How are scientific discoveries made?

Daniel and Kelly explore how scientific discoveries are made, digging into fun stories, the history of science with Prof. Lydia Patton and the lessons of Nobel Prize winners with Prof. Brian Keating. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hollywood tells us what it's like to make a scientific discovery. Okay, set the scene. A lone scientist, wearing a lab coat, because they're always wearing a lab coat for some reason, has a flash of inspiration, sometimes during a musical montage. And that's when the ideas come together. He, and it's almost always a he, rushes out to tell the world, and everyone greets the news with enthusiasm. That's a fun bit of storytelling, but what is it really like? Does that scenario ever happen? Or are scientists working slowly for decades, pushing the fuzzy bits of the puzzle together, until people are finally convinced? And yes, I have to admit, that wouldn't make quite as good of a movie.

• 2:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  But anyway, today, we're going to pull back the curtain on the process of scientific discovery and tell you stories of dramatic, as well as frustratingly slow, discoveries. You'll hear the actual historical audio of scientists being shocked at a discovery that they were making in real time, a conversation with a historian of science, and an interview with a man who has spoken to more Nobel Prize winners than maybe anyone else on the planet. And we'll try to learn what led to moments of understanding and discovery. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space. And today, we're going to talk about how many times I have not discovered things.

• 3:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Hello, I'm Daniel White, and I'm a particle physicist. And I got into particle physics to reveal the fundamental nature of the universe and make earth-shattering discoveries. But in 30 years, I've made exactly zero.

• 3:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  You've made exactly zero? Okay, well, that's a nice lead into the question I have for you today. So, you know, at least in my field, and I assume this is the same in your field, before you start an experiment, you have a prediction. You have an expectation for how the results are going to go. And then you design your experiment well, so that if you're wrong, you can be sure that you're wrong. That's a good experiment. So what percent of the time, roughly, does the work that you do match the predictions that you made initially?

• 4:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, way to put your finger on a sore spot, Kelly. So far, every single experiment we've done matches our expectations. And we've even analyzed the statistics of that. Like, you don't expect, when you flip a coin, to get exactly 50% heads and tails on a fair coin. You expect some fluctuations, and we see exactly those kinds of fluctuations. Sometimes the data is a little bit weird, rarely it's very weird, and almost never is it super duper weird. So we have a beautiful Gaussian curve of all of our weirdness, and really, no surprises so far.

• 4:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, so every paper you've done, the prediction you were testing, you found exactly what you expected?

• 4:48Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I work in a field where if we find something unexpected, it's a Nobel Prize, right? If you find a new particle, if you find a new force, that's a huge revelation. So we are constantly searching for stuff. No, we didn't find dark matter. No, we didn't find this. No, we didn't find that. 99.99% of our papers are negative results. We looked for X and we didn't see it. The standard model wins again.

• 5:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, well, congratulations for being right on thousands of papers. Like you told us the other day, you have thousands of publications.

• 5:22Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, it's a great disappointment. I wish that we were wrong. I got into this field to prove the standard model wrong, to find situations where we see something we don't expect. And not just to discover something new, right? Some theorists could come up with a model of supersymmetry and predict the selectron or whatever, and we could go off and see that. That's sort of what happened with the Higgs boson and with the top quark 20 years earlier. But it's been a long time since we had a surprise, a moment when the data told us something about the universe we weren't expecting.

• 5:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, Daniel, I'm excited that I can say to you that I wish you failure.

• 5:55Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go, exactly. What about you? How about your great moments of discovery? Were they unexpected or expected?

• 6:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think I'm at like 50/50 on my predictions panning out. I mean, so it's not, it's not a like coin flip. I actually, you know, I do serious literature searches, but you know, when you study animal behavior so often, it's like, oh, you know, we know that the neurotransmitters are doing this. So we should predict that the animal will do this and then they don't do what you expected. And that's pretty typical as we sort of muddle through neuroscience and whatnot.

• 6:28Daniel Whiteson?

  But when that happens, when they don't do what you expect, have you learned something about the animal, something fundamental that is scientific? Or have you learned, oops, I made a mistake, or I don't know how to do neuroscience or something?

• 6:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, we always learn something. Like I do, I spend a lot of time carefully designing my experiments so that even if the answer is, things didn't go the way you thought they would, there's still something interesting to say.

• 6:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that's a well-designed experiment. Congratulations.

• 6:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, thanks.

• 6:55Daniel Whiteson?

  We publish no matter what.

• 6:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Well, I've gotten very comfortable with this form of failure.

• 7:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And the success and failure of scientists is part of our topic today. We are doing a deep dive into the nature of the scientific process, pulling back the curtain on how science actually works, what scientists do all day. We don't just take naps and wake up with great moments of inspiration, though I guess that does happen for some of us. We work slowly and carefully through the process of science, figuring out how the universe works and convincing our peers of what we have learned. We have an episode later this week on the scientific review process, but today we're digging into the juiciest bit, how scientific discoveries actually happen.

• 7:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we are super lucky to have a bunch of different input for this particular episode. We're going to start with Daniel walking us through what discovery tends to look like in physics. Then we're going to bring an expert on to talk to us about the history of scientific discoveries. And finally, we're talking to someone who interviewed a bunch of Nobel Prize winners and asked them about their discoveries and how that went along. So Daniel, on this path of discovery, maybe this should be a self-help podcast now. It feels self-helpy right now, but.

• 8:10Daniel Whiteson?

  How to win a Nobel Prize, steps one through 10. You'll be shocked at step seven.

• 8:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, let's start with your first discovery that you want to tell us about today.

• 8:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think it's important to walk through some examples of discoveries because I think that the picture people have in their minds of how scientific discovery happens is shaped by. A lot of these stories, most of which are apocryphal and give people sort of a cartoonish view of the process. And I want to get into the nitty gritty.

• 8:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I have to make a confession here, which is that for a long time, I didn't realize that apocryphal means a story that probably isn't true.

• 8:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 8:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I'd just like to clear that up for anyone who is comparably bad at the English language.

• 8:52Daniel Whiteson?

  These are great dinner party stories or pop side clickbait, but they're not always real. And maybe one of the most famous moments of discovery is Newton and the apple. As the story goes, Newton is sitting in his garden. He sees an apple fall down and he thinks about it deep and he goes, Hmm, why do apples fall down towards the center of the earth? And he comes up with this theory of gravity. Is that the story you've heard, Kelly?

• 9:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely.

• 9:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And does that story make sense to you? Like, how does looking at an apple tell anybody how gravity works?

• 9:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I guess I didn't imagine that he looked at the apple and immediately knew how gravity works. I imagined that he saw the apple fall and thought to himself, why did it go down and not up? And that got him sort of thinking about the question more deeply.

• 9:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, you know, that's a question that Aristotle worked on thousands of years earlier. Like, why do things fall down? That was a deep question. And you know, his answer was like, well, there are some things, it's in their nature to fall down. And an apple and rocks and earth are made of the falling down kind of stuff. And that's not really an answer, you know, but this definitely has been a question for a long, long time. And so it doesn't even really make sense to me because like seeing the apple inspires the question, but the question is an ancient and outstanding one. Anyway, this whole story doesn't make any sense because it's all made up. It didn't really happen that way at all. The real story is that Newton took years, decades to develop his theory of gravity. He was writing letters

• 10:22Daniel Whiteson?

  back and forth with another scientist, Hook, for years. And he was thinking about gravity and he was wondering if you could come up with a theory of gravity to explain why apples fall down and also why the moon doesn't fall down. Like, why is the moon in orbit around the earth? This kind of stuff. And so he was trying to develop that and he was trying to make it mathematical. He didn't want just a story like Aristotle provided. He wanted a theory, something that would let you calculate the force between two objects, for example. And so it took him two decades to put this theory together. And you know, the fundamental idea he came up with is that gravity gets weaker with distance. And he showed that if you framed it in this one over R squared, or R is the distance between objects, the

• 11:06Daniel Whiteson?

  force drops with the distance squared, that you could actually calculate not just that an apple should fall, but also that the moon should be in its orbit. And he was able to reproduce the motion of the moon. And this is the great triumph to have a single theory of gravity that describes not just what's happening on earth, but also in the heavens.

• 11:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, so first I'm wondering with Aristotle and the birds, did you think that the that birds were like made of uppy stuff sometimes and downy stuff others? And like, what did this transmogrification look like? But but let's not get too far off topic.

• 11:38Daniel Whiteson?

  I would love to have Aristotle on the pod and ask him some of these questions, you know, also questions like, why didn't you ever do an experiment to try out some of your ideas? Like in 10 minutes, Galileo disproved a lot of Aristotle's ideas just by doing experiments.

• 11:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I was looking at the New York Times Bestsellers paperback list the other day, and a book that beat mine is one where a medium is giving you advice from the dead. So maybe we can, there's some people we can reach out to to make that happen.

• 12:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That's nonfiction?

• 12:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's in the nonfiction. Yeah. I know. So anyway, but and it and it beat me FYI. But anyway, so.

• 12:14Daniel Whiteson?

  But you guys are on the nonfiction bestseller list?

• 12:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, we are.

• 12:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Congrats.

• 12:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks. It'll be, it won't be top secret by the time the episode comes out. But we're on 11 and Ada will point out that we didn't break the top 10, which is what she does every time I mention that we're on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

• 12:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, my God, that's huge. Wonderful.

• 12:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks. Anyway, would be nice if I was above the medium person, but I'm not. But anyway, okay, so.

• 12:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that gives you a very nice cocktail story to tell when next time you go to a fancy party. And this is what happened with Newton. Newton developed his theory of gravity, and then he told this story. At like parties where it's like, I saw the apple and I had a moment of inspiration. And so this is Newton basically writing clickbait. And then the story got around and Voltaire heard about it. He's a famous writer and he wrote about it. And that's what popularized it. And so Newton sort of like wrote a PR pitch about his moment of inspiration. That didn't really happen. And then it got propagated by the mainstream media, which was Voltaire at the time.

• 13:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. How do we know that this didn't really happen to Newton? If he said it did.

• 13:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, we have records of Newton's work, right? Like the dude kept logbooks and we have his letters and we see him struggling with these concepts together with Hook over years. And then it was 20 years later that his theory was fully developed. So we see the development of it in his notes and in his letters.

• 13:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, fantastic. I didn't expect Voltaire to come into our episode today, but there he is.

• 13:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, well, that's because this is the best of all possible podcasts.

• 13:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh, you're so right. You're so right. All right, so while people are discovering that this is the best podcast ever, let's move on to another amazing bombshell of a discovery about radioactivity.

• 13:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So here's a moment of discovery that really is sort of like the cartoon. There's an accident which leads to a moment of inspiration and then like very rapidly publication and awards.

• 14:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Just real quick to say, you usually don't want the words accident and radioactivity in the same sentence. So I'm hoping this accidental discovery didn't end anyone's life.

• 14:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Pretty sure everybody involved in early radiation discovery has got cancer. Sometimes several times.

• 14:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, you're the downer today. All right.

• 14:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Speaking of X rays and cancer, some listener wrote in recently and told me that until fairly recently, you could go to a shoe store and get a very intense X ray of your foot to like make sure your shoe is sized correctly. Yeah.

• 14:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do not recommend.

• 14:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Do not recommend, absolutely not. Anyway, Becquerel is credited with the discovery of radioactivity, specifically in uranium. And this comes quick on the heels of Runcan's discovery of X rays, which was also an accident. We can dig into that another time, but X rays were the new thing. Everybody was excited about X rays. And Becquerel knew that uranium, if you left it near photographic plates, would leave an imprint on the plate. So for example, uranium crystal, and you put it on top of the plate, that it would leave the shape of the crystal onto the plate. And he was wondering how this worked. And he actually had the totally wrong theory. He thought that uranium was absorbing sunlight and emitting X-rays. Because X-rays were this new, exciting thing. And so he thought, maybe that's what's happening.

• 15:24Daniel Whiteson?

  And so he wanted to do this experiment where he wrapped photographic plates in paper, so that visible light didn't hit them. And then he would put a block of uranium on top of that, and he put the whole thing out in the sunlight. And the idea was, the uranium would absorb sunlight, emit X-rays, which would go through the paper and leave an imprint on the plate. That was his big experiment.

• 15:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 15:43Daniel Whiteson?

  But it was cloudy in Paris, right? Paris did not cooperate with his plans. His experiment needed sunlight. So he put the whole thing in a drawer over the weekend. And he came back after the weekend, and he decided to develop the photographic plate, even though he hadn't put it out in the sunlight. And what he saw was a perfect picture of the uranium crystal, even though there hadn't been any sunlight. And that's when he realized, oh, uranium is actually just generating radiation on its own. It doesn't require sunlight, and it wasn't X-rays. And so this is like his moment of discovery. He realized, wow, this uranium is generating something on its own. He reported it the very next day to like the academic society, and then won the Nobel Prize for it.

• 16:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa. I wonder why he decided to develop the photographic plate anyway?

• 16:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, people asked him this. And he was just like, I don't know, on a hunch, I just was wondering, you know, just like curiosity.

• 16:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 16:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is amazingly lucky.

• 16:38Daniel Whiteson?

  It's very lucky. Yeah, absolutely. And he's also very lucky because it turns out that somebody else did the same thing 40 years earlier, and wrote it up, and reported it, and was just totally ignored.

• 16:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no. And did he, did Becquerel cite this other guy?

• 16:52Daniel Whiteson?

  No, he was just like lost in the literature.

• 16:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 16:55Daniel Whiteson?

  You know how you've done something, and then you think it's clever, and then you discover that some Soviet dude did it in 1978, much better than you did?

• 17:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Happens to me all the time.

• 17:03Daniel Whiteson?

  That's because we have good literature searches, and they didn't at that time. And so, yeah. This was really a moment, right? An accident. Very quickly, Becquerel realized what it meant, and it changed our understanding of the whole microscopic world. And this led to Curie's experiments and the foundation of quantum mechanics.

• 17:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so I had always thought that Curie discovered radioactivity. Can you quickly tell us what it was that she discovered in particular?

• 17:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, so Curie discovered two new radioactive elements. Becquerel discovered radioactivity from uranium salts. Curie discovered polonium and radium. She actually coined the term radioactivity. And Curie's real insight is that radioactivity is an atomic property, not a chemical one. It's not like you got atoms bumping together and emitting something due to some reaction. It's something inside the atom that's happening.

• 17:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, awesome. So next I see that we're talking about the MM experiment, which makes me think about M&Ms, and now I'm hungry. Is this experiment delicious?

• 18:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, this is the experiment to discover whether the different colors of M&Ms actually have different flavors.

• 18:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And why they melt in your mouth but not in your hand, which, side note, absolute bullshit.

• 18:11Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, this is the Michelson-Morley experiment, the famous experiment that taught us that light travels at the same speed for all observers and disproved the existence of the ether.

• 18:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's important.

• 18:23Daniel Whiteson?

  It's important, and it's often told as this groundbreaking experiment, which pivoted our understanding of the universe. And it's true that this was an unexpected result, and it proves something really important about the universe. But contrary to the popular lore, it's not something that was widely understood or appreciated at the time. It's a little bit revisionist history to go back and say, oh, yeah, this experiment happened, and then everybody changed their mind.

• 18:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, so this experiment happened. Nobody changed their mind because they ignored it, just like the last guy who discovered radioactivity, whose name I think we managed to not even say. So take that guy who did it first.

• 19:00Daniel Whiteson?

  That was Abel de St. Victor.

• 19:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, great.

• 19:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Who discovered radioactivity 40 years before Becquerel, but was ignored by the Nobel Committee.

• 19:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, but we've just set it straight.

• 19:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and that's not exactly what happened here. People were aware of this experiment. They just really struggled to digest this bizarre concept that light could travel without a medium. And so let's go back to 1887 when this experiment happened. Back then, we had interference experiments and diffraction studies. We had all this data showing that light was a wave. And Maxwell had his equations that described light as ripples in electromagnetism. But they were wondering, like, what is it a ripple in? You know, like, sound is a ripple in air, and water waves are obviously ripples in water. But what is light propagating through? You know, this velocity that we see should be relative to some medium. If light is the same kind of thing as everything else we've studied.

• 19:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And so Michelson-Morley did this experiment to try to detect that medium. They said, well, if light is moving through some medium, let's call it the ether, and it fills the universe, the earth is also moving through it because the earth goes around the sun. And so as the earth goes around the sun, we should see different velocities of the speed of light because we have a different velocity relative to the ether. And so they did this cool experiment with interferometers, where they had a light beam and they split it, and it went in two perpendicular directions and then came back. And they were very sensitive to small differences because of their cool optics and interferometry. And they expected, when they did the experiment in spring and in summer and in fall and in winter, they would get different results and they could measure our velocity through the ether. But what they found was no difference,

• 20:39Daniel Whiteson?

  that there was never any difference in how long it took light to go one direction or the other. And this was totally insensitive to the time of year. And they, it was really an amazing experiment, like, the detail they put in it to make this thing super sensitive. And so they found nothing, and that was very confusing. Like, obviously now in hindsight, the conclusion is there is no ether and light moves at the same velocity regardless of the observer. And it's a propagation of electromagnetic waves through space itself. We know that now. But it's not fair to say like, we thought there was an ether. We had Michelson more of the experiment. The next day it was like, yeah, let's move on. Obviously there's no ether. Instead, people clung to the ether hypothesis for a long time.

• 21:20Daniel Whiteson?

  They thought, maybe there's a blob of ether and the earth is dragging it along with it. So we can't detect our velocity relative to the ether. Cause we're like in a little pocket of ether. And we had to do all sorts of other studies to disprove that by looking at like the angles of stars and how they change through the year. And so it wasn't widely accepted until after Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905. So this is 20 years later. Einstein comes up with this theoretical explanation for this experiment, which brings it all together and finally makes it all make sense. And it wasn't until then that it was like, okay, yeah, I can put this together. And this is the way the universe works. Really the physics establishment was like, well, that was a strange experiment. We don't understand it.

• 22:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's put it in the hmm category until we figure it out.

• 22:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, one, I think it's nice that they at least paid attention to it. Even if they put it in the hmm category, it was read. So that's good. But did Eminem survive until 1905 to see the work validated?

• 22:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, good question.

• 22:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cause it would have been a delicious moment to know that you were right.

• 22:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, both of them lived on for decades longer. So they definitely saw the theory of relativity become widely accepted.

• 22:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I love hearing that scientists get validation within their lifetime. That's a, that's a good feeling. All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about another discovery before bringing on our other experts.

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• 26:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so in our last experiment, our scientists were deliciously validated. Who is the next scientist we're going to talk about?

• 26:29Daniel Whiteson?

  So we're going to talk about another famous discovery, that of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. This is a really fun story, but there's a nuance here that I think is not widely appreciated, which is again, how long it took to really accept this sort of surprising result. Jocelyn Bell Burnell was a graduate student. She was studying quasars. She was not out to look for pulsars. She was looking for these huge jets that shoot out of black holes. So black holes at the center of galaxies have accretion discs, stuff that's swirling around them, but they also shoot material up their north and south poles. And these things are called quasars, are super duper bright and for a long time not really understood

• 27:10Daniel Whiteson?

  because nobody could understand where the energy for creating such a bright source was coming from. And she was studying these and wanting to understand their time variation. Like you know how a star twinkles because it goes through the atmosphere? These quasars radiate in the radio spectrum and she was looking for their scintillation due to the interaction with the solar wind, like particles in space. So she built this huge radio telescope and a radio telescope is Not like a telescope you look through with your eyeball. It's more like a huge antenna. And she rolled out 120 miles of wire over like four and a half acres to build this big radio antenna to capture this information and to try to understand quasars.

• 27:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, sometimes graduate students do just like absolute mind blowing quantities of work. Like, I imagine it took a long time to lay all of that out. So

• 28:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Shout out to the grad students out there.

• 28:06Daniel Whiteson?

  I know. She did all the work on this. She spent two years just building this telescope. And the data is hilariously old fashioned. You know, you might imagine you're sitting at your laptop. The data comes in, you're analyzing it with some cool visuals. She had a printer which produced 100 feet of paper per day with the data on it. And she like visually analyzed it and looked for stuff like this.

• 28:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 28:28Daniel Whiteson?

  And on November 28th, 1967, while looking for quasars, she saw something weird. She saw pulses separated by regular time intervals from one location. So it's like beep, beep, beep, beep. And this is really weird, right? This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear from the universe. You might expect to hear it from like satellites or from radios or other artificial sources. And so at first she nicknamed it in her notes, LGM1 for little green men. She was like, am I getting signals from aliens here? Have I received the first interstellar transmission?

• 29:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's interesting that the little green men trope was around that early. I guess I hadn't realized that we've been imagining aliens as little green dudes for that long.

• 29:17Daniel Whiteson?

  I think it comes from the history of like badly informed fiction about life on Mars, doesn't it?

• 29:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 29:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's an episode we should do.

• 29:25Daniel Whiteson?

  And so she was wondering like, well, what are the possible explanations for this other than aliens? And so they went through all sorts of cross checks to try to understand what this is. So she's, this is not like Becca Rell where she discovers this. She understands immediately what it is. She goes and publishes it and then wins a Nobel Prize. No, instead she spent months thinking about ways she could Fooling herself like, could this be signals reflected off the moon? Right? Could this just be something from an orbiting satellite? Could it be like an effect from a big building near the telescope? That's like gathering and focusing radio waves. She thought about all of these things and like, this is good science, right?

• 30:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, good for her.

• 30:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Think about all the ways that you could be fooling yourself because she didn't want to embarrass herself. Go off and publish a paper about aliens and then it turns out it was just a tea kettle in the lounge, right?

• 30:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, that would be embarrassing.

• 30:16Daniel Whiteson?

  But finally, it was confirmed with another radio telescope. So she knew it wasn't instrumentation, but this took months, right? Took a long time. And then finally, people understood also that it really was a signal, but it wasn't aliens. These were just super fast spinning neutron stars that emit beams along their poles. And then their poles sweep across the surface of the earth, leaving these regular blips in the radio. So really an amazing and very important discovery for which her advisor won the Nobel Prize and she didn't.

• 30:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's what I was gonna guess. Is this one of those stories where the woman's advisor gets the credit? Ah crud.

• 30:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, and she is so classy. She came to UCI and talked about this and she is very classy and not bitter at all.

• 30:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Good for her.

• 31:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, it's a good story.

• 31:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, it's an awful story, but a good, she did great.

• 31:06Daniel Whiteson?

  She's handled it very well.

• 31:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, okay.

• 31:08Daniel Whiteson?

  And a really fascinating discovery and one that really took a long time to verify that this is real. Right? And that's the thing I want people to understand is like, it's very rare to have a moment where it's obvious that you've discovered something. And you really don't need to do any other cross checks, but it does happen. And very soon after the discovery of the pulsars, there was exactly this kind of discovery. And while these folks were making their discovery, they accidentally left a tape recorder on.

• 31:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 31:36Daniel Whiteson?

  So we have audio, you're going to hear of folks making a mind blowing discovery in real time.

• 31:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 31:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So this story starts with Bell's discovery of the pulsars, right? But these are in the radio and people were wondering like, could you also have pulsars that are in the optical? You could like see in a telescope. So John Koch and Mike Disney were two theorists. These are not astronomers. They didn't like know how to operate a telescope or do data analysis. They were like, well, this is possible. Let's give this a try. Let's go out there and try some experiments. And so they got some time on a telescope at Kit Peak near Tucson, which is a gorgeous place and anyone in Arizona should go up to Kit Peak. And they set up this machinery to convert the flashes into ticks and then listen to it, which is why they had his heat recorder going. But then they converted the ticks into frequency. And so they were looking for a pulse on their oscilloscope,

• 32:28Daniel Whiteson?

  looking for like a little peak on their oscilloscope. And they thought they had it all set up and they went up there and they tried it and they saw nothing and they were very disappointed. And they had two more days to do observations and those two days were both cloudy. So they lost out. And while it was cloudy, they were going for walks and thinking about it. And they realized they had a mistake in their calculation. They were looking in the wrong place. No. But they didn't have any more time. Oh, no. Fortunately, the next guy on the telescope got sick. And so he had to give up his time. So they had one more night. And so they went and they tried their new calculations and they plugged the thing in. And you know, they're just like getting started. They're just like plug it in, turn it on. Okay, let's get going. They didn't really expect to see something.

• 33:09Daniel Whiteson?

  And as you'll hear in this audio, they're really surprised to be making this discovery. So here it is, the audio of their discovery.

• 33:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  This next observation will be observation number 18.

• 33:22Daniel Whiteson?

  You've got a bleeding pulse here. Hey. Wow. You don't suppose that's really heavy, yeah? It can be. It's right bang in the middle of the period, but maybe right bang in the middle of the scale.

• 33:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  It really looks something from here at the moment. It's growing too. It's growing outside a bit too. God, it is, isn't it? Yeah. It's a bleeding pulse. It's growing, John. It is. Look. It is. You're right. This is so much fun.

• 34:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I love also their mid-Atlantic accents. It looks like a bleeding pulse.

• 34:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not sure that's exactly the mid-Atlantic accent that I grew up with in New Jersey, but, uh, but yes, it's a fun accent.

• 34:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I love listening to this, you know, where they're trying to convince themselves it can't be it, but it really is. Oh my gosh. And look at it's going. It's so exciting. Yay, we did it.

• 34:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  We did it.

• 34:22Daniel Whiteson?

  There really was nothing else that this could be. It was exactly what they were hoping for and exactly the place they thought they might be able to see it. And it all worked and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they had it. So sometimes you really do have those amazing moments of discovery.

• 34:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did they also get Nobels?

• 34:37Daniel Whiteson?

  No, it helped us understand the Crab Nebula and it was a really important result, but their discovery was in 69 and Bell discovered her first pulsar in 68. And in 74, the Nobel Prize in Physics was not given to any of these folks, only to the advisor of Bell.

• 34:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is not cool.

• 34:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Not cool. Exactly.

• 34:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, we've now gone through some really exciting examples to give you like a real personal taste for what it's like to make these discoveries.

• 35:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's talk to somebody who's an actual expert in discoveries, a historian of science, a philosopher of science, who thinks about the nature of discovery. So it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast Professor Lydia Patton. She's a professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech, where she specializes in philosophy of science and history of science, especially on the development of experimental and formal methods. Some of her recent work focuses on gravitational wave discoveries. Lydia, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast.

• 35:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. It's great to talk to you.

• 35:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So we are two scientists on this podcast, talking about our experience of discovery and our understanding of it, but we're not experts in that, right? We are scientists, doesn't make us experts in like the history of science, philosophy of science, which is why I wanted to invite you on the show and ask you about the concept of scientific discovery. Most people, I think, have a view of discovery as sort of a eureka moment. You see one thing, you understand the universe is different from the way you thought it was. It all clicks in your head. You run down the street naked, shouting it at the top of your lungs. Everybody accepts it and then we sort of move on and make the next discovery. Is that real? Does that really happen often? Or does it sort of clash with the reality of the day-to-day working of science?

• 36:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so, I mean, Archimedes supposedly did happen at least once that someone did that. But I think there, I think there are moments when everything falls into place.

• 36:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the first thing that I think is really easy to understand is that those moments are often hard one. So even the Archimedes moment, it wasn't as if he just came up with the concept of the lever, came up with the concept of displacement like out of nowhere. He had been thinking about that for a long time and there are great sort of accounts of that in the history of science.

• 36:59Daniel Whiteson?

  So are you telling me this really happened? Like, we actually have documented evidence that this happened? Or this is apocryphal?

• 37:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, probably not. That's the, no, the myth is that he was in his bathtub, which I, you know, who knows whether they even had bathtubs at the time, right? But, and that's, he, he figured out the concept of displacement from something falling in the water. And that that's why he was running through the streets naked, shouting eureka, like I figured. But even that story, which is probably apocryphal, he has to know what he's looking for in the first place. Like, he has to know why, like, the average person, if they just see something fall in their bathwater, are not going to say, oh, this is a physics concept, you know? This is something that, that I can use to solve all these physics problems. Well, you

• 37:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  had to have a lot of training to even recognize that that's a problem. And you had to have a lot of background to even figure out, like, okay, this is going to help me with mechanics. This is going to help me with something with a problem that I want to solve. And so I think that the first thing is, even with those kind of eureka moments, there's often, you know, five, 10 years of difficult training and preparation in the background of them to even recognize what it is when you see it.

• 38:12Daniel Whiteson?

  And not just training to recognize, but also lots of failures, right? Lots of moments where it didn't all come together, things you tried that didn't work.

• 38:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  That didn't work out and things that didn't solve the problem. And it's like, it, I mean, people often use the example of solving a puzzle. That's not quite it, but it's

• 38:30Speaker 05

  The idea is you, even if it is something as simple as solving a puzzle, and I would agree that science is more complicated than that. But even with a puzzle-solving metaphor, you have to try and fail a whole bunch of times before you start figuring it out. Like, if you think about when you were a kid and you tried to do the Rubik's Cube, it took a long time to try to figure it out until you could reliably do it. And it's kind of the same thing.

• 38:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Fascinating. And so even this canonical story, this eureka moment, is probably a story that's been made up to convey to the general public what this is like. How long has there been sort of this disconnect? Why are we making up stories about how scientific discoveries happen? Like, where do these cartoon versions come from and why do we need them?

• 39:17Speaker 05

  That is one of the biggest questions that I think historians of science wrestle with. Philosophers of science maybe a bit less. But philosophers of science deal with something where we wonder a lot about why we have a need for truth in science.

• 39:33Daniel Whiteson?

  That seems like an obvious question.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  It is an obvious question, but it's a tough question to answer. Why do we want to think that science describes reality, right? And so this is one of the biggest questions in contemporary philosophy of science is why, what makes us think that the claims of science are claims about real things that actually exist, or claims about truth are true claims? And I think that there's something so seductive about truth that the idea is that, for one thing, you can use it to win any argument, which to any philosopher is going to be super attractive, right?

• 40:09Speaker 05

  It's like your sort of trump card, you lay it down and you win the argument because you have made a claim that's just true. And I think that that's, that kind of feeling, like, oh, now I win any argument. Now I just come out on top. You know, if I end up in an argument on social media, like, if I just bring this out, everybody will have to agree that I'm right.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  And I think that kind of certainty is what's very attractive. Certainty, winning the argument. Being right, these are all very attractive things. And I think that what's masked behind that, so of course, if we think of science as being the source of certainty, the source of rightness, and a privileged source of being able to win any argument, even a political or a social argument. If we think of science as being in that position, then that means that if someone makes a scientific discovery that gives us truth and certainty and ways of winning the argument, then that sort of fits in with that narrative.

• 41:18Speaker 05

  That, oh, okay, now we're on top, we're the, we're winning. And we have this certain true picture of the way the world works, which is also extremely attractive.

• 41:27Daniel Whiteson?

  I see. So it's compelling to imagine that like, truth is revealed to us in these moments. And that we can share with people and be like, see, look, this is the way the universe works. It's X and it's not Y. And the data itself will convince everyone. That's the idea.

• 41:42Speaker 05

  That's the idea. And there have been multiple examples of that. One of my favorites is with somebody I've studied some in my career is someone named Hermann von Helmholtz. And he was a German polymath, really. He physicist, philosopher, mathematician, many other things. And one of the things that he did was, in the beginning of his career, he really went after vitalism in medicine. The idea that there's a kind of vital force over and above the forces of metabolism and so forth in the human body. And the thing is that many medical systems, many medical approaches in like ancient Chinese medicine

• 42:24Speaker 05

  and in many traditional medical sort of paradigms are based on this idea of a life force. That what medicine is doing is kind of helping the life force to get stronger so that people will survive. And one of the first things that Helmholtz did, and he wasn't even a medical doctor, you know, was do a whole bunch of experiments that disproved in his mind the vitalist hypothesis. And his achievements in conjunction with the achievements of a bunch of other people in that same vein basically killed the vitalist paradigm. And it had a huge impact. And so what happened was that people had this kind of certainty, like he had this kind of certainty.

• 43:07Speaker 05

  I honestly look back at Helmholtz and I think he didn't really know. He was involved with a group of people who, the Berlin Physical Society, they thought that vitalism was wrong and that everything should be explained by, you know, material processes in the body and so forth. But they didn't have any absolute proof of it, but they were, they were seeking it. And so that was what they wanted to find. And so there's this kind of sense that if there's something that you want to establish beyond any possible doubt, you try to look for this eureka moment. You try to look for this certainty in science and that that's the value of science. That's one account of the value of science is that it gives you this kind of truth and certainty that you're looking for.

• 43:51Daniel Whiteson?

  That's just something a little bit troubling that you're more likely to be convinced by something you expect to hear, right? Which is maybe why it takes a long time to accept some data which counters your understanding. You know, tectonic plates and the Michelson-Morley experiment. Why can't we just let the data speak? Is there some part of our science which is too subjective? Which, you know, makes us skeptical of some discoveries and more accepting of others? Is there a way we can upgrade our science to make it less subjective?

• 44:24Speaker 05

  Okay, that is, that is a great and huge question. I think, why can't we, I'll tackle, why can't we just let the data speak? Because to me, that is, that is one of the biggest questions that I look at. Data does not speak in and of itself. That's one, there are a lot of people who say, well, oh, I'm evidence based. Oh, I just go by what the data said. Oh, I just go. And there's something to be said for that. I mean, you do need to test your claims against the evidence. If your, if your claims just keep getting refuted by obvious experiments, then either you need to adjust your claims somehow or, you know, I mean, that I think everyone knows is the, the scientific method that you have to, part of a scientific method is that if what you're saying just keeps being refuted

• 45:08Speaker 05

  by experiments or tests, then it's wrong. But to say that is not to say that you can gather new data. And immediately know everything about what it says. And a lot of times, even very high level scientists will will say, look, you know, we're running this experiment. And one of the most exciting things about it is that we're getting data that even we don't understand.

• 45:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  You know, even we need a new paradigm or a new framework to fit this in in order to understand what it's telling us. It's like learning a new language, you know, you you have all of the information there, but you need to be able to translate it into something to allow us to understand what's happened. And I think there are a lot of discoveries in science that worked that way, where a lot of experiments, especially in science, that worked that way. Where they were what Friedrich Steinle calls exploratory experiments. Where people were just trying out different hypotheses, just testing out what they might be able to find. And then they get this data and it's really interesting data, but they're not really sure what it means. And they have to come up with a new explanation to even

• 46:16Speaker 05

  to even get the the kind of the juice out of it, to get the the real information out of the data.

• 46:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, so it sounds like you're telling me, and I apologize for asking you to summarize or simplify an entire like hundred year long argument among philosophers. But it sounds like you're telling me there's no way to be purely objective about science because the process of interpreting data is inherently subjective or personal or dependent on your point of view and the questions you're asking and the and the explanations you're interested in accepting.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  Okay, so that's a slight, that's a somewhat provocative way of putting what I just said.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  So I would somewhat, so the whole objectivity, subjectivity debate is a is a is a big one. And so what I would say is it's not so much that you have to choose your subjective slant on the data. But it is that even objective facts require an interpretation of the data. So I think it's actually kind of independent of the objective, subjective divide. I think it's that if a lot of, you know, a lot of times what you have is just like this detector clicked five times in a minute. Well, what does that mean?

• 47:32Speaker 05

  Well, we only know what that means. We don't have, it's not like we have to pick what we think about it or what we expect or what we want out of it. It's that even in order to know what that means, why did the detector click so many times? What's going on there? You need to know what the setup of the experiment is. You need to know what the theory is that it's trying to test. You need to have some kind of framework for interpretation. And that, I think, is the part that that sometimes gets confused is people think, well, that's just your opinion then. That's not science. I'm like, well, no, the science is in knowing all of that, like knowing how the experiment works, what kind of information we can sort of get from the data once we get it. And that process doesn't have to be subjective,

• 48:18Speaker 05

  but it doesn't give us objective results without any effort.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  I think that's really where I I see attention.

• 48:25Daniel Whiteson?

  So science is sort of a complex and nuanced process. But I think that a lot of people have the impression that science sort of came into being all very quickly, a few hundred years ago, when, you know, Galileo and Bacon understood the importance of empiricism and doing experiments. Is that a cartoonish, simplified version of the development of science? Can you give us a sort of more nuanced view of like how we came to develop this engine for discovery?

• 48:54Speaker 05

  The process of coming to a scientific understanding didn't come into being immediately. And even thinking of our understanding of the world as scientific is a relatively recent phenomenon. So most of the people who we think of as the pioneers of the scientific method would have thought of themselves as natural philosophers. The tradition of natural philosophy encompassed philosophy, science, theology, just multiple ways of of understanding the world. And the publication of Newton, as you probably know, the publication of Newton, where he introduces the laws of nature and the laws of physics and so forth,

• 49:40Speaker 05

  was called The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, not The Mathematical Principles of Physics. And so for a long time, the idea was just, we're trying to understand the world. We're trying to understand things. From whatever perspective we may have. And the idea of science, however, is extremely old. So you have even, you know, some of the ancient Greek philosophers talking about science. And so the idea that it came into being with Bacon and Galileo is actually even too recent, right? Like, the idea of a scientific understanding is very old. But at the same time, even people who were doing what we would think of as pioneering science

• 50:24Speaker 05

  did so under the banner of another heading, right? So it was really, in my view, historically, in the 1800s, that those two things started blending in an institutional context to give us something like the modern idea that there is a department or a faculty in the university that is specifically devoted to science. And that's really more of a professional idea than anything to do with the essence of the way that science is carried out. This is the briefest thing I can say about it. If you spend a lot of time around historians of philosophy of science, historians of science, you will realize that the further back you get, the more complicated this all is.

• 51:09Speaker 05

  And the more you find people in very different fields contributing to science. You find people like Goethe contributing to plant science. Schiller, in the 19th century, they were cited often by, like, major scientists in the, in the German 19th century. And, and we don't really know what to do with that because we have a particular, you know, idea of the way, of who a scientist is and who gets to be a scientist. And that person works at a certain type of university or a research project. That person has certain types of professional bona fides that we require. And historically, that just hasn't been true because that didn't exist.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  And so I think that there's been much more of- A broad sort of pluralistic understanding of what science is, the more you sort of push things backwards. A lot of people were doing research for like private corporations. They were doing research. I mean, if you look at Michael Faraday, you know, he was one of the most important people in the history of electricity and magnetism. And a lot of his work was done privately. It wasn't done at a university because he didn't have university training. But that's one point. That's the sort of historical point that science is very complicated and it the current understanding is actually very historically specific, even though we think of it as, again, searching for this kind of certainty and eternal truths,

• 52:36Speaker 05

  we think of it as like the way to be a scientist, but it's certainly not in history.

• 52:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And Faraday's examples should give motivation to all the folks out there who are amateur physicists coming up with their own theories of everything in the garage, right? It can happen.

• 52:49Speaker 05

  100%. I mean, this is the guy who came up with the motor, basically.

• 52:55Speaker 05

  I think that should be an example to anyone.

• 52:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So you alluded earlier to this deep question in philosophy about whether science is discovering truth, you know, is what we're learning about the universe really universal? Does it reflect the way we think? Fascinating question. I'd love to dig into it in another episode, but I want to ask you a related question, which is about the universality of the process of science. We have this technique we've been building up and evolving this then developing to learn about the universe. Do you think that it's likely that other intelligent civilized races around the galaxy, for example, are doing science? You know, I'm not asking, is there a person they call a scientist and do they have the same cultural institutions? I think that's very unlikely. But do you think they have also stumbled on the process

• 53:43Daniel Whiteson?

  of building hypotheses, doing experiments, refining that? Do you think we're likely to find that in alien species?

• 53:51Speaker 05

  Oh, that's a great question. So I think, I think one of the things I think

• 53:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  About that is that it's closely related to another question, which is, is science inevitable in the way that we've developed it? So on any planet with any species, or even if we went back and reran the tape of our history,

• 54:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Yep.

• 54:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Would it all happen the same way? And I think it wouldn't necessarily, even if the changes were just minor. There are people who argue that certain formal features of science would always inevitably be the same way. We would always find some way to do experiments. We would always find some way to test our claims. We would always find some way to incorporate formal reasoning. Right. I'm not sure that's true.

• 54:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It seems awfully flattering, right? To say that the way we're doing it has got to be the only way.

• 54:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are very triumphalist about our way of doing science.

• 54:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 54:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  We think that we have the way and that this is the right way. And, and, and I think that sometimes people cling to it as a, as a way of solving our problems. You know, the idea is if we could just all get on board, if everyone could just trust the science and trust the scientists, and we would all get. And it's funny how the people who get the most skeptical look in their eyes when they hear this are scientists, right? They're like, us, but why, why are we supposed to save everybody? You know, like, what's, wait a minute. And, and I think that's one of the, one of the aspects of science that's kind of funny is that, you know, what it, what it shouldn't be required to do is save the world. And I think we want it to, but it, it shouldn't be required to. It's a means of discovery. It's a means of exploration. Now, do I think that there would be scientific discovery

• 55:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  in any curious, intelligent species on other planets or wherever they might be? Of course, yeah, right? I mean, I think in their own way, right? Like bacteria explorer. And, you know, this is something that, of course, a biologist would be better, better suited to, to talk about in detail. But there are species that, in their own way, are.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  Exploring, making experiments, figuring out which environments are better. And we don't have any way of knowing whether they're doing that intentionally or for what purpose. But I think that it's a little condescending to assume that because we don't know that they're not doing anything. You know, I think even if we just look at our planet, there are lots more species that are probably doing something closer to the scientific method than we might think.

• 56:23Daniel Whiteson?

  What's a good candidate, do you think?

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Uh, well, one of my colleagues at Virginia Tech, Ashley Shu, did her dissertation on New Caledonian crows. There is other work on New Caledonian crows. I think they're a good example of tool-using creatures in any case and who have done... If I were better versed in this area, I would have lots more examples.

• 56:42Daniel Whiteson?

  But does having many examples on Earth make an argument that it's more likely to exist on other planets as well, like other environments?

• 56:50Speaker 05

  I would like for that to be true because, as you say, maybe you didn't intend to say this, but it's his interpretation, it kind of throws a mirror up to our own practices and says, um, look, again, what we want is this idea of the inevitability of the scientific method in the way that we've discovered it or developed it. The certainty of science, the truth of science, the idea that we've figured out the one right way. And I think that triumphalism is a nice word for that. And I think that thinking about, well, wait, what if they do it differently elsewhere? What if there are other ways of doing this, whether on the Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy?

• 57:33Speaker 05

  And we're more able to reach out, um, send signals to other places now than we ever have been. And I think that the possibility that there might be another way of doing science, on the one hand, it sort of undermines that idea of certainty and truth. And on the other hand, that's, that could be seen as a good thing. That could be a good thing.

• 57:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Wonderful. Well, I look forward to all these developments in the process of science itself and our social relationship with science. I want to end by asking you one last question, and this is going to be the most controversial, politically-charged question I'm going to ask you.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 58:12Daniel Whiteson?

  If you had to choose, would you rather live in Virginia or California?

• 58:15Speaker 05

  Oh. Oh. Oh, my gosh.

• 58:21Speaker 06

  I mean, but California.

• 58:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you. All right. Excellent. You've come down on my side of the argument. I appreciate it. From a professor in Virginia. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming on the pod and talking to us about the process of science and discovering.

• 58:38Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Thank you. Great to talk.

• 58:50Speaker 04

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• 1:02:29Daniel Whiteson?

  We're back, and today we're talking about the process of scientific discovery. Up next, we have a fun interview with Professor Brian Keating, who's written a book about his interviews with Nobel Prize laureates. So it's my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Professor Brian Keating. He's a cosmologist and a distinguished professor of physics at University of California, San Diego. He's also the co-director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination. He's a principal investigator of the Simons Observatory, and he has a side hustle of writing books and doing podcasts. He's the author of Losing the Nobel Prize, of Into the Impossible, and of Volume Two, focused like a Nobel Prize winner, we'll be talking about today. And he's the host of the Into the Impossible podcast.

• 1:03:14Daniel Whiteson?

  So he's one of those rare unicorns that both does physics research and talks about it to the public. Brian, welcome back to the pod.

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  Ah, it's great to see you. You know, it's always great to be with you.

• 1:03:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Wonderful. Well, I really enjoyed reading your book. It's fascinating to hear these thoughts from all of these luminaries. My first question to you is a simple one, though, like, what is your secret for getting access to all these Nobel Prize winners, for young science journalists or aspiring podcasters out there? How do you manage to set up these conversations?

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  Well, I think, you know, it's called the, I think it's called the Matthew Effect. So, say Matthew said, the rich get richer, effectively. So it started off, as you said, with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. And we were blessed here to have people like Freeman Dyson and, you know, local on staff. And so we just got to hang out and to say he was my first guest on the podcast is a pretty awesome, awesome expression I never thought would, would, you know, be a thing that I could say. And then after, you know, getting people like him, then a Nobel laureate like, you know, Roger Penrose, who I knew before he was a Nobel laureate, some say, you know, responsible for it. But that's just me.

• 1:04:24Daniel Whiteson?

  People are saying, yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  The voice is in my skull. And then other just great luminaries would come to give a colloquium, you know, Barry Barish, or, you know, people like that. And then I felt it was a real shame and a disservice to the University of California, the people that you You and I serve so selflessly and such low wages that we, you know, wouldn't share that with the with the California taxpayers and with the locals that couldn't make it to campus. And so decided to record audio and and then later on made it into videos. And then every time someone of a great stature, whether a Nobel laureate or not, would come by, I would ask them if they wouldn't mind sitting for an interview. Well, you know, half of them agreed to come on. Unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity.

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  There are only, I think there's only four living women who have won the Nobel Prize. And only, I think, two are American or three are American. And so it was hard to get, you know, them especially because they they're sick of getting asked, what's it like to be a woman? You know, and so I try not to do that. So but for this volume, the second volume, I did get the opportunity to speak to Donna Strickland, who is an amazing experimentalist and hilarious and disarming and ultimately incredibly gracious. I've interviewed 22 so far, including, I have this book somewhere around here, the guy who invented Viagra, Dr. Lou Ignarro, who's at UCLA, not far from you. And he's my 22nd interview.

• 1:05:50Speaker 05

  And after the second group of nine, so 18, I decided I'd put out another volume and that's where we're at today.

• 1:05:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So of all the people on the earth, or at least the people I know, you've probably spoken to more Nobel Prize winners than anybody.

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  I think that's true.

• 1:06:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And, you know, I want to dig into in a minute what you think their methods have in common. But what do you think their moments of discovery have in common? Do you think they all share this like eureka moment? Or do you think in each case it was like a gradual understanding of this novel realization about the universe? What do those moments have in common?

• 1:06:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there's this cliche from Isaac Asimov that, you know, a real scientist doesn't say eureka because that's kind of means I have found it in Greek, as we all know. And and that means you found what you're looking for, which is the recipe for confirmation bias, which we're not supposed to fall victim to. So I think the, you know, their reaction. Is more more often than not, you know, what I call sheer terror of of suspecting that you might be right. But with so little confidence and conviction that you could be wrong. And effectively that that leads this type of paralysis where you're like not sure. And so what do you do as a good sign? You just keep collecting data.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  And I think the thing that separates these individuals from, you know, me, I'll say, not you, but me is is that they don't, you know, kind of. They had this courage to be, you know, to lean into the discovery and really, you know, kind of reify it and make it make it whole. And and I think that that kind of courage is rare. It's rare in individuals, let alone in scientists. So I think that ability to see that they've done enough that like the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. That, you know, once you've established this thing, it's now up to you to kind of then convert from scientist to what I call salesman mode. Where you really have to convince other scientists that you're right. And it's not enough for you to think you're brilliant.

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  I mean, only one person in this whole collection of 22 people has admitted to me that they they deserve the Nobel. Like, you know, it was something they were gunning for their whole life. They knew where they were going to win it. It was preternaturally preordained.

• 1:07:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So what do you think these folks have done to prepare themselves for these moments, for these great discoveries? Is it just luck or have they sort of made themselves, have they sort of set themselves up to be lucky?

• 1:08:06Speaker 05

  Some say that they are lucky. A lot just never stopped working on stuff. And the fact that they won a Nobel Prize was sort of incidental. That it was, you know, was something that they didn't plan on. You know, for example, I talked to Giorgio Parisi, who, you know, won the Nobel Prize in part for, you know, predictions and theoretical physics ranging from spin glasses, what are called spin glasses, to you know, kind of chaotic invariance and and chaos theory. And there's a few people in the book that have relevance to chaos theory. And so it's it's almost impossible to to kind of predict that I'm gonna, you know, go out and solve this thing that has to do with how these birds migrate called starlings and how they flock and.

• 1:08:51Speaker 05

  The behavior and the phase transitions that they exhibit after working on SO10 symmetry group, after looking at spin glasses and so forth. So a lot of them have these very tortured paths to the Nobel Prize, but their intellects are just such of such a magnitude that it's it's sort of obvious in hindsight that they would get to this level.

• 1:09:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And what about their daily habits? Is there anything they have in common? You know, do they all start with the same super espresso? Or do they all, you know, like block out time for themselves? Or is there anything there that's like very concrete that we can extract from their success?

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, no, there's no like, you know, special cereal, you know,

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  Wheaties or Sweeties or something like that. But there are, you know, kind of traits, I would say there wouldn't say necessarily habits, although they all have this, you know, kind of chimeric ability to be incredibly joyous when they're working. It's not a drudge. It's not something that they do that's tedious or and I found it, you know, a little bit depressing because what we do as experimental scientists working on big projects, almost none of it, at least in my experiences, has to do with physics. I mean, yesterday, we are on telecon with my fellow, you know, kind of co-leaders and we're talking about like how to get these louvers that open on

• 1:10:18Speaker 05

  the generators that power the Simons observatories telescope motor platforms when they get clogged with snow and you want to, you know, ingest the right volume of air to cool the turbines, you have to cool them even though you're, you know, eight meters of snow fell this year, you know. And so it's just like, or the concrete, you know, contractors on strike in Chile, which happens, you know, once a month, it's the season or whatever. And then we have to deal with So it's rare that we get to spend time like thinking about the cosmic microwave background. And so I think the tenacity, the intellectual rigor, and the desire to lean into teaching and service and giving back after the prize. And I'm sure they did before the prize too. But that's the commonality I observe in their current state as I got to observe them collapsed in that wave.

• 1:11:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And you draw another lesson from all of their experiences. I mean, it's in the title of your book, and you go into it in great detail. You think that folks should focus on a topic that we should go deep instead of broad as scientists. That sort of clashes with some historical trends, right? Folks like Gauss or Newton, you know, they're extremely broad. Why do you think that today scientists have to focus, have to be deeper?

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's the fields and the amount of knowledge has expanded so much that it's basically impossible, even when you focus on one subfield, sub-sub-subfield, or you know, sub-sub-subfield. And to do that, you know, it's easier to do that in one field, obviously, than it is in many. And I think it's incredibly fascinating when you see that they could do so many other things. You know, Reinhard Genzel is a great example. Like, he could have done any, he actually could have been an Olympic athlete. He was an incredible athlete. His father was very into physical sports in Germany. And, you know, he could have done a lot of things, not just in, outside of science

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  or in technology and optics, you know, he really pioneered along with our colleague in the University of California, Andrea Gez, this concept, application, rather, of adaptive optics to picking up the black hole in the Milky Way Center as a laboratory to test general relativity. So there's so many things there. He could have gotten into optics, he could have gotten into general relativity experimentally, he could have done more stuff, but he could Have also gone into DARPA and would they use these same techniques in, for example, in adaptive optics, where you have these deformable mirrors that compensate for the distortion of the earth's lens-like atmosphere that causes stars to twinkle, twinkle, little

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  star. He could have applied that, as they do now, to like sniper scopes, you know, which is an application of adaptive optics that, you know, is for military purposes. But there's many other things, artificial guides. A lot of the technology was classified, you know, in the US at least. So he could have done a multitude of things, but that's really what he's done. And I think, you know, it's, but it's, he's only, he's the literal next generation after Charles Towns, also a UC, you know, professor, fellow of ours. And, and he, you know, was known for extremely broad knowledge of reasoning. I mean, he credits his, his ability to blow glass. I don't know if he knew that. He went to like Towson or

• 1:13:33Speaker 05

  some small school, had like blow glass for, you know, champagne bottles. And then that became very useful in making vacuum tubes for, you know, eventually creating rarefied gas vials that were then used to do mazer simulation that led to the mazer and then the laser. And then he got into like looking for aliens and optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence and adaptive optic. It was just incredibly. So that was one generation between him and his, his advisees, his student, Reinhard Genzel. And yeah, you know, he could do it. And it was, and I don't think Reinhard's less intelligent. So yeah, from my perspective,

• 1:14:13Speaker 05

  I think there's just so much to know now. So it's hard to focus because so many distractions. I'm not talking about outside the lab. I'm talking about inside your own field. How do you focus? And I like this acronym that people, you know, use that, you know, focus should be thought of as an acronym for follow one course until successful. And I wish I had done that. You know, I'm glad that I have kind of a broad education, not just within physics, but outside of Physics, but I, I think there's a lot greater path to success to do something that only you can do.

• 1:14:46Daniel Whiteson?

  But how do you know when to focus? Like, how do you know as a young scientist that you found the right field? Personally, I started out in plasma physics and then solid state physics. And it wasn't until I got to particle physics that I was like, oh, this is my jam.

• 1:14:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:14:59Daniel Whiteson?

  This is where I want to dive deep. So, you know, if I had focused too early, I'd be doing fusion research right now and promising, you know, the tokamak would turn on and ignite next year for the last 10 years. So how do you know when to focus?

• 1:15:12Speaker 05

  So I think maybe you wouldn't in the sense that you weren't really able to focus at the level of say, you know, Michael Jordan practicing a thousand jump shots after every game or something like that, you know? In other words, you had to find your path and then you followed the course that led to success. In your case, that was particle physics. I also started off, I want to be a condensed matter theorist, God forbid. You know, now I'm an experimental cosmologist. But I think a lot of my success, at least, or my ability to maintain this is not the subject at all. I think it has nothing to do with the subject.

• 1:15:50Speaker 05

  So from my perspective, the, the focus of the book is to implement skills and tactics and habits and strategies so that you can become an expert.

• 1:16:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So there's this lore about big discoveries. I've often heard people say that you can't make paradigm shifting discoveries after you're 30 or something.

• 1:16:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Daniel Whiteson?

  So in your experience talking to folks, did they make these discoveries when they were young? Or is it after like decades of focusing and refining and coming to the edge of the field that they've made their discoveries?

• 1:16:20Speaker 05

  Most of them did make it as young people. It's, yeah, well, well, here's the thing though. Well, first let me say, I think that also correlates with what I said earlier that, you know, you want to get on course early in life. I don't necessarily correlate it with age as well as I do with thinking yourself as a professional. So getting on track early is, I think, you know, cornerstone. So they all got on track that some of them did, you know, kind of branch out either after or at the same time. You know, most notably, you know, I think Kip Thorne is probably the exception that he really did the work that won him the Nobel Prize in his 50s. You know, if you think about it, but the groundwork was laid in his 20s and 30s.

• 1:17:03Speaker 05

  So I think that's important to know, but, but the way that they get to it, everyone gets to Sweden in a different way.

• 1:17:10Daniel Whiteson?

  So talking to all these folks, has it changed the way that you do science?

• 1:17:14Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, I had an unhealthy obsession with the Nobel Prize as a, as a kid, as a young scientist. As I wrote about in my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, which is a memoir about, you know, the bicep affair of thinking we discovered cosmic inflationary gravitational waves. And then having to retract that and then, you know, with the aftermath of that biting the dust, as you called it, very painfully so, Daniel. I'm still smarting from that, but, but in reality, yeah, how do you recover? How do you do science? How do you compete with your colleagues and all sorts of nasty stuff about science that you don't really ever get to see? Because science is always presented as, you know, so and so had this brilliant idea and then so and so won the Nobel Prize.

• 1:17:57Speaker 05

  And then this is now how we teach it, even our labs at UCSD, I'm sure Irvine too. You know, we're teaching, here's a Nobel Prize winning experiment, here's another one. Some of these things took 40 years to get to work and we just do it in an afternoon. So I think there, it's changed my opinion that I don't venerate it. I don't venerate the prize. The people are impressive, but they're just people and a lot of them, Barry Barish wrote the foreword to the first volume, Think Like a Nobel Prize. And, you know, he said that he had the imposter syndrome even worse after he won the Nobel Prize than he did before it. I said, what are you talking about?

• 1:18:34Speaker 05

  He said, when you win a Nobel Prize, kidding, you'll never know this feeling, but you go to Stockholm and you get this huge gold medal, like, you know, Flava Flav. And they want to make sure that you confirm that you got your prize due to you. And so they make you sign this book, this ledger that has every single Nobel laureate in physics back to the beginning in nineteen oh one with the invention of the X-ray by Wilhelm Röntgen. And so Barry tells me in twenty, you know, twenty twenty, uh, that when he won it in twenty seventeen, you, he went there and he's curious guy and he's turns the pages in the book and he sees, you know, oh my God, there's, there's Feynman. Oh my God, there's, you know, Madame Curie. Oh my

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  God, there's Einstein. And he said that he saw Einstein's signature. He said, I don't deserve to be in the same book as him. Let alone, you know, being the same mention as him. And I said, Barry, I've got good news and good news for you. First of all, Einstein had the imposter syndrome. And he's like, what are you talking about? He's like Einstein. I told him Einstein wrote that Isaac Newton contributed more to civilization than even he did to science. And his contributions to science will never be matched again. And I said, but that's not all, Barry, because Isaac Newton had the imposter syndrome. And now he's like, oh, you gotta be kidding. And then he said, uh, I told him, no, actually Isaac Newton felt that he utterly failed to live up to the standard set by his hero.

• 1:20:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 1:20:02Speaker 05

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:20:03Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  In fact, he reputedly died a virgin, uh, in order to emulate the only way he could emulate, you know, couldn't turn loaves into fishes and water into wine, but he could die a virgin. And in fact, he did. But some say that was because of his personality, like.

• 1:20:18Daniel Whiteson?

  The first incel.

• 1:20:21Speaker 05

  That's right. So it's changed me, I think, to not venerate the prize as much. I do think it's type of idol.

• 1:20:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So one of the things I like about your book is that you look forward to the next generations and you imagine that young people are reading it and thinking about their careers. And so what is the takeaway for young readers? You have to give them one piece of advice to aspiring scientists or you're talking to your graduate students or prospective grad students. What do you advise them about how to chart a path through a changing field, you know, which is different from the field that we grew up in and will be different in twenty years. What is your advice to the next generation?

• 1:20:56Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. So for me, it's all comes down to conservation laws. In this case, conservation of energy. You know, energy, time, whatever you want to say. It's very hard to, but if you concentrate and you conserve, it's a form of focus, right? I mean, you take a magnifying glass, you take a light, you can concentrate the sunlight and and burn up those little worms that, no, no, I'm just kidding. I never do that out there, PETA, but you can melt an army man, right? You ever did that?

• 1:21:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Speaker 05

  That's what I used to do. Right? But you can't just hold them up in the sun, right? So you have to concentrate, you have to focus, you have to conserve it and narrow down. So for me, it's prioritization. What is the most important thing on your plate? Like, do the hardest tasks that are most necessary. You know, there's this Eisenhower matrix framework, important, urgent, you know, and whatever different spectrum of tasks. And, you know, for me, it's like, the most important thing I think a young person can do is to say no. Because the better you are, you know, there's a saying in the business world, like, if you want something done right, ask someone who's too busy to do it. Because they're the ones that, and you know this, there's like only a handful of people

• 1:22:07Speaker 05

  on an experiment that really do, you know, 90% of the work. This might be 10% that do 90% work. And those people, they're so oversubscribed that their energy is so drained, they're so distracted, and they're so, you know, kind of torn by their eagerness to please, that they don't set boundaries. And so, I really do tell my students to concentrate, conserve, focus, whatever you want to say, on energy, and do that by having appropriate boundaries in time and in space.

• 1:22:38Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, thanks very much. The book is called Into the Impossible, Volume Two, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. Thanks very much for coming and telling us about all the wisdom you've gleaned from all of these successful stories.

• 1:22:51Speaker 05

  Thank you, Daniel. I want to get back to your audience too, because I love the audience. And your audience is kind of that key demographic. So for people that do get a copy of this book, if you're in academia, I love to give out these meteorites. I think I've given them to Daniel.

• 1:23:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I have one here on my shelf, yes.

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  Give them to your kids. And so, to get one, if you're in academia, like my ideal target demographic, just go to briankeating.com/edu and sign up for my mailing list, which I send out every Monday with some cool stuff, including appearances like this, and thoughts on academia and life as a scientist, etc. So briankeating.com/edu with your edu email address. And if you live in the USA, you will get one of these beauties that was delivered.

• 1:23:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Delivered by Gravity, not the US Postal Service, and I will deliver it to you. Amazing. And you can also catch Brian on his podcast, Into the Impossible. All right. Thanks very much, Brian. Thanks, Daniel.

• 1:23:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:23:56Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:24:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:24:08Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org.

• 1:24:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:24:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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