
physical it has to be platonic but
you can think of of scientists and
mentor i have a chart in the book and
then a plaque made by one of my graduate
students former graduate students she's
now a professor
in new mexico darcy baron and she made
this plot and it has 17 generations so
here i am 17 you know levels down
there's a guy labnets not the famous
labness different live nuts 1596 he was
born and i'm in this chain
and i don't know if you know this but in
the russian language the word scientist
means someone who was taught i'll say it
very slowly one who was taught right
which only hachoni so um it probably
means like i was taught right no i could
just just speak
no no it's some it's it's literally
someone someone who is taught right so
what does that mean to me it has a dual
kind of meaning at least dual meaning
one is that you have to be a good
student
to be a scientist because you have to
learn from somebody else
two you have to be a teacher you have to
pay it forward
if you don't i claim you're really not a
scientist in the truest sense
and i feel like with the work that i do
in outreach and stuff like that i'm
doing it at scale i'm influencing more
than eight you know 24 kids i might have
in my graduate class or undergraduate
class and they potentially could reach
thousands of people around the world
and make them into scientists themselves
because that's the flywheel that is only
beneficial there is no competition there
is no zero sum fixed a fixed mindset
versus growth mindset um because it is
an infinite game imagine a culture that
had none of the trappings of the
negativity of the soviet union or
pre-world war one uh
germany or imperial japan you know
science celebrated and we're just making
like a nation of scientists and like
we're not doing it to become
multi-billionaires or necessarily you
know for any
military purpose whatsoever but if we
had that you know sometimes i'm flying
you know home at night like when you fly
into la
you literally it's very rare you can see
like the number 10 million like it's
very hard to like visualize things you
see a brick wall you ask how many bricks
are there there might be a thousand two
thousand ten million lights there's 10
million souls and you can see and
they're discreet they're not like the
milky way all blending together each
lost in their own busy lives excited
fall in love afraid of losing their job
all that by the way people should know
that you're a pilot so you literally
mean fly yeah sometimes they get to do
it you get to look at the
the the eye of god perspective on these
uh 10 million and these millions of
and i have this age they're like
constellations but upside down like the
city this is like a constant hopefully
i'll stay keep the plane the right way
up but when you think about that like
imagine they're all working together
and imagine like you always talk about
love and but like
you don't know you don't know that
they're not worthy of love like so
you're looking down on them and it's
just amazing because you think like what
an amazing creation is man and humans
and what can we do it's it's phenomenal
it's so exciting and then i get to do it
you know it's a job i say don't tell
gavin newsom but i do it for free you
know
i love what i do and
but to think about like oh if my student
succeeds that i'm not no it's it's
it it is unfortunate that you have
experienced that i've certainly
experienced it and i think there are
ways around it i think it is it is a
vexing problem because people want to
you know it's very tempting to keep your
own kind of you know garden fertilized
you know one thing that's interesting is
like you know people like why are you
doing this thing and a podcast you're
supposed to be a you know serious
scientist leading this huge project and
um collaborators and
and i'm like well most of what i do as i
said before it's yeah for you it's
velcro for me it's like you know
what is the deal with the with the
safety standards on the truck that we're
driving up to deliver the diesel fuel
that will power the generator that allow
the concrete truck to it has nothing to
do with the big bang inflation the
multiverse god's existence has nothing
to do with that right so those are
people i say i have to talk to
the people that come on the show those
are people i want to talk to
and that's super fun i mean it's it's a
real honor that i get to do it i'm using
i have some unfair advantages right i'm
at a top university we have people
that's affiliated with the arthur c
clarke foundation
you know brilliant scientists coming
through and but i felt like it would be
kind of a a shame if i didn't you know
allow them to teach at scale because
they're better teachers than i am
let me ask you a
interesting maybe difficult question
have you ever considered talking
on your podcast
with the people who would get the nobel
prize for bicep 2 if it turned out to be
detecting what it is
yeah i mean i'm still i'm still friends
with them and they have still gone on to
so i should we should say like why we
didn't win the nobel prize and then
what happened with the group that is now
leading it completely
that i'm completely divorced from in a
secular sense uh we're friends you know
we we see each other you know we send
each other emails and stuff like that
i'd love to get their sense of like what
the the natural heartbreak built into
the whole process
of the nobel prize what their sense is i
would love to hear yeah an honest real
conversation i understand your friends
yeah yeah there's some hard truth that
even friends will talk they weren't
i mean i remember one of them you know
was like well what's this i hear about a
book and i mean a lot of people tell me
not to write the book they said it's
going to give you know too much
attention to the nobel prize it's going
to look like sour grapes
again i say you can prove i have sour
grapes or not just give me the next
prize no uh so you would if you get a
nobel prize for literature you would
turn it down i don't know
it's funny because sabine hassenfelder
uh who is uh who's a fellow kind of
youtube sensation and uh
she's shoeing for the nobel peace prize
you're right she's so gracious and so
she has that that
that german you know just just gentle
and genteelness um she's a little too
nice for my taste
i would say i wish she could really say
what she thinks not and be snarky on
occasion so she wrote a review of my
book when it came out three or four
years ago and she uh she said well you
know brian keating like she said well
it's you know it's a good it's
interesting he talks about about
cosmology but you know um
they can do whatever the hell they want
and he you know presumably has this you
know problems with it but it's none of
his business basically it's a private
and uh and at the end she said but you
know if you want one good thing he's a
really good writer and who knows he
could win the nobel prize in literature
someday
and then she allowed me to publish a
rebuttal on her blog which was kind of
funny but anyway um no so getting back
to the guys that we were you know kind
of
collaborators or frenemies and we're
still look i you know we don't wish each
other active ill i've visited them
they're welcome to visit me they have
visited me the thing i have to say is
that i just wonder about introspection
like for me
literally i don't
i don't care about the nobel prize other
than what it can do to you know benefit
science but i no longer i did but by the
way i did seriously care about how i
benefit brian keating early on in my
career i'm just totally honest i'm not
proud of it it's kind of embarrassing
but now i would hope that people would
say like okay the guy is like you know
it's not he's obsessed with it my next
book is not about this it's about
something completely different and um
you know i i do feel like people
um
lack introspection a lot of times in
science like we don't think about why
we're doing what we're doing and i think
it comes down to curiosity um one thing
about joe and again i've i've only
listened to like i have to confess you
know you're like my father now i'm
confessing my sins it's your father left
friedman um i haven't listened to like
that many of your episodes start to
finish okay with our friend mutual
friend eric i've listened to a bunch of
recent ones
uh einstein
weinstein uh weinstein weinstein that's
what it is um
and a few others i haven't ever listened
to a full joe rogan episode but from
what i've seen with him he has a pretty
natural curiosity he doesn't have
passion there are a lot of podcasts you
have passion like i've been on their
show he is curiosity like he's not going
to stop talking about something until he
hops it until he understands it until he
gets it viscerally and i i respect that
because as i say in this more recent
book
passion's like kind of like the the
dopamine hit that gets you started like
oh i'm going to be great maybe i could
win a nobel prize like that's not going
to sustain you
the sustenance comes from the passion
converting to curiosity and what i want
to do is convert you know as many things
as possible to cure to things that i can
then because actually i've had on you
know people that that discuss addiction
and there is an addictive quality to you
know doing doing podcasts or whatever
but there's an addictive quality being a
scientist and you get to do things that
are very specialized and specialized
locations with special people uh paid
for by other people have no freaking
idea what you do i mean imagine you
worked in some like some job and you
know feynman said he said all these
contradictory things like when he was he
was once said like he said if you can't
explain it to your grandmother you don't
understand it yourself then the day you
won the nobel prize the reporter asked
him what'd you win it for he said if i
could explain it to you bud it wouldn't
be worth a nobel prize so let's leave
aside his inherent contradictions but um
but in reality there is a kind of like
dopamine rush that you get from it but
um
but you know what is ultimately going to
be the sustenance of it so yeah i i do
feel like um we have to find a way to to
nucleate that i don't know actually i
don't know if it's like can you can you
turn someone into us i used to ask this
question all the time like can you make
someone creative
like can you teach someone to be
creative i don't know can you teach
someone to be curious
i don't know i do know that kids are
naturally curious as they get older they
get less curious
just like i heard from the other forward
authors james altitude he said once he
did they did a study kids smile 300
times a day or smile or laugh adults
five or six
five or six no i'm just trying to get
you to laugh but you're not gonna uh but
anyway no it's true so somewhere you
lose 30 you know to 50 i'm not
entertained
but that's because i'm an adult no and
then i i do remember there's some some
distribution on those studies with the
happier adult small a little more but
still the kids blow them out of the
water russian so can you is it or should
in other words should we invest our
energy in
getting the half-life decay constant
stretched out more for curiosity for
kids or should we try to reset the the
dopamine hit and then you know i don't
know it's it's an open question well i i
think um it goes to david foster wallace
the key to life is to be unbearable i
think
i think you could train this kind of
thing which is in every single situation
so like uh which i think is at the
at the core at least this correlated
with curiosity is in every situation
try to find
the exciting the fascinating like in
every situation you sitting at the i
don't know
waiting for something at a dmv or
something like that find something that
excites you like a thought like uh watch
people or start to think about well
i wonder how many people
have to go to the dmv every day
and they try to go into the the pothead
mode of thinking like
wow isn't this weird that there's a
bunch of people that are having to get
a stamp of approval from the government
to drive their cars and then there's
millions of cars driving every day i
could do this better maybe there's some
blockchain and they could like vin
transfer yeah exactly yeah no that is a
good that is and then every situation i
think if you rigorously like just
practice that at a young age i think you
can learn to do that because like
sometimes people like ask me for advice
and like
to do this thing or that thing is i
think you at the core really have to
have this
muscle of
finding the awesomeness and everything
because if you're able to find the
awesomeness in everything like whatever
journey you take whatever whatever weird
um
that you take through life is going to
be productive it's going to end up in a
in a great place so like that muscle is
at the core of it and i guess curiosity
is uh
central to that
but
you didn't win the nobel prize the team
of bicep that led the bicep two didn't
win the nobel prize because of some
space dust that's right uh
which one is the moon which one is that
one's uh dust the space dust yep
what are we looking at so why why is
space dust the the villain of this whole
story well it's funny you know i wrote
these books and i don't know about you
but when you get all these books i'm
sure you get books people send you books
they always come in these dust jackets
right i was like what the hell is a dust
jack like how much dust is raining down
at any moment
i mean this is immaculate this room is
russian tidiness galore but but in a
normal household how much dust is
raining down it's not not really pretty
until i wrote a book and i realized you
know i'm writing a story about the
origin of the universe
and the prologue you know to the cosmos
and
dust is going to cover this story it was
actually it's actually more a story
about astrophysics and cosmology than
dust and this is the link between
the cosmological and the astrophysical
so what does that mean so astrophysics
is broadly speaking the study of
physical phenomena manifest in the
heavens astronomical phenomena
cosmology is concerned with the origin
evolution composition of the universe as
a whole but it's not really concerned
with stars galaxies and planets per se
other than how they might help us
measure the hubble constant the density
of the universe the neutrino content
etcetera etcetera
so we ten have a tendency to kind of
look a little bit you know they're like
not all astronomers and astrophysicists
are equal they're all equal but some are
more equal than others so we have kind
of a prejudice a little swagger right
and cosmologists are studying you know
we're using einstein we're not using
like you know boltzmann or we're
thinking of the biggest possible
pictures
in so doing you can actually
become blinded to
otherwise obvious effects that people
you know would have not overlooked in
our case when we sought out the signal
we were using the photons that make up
this primordial heat bath that surrounds
the universe luckily only at three
degrees kelvin approximately we're using
those as a type of film onto which
gravitational waves will reverberate it
make them oscillate preferentially in a
polarized way and then we can use our
polarized sunglasses but in
a microwave format to detect the
characteristic two-fold symmetry pattern
of under rotation
that's the technical way that we undergo
i mean there's a lot more to it um but
there more than one thing that can mimic
exactly that signal first of all when
you look at the signal
the signal if inflation took place big
if but if it took place
the signal would be about one or two
parts per billion
of the cmb temperature itself
so a few nano kelvin the cmb is a few
kelvin the signal from these b modes
would be a few nano kelvin it's
astonishing to think pansies and wilson
1965 measured something that's a billion
times brighter and that was what uh 60
years ago let's call it 60 years ago
since they discovered it
moore's law you're more experts let's
call it every two years
so you're talking about like 2 to the
30th power
doubling or something like that at that
so let's call 2 to the 20th something
like that so that's like only um uh 2 to
the 10th is a as a as a thousand all
right correct my math i'm wrong to the
20th is a million right to the 30th is a
billion so you we're outpacing moore's
law
in terms of the sensitivity of our
instruments to detect these feeble
signals from the cosmos
and they don't have to deal with you
know in the semiconductor fabric factory
in santa clara california they have to
deal with like you know meteorites and
aspirin things like coming into the
laboratory it's a clean room it's
pristine they can control everything
about it right we can't control the
cosmos and the cosmos is literally
littered with particles of schmutz of
failed planets asteroids
meteoroids things that didn't coalesce
to make either the earth the moon the
planet jupiter or its moons or get
sucked into them and make craters on
them etc etc the rest of it is falling
and it comes in a power spectrum there's
very few thank god chicksylub size you
know impact uh or you know progenitors
that will take out all life on earth um
but there's extremely large number of
tiny dust particles and microscopic
grains and then there's a fair number of
intermediate-sized particles
it turns out this little guy here
is um
is the end product
of a collapsing star that explodes in
what's called a supernova type 2
supernova so stars spend most of their
life using helium nuclei protons into um
and neutrons into helium
nuclei and then from there can make
other things like beryllium and briefly
make beryllium and carbon nitrogen
oxygen all the way up until it tries to
make iron
and nickel
iron and nickel are endothermic it takes
more energy than gets liberated to make
an atom of iron when that happens
there's no longer enough heat supplying
pressure to resist the gravitational
collapse of the material that was
produced earlier so the star forms goes
inside out that's how
scientists discovered helium was
discovered on the sun i don't know did
you know that's why it's called helium
yeah they went there at night and
oh well done they went there at night no
helium means helios is the god of the
sun it was discovered in its spectrum
from observations of the telescope like
150 years ago it wasn't discovered like
when uh oxygen and you know iron was
discovered um so it's only a relatively
recent comer to the pure activity the
helium came after oxygen oh no first
first hydrogen forms into helium so
that's the first thing that forms now in
terms of discoveries oh yeah after
oxygen yeah i think priestly and
yeah and others dalton discovered it in
the 1700s no helium was really only
discovered from the spectrum of looking
at the sun and seeing the weird atomic
absorption and
called fraunhofer lines in the solar
spectrum
so but when it tries to make iron
there's no longer any leftover heat in
other words there's heat left over from
fusing as you know the son of a plasma
physicist you fuse to
hydrogen nuclei you get excess energy
plus you get helium so that's why fusion
energy could be the energy source of the
future and it always will be no no
hopefully it'll come much sooner than
that and so doing trying to make iron it
takes more energy doesn't give off
enough energy star collapses explodes
and what does it spray out into the you
know cosmic interstellar medium it
sprays out the last thing it made which
is that stuff luckily for us because
some of that coalesced and made the core
of the earth onto which the lighter like
silica and carbon and the dirt and the
crust of the earth were formed and some
of that made its way to the crust the
iron made its way to the crust some of
that your mother ate and uh synthesized
hemoglobin molecules and hemoglobin has
iron particles in it it's a quite
amazing substance without it you know we
wouldn't have a red blood we wouldn't
exist
as we are
is this a very long complicated mom joke
i've done enough dad jokes my quota's up
um so i'm taking this this object uh you
know seriously there's not all of it
gets bound up in a planet in fact
forming planets is very inefficient um
and so there's a lot of schmutz left
over some of which gets in the way
of our telescopes looking back to the
beginning of time and some of those
molecules like iron is used in compass
needles right they're magnetized and
magnetic fields in our galaxy can align
them and make the exact polarization
pattern that we're looking for
as if the compass needles get all
aligned that's like the polarization of
of the dust grain it's like that fill
the polarizing filter that means light
polarized like this will get absorbed
and light polarized like this will go
through so it's absorbing it's making
100 polarized light out of an initially
unpolarized light source and that's what
happened and what we ended up claiming
we on on march
17th
and i'm sure if you were there you might
remember this at the harvard center for
astrophysics there was an announcement
there were like three or four nobel
prize winners in the audience and the
bicep2 team which i was no longer
leading i was still a member of it
in fact in the announcement the first
person they mentioned
besides you know thank you all for being
here as me and my team at uc san diego
although i wasn't invited to go to the
press conference uh because that uh
harvard complicated yes exactly um it's
a little school up there in the in
cambridge area
um and so uh they ended up making this
announcement that we had discovered the
aftershocks of inflation we detected the
gravitational waves shaking up the cmb
and on that day past lex friedman
podcast back when it was called
artificial intelligence max tag mark
said goodbye
universe hello multiverse and hello
nobel prize
see he saw that as confirmatory evidence
not only of inflation not only
gravitational waves but of the
multiverse goodbye universe hello
multiverse multiverse is a natural
consequence consequence of inflation yes
according to its prominent you know
supporters yeah uh yeah and of course
leave the poetry to max which uh he does
masterfully
okay
so that the excitement was there i mean
maybe
the initial heartbreak for you is there
too that's that's some of the darker
moments you're going through but broadly
for the space of science
there's excitement there
and
and i often note that this is a problem
in what i call you know the science
media complex because often times you'll
see things like past gasser seeger
venus life you know exists and that will
be really i mean it's fascinating right
and with the work that she's doing or
her colleagues are doing uh or clara
who's on your show as well and
that will be on front page new york
times boston globe
san diego union tribune it'll be above
the fold make headlines around the world
and then six months 12 months later as a
case for us retraction page c17 of the
saturday edition that nobody reads you
know and underneath the personal
so we have a problem in science that the
you know if it if it if it explodes it
leads you know and we get this huge
fanfare and this is not unique to my
experiment this happened with the
earlier discovery of so-called
martian life
uh of discovered in antarctica
um which was announced after peer review
we weren't peer reviewed at the point
where we made the announcement we had a
press conference and there are other
reasons that the team leaders felt it
was important to do that so that we
don't get scooped by a referee it was
unethical we thought we had done
everything right but that's confirmation
there's like levels to this yeah there
were many levels
and there were people you know me
warning about you know how it would be
interpreted and wanting to also make
sure that we put all the data out
including the maps which we still
haven't released and um so there were a
lot of reasons to be skeptical but the
audi the
the public never knows this yeah i think
it's so i've made a rule that if i am
ever in charge of you know doling out
large amounts of science funding
that when you you should keep kind of an
option in other words you should have
money for publicity it's fine have money
for your press conference but hold in
reserve in a bond to be used hopefully
never but if it's to be used an equal
fund for the retraction if it should
occur
so you would like to see um because
that's a big part of transparency
is the
to me in the space of science at least
that's as beautiful
because it reveals
the
it's like it's uh it tells a great story
there's a there's an excitement there's
uh humanity there so there's a climax of
the triumph but there's also a climax to
the like the disappointment yeah
because that also eventually leads
to triumph again that sets up that's the
drama that sets up the triumph like with
andrew wiles bringing for mars last
uh from us theorem as i guess it's not
lasting whatever the
is
like the ups and downs of that the
roller coaster the whole thing should be
science that is science and when we
don't do that then we cultivate this
aura that excludes other scientists
often from minorities or women back
that you have to be eins like einstein
came out of the womb and he was just
like this guy was like curly no he
wasn't he was he wasn't bad at math that
was all that's all nonsense but he said
that he you know when he said he
attributed his success to lex he said i
never asked my dad
what happened when i ran alongside a
light beam as a kid and thank god i
didn't because had i he would have told
me the best answer of the day which by
the way
you know he would create 20 years later
as a 26 year old in in the patent office
obviously in switzerland and in so doing
by delaying when he asked these
questions he said i approached it with
the intellect of a mature scientist not
a little kid and i wouldn't have
accepted the same explanation so
sometimes assuming that scientists are
infallible inevitable
omniscient you know being i think that
really does a disservice jim gates said
you know he's like einstein wasn't
always einstein
and we cultivate this mystery and allure
at our peril because we're humans until
we have artificial einstein which i
don't think will ever exist you've
launched the
uh assayer project where you hope to
assess theories of everything with
experiments you have a youtube video
where you're announcing that that looks
super cool
can you describe this project and you
also mentioned kind of you give a shout
out to a little known fellow by the name
of galileo galilei
as an inspiration to this project
yeah so galileo is kind of my my avatar
my hero the kind of all-around scientist
that i would love to
approach the you know logarithm of
galileo he was not only a phenomenal
scientist
he was
an incredible artist a writer a poet a
philosopher
and back then they didn't have
distinctions between you know scientists
and i was like a physician was like a
physicist
um and he would indulge you know kind of
these really intellectual flights of
fancy
thinking about uh phenomena such as the
earth's tides or the or you know the
composition of the milky way and what's
interesting about galileo is that he was
almost as wrong often as he was right
and galileo was not alone like this i
always say like einstein had at least
seven nobel prizes that he could have
won for discoveries that later became
true but he also had seven
you know huge you know impossible to
believe blunders in some sense
um it's too bad because he could have
had a good career as i would say uh and
galileo was like that too in other words
he would fall victim to i think this
confirmation bias that all scientists
have to guard their lives against their
careers their brands their reputations
against which is the exclusion of
evidence that doesn't conform to what
you're trying to prove for one reason or
another
or the radical acceptance of things that
do comport with it in order to bolster
your confidence and both are equally
intoxicating it's a you know
confirmation bias is a hell of a drug uh
because it it really you know reinforces
this notion which is partially sunk cost
you put so much time effort money
reputation into it you don't want to be
wrong and go back on it and with galileo
he would uh he would be
incredibly perceptive
about things such as um you know the
earth being
not located at the center of the solar
system and the sun being the center so
called copernican hypothesis
um and he would use as evidence very
very interesting ideas that all of which
were wrong basically and in fact we
weren't able to prove that the earth
orbited around the sun and i ask you
like can you prove the earth is is not
flat no well you're a flat earther
anyway but um but but it's i asked my
crowd uh flat earth society member
t-shirts coming out soon
merch slash merch
but it's actually not trivial to do that
but most of my students graduate
students can prove that the earth is
rounder explain how the earth it is
actually not trivial to do though it's
not yeah and much harder is to prove
that the earth goes around the sun in
fact that's extremely hard to prove and
and almost none of my students even
after they get their phd in the final
exam i kind of like to just you know
give them a little bit of humility
because i think to be a good scientist
you need to be humble you need to have a
little humility and you need to have
swagger you need to feel like a little
cocky like i can do this i can do this
thing that einstein by definition
couldn't do i'm going to attempt it i'm
going to attempt to do what was
impossible just a generation ago how do
you uh prove that the earth goes around
the sun do you have to
is it by the motion of other planets so
there are many ways to do it i mean
obviously you could take a spaceship
park it at the north celestial pole of
our solar system and and just watch what
happens uh but obviously that wasn't how
was discovered in the late 1700s so it's
called aberration so if you look at
stars um uh as the earth orbits around
the sun uh the position of the stars
will shift slightly because of the tilt
of the earth and because the earth is in
motion around the earth and around the
sun and because the earth has a non a
trivial amount of velocity compared to
the speed of light in its orbit around
the sun
the stars will trace out little tiny
ellipses and those will correspond to
the fact that we're moving around
if they're at infinite distance which we
assume that they are they're not really
but for all intents and purposes and the
scale of the solar system are infinitely
far away so that's called stellar
aberration
and that was the first way it was
discovered and actually we still use
that we have to correct for that effect
we measure the cosmic microwave
background because imagine you're inside
of an oven it has some temperature three
kelvin a thousand kelvin whatever if
you're moving towards you the photons
that are coming to me in that direction
will be blue shifted hotter and the ones
behind me will be redshifted i'll
artificially impute a greater or lesser
amount of matter or energy where you are
and it's a
extension of the doppler effect so we
actually make use of that and construct
what's called like a local standard of
rust
anyway um so you can do it but galileo
said no no i'm not going to wait for
that i have other proofs for it
one of which is that the earth has tides
and the tides come in and out twice a
day high tide and low tide and it's he
made the analogy of because the earth is
moving
around the sun say this is the sun here
and it's moving around the sun but it's
also rotating on its axis see how the
water is sloshing up and down inside the
vodka bottle um as that happens he said
that's what the tides are caused by
totally wrong most people listen to this
podcast just just
just so you know if you're listening to
this he actually has a bottle of vodka
in his hand half drunk
and we're both
drunk and whatever else is possible so
as it sloshed around he claimed that was
but now it has nothing to do with that
the moon
over there the moon pulls differentially
on the earth and the earth's ocean
that causes the oceans to bulge slightly
towards and away from where the moon is
and the moon is actually the source of
the earth's tides it has nothing to do
with copernicus the orbit of the center
so he was totally wrong about that he
also thought that the milky way was
comprised only of stars when we know
it's made of gas dust nebulae and things
like that so he had a fair share of
blunders now one thing i always kind of
make note of and i'm actually
producing along with jim gates
fabiola giannatti frank wilczyk um and
uh carlo revelli and my friend lucio
picarillo the first ever audiobook of
one of gal of galileo's dialogue the one
where he claimed to find evidence for
the orbit of the earth around the sun
but it was an error
so you're reading parts of this text
yeah it's just incredible brilliant book
so this book is uh was written in 1632
it was written and it was the one that
caused him to go into house arrest and
almost threatened to be tortured and
that book um laid out his arguments for
what was called the copernican or the um
uh non-peripatetic aristotelian etc
notion of the planetary dynamic
and and eventually he was forced to
recant that he believed in it and
allegedly he said he still believes the
earth moves anyway so we're making that
it's written in the form of a trilog
it's actually called the dialogue but
it's three people there's one named
salviati who is espousing galileo's
notions about how the heavens were
orchestrated and salviante means like
the salvation the savior then there's a
middleman segreto so carlo revelli is
playing salviati brilliant one
i am playing segredo who's like an
intelligent interlocutor i'm you know
kind of just i can appreciate aristotle
i can appreciate copernicus then there's
this guy simplicio the simpleton and he
espouses the words of the pope so you
can imagine like you know you're working
in the putin's government or you're
working in whatever uh and uh and all of
a sudden you're you're kind of putting
the words of of like the fool literally
calling the fool but you're using the
words of the all-supreme powerful being
on earth at that time as the vatican
church especially for an italian like
galileo so he wasn't as brilliant you
know politically uh as he was uh
astrophysically and otherwise who's
who's uh doing some cliche so plicio is
a friend a friend of mine in university
of manchester named luccio picciorello
he's a irish guy but he has an attack no
no he's he's a full-blooded italian but
they all speak english and italian i
only speak uh and that forwards are
written by so one forward and this place
has three four words uh which is like a
12 word
okay uh the four words are written for
me yeah that was a good one uh the four
word three four words one of them is
written by albert einstein in which he
says galileo was not only one of the
greatest scientists in history this is
einstein telling galileo
but he was one of the greatest writers
and minds of all of human history that
forward is read by frank wilczak who
you've had
um jim gates you've also had he reads
the translation um uh the translator
stillman drake is a renowned uh
scientific translator and then fabiola
giannatti she reads the introduction and
dedication
from galileo to the duke of tuscany and
uh and some of the different
introductions that galileo himself had
it's just it's it's such a thrill to be
able to do it i only randomly found out
because i had i wanted to study it and
it's like 500 pages long and i was like
let me get the book because i'm an audio
medium kind of guy didn't exist so i
said let's do it ourselves and so we did
it and hopefully it'll be out on
galileo's birthday uh which is february
15 2022
he'll be a ripe 457 but that's not the
only one of his books galileo wrote many
books
one of which is called the military
compass and this is an interesting book
for my blockchain and your blockchain
aficionados in this book he talks about
a compass which is not a magnetic
compass but actual like slide roll it's
basically a slider rule and he he it's a
manual it's like imagine if your phone
you know came with a manual nowadays
they don't right but this was a manual
for how to use this slide roll which is
like enormously important and it gives a
whole bunch of work examples it's a
brilliant book one of the examples is
how do you convert money so he does a
money conversion currency conversion
between ducati and florentine ducati and
scooty and whatever you know lyra
whatever he does all these currency
conversions one copy of this book or
maybe maybe two exist first printings
from 1600 still exist
if galileo had just kept those in his
family they're worth 100 million dollars
nowadays you can't get a scooty a
scooty's worth nothing like a ducati's
worth not i mean maybe some collector
wants a piece of paper right so it's a
lesson like there are value in physical
you know non-fungible tokens this
original non-fungible token so um but
then a third book is called the assayer
so what is an assay
so assayers were kind of like these
alchemists you know physicists chemists
that would uh would would be around a
court and every so often for the
treasurer
they would want to accept pieces of gold
from the citizens and convert that to
script or you know paper money
and to do that they needed someone to
verify with a standard of gold that they
knew to be gold and uh do some kind of
semi-non-destructive evaluation of the
purported object the metal that was
supposed to be gold
so they would take these pieces of gold
theoretically gold and they would rub it
on something called a touchstone
touchstone was a special piece of rock
granite whatever it has no intrinsic
value it's just a piece of rock but with
that rock you could assay and determine
the content of this thing that could be
worth you know millions of lira or
whatever right so it's incredibly
important job and
so this person would take this piece of
inanimate rock and use it to do
something valuable what i want to do in
the assayer project is take this
plethora of physical theories of
everything i said recently you know we
should give a nobel prize to someone who
doesn't come up with a theory of
everything because there's just that's
good
there's just like it's just rotten with
them and and and i think it's great you
know i often say that um
theory is kind of like software and i'm
not denigrating software at all but like
you can create a lot of software you can
make a coin and it'll make its own quine
and like you can make infinite amounts
of stuff look it up kids that's one of
my favorite videos and you can see you
can replicate you can't replicate you
can't make a telescope that makes a
telescope that makes it in other words
hardware is kind of like the
non-fungible token that's the ultimate
minted you know limited edition the book
the the compass book
and so um it's very expensive that means
you have to be very careful before you
invest decades billions and humans into
pursuing one of these theories of
everything you have to have good
intuition for it and lately what i've
seen is not predictions but
retrodictions so you see that the large
hadron collider will come out with a
measurement and then so-and-so will say
oh this is uh you know this is
compatible with string theory or g minus
two of the muon it has these bizarre
properties fifth force string theory
predicts this
um string theory solves this um
neutrinos uh sterile neutrinos uh large
hadron collider
bottom or b experiment blah blah they'll
say that it's compatible after the fact
and it's not so bad right because look
what did einstein do with gr general
relativity
the first thing he did was not predict
something new he looked at the anomalous
behavior of the planet mercury and he
saw it was behaving strangely and people
had said oh that's because there's
another planet hiding behind the sun
that we can't see that perturbs the
orbit of the planet mercury and it's
always called vulcan
um that was one approach that's kind of
like the dark matter approach where it's
like there's a clump of matter that we
can't see that's influencing the planet
that we can't see and we use that to
divine and intuit the existence of the
other planet that's actually how neptune
was discovered neptune was discovered
because of the anomalous behavior of the
planet uranus so neptune was dark we
couldn't see it it was tugging on uranus
in a certain way and that led to laverie
discovering the planet predicting where
this planet should be found
so it had a good heritage in physics
right to predict this planet that you
couldn't see that worked but einstein
said no um it's caused by the warping
and bending of space-time due to the
presence of matter
would later become known as the einstein
equations so he he explained why mercury
did that he didn't it was known since
the time of newton that mercury was
behaving in this really freaky way so he
didn't predict it he retrodicted it
that's fine but at some point you should
come up with something new that's
uniquely predictive of your theory as i
just said the theory of dark matter in
the context of neptune is actually a
valid theory it just happens not to make
sense in the context of
vulcan and so um if he had kept doing
that maybe you know maybe perhaps he
wouldn't have come up with these other
predictions that he would later reject
like he rejected the existence of
gravitational waves you and barry talked
about that he didn't actually believe it
was the one peer-reviewed paper that he
had you know he used to send back in
those days he sent a letter to nature
physical review publish this you know
let me know how much it cost
and they got it rejected because he said
you can't detect gravitational waves and
actually or they're not real and the
guys show that they're real because he
can't corrected a math error in einstein
and rosen's paper um so it's fascinating
what should the assayer do he or she
should look at these theories look what
things they explain that already exist
and look at what new predictions they
can
claim to explain if we can build
experiments to ch to test them so you
have to kind of challenge yourself to
think about what kind of predictions
can they make such that we can construct
experiments so that's like ultimately
back going to this
to the signal to the
experimenters theorists essentially
that's right so like very experiment
centric
exploration of the fundamental theory of
everything that's right and the best
scientists the best physicists were both
experimentalists and theorists
or at least that they if they were
experimentalists they understood the
theory well enough to make predictions
or to explore the predictions and the
consequences of those predictions they
or if they were theorists they were like
galileo like einstein has patents for
things that he invented
and then you know some of his work led
to the laser and the mazer um so he had
practical it wasn't just pure airy fairy
you know quantum reality and expanding
universe um so in this case what i want
to do is look at you know there's 10
different theories of everything or
cosmological models they make
predictions they have advantages and
disadvantages and i'm just asking the
question why aren't we applying bayesian
reasoning with confidence intervals why
don't we have updates every time an
experiment comes out
we can update our credulity in that
experiment or that theory rather based
on the results of the experiment and we
shouldn't do it after the fact or as you
know michio kaku has said
well you have to tell me what the
initial conditions are that's not my job
you're supposed to tell me if string
theory is correct what should it predict
if it's true
there's one big problem which i should
say that um to be a good
assayer i think you have to
you have to be
worldly in the sense of
um worldly and curious like we were
talking about before with with you and
joe and
you can't only talk your own book you
can't only understand your own pet
theory of everything um you can't only
say well i only understand string theory
and i don't have time for these other
theories or as if it's beneath me to
even under uh you know go into garrett
lisey or eric weinstein or stephen
wolfram or aspects of you know m theory
etc etc and there are some that say you
know like why do we give um you know
string theory so much
um so much of an advanced pass when it
we they're actually predictions that's
made that are completely anathema to
what we observe in physics like the dark
energy should be negative and we see it
as positive like that's a huge strike
you know if you told somebody here's my
10-year application and what do you
think oh i've made this pretty if it
wasn't done by you know maldisana and
you know whitten and folks like that i
don't know if it would have had the
traction the endurance the resiliency
that it's had and that worries me
because
all these men and some women are making
these fantastic brilliant beautiful
ideas and they're not even looking at
what their neighbors doing
there's a
thing that i really enjoyed
seeing and i don't see often enough with
these theories
which is others who are also experts
kind of uh studying them sufficiently
well
to steal man the theory
to show the beautiful aspects of the
theory
you know i see that with stephen wolfram
he has a a very different uh
sort of formulation of physics with his
physics project
now i'm
it's you know physics is a foreign land
to me but uh
his formulation especially in the
context of cellular automate our
hypographs
just as objects as mathematical objects
themselves are familiar and so i'm able
to see the the real beauty there and it
saddens me
that
others
in the physics community can't also see
the beauty
like give it a chance give a chance to
see the beauty and then your respect
right so there is one person who does
take time and is
what i consider to be a great scientist
in terms of what he thinks he obviously
has invested interest in his own theory
and it's eric
eric's
got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of
the history of physics and he has a
great warmth and graciousness when it
comes to
giving others and i've witnessed this
and i've had look first of all i think
debate is pointless like i don't know
about you but if you've ever voted like
oh i saw this debate and you know
because trump did so badly and i'm going
to vote for but no it never happened you
almost never change anybody's mind
unless you debate with love unless you
have
almost like we're going to win together
like the red team approach in the
military they're trying to win a war so
they may disagree on this on the tactics
day-to-day but the strategy we have to
win this war i love you and i want to
protect you
i don't see that in very many of these
physicists from kaku i almost see it
it's embarrassing in some ways because
they'll they'll almost mock with the
exception of eric you know garrett's
interesting you know his theory is you
know people have a lot of issues very
technical uh but eric has taken the time
to try to understand it eric has taken
the time to understand peter white's
theory and i i don't see i don't see the
same graciousness extended from them i'm
sorry yeah
you're right you're right i mean with
eric he hasn't he he wants to but he
hasn't extended the same for stephen
wolfram because i think
no he did no actually no he did i had a
debate with them live on my show no i
did i listened to it but like i just
think it's outside of the toolkit oh
that eric is comfortable with so it's
not it's not that he's not but you're
the main thing that's often absent and
eric does have is like the willingness
and like not just like dismissing or
mocking the that he's he's reaching out
but okay i mean what if it's not
you know i made a joke when they were on
i was like how many theories of
everything can there be you know
highlander you know there can be only
one you know i don't know maybe but he
of course also like the other folks who
propose a theory has um
in ego yeah
he uh he rides a dragon
the dragon representing the ego
well let me ask you about
your friend eric weinstein
so he proposed initial sketches of
geometric community
which is his theory of everything maybe
you can elucidate some aspect of it that
you find interesting but
um
what do you think about the response he
got from the scientific community
well you know some of the response came
from people
academicians professors some came from a
lay audience and some came from
trained scientists or no longer you know
maybe practicing in universities
um i thought it was
there was a lot of vitriol which
surprised me because i look at what he's
trying to do
and
it was always the vitriol would always
come with some element of ad hominem um
and maybe that's his personality maybe
that engenders this or whatever maybe
there is kind of just a natural tendency
you know i always get these emails
professor keating
um i have a new theory einstein was
wrong i'm going to prove it i'm not good
at math but if you help me i will share
my nobel prize with you
oh thank you have you read my books you
know um in other words it's always
taking down taking down the dragon it's
always taking down the kung fu master
right that you get the hit points from d
and d you get their hit ones you take
their cards you get their risk tokens
from kamchatka
and thinking about
with eric it's like because what he's
doing is so aspirational it is grandiose
in a good sense what he's trying to do
is is construct a geometric theory of
everything that has aspects of super
symmetry instead of stuff embedded in it
he's trying to meld that it has very
um unusual features in that it features
not only multiple spatial dimensions
multiple time dimensions it uses new
mathematical objects that he's invented
and look i had uh you know had him on my
show i've talked with him we've had
consultations with other physicists you
know where he'll come down and i have a
visitor's office and he comes down to
san diego sometimes and spends time
there and we talk with eminent
mathematicians and physicists um
eric's uh been out of the academic world
for a long time
and there is as i said before an aspect
of persuasion that must take place
in order to get anything through and i
think there was a slight amount of
good nature not ignorance naivete but
just the sense that if this is right
everyone will recognize it if you build
a better mousetrap the world will beat a
path to your door as the expression goes
that's completely untrue that almost
that doesn't even happen with mouse
traps i mean you know how many freaking
mousetrap types there are it's like
no they don't beat a path here you have
to sell that freaking thing you have to
sell it like steve jobs or elon you i
have never i've had one paper out of 200
papers i've published in peer-reviewed
journals i've only had one half a
percent published with no referees
comments in other words published like
dream submitted it probably it happened
to be an appreciative journal i was
pretty psyched about that but you almost
have to crave the response getting it
back from a journal and i think he
doesn't see first of all he doesn't
subscribe to the peer review process he
thinks that is anathema to the way
science is at best interest in public in
journals etc etc
i think you can have elements of peer
review that are substantive and valuable
i think you have to learn from your
critics one of my conversations with
john mather he talks about loving your
critics
in this book but not being so open to
their criticism that their criticism
goes to your heart and not being so open
to their compliments that their
compliments go to your head
it's a very tough scilla and charybdis
to walk well there's something i mean
i want to be careful here because i i'd
like to talk to eric about this
uh directly but i'll just
from a perspective of a friend
want to ask about
the um
the drug of fame
so there's also the public
uh
perception of the battles of physics and
so there's a very narrow community
but then there's the way that's
perceived
the exploration of ideas is perceived by
the public and so there is a cert
certain drug to the excitement that the
public can show
when they sense that you have something
big
and that in itself
might become the thing that gives you
pleasure
and um
i think that with theories of everything
or with any kind of super super
ambitious projects and this is taking us
back to
when you were ambitious about trying to
understand the origins of the universe
if you convince yourself that you have
an intuition about the origins of the
universe
and you have a platform like you do now
where you
start to communicate your intuition it's
it's it's hazy like all the science
you're still unsure but you have a sense
i mean perhaps you don't have that as
much as an experimentalist because you
always kind of start going okay how do
can of build a device that to me to see
through the
through the fog but if you're more like
a theoretician who kind of works in the
realm of ideas in the realm of
intuitions
it's uh
it is also a source of pleasure you
mentioned dopamine
a source of dopamine
that you can communicate to others
that you're really excited by the
possibility of solving the deepest
mysteries of the universe
so there's some
aspect to which you want to be a uh
grigori grisha pearlman and go into the
hole and get the work done
and shut the hell up about the let me
speak about myself about
you know talking about the dream and
planning and exploring how great it will
be if my intuition turns out to be
correct that's right
the sketches i have turn out to actually
build the bridge that takes us to a
whole new place
as a friend of eric's
or a friend of um
or my friend
what kind of
advice do you give what is your role is
it to be a supporter given that he has
many critics
or is it to be in private
um a critic like a lot of my friends
will say hey shut the hell up
just get it done well first of all i
want to ask you a question i've asked
him and then it comes from uh animal
farm by uh
my probably my favorite book yeah so you
remember benjamin the donkey yes and
he's talking to the pig
i forget the pig's name you probably
know anyway the pig says to him you've
got this long lustrous beautiful tail
you're so lucky i got this short curly
little squiggly thing does jack squat
tell me
how does it feel to have such a lustrous
tail and benjamin says well the good
lord he gave me a tail to swat away the
flies but you know what
i'd rather not have the tail
if i didn't have the flies so i ask you
as i've asked eric
is it worth it
you know you've got these you've got
these beautiful tail but there are flies
i'm not saying in a negative way i'm
just saying you get unwanted
distractions dopamine you know it's kind
of the highlight the spotlight
effect it's obviously allowing you to do
things that you could never do alone and
i think
you know first of all i'd love to know
how you answer that because that's
something i don't feel i can relate to
myself
well this has to do with more like
platforms platform stuff yeah scale
oh i um
that has no very little effect on me i i
enjoy it
i enjoy meeting new people but that has
nothing to do with platform yeah no that
has no effect on me
um
do i want somebody that enjoys
the act itself so this conversation the
reason i'm doing this podcast with you
today
is
because it allows me to trick you into
talking to me for a prolonged period of
time i don't care about platforms i
assume nobody listens it really doesn't
matter
yeah if it got it right my whole test of
it was a good podcast because how do you
know like podcast been around what 12
years how do we know as podcasters were
doing a good job like sometimes someone
said that was the best interview i ever
had but that doesn't happen that often
at least for me but
if you realize that you forgot to put
the sd card in that little guy and the
zoom didn't work would you do it again
and i think if you say yes to that that
was a good podcast yeah exactly that's
that's exactly it so
in that
in that space yeah um
all of it is worth it yeah but
but the dream the the i'm more referring
to the psychological effects forget the
platform forget all that
you know i maybe shouldn't even brought
up the platform because it really has to
do even in your own private mind which
is what i'm struggling with
i
enjoy the planning the dreaming
the early stages
um
so much
that
i often don't take projects to
completion this is a
psychological effect that i'm sure
basically everybody every engineer
everybody that does anything goes
through i just uh
in this case particular i think it also
applies and i wonder as a friend what is
the role
so yeah i mean that effect has been
documented everything from you know
planning telescopes to dieting so
there's a there's a tiny bit of dopamine
that you get
visualizing how you're going to feel you
don't need to know this but you know you
don't deal but losing five pounds i said
i'm gonna lose five pounds and i'm gonna
be able to do run you know a minute
faster so there's a part of me when i'm
planning the diet and the meals and the
exercise that i get a little bit of that
thrill and that actually saps a little
bit of my willpower to actually complete
the task that will take me to that goal
so that's a documented effect and that
happens in um and project planning and
project management it's a very very
important thing to guard against as a
manager of a big project
with eric it's interesting because with
him uh first of all we you know we
relate extremely well you know on a
friendship level and uh very close he
does remind me a lot of my father
and i i've told him that you know just
as a mathematician as a big thinker
as you know in his case as a father you
know the father kind of figure that i
didn't have in a sense but that he is he
is a true lover of life he knows he's
got a huge platform he knows he gets a
lot of attention for what he does
um and you know i jokingly say well it's
one thing like how do you know lex that
someone's an expert
the experts say
there's a good rule ray dalio writes
about in principles he says an expert is
someone who's done something three times
successfully like you can do one
something correctly once you could do
something correctly it's very hard to
pull off like three projects three
telescopes
three whatever right so um so look for
uh it's arbitrary could be four it could
be two right but the point is look at
eric so how many things has he
contributed to and made you know pretty
substantive kind of uh paradigm shifts
for different people i would say he's
been right many times does that mean
he's infallible that he's ineffable no
of course not for me so what i'm saying
is i get a little bit of the joy of kind
of learning something purely
as a as a scientist something completely
outside of what i do mathematics
gage theory um the the kind of very um
very advanced geometry topology that
he's interested in
but every now and then i will sneak in
that i want you know i've told him i'm
going to turn your son into an
experimentalist despite you you know
like he is not going to be a theater zev
is not going to be a therapist he is
working with me he is learning from me
it is we're trying to get him into he
wants to bypass all of the you know kind
of nonsense of undergraduate and go
straight to graduate school and i've
tried to encourage him that maybe he
could do it maybe he can't but there's
no other way than to try and so we've
i've prepared a whole curriculum for zev
to basically bypass all of undergraduate
and to his credit he he's earns all the
credit he's learned it to a level that
matches many of my graduates okay hold
on a second i have to push back and this
is me saying it and i'll yeah i'm sure
i'll talk to eric about this
but to say
you said
eric's done
was right on multiple
things
i think eric has a
great deep
insight about human nature and how
societies work and he says a lot of wise
words on that world
but i think if we're talking about
experts you kind of have to prove you
know it's like michael jordan playing
baseball
like he's proved it many times that he
can play basketball
but he's also got to prove that he can
play baseball and i would say the whole
point of i mean of radical ideas
is you're not
i mean it's very hard to be sitting on a
track record of i mean you're when
you're swinging for the is always you're
uh there's not a track record to sit on
and uh like max tegmark is an example of
somebody
who has a huge track record of more like
acceptable stuff but he also keeps
swinging for the fences in every other
world so he has that track character
with eric if you look at just the number
of publications all this stuff he did
really he chose not to travel the
academic cross so there's no proof of
expertise except sort of an obvious
linguistic demonstration of brilliance
but that's not how physics works
there's a polite way to damn somebody as
a scientist and say he or she
they really know the history of physics
very well like this is always lovely
like sean carr always jokes about like
you know like physicists should never
talk about history or physique
but it's more than that so
eric has certainly contributed in
finance and finance specifically
gauge theory and economics and um in
inflation dynamics in the nominations
hold on a second that's yet to be proven
he has a lot of
power
he's got calculus calculus proven i mean
he he has a gauge model for currency um
for currency uh uh exchanges between
different nations that is explanatory
not not it's not um you know is it is it
is this something in other words it's a
model and it's used for pedagogical
purposes and it might be okay but it's
unique to him i mean him and pia yes
it might be a powerful model
it might be one that's actually deserves
huge amount of applause and celebration
but does not yet receive that and that's
one of the things that eric talks about
it has not received the attention it
deserves but it has not yet received the
attention it deserves and so like the
the proven expertise thing i mean
there's a lot of people that go to their
grave without the recognition they
deserve and it's a tragedy
but the fact is
like
you have to fight for that recognition
the tragedy happens for a reason you
can't just say
this person is obviously brilliant and
therefore they deserve
the credit um
uh in every single domain it doesn't it
doesn't like transfer immediately
there's nobody that's well at least i
wouldn't argue eric is one of the
special minds in our generation but you
still have to fight the fight of physics
and prove it within the community and i
think the same applies in economics you
can't i mean as somebody
that uh you know i've i've gone through
the academic
journey just like you said the peer
review all of those things flawed as
they are that's the part of the process
you have to convince your peers the
um the people that are as obsessed for
whatever the hell reason about that
particular thing that you're working on
yes there's egos yes there's politics
it's a giant mess but i think it's a
beautiful mess
through which you have to go through in
order to
[Music]
reveal the power of your idea to
yourself and to the world well let me
use an example so um you know of james
clerk maxwell and he invented the laws
of electromagnetism which is the first
example of a unification principle ever
displayed by the human mind in history
math purely mathematics um unifying
completely disparate phenomena in one
case electricity charges static
electricity lightning and the other
magnets bar magnets currents etc unify
them you know what he did
i like to do a thought experiment
imagine twitter exists 1864. maxwell's
working away and he goes i have this
wonderful idea with fluctions and and uh
inductive virtue and blah blah and it
revolves on this thing called an ether
and by the way there are these little
vortices and gears and the gears have
these planetary things and they suck up
vortices and the vortices to determine
the density of the electromagnetic
potent
you'd be like this guy's a freaking not
a and and what would you do come
on honestly you would say everything
this guy does is wrong i mean he's got
this idiotic idea and it would be proven
falsified a couple decades later by uh
michaelson and morley and in so doing
you would have thrown out a very
beautiful baby with bathwater or imagine
twitter imagine a twit storm you know
clerk maxwell uh at clerk maxwell uh one
would get it would be brutal right and
to the detriment and that might even set
back history imagine yang mills doing
the same thing churn simon's all these
things are very fantastic but but why
lex why does ed witten
what is juan aldo cena let me give a
good example one guest brilliant guy i
love him
he is the reason that stephen hawking
conceded his black hole information
paradox loss uh issue what did he
conceive it conceded based upon mile the
same as calculation in ads cft and
five-dimensional wormholes about
is any of that first of all we don't
live in an ads universe second of all we
don't know if wormholes are traversable
if they exist even uh you know these are
devices you know kip thorn is
popularized from movies like to say that
this is something on which i will
concede a bat now obviously hawking was
doing that for publicity why does
maldisana what is and he's got a pretty
high h index pretty well respect guy ias
loved talking to him brilliant guy by
the way he also had uh made use of eric
and pia's work on gauge theory and
economics uh originally and one i
believe the breakthrough i can't
remember exactly what but partially you
know credit some of the work that he did
which appears there's a footnote to pia
milani's thesis and some conversations
with eric i think in it anyway getting
back to that why why is there not the
same skepticism is it because maldisana
who's an eminent physicist obviously has
published you know realistic work and
done and what about whitten
you know whitten gets a pass i mean if
you wouldn't get so passed on which
aspect the strength yeah the m theory is
correct i mean here's let me just say
hawking hawking gets the ultimate pass
hawking would say things like m theory
there's zero evidence for it i mean
there's the famous meme that went around
this weekend like what is string theory
predicted and it's nothing and by the
way that's actually wrong i talked to
cameron i know you talked to carmen
carmen says that string theory does make
predictions it predicts the mass of the
electron lies between 10 to the minus 1
planck mass and 10 to the minus 30
plagma okay whatever our electron it's a
big range it's a huge range
is that imagine qumran comes up and
again he's just some nobody but he
actually you know he doesn't have a
profile he's not harvard has zero h
index or whatever eric says
why do we not like in other words why
are we more harsh on people that are
that are trying you know the answer to
that so i get a million emails just like
you said you yourself where they proven
in my world is artificial intelligence
the
equivalence of that
uh is i figured out how to build
consciousness how to engineer
intelligence how to in and awesome you
should send your emails to me and i'll
send my emails and we'll reply
i mean i and i don't want to sort of
mock this because i think it's very
possible that there is
either kernels of interesting ideas or
and whole like there is geniuses out
there that are unheard but the because
of so much noise
you do have to
weigh
like uh
hire the edwins of the world when they
make statements and that's why you build
up a track record as you just said with
ray dalio
you have to show
that you can uh
like if you're pollock and you show us a
painting of a bunch of chaos you have to
and this is a bad example probably
because he probably never showed this
book he could do it right yeah
it's much more conf it's much more
comforting
to see that they can paint a good
accurate picture still life of still
life of an apple on the table so there's
a meteorite at a time because then i
mean um
uh because then
there's something about the scientific
community that they have perhaps an
oversensitive sensor to where
they're not going to give the full
effort of their attention
if you don't have the track record now
you could say that's the kind of club
that only you have to like you have to
have 10 you have to this yes that exists
but
there's some aspect in which you have to
play the game a little bit
to get the machine of science going
otherwise if you're
uh always saying well i'm
i have my ball and i don't want to play
your game your game sucks then nobody's
going to want to play with you that's
true in there look inherent in all this
is an underlying grandiosity look how
could you talk about
doing what cox said on on here and
elsewhere you know we're looking for the
umbilical cord that connects our
universe to another universe that will
then reveal in a one-inch equation that
will surely win a nobel prize the mind
of god that's like a prerequisite i
guess to tackle these questions i think
it's it's
detrimental i think doing that first of
all i think there's an element of almost
snarkiness because none of these
scientists are believing you know uh
gnostics they're they're not theists
right so they're using it as kind of a
stand-in and they always talk about
einstein didn't mean it was like a
spinoza and he wasn't a you know a
theater god doesn't play dice god
doesn't play yeah he's mentions of god
yeah yeah and then um stephen hawking
says if when we come we get m theory
understood we'll know the mind of god uh
that's the title of kaku's book the god
particle the god equation
it you know
do any of them really believe in that no
is that a prerequisite no i'm not saying
that but um but the point being you're
talking about something has to do with
god right i mean where else do you go
from there i mean i think god for now
enjoys a little bit more you know kind
of pr than elon or joe or whatever right
so so like it's you know god's got a
pretty good you know h index himself he
has a by the way a twitter account just
so you know it's pretty good it tweets
of god yeah
um so if you look at that um you have to
go in there again you have to go with
some swagger you have to have a little
bit of of arrogance but you should i
agree mix with a little bit of humility
so he's doing something he comes from
outside of academia now if he rails
against er i'm talking about eric if
he's just railing oh the system and i'm
not going to publish because f that and
that's only created by by greedy
journals i i don't think he's doing
himself any favors on the other hand if
he's shopping it if he's talking it if
he's if he's willing to expose it to uh
to to criticism and to even embrace
people who may not have the purest
intentions perhaps but in the sense of
of like they're they're not arguing
solely to get to the truth with a
capital t what they're trying to do is
take down error hopefully those aren't
those people aren't out there but on the
other hand
looking at what eric does for other
people looking at the fact that he has
courtesy he will look at wolfram he will
look at lisey who's one of his closest
friends i mean he calls him his uh as is
not his nemesis nemesis right right yeah
and i think that's interesting that
they're loving friends i really enjoyed
that portal conversation between
guerrillas uh eric eric has torn about
that conversation because i guess
because of the nemesis of the beautiful
dance of minds playing with these ideas
and fears of everything some of these
things you know look so fundamentally
now i might disagree with him eric on a
different aspect which is the only one
i'm capable of but let me say one thing
which is experimental but but let me say
one thing i understand probably
a third of what eric's talking about
with gu i understand you know gr i
understand mathematics i understand some
group theory fiber bond i can get a
little of the age theory um
but i i also understand what i don't
understand and i understand that there
are people like witten maldisana uh nema
other people that that can't understand
it and they're not trying to understand
sabine she can understand she makes all
these you know oh i don't understand it
i don't want to understand it i don't
have time and then she makes a video a
music video you know kind of mocking
eric and stephen and garrett yeah i'm
like oh you have a time to do and i love
sabine and i've i've actually promoted
my show on her and i i love her and
she's doing a wonderful job but
you have a video that you said yourself
takes eight weeks to produce from start
to finish and you couldn't have spent
you know 30 minutes two hours i brian
keating have done it as an experimental
cosmologist and i have enough to say
like this is interesting it's part of
the assayer project and it actually i
shouldn't say that there are no people
they're very serious
uh alvarez gomez at suny stony brook
simon center for geometrical physics so
he and i are running this this uh
seminar hopefully this summer we're
going to reenact the famous shelter
island conferences in the 1900s
where you know feynman got together and
they calculated the lamb shift
but what did that feature
the harmony the resonant minds behind
the best experimentalist in cosmology
particle physics condensed matter
physics is now teaching us tremendous
things about you know lower dimensional
systems that can be applied um theorists
and experimentalists observers
cosmologists we all were get together
and we're just gonna do it out of a
spirit of love but if it's just like oh
this guy's like a loud map i don't have
time for that i really don't i don't i
don't think it's interesting way to
spend my time there is a aspect that i
hope to see and
it goes back to our sort of uh
discussion with about joe rogan
i do hope to see sort of love and
humility in the presentation like let go
of this kind of
fear of your ideas being stolen and the
ego that's inherent to the scientific
pursuit and um right
now that everybody's
established and known entities let go of
that a little bit so we can
explore and celebrate ideas i would love
to see more of that just because you're
saying especially with these big ideas
of theories of everything
i mean this isn't talking tales out of
school but i mean he has made claims
that i fundamentally disagree with you
know in terms of like
you know he's had this twitter
baiting you know loving trolling of elon
you know why are you spending all this
money to get to mars you know we should
be spending money on interdimensional
travel and we can unlock it if we and i
said to him like and he makes the point
you know that oh the atomic theory
you know that unleashed the nuclear age
and uh and that you know could lead to
planetary destruction
um but i make the point pushing back
with love on him and i say look nobody
looked into the equations you know like
fermi didn't like look into all these
equations of of the unification which
still doesn't exist by the way we spend
all this time lex and i don't know why
it is it's a phenomenon purely in
theoretical physics people are looking
for the toe
and they're overlooking the gut in other
words they're spending all this time in
the theory of everything that god equate
and there's this gut that unifies the
three stronger forces we don't have a
single theory for that and people like
lashound they've tried and failed at it
yeah people don't know there's four
forces gut grant unification theories
that unifies the three forces stuff and
done trying to get a shortcut to the
theory of everything which unifies the
four
um and then there's this whole thing
that may be quantum gravity is not even
a thing right
um
so we're we're we're trying to solve
uh
we're trying to solve the puzzle of
everything at the physics level
and then already before solving it
already saying once we solve it here's
going to be all the beautiful just like
time levels jumping in yeah going to
level you know 256.
yeah yeah yeah i mean i i suppose you
need that kind of ego that confidence
that ambition in order to even have a
chance at some of these the only two
people in this book of nine nobel
laureates who told me they don't
have the imposter syndrome were two
theorists frank wilchuck and sheldon
glashow
and you know frank is pretty interesting
and i know eventually we're gonna talk
about the meaning of life but you talk
about frank
frank invented this theory along with
his advisor and another a third person
in the early 1970s which from 1974
through when he was at princeton all the
way up until 2004 when he won the nobel
prize every day of his life imagine this
alex you're going to have this startup
someone tells actually someone tells you
you're going to win the lottery you're a
lottery in 40 years
what becomes your singular focus in your
life from now until the next 40 years
well
i'm not sure i mean would it be winning
the lottery or if i'm sorry i'm sorry if
you're guaranteed to win a lottery yeah
there's this here's this wallet bitcoin
wallet it's going to guarantee i have
this much money stablecoin whatever uh
you're going to win it 40 but you have
to wait 40 years to me it would be
surviving for the next 40 years you
wouldn't leave your house you would
cover go out in a bubble wrap hat you
wouldn't go out without 20 masks on
right your whole life would be consumed
with now imagine everyone's telling you
you're going to win the nobel prize
which is bigger than the lottery i mean
many peop prizes are worth more than the
nobel prize and every person who wins a
prize that's worth three times the money
like maldasena he would trade the
breakthrough prize for a nobel prize in
a heartbeat so
these guys had to wait 40 years imagine
the excruciating pain what got him
through it he didn't feel like he didn't
deserve it he felt like hell yeah i
earned it he has that swagger and what
i'm looking for in this asshair is to
try to find ways that we can test stuff
now because i don't know if i'm going to
be here in 40 years i hope i am but can
we bypass can we get shortcuts what's
called the low energy regime and to me
that's that's what's interesting like
what can we do now i don't care like
isaac newton came up with color theory
and he did something really interesting
next time i come i'll bring you some
prisms so what did he do he took a white
light he took a prism from the sun
actually he put it through a slit put it
through a prism and it made a beautiful
rainbow like you've seen
and then he took another prism and he
put it upside down like you know dark
side of the moon whatever and the light
went through the first prism turned into
a rainbow and then the rainbow went into
a prism and came out a white light
that's pretty cool then he took a
popsicle stick or whatever his
pipe tobacco and and he put it in the
beam like blocked out the orange and it
didn't make white light come out so he
showed like colors of synthesis it's a
combination he didn't use like uh the
large hadron collider to do that you
know he used a very low energy
experiment to prove a unification in
this color physics and different kind of
color physics than quantum
chromodynamics but nevertheless can we
find things like that are we spending
way too much time and energy thinking
about the future circular collider which
even if it gets built will cost 30
billion dollars just to build by the way
anytime from now on if i leave you with
anything anytime an experimental
physicist tells you a number always
double it maybe triple it how much it's
going to cost to operate it so like do
we build an aircraft carrier to build an
aircraft carrier do we build a nuclear
reactor a semiconductor facility and the
rule of thumb that works pretty well in
project management is it costs about 10
per year to operate a given object of
sufficient complexity and in this case
so in 10 years it'll cost double the
cost so never believe a number whether
it's from our mutual friend harry or
whoever don't believe the number double
it and then say is it worth it and so
building a solar system size accelerator
even if it were possible do we have to
do that or can we use these two 30 solar
mass objects colliding together to test
the the number of large extra spatial
dimensions can we do that people are
working on it i think it's fascinating
so
focus on building detectors experiments
uh
that
like where the cosmos is part of the
experiment i suppose that's doing the
hard work because when you're saying low
energy regime
because for some of these especially big
questions like theories of everything
you need some high energy events
and so somehow figure out how the high
energy events that are already happening
out there how to leverage them
here on earth so one of the alternative
theories of uh cosmology that is not a
singular quantum gravitational requiring
as the big bang and inflation are is uh
are these bouncing models some of them
feature a similar kind of entity called
the quantum field
and that quantum field in the initial
stages of the universe of our current
after the bounce which is not a
singularity it compresses to a classical
kind of rebound and the universe starts
expanding
during that process
the expansion is governed by what's
called a scalar field of which we only
know one that exists that's called the
higgs boson i think this is a scalar um
fundamental particle fundamental field
um that field then later does double
duty and it becomes dark energy
so it solves two problems and i'm not
saying it's correct we don't know yet
but are there observations of and so
dark energies manifest today it's
manifest in properties we see in
supernova explosions um etc etc we see
the effects of accelerating universe
caused by presumably dark energy is dark
energy a constant or does it vary that
has to vary in order for this theory to
be true because that eventually has to
decay so the universe can not support
itself and collapse again again
classically so we could use low energy
phenomena it's hard to think of
supernovas being a low energy phenomenon
but you use that as a tracer of the
cosmic expansion field and see does it
change or is it a constant that's an
example of a low energy limit to prove a
high energy phenomenon like this
collapsing universe in the cyclic model
speaking of things that cost a lot but
are super exciting
uh page two
crap no we'll get we'll wrap it up and
now calm down this is this there's more
than page two
what do you think this is
this is uh jesus
well louis de broglie's thesis was three
pages long and he won the nobel prize
for the wave particle duality
so you know size
matters in different dimensions in life
i think the the lessons i've learned
about life is the shorter the paper or
the shorter the thesis
uh actually the shorter the paper some
of the greatest papers ever written are
sure like i feel like uh
some of the best ideas in this world not
to sound like a contradiction of feynman
a contradiction on top of a
contradiction but it could be written on
a napkin honestly
um it which just kind of tells you
something about ideas
what are your
thoughts about uh the james webb space
telescope um is this
as somebody who likes
telescopes and this is one of the
i think it says um
it took 20 years to build 9.7 billion
dollars
is that way too much too little are you
excited about this thing
it's it's sufficiently different from
what i do in my field that it's
incredibly interesting to me because
it's it's i have no you know horse in
that race and so i'm not competing with
them for time or money or resources or
people or whatever so i can purely be
an advocate and an aficionado of science
it is in some sense the successor to
hubble it will do things that hubble
can't do
it will also may or may not have the
impact on a visceral
kind of artistic level that hubble had
what are some of the most iconic things
that hubble did
the hubble ultra deep field the pillars
of creation you know storms and and
imaging and of these twisted deep galax
deep sky galaxies those resonated with
the public
just visually they were beautiful
yeah when you look at um these images
the hubble ultra deep field you'll maybe
put that in you'll show every speck of
light except for one 4 000 blobs of
light there's one star in our galaxy the
rest of galaxies now that image is less
than one tenth of your fingernail held
out at arm's length it contains 4 000
galaxies so now you can figure out how
many galaxies there are in the whole sky
just by seeing how long does it take you
to move your fingernail over the whole
sky so we have another couple hours
no so it comes out to be that's how we
get 500 billion or more galaxies now
it's not exact to the galaxy but it's
it's it's a good order of magnitude
estimate maybe even better
um hubble produced that and it was
basically serendipitous they pointed to
some dark black piece of sky what they
thought was blank and they saw it same
thing that happened with the cmb they
were looking they were something they
didn't find same thing they found when
they were looking for the deceleration
of the universe and found it was
accelerating um so what i sometimes hear
is that we don't know what we're gonna
discover i never think that's a good
idea to spend billions of dollars on
something like you should have some
guaranteed low-hanging fruit
and then there should be swinging for
the fences
and i think in this case it was really
everything is swinging for the fences
because it's either it's kind of a
single point failure if that telescope
which is this origami construction of 22
hexagonal panels that have to unfold
properly and then orient themselves a
million miles from earth beyond the
earth moon distance by a factor of four
and and still transmit telecommunity you
know
telecommunication back to the earth get
solar energy keep it away from the sun
you know you don't want to look through
the telescope of the sun with your
remaining good eye and you do that and
you cover it's going to be phenomenal i
i um for science for sure if it works
there are a lot of people think you know
it's so risky it's such nasa sunk so
much of their budget it ate up you know
and what if it does fail i mean there's
no guarantee yes it's insured but so
what you're not gonna get back those 20
years of people let's start building it
again like they didn't build two copies
of it um and then if it fails it kind of
has a dampening effect
on
the prospects and the inspiration of the
public for the what science can do what
science engineering can do is out in
it will make a huge impact
scientifically let's hope for the best
let's assume it does succeed it's
launched in a couple weeks and um and
when it does it will transform our
understanding of you know we just
discovered not only like extrasolar
planets that have moons on them an
asteroid belt we discovered an
extrasolar planet in another galaxy this
will be able to see crazy stuff like
that spectroscopy imaging um but but
it's and it will be able to go back
farther in time such that we will be
doing cosmo like hubble did some
cosmology and measured the hubble
constant that was its key project when
it was designed and launched um but
because it is optical telescope it's
sensitive to more you know close in
redshift so shorter distances now james
webb is much much higher redshift it can
probe the darker deeper distant universe
okay let's talk about not the distant
universe but our neighboring planets
first i gotta ask you about the moon
um so there's a there's a piece of the
moon on this table that you've given me
yes uh that we didn't have to pick up
that arrived here that's right so how
did a piece of the moon arrive here on
earth so this chunk of the moon if it
were delivered by
the apollo and nasa emissions uh you and
i would be guilty of a felony right now
because illegal to own pieces of the
moon collected by the apollo astronauts
so don't even joke about that when you
go over to houston
this piece of moon rock was delivered
via the old-fashioned way by gravity so
this was a chunk of the moon which is
blasted off because the moon gets
bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids
some of them eject material from the
surface of the moon into space
and it will then orbit the common uh
moon earth system
and it will then eventually enter our
atmosphere and if the piece is large
enough and the trajectory is proper it
can land intact and this one landed with
a few uh 100 grams worth and they sliced
it up and then it was delivered via us
postal service to my house so you can
buy these pieces and actually can buy a
piece of mars you can buy a piece of
mars delivered by the same route
now what's so interesting about that
well if a piece of mars can get here a
piece of earth can get there
if some piece of earth has some life
forms on it it could get there and if
that can happen in our solar system it
could happen throughout the galaxy
so i'm actually not of the opinion that
there is life elsewhere in the universe
at least technological life that we can
see i see this look of horror on your
face um i view it
i am personally extremely pessimistic
would be extremely surprised i'm just
i'm curious by the transition
because you just said that life
could have arrived from mars or like
from planet to planet but because of the
meteorites striking and so on yeah and
then you went to
you don't think there
there might be life out there in the
universe technological life
technological life
like yeah advanced intelligence
civilizations okay
uh yeah okay so go on yeah so that's a
the generalization of what uh the famous
astronomer fred hoyle called i know this
is a pg-13 it's called panspermia
panspermia and uh beep that up yeah yeah
please and uh that's the exchange of
genetic life for material from
other reaches on earth which explains
the origin of life on earth but not the
origin of life itself which i think is a
much grander mystery and much more
interesting
how did life get here and you've talked
with many eminent people about that
i'm not going to add that much but but
just thinking about the reverse process
let's say life started on the earth
somehow
and then made its way out into the
universe is there enough time for the
whatever material went from earth via
panspermic direction you know spraying
the love gun out into the universe did
that then have enough time to incubate
and go on to a planet that could support
it certainly not within our solar system
which traveling at the meteorite speeds
would require you know hundreds of
millions of years then looking at the
evolutionary history from bacteria to
bach
from you know
rocks to rock mononof i don't know i can
do this all day oh wow it's pretty good
how do you get from those very simple
inanimate objects to like i just simply
think there's not enough time for earth
to seed life technological life
throughout the galaxy i don't think
there's any evidence for that but so you
you really think that the origin of of
life on earth
is a really special event yeah if it did
originate on earth my question for those
that search for life outside the earth
is what if you had a letter from god and
the letter said um life didn't originate
on earth like would you
choose a different profession like it
would seem hopeless like in other words
we only have a sample of one in fact we
only know of one conscious life form let
alone one planet that has life on it
right what if you knew for sure it
didn't start here that means that like
there's almost nothing about earth that
is um originated it didn't originate the
life process so to study purely the
origin of life not life itself i think
that's still fascinating but how could
we learn about you know the origin of of
remember you have to go from inanimate
object to a living object whatever that
definition of life is and i'm not an
expert in many definitions max sarah you
know many different uh definitions but
but how do you actually go from from
from inanimate to animate it's a huge
question yeah but then you don't have to
be the place where life originated to
replicate the origin or to under like uh
yeah that's one way to understand
something is to
uh build it yeah but another way is to
just observe it you don't have to truly
re-uh re-engineer from scratch so
you know i
but then yes if it didn't originate on
earth then your intuitions about the
basic prerequisites of life are are off
what's the governing principle right
like me what is um and then you could
have just an almost an arbitrary number
of possible
like
if life didn't start on earth
to me that's exciting because it's like
we know even less than we thought
the thing is it can prosper on earth
though
yeah so maybe the origin of life is
fundamentally different from
the maintenance of life right and maybe
maybe the existence of the earth life
symbiosis is critical i think sarah you
talked about sarah walker um
that it's a planetary phenomenon etc so
doesn't that make it less like in other
words like not only do you need special
life conditions to create life but then
sustenance of life as you say that also
has to be
maintained under very specific
circumstances by very specific planets
and with very specific tectonic activity
and moon and by the way you need a
jupiter nearby you need an earth and a
moon system so that you don't get
bombarded too early and i always think
like this like technological life i
haven't said this before really soon i'm
just speaking i usually like to write
down before i say different things but
one of the things i thought about
somebody hosts a podcast you should
probably accept the fact that you're
going to say stupid things every once in
a while not every once in a while every
while i claim that you know to get to
sending you know people to the moon
you know our planet needed whales and
and dinosaurs right like you don't make
a solar panel from another solar panel
like you made a solar panel from a
factory that melted down glass silica
you know aluminum extruded that using
fossil fuels where do those fossil fuels
come from like so any civilization
that's going to be a dyson you know
kardashev
did they have dinosaurs like do they
have like prebiotic life do they have a
great oxygenation event did they have a
dimorphism between prokaryotic eukaryote
all those hurdles they give each one
let's say there's eight hurdles
and each one of those has a probability
of one in a thousand to go from you know
uh eukaryotic prokaryote whatever let's
say there's a one in a thousand chance i
think it's like one in 10 to the 40th or
whatever if you really do it but let's
say it's first generous nature one in
ten to the three
let's say there's eight of those hurdles
that means you have you know 10 to the
to the to the 24th power
uh different
possibility and that's just with eight
like the moon has to be there jupiter
has to be there dinosaurs had to be
there all the different things that we
have to get to technological life
there's only 10 to the 2 only there's 10
to the 22nd we think earth not earth
planets in the observable universe not
the galaxy so that's a hundred times
fewer than the probability to get you
know 100 percent clearing these eight
very low hurdles of one in a thousand
that's fascinating because now i really
need to listen to your conversation with
lee cronin who i believe you had
because he believes the opposite yes
yeah i want to have a debate with him
he believes
that
the the way biology evolved on earth
could have evolved almost an infinite
number of other ways so like if you ran
earth over and over and over you would
keep getting life and it would be very
different
so it's
the the fact that our
particular life seems unique
is just like well because every freaking
life is gonna seem unique but you know
be very different it's not like
we shouldn't be asking the question of
what's the likelihood of getting a
human-like thing
because that seems to be super special
it's more like
um
how easy is it to make
anything that has the skills of a human
and i don't mean like something with
thumbs but
achieving basically a technological
civilization and according to lee at
least it's like it's it's trivial i know
we fought i fought a little bit i'd love
to debate him and i think it'll be a lot
of fun because we debate with love when
i talk with lee i love him and he loves
me i think i hope but let me ask you a
question i asked this of him and sarah
on our clubhouse once so what do you
think would happen the next day let's
say we discovered life
it's proxima centauri b
it's um
it looks just like slime mold like you
got on your brie cheese or whatever
we discover
what would happen the next day
and they were like oh this would be
transformative and and i'm not trying to
be like you know total cassandra about
this but i said i don't think anything
would happen
what are you talking about
transformational i'm like i stipulate
that life exists go down to like the
river you know i'm in san diego go out
to the pacific ocean scoop up a glass
you know um you're gonna find life in
there and what are we doing what are we
doing to our earth
we're destroying it callously we're like
pumping crap into there like we have
this toxic waste spill a couple months
ago in san diego i couldn't go to the
beach
let me take it a step further you know
how many you know how many people i'm
sorry that you do know but how many
people died in the 20th century
killed these are advanced civils this
isn't slime mold
we kill we maim we harm we hurt
we hate
i don't think anything would happen the
next day then we go back to what we had
and i said if that weren't proof enough
life has been discovered at least two or
three times just in my professional
career once in 1996
these allen land hills meteorites in
antarctica they saw like microbial
respiration processes still we don't
know it was a press conference held by
bill clinton on the white house lawn
that's featured in the movie contact um
repurposed for that movie
and um and then there's uh and then
there's this um the this phosphorus life
this this toxic life in the pools of
mono lake
many you know extremophile we don't give
a crap
we continue to so why are we thinking
that like our salvati from whence will
our salvation come as the bible says
like it's not going to change how we are
it's not going to magnify how i treat
you or you treat me and and we're pretty
knowledgeable people you and i compared
to you know lay people okay that's
interesting that's a really interesting
argument i i wonder if you're right but
my
intuition is
and i can
i can maybe present a different argument
that you can think about in the realm of
things you care about even deeper which
is like what happens once we figure out
the origins of the universe like how
would that change your life
i would say there are certain
discoveries that even in their very idea
will change the fabric of society i tend
to see if there's definitive proof
that there's life and the more complex
the more powerful that
idea is elsewhere
that i'm not exactly sure how it will
change society
um because it's such a slap in the face
it's like a such a humbling force or
maybe not or maybe it's a motivator to
say
um yeah i don't know which force would
take over maybe it would be governments
with military
uh start to think like well
how do we kill it
if there's a lot of life out there how
do we create the defenses how do we
extract it or or yeah or mine it for for
benefits
i mean i just see like there's a hundred
million literal counter examples about i
mean
right now there's like like 700 million
kids in poverty and like we just how do
we go about our life and just not deal
with that i mean i look i put it aside i
eat hamburgers and you know in 100 years
i'll be canceled for being a you know a
carnivore or whatever but you know so
obviously to get through life you have
to make certain compromise you're not
going to think about certain things but
i i i just think there is a sort of wish
fulfillment like every time there's why
are we going to mars and digging and
flying this cool ass helicopter i'm
we're looking for water like stipulate
that water was there
like i believe there was water i think
we should invest again and see what the
geology was like but but don't you think
so so you're saying i don't think you're
going to get meaning from it that's all
i'm saying i i'm not saying it's not
worth doing i'm just saying there's a
wish fulfillment aspect that people will
find meaning for life from science okay
but
there's a there's a complicated line
here what what if it's this
intelligent civilization
living
obviously probably not on mars but
somewhere like uh in neighboring galaxy
that we uh sorry in in in the name in a
neighboring star star system
that we discover
don't you think that profound change in
meaning i mean i guess again i assume
that because of this pan ceramic process
or whatever that
the probability is much much greater
than zero i mean it's not one a hundred
percent but it's it's much likelier than
that that at least some living material
from earth has ejaculated itself into
the solar system into the universe right
into our guys
please
as well that's right so ice like the
fact that that could happen and that
you're holding a piece you know from a
planetary body and one that couldn't
support life as far as we know uh but i
could get next time if you're if you if
you play nice and you come on my podcast
someday i will give you a tiny chunk of
mars so mars theoretically could support
stuff right now so yeah so i believe
that there's there could be remnants of
earth in this so so that means there
could be evolution i don't think there's
any chance that there's like you know
people using iphones and having podcasts
and stuff and probably so there's this
interesting there's so much some chance
though right
so again yes i think the pro well
obviously the simple state statement to
say it's much much much higher
probability that life exists and
technological life exists right i don't
think we can argue that um it doesn't
mean it's forbidden again i'm not saying
any of this is forbidden not worth
studying not interesting it's a
likelihood thing yeah and to answer your
i think you're wise to push back and
like what does it matter what i'm doing
and i like to think about that you know
because it's like what is the value of
what you're doing like you have to
answer that question or else at the end
of your life you'll have these
existential you know kind of crises
right so when i think about like who i
am part of my identity is answering and
asking scientific questions for me
though there is a religious kind of
undercurrent that does undergird in some
sense this quest again i'm not like a
practicing i'm not like wearing a you
know like i'm not like full-on into
my birth religion judaism
but at the same token i think as you
know one of the things einstein did say
is that you know religion without
science is blind and uh or is lame and
uh science without religion is lame it's
blind and lame anyway the point is that
like you can't get meaning
um you know from just knowing facts like
wikipedia knows more than all of us will
ever know right it has no wisdom you
know wisdom it means you know sapien the
word wisdom in latin and sapient we are
wise and by the way do you know what
we're what our real name is homo sapien
sapien so it's man who knows that he
knows do you know what he knows do you
know what the knowing is it's that he's
gonna die
we're the only creatures that know that
we are going to die we don't know when
we're going to die
but like you know i have a cat
a fierce attack cat is beautiful um she
doesn't know when she's going to die it
doesn't mean i'm more valuable than
surviving
the survival instinct is much it's
fundamentally different from like the
knowledge
of death and that's where ernest becker
comes in with the terror of death and
that that's a creative force
that um seems to be more feature than
bug
but the
human condition is that
um
i mean it's a gift
of knowing
our own mortality
um yeah to me i mean that's that's why
you know i i agree with you in some
sense in terms of the aliens not being a
thing that solves all mysteries
that's why you know my love has always
been the human mind so understanding
who we are what the hell are we and i
think your love has been an echo of that
which is
where did we come from yeah or basically
as cheesy as the songs you know
uh michio kaku is away with words i if
you if you can just like enjoy the
uh you know he speaks in complete he's
like sam harris of cosmology i mean he
speaks in complete paragraphs but like
also unapologetically
he says you know we will know god or
we'll know the mind of god or whatever
the quotes those kinds of things
that's exciting
that physics might be able to find
equations that unlock our origins
at the very core and like the fabric of
it all too and not just our origins
you know what's up you know what's at
the beginning um something tells me
we're too dumb to truly understand was
at the beginning but i think we should
be humble in that way i mean again
another thing is you know
you ever hear the saying like we shared
99 of our dna with chimps or bonobos or
whatever
i share like probably more than that you
know sometimes i wish we shared like 100
like that would be so much more
interesting like oh well there's 50 of a
fruit fly or banana like
no no there's something but that should
make us feel more precious and i almost
feel like discovering life on another
planet whatever solar system would cause
a diminution of humanity like the one
thing i do hold fast to from religion i
don't know where i am with god like do i
believe in god i think that's an
unanswerable question
um but but i have some thoughts about it
but by by the same token
i think the one thing i do get from
religion is that every human has
infinite worth because we are in a
religious capacity considered to be
equal to god in other words we are gods
not to be like you know but we can
contemplate what god did we have aspects
of god we have free will god had free
will uh if he exists again i can't prove
that god exists otherwise you wouldn't
have any credit for believing in god
this is interesting i mean
it's like i'm talking to einstein here
but let me ask anyway can you clip that
for my eclipse shop
[Laughter]
for somebody who's looking at the
young universe at the early universe
and are talking about god and are
agnostic
who do you think is god
so i thought you had just like one of
the best podcasts with sam harris this
past summer
and um one of the things i liked about
that conversation is he talked a lot
about happiness
and meditation
and he says something that's really
resonated with me and i've been working
around and trying to work out in my own
way but he said like you can never
you could never be
you could only become happy
and i'm trying to take a little bit
further than that because i think it's
it's interesting like meditation is like
you're not like oh i'm happy and now
like oh my kid came in and i'm not happy
they're like no like you can be
satisfied kurt vonnegut said like so you
ever catch us sometimes alex you're like
walking around you're like life is
freaking amazing like i'm happy and kurt
vonnegut said you should say to yourself
every time that happens like a little
mantra like if this isn't goodness if
this isn't happiness nothing is just
remind yourself how awesome it is every
breath everything that you do when you
make an impact even some of the bad
stuff that happens good it's good so sam
said that
and it made me think because i was like
well
what does it really mean
to to be happy uh because like i can
think of um i can think of about you
know two or three ways that right now i
could double my happiness
you know like when the lottery or
whatever like i could double my habit
there's only a few ways though right
like
you know i had uh
this this kind of thought like how many
boats can you water ski behind like you
had twice as many followers now you got
two million followers five mil whatever
it doesn't do anything it's called the
hedonic treadmill like once you get to a
certain level it takes a lot more you
know change and followers money impact
women whatever you want to make you have
one more quanta of happiness right on
the other hand
this is a concept from entropy
i can make your life miserable in an
infinite number of ways in other words
there's more space space to make your
life unhappy than happy
and so i thought about that in the
context of what sam said about happiness
um so it's sort of like yeah it's an
expression of entropy and that what you
should be doing in life
is doing that which
will cause you devastation
if it goes away
because those are the things that like
are where you're reducing
entropy like a kid like anyone who's a
parent
knows instantly what i'm talking about
like how to make your life a billion
times worse
but there's no way to make your life a
billion times better
and so thinking about that now turning
into the question of god's existence
i feel like there's no way that you can
believe in god
to quote misquote sam but there's ways
that you can become a believer in god in
other words you could increase the
bayesian confidence level that there is
some and let's not call it god because
that's a freighted term let's just call
it some infinite source of goodness or
our beautiful power in the universe
right
simple things can do that you can
increase your credulity in the goodness
of life and we have this bias as humans
towards negativity negativity bias
well-known fact
so what i want to do is
let's call god good right that's where
it comes from god good same words in
german
and
when we think about what is good
let's do those things
that would devastate us
and a lot of that could be relationships
and there's a powerful concept from
um from network theory which is that you
know the number of connections in a
network you know i'm just saying foreign
it grows as the square of the elements
in the matrix in the number right so you
think of a matrix with n people you know
person one two three four and then
there's four other people there's 16
different pairs but two half of them
overlap the diagonal is where you know
each other you know yourself so there's
but that still grows as n squared
so those connections
increase
and decrease right you ever have two
friends that are fighting and like
you're kind of upset even though you're
not fighting with either one of them so
like a network grows like that so you
want to increase your network as much as
possible but only the kind of high
quality interstices between them and i
think in doing so you incr you you make
yourself fragile not anti-fragile and i
think that is where
purpose and maybe approaching some
notion of god can come from
so that is a source of meaning
maximizing the goodness in life and the
way you know is good is if it's taken
away it would devastate you
that's one way
think about it your brand your business
your spouse your kids
i mean parents can't contact i've known
parents that have
jim simons here's a perfect example he's
one of my oldest friends and mentors
he is one of the richest people on earth
gulfstream mega yacht this is all
documented books about
um he lost two sons as adults
and i hear people say i'm so jealous of
jim simons
would you take everything
i don't know where he has that strength
and his wife marilyn and his first wife
barbara
i'm not i'm not like that
uh some people are there are angels that
walk among us
and
you know i there's this famous prayer
it's like you know uh god you know
there's there's an old saying like one
of the hardest tests there are in life
is to be given a lot of money and you
see it like happens with like lawyer
like people that win the lottery or
whatever or nfl football players after
their career's over they get they're
broke right and i was just like god
please test me with money you know
that'd be great but but in reality you
should never say i'm gonna
i want what x person has unless you're
willing to take everything and you'll
find you won't want to take everything
yeah
i think a lot about the altering effects
of fame of money of power on people
i
it uh
it blinds people
and and i wonder about that
for myself because
it seems like
in themselves these are definitely not
the goals i'm
pretty much afraid i'm not desirous
and i'm definitely afraid of each of
those things
money
fame
and power
but it seems the dreams i have
as consequences
can often have these things
and i'm really afraid of becoming
something
that would disappoint me when i was
younger that would um that i wouldn't
recognize
you know because change happens
gradually
but are you using yourself as the
as the touchstone to use the assay or
amount like what is your rubric to to a
prize if you have lived up to that 12
year old whatever year old lex like how
will you know or not know if you've let
yourself down or
like i always think live to impress
yourself like i don't care if i have
followers like it's nice or whatever but
it's hedonic and it's just never ending
because you'll always see the next level
but i think it's pretty damn cool that
like i've gotten to go to these places
the south pole and i've done these
things and i've made a family and and
i'm
able to teleport my values into the
future
um through my children and i've had
ideological children that i
so by what metric you know have you not
already a impressed yourself and b could
you let yourself down i don't in terms
of the therapist i think some of it is
psychology for me i'm very much just
never
i'm highly self-critical
i'm never happy never happy with what
i've done but i'm always happy in the
way that you describe which is that uh
the vonnegut thing where you just often
during the day i will feel i don't know
i just remember
just eating uh
beef jerky and being truly happy that
was just last night and i have that
all the time and that to me
is why
i mean
that feels to me like a healthy way to
live life and at least for me it's the
one i really enjoy
a lot of people tell me that maybe being
so self-critical so hard on yourself
is not a good way to go but more and
more as i get older i realize it's just
who i am i you have to a certain point
accept this is how i'm always going to
be this self-critical it's like the
oracle of delphi right you know thyself
but i want to leave you with one last
thing it was just to say just on this
topic
you know it could be different right
we could go down to the ocean and get
some krill instead of the 7-eleven you
know it could be that we have no other
no other taste buds and and you know
eric's talked to the four dimensions of
you know the vibration of your tongue
right it could be
like there's one and it's just like
not you know
memphis barbecue or whatever you like in
your in your in your slim gym it could
be something it could be very boring
similarly what if like that's a clue
like what if that's giving us evidence
here's another clue
we there are many animals most animals
have single
mono color vision they only see in in in
black and white intensity they only have
rods and no cones
we could be like that but we're not
why is that not a clue like
if like
god's not gonna like hit you over the
head
and say like here i am because then
everybody would believe in him and
there's very simplistic i've had debates
even with like famous atheists like
lawrence krauss he's like self-declared
militant atheist
and i was like well i don't believe in
the same god you don't believe in like
some guy in a white beard and a chair
like that's infantile like i gave that
away a long time ago
but what if there are clues what if yang
mills theory and
you know maxwell's equate like what
those are beautiful
if you've ever seen like you know
expressed in tensor notation einstein's
equations or or maxwell's equations or
and then maxwell's equations riding on
uh einstein's it's unbelievably
beautiful
doesn't have to be that way
that we can comprehend it
that's a crack maybe that's where the
light gets in and the light is what
reveals what's beautiful so i i don't
believe in god i think that's a stupid
notion like do i believe in god like
sometimes i i wonder if god believes in
me you know like more than if i believe
it like he needs brian keating like you
know what you know it's like one of my
friends is a rabbit he's like um
what would i be doing if i were god
exactly what god's doing right now like
you think i know more than god give me a
prayer leaving cue clues of beauty for
for these hairless apes yeah
and to see what they do with this and
then marvel at um
at the both the tragedy of what the what
those apes do to each other and
the
the rare moments of uh when they have
when they understand understand deeply
about how the world works
brian you're an incredible human being
i'm a big fan and i'm really honored
that he was
first of all shower me with rocks from
the moon from space from space space
dust
dust and crystals magical crystals
healing crystals yeah that you can you
can use for good and tell me your story
and spend your really valuable time with
me today this is amazing it was a great
pleasure for me lex thank you so much
thanks for listening to this
conversation with brian keating to
support this podcast please check out
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let me leave you with some words from
galileo galilei
in questions of science the authority of
a thousand is not worth the humble
reasoning of a single individual
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you