What Really Happened In Antarctica? Julian Dorey x Brian Keating

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this special crossover episode, Brian Keating joins Julian Dorey to celebrate Julian's impressive milestone of reaching 1 million subscribers. Together, they take a deep dive into the latest theories shaking up our understanding of the universe—from fresh debates surrounding the Big Bang, new discoveries about dark matter and dark energy, to the powerful technology transforming how we explore the cosmos. Key Takeaways: 00:00 "NASA's Impact Despite Small Budget" 09:03 Discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background 15:03 "Big Bang Evidence in Tap Water" 17:21 Meteorite Discovery Challenges Dark Energy 22:21 "Understanding Spiral Galaxies Dynamics" 31:37 Celebrating Science and Serendipity 36:56 Debating the Universe's Origins 40:49 Hubble Constant Discrepancy Foun 47:31 "Conversation on Space and Starlink" 52:31 Consciousness Expansion or Earth Protection? 56:09 Ocean Colonization and Future Challenges 01:02:44 Cosmic Birefringence Exploration 01:07:12 Nobel-Worthy Discovery's Iron 01:12:42 "Fermi Paradox and Civilization Longevity" 01:16:23 Cosmic Coincidences and Probability 01:20:21 Podcast Crossover & Elon Interview ----- Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: ‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:56Speaker 02

  Welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast, featuring me, Brian Keating, and Julian Deray's podcast. It was amazing to be there when he got to his 1 million subscriber milestone. I like to think I played a small part in that. Now, today's episode is going to take us deep into new theories about how the Big Bang may have started and how the universe may be evolving. We'll also talk about the potential future of cosmology and even consciousness as we dive deep into what's possible to be known in life. We'll discuss Elon Musk, Alien Life, my late, great mentor Jim Simons, and so much more. So join us for the special episode of Into the Impossible. Let's go.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  We're back. Real quick, though, because you keep mentioning it as well. What are people arguing about the Big Bang these days? Because they're trying to say like, maybe that's not what caused the universe. Like, what are your thoughts there?

• 1:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so there's a whole kind of, again, anti-authoritarian standpoint, which is to question all narratives, which is that the Big Bang never happened. So that's the cosmological equivalent of Flat Earth, of moon landing denial, et cetera.

• 2:08Brian Keating?

  Is that actually NASA or Big Space, there's this podcast, sorry, there's this channel called The Thunderbolts Channel, this guy Will Thornhill or Thornbird or something like that. And they make all these videos about the, what's called the Electric Universe. And there's this guy not far from here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania called Eric Lerner, who's been writing for 37 years now that the Big Bang never happened. And his evidence always is whatever the latest new telescope discovery or, you know, project is in cosmology, in astronomy, that that evidence is actually counter evidence to the Big Bang narrative and that NASA or the big, you know, big cosmology, again, there's, there

• 2:51Brian Keating?

  are more people that play professional sports, there are more people that play, you know, in the NBA than there are professional cosmologists. In fact, one NBA team, one, let me just go to your beloved Phillies, okay? Your beloved Phillies.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Well, that's the MLB.

• 3:05Brian Keating?

  That's right. Okay, we're gonna go, I know, we're gonna go there, we're gonna go there, major league, okay, here we go. Major League Big Bang, in terms of how many professional experimental cosmologists like me are there, is fewer than on the Phillies. Just one team, okay, that are professors.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  That's nuts.

• 3:19Brian Keating?

  That build instrumentation that looks so, to think that we're some massive cabal that's conspiracy, in fact, it's, it's almost like, you know, the people that think Jews are running the world, like Jews are 0.2% of the world's population and something like 20% of the Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews. And I'm not saying there's any correlation, but I'm, gotta do better at gatekeeping in this room, my brother.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  We got a little flea in here or something.

• 3:41Brian Keating?

  Whenever I said, you know, something bad about the Phillies, you know. I got the second best cheesesteak in the world.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  That was a Nazi fly, it wasn't too happy.

• 3:49Brian Keating?

  Is that you, Candace? Candace Fly- Fly-ins? So, yeah, right. So, when you look at the ability of a small group to influence, like NASA's small group of individuals, you know, that have this outsized impact, there's always gonna be this tendency for people that look for ulterior waves that they could have done stuff illegitimately, either conspiracy or Rothschilds or, you know, like I said, the, you know, NASA controls or big cosmologies, nothing of the sort. In fact, it's a testimony to how amazing that group of individuals like NASA was, that a tiny fraction of the budget, you know, the humans, sorry, the US population of women spend, and maybe some men, but, but spend more on lipstick.

• 4:33Brian Keating?

  Every year, the NASA's budget, by far, okay? They spend, NASA's budget is under $20 billion. That's like pennies, it's nothing. Out of, you know, just in the military, which actually benefited a lot from GPS, laser ranging, what's called adaptive optics. So, we have sniper scopes, okay, that the SEAL teams use. You know, I have relatives that are in the teams. And they use sniper scopes, they use what's called adaptive optics. Adaptive optics. Yeah, adaptive optics is the reconciliation that astronomers realized they needed to do because of the following nursery rhyme: "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." Stars don't twinkle naturally, okay? They don't twinkle of their own accord, losing or gaining energy, despite what some fools claim on the internet.

• 5:18Brian Keating?

  They're actually twinkling because the atmosphere contains cells of different density, pressure, etc., and different composition of gases, and different amounts of water vapor. Those gases, over different regions of time, will act like lenses that refract and bend and change the trajectory of light, such that different pathways of the light will be affected. Like little lenses going in front of the camera. If you kept putting lenses randomly in, at different sizes, in front of your camera, the same exact thing would happen. The image that you see would twinkle. So, astronomers realized, "This sucks, and we've got to get rid of it, but we can't afford a space telescope." You know, there's only been two opticals, you know, even near-infrared space telescopes that astronomers have ever used. One of them was Hubble, and now we have James Webb Telescope.

• 6:01Brian Keating?

  James Webb's not even an optical telescope, it's an infrared telescope. There's really only been one major, you know, pretty picture-producing optical telescope in space, in human history, okay? And it's not like other countries are making great space telescopes the way the US has. Again, another tremendous accomplishment by NASA. Wouldn't have been possible if not for the fact that we went to the moon. But, besides all that, the fact that the atmosphere causes things to twinkle is because there's atmosphere between us and the objects in space. We don't like that because it blurs out the image, it makes it much less easy to see the resolution of it, and it distorts and changes the properties of what you're looking at, because you're looking through this dirty window. Imagine you're trying to look at your neighbor through a spyglass here. Well, that's exactly what a sniper's trying to do, right?

• 6:44Brian Keating?

  A sniper's trying to look through a mile, you know, one of my relatives, I won't say who, has a confirmed kill at over three miles, okay? Imagine, three miles away, three miles away. And it's not Andrew Bustamante, I wish he was in my family, but he's not. Andrew's probably been able to reach out, you know, pretty large distances. I mean, snipers are amazing, right? But they have to deal with it.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  I don't know if Andrew's a sniper. I don't know if he's done that in the past.

• 7:06Brian Keating?

  I'm sure he's got some.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  He's done a lot of shit. I don't know if he's been sniping. We can't give, I don't, I don't want to give him more free clout. You know, he's got enough free clout out there.

• 7:14Brian Keating?

  I know. He's got a great, a great little industry going on there. Every day, every day sniper.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yes. Every day sponsored by CIA. That's right.

• 7:21Brian Keating?

  So the same thing happens if you're on Earth. If you're trying to hit a target three miles away, that's a lot of atmosphere between you and that target. You ever seen like, you're driving in the west and you see like a mirage on the road or you see this like the, the warping of like the image on the road.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  I've only ever been to Vegas and Milwaukee.

• 7:35Brian Keating?

  Well, Vegas will be a place where you can see just this exact phenomenon.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I was on this trip.

• 7:41Brian Keating?

  Okay, you weren't out driving in the desert. Next time we'll come out, we have, uh, my cousin owns a shooting range out there.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  No cocaine in the desert, Brian.

• 7:48Brian Keating?

  No, okay. No, not like that. No drop offs.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  He's like, oh shit.

• 7:52Brian Keating?

  No hangovers. No hangover five. We'll stop at four. Anyway, the atmosphere has turbulence and that makes it hard to hit a target at more than a few miles. So now what the astronomers built to look at images of galaxies and stars millions of light years away. Now a sniper on Earth can look at millions, you know, thousands of meters away. Okay. So they can correct for the atmospheric distortion using a technology that was invented for astronomy. Okay. So these are all just benefits that accrue. Okay. So, um, I forgot exactly how we got on the subject, but I know we were talking about, um, developments in astronomy.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Well, it's the big bang and how people have been saying that's.

• 8:29Brian Keating?

  That's right. So people have been saying this for a long time. Every time that something new comes out and dated, and the most recent example is the James Webb Space Telescope. According to these proponents of the no big bang hypothesis. Okay. They don't believe in the big bang at all. They believe something completely nonsensical called tired light, which we can talk about. It's basically a static universe. The universe has been here forever. Unlike the fact that we know for, you know, as near as we can know for a certainty in scientific facts. Um, about 13 miles from here is Holmdel, New Jersey. There used to be a laboratory there called Bell Labs. And they invented a lot of the technology, like the transistor, the laser, the radio, telecommunications, cellphone devices.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:10Brian Keating?

  What they were trying to do is build the first communications. So there used to be only one cellphone carrier. And basically, one telephone company in the whole world. It was AT&T. It was Bell. And Bell Labs is here in Holmdel, about, what, 12 miles away from here, something like that.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Well, that's where they shoot severance now.

• 9:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah, is that really? Oh, okay, cool.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 9:28Brian Keating?

  Yeah, makes sense. It's kind of that dystopian vibe to it. So Bell Labs was tasked with the following thing. Radio waves were being sent and bounced off of the early satellites that were launched in the early 1960s from California, from near Pasadena, where I used to work at Caltech, bouncing up to a satellite and then echoing that exact signal back down to Earth, back to New Jersey. So it was the first transcontinental communication using bouncing of radio waves off of a satellite, which is the only thing high enough in space to get... When scientists here named Penzias and Wilson, they were looking and they saw the signal, but it was really noisy. It would be like as if you were paying to, you know, film this in 4K and you were getting like 144P.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:10Brian Keating?

  It was horrible, static noise. It was just awful. I'm like, what the hell? I'm paying millions of dollars, billions of dollars, and I'm getting this crappy image? What is causing that? Well, behind the satellite that they were looking at is the cosmos, is all this heat left over from the Big Bang. And that was called the cosmic microwave background radiation, the CMB, which is this three Kelvin signal, that these two astronomers that were working for a technology company, trying to improve their telecommunications communication ability. They weren't trying to detect the Big Bang, in other words. They had no ulterior motives. They just wanted to understand it. And then my grandfather, PhD grandfather, David Wilkinson, and his colleagues at Princeton University, realized that the static that they were seeing behind the satellite was actually coming from the Big Bang itself, or the cosmos itself.

• 10:56Brian Keating?

  That was the discovery of the CMB in 1965. It's the 60th anniversary of it, actually, last month was. And this was-

• 11:02Speaker 03

  They could see it?

• 11:03Brian Keating?

  Say it again. They could see it in static, as radio waves. It was a radio telescope, just like-

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Something that happened billions of years ago. They can see it as-

• 11:10Brian Keating?

  It's happening right now, yeah. The universe is red shifting. It's getting bigger and so the light's getting colder and colder, farther and farther away, but it's still moving towards us as the universe expands. It goes from up, uh, high wavelength, uh, short wavelengths to long wavelengths.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  So you can trace those wavelengths to an initial, I'm gonna use a-

• 11:25Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  -peak term, for an initial wave, I'm gonna call it.

• 11:28Brian Keating?

  No, there's waves.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  That is the Big Bang itself.

• 11:30Brian Keating?

  Everything that, uh, that's above absolute zero in temperature emits radiation. You're emitting radiation now. We're about 300 Kelvin, what's called Kelvins, or it's 90 degrees, uh, 98 degrees Fahrenheit, convert it to Kelvin and maybe it's 310 Kelvin.

• 11:43Brian Keating?

  A Kelvin's the absolute temperature scale. If you cool something down to zero Kelvin, all of its motion stops. Heat is just a random mode, what we call the random motion of molecules. You can stop it, you can slow it down, but you can only do that with an infinite amount of energy cooling it down to absolute zero. So everything in the universe that you've ever seen, anything in space is above zero Kelvin. That means it's emitting waves of radios or microwaves, depending on how much its temperature is. The sun is 5,000 Kelvin, and that's why it emits light. We're emitting heat. You could detect your girlfriend or whatever, right? You could come up really close to her, not touch her, and you can feel the infrared heat coming up. That's 300 Kelvin radiation. That's in the infrared. That's the heat. In the, the universe has been cooling off so much that's gone from visible light or X-rays and gamma rays, the highest form of energetic light there is, from the initial heat that was left over from the fusion of the first elements after the Big Bang.

• 12:35Brian Keating?

  That heat was all pervasive, exists in all directions at all times. And as the universe has been expanding, when you expand an oven, you cool it down. You ever spray off one of those cleaners of your computer, the Freon cans or whatever that clean off your-

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:48Brian Keating?

  -computer, the dusters, right? What happens to the can? Gets colder. Yes. Because you're expanding the gas, it cools it. So the universe expands, the heat in the, in the universe is cooling down. So it went from 3,000 Kelvin, which is where hydrogen forms, to 3 Kelvin over the course of 13.8 billion years. Crazy fucking cold, too. Exactly. Yeah, you can do it. I actually had this like little cyst frozen on my forehead there with some of this gas. Oh, okay. Yeah, exactly. Took it off. I wouldn't have known until you showed me. Now I'm gonna look at it the whole time. I'm a cosmetologist, you know, I gotta, I gotta show you the hair, what goes on behind the makeup. Make sure we get that in 4K. That's right. Don't get that 144P. So, the point being, they found this radiation source, heat radiation,

• 13:29Brian Keating?

  that had cooled off from 3,000 Kelvin to 3 Kelvin, meaning the universe has expanded by a factor of 1,000, which means the universe has gotten a thousand times bigger since that very first light. You talked about this with, with, put the timestamp in there, Joe. At 2 hours and something minutes in the Claudia Duran episode, you talk about last scattering surface. My guy. Come on, man. You gotta, gotta give me, gotta give me something here. I'm a longtime listener, second time guest.

• 13:57Brian Keating?

  So, so the point is, we know for sure what temperature this occurred at, we know how long the universe has been expanding for, we know all these different properties of the universe, but in order to explain those phenomena, again, people are gonna use properties of science that sound plausible to the uneducated. So instead of that, he and other people say, no, the universe isn't expanding. It's static. It's been here forever. It's eternal. It's never changed in size, which goes against everything that we know, from the measurements of galaxies by Hubble, to the measurements of the cosmic microwave background, to the abundance of the elements in, in this glass of water. You know, this water contains elements that aren't just hydrogen and oxide, and they contain isotopes of things.

• 14:38Brian Keating?

  I'm not talking about the hard water of New Jersey, which is a problem. I know you went down to the Meadowlands and scooped some up. That's right. So, elements. Dig a plot for you in case we gotta bury you. Have things called, called isotopes, right? So isotope is the same number of protons in the atomic nucleus, but different numbers of neutrons, so it has different atomic weight. Hydrogen has three different isotopes. Ordinary hydrogen is just a single proton surrounded by a single electron. There's another form of hydrogen called deuterium. Deuterium. Deuterium has a proton and a neutron and one electron. The electron is negatively charged, the proton is positively charged, and the neutron is neutrally charged. Then there's another one called tritium. Tritium, have you ever heard of trigicon sites or something on a fancy watch?

• 15:21Speaker 03

  There's another word I'm thinking of that someone said in here, but it's different.

• 15:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so tritium is, has two neutrons and one proton and one electron. The electron is responsible for the chemistry of the atom. And the number of neutrons is probably other nuclear properties for fusion and fission and all sorts of other things.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  It still comes out to zero, obviously.

• 15:38Brian Keating?

  The charge comes out to zero, total charge, or also be electrically charged, which some people violate in their, these thorn birds or whatever they're called, um, thorn, thunderbolts. They talk about the universe has this net electric charge, which is completely false. And I have a video coming out about that on my second channel, because I do take advice from you. I have a smaller channel, Professor Keating Experiments.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  We'll have both linked down below.

• 15:59Brian Keating?

  Yes, that's right. So in this glass of water is evidence that the big bang occurred. Because the amount of, the ratio of the amount of the second isotope of hydrogen, which is called deuterium, to the third isotope called tritium and the first isotope called prodeum or just normal hydrogen. Those agree exactly with the properties of a universe that was once incredibly hot, incredibly dense and had the certain temperature. So the temperature, density and pressure of the universe as predicted by theory is exactly borne out by water you got from the tap here in New Jersey.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 17:00Brian Keating?

  Okay, so this is proof, these are fossils. Remember, all we can do in science as cosmologists, rather, we're looking through time machines, right? A telescope is a time, I don't see you as you are right now. You're about three feet away, light takes one foot, one nanosecond to go each foot. So I see you three nanoseconds ago. The sun, sun's eight minutes away by light travel time, right? That means if seven minutes ago, the sun disappeared, we wouldn't know it for another minute, right? We wouldn't feel anything, everything would go on, right? We, how would we know it? There's no force, nothing goes faster than the speed of light, including gravity. So, and according to Claudia, it goes slower than, so gravity can actually travel slower than light. And that's a different podcast that you already did. So we have fossils. We have fossil photons that come from the heat of the big bang. We have fossil protons and neutrons that come from the big bang, and only from the model of the big bang.

• 17:45Brian Keating?

  There's no way to explain the abundance of the ratio of deuterium, tritium, and protium inside this glass of water, except for the fact that there was a big bang. Because stars don't make hydrogen. Stars don't make isotopes of hydrogen. Deuterium's very fragile. It breaks apart very easily. The only way that it occurs is if the universe was born with it. Now, these meteorites, these come from stars that exploded. So when a star, which is primarily made of hydrogen and helium, once it tries to make things in its core, like iron, which is why this meteorite's so heavy, and magnetic, if you have a magnet here, we can play around with that. This is actually Joe's, so I'm gonna give it to him. I don't want to damage it, but this did fall from Earth, you know, fall from space into Earth. And this meteorite is made of, has isotopes that are some of which are radioactive,

• 18:30Brian Keating?

  which tell us its age as well. And its age is younger than the age of the universe, but older than the age of the Earth. So this is actually older than the age of the Earth by isotopic abundance ratios. We know that very accurately. Its composition, which you get when you go to my website, you get a copy of its composition, its fingerprint, its chemistry, all points to a hot thermal origin of this meteorite that's extremely different from the way that the hydrogen formed in that. There's no hydrogen in this meteorite. When a supernova blows up, which is what produced this, it doesn't make any hydrogen. In fact, you can tell the absence of hydrogen that certain supernova occurred, which is now giving us energy, giving us evidence that dark energy may not be constant. So the last three months have been as revolutionary for cosmology.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, everyone's talking about this.

• 19:16Brian Keating?

  As any period in my history since I was a graduate student in the late 90s, when the first announcements that there was such a thing as dark energy and something called the cosmological constant may be present. And in the last few months, we've had, I've had on my podcast, uh, three or four different episodes about dark energy and dark matter and how they might not be what cosmologists thought they were for the last two generations of cosmologists.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  And what's, what's the new, the new evidence here that's, that's driving at this?

• 19:48Brian Keating?

  Um, yeah. So the new, the new evidence that we're seeing comes from two different types of instruments. One is the newly commissioned Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, not far from where our Simons Observatory telescope is.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Where's Simons, by the way?

• 20:02Brian Keating?

  Simons Observatory is north of Santiago, Chile, in the Atacama Desert. So it's called the driest desert on earth. Um, it's at 17,000 feet above sea level. So you need oxygen when you go up there. You need ultraviolet protection. It's like being on the surface of the planet Mars. Uh, see how blue the sky is? So if you go out here in New Jersey on a sunny day, if that ever happens, you look out.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  It's sunny out here, Brian.

• 20:25Brian Keating?

  It was sunny. Yeah, it was way too sunny yesterday.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Don't be taking so run out on me.

• 20:30Brian Keating?

  Okay. So now look at the, uh, look above the horizon. You see how it gets like blue pretty quick? As you look along exactly at the horizon, it's kind of whitish and that's a proof of that we live on a round planet because its atmospheric column density is much thicker on the horizontal direction and it goes down exponential, or you know, it goes down as the, uh, one over the, see can't of the angle, but you see how blue it gets?

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:53Brian Keating?

  If you were out here and look at this image of the, you happen to have this nice, beautiful image of the, uh, New York skyline here. See how much wider it is at the same degree of altitude above the horizon here? That's because there's much more water vapor and particles and smog and stuff in the, uh, in the, uh, along the atmosphere here in the city than there is 17,000 feet above our current elevation.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Why you can't see a lot of stars here, but you can see them all there.

• 21:17Brian Keating?

  In part, yeah. And we're not looking for stars, but exactly. So you see how, so right above us, if you were to look straight up here, it would be blue, but it would be about as blue as it is here at only a few degrees above the horizon. That's why we go to the Chile. It's extremely clear skies, low amounts of water in the atmosphere and extremely dark. And it's completely different. You know, we see different constellations, which is another proof that we live on a round planet because you don't have that phenomenon if we lived on a flat planet. We have a website, go to, uh, simonsobservatory.org, Joe, and you'll see our brand new website. Looks really cool.

• 21:50Brian Keating?

  And we've got some drones flying over there. And so that's what it looks like.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  I like the motion graphics.

• 21:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah, isn't that cool? We're doing it for the clicks. Now, so there's three telescopes that we've built over the last eight years in the making. So this, if you were coming from the big bang, if you were a photon coming from the big bang, this is about what you'd see about a microsecond, nanosecond before you ended your 14 billion year long journey. Now, the telescope that I'm going to talk about next, there's two telescopes. One is in the northern hemisphere. It's called DESI, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. And then the other one is called-

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument.

• 22:27Brian Keating?

  Yes. DESI is its acronym. And the other one is called the Vera Rubin Observatory. Now Vera Rubin was one of the first people, along with my late colleague Margaret Burbidge, to detect the presence of dark matter in galaxies. She observed that galaxies are rotating way too fast. So imagine like here, people are coming in and out because it's a really important center of gravity for entertainment, for finance, everything. So imagine you're just looking at the people that are here and you said, well, let me compare that to Topeka, Kansas. Okay, just picking some random city. Well, why aren't there the same number of people coming in and out? Well, there's not as much gravitational pull in terms of finance, commerce, entertainment, media, all these other things in Topeka than there is in New York. But blindly, if an alien were looking, why are there more people in, why are there more

• 23:12Brian Keating?

  people coming in and out of New York City or Newark or Hoboken than out of Topeka? Well, they'd have to go through this analysis. But she noticed that there's way more people, if you like, in the outskirts, in the boondocks of our galaxy and other galaxies, in that there's much more mass out there and it's causing the stars to rotate far faster and the galaxy itself to rotate much faster than it would if all the mass that we, that we had in a galaxy was giving off light the way that even this meteorite gives off heat.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Can you explain that some more? You lost me a little bit.

• 23:43Brian Keating?

  Okay, so if you have, a galaxy is a giant collection of stars, gas, dust, and now we know dark matter as well. And what happens is a spiral galaxy, there's a couple of different types of galaxies, but the one that the Milky Way is, Andromeda Galaxy is, and many others are spirals. Over billions of years, the stars have been accelerated into this constant, stable whirlpool, Vortix-looking pattern that we call a spiral galaxy. If you measure the individual velocity of the stars as a function of their distance from the black hole at the center of those galaxies, you see how fast they rise. If it were like the solar system, okay, the planets in our solar system orbit around the central mass of the solar system, which is the sun.

• 24:25Brian Keating?

  The sun contains 99.8% of the mass of our solar system. The planets rotate with a... 99.8 knows that. Yeah, it's almost 100%. Jupiter's on 0.1%, Saturn's about 0.007, and then Earth is almost nothing. Yep, that's right. And then there's, you know, so if you looked at their plot, Johannes Kepler demonstrated this in the 1600s. If you plot their velocities, the planets' velocities go down as 1 divided by the square root of the distance from the center, which is the sun. Okay, so Pluto and Neptune go around much slower. If they're four times as far away, they go down as 1 over the square root of 4, or 2 times, 1 over the square root of 2 times, the rate that the Earth goes, okay?

• 25:08Brian Keating?

  So things that are farther away, Jupiter takes 12 years to go around the sun, Earth takes 1 year to go around the sun, Mars takes about 2 years to go around the sun, it's about the square root of 2 times farther away. So that's called Kepler's Law. Kepler's, one of Kepler's laws is that the period that it takes a planet to go around it is proportional to, the velocity that a planet goes around a star is proportional to 1 over the square root of the distance, okay? That's just a law, and it comes from Newton's laws of gravity. He didn't know that, but that's where it comes from. Thanks, Isaac. So if stars were like little, sorry, if stars orbiting around the galaxy were just like planets orbiting around a star, then their velocity should also go down as 1 over the square root of the distance. It's just Kepler's Law. There's no reason why a star would behave different than a galaxy, or a planet.

• 25:53Brian Keating?

  What Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbidge and others discovered was that wasn't the case. Fritz Wikis is another guy. They actually found that instead of going down, the velocity stops going down and goes and maintains its velocity way beyond the point where you can see the spiral. And there's some implying that there's some mass way beyond the the light radius of the galaxy. It means that there's some mass that's causing their velocity to remain high as if the sun were much more massive, but it's only much more massive for the ones that are farther away. So it's very bizarre. And Rubin and Burbidge and Zwicky, they all discovered this phenomenon, that there seems to be what's considered to be dark matter. In other words, matter that doesn't give off light. There's no source of light that's caused by these.

• 26:38Brian Keating?

  Now, it could be black holes, it could be anything that's massive could cause this. Is that just so hard for me to conceptualize this? It's not. Think about you versus like a toddler, you're swinging, you ever put like a ball on a rope and you swing it around your head? Who can swing the ball faster? You or a toddler? I can. Or you or your girlfriend or whatever. You're more massive, so the more massive you are, the faster you can swing something around you before you start to get perturbed, like eventually you can do it, right? I understand that, yes, yeah, yeah. So that's exactly what's happening. So the more massive the galaxy is, the more velocity can be at the outskirts of that galaxy, of the stars, the outskirts of the galaxy. And these, but the thing is, these, these stars in the galaxy are moving as if there's like, you know, Ronnie Coleman or who, you know, some huge guy at the center swinging

• 27:22Brian Keating?

  around, but all we see is this little tiny, you know, you know, whatever, some, some person, your girlfriend or whatever, at the center. And so it seems inconceivable that all the mass of that galaxy or the object swinging around is due to the, this, you know, person that you can see. It must mean there's some other force. Now, if you're underneath her, you're wearing her clothes or something, you're there, then yes, you could explain it. So there's some missing mass, some missing strength that's causing things to rotate faster than observed. Now, we haven't seen that, that's the whole controversy. Yes. We can't see these particles, we should be able to see them, detect them if they're like particles of mass. And that's part of one of the goals of the Simons Observatory and other projects, is to detect that.

• 28:03Brian Keating?

  But the very first kind of, you know, new telescope dedicated to Vera Rubin just came online. And so there's this telescope in the southern hemisphere, it's over eight meters across, bigger than the Hubble telescope, bigger than the James Webb telescope. And its whole job is to scan the sky every single day and make, instead of taking a still picture like that, It takes, makes movies of the universe. It's the first motion picture camera in ultra-high res. So the cameras that you're using 4K, right? So that's, that's like 2200 by 1800 or something.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Well, these are, these are still, I'll stay with it.

• 28:38Brian Keating?

  Okay, so stay with it. So this camera that's in the Vera Rubin telescope is a 3.2 gigapixels, billion pixel camera. It would be something like a thousand or 200 of those.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  A billion pixels?

• 28:50Brian Keating?

  Billion pixels, yes. Well, they built it specially. The US government and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, other places, Department of Energy, all these places.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Billion pixels.

• 28:59Brian Keating?

  Three billion pixels. So it's like 100 or 1,000 of the, and these things have to be cooled. These, unlike the cameras that you guys are using or your iPhone, they have to be cooled down to be as sensitive as possible to these different wavelength bands that they're seeing. So this is a cooled camera inside of a, of a chamber that is a vacuum chamber too, because you can't cool something down if you don't put it in a vacuum. So it's this massive cam, if you look up the camera, Joe, look up Vera, VRO camera, chilling. And these sensors were also partially invented at Bell Labs.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  So they're doing this but moving.

• 29:31Brian Keating?

  Yep. And, and, and they're making a movie and they're looking for things that are transients, things that are moving that shouldn't be moving. They're able to take the deepest images ever made. You can actually just go to my, my YouTube channel, how about that? And I'll show you some of the videos.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, free plug while we're at it.

• 29:47Brian Keating?

  Exactly. That's right.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  That's what we're here for, Brian.

• 29:50Brian Keating?

  All I'm paying for.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  That's what I use my platform for. Free plugs.

• 29:53Brian Keating?

  Not for these cranks like that.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm even just blown away by that picture there. I love looking at stuff like that. So what video are you looking for, Brian?

• 30:04Brian Keating?

  Uh, it's in the playlist. Uh, go to videos, um, Joe, and then click on the second one, Rubin's first data. There it is.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  All right, hold on. Let me turn this volume on so we can hear it.

• 30:14Brian Keating?

  Oh, you're not subscribed. Oh, there you go.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  That's not my account. That's his account. Yeah.

• 30:19Brian Keating?

  Just wanted to be clear. Give it a thumbs up. There you go. Thumbs up.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Can we hear that from your speaker, Joe? Is that what we're doing? Let me just make sure I got it here. Let it rip.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 30:56Brian Keating?

  What you're about to see is an exclusive interview with one of the leaders of one of the most exciting observatories ever built, the Veer Rubin Observatory. In just 10 hours, you captured over 2,000 asteroids, which is something like 100 times faster than the discovery rate around the whole planet. Some of these asteroids could be Earth killers, and that same technology is set to revolutionize our understanding of dark matter, peering into the massive Virgo cluster with unprecedented clarity.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  When you finally...

• 31:24Brian Keating?

  So when I show, go back to, I said the Virgo cluster?

• 31:30Brian Keating?

  Go for it a little, yeah. Which is something like 100 times faster than the discovery rate around the whole planet. Some of these asteroids could be Earth killers, and that same technology is set to revolutionize our understanding of dark matter, peering into the massive Virgo cluster. Right there, okay. So this is the first cluster that they looked at. What you're seeing here, the things that have like crosses on them, those are stars in our galaxy. Everything else that doesn't have a cross on it is a galaxy in another part of the universe. Some of these are like 50 million light years away from the Earth.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  50 million light years away, and we can see it.

• 32:03Brian Keating?

  And we can see it, and we can see if they're moving, and we can zoom in on them, which you can do. There's a tool in the video description called Skyview app or whatever. And you can zoom it. This image is just like the first image that you get, and it's like a telephoto lens. This image he showed me when we did the interview with Mario Urich, you can zoom in on a galaxy and basically do it like a 200-power telescope, but it's your, you can do whatever you want with it. All this data is free. It's available to the public. They're not hiding it. They're not saying, oh, there's some classified information there. And some of the information that I can detect, the thing I let off with, is that in 10 hours, discovered 2,000 asteroids. Now, why is that important? Well, a lot of these were discovered, they were never known. And some of these could eventually be something that could threaten the Earth.

• 32:46Brian Keating?

  So they have tracked, and he goes on to talk about in the interview. He's one of the leaders of the time domain, which looks for things that are basically making a movie of the universe. So it's the first time we've had a dynamic telescope. Literally, it's the first time we had a video camera on the universe with this sized type of telescope with this resolution. So it can do anything. And the coolest thing about it is that anybody has access to it. It's like you have your own eight meter diameter, eight meter diameter telescope. It's bigger than this building.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  When I hear something, though, like, what'd you say is 50 billion light years away? Is that right?

• 33:15Brian Keating?

  Million.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  50 million, either way.

• 33:17Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Like, like, it's, that doesn't even process for me, like, how we have created something on this earth where we can actually see that.

• 33:25Brian Keating?

  That's right. That's one of the beautiful things about science, which is why I'm such a huge promoter and cheerleader of it, unabashedly so. And I believe it should be protected and kept. These were not built by people who were like, had to, in order to have like some wild-eyed idea, like, there's no person, Einstein, a thousand Einsteins working in isolation, as smart as he was, could not have done this. It took the cumulative efforts of thousands of people, billions of, millions of dollars, it's not quite a billion-dollar experiment, but it's millions of dollars, and it's built up over time in order to focus, no pun intended, on serendipity. So serendipity is the one tool we have in science to guard against confirmation bias. Imagine you're not looking for something, but you find it.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:08Brian Keating?

  Versus if you're looking for it and you find it.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 34:10Brian Keating?

  So that's what happened with the CMB, the cosmic microwave background, which is my area of expertise, was found by accident. Remember, I said they were looking for a communication satellite with excess noise. Has nothing to do with the Big Bang. They didn't even think it had, they didn't know what they had discovered. They had to ask scientists, theorists, and others to collaborate with them. And they were trying to win their own Nobel Prize, these other guys, including my PhD grandfather, my academic grandfather. And so the point is, when you do these measurements, you don't know what you're going to look for, if you do a measurement and you're not trying to find something. That in some sense is the purest thing you could possibly discover. Like penicillin was discovered by accident. A guy left out some cheese or, you know, some mold and he discovered, actually the bacteria won't be, you know, capable of digesting it. It acts as a toxin to them. And that was then developed into penicillin.

• 34:54Brian Keating?

  It wasn't saying like, hmm, let me invent this thing that will then be used to cure, you know, as an antibiotic. The X-ray, X-ray was invented basically accidentally. This guy, William Rengen.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Really?

• 35:05Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he was experimenting with just like electrons in a tube. And then he noticed that he had a piece of film in the other room and the film kept getting exposed and it had this pattern of the case that it was in. Then he took his wife and he said, honey, put your hand here. And then he fired the electrons in this tube at her hand and she saw her bones. The first X-ray in history. If you look up Rentkin X-ray, I think her name was Martha.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  I always wonder what it would be to be like a fly on the wall in a room like this. Like, holy shit, don't move. Don't fucking move. We are never having to pay our mortgage late again. There it is. Wow.

• 35:41Brian Keating?

  So serendipitous.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  That's the original one right there?

• 35:43Brian Keating?

  That's the first X-ray of a human.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  God, that even looks like pretty good today.

• 35:47Brian Keating?

  That was the first Nobel Prize too, in physics. And that was part of the Nobel Prize desire was to create things that would have a beneficiary effect on human flourishing. And in fact, it has. I mean, anyone who's had a tooth balled, you know, knows how important it is to have an X-ray. So if that's Vera Rubin, it's going to revolutionize our, find things serendipitously. It'll find things intentionally like it's looking for asteroids and so and so. But what if one of those asteroids on a collision course to prevent the earth from getting destroyed? You know, we gotta call Bruce Willis and get him out there, right? So this is a part of the.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Don't forget Ben Affleck.

• 36:18Brian Keating?

  Ben Affleck, that's right. So we get all these serendipitous benefits from all these types of tools and technology. Now, dark energy, which we should pivot to, is a completely different thing. So dark energy is an invisible energy. And so in that sense, it's invisible, so it has that similarity to dark matter, but it acts completely differently. Matter tends to only gravitationally attract. That's what's weird about gravity versus the other forces. Electricity, positive, negative charges. Magnetism, north and south magnetic poles. They can attract or they can repel, but gravity only attracts. It's weird. But there's something effectively called anti-gravity, which is real, but it's incredibly weak and dilute, and that's what dark energy is.

• 37:03Brian Keating?

  Dark energy is like a repulsive form of gravity that causes the universe to expand, to inflate, to get bigger every day, and to get bigger at a faster rate as time goes on.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Why does that, why is that anti-gravity? For it to expand the universe?

• 37:17Brian Keating?

  So in the, in Einstein's theory of relativity, when you add in energy into empty space, the empty space effectively is causing repulsion, gravitational repulsion. It almost acts as if you have two like charges together. Remember I said gravity only, gravity acts as if it's only, it's always has two different charges, but there's only one type of charge, that's just this mass, right? There's no like antimass and mass, but all mass attracts as if one was positive and one was negative, but that's just because gravity itself is universally attractive. But if you have pure energy that suffuses space itself, the space can get bigger without the matter within it getting bigger. So it acts as if it's like blowing up air pressure inside of a balloon or tension and stretching out a rubber band or something like that.

• 38:00Brian Keating?

  It acts as if it's repulsive gravity, and it has appeared as since the time of Einstein. So in 1917, 1915, when Einstein came up with his law of general relativity, 10 years after the speed of light, special relativity, he came up with a law that described how the universe as a whole could be expanding or contracting. But he observed at the time, they didn't know of anything that was expanding or contracting. They thought the universe was static at that time. So in 1915, the model of the universe was that the universe was eternal. And so nobody believed that the universe was, and actually that's all the evidence showed. When you look at a star, the only things that move in space are the planets that we can see, planets and asteroids. We couldn't see, we can't see the galaxies moving unless you had a very powerful spectrum.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  So why'd they say the universe was eternal, well?

• 38:45Brian Keating?

  Was eternal?

• 38:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:47Brian Keating?

  Because if it's not changing, the notion is that it has always been there that way. It didn't need to have a creation, didn't need a creator, it didn't. There were a lot of biases against the kind of big bang narrative at the time. But actually, the big bang model was proposed by Le Maître, this guy who was a Belgian Catholic priest in the late 1920s, that actually, no, the universe should be expanding. Einstein didn't believe it, and he put into his laws of physics, he put in this fudge factor called the cosmological constant. Which was, in order for the universe to remain stable and static, he had to prevent the gravitational collapse of the matter that he could see with his eyes, stars, planets, etc. He knew there was matter, so there had to be something keeping it from collapsing, or else he wouldn't be there asking the question of why the universe wasn't collapsing. So he put in this thing.

• 39:32Brian Keating?

  He later called it his biggest blunder. It's called the cosmological constant. And what has been known since 1998 was that he was actually right that there should be a cosmological constant, but it doesn't keep the universe static, and it doesn't make the universe contract, it makes the universe expand. So that was a possibility he did not consider. He thought it's not contracting, as it would if there's only matter, so there should be some buoyant force that keeps the universe from contracting, that he called the cosmological constant, or the vacuum energy. Now we know that there is some form of vacuum energy. What was discovered in March and February this year by the DESI, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, was that there seems to be evidence that the dark energy component is not a constant,

• 40:16Brian Keating?

  that it's varying with time, and that, in fact, it's getting weaker over time, and that the universe, even though it's expanding now, and the expansion rate is accelerating, eventually that expansion rate will stop accelerating, come to neutral, and then it will start decelerating, and the universe could, in fact, collapse.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Like a sucking sound.

• 40:34Brian Keating?

  Or, yeah, it could be a giant sucking sound. Or it could taper off asymptotically, and just expand and dilute over an infinite period of time. So there's possibilities that it expands forever, rips apart, all the matter, all the energy in the universe effectively rips apart after a finite time, that's called the big rip.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, but does a big rip happen like in a snap of a finger kind of deal?

• 40:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, at the end of time it does, yeah. At the end of time, when the vacuum itself is decaying and ripping apart, yeah. Every atom in the... Right now, the universe is expanding. But we are not expanding. I mean, you know, Brooklyn's not expanding, as Alvy said.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  That's a win for everyone.

• 41:12Brian Keating?

  That's right. Our waistlines might expand, in my case. But the key discovery by DESI is that that constant, which we thought would lead to the eventual heat, what's called the heat death of the universe, where the universe continues to expand slowly, cooling over time, such that there's only photons left at the very end of time, but that takes an infinite or very long period of time, maybe tens of billions of years or so. Tens to 100 times longer than the observable age of the universe today. What Desi has found is that that may happen much faster. Again, keep paying your taxes out there. I'm talking to you, because the universe will not be changing on any rapid time scale. But it is kind of this paradigm that we now know that there is dark energy, but that it's not a constant amount of dark energy. The amount of dark energy seems to

• 41:55Brian Keating?

  be decreasing. It's not a slam dunk yet, and there are other observatories, hopefully like Simon's Observatory and maybe even Rubin Observatory, that will provide evidence. But the evidence that the universe is simple and explained by just dark matter alone, plus a cosmological constant, that seems to be in a lot of trouble. And in fact, there are people that say that even the measurements of certain parameters, the most important one is called the Hubble parameter. The Hubble parameter tells you, as you go out in distance, how fast is a given galaxy moving away from every other galaxy. That constant is the most important number in cosmology. It's related to how old the universe is. Right now, there are two different measurements. And just yesterday, the team at the South

• 42:39Brian Keating?

  Pole that operates a parallel telescope to the ones that I was involved with called BICEP, their telescope is called the South Pole Telescope, they announced that there is a discrepancy in the Hubble constant that's at something like almost a one in 100 million chance of being a fluke, like some really tiny number that they made a mistake, that they make measurements of the cosmos in the early state when it was young, when the CMB was first formed. And then, observation using supernova and more local instrumentation, like that was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2011, that instrument is showing a much larger value for the Hubble constant. And they don't agree. And the chance of them

• 43:24Brian Keating?

  being fluke disagreement, each one says they know the result to better than 1% precision, and they disagree at six times the individual uncertainty of each one. So there's basically, it would have to be a fluke that they're both accurate, and it's just a fluke, we happened to measure, you know, one of them at the low end and one of them at the high end. That measurement is now, was released yesterday by the South Pole Telescope. And it's the largest, you know, it exceeds the threshold of scientific credibility. Like it's now at such a level that you almost can't consider the measurements to ever be consistent again. So we have to explain, how did the universe expand differently at early times versus now?

• 44:06Brian Keating?

  It could be because the cosmological constant is different at early times or late times. Or, and we have evidence for that, at something like one in 30,000% chance of being, uh, chance of being wrong by fluke. Uh, but these two different measurements are really exciting. See, that's another difference between a scientist and a fraud. A scientist is excited when there's a discrepancy. We don't say like, oh, uh, we, you know, can't even prove that actually there's, uh, there's lunar laser ranging modules that have been proved. So actually like, um, I should be excited because now it means that, um, we're closer to truth, like we have a better example.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Or you're finding something entirely new you never thought about.

• 44:42Brian Keating?

  Yeah, maybe there's actually, okay, maybe that proves there are aliens that are there that took the lunar module there and said, I'll be more, I mean, I'm just making that up. But the point is, a scientist should be the most excited to be proven wrong because that's how science progresses, right? If we thought Newton was the final word, we'd think that the speed of light is infinite, gravity is infinite. It's always one over R, that there's no subatomic particle. I mean, think about all the things that, if you stop science at any point in time, you ruin progress in humanity.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:10Brian Keating?

  Even though each individual scientist is wrong, I'm wrong, I know I'm wrong. And if I say the earth is a sphere, I'm wrong too. I mean, we had this debate last time, you made it into a viral clip and I clipped it from your question.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  I remember that.

• 45:20Brian Keating?

  Um, you know, it's not a perfect sphere, but it's much more of a sphere than it's flat.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  I thought you were going flat earth on me when you said that. I was like, oh shit, here we go.

• 45:26Brian Keating?

  Well, now you brought that in, so we got our little display over there.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, keep that back there as a reminder.

• 45:30Brian Keating?

  But if you look at the universe, the universe is actually smoother than that globe. So that globe is not a relief globe, doesn't have mountains on or anything like that. But even if it did, the, the size of the mountains relative to the size of the radius of the earth is larger than how rough the universe is. In other words, the universe is more smooth, isotropic and homogeneous on its largest scales than the globe is on its largest scales. Or the actual earth is on its largest scales.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Meaning like, hold on, let me back that up. So the mountains within? In a globe relative to the

• 46:01Brian Keating?

  Radius.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Radius of the earth.

• 46:03Brian Keating?

  Correct.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Are larger than what it would be on the hypothetical air quotes there mountains that exist in the in the universe in relation to the earth.

• 46:11Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:12Brian Keating?

  The universal fluctuations in density and pressure at the early times. So the, the, the challenge is that, um, you don't have kids yet that you know about, right?

• 46:20Speaker 03

  I don't, not, not that I know.

• 46:21Brian Keating?

  Not that you know about. Okay. So I have kids. So when your kids turn two, please, may you have, can we need more people, you know, Elon's all concerned about.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  I'm looking forward to having kids. I'll definitely have several.

• 46:30Brian Keating?

  Best thing in life.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:31Brian Keating?

  No, bar none. But having with the person that you love the most, that's best.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  That's the key, Brian. You gotta find the right one.

• 46:37Brian Keating?

  I have the algorithm. I told it to Lex. He never, he never even listened to me either. All these guys, think of how many unmarried podcasters there are, uh, that I love. Andrew Huberman, dear friend, unmarried.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  I mean, Andrew Huberman knows how to juggle him, my dog. Shout out to the focus on that guy.

• 46:54Brian Keating?

  Uh, made up, some of that's.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  I, I'll bet some of it's made up, but shout out to the focus.

• 46:58Brian Keating?

  Okay, let's go through these guys. Okay. Cause you're, you're in rarefied air and I want to convince at least one of you of that. Okay. So I've talked to Theo Vaughn. I haven't been on a show, but I've talked to him. Um, he's unmarried male podcast, no kids. Andrew Huberman unmarried male podcaster, no kids. Lex, Lex Friedman unmarried bugger. Chris Williamson unmarried bugger. Steven Bartlett, you seen a pattern here? There are way too many of you guys and maybe I gotta do better.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  Don't worry.

• 47:22Brian Keating?

  I mean.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  I'm working on it.

• 47:23Brian Keating?

  Hopefully you will, cause the world needs more.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:25Brian Keating?

  Uh, little, uh, little Julians out there and Julian.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think life would be fulfilling without that. If you didn't find, I mean, obviously like you have, but if you didn't find like your counterpart or someone, you know, the woman that can, that can keep you honest and also support you in everything you do. And then also like have your kids and raise them and, you know, continue the evolutionary cycle. I don't see the, personally, I don't really see the point to life if you don't have that.

• 47:54Brian Keating?

  Yeah. I mean, people worry about, oh, the, uh, you know, legacy and even people like Elon, who's got a lot of kids. I mean, you have to understand, he has so many kids, he doesn't know how many kids he has. I mean, they're coming out of the woodwork left and right. Um. But look at it.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  I think he's got to be careful.

• 48:09Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he definitely needs to be careful. He's definitely got this kind of Messiah complex. I talked to him for a few minutes on my podcast last year and I tried to kind of convey to him that that the Mars reality is not as important as basically fundamental physics and astronomy and cosmology.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  How do you feel about that?

• 48:27Brian Keating?

  Uh, well, I kind of wasn't as good as maybe you would have been about it. I I made it more personal. I said, look, Elon, you want to go to Mars? And he's like, yeah. And I said, well, um, which one of your kids are you going to leave behind? And he was on, his son was on the podcast. It was on X, it was a Twitter space, X spaces. And his mom and his son, you know, his son was there and his mom was there. And um, and I could hear him playing in the background like you and I are both fathers. You've had the tragic, uh, unfortunate occurrence of losing a child, uh, in your life. You know, thank, uh, you know, hopefully that won't ever happen, uh, again, or anybody that we love. But um, but you know how painful it is to say goodbye to a kid? And yet you know, you can't bring X to Mars with you. It's not safe. It's not, it's not prudent.

• 49:11Brian Keating?

  And plus it's not within his free will domain of, of, of expression. Like he might not want to go to Mars just because you want to go to Mars. So you'd be dooming him if you took him. So I don't think you'd take him, right? He said, yeah. And I said, so who are you going to leave behind? And how is that going to go? And, and then his mom jumped in and said, well, we don't want to talk about anything unpleasant. Yeah. And she cut it off. So I talked to him for 10 minutes. I did get in a couple of questions about cosmology and he's very interested in space and physics and hopefully he'll take care of, because the Starlink satellites actually contaminate some of the radio waves that we're looking for from the same.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  They contaminate? How did they contaminate it?

• 49:42Brian Keating?

  They broadcast in the exact frequency range that we're looking for.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  So you shoot it down?

• 49:46Brian Keating?

  Uh, I don't think you can, you could take it on Mars. No, that'll be, that'll be dangerous.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  You're not out there with the fucking Kalashnikov?

• 49:52Brian Keating?

  Got the, uh, get the Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck up there with the jackhammers. Um, so anyway, no, life makes sense only, uh, when you have something beyond yourself to think about. And I think with these guys, and I've told every single one, it's not like talking out of, out of school, but, but you know, you look at that and you say, well, I'm waiting for the right person or any of it. Okay. So I have a simple algorithm for men to find the right person.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 50:42Brian Keating?

  So it's obviously important to man to want to have an attractive partner. Well, let's just take heterosexual. That's what I'm familiar with right now. But I'm sure it applies equally for non-heterosexual. But heterosexual men want to find a beautiful girl at some level, a woman at some level. I don't think that's too sexist. It's an imperative. Even men who are gay want to find a beautiful man, right? I mean, it's not like a mystery. Humans, the males, are very visually stimulated, etc. It's part of our propagation mechanism. But I said, look, you don't necessarily want to find like the hottest woman in the world necessarily, because it might be something that's difficult for you. But then you can always ask why? Like, keep pursuing that.

• 51:24Brian Keating?

  Why is it important to maintain human consciousness? Why is that important?

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Because it's the greatest gift that we know of on this, in our world that we can conceive. The idea that we can have a civilization that communicates with each other at a way higher level than other species on this planet do, and that the chances of that even happening were so slim, and yet here we are.

• 51:48Brian Keating?

  Okay.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  This is a piece of life we know of.

• 51:50Brian Keating?

  You just finalized the argument to have kids, by the way.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 51:53Brian Keating?

  Everything you said translates 100% to why you and other men, Andrew and Chris and all these guys should have kids, right?

• 51:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 51:59Brian Keating?

  Right? Because the same principles should apply. But again, you have to keep saying, well, then if that's true, then, so then you're saying that a future life, a future consciousness, is actually worth some fraction of a present amount of money and time and consciousness and so forth and then attention. So there has to be some trade-off between how much you apply there, right? So here's a crass example. He's going to abandon one of his current kids, or 13 of his, maybe all 14 or 15 or however many he's got. He's gonna abandon them, abandon them. So he's not gonna be the consciousness, loving ideological father, biological father. He's not, he's already abandoned, he's already basically disavowed one of them, right? The one that is a trans, right? He doesn't, she doesn't talk to him, he or she, whatever, I don't wanna get into trans stuff. But, but they don't talk to each other, right? And they hate each other.

• 52:44Brian Keating?

  And so because of that, he, uh, he's alienated one. So how much is a current child worth compared to a future possible child? It may not even exist, by the way. So these are these big questions, which I don't think he's fully gras- I don't think he's a very deep, like, I don't think he ruminates about things like this. I think actually sometimes it's important to have a philosophical, maybe even a religious perspective on things like this. To get perspective, to get, to get some wisdom in there. Like, again, science doesn't mean wisdom, it means knowledge. Science is a process by which we collect facts, we vet them, we test them, we stress test them. And then we get a consensus on what is limited to not be falsifiable. And that is the process of science. So I don't think, purely thinking engineering wise, or he's greatest engineer, maybe, uh, in history.

• 53:29Brian Keating?

  Certainly is an incredibly accomplished person. He's like three months older than me. Amazing, amazing person. Would I trade my life with his? Not in a billion years, not in a nanosecond. His life, according to even himself, is torture. Is pure torture. Inside, inside of Elon's mind is a torture chamber that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. The, the distractions, the compulsions, the OCD, the Asperger, whatever he's dealing with, the suffering, the demons that drive him. To sleep almost not at all, to, according to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, to use other substances. To not have contact with one of my children if I were him, it's unthinkable. So you, you have to wonder, you know, like, is the ultimate purpose that, and if so, if it's future consciousness?

• 54:11Brian Keating?

  Which is easier? It's like the UFO thing, like, which is more plausible? UFOs have visited Earth, correctly probed our friends and neighbors, uh, you know, made crop circles and built the pyramids and Stonehenge. Or that there's, you know, uh, cultural, sociol- uh, socioeconomic explanations. Psychological explanations, people were drugged or teased by their friends, hazed by the US government, which we know exist. I mean, they totally gaslit people for decades. They weren't doing this. I said, in a long time, this is probably what they're doing. Or testing technology out, like radar reflecting spheres and cubes and whatever. All that stuff, is that more plausible? Is it more easy to extend consciousness to other planets? Or to extend consciousness to this planet on Earth? Imagine if he dumped a trillion dollars into saving the Earth?

• 54:56Brian Keating?

  Whatever that means, preventing nuclear war, getting rid of engineered viruses for enhanced purposes, asteroid deflection, and simultaneously put 0.1% of that trillion dollars into fundamental physics research, math research, computer science research. Look, last time I was here was 2023, end of 2023.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  November.

• 55:19Brian Keating?

  November. And that was just when ChatGPT-3 came out. It was right around then. It was a watershed moment, just like, I think it'll be a watershed moment. We look back and the cosmological constant not being constant. Since then, everything's different, right? So many things have changed in my teaching, in my life, in my kid's life. I taught my daughter how to make a song, and it actually taught her how to prompt properly, because she tried to make it sound like she prompted it like, I like Dua Lipa, I want it to sound like Dua Lipa. And the prompt came back from Sora, Sona. You can't do that, you can't use, that's a forbidden word. You can't use any artist's names because it's a violation of their copyright, even if you're doing it in the style of it. So she learned how to prompt from that. Like, she learned, okay, this is acceptable. So the machines are training us now. Are they going to train us in physics? I don't know.

• 56:03Brian Keating?

  I don't know if Grok is capable of constructing a curved spacetime from a Riemannian manifold, the way that Einstein did, just sitting and thinking about falling in an elevator whose cable broke. Okay, can a computer do that? Can a computer mimic and modulate just by sheer GPU and LLM power marry together? I don't know. I don't know if that's how the brain works. Just because neural networks work that way, that doesn't mean that's the magic in the machine. What if there was 0.01% of the trillion dollars going to cost to get some robots to Mars? And by the way, we send people there, we go on expeditions there, but we don't try to set up a planet living there. I mean, the surface is poisonous.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  You've got to crawl, walk, even before you run, if that were even possible.

• 56:41Brian Keating?

  But it's different. It's known to be thoroughly uninhabitable. I mean, it's completely...

• 56:46Speaker 03

  What makes it, just for people out there who aren't familiar, what makes it uninhabitable?

• 56:49Brian Keating?

  There's a book, Zach Wiener Smith and his wife Kelly wrote a book called City on Mars, an incredibly skeptical take on all the conditions, both economic, physiological, physical, chemical.

• 57:03Brian Keating?

  Atmospheric pressure, all these different things. One of the things, you know, they say is the surf, just to get there is a hazardous radiation exposure dose, you know, the same people who think we never went to the moon because of Van Allen belt surrounding the earth would poison or radiate the human body beyond recognition. Not only believe that it's possible for Elon to go to Mars, but that you're going to take babies and zygotes and embryos and people that didn't choose to be born on the surface of Mars, criminals are going to be born on the surface of Mars.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Criminals.

• 57:31Brian Keating?

  I mean, think about how many, 0.1% of the US population are felons, right? So we have.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  I thought you were saying we were taking like criminals there to fuck or something.

• 57:39Brian Keating?

  So every time you go and see your Phillies play, there's like 10 murderers or 10 felons. There's 20 alcoholics, there's convicted rapists in Philly. Yeah, that's true. And San Diego, and our beautiful, America's finest city. But, but here's the point, if you go and you say that this is your priority, you're tacitly saying that I don't have other priorities, including currently inhabited earth. Earth is the only place we know where this consciousness flickers as a flame. Why not see what the undersea water has, I told you, the Antarctic was only explored 112 years ago.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:14Brian Keating?

  First, first, for the first time, there's parts there we don't even know about. The pyramid's not being part of them, okay? The period pyramid under the ice. Okay, we'll get to that next time. That's number three.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Don't shut that down.

• 58:23Brian Keating?

  Podcast number three, I gotta go. But, but eventually, we could look at colonizing underneath the ocean. There's tons more resources right here in, you know, in the Atlantic Ocean than there are. And what about conserving the resources that are in, you know, species that are dying, et cetera, and in modulating some of the effects from the climate, not saying all of it's manmade, but, you know, how can we modulate those effects? How could we make human life flourish here? So consciousness, the life of a human being now, being weighted far more than a potential future human being, who may not have a job, thanks to AI, may not, may have to rely on universal basic income, may not be sitting around writing the poetry that the socialist paradise dreams of, right? So there's a lot of problems with living in the future, and that's the whole effective

• 59:06Brian Keating?

  altruism, kind of nonsensical, you know, scam that Sam Bankman Fried and others were big proponents of. But yeah, like, how do you weight what a future human life is worth based on your conventional social mores today? Who gets to say what it's worth? Elon Musk? I mean, I don't think so.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  No, no one gets to say what it's worth.

• 59:21Brian Keating?

  Would you, by the way, if he said to you, Julian, hey, the starship's leaving tomorrow. You want to come? You want to be the second man on Mars? But, oh, by the way, right. And you're probably like a huge supporter and fan of Elon. I mean, I'm a fan of a lot of stuff he does.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  I'm not a fanboy.

• 59:37Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  So, and, and there are, there are, I, I do have to say this, there are just some patterns with him that he's exhibited that I've just noticed more over the last couple of years that I'd be lying if I told you that's in line with what good people do. And I think one of those things is like some of his, I don't know, personal

• 59:57Speaker 03

  insemination of, of women and all that. And it's like, I get it. You're trying to populate the planet. That's awesome. But I think the way that he treats some of it is wrong objectively.

• 1:00:07Brian Keating?

  Yeah. No, I agree. Uh, but you know, he's got 200 and something million followers. I bet one, one.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  So go fuck yourself.

• 1:00:16Brian Keating?

  He's got 200, 200 Julian Dorey's, uh, podcast. Um, but no, I mean, I, I would bet on 1% of them. Let's say 0.1% wants to go to Mars with thousands of people, right? Uh, it's to me to think about, you know, kind of if you, I just don't think it's been thought through fully. Whereas we know the basic research, basic scientific research, that these things pan out in ways that you can't predict. In other words, he's trying to take us, he's an engineer. He's trying to take a certain track, which is apply money, apply certain, you know, benzene and chemical rocket things together and the rocket go fast. And it will reach, you know, Mars in a certain, but.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's his estimated time to reach Mars?

• 1:00:55Brian Keating?

  Well, the soonest Mars could be reached is something like nine months. That's the fastest you can get there. Longest, and it's on the other side of the solar system is, is something like 21 months or something like that. Uh, but obviously you time it to be like that, but the, in terms of the total amount of mass that has to be reached there. And then you have to geoform. I mean, no one's going to want to live in a bubble dome. Like, uh, he thinks it will take something like, like a thousand starship launches to build basically a bubble dome type city there. Okay. Uh, but.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Thousand starship launches?

• 1:01:25Brian Keating?

  Yeah. In terms of total metric tons to orbit.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Trillions of dollars.

• 1:01:28Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah. That's right. Well, you know, he's on track to be, you know, he is the richest person in the world and he's probably going to donate all.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  He ain't got that.

• 1:01:35Brian Keating?

  Yeah. No, but governments do. And I think if he has the ear of people like President Trump still after calling him a Epstein.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  LHTD, man.

• 1:01:44Brian Keating?

  After accusing him of being on the Epstein files.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, that went away real fast, didn't it?

• 1:01:48Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I regret some of the things I said, yeah, I mean, I wonder if I could take that back.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just whoop, wipe that one away.

• 1:01:56Brian Keating?

  That doesn't work with my wife, you know.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it wouldn't.

• 1:01:58Brian Keating?

  I regret some of the things we said, honey, when I threw that at you and she threw it at me. All right, well, I gotta head uptown. I'm gonna head out tonight to, uh, to an event where I'm gonna be talking about, uh, all these meteorites. Again, you can get them on my website. But next time I talk, I wanna talk to you about something really cool. Because my next book is going to be about this magical person who brought me to New York City this time, Jim Simons. So Jim Simons was kinda like my scientific godfather mentor. He happened to be one of the richest guys in the world, but he was also one of the most curious people in the world. He invented things in mathematics that have applicability, everything from genetics to quantum computers to cosmology, to string theory and beyond.

• 1:02:38Brian Keating?

  And he, up until his dying day, he basically was commanding me, issuing me challenges to, to go out and discover this phenomenon, which is related to this magic crystal. So I kept teasing the magic crystal. So you have huge retention. This video's gonna have like a flat retention curve, 99%.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Look at you, you little YouTuber.

• 1:02:56Brian Keating?

  Come on, you know I gotta YouTube it up. So take a look at this thing here. Here's my card. This is you get when you get onto my mailing list there. Um, so take this, so look at it.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  This is like a Costco lifetime membership card right here.

• 1:03:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's pretty nice. So now put this magic crystal in, which is mostly clear, right? You'd say it's, it's, it's got some little cracks in it, but take a look and tell me, describe for the audience listening, perhaps when you put it over some text, what happens to the text?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Gets a little foggy.

• 1:03:48Brian Keating?

  Okay, so put it, put it down flat. Put the card and the, and the crystal down flat. This is called Icelandic spar or?

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Now it doubles it.

• 1:03:54Brian Keating?

  Crystal. It doubles it. Perfect. This crystal is called bi-refringence. Bi like bisexual.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Bicycle. Bi-refrigen. It has two refractive indices. Two different directions for light to propagate in. Your glasses have one. If you had glasses made of this stuff, you'd go nuts. Now, this is a polarizer. What I have here is called an optical polarizer. What it's gonna do is kill off one of those two polarization states that have different indices of refraction. Tell me what happened. Put the card. You guys fidget too much.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  Put it flat?

• 1:04:26Brian Keating?

  Put it flat. Put both of them flat. And now, put that on top of it.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Separately?

• 1:04:30Brian Keating?

  Well, you put it separately first, just to show that not, it doesn't do anything. It just makes it darker, right?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  It just makes it darker.

• 1:04:35Brian Keating?

  So on your cameras right now, you don't have any ND filter. Shame on you, Joe. Shame on you.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  What's an ND filter?

• 1:04:40Brian Keating?

  ND filter, Joe?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  That'd be my fault, not Joe's.

• 1:04:42Brian Keating?

  What's that?

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's, what's an ND filter?

• 1:04:44Brian Keating?

  It's a neutral density filter, so it allows the aperture to remain open more, so you get a little more motion blur. It cuts down on the intensity by a certain power.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  I hope you know what he's talking about.

• 1:04:53Brian Keating?

  Yeah, good. There are other ones called circular polarized filters, and then there are ultraviolet light filters. Oh, it's a good tip out there for expensive lens, you know, kinda horrors like me. There's a beautiful camera shop around the corner. It's amazing. You should go take a look.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  Well, we got B&H on 30, on 34th over here.

• 1:05:08Brian Keating?

  It's over here too?

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:09Brian Keating?

  Okay. Gotta check it out. Baroka Sham. I gotta go check it out. So, when you look at that with, through the polarizer, it just dims everything. That's all it does. It's killing off half the light. Now, if you put it on top, and now, you might have to rotate the, the circle, the polarizer.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  Now, it's all single.

• 1:05:24Brian Keating?

  Now, it's making it single. So it's killed off one of the two images that was distorting the view that you have of the cos, of the card. In the cosmos, there have been claims that the universe does the same thing as that crystal. In other words, it appears as if the universe, according to researchers using data from the Planck experiment, that there's a delay, or there's a slower propagation of light, like Claudia thinks for gravity, but this is for light. Light may slow down slightly based on its polarization. That is an idea that is related to what Jim Simons invented, called the Chern Simons topological invariant.

• 1:06:00Brian Keating?

  What we're looking for at the Simons Observatory is to determine whether or not we can see this, it's called cosmic birefringence. Birefringence is the double refraction. Why, you saw two images. The polarizer kills one of them, allows you to see clearly in one light only. Now, one last experiment you could do there, and this is actually what we're doing at the Simons Observatory. So, put the card, uh, put the, uh, crystal, the birefringent calcium crystal, put that on top of the text. Put the polarizer on, it kills it off. Now, rotate the polarizer about its center, and tell me what happens to the letters that you see. Just keep, keep the crystal and the card fixed.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  So, just rotate it like this?

• 1:06:36Brian Keating?

  Just spin it, yep. What do you see happening?

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  They get darker.

• 1:06:40Brian Keating?

  Gets darker, and then it gets lighter, and you can see it again.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:43Brian Keating?

  That's called modulation. What you're doing is you're changing-

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Oh, and they change positions.

• 1:06:47Brian Keating?

  Change positions, right. So, you're basically killing on and on.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my ADD is gonna go nuts with this later.

• 1:06:52Brian Keating?

  It's pretty wild, right? This is incredible stuff. This is fundamental physics. To determine if, on cosmic scales, if the universe behaves as if it's filled with this crystalline refractive index material, is one of my top goals. Because it turns out to be related to properties of dark matter. It could be that the dark, what we call dark matter, is just what's called a heavy photon, a photon that actually has mass, but we've never seen it, because we've never seen far enough back that the effects, this is a huge effect here. I mean, you can see it with your eye, basically. But imagine if the effect is like parts per trillion, and we've never been able to look far enough into space until now at the Simons Observatory. So, this is one of the goals of the Simons, the one I'm most interested in, because it was the one that Jim Simons thought, this is a guy who had a mega yacht, had a G650-

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  He's a hedge fund guy, right?

• 1:07:35Brian Keating?

  He'd started a hedge fund, and he had run it, and was successful. Then he pivoted, so, this is his career. He's a mathematician, he's the first chairman of this, uh, SUNY Stony Brook Math Department, which is where he hired my father, and so they were colleagues, and that's how I got to know him. He hired my father, my father was a professor at Cornell, he moved down to work with Jim at Stony Brook.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, he died last year, I remember.

• 1:07:54Brian Keating?

  He died a year ago, and that's why tomorrow is a memorial, kinda tribute to him, where we're gonna have some of the greatest physicists, Nobel Prize winners, and-

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  He's just ripping Boggs till the end. God bless him.

• 1:08:04Brian Keating?

  He actually was, uh, yeah, he smoked Merit Filterless usually for 65 years. Died, uh, May 10th, yeah. So, tomorrow, uh, we're going, we're having an event for him, uh, where we're honoring his life, his legacy, his scientific contributions. But one of the ones that he always, kinda, wanted, is he had the 650, he had the limo, he had the Gulf, you know, he had the mega yacht. But he won a Nobel Prize. It's really funny. The man who had everything. I got him an asteroid. I have this asteroid named Jim Simons after him.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:08:31Brian Keating?

  Wikipedia, you'll probably find it there too. Sixty-six eighteen, Jim Simons.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  I didn't know until Eric went on with Rogan back in February two thousand twenty-three. In that episode where they where he's like, "Michucau, Michucau is out of control." But like, he talked about this guy, and I really never knew about this guy before then.

• 1:08:50Brian Keating?

  He is a fascinating, yeah, Eric, you know, projects a lot of stuff onto him, like maybe he was involved in gravity research and then and funding like super secret technical organization near Brookhaven National Labs and Stony Brook and and the hedge funds a cover, a CIA cover. I don't agree with him. I mean, he told me and actually on my podcast with him last month, he said that, you know, Jim told him that it was actually much more boring than he suspected. And I knew that because he had told me that the secret that they had.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  That's what I would tell him too if I was working for CIA.

• 1:09:16Brian Keating?

  Yeah, but it's hard, again, it's hard to have a conspiracy, a cover up, whether it's about assassinations, whether it's about UFOs, or whether it's about CIA, you know, involvement in a math department. You know, it's, it's, maybe you can control it over one or two guys or gals, but then their spouses, their kids, they want to put something in their will, they want to do, and it's going to have to be verified. Right, so that's what they say. They say two people can keep a conspiracy if one of them's dead.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:09:40Brian Keating?

  Famous, famous, uh, famous saying, right? So, anyway, the next time I come back, I hope that we'll have information that either refutes the claim made by, quite frankly, their kind of competitor. I mean, I've been looking for the signal. They claim they detected it using this billion-dollar satellite called Planck data, and they're great scientists. And I'm kind of trying to see if they're right or wrong, and I've been working on this for a long time, but no matter who's right, we want to know the answer. And so I'm comfortable being wrong. But if, if it does turn out to be there, it would be incredibly ironic, because it would mean that Jim Simons, beyond the grave, is now experiencing this Nobel Prize-worthy discovery that only he was legitimately responsible for, both in terms of funding the observatory.

• 1:10:23Brian Keating?

  Funding the team, funding the basic scientific research and providing the inspiration to millions of people to be fascinated with stuff in the cosmos for the betterment of mankind. Really, he's like a modern day Alfred Nobel, or was.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Can you get a Nobel Prize posthumously?

• 1:10:39Brian Keating?

  No, that's one of the problems I wrote about in my book, my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. It's about how it's cruel, unfair, and inaccurate description of how scientific method works. It doesn't work that way. Science is not about like, oh, you happen to be alive when this thing came. No, what matters is like, we still use Newton's laws over certain ranges and then someone comes along and shows that Newton was wrong, named Albert Einstein, and then someone will come along later on and prove that Einstein's wrong and that actually, you know, Claudia or, you know, somebody else.

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  That's how it works.

• 1:11:07Brian Keating?

  And my job as the experimentalist is provide the data that then discovers or refutes what they claims are being made and hopefully gets us on a pathway that's closer to the truth.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  As we see farther away, last question for you, as we see farther away though, we're talking about distances today that just blow my mind and obviously the, the exploration aspect of science is moving up at a, at a fast rate. As we look farther away though and begin to actually conceptualize just how many galaxies there are or that we didn't know about before, or how much matter or lack thereof might be in some of these. Mathematically speaking, doesn't it start to make the possibility that, the probability that there is intelligent life out there, meaning like an alien as we would consider it here, doesn't that make it damn near 100% as we get farther and farther here?

• 1:11:58Brian Keating?

  I don't think so. I mean, I've had this debate, again, going back to Antarctica. So when I was in Antarctica, I think at one point in time, I was probably the most overweight person on the entire continent, you know, 25% body fat.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  Were there five people there?

• 1:12:14Brian Keating?

  Well, no, that's the point. Yeah, it's this huge amount of space though, which is basically the argument you're making. Space is proportional to content, right? So like, just because you have a lot of space, like there's an awful lot of, you know, of hard disk space in, in the cloud, so to speak, right? Does that mean it's all filled up? There's a lot of content on there too, but it's a fraction of what there could be. On Antarctica, right now, in the middle of their winter, it's actually gonna be the coldest night, it's gonna be about 100 below zero Fahrenheit. So on July 4th every year, they do what's called the 300 degree club. They go outside, they go into a sauna, there's a sauna at the South Pole, it goes up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Then they go outside for the ultimate cold plunge, except they don't lie down. They run around, you can only wear your shoes or else your clothes will freeze your body and freeze off your junk.

• 1:12:56Brian Keating?

  So they go out from 200 degrees positive to negative 100 degrees and run around the South Pole, which is just like a flagpole, basically. And then they come in, that's called the 300 degree club, experiencing a delta temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Insane. You can't imagine it. Now, if you spit, your spit freezes in midair, your eyeballs could freeze in midair. But, uh, but anyway, that's a tradition down there.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Who the hell wants to do that?

• 1:13:18Brian Keating?

  So in Antarctica, there's right now 40 people there. So it's a continent, it could support billions of, literally every single person on Earth could fit in a one cubic mile cube. Did you know that? If you took everybody on Earth, put them in a blender, they fit in one mile, a cube from here to Manhattan. Well, or so, don't put them in a blender, they fit in a two cubic mile. I mean, how big do you think you are in a blender versus, you know, uh, fully extended? Maybe two miles. Does that make it any less tiny compared to the size of the Earth? There's almost nobody on Earth compared to the size of what the Earth could support. So you're telling me the universe has a radius, which we know to be true, of 45 billion light years. I mean, first of all-

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  We know that to be true.

• 1:13:54Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's how far away the CMB is. That's where the CMB last scattering surface that you talked about in timestamp two hours and 14 minutes with Claudia Durham comes from. Don't you remember? Do I know your timestamps better than you do?

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  On this count, you do. That's a first in the history of our show. Nice job.

• 1:14:09Brian Keating?

  So when you look at the universe, you see how what we're observing, again, could not be there. Like, these things could have disappeared. So I like to, let me even just spot you all that. Let me just say, in our galaxy, let's just focus on things that plausibly could have come to Earth in the, uh, 30,000 years since human beings in modern form came about in, you know, the Mesopotamian region of, of, uh, the Middle East, right? 30,000 light years away. And traveling at the speed of light. And they got it. That's a volume about the size of our galaxy, okay? Or an area the size of our galaxy in radius. In that regime, there's, we have zero evidence, even though there's literally 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Each one has maybe 10, 100 planets, just like ours does, right? Minor planets, big planets.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  All it takes is one though, Brian. All it takes is one planet.

• 1:14:57Brian Keating?

  All it takes is one, but there's also zero evidence for any of them to be there. So if you have something that says you can't have this, like again, perpetual motion machine, or you have some symmetry principle that says that there's no possibility whatsoever of getting, of getting some angular rotation that doesn't produce what's called angular momentum. Like there are things in physics called conservation, conservation of energy, right? So all it takes is one. Well, all it takes is one violation of conservation of energy. Yeah, but we've never seen that. We have no evidence for that. We have principles of physics that are based downstream on that of not not occurring. And here's the other thing. You say it all takes is one, but I can come up right now with, with a probabilistic estimate, the Fermi paradox solution called the Drake equation.

• 1:15:40Brian Keating?

  And it has all these terms in it, but there's one term that we have no idea about, which is how long does a civilization last for? So even, let me stipulate that there's, there's, there's been millions of civilizations, but our galaxy is billions of years old. So that means if each one doesn't last for more than a thousand years, which I mean, do you, what would you put the odds of, of humanity existing right now in 2025 for another thousand to 10,000 years?

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  The odds?

• 1:16:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  At a thousand, I'd say the odds are excellent. At 10,000, it gets dicey.

• 1:16:10Brian Keating?

  I think Musk would say the odds of 10 years from now is pretty low. Or else why would he put all his money into it? If he, if you told Elon.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  10 years?

• 1:16:17Brian Keating?

  Well, why is he building rockets on a time scale to get to Mars in 2035?

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  I know, but that seems a little doomer. 10 years is crazy. You're talking about civilization collapse?

• 1:16:25Brian Keating?

  He obviously thinks that there is some urgent reason to go to Mars now. Rather, look, if you tried to invent the iPod in 1985, you probably could have. I mean, there were hard disks back then. There were certainly Walkman. I had a Walkman probably before you were born. And so you could have put one together. It would have cost a trillion dollars, right? But if you waited until, okay, now they shrank down to one inch diameter disk drive that could fit a thousand MP3 files, and you waited for the MP3 compression algorithm to be invented, now it's much easier for you to invent the iPod, right? So why, you don't want to do things now. In fact, Steve Jobs famously said, like, I don't give away money now because if I give away a dollar now, that's a hundred dollars I don't give away when I die. He gave away all his money when he died. And some people think that's illegitimate. And some say it's not a good way to give charity. I'm not going to comment on that.

• 1:17:10Brian Keating?

  But the point is, it's always easier, it gets faster. Moore's Law, just think about Moore's Law. If you try to invent an iPhone today, you could not do it. I mean, an iPhone 100 years ago, you couldn't do it. But if you wait 200 years, it'll be like, we literally do things in our lab classes that won Nobel Prizes 50 years ago. In other words, technology, instrumentation, analysis, compression, algorithms, computing, all these things are going to make things exponentially easier. So why not just wait? The answer is, he doesn't think we're going to last that long. He legitimately thinks we need to get to Mars and back up that hard drive of consciousness in the next decade or two decades. Now, you can argue with that, but it's certainly not, you couldn't convince me that he thinks a thousand years from now, meaning that he doesn't think consciousness of Flickr will be not extinguished a thousand years from now.

• 1:17:55Brian Keating?

  You seem to be more optimistic. I'm not going to argue which way or another, but the point being, you have to make this estimate. But the fact that you and I can't really agree on it, he maybe disagrees with all, both of us, the fact is, that just points to the fact that even if there was a technological civilization with opposable thumbs that can make an iPhone, that can make, that, we don't know how long they can last for. They could last for a year, they could last for a thousand years, but they probably don't last for millions of years. So, they're either there, they were there and they're dead, right? Or they're coming in the future, right? After a million years more of evolution, and maybe they're watching us or doing something else. But just the mere fact that space is big is, has no bearing on the probability of life existing elsewhere, let alone technological.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  I would say if that's the only variable you're looking at it through, that would be correct. However, when you start to look at the existence of these other stars, and, and then you consider what we don't even know about our own planets in this little solar system right here, and now extrapolate that across, I'll just say thousands, but it's probably more, you know, thousands of other solar systems that could exist. Again, that's where it starts to get to.

• 1:19:03Brian Keating?

  This is like, to me, I've heard this argument many times, but, but it's kind of like a gambler's foul, like, okay, so it's, it's only worked here, but it's got to work somewhere else because the problem, there's so much time has elapsed, and the universe is so big, but all those things, if I told you this, we wouldn't be here if Jupiter wasn't about the size that it is right now. We wouldn't be here if the moon wasn't exactly where it is with the exact same size that it is. Forget about us going to the moon, okay? So, and now you ask the probability, how many different things are responsible for our existence, going back just in our solar system? So like the position of the moon, the size of the moon relative to the earth, the size of Jupiter and the other outer planets, that there aren't other ones. You know, most stars in the galaxy are double stars. We don't have a double star. That makes things easier for stable orbits to develop and so on.

• 1:19:46Brian Keating?

  And we also were hit by a massive asteroid called Theia back about four and a half billion years before. That's where this asteroid fragment, the meteorite, comes from. Comes from a huge collision in the pre-existing solar system. If that occurred after, say, the moon had formed, we wouldn't be here. The moon wouldn't have formed and probably would have been obliterated, the earth-moon double planet system. If the comet that hit the Yucatan Peninsula, killing off the dinosaurs, if that occurred before the asteroid that hit the earth or pre-earth that formed the moon, if that happened before and didn't kill off the dinosaurs, we wouldn't be here, right? Because dinosaurs would have outcompeted us and we couldn't survive. So all these different collisions.

• 1:20:28Brian Keating?

  And lastly, there are things called the comets that provide the water on Earth's oceans. If those came before Theia or before the, or after the dinosaurs, you know, wiping asteroid, we also wouldn't be here. So there's three different types of collisions. They had to happen in exact right order. They had to occur in the exact environment of our solar system when afterwards there were, you know, before which there were oxygenation of microbes and afterwards there were prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells that had cellular membranes. All these things, any of them change in order, that wouldn't have. Now, this could be used and distorted as argument for God or design. I don't think that's relevant. We're just talking about life, intelligent life, all these variables. Just take 10 of them and say each one has a part in 1,000 of a current, which I think

• 1:21:13Brian Keating?

  is very low. I mean, the odds of the asteroid hitting the earth, proto-earth and forming the moon coming before the asteroid that killed the dinosaur, that's like a trillion to one odds, but let's just call it 1,000 to one. Make it as favorable as possible for you. Now, take 10 different things. Size of Jupiter, distance of the moon, formation of the moon before, after the formation, before the formation of the dinosaur killing asteroid. Get 10 of those things, each one is a part in 1,000. You get 10 to the one, to the 1 over 10 power. So you take 1 over 10, 10 to the 30th power. One in 10 to the 30th. There's only one times 10 to the 24th stars in the entire observable universe. In our galaxy, there's 10 to the 10 to the 12th or at most stars in our galaxy.

• 1:21:57Brian Keating?

  So now you take those, that means it's one in a trillion odds that we're here. Okay. So I, that we're not, that we are not alone. So these are just, I mean astronomical numbers. It's very hard to multiply large numbers by almost infinitesimal numbers. You get, you can get any answer you want. And so because of that, I don't like the argument that, oh, space is very big and therefore there has to be life. There's no evidence for that. It sounds good, feels good, doesn't pay the bills.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  There's a lot to dig into there, but I know you gotta leave Dr. Keating.

• 1:22:28Brian Keating?

  Chapter three.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  This, we will definitely do that in chapter three. Yeah. I like the way he's thinking. I like the way he's thinking, but listen, I love talking with you, Brian. It's a lot of fun and you got a lot on the bone there that you're always looking at. You're also one of the most connected guys within the physics space I've ever talked with. So I know you're talking to a lot of different perspectives. So thank you as always for stopping by.

• 1:22:49Brian Keating?

  Thank you for hosting me.

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  All right. And we'll have the links down to your YouTube channels below and then we should put your website down there too.

• 1:22:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, BrianKeating.com.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  You got it. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

• 1:23:00Brian Keating?

  Peace.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Thanks again for watching the special two-part crossover episode of Brian Keating on Julian Dorey's podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you'll subscribe to Julian's podcast as well as to into the impossible. Now, if you can't get enough of the stuff that we talked about, I know you'll enjoy my brief but fascinating interview with Elon Musk. Click here for that and don't forget to subscribe.

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