Kelsey Johnson: My Quest to Decode the Cosmos [Ep. 467]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Can science, philosophy, and religion work together to address humanity's biggest questions? What lessons can the cosmos teach us about our place in the universe and the future of humanity? And how do we bring back that sense of curiosity that seems to have faded among professionals? Here today to invite us into her daring quest to decode the universe’s secrets is the brilliant Kelsey Johnson. Kelsey is an accomplished astronomer, professor, and science communicator known for her groundbreaking work in astrophysics and her unique approach to blending science with philosophy and existential inquiry. She is a faculty member at the University of Virginia, where she has made significant contributions to the understanding of starburst galaxies, molecular clouds, and magnetic fields in the universe. Kelsey also founded the Dark Skies, Bright Kids program, which introduces rural communities to the wonders of astronomy. Tune in to learn more about curiosity, the intersection of science and philosophy, and the universe’s mysteries. Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:13:06 What inspired Kelsey to write Into the Unknown 00:16:23 Why scientists lose their curiosity 00:18:33 Judging a book by its cover 00:24:18 Balancing science and philosophy 00:31:55 The role of religion in understanding science 00:37:21 The cosmic marshmallow test 00:47:04 Dark Skies, Bright Kids 00:50:53 The Fermi paradox and the search for extraterrestrial life 01:00:55 Changing perspectives in cosmology 01:05:48 Starburst galaxies 01:08:03 Molecular clouds and feedback 01:10:38 Magnetic fields 01:12:59 Arthur C Clarke’s three laws 01:19:31 Outro Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Kelsey Johnson: 📚 Get Into the Unknown on Amazon: https://a.co/d/5XW0bmG ✖️ Follow Kelsey on Twitter: https://x.com/ProfKelsey ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Brian Keating?

  Welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast. Today's episode is a mind bending journey with an astronomer and author Kelsey Johnson that will challenge everything you thought you knew about science, philosophy, and even our place in the cosmos. From a childhood marked by hardship to becoming a renowned astronomer and president of the American Astronomical Society, Kelsey's story is anything but ordinary. We dive deep into the questions that most scientists are afraid to ask. Are we alone in the universe? What lies beyond the boundaries of our knowledge? And why do we lose our sense of wonder as we age?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  So I spent a good chunk of my childhood really kind of honestly wondering why I existed and what my place was in the universe.

• 0:46Brian Keating?

  You'll discover why studying the darkest skies often leads us to the brightest insights as Kelsey shares her groundbreaking work with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Telescope and her mission to democratize access to the cosmos through programs like Dark Skies, Bright Kids.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  The darkest skies available to us as humans these days are often in the same locations as the most socioeconomically disadvantaged populations in rural communities.

• 1:13Brian Keating?

  This isn't just another science talk. We'll explore the intersection of astronomy and philosophy, debate the existence of extraterrestrial life, and tackle the profound mystery of consciousness itself. Kelsey's new book, Into the Unknown, serves as our guide to these impossible territories.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  If all experiments ever did was confirm what we think we know, then why the heck are we doing the experiments to begin with? We want to push against the things that we think we know.

• 1:40Brian Keating?

  Get ready for an extremely honest, vulnerable, and absolutely fascinating conversation that will rekindle your childhood sense of wonder about the cosmos. Whether you're a seasoned scientist or simply curious about life's biggest questions, this episode will leave you seeing the cosmos and your place within it in an entirely new light. So now, open your mind, embrace the unknown, and join us as we venture deep into the impossible. Kelsey Johnson, welcome to the podcast.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so excited to be here, Brian. Thank you.

• 2:09Brian Keating?

  It's great. Yeah, we were together last five, six, seven years ago, B.C. before COVID.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  No one's counting.

• 2:17Brian Keating?

  That's right. We haven't, you know, we study the billions of year old universe, so we never age. But this phenomenal book is the reason that we're speaking on this occasion. This is a book really unlike any other that I've read in a long time. As I told you before we hit record, you're a renowned eminent astronomer and your work is studied in citations by thousands. And I didn't expect this. I expected a book about the technical details of how you run your research, you know, and your career and the things that interest you. And I got this beautiful poem about about philosophy, about the meaning of life, the deeper questions about theology. And so I'd love to get a short quip from you and really what inspired you to write it

• 3:02Brian Keating?

  before we turn to judge it by its cover.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, first, I have to say I am really glad it surprised you. Like, who doesn't love a good surprise? I have this whole like hidden part of myself that professionally I kind of have kept, I wouldn't say a secret, but I don't really, you know, showcase all these existential thoughts I have. But at some point in middle age, I just decided, you know what? I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I've been teaching about this stuff for a long time. And I really want to use the format, in this case of a book, to try to invite everyone into a space of sort of, I would say existential curiosity. I think often, I don't know how you feel, Brian, in your professional life, but I feel

• 3:47Speaker 01

  often, you know, as middle aged professionals, somehow we just don't carve out the time to think about these really big, meaningful questions about what it means to be in the universe that we're in.

• 4:00Brian Keating?

  I'll let you know when I get middle aged, Kelsey. I'll let you. I'm just kidding. My first gray hair. I was listening to this punk, you know, I do these meditations with Sam Harris, past guest on the podcast, and he's got this guy, um, in a waking up app, who's like complaining about turning 30 because he found a gray hair. I'm like, oh, man.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 4:20Brian Keating?

  You're absolutely right. In fact, I call those, um, dorm room couch sessions, right? We, we did that in college, uh, but we don't do it now. And why is that?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I feel like as we, let's say, approach middle age, you know, we're not middle aged yet, right? You know, 70 is the new 30, whatever that is. Somehow these questions about our place in the universe almost become trite and, and in some cases, take on a valence of like ridicule, like how silly are you for thinking about our place in the universe when it's this big, unanswerable question? And I want to push back on that. And I want to say, maybe we can't know the answer. Maybe we can never know the answer to some of the questions in this book, but that doesn't mean that there isn't value in sitting back and thinking about them and being curious and being awe inspired by the universe. So I, you know, I want to sort of take a stand and invite

• 5:12Speaker 01

  people like, hey, if a professional astronomer feels confident enough to publish book on the, a book on these issues, maybe, maybe we can lean in. And I think it would have really enormous value for both people themselves, but also for society to get a better sense of an awareness of our place in the universe, which I think is lacking.

• 5:34Brian Keating?

  I am fundamentally depressed, disappointed, disillusioned by the ultimate lack of curiosity by our colleagues and the professor. Uh, you and I have many colleagues in common. We're going to name all their names right now. No, we're not going to name names, but I was always really kind of, I thought as a kid, first of all, I'd never thought I'd be a professor. I don't know about you. I thought I'd, you know, I'd be a carnival bouncer or something like that, but.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Okay. I want to know more about that.

• 6:00Brian Keating?

  But I thought being an astronomer was like getting paid to be a candy taster. You know, it's like, who's going to pay us to do what we do? Forget about it. Even though my dad was a professor, but I still never thought, you know, he was much smarter than me. So I'd never do it. But why do you think the curiosity gets? You know, kind of wrung out of us as professor. I mean, if you ask the public, it's of course, you know, we're stroke, I'm stroking my, my, my beard, you're, you know, tossing your, your, your, your hair. Why is it that the, you know, kind of curiosity that every child is born with, kind of gets beat out of us professionals, except for the, you know, the wonderful few like you and me and, and our colleagues that we cherish so much.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Part of this actually starts with kids, like kids, of course, are full of curiosity, right? Why this? Why that? How does that work? How does this work? And I think, you know, we know from, from childhood development that that sort of gets squeezed out of them as they move through the school system in a way that maybe some of it is developmental, maybe some of it has to do with the school system, maybe it's both, maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture, I don't know, right? That is not what we, either of us have PhDs in. But then I think by the time we become professionals, you know, you and I sitting here as actual professors and PhD astrophysicists, I think so much of our day to day life is focused on publishing the paper,

• 7:22Speaker 01

  getting the grant, teaching the class, writing the report, grading the essays, that it's easy to get overwhelmed, I think, by the day to day. It's hard to carve out space, I think, to really give yourself permission to think about these things that make you curious when you're struggling to, to meet the day to day. What do you think? Where do you think our curiosity goes?

• 7:45Brian Keating?

  I mean, some never lose it. I think those

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Clearly, clearly.

• 7:49Brian Keating?

  But, but sometimes those people, and again, I won't name names, but, but they're extremely generative and they, they do not have this normal kind of filter or self censorship. So, and it's often hard to determine if those people are cranks, crackpots, or geniuses in disguise. There's no label. We can't judge them. We, I mean, you know, if somebody had looked at me as a, as a freshman in, in college, you know, I don't know if they would have predicted I could go on to do the things that I've done and start podcasts and talk to people like you. But I, but I do believe that there is this gene, like you said, I, I talked to Barry Barish about it a long time ago on my, when I was writing my second book about Nobel Prize winners and their

• 8:31Brian Keating?

  life advice, so to speak. And he said, curiosity is like, as you get older, becomes a dangerous word, something to be avoided. Curiosity killed the cat, not your cats, you have, you have plenty of them now. But, but It gets negative, like annoying. And you and I are both parents. And, you know, ultimately, kids will keep asking questions until they get satisfied. But sometimes even you, you describe in the book, talking to your kid, and it's not even satisfying to you. And so ultimately, the final question, because, you know, because I said so. And that's not satisfying at all. So I want to turn to the book and do what you're not supposed to do ever. But we always do it on the book, a segment that we call Judging Books by Their Covers.

• 9:13Brian Keating?

  Of course, on the back cover, I'll read from multiple time past guest, John Mather, Nobel laureate, A Delightful Conversation with the Brilliant Explorer of the Magic of Our Universe, how we found out, how she found out, what it means for all of us. And above all, what it really, what we really don't know, or possibly know, except maybe sometimes. So John was especially loquacious there. And then my good friend, my best man, Stefan Alexander, his groundbreaking book takes the reader on adventures that explore the many questions that scientists are afraid to ask. And I think that's exactly right. It will stand as a roadmap for the future of our field. Kelsey, this is a beautifully done book. It's all basic books are. They rejected me for my first book. But anyway,

• 9:55Brian Keating?

  I love their books. I love T.J. Kelleher, your editor. It's wonderfully illustrated. You know, I read a book, I won't say by who, in the last year, but it was like this dense tome. And it's also very, very deep philosophical work. There's not a single illustration in it. Many authors don't realize it until too late. They have to pay for the illustrations. So maybe she was, or he was trying to save money. But, but anyway, Kelsey, take us through the cover of this book, what the title is, the subtitle, and this mysterious doorway portal through the cosmos. Hard work.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so I have to say, so I was actually at an American Astronomical Society meeting. And I was actually sitting, we have sort of a back room where we can sit and decompress. And like, people don't, I don't want to say bother us. We always want people to talk to us, right? But sometimes, okay, I'm actually a hardcore introvert. So I need to like sneak away and like, just be in my own head for a little while. And I was sitting there and I was going through my email. And I got the cover art from the publisher. And I was, you know this experience from having done your own books, right? But you, like, what is the cover art going to be? And it carries this weird, like, weight. And so I was really excited, but also nervous. And I opened the file and saw the image you just showed on the camera. And I think I actually squealed in the room. And everyone looked at me.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  But I was so, because I really, I love the cover art. I love, I love the colors. It's totally normal. But I love that, you know, when the graphic artist did the cover art and they, they made that door, right? Just inviting you, inviting you to just sort of nudge it open and peek through and see what's behind. And the symbolism there for me was just spot on. So I loved it.

• 11:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think it's really delightful. Now talk us through the title, which I have to say, I have not read another book, even my own books that have the same title on this title of this podcast that has more quotes from our founding father, Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Talk about this, Into the Unknown. It's only, I, I can't read, look at it without saying impossible. But, uh, but please talk us through the title and the subtitle as well.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Here's the thing that I think, um, I know you appreciate and, and maybe some viewers or listeners do. Converging on a title with your editor and your publishers and the PR team turns out to be non-trivial. And one of the things that was, because I really wanted to invoke the unknown. And so one of the, one of the titles that was on the table was something like, you know, to the boundaries of knowledge. But, but that wasn't right to me because I don't want to go to a boundary, right? I want to ask what is beyond that boundary. And so trying to evoke this, what happens when we move? Yes, we've moved to the edge of what we know, but what if we try to look beyond that? And the subtitle, right? The quest, the quest to understand the mysteries of the cosmos.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  That word "the" there is doing a lot of work because it's not my quest, right? It is a quest that all of us share. And so that word was very, very specific. And, um, one of the things I realized when, when trying to come up with this title. So I was like, how do you come up with a good book title? So I put it into algorithms online and like come up with a good book title. And these algorithms will ask you for chunks of your text and you put them in and out comes an AI-generated book title. And they all sounded like melted vanilla ice cream. Like I hated all of them. And so now I've become acutely aware of book titles that are clearly AI-generated. They just don't have any like. Just to them. I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe I shouldn't have confessed that, but I just did. So it's too late.

• 13:30Brian Keating?

  It definitely did. And the thing that speaks to me is this is, I mean, it's hard to write a book about epistemology and then like bestseller and, you know, have it be compared to, you know, astrophysics for people in a hurry as this book has been compared to. And I guess, you know, that again, is not even for our curious and not intellectually drained and tapped out colleagues, even in other words, for the most sort of philosophically or intellectually curiously inclined colleagues that we have, they still don't explore epistemology. So what do you think that can really, you know, tell us about, as it seemed to me, you're using astronomy and physics as a vehicle to deliver as a vector to deliver this delicious

• 14:15Brian Keating?

  content about philosophy, this theory of knowledge ontology. Was that your intention?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  In fact, it was. Wow. Well, well done. In fact, I use astronomy as a plot device like that even in my courses, right? So, you know, astronomy piques people's curiosity and their interest in a way. And you can kind of use it as, I don't want to say a bait and switch, because I don't think there's a switch, but you can use it as a

• 14:37Brian Keating?

  Gateway drug.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  A gateway. A gateway. It's the gateway drug to philosophy. One of the things I think about a lot with modern science and as we interact professionally in the field is yes, of course we value the scientific method, right? We are scientists and we value empirical inquiry and we value it as a way to learn what we can about the universe. And I get that, right? Because you and I live and breathe this and we do experiments and we write papers and we have uncertainty bars, right? And we make predictions. But I feel like there's a level of epistemology that often it's so easy for us as scientists to just kind of ignore because we just kind of assume the scientific method is the end all and be all of epistemology.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  But when you really sit back and you think about what it means to know something and how we know things and how we could fool ourselves. If we're being intellectually honest, there's a lot more to it. And, you know, scientists are great at being scientists. And, well, okay, some scientists are great at being scientists. But we're less good at being philosophers, right? And so many of us think we know the path to knowledge because of our professions. But there's a little bit of arrogance there that I would like us to keep in check.

• 15:53Brian Keating?

  Absolutely, yeah. And that kind of, you know, the hubristic side of us has to be balanced with this audacity that we really need to have of being able to go into the unknown, into the impossible. And, and we'll conclude with those questions in a while from now. But I often think, and I'd love to get your reaction, because you're not only a renowned, you know, college professor, but you're renowned for your outreach, for your leadership. But I often feel like we don't take advantage even of some of the more addictive nature of our drug, you know, kind of portfolio. And, and that's, you know, sort of this, this, I always use finger puppet. So here's Galileo, my hero.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Okay, I love that.

• 16:34Brian Keating?

  Puppet, yep. I've got one of Carl Sagan, we'll bring him in later on, maybe if we're lucky, Einstein and Marie Curie.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  I've got nothing to hold a candle to this. What do I have? I have, oh, here's what I have. I have a little black sheep. How about that? I can be the black sheep.

• 16:47Brian Keating?

  That's nice. That's very nice. But Galileo, I would say we should teach the controversy. And that makes my religious colleagues, you know, really excited and my atheist colleagues, you know, get upset. But I actually spoke about this. I had the opportunity to host Richard Dawkins and Live on Stage last week in Vancouver. And I said, we don't teach the controversy. And he started getting nervous, like, is this guy a young earth creationist? And I, I chose him, you know, I should have chosen somebody else. But I ended up saying, you know, Galileo was in prison for the last nine years of his life. In the sumptuous villa outside of Florence, Italy, which I don't know if you've been to, but you should, it's an astronomical, you know, kind of cathedral, if you will.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I'm sure I'll get my invitation any day now.

• 17:26Brian Keating?

  Ah, well, you can go and just visit it. I'll connect you to the, to the director of the, of the University Observatory. But he was in prison there. Why was he in prison there? Because he wrote this book called The Dialogue that claimed the earth was going around the sun. Like, that's much more interesting than also what he does. In his final book, The Discourse, he talks about a ball on an inclined plane and he talks about a pendulum, you know, he talks about all this boring physics stuff, quote unquote, boring, but not when you reveal that this book got him jailed. And why do we, I always say, you and I have the best script ever written, but some of our colleagues are the worst actors. And we have this incredible portfolio of, I mean, everything you cover in this book, and I want to go through, you know, some of the, some of the most kind of just tantalizing.

• 18:09Brian Keating?

  I hate, by the way, when, I don't know how many podcasts you've been on since the book came out yesterday, but, but in the run up to it, but I hate when authors are at, you know, can you explain the whole book and, you know, give the short form version so nobody has to buy? No, no, no, you guys are gonna buy it, you're gonna love it, and you're gonna be glad you did. But, I mean, how do you kind of span this gap without, you know, what was your strategy to not really dumb down anything? Certainly, I hate when people dumb down stuff. This is, I learned stuff here that I hadn't understood before, from, you know, the search for life. These are all things that have been done and done many times over. But how do you do it over such a broad spectrum? Was there a worry that you might dilute it or might, you know, overload the reader? How did you accomplish that?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think the jury's out as to whether I did accomplish it, so.

• 18:54Brian Keating?

  I'll say you accomplished it.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Okay, well, you and I are both PhD scientists, so I don't know if we're maybe the best judges of this, but I do, I do appreciate that, that feedback. Part of my strategy has just been that all of the material in this book is stuff that I've been teaching about for a really long time. And through teaching about it and through interacting with students, right, who are non-science majors, about what sticks with them and what doesn't, and where they get overwhelmed, and how you can scaffold people in their learning, right? Because you don't have to have a PhD in astrophysics, I think, to appreciate the main points of everything

• 19:35Speaker 01

  that's in the book, which was what I was trying to do. And, but, you know, where expertise is needed, you give a little bit of expertise, but not more than you have to, right? You don't have to say everything just so you sound smart and you convince the reader that you understand all of astrophysics. And I worry sometimes that, you know, I've, I definitely read my share of popular science books, and I worry sometimes with authors. That the material can get so dense, sometimes justifiably dense. But sometimes I feel almost as though there's a little bit of psychology there because they're trying to prove that they know what they're talking about. And I decided consciously, and maybe, maybe this will be a disaster, but I decided consciously

• 20:20Speaker 01

  that I had to take it as an assumption that their reader would trust me. And if they didn't trust me, they would just stop reading the book and put it down. And if they were still reading the book, they would trust that I knew what I was talking about and trust that I was giving them the information that they needed. And when I had to do something that was a little bit more technical in the book, I tried to signpost that and say, hey, this part is going to be a little bit challenging. That's okay. Like, here's the main point. And if you need to come back and read it again, that's fine, too. Or if your eyes glaze over in the next couple of paragraphs as we're talking about all the different fundamental particles, that's fine, too. Here's the main point. So that people, you know, I don't, what I don't want to happen is for people to be reading the book and get to a part that's so dense that they put it down and they never come back.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  I want to give them an on-ramp, on-ramp to come back.

• 21:07Brian Keating?

  Hey, I know that you're here and I know that you're as fascinated with brilliant conversations as I'm having, as I am with Kelsey Johnson. And I want to make sure that you catch every single episode. So make sure you're subscribed to the Into the Impossible podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcast player. And for a bonus homework assignment, a guaranteed A-plus grade, leave me a review or give me a thumbs up wherever you're watching or listening to this. We're almost at a thousand reviews on each of Spotify and also on Apple Podcast. I want to get there as soon as possible. So please do me that little favor. Click the subscribe button and you'll get that guaranteed A-plus. Now, back to the episode. You mentioned that you taught all the subjects in the book, which kind of maybe was a little

• 21:51Brian Keating?

  bit titillating to me because in the book you talk, not an insignificant amount of ink is spilled on the convergence of theology with science. A, do you teach that in UVA? That would be very interesting. And obviously you grew up in a religious background. I tell you, I'm a practicing Jew. I'm not Orthodox, but I do practice. I take it seriously. I don't work on the Sabbath and other things. And, you know, I speak Hebrew or read Hebrew, at least I read the Bible many times. I have my own, you know, kind of ways to reconcile it. But how do you, you know, kind of balance this? And especially talk about your upbringing because you allude to it, but you don't specifically mention the tradition that you were raised in.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I didn't mention the tradition I was raised in explicitly because I don't, you know, I don't want to name call. I don't want to throw any tradition under the bus.

• 22:36Brian Keating?

  And I do think there are a lot of- Come on, Kelsey. Let's throw those Mennonites under the bus. We know for sure that what I started watching this, okay? We know for sure.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  I feel, just feel like that would be bad karma. You know, let's put religious tradition aside. One of the things that was really core to me growing up, and I'm going to share something here that's actually a little, maybe I was gonna say a little bit personal. It's actually a lot personal. And this is maybe a left turn that I don't, I don't want to dwell on, but I think it's important for the question you're asking. So I grew up in a very, very poor household. It was just me and my mom, which again, I didn't signal explicitly in the book because I don't want it to become a book about growing up with a single parent under the poverty line. But we were very, very poor. And by poor, I mean, you know, we didn't always know where the food was going to be. We didn't always have running water. We didn't always have electricity. I can remember times when like the toilet didn't work and I would have to like, you know, just go to the bathroom outside as a matter of course,

• 23:28Speaker 01

  like in the woods and like, like that was sort of my life and it was normal. Obviously I love my mom or I love my mom. She died about 20 years ago. She worked very, very hard and she did her best and she worked three jobs and she didn't really have a support network. But what that meant is that she, she turned to alcohol and she became an alcoholic. And then all of the things that come from that, which included abuse. Sorry, this is going somewhere, I promise. But one of the things that came out of this as I was growing up is especially when she was intoxicated. She made a point of telling me that she, she wished that she'd had an abortion. So I spent a good chunk of my childhood, right? With, you know, with the childhood frame of, you know, level of cognitive development,

• 24:11Speaker 01

  really kind of honestly wondering why I existed.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  And what my place was in the universe because my mom didn't want me. And that led me, I think, to try to figure out what my place in the universe is was in any way that I could. And what the only way that was really available to me at that point was we only had, you know, maybe a dozen books in the house because books are expensive. And like three of them were different versions of the Bible. And so I convinced myself that the only way I could find out was like through religion. And so my entry point into trying to understand our place in the universe was through the lens of religion. Now, obviously, that evolved and changed over time.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  But for me, wanting to understand that overlap and these big existential questions and our place in the universe goes back to my very, very, very earliest memories.

• 25:07Brian Keating?

  Were you, you know, kind of nervous to include? I mean, sometimes they call it the third rail, you know, of, of, you know, science books, et cetera. But Stephen Hawking would say things like, you know, every, every time you mention it, the an equation, your, you know, readership goes down by half. But thankfully, if you mention God, it goes up by two. But it's natural, right? I mean, who doesn't? I always ask people, I'm going to ask you, because when do I get a famous, brilliant chance to talk to a famous, brilliant astronomer? What's your favorite?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Oh, I love you.

• 25:35Brian Keating?

  What's your favorite day of the, of the year?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  My favorite day of the year? Winter solstice.

• 25:41Brian Keating?

  Okay. Well, that's very interesting. Never gotten that one. I've gotten Yom Kippur, but I've never.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 25:47Brian Keating?

  But usually, Kelsey, it's, it's, it's somebody's birthday, anniversary, when their kid was born, Christmas, New Year's. And I always point out, those are all kind of origins. And even winter solstice is the origin of when winter starts, except you're being very north boreal, you know, kind of, what should I say? Austral, Austral phobic. You're being Austral phobic, Kelsey. How dare you?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well, I almost said summer solstice. We got our wedding anniversary is on the summer solstice. So both solstices and is what is the plural of solstice? Solstices? I have no idea. Anyway, all, you know, the equinoxes and the solstices all have a special place in my heart, but I do really love the winter solstice. Anyway, but I agree, they're all origins in a way.

• 26:31Brian Keating?

  Why shouldn't people be fascinated by the origin of the universe? And that is, of course, you know, an interesting way to start a religious document. I always point out, you know, the Torah, the Old Testament starts at the beginning of the universe, not like, well, you really will want to eat that thing with the curly tail that's pink, but you can't do that. You know, like, it should have started with the rules, like, America starts with, like, the rules, a little philosophy, but doesn't start with, like, the origin of the universe in the Constitution. But it's, it's, right?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Maybe it should.

• 26:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah, maybe it should, right. Of course, back then, they, they probably would have thought it was eternal or something like that. But were you, you know, kind of interested or curious or worried that, you know, perhaps it might, you know, kind of touch, touch, turn people off? I, I don't think it does at all. I think you're respectful, obviously respectful towards it. You don't, you don't specifically talk about any one faith. But, but it's natural, right? And, and I think along with the humility and, and the ultimate conclusion, I don't think this will detract from the, the, it's actually not the readership that you should care so much about. It's the purchase, you know, the consumer base that buys it, right? And leaves reviews, as, as you all should of this wonderful book. But, but, you know, you talk about, you can't disprove God, right, Kelsey? You can't say, you know, that God created the universe a millisecond before, you know, the statement,

• 27:44Brian Keating?

  right? We, and where you're all implanted with the, but at the end, you do talk in a very curious thing. You call it the cosmic marshmallow test. And I wonder, like, who is doing that test? Is, is it, is it like a simulation hypothesis? Or, like, what is this? First of all, explain the ordinary marshmallow test to my listeners that may be unaware of it. But then, what is a cosmic version of this? Is, is this a version of reincarnation of the simulation hypothesis?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so glad you picked up on the marshmallow test. All right, so

• 28:15Brian Keating?

  Anything with carbs, anything with carbs. I'm all over.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Well, marshmallows for me, they've really gotta be like crispy and brown on the outside, or they're just like not worth it. Okay, so the marshmallow test is a super classic psychology experiment. And if you're not familiar with it, there are some fabulous videos you can find online of kids participating in this, and they are just hysterical. And you're laughing, so I'm thinking you've probably seen some of these. And so in the, in the test, you have children of various ages and they're, they're in a room by themselves and they're given a marshmallow. And, you know, the experimenter tells them that they're gonna come back in some number of minutes, maybe it's five minutes, or maybe it's 10 minutes, I don't, it doesn't really matter. And if, if the child cannot eat the marshmallow, then when, when the experimenter comes back

• 29:03Speaker 01

  into the room, they'll get a second marshmallow. And so all it takes is a little bit of sort of prefrontal cortex activity and being willing to wait and have delayed gratification to eat that marshmallow. And it's just hysterical to watch these kids wrestle with whether or not to eat the marshmallow. And some of them like nibble on edges of it and they try to hide it, or some of them just, they're like, screw it, and they pop it in their mouths. Relating that to the book, one of the things I think about a lot, and I'm not going to ascribe agency to it, I'm not going to say this is a simulation hypothesis, or it's God, or it's some super intelligent high schooler doing an experiment. I'm not, I'm not going to go so far as to ascribe agency, because I, I don't know.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  But what I feel in society today is that we are so focused, or we have become so focused on these near-term marshmallows and like grabbing as many marshmallows as we can, as quickly as we can, and shoving them in our mouths, that we're not thinking about the long-term consequences. And, you know, what would happen if we delayed shoving all these marshmallows in our mouth? Figuratively, right? And now I'm envisioning someone with like chipmunk cheeks and like full of marshmallows. But I, I really feel like it's to our peril. And I feel like we are We are losing touch with the universe because we are so focused on the immediate

• 30:22Speaker 01

  and the day to day. And, you know, when you take a step back to 40,000 feet, or in our case, you know, 13 billion years, these things really don't matter in the long term. And yet, we're doing things that are going to affect the long-term ability for humanity to flourish, because we're so consumed by it. Anyway, I just, I worry, I really do worry that we are failing our, you know, global-scale marshmallow test.

• 30:47Brian Keating?

  I want to read to you a very, very appropriate poem, and then a response. So this is kind of like a, you know, a modern version of like a rap battle or something. But it has to do with two different poems. One is a actual poem, and the other is a prose poem. So the first one's by Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer." Are you familiar with this poem, Kelsey?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  I've heard it, but please read it again.

• 31:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so you are a learned astronomer. "When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs and the figures were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them, when I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured, or she lectured, with much applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till, rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air. From time to time, I looked up in perfect silence at the stars." So that's poem number one, by a man, a Whitman. And here's another man, fine man. Feynman responded. He clapped back at the old poet. He said, "Poets say

• 31:57Brian Keating?

  science takes away from the beauty of the stars, mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see stars on a desert night, and I feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. Stuck on this carousel, my little eye can catch one million-year-old light, a vast pattern of which I am a part." What is the pattern? What is the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little bit about it. Far more marvelous is the truth, Kelsey, than any artist who speak of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men, or women, are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were a man, but if he is an immense sphere

• 32:38Brian Keating?

  of spinning methane and ammonia, they must be silent? Which camp, which team do you fall into, Whitman? Or the Feynman.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  I'm gonna go third. I'm gonna reject the false dichotomy. Okay, because I feel like what Whitman is responding to is a stodgy old professor without curiosity who is just spitting facts. And as you read that poem, like, I get it, my blood almost boils. I get this visceral reaction to sitting in a classroom that could be full of wonder and magic, but has been so flattened by academic hubris that it just becomes off-putting. And I get that, right? You and I have both been in rooms like that, I'm sure of it. And I feel like that's heartbreaking, because you said earlier in this interview, "We have the most wondrous script ever in the universe."

• 33:28Speaker 01

  How dare we not share that wonder with the people around us? Like, how dare we package it in a way that feels so soul-numbingly boring and awful? Like, that's like a tragedy. So, I get that. Like, I do get that. And I feel like what Feynman is doing as a counterpoint is saying, "Wait a second, right? Science is about awe and wonder and curiosity at its core. And I think we need more of that. I think we need more of that in the profession." I think, you know, I have this idea, there's an experiment I want to do, and I almost got funding for it, but then I didn't, to look at and investigate the impact of experiencing awe on professional scientists.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  And the role that that may have had in their career development, or their career choice, or their career trajectory, whatever it is. Because I feel like as professional scientists, we start to become desensitized, or we consciously become desensitized, to the awe and the wonder. And if we become desensitized to the awe and the wonder, how in the world are we supposed to share that with the rest of humanity? So, let's not become desensitized to it, right? Let's embrace it. Maybe we sound, at this point, okay, I will admit, right, firmly camped in middle age here. At this point, I've just kind of decided to heck with what my colleagues think of me, and maybe they'll think I'm ridiculous and I'm silly for talking about things like awe and wonder and curiosity.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  And existential questions, but I have to be authentic to who I am and what I think matters. And this is what I think matters. In some ways, I think it matters more than some of the results that we get scientifically. Yes, the scientific results are great, but at the end of the day, I think what matters more is our awe and our wonder and our curiosity.

• 35:14Brian Keating?

  I sense it might be true that for me, when I had kids, I kind of had the second childhood. And I didn't have as hard a childhood as you, but I did go through a significant amount of trauma and a little abuse here thrown in for good measure, but, but I found both the chance to revitalize, you know, kind of redo my childhood, but make it better. I heard from a psychotherapist I used to see once, he said, your job as a parent is to pass on only half of your neurotic behavior to your kids. Every generation does that, Kelsey, will be great. But I find that, you know, once I took my, one of my kids to SeaWorld here, it's beautiful, famous SeaWorld.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I've been there. It's beautiful.

• 35:54Brian Keating?

  So nice. And yeah, we, we used to have the double A S here every year, every other year, but, but for some reason they stopped, I guess because the Padres are not doing so well. But they would only have it when it would like flood torrential rains. They would only have it here in January, which is the only rainy season we get. Anyway.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Do you remember the parking lot that was completely flooded? Like, it was ridiculous.

• 36:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah, my shoes are still drying out 20 years later. But the, but the interesting thing I found that resonated with what you just said, I took my kid there, we got there early and we got there so early and I always carry a telescope with me and I'm sure you have, you know, as an astronomer should. I took my kid out, we were just walking around and I saw the roller coaster was driving. I could tell someone was in the roller coaster, but no, only one person. So I zoomed in, you know, as astronomers do, we have to, you know, we, we pop the periscope. We, and I saw and it was a dude and he was in the front row of the other roller coaster. And he was just like this stoic, every curve, every loop, every roll. And he was just like stone face. And I was like, this guy's jaded. He's like the astronomer colleagues you just mentioned. He's done it. He's

• 36:57Brian Keating?

  been there. You know, it's not like as it was for me, the first time I went on the roller coaster. And I wonder if that's what happens. And I wonder if you would agree if the solution might just be. Dark skies, bright kids, or something like it. Or having your own, because not everyone can have kids, right? I mean, we have to be sensitive to that. I always say, even if you can't have kids, I think it's the single biggest change in my, in my life. It makes everything, getting a PhD, being a professor, even getting married. Pals in comparison, although it helps to have a good partner. When you get that chance to redo things and see things through kids' eyes. I wonder, you know, if even for those that can't have kids, they can still be a mentor. They can still be a big brother, big sister, right? Talk about what this program has meant to people that you initiated. Dark skies, bright kids.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  I do want to say, I think there is real value in trying to see things through another being's eyes. Right? Whether that's a child, it could be your own child, it could be a child you're babysitting. It could be a niece, a nephew, whatever it might be, right? The way you experience the world, and if you're with a child, right? You, you're kind of forced to experience the world with them. Because you have to be thinking about what, what are they thinking? What's catching their eye? What are they going to pop in their mouth, right? Whatever it is. But I will say, I also, you know, I have these two enormous, beautiful dogs. And I'm out in the woods every day with them. We live, we live literally in a log cabin in the woods, which is my, like, music, it's my, my dream location.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I also see the world through my dog's eyes, right? Not through their noses, I can't comprehend what their noses pick up. But they're captivated by all of these different things. And I think whenever we can put ourselves in a different perspective, it just kind of shakes up the view a little bit. With the Dark Skies Bright Kids program, and I started this, gosh, more than 15 years ago. I should say, I've really, I've had to take a step back from it because of all the administrative work I'm doing. But the graduate students have really taken the program on and they are running it day to day. But the idea here is what, what really started the program off 15 years ago was this realization, which is like dumbfoundedly obvious in hindsight.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  That the darkest skies available to us as humans these days are often in the same locations as the most socio-economically disadvantaged populations in rural communities. And is there a way for us to really reach out and work with these rural communities and their children to be like, hey, you have this kind of amazing natural resource in your backyard. I don't know if you're, probably you're aware of this, but like 80% of the world's population right now lives under light polluted skies and you don't, and that is amazing. You know, it's almost like what, what Feynman said, or even at the end of Whitman's poem, "Go outside and look at the stars." I mean, how often do people even

• 39:46Speaker 01

  go outside at night at all anymore and go outside to not just like walk from their door to their car and then actually take time to look up at the night sky for more than a millisecond? It's just something I feel like we've lost in our daily practice that is important.

• 40:03Brian Keating?

  I know you're here because you love learning. And if you want to learn from the best brilliant brainiacs like Kelsey, or from the 21 Nobel Prize winners and authors about space, huge telescopes, leadership, philosophy, and consciousness in the cosmos, please join my Monday Magic mailing list. I send one bite of goodness out every Monday to get your week started off right, to inspire you with something I've been musing about, an appearance that I've done recently, something genius from around the world of STEM, an image that is fascinating and intoxicating, as well as a conversation, my notes on a conversation just like this one. So if you want to get that, and you want to dive deeper into the whole universe of ideas and minds that I love to explore, join my Monday Magic mailing

• 40:45Brian Keating?

  list, briankeating.com/list. And if you're one of the lucky winners that I select each month, you'll win a real piece of the early solar system. That's right, a chunk of a meteorite that landed on Earth thousands of years ago, that traces the properties of our cosmos from billions of years ago. You don't want to miss out. If you have a .edu email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties if you live in the US. For those of you with a .edu email address, go to briankeating.com/edu. Now back for the end of this fascinating episode. People do. They go from forty five degrees down, you know, looking at this, off maybe twenty degrees up, and that's about it. And it's, it's, it is. It's like removing a sense, you know,

• 41:25Brian Keating?

  it's like taking away, uh, I mean, when we, we are circadian beings as a consequence of living on a rotating semi spherical, you know, object. And who knows what the loss of the night sky will mean. It's certainly not, you know, it's, it's another way we're geoengineering the planet. And I'm not convinced it's, it's a great, it's a great, uh, you know, will have great consequences for us. But let's turn to that. Let you talk a not insignificant amount about the most fascinating, second most fascinating question to are there inflationary gravitational wave B modes in the CMB, which I know all the audience loves to talk about.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  I almost wanted to give that a whole chapter, but I had to like hold back.

• 42:03Brian Keating?

  Talk about the Fermi paradox. Talk about the current, you know, belief that there are aliens. It's even in the zeitgeist, uh, that, you know, aliens are visiting your neck of the woods and the east coast and my neck of the woods out here, um, in California as well. But this notion that we, you know, it has to be, there's so many planets, there's so many stars, Kepler's told us this, there has to be life in the universe. Where do you come down on this?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  This is tough, right? Answering this as a scientist versus as like a normal human with intuition is kind of a little bit different. Right. But for me scientifically, um, there are a couple of things we know about life, right? On this singular data sample we have on planet Earth, we know that life emerged on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could have, right after the period of known as the late heavy bombardment. That suggests, right, our singular data point, and I want to be clear, like, we can't really extrapolate too far from this, not get in trouble, but that singular data point suggests that maybe life isn't so hard to get going if it started as soon as it could have after late heavy bombardment. And then the second thing we

• 43:12Speaker 01

  know from our singular data point sample of planet Earth is that everywhere we find liquid water, we find life. So if you take those two things at face value, which is a little dangerous, but it's all we have, and you extrapolate them, right, that suggests that you do, you do some math and you put it through an equation and you come out with some numbers, right, life ought to be abundant. In the galaxy and in the universe. And yes, most of that life will probably be, you know, microscopic or unevolved or something completely foreign. I do want to say like little side note here. I think that we as humans tend to be incredibly myopic about what we think of as possible forms of life.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  So I just want to like hang that out there and maybe we can come back to it, maybe not.

• 43:58Brian Keating?

  Hashtag tardigrade. Yep.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right. But even tardigrades, like tardigrades are more alien than most people think of aliens. Right? So if the galaxy is teeming with some kind of life, even if it's microscopic and we, we put in some numbers and yes, we have to make assumptions about what fraction of that life will evolve, what fraction might become intelligent, what fraction might go on to, you know, need or want to investigate other things in the universe. And this is where Fermi, you know, was walking to lunch and he's like, where are they? Don't you love it? Like back in the day, how easy it was. Now he has this whole paradox named after him. So with some basic assumptions, it's possible, in fact, possibly likely, depending on your

• 44:41Speaker 01

  numbers, that not only should the galaxy be teeming with life, but if that life evolved and became quote unquote intelligent and had the need or desire to have to colonize other places in the galaxy for whatever reason. Right? We can look at human needs for colonization in the past. Intelligent life could have colonized the galaxy like thousands of times over. But we don't see it. Right? So why don't we see it? And, and there are different categories of solutions here. Of course, one is cover ups and conspiracies. And one is that life is actually really hard to get going and maybe it doesn't evolve the way we think it should. That's, all of these are totally on the table. But the solution that really keeps me up at night, and I don't think I'm alone in this,

• 45:26Speaker 01

  is one possibility for why we don't apparently see, you know, extraterrestrial life everywhere we look in the, in the galaxy, is that there's something about the evolution of quote unquote intelligent species that when they hit their technological adolescence, right? If they make it to the stage that we are calling intelligent and we are in our technological adolescence, we've, we've only had the tools of modern science for like a hundred years. Right? The idea is that when a species hits their technological adolescence, they are basically doomed to destroy themselves. And that is the one that keeps me up with Fermi's paradox. And I think it's a real warning sign for us to be like, hold on.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Like, we are developing as a species and we don't yet have a prefrontal cortex. And so how can we be mindful about that?

• 46:17Brian Keating?

  It's this, you know, consequence between the, or competition between possibility and probability. You know, I've been to the South Pole twice, yet to see the 11% of the biodiversity on Earth that the continent makes up and comprises of this Earth's surface areas. So, you know, just saying that, oh, there are the, all these planets, that really means nothing. And I've even taken this out, you know, Adam Frank, Professor Frank up in Rochester, you probably know, also a prolific writer and, and great communicator of science. He, you know, he talks about, oh, they're, they're, you know, have to be lower than one in 10 to the 22nd power for there not to be life elsewhere in the observable universe. I'm like, Adam, that's like a sphere 90 billion light years across and 13.8 billion years

• 47:00Brian Keating?

  old. That's, yeah, if they're out there, you know, it's 68 billion years, light years away, I don't care, you know, I care if they're within 100 light years and there, there don't seem to be too many of them.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  They don't.

• 47:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And, and we have to face that. It is a religious statement. I find the people that are most anti-religion, anti-God are some of the most pro-alians or simulation hypothesis people that I know. But I want to turn to your actual work because I think it's, you know, a lot of people are just authors. You're no mere author, Kelsey, and even if you were, this would be a wonderful. You're, you know, leader, you know, president, you know, leader in your department, president of the double A S, so much research, the panels that you serve on, that we served on when we met each other, just astounding. But I think it's really important that people know that some people can do it all. And, and you seem to be able to do that. Mother.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Oh, good grief.

• 47:52Brian Keating?

  Spouse, parent of a pet and set of pets, log cabin aficionado. Let's talk about your research. I dug into some of your research and your latest papers on Alma. First of all, what, what is multi-wavelength astronomy, sometimes called multi-messenger astronomy? Where does that fit in, in the vast spectrum? Not, I want to move away from the book. For a little bit, but tell me about where does it fit in in in the spectrum of astronomical pursuits?

• 48:18Speaker 01

  I think that multi wavelength astronomy is where we are moving as a field. And, you know, one of the things I think we share as observers, Brian, is we get that astronomers are effectively scavengers of light. Right? Nearly all of the information we can get about the universe is from light. And so we've gotten really good at analyzing light and decoding light. And we have this whole toolbox of different wavelengths we can use. And and any given object or phenomenon in the universe is going to have a whole range of light that it that it interacts with and that it emits. So we have to use our whole toolbox. We have to bring all of the wavelengths to bear

• 49:00Speaker 01

  that we can on different topics and different issues in the universe if we really want to understand them. You know, it used to be back in the day, and I won't assign any decades to this, right? But when, you know, at least when I was a grad student, and I don't know if you had a similar experience, you sort of defined yourself by the wavelength regime you used. You'd be like, I'm an optical astronomer who studies stars. It was like those were the two characteristics that defined you, or I'm a radio astronomer, or whatever it might be. But I really perceive that there has been a big shift there. Now, part of the problem is that any given one of these wavelengths comes with its own telescopes. It comes with its own analysis techniques. It comes with oftentimes different physics.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  And so it's a different jargon, different units, right? And so it's hard for any single person, I think, to really, truly understand how to use every single wavelength, which is part of the reasons why we end up having so many large teams. But we have to have an awareness of them at least. What has your experience been?

• 50:03Brian Keating?

  I'm much more restricted in terms of wavelength, really to the millimeter wave, once every decade, maybe infrared. But I've been an amateur astronomer and even done some forays into optical polar imagery. But yes, it's very, because there's so much that you have to learn, even if you wanted to just, you know, just quote unquote, stay in one field, let alone try to, you know, kind of be a Fermi, master theory and experiment. Or many of the wonderful colleagues that we have that can do it all, you know, I can't personally. But so I try to maybe be more focused on singular approaches rather than, and maybe to my detriment. But one of the things that's been in the zeitgeist as well

• 50:46Brian Keating?

  is the notion that the big bang never happened. Or if it did, it happened twice as long ago as previously thought. And I've hosted some of these people, including Rajendra Gupta, who made headlines around the world about a year or two ago, when he said the, you know, the big bang happened 26 billion years ago. And I hosted him here. He actually came here on the day that we had a anti-Israel riot and the sheriffs had to come in and shut down the camp. So he came all the way from Ottawa to California and he sat in his hotel and we did a Zoom version of this kind of a podcast. But, but talk about what we know from your research and your colleagues about high redshift galaxies, especially important for understanding how the early universe evolved. And you've used Alma, I don't know

• 51:28Brian Keating?

  if you've used JWST, but, but you're certainly very much in a position to. So talk about that. How does it influence that? And should we be open to such claims that, you know, the universe could be twice as old as we thought?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Listen, I think we always have to be open to claims that things are different than we thought, right? That's how science progresses, is if we allow ourselves to stay open-minded enough to consider things that might conflict with pre-existing ideas we have. There's this great word I learned from my friends in the humanities, and I actually use, I use it in the book, the word defeasable, right? Which means that there's something you believe to be true for whatever reason. But are there bits of evidence or pieces of information or facts that could come into play that would cause you to change your belief? And if there are, that belief is said to be defeasable. And I would maintain in my core that

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Science has to be defeasable, right? Anything we think we know, we have to be willing to change if evidence comes in. Now, where the rubber hits the road on this is really what counts as evidence. And I think when we're talking about making, you know what? I think amounts to an extraordinary claim about age of the universe or something like that, that's been really thoroughly scientifically vetted. The evidence for that has to reach a pretty high bar, right? As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I love the puppet, that's great. So there's this tension, right? There's a tension between yes, be open to new ideas, but yes, also require a high bar for evidence if you're going to overthrow something that has been really thoroughly vetted.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  We saw this with dark energy, right? When dark energy first came out of the gate in the 90s and we were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second here, right? I think probably most of the astronomical community outside of the people who were on the experiments were like, they must have done something wrong, right? This just doesn't make sense. But, you know, they were like, we're going to check ourselves. We're going to redo things. We're going to check all of our assumptions. And over time, right? The entire community was, okay, maybe there's like 1% that's not converted, right? But now I would say it's just accepted as part of our new understanding of the universe. So, you know, the short end of it is, yeah, we're definitely getting results out of the Webb telescope or from Almar,

• 53:50Speaker 01

  or really any new facility we bring online. And we want them to challenge the status quo of science. Because if all experiments ever did was confirm what we think we know, then why the heck are we doing the experiments to begin with? Right? We want to push against the things that we think we know. But at the same time, we've got to be willing to take a step back and ask, does that weird data set really tell us what we think it tells us? And I think what we've seen over the last few years, especially with some of the results coming out of Webb that have sort of been held as tension points for our understanding of cosmology, you know, with more information and with more analysis, they've kind of been walked back and be like, okay, that was interesting,

• 54:33Speaker 01

  but we're now in more accord with what our paradigm was before. So I guess the upshot of all of it is, yes. Do crazy experiments, ask what if, think crazy thoughts because sometimes they're going to move science forward, but also do due diligence and take your time and make sure that we don't just hastily jump to conclusions.

• 54:56Brian Keating?

  And so as we wind down the science, you know, kind of research topic, I wonder if you could kind of do a rapid fire explanation and really explain the significance of the following phenomena that you're so deeply associated with and that you've made fundamental contributions to, and those are starbursts galaxies and their evolution, molecular clouds, feedback, and magnetic fields. So let's start with starbursts galaxies. Is that just a delicious, you know, ploy by the candy industry to make Milky Way, Milky Way bar with a starburst? What is a starburst galaxy?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so first and foremost, starburst galaxies are, well, okay, they're the second coolest objects in the universe because dwarf galaxies are really the coolest, but sometimes dwarf galaxies are starburst galaxies and then you really have the ultra coolest. So starburst galaxies are phenomenal and these are some of the poster children that you will see whenever you have astronomy posters out there. So what's happening in a starburst galaxy is for some reason, and there are different reasons this can happen, a galaxy is really rapidly forming stars at a way that is just completely unsustainable, right? It's just like gobbling up fuel and creating stars like there's no tomorrow. And so because

• 56:11Speaker 01

  of this, because of the intense star formation, the galaxy just like explodes with activity, you know, both with star formation itself, which I'm going to argue was one of the most important processes in the universe, but I'm a little biased, but then the products of that star formation, right? Because when the massive stars form, and they only live for like, you know, a week in cosmic time, not even, right? They're like a blink of an eye. So these massive stars form, and you know this, and I'm sure some of the listeners or viewers know this, but when the massive stars die, like they die in pretty spectacular ways. So you have the supernovae, the neutron stars, the black holes, all of this energy being ejected into galaxies. And so starburst galaxies are like, it is like a kid in a candy shop in terms of the physics that's going on.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  But they also have a really important impact on the, on both the galaxy itself, but on the universe around them. So I, I do, I love myself a good starburst galaxy. And they just look pretty. That's, you know, we have to remember they look pretty.

• 57:11Brian Keating?

  They look beautiful and I'm looking for my patid. When you mention starburst, I cannot resist. I will, I send out the fragments of a starburst galaxy, a real meteorite, to everyone with a .edu email address, which will include you, Kelsey, when you subscribe to my Monday Magic mailing list at briankeating.com/edu. And if you're not blessed with a, with a .edu email address, you'll still enter into a competition to win one. I do send those out as well to those people that are not currently engaged in university study. So that is what I give a little piece of the cosmos. That was the villain of my book, Losing the Nobel Prize.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  I'm a sucker for that.

• 57:54Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Tell us about molecular clouds and feedback. What do they have to offer us about the universe?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  You know, often when we think about the universe, we think about the big, bright, shiny objects, right? Like stars, because of course they are big, bright, shiny objects. But what, what all of this is made from, at the end of the day, are gas and dust and these giant clouds of molecules, conveniently called molecular clouds. And it's from these molecular clouds that much of the astrophysics in the universe comes. Now, it, it was only, you know, people have been trying to study molecular clouds for a long time, but it's hard because the light that they emit, the light that the molecules themselves emit, is in a wavelength regime that's actually really hard to study from Earth. Definitely

• 58:44Speaker 01

  observatories were trying to do this for a long time, but it wasn't until the Otakama Large Millimeter Array was built in the Otakama Desert in Chile that we really opened up a robust window to study light from molecules in the universe. So studying them over, I would say roughly the last decade, has really exploded as an industry because now we can suddenly

• 59:07Speaker 01

  We can do what's called astrochemistry, right? Now, we not only have astronomy, we have astrophysics, we have astrobiology, now we have astrochemistry. Now, I think we just have to wait on astro sociology and astro psychology and astro linguistics, and then we'll know we're in business.

• 59:21Brian Keating?

  Astrogender studies.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly, right? And we're not poking fun of that at all, but right, like, I mean, seriously, we'll know we're in business when we're studying the sociology of extraterrestrial species, astro politics. But we can do actually bona fide astrochemistry, which is giving us this whole other toolset for trying to understand the universe and the physics of the universe. It's a really fun area to be in right now.

• 59:47Brian Keating?

  And then, you know, sort of the last question I am very curious about are magnetic fields. My interest comes from the fact that we see magnetic fields on Earth, we see them in, you know, the Sun, even some animals have decent magnetic field sensitivity, but beyond galaxy clusters, we don't see them in unbound or primordial conditions. And that would explain some interesting findings that would have relevance to my field, both of studying the primordial cosmic microwave background, but also, you know, explaining how, how certain types of polarization rotation could occur in a, in a meaningful way. And not the least of which, it may be that primordial magnetic fields explain the so-called

• 1:00:29Brian Keating?

  Hubble tension that I just had Wendy Friedman on to discuss a few weeks ago. So tell me about magnetic fields, their importance, their relevance, and what we know about the earliest fields in the universe.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Magnetic fields are like the wrench in everything we do in astrophysics, right? We know, we know that they're there, but they are actually really hard to study in the distant universe. Magnetic fields really matter because they're one of the main physical manifestations of forces in the universe that dictate how things behave and what happens. You know, you can see them really clearly around the behavior in neutron stars with pulsars, they matter with star formation itself because you have these magnetic field lines that permeate and thread through galaxies, and it sort of shepherds where a material can go if it's ionized. So magnetic fields like really matter, but they are really hard to study.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  And so one of the things I would say is that most astronomers I know, and maybe you travel in different circles than I do, but most astronomers I know are a little bit afraid of magnetic fields. Right. It's like physics you don't, you don't want to deal with. It's like physics you don't want to put in your model. And there's always a caveat in the paper, you know, whatever the paper is on whatever it is, it's like, but we haven't considered magnetic fields. Right. It's, it's like this boogeyman that's out there because it's a whole skill set that not very many astronomers do. And it's just really, really hard to do. And so my thinking is, you know, as we are looking at magnetic behavior of things farther and farther away in the universe. Right now, I think the sky is the limit in terms of what it may or may not be doing.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Because it is so hard for us to get observational constraints on it.

• 1:02:08Brian Keating?

  So Kelsey, as we come to the conclusion of this delightful chat, we're coming up on just over an hour, which I promised you we would hit and exceed. We'll have to do a part two. Maybe we'll do an in person. As you know, I'll, I'll, I'll be out there at some point soon. But the way that I like to conclude many of my interviews are with kind of rephrasings or restatements of Arthur C. Clarke's famous three laws. And you have them.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  No kidding.

• 1:02:32Brian Keating?

  You have them in your book and they're guideposts throughout the book. So the first one I want to mention is how we open, we actually opened the podcast with the phrase from 2001, A Space Odyssey, that you can see in the background of my room, open the pod. Cause that's actually the origin of the name podcast came from Arthur C. Clarke through 2001. But the first one I want to ask you about hearkens to his famous quip that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And to do that, I want you to tell me, what is the most magical form of technology or scientific knowledge? And what would be sort of the single choice that you might use to put on a monolith from 2001?

• 1:03:16Brian Keating?

  That would be a billion year long time capsule. What sort of thing should we use as humanity to brag to have some cosmic chutzpah about our place and what we did while we were here today?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  The problem with answering this is that it immediately got very depressing in my brain. You know, I'm thinking about all the terrible things that humans have done and all the things that we really should not be proud of. That may seem the most magical, you know, right now I have, I have artificial intelligence on my mind. I have chat GPT on my mind as, you know, if you, if you plucked someone from a hundred years ago, what would they have thought about that technology? But I'm not sure that a hundred years from now, we're going to think it was as great as we think it is now. And so I'm, I'm, I'm really worried about, I mean, this causes you to take stock of who you are and what you're doing, what you, what you value and what would we want to put on that monolith? What I would love to be able to put on a monolith is something about our understanding

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  of the universe or like mapping of the stars, but we're losing contact with the night sky. And so I think the things that I want to put on the monolith are things that we're losing in humanity.

• 1:04:20Brian Keating?

  I asked Anne Druian, who is Carl Sagan's widow, co-author on the book Contact, I asked her the same question. She said, oh, I did that. What? You made a monolith? Oh, my brainwaves were recorded for the Voyager, you know, golden disc, a pioneer golden disc, I forgot which one. And yeah, her brainwaves a couple of weeks after she met Carl and was falling in love with him are on there. But of course, on that record or, you know, long dead civilizations and voice recordings of tribes that have, you know, become training data for chat GPT. So you're not alone in being a little bit, a little bit lacrimose.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  But hold on though. You know what I think we should do?

• 1:04:58Brian Keating?

  What's that?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Is put lessons we've learned, right? What are things that we've done that we've learned from?

• 1:05:04Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  That would be very powerful.

• 1:05:06Brian Keating?

  I would definitely agree. I always say, you know, in my interviews, I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners to date.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Holy cow.

• 1:05:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And I'm always fascinated. They're brilliant. They have a lot of knowledge, but my, you know, singular quest in this podcast mission is to see if, you know, a sufficient amount of, of knowledge can, can be converted to wisdom. And it's not exactly clear to me that just having, you know, chat GPT has much more knowledge than I do. And, uh, but, but, you know, I'd like to think I have a lot more wisdom than it. So yes, I think that that would be an instruction manual, a warning perhaps. And, uh, you know, I wouldn't put in like the biography of Kim Kardashian, that's for sure. Okay. Second to last question comes into the origin of the name of this podcast, which is quoted as Arthur's second law. It's a little confusing, the nomenclature sometimes, but it's very similar to the title of this book.

• 1:05:57Brian Keating?

  Which is the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them a little way into the impossible. I want to ask you that question, but in the form of advice to your younger self. When you were 20, if you had 30 seconds with Kelsey, what would you advise her to do to give her the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  That is a hard one. Well, first of all, I don't think the 20-year-old me would have listened to the middle-aged me. So there's a problem there. But if we assume that she would have listened to the middle-aged me, I probably would have done my level best to convince her not to put up artificial boundary conditions that don't need to be there. Give yourself permission to think differently, right? Give yourself permission to ask what if? And give yourself permission to be naive, because when I think when we're willing to be naive, especially about, you know, our place in the universe and what might or might not be impossible, I think we give ourselves permission and space to grow. And

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  if we're not willing to be naive and give ourselves permission and space to grow, then I don't know what the point of this all is.

• 1:07:09Brian Keating?

  And then our final question sadly is Arthur's, one of Arthur's laws, not for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I love to drop that on my department chair from time to time when

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Oh, no, Alison.

• 1:07:23Brian Keating?

  She's not my chair. Yeah, see, I'm not in the astronomy department, but I am in the

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 1:07:30Brian Keating?

  Shout out to Alison. Yeah. But this quote, which I am not using as an insult, do not take it in any way, but you quote it in the book anyway. So when a elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible, he or she is very likely to be right. But when he or she says something is impossible, they are very much likely wrong. What have you been wrong about, Kelsey? What have you changed your mind about, if anything?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  I've changed my mind about so many things, where to start. I've changed my mind several times about my thinking about higher powers, or God, if you will. I've certainly changed my mind about different bits of research where data has come in, and I've been like, "Oh, that's not what I wanted to be true." And confirmation bias here is hard, right? It's hard to change your mind when you've become attached to an idea you have. And I will say, I love it when scientists will own up to things. Somehow, for me, it like, gives them so much more street cred, when they're like, "This is what I used to think, but then this new data came in, and even though this is what I used to think, I actually changed my mind." And when you hear that, isn't it like, wow, like, good for you. That's

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  exactly the way science is supposed to proceed.

• 1:08:39Brian Keating?

  Yeah, but we often have this portrayal of this invulnerable, invincible, inerrant, you know, super deity that's infallible. And I think that does great disservice, because I'm not that way. Einstein wasn't that way. And I think it cultivates this incorrect... There are scientists like that, that are arrogant, you know. And again, the hardest thing is to balance two opposing views, right? The Yiddish proverb, you stand in the middle of the road, you get hit by both sides of the street traffic. So, I do worry that we cultivate that at our detriment, because Einstein wasn't Einstein at age five, you know, or 10. And it makes it seem impossible. And that's the last thing we want to do, is

• 1:09:21Brian Keating?

  to restrict access to this wonderful script that you have written about so delicately, so touchingly, so humorously hilarious at times. You have a beautiful voice for audiobooks and a lovely interview. I hope that you'll see great success from this, and maybe write a part two, and you'll come back on. And...

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  The solved mysteries of the universe.

• 1:09:44Brian Keating?

  It's the only way we get together, is when you write a book. So, we gotta get now, we'll get together. Kelsey Johnson, Professor Kelsey Johnson, a real hero to many in the field, for all you do, on behalf of underrepresented groups, but also represented groups like me and my colleagues. So, thank you so much for everything you do, and thank you for this wonderful gift of a book.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Oh, Brian, it's been wonderful, and so great to talk.

• 1:10:06Brian Keating?

  Want to dive deeper into mind-bending ideas like we just enjoyed with Kelsey? Watch my recent conversation with Sean Carroll, where he explored the deepest mysteries in the cosmos, including consciousness, physics, AI, and aliens. You don't want to miss it.