Are We in a SIMULATION? | Brian Keating on the Arora Podcast

The Arora Show with Brian Keating What happens when science reaches the edge of what it can explain? In this episode of The Arora Show, Amira & Aryaan sit down with renowned cosmologist and physicist Professor Brian Keating for a fascinating conversation about the universe, consciousness, God, the Big Bang, and some of the biggest questions humans can ask. We explore the origins of the universe, whether there was truly a “beginning,” what existed before the Big Bang, the mysteries science still cannot solve, and where physics, philosophy, and spirituality collide. Brian also shares his perspective on the search for extraterrestrial life, the limits of human knowledge, Nobel Prizes, modern cosmology, and what decades of studying the universe have taught him about our place within it. In this conversation: What happened before the Big Bang? Did the universe come from nothing? Does physics leave room for God? Can science explain consciousness? Are we likely alone in the universe? What are the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology? Where does scientific knowledge reach its limits? What does the future of physics look like? Professor Brian Keating is an experimental cosmologist and professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. His work focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of the universe, and he is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible. Subscribe to The Arora Show for long-form conversations exploring consciousness, science, spirituality, psychology, philosophy, and the nature of reality. Hosted by Amira Arora & Aryaan Arora TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Introduction: The Big Bang, God & Simulation Theory 02:25 - Dr. Brian Keating's $200 Million Experiment to Understand the Big Bang 06:20 - Why Are Humans Obsessed With the Origin of the Universe? 09:20 - How Telescopes Reveal the Beginning of the Universe 16:04 - Is Interstellar Scientifically Accurate? Black Holes & Time Travel 20:45 - Are There Questions Science Can Never Answer? 23:01 - What Happened Before the Big Bang? 27:37 - What Is Time? Stephen Hawking's Theory Explained 30:42 - Is Reality a Simulation? Consciousness & Donald Hoffman 35:13 - Could Advanced AI Simulate Our Entire Reality? 42:49 - Does God Exist? The Fine-Tuning Argument 50:00 - Science, Religion & the Existence of God 1:04:00 - Why Does God Allow Suffering and Evil? 1:10:00 - Artificial Intelligence, Human Creativity & Consciousness 1:15:00 - Can Physics Explain the Mind of God? 1:18:27 - Do Humans Really Have Free Will? 1:24:55 - The Hard Problem of Consciousness Explained 1:27:43 - Why Does Anything Exist Instead of Nothing? 1:29:55 - Can Science Prove Simulation Theory? 1:34:45 - Death, Mortality & the Meaning of Life 1:39:25 - What If Scientists Discovered Alien Life? 1:45:06 - Brian Keating on the Nobel Prize & Academia 1:46:35 - Facing Death and Saying Goodbye to Loved Ones 1:48:10 - Final Thoughts #BrianKeating #TheAroraShow #Cosmology #Physics #BigBang #Consciousness #Science #Universe 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

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• 0:54Speaker 02

  What exactly are you building? What are you hoping to discover?

• 0:57Brian Keating?

  Many years ago, I proposed the very first experiment to look for basically the shrapnel of the Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang to bang? Raised $200 million for the project. So the main leading theory behind how the universe came into existence involves basically a singularity, a time at which there was no time before that. That day, was that the first day that time existed? How does time come into existence when there's no time for it to have come after? So these are some of the biggest questions in all of consciousness, of all of what humans could conceivably be capable of visualizing. About 30 years ago, I had an idea that we could actually do it using technology. We could build technology tools and instruments that would be extremely advanced, very sensitive, and they would reveal the reverberations

• 1:42Brian Keating?

  in the fabric of space and time. So this experiment that I co-lead with my colleagues around the world, this instrument is really poised to do what nothing has ever done before, to make this definitive measurement.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Has your view, though, on God changed ever since you went into this journey of cosmology and science?

• 1:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah, we care about God because God then transgresses and transcends the boundary between the laws of nature and the laws of how you treat your neighbor.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  If God really does exist, then why is there so much suffering?

• 2:13Brian Keating?

  So those are concepts called theodicy. You know, good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people. Believers have to count for the only one question, the existence of evil in a world created by God.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  We're trying to figure out what happened before the Big Bang. What was the origin of anything at all? But why not nothing?

• 2:29Brian Keating?

  That's an open question, related to where my research is leading me.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Simulation theory, the idea that our whole reality could be running on some deeper layer of code. Do you think that's something science should take seriously?

• 2:42Brian Keating?

  Let's say you're looking at something, a star, you know, and there's some angle. There'd be some fundamental discretization of the arrival of these objects, either the wavelength or the period. And if you could have quantization of energy, that would prove that you're in a simulation, right?

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Hi, everyone. Before we get into the podcast, I just wanted to say 90% of you that are watching this right now aren't subscribed, and it would mean the world to us if you would. So if you can hit that subscribe button and the notifications icon, that would truly help us out and help us to give you the content that you want to watch. So thank you so much, and here we go into the podcast.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Dr. Brian Keating, welcome to the show.

• 3:28Brian Keating?

  It's great to be here in San Diego with you New Yorkers. Thanks for coming on.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. So we're going to get straight into it. You are leading an experiment involving, I think, over $200 million in scientific funding. So of course, we would love to know what exactly are you building? What are you hoping to discover with this entire project?

• 3:47Brian Keating?

  Well, so over the course of my career, I would say I've raised $200 million for the projects, and I'm currently co-leading one of the biggest ones ever in my field, called the Cynons Observatory. And that's done in collaboration with partners at Penn and Columbia. We do have people at Columbia, but primarily at Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago in San Diego. And we were the founders of this experiment to look for the beginning, sort of the signature of what caused the Big Bang to bang. We know that the Big Bang occurred through a variety, a host of different pieces of evidence. And in science, the more pieces of evidence that converge on a singular explanation, the better. And so we realized, you know, many years ago, I proposed the very first experiment

• 4:30Brian Keating?

  to look for basically the shrapnel of the Big Bang. What would cause the Big Bang to bang is an open question. We know that the Big Bang happened, but what caused it to explode, if you will? It's not really an explosion, but let's talk about it in that way. The Big Bang began, we know now. We didn't know, you know, really with this precision, but we know it took place about 13.8 billion years ago. And because of that, we can search for the physical aftermath of the, effectively, of the aftershock of this explosive expansionary process. So the main leading theory behind how the universe came into existence involves basically a singularity, a time at which there was no time before that. So there was a day at which the Big Bang occurred. We could keep going back from today, go back 24 hours, 24 hours, 24 hours,

• 5:15Brian Keating?

  until you get to 13.826 billion years ago, in terms of 24 hours. And let's say that today's a Tuesday. Let's say it was a Tuesday. I mean, it could have been. It was, we didn't have days. The sun didn't exist, the humans didn't exist. But let's just say it corresponds to 24 times 13 billion times 360, etc. That day, was that the first day that time existed? How does time come into existence when there's no time for it to have come after? So these are some of the biggest questions, not just in, you know, cosmology, not just in science, but in all of consciousness, of all of what humans could conceivably be capable of visualizing. And so about 30 years ago, I had an idea that we could actually do it using technology. We could build technology tools and instruments,

• 6:00Brian Keating?

  primarily telescopes, which we can talk about, that would be extremely advanced, very sensitive, and they would reveal, not the light of the Big Bang, not the explosion itself, but the reverberations in the fabric of space and time.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 6:13Brian Keating?

  And that's called gravitational waves. And if the Big Bang began with this period of rapid expansion, as we, many scientists think we, you know, has the most, I'd say, many scientists believe the universe began with this inflationary aftershock, but it's not proven. We can't really prove things in science. We can falsify alternatives, can't prove it. So our job is to have as much physical evidence as possible that the universe had either a beginning in time or perhaps had many beginnings in time, where the universe exists not as, you know, a lone entity, a universe, a singular cosmos, but perhaps part of what's called the multiverse. So this experiment that I, you know, co-lead with my colleagues around the world, about 450 scientists, engineers, and researchers

• 6:58Brian Keating?

  on, you know, six of the seven continents, this instrument is really poised to do what nothing has ever done before, to make this definitive measurement of perhaps the very first instance of the creation of our universe. And that would be, you know, beyond my wildest dreams if that can occur.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, Brian, one thing I've always found fascinating is that human beings seem uniquely obsessed with this question of existence itself. We're constantly asking where all of this came from, why we're here, why anything exists at all. Why do you think that question seems so deeply built into human nature?

• 7:34Brian Keating?

  Well, I think it's inevitable that we want to know about where we came from. I always say, like, what's your favorite day on the calendar? I'll ask each one, what's your favorite day on the calendar?

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Wednesday.

• 7:46Brian Keating?

  Of the year. Oh, your birthday. Your birthday, right? So what's your birthday? Yeah, exactly. I was gonna use that as a joke. What day is that? And then I'll ask both of you guys.

• 7:56Brian Keating?

  So you guys, you guys tell me that you guys are twins. So your birthday, right? Or some people say New Year's Day, or Christmas, or, you know, Diwali, or any holiday, any event. What does that commemorate? It's typically commemorating the beginning of something or a cyclical cycle of iteration. So people like that. And what's the only thing you can't have personally witnessed? You know, your own origin story. I call it your own Big Bang, right? Your parents, you know, had you. You were, you know, you were there. You were there, but you couldn't physically be a witness to it. So you have to rely on what other people told you. The, you know, cosmology, the birth of the universe, if it indeed did take place on a single day. And there are many, many competitive ideas

• 8:39Brian Keating?

  that suggest that it didn't, it might not have. But let's just assume it did begin on a certain day, a certain time, and then time itself came into existence. That no entity could witness, you know, perhaps except for some omniscient god or simulator of reality. And so the question is, you know, what does that imply for satisfying a human desire? I think it's the most human question you can ask. And I think it taps into this desire to want to know what was the universe like? What were we like? What was, what are the boundaries of our knowledge? Because if time comes into existence, you really can't know about beforehand, right? So these are the real things that make it so fun to do cosmology, because you're addressing, you know, the most basic question about every religion

• 9:23Brian Keating?

  addresses this in some way or another. Every culture addresses this. What is the origin story of not just the human race, not just of Earth, not just of our solar system, our galaxy, our cluster of galaxies, but the universe itself? And perhaps, if there is, we don't know, but there may be evidence that there is a multiverse, of which we're an infinitesimal speck within. And so all of these have ramifications for meaning. Uh, for purpose, for theology, for philosophy, and in no other science as great as, you know, um, you know, the biochemistry of nematode worms or whatever is, uh, they don't really address the questions of existence, of meaning, of theology, of religion, of God. And so it's really quite astounding that we can address that using, you know, these

• 10:08Brian Keating?

  tools of telescopes, of instruments, of devices, whereas before it's pure speculation and theology.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Can we go a little bit deeper into the instruments you're using for this project? I know you've brought some.

• 10:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I brought some parts. So in astronomy, in one way or another, we're always doing some type of telescopy. You know, I never use that word, but a telescope means distance viewer, tally, distance, uh, scope to view. Uh, and so what we try to do is make visual what's not observable. So we have senses. We actually have two telescopes in our heads. Our heads have two devices that are refracting telescopes. They use lenses. This is a lens based telescope replica of Galileo's first instrument, the very first telescope, not invented, but first used for doing observations of the universe. And so it has a lens on one side, a lens on the other side, couples to the human eye and has detectors. Those are the basic components of a, of a telescope. It doesn't matter if it's looking for neutrinos

• 11:04Brian Keating?

  or if it's looking for gravitational waves as we are, or it's looking for photons, like, like particles. It has basically those common elements, uh, together. And so in our instruments, we are looking for heat. We're not looking for light. We're looking for heat that came about from the creation of the first atoms in the universe. First atoms came about 400,000 years after the big bang. Regardless of how that bang happened, we don't know, uh, yet. We hope to get some information. The universe was, uh, a transition from being an ionized plasma of protons, neutrons, uh, occasional, uh, heavier elements like lithium and helium

• 11:45Brian Keating?

  and things like that. But it's primarily hydrogen and its isotopes. Hydrogen has three isotopes. At 380,000 years after the big bang, due to the expansion of the universe, the universe had both cooled and expanded enough that it was no longer possible for the heat present at the very moment of creation to ionize the atoms, to keep them separate into plasma, ion of electrons and protons. So they combine together and the simplest atom is a hydrogen, hydrogen positive proton, a negative electron. When that occurred, the universe becomes transparent. Now light can propagate. Light can't propagate in the plasma, gets scattered like in a cloud. When the universe becomes neutral, becomes atomic, that fusion of proton

• 12:29Brian Keating?

  with electron, that made the universe transparent to light. And then the light that was present traced the properties of that time period. So it's a snapshot. When we look back in space, we're looking back in time. You're six feet away. I don't see you as you are instantaneously now. Light travels one foot per nanosecond. So you're six nanoseconds, you know, I see you six nanoseconds younger, quote unquote, than you actually are. You extend that to the sun, eight minutes. The sun could have disappeared at eight minutes. I hope it didn't. You know, San Diego, it's tough to tell. It's always so nice and sunny. Uh, but it could have disappeared. We won't know for 8.3 minutes. Because of the finite, yet fast light travel time, we trace. So what you look at, when you see an astronomical

• 13:10Brian Keating?

  source, you're not seeing it as it is now. You're seeing it as it was then. So we see the universe as it was when it created the first atoms, when the first atoms were neutral, created and present in the universe. And anything else that was there, the dark matter, which is not an atom, as far as we know, the dark energy, which is this mysterious substance, it's all pervasive vacuum type energy that seems to fill all of space. Um, and the, the fabric of space and time itself called the gravitational, uh, metric. So we perceive all the physical quantities of it as it was back then. So it's a time machine. All telescopes are time machines. Our time machine uses that light to divine, to derive

• 13:51Brian Keating?

  what were the properties of the matter, of the energy and of the space and time itself. So we can see via the imprints that the light presents to us, the fingerprints of the geometry of space and time, the composition of space and time, the early epoch of the space and time, and we can make projections about what we'll see in the future. So it's a very powerful time machine that is the representative of the oldest light in the universe. We can't do that with our eyes. It's in the microwave, which is, you know, saying that you heat up water in, in your oven in your kitchen. We can't see it. If you could see it, your microwave would be glowing brighter than anything in your house. Uh, however, we can build sensors that detect it. So our sensors don't look like, you know, retinas. They

• 14:34Brian Keating?

  don't look like, um, uh, they look a little bit like CCD cameras, like in your phone or whatever. But this is, this is a cluster of, of 256 detectors and it's about the same size as my iPhone, you know, total size of the iPhone, which has in its camera 48 million pixels. So these pixels are much bigger. Why is that? Because the wavelength of light that we're looking at is about the size of these little squares here. So there's 16 by 16 squares here. Um, the wavelength of light that we correspond to the peak brightness of the cosmic background radiation that I study is two millimeters compared to 500 nanometers that your eye sees. So red light is 500 nanometers in wavelength, microwave

• 15:15Brian Keating?

  wavelength of the brightest light that we see in the microwave is two millimeters. So we have to build special detectors. We put them at the focus of a telescope. The telescope doesn't use glass as its lens. It uses pretty ordinary material. This is just polyethylene plastic. It's very high density, so it refracts light, it bends microwaves. You can't see through it, but if I could see microwaves, it would go right through it, just like glass. Glass is more transparent to microwave. So it's a counter to your intuition. So you wouldn't use this for a camera, uh, that you're, that is in this room that's recording us, but, um, but you wouldn't use that type of camera to record that cosmic microwave background. Similarly, we have these very advanced detectors. Because we're looking at heat, we have to cool our detectors, just like you wouldn't build an optical telescope,

• 16:00Brian Keating?

  um, you know, on Broadway in Manhattan and Columbia University. You wouldn't build it there. The telescope there can barely see the moon. So you build it somewhere dark, like on top of a mountain. For us, the equivalent of being dark is to be cold. So we take it to cold places, dry places, the South Pole, Antarctica, um, the mountains of Chile, sometimes into space, but it's very expensive. Um, but that's really it. Yeah. So it's, there are all these commonalities. They all have to minimize these natural or man-made backgrounds. They all have to maximize their sensitivity, their desired signal.

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• 17:00Brian Keating?

  Um, and, and many telescopes use lenses. They could be reflectors, mirrors instead of lenses perhaps, but they use some type of optic focus, concentrate, and then they have a detection. And then the hard part begins, because you get tremendous amount of data and that's where the fun begins. And that's where the challenge really kind of begins to. It's, it's hard to build the instrument, but it takes almost as long and as much effort, as many people that are brilliant brainiacs to do the analysis.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  You know, Brian, uh, some of these topics and aspects that you're talking about, I'm sure a lot of the viewers are going to be watching this podcast are going to be wanting to, it's going to be in their head right now. You know, Hollywood really heavily uses this in a lot of their films. I know, I'm not sure if you watch Interstellar, but like they talked about this. They talked about the whole, this whole topic of time, how if you're on one planet, the time could pass differently in, on earth versus that planet. Is there any possibility that any of this could actually be true?

• 17:52Brian Keating?

  Hmm. So I had a controversial take. First of all, I'll say, I interviewed Kip Thorne, who won the Nobel Prize for detection of gravitational waves of LIGO and a prediction of theoretical analysis and analytical methods, um, as part of my podcast where I've interviewed 26 Nobel Prize winners. And, um, and I talked to him about the power of visualization in terms of scientific storytelling. And he actually wrote papers that are in physics journals about the accuracy and how you do these computational, um, his heroic computational tour, tour de force, where, you know, one second of film in the video, in the movie took 20, you know, 200 hours of supercomputer time to simulate. Um, so the physics is accurate.

• 18:35Brian Keating?

  The, um, the, the background story is not. So the, the teleportation, the wormhole, which he, he didn't conceive of the wormhole. That was sort of Einstein and Rosen. Um, I first had this idea that you could have such a thing, uh, but he made it much more popular. First in the movie Contact with, uh, Joe Foster. It was based on a real life story up until they attacked aliens and that's, um, Jill Tarter is a renowned radio astronomer from the SETI Institute here in California. And these measurements that they made were, you know, kind of fancifully displayed in terms of, well, could you teleport? Could you use this shortcut through space and time? This is an old idea, like I said, goes back 100 years almost, but it's completely impractical.

• 19:19Brian Keating?

  It's very fanciful. I made a joke recently that, you know, that, that actually Project Hail Mary, written by UCSD, a former UCSD student, Andy Weir, who I also had on my podcast, is actually more scientifically accurate, even though it involves the, you know, eating of the sun by, by bacteria than interstellar in some ways, because it doesn't use wormholes as much. It uses faster than light travel, perhaps, or some version of very close to the speed of light. So, no, I mean, unfortunately, the, you know, for, for one thing, the way it's depicted is always highly idealized. So even though they, they did talk about these

• 20:02Brian Keating?

  black holes in the movie very accurately, that, that level of detail was not applied to the storyline that allowed the trans, in transportation of Matthew McConaughey Cooper, right, to another world system. So that was highly inaccurate. And yet, when he got to his destination, it was extremely accurate, right? And so that, that's just artistic license. I think, yeah, there, there are a lot of things that are depicted in, in these movies that they take a lot of artistic license with. But the reason, you know, that they do is not a surprise, because you, you have to kind of

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Sell it to the audience.

• 20:38Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you have to kind of make it, oh, it's, it's complicated, it's technical, it sounds like, I don't know, it could be. And when you combine them together, it is sort of, it is sort of surreptitiously attractive, it's seductive, right? Because, oh, this, the black hole's perfect, you know, Brian told me, oh, these are, you know, he won, the guy won the Nobel Prize, he, talking about black holes, he must know what I was talking about. But the wormhole part of it, no, it's not so much.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Because like, if you, even if you travel through a black, like, it's probably, you, a human being can't survive, right? Is scientifically

• 21:08Brian Keating?

  That's, that is one, that is one major problem, yeah. A human being couldn't survive at least that transport. So what you're referring to is that the wormhole actually needs, we think it would need like two black holes on either side of it. So to make this bridge to cut through spacetime, if you imagine spacetime could have an opening on one side and an exit on the other side. Leaving aside the stability and how, how hard that would be to make, using tremendous amount of negative energy, which we don't really know what that is, or how could it exist, but let's say it could stabilize it, how big it could be, could it be big enough to fit a human being in? I guess you'd have other, you know, problems. But, but yeah, these are devices that are just used because they sound, you know, a little bit plausible, but, you know, in fact, they're much less plausible than like Spider-Man,

• 21:52Brian Keating?

  you know, spinning a web and swinging through, you know, Manhattan and

• 21:55Speaker 02

  You were talking about how a lot of these tools that you have, equipment are now, they give you the, essentially the capability to know or try to at least predict what will happen in the future as well.

• 22:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Do you think there is anything at all that cannot be answered by science, even in the future?

• 22:13Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of science. So, science at a certain level is very humbling, because it can only answer, you know, a very, very prescribed, you know, very, very limited set of, of questions, right? I mean, you can't answer, you know, trillions and trillions of other questions. So it's, it's almost more accurate to say, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a tally, it's a marker, it's a, it's a logbook that encapsulates our ignorance. It's just, it's telling us what we know, but what we know is so miniscule to compare it to what we don't know. And, and to, you know, it's, it's, it's sort of the most primitive thing, which doesn't mean easy or trivial, but elementary, like elementary math, it's actually really hard. Like, to prove one plus one equals two, takes, you

• 22:58Brian Keating?

  know, over 100 pages of rigorous abstract mathematical proofs and the methods of the proof and, and all sorts of, you know, other tools that are used and discovering the, the underlying ontology of mathematics, and then whether or not you can even do that in science. We, for example, we can't prove anything in science. I can't prove the earth is round. Like, I can prove it's not flat, but I can't prove it's round. And so a lot of what we do in science is falsify other hypotheses, right? It could be that, you know, DNA has these four bases and RNA has five base pairs or whatever, but, you know, there could be some underlying mechanism that we have yet to discover, you know, and maybe there's a six, or whatever. So if you just said science is fixed at any given moment,

• 23:42Brian Keating?

  it's actually, it's, it's actually limiting what science can do. And, and that's sort of kind of going against the scientific principle that you should be very humble when it comes to science. You shouldn't say, look how great we are, we can answer all these things. Yes, of course we can. And of course, we can develop technology and C sensors that allow us to reveal, visualize the invisible. But you shouldn't confuse that with true, perhaps the truth, the underlying truth, which we don't have access to. We can, we can eliminate falsehoods, but, you know, to the limit of what can we know to be true? How, how much of what there is know, knowable, do we know? It's very small.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  I think even before I started looking into your work, while growing up as well, essentially, we were taught about this whole Big Bang, that's how the world's created and that's it, and no one talks about anything else. And that question was inside me, that what came before that? Like, we're assuming, okay, the Big Bang created the world, so what came before that? Besides you, have there been scientists who have worked on this question deeply or gotten any

• 24:42Brian Keating?

  There are scientists that work more, way more deeply than I do. What differentiates me from the scientists that mostly you'll find discussing it or conceptualizing it, they're typically theoreticians, they're typically concerned with the underlying theory behind these models. So, the Big Bang, you know, was created not by experimentalists or, you know, people building telescopes, it was predicted by, actually, it was a Catholic priest, Le Maître, who came up with this idea that perhaps the universe started in this, what he called a primeval atom, you know, something of nuclear density, extremely extraordinarily high, the size of our solar system perhaps, and then it was unstable,

• 25:23Brian Keating?

  it exploded, and it began expanding in all directions. So it was partially, had some of the seeds and kernels of what would later come about. I was then, you know, criticized by Einstein for a long time, and then finally Einstein accepted it when he was shown experimental evidence from an observer, Edwin Hubble, who proved to him that the universe had at least a larger, a very, very vastly larger number of galaxies that were expanding away from the Milky Way. And that was revolutionary. And it was really, Einstein believed the universe was static, had no beginning. And for thousands of years, most cultures, most traditions, most civilizations, except for Judeo-Christian culture, or, you know, creation

• 26:03Brian Keating?

  myth or story, cosmogony, had a cyclical or eternal cosmos. So that was the norm. And so Christianity really didn't have, Judaism didn't have a, a real quantitative demonstration that the verse of Genesis 1:1 was actually true, until the discovery of, you know, the first discovery of these galaxies expansion apart, then later the discovery of the cosmic microwave background that I studied in 1965, and then, you know, soon after the discovery of the abundance of different elements that can only be formed under conditions of nuclear fusion. So that was the prevailing narrative. Now, what typically happens is that a theory

• 26:47Brian Keating?

  in science comes along to replace a theory that has some serious flaws or gaps in its, in its predictive power. So the state, let's just say, for 2,000 years plus, from Aristotle to Einstein, till 1929 at least, pretty much every scientist, if you asked any scientist to say, how, when did the universe begin? They'd say, what are you talking about? It's always been here. Something can't come from nothing, it has to be here for all time. And the question was, okay, so what evidence was there to prove that wrong? Again, we can't prove something right, we can prove something wrong. So there was no evidence, it was just conjecture. And theorists had this idea. Some people believe that, yes, there, there certainly could have been something like an origin point to solve certain paradoxes,

• 27:32Brian Keating?

  but it wasn't quantitative, so it had no experimental support. So you really had to be humble about it. And until these discoveries, really, people didn't have that level of belief in anything, except they just kind of accepted on faith that the universe looks static, because it does look static. And then the time scale of a human being, the only things we see moving are the planets. In fact, the word planet in Greek means wanderer, means it moves against the fixed stars. Same root word as plankton. Plankton means something that wanders in the ocean. Plane, the airplane you guys are gonna be on, it means something that flies, moves. So we named this five things that we could see in this night sky. We named them planets up until the 1700s,

• 28:13Brian Keating?

  when the first one beyond Saturn was discovered by William Herschel. So they were, and that kind of, you know, didn't break a paradigm. We still knew that the stars seemed to be fixed. We didn't believe there were any galaxies other than the Milky Way. So it really was this rapid, like Cambrian explosion of knowledge in the 1900s, up until to this very day, that suggested that there was a beginning. And then are your questions exactly appropriate? What came before the beginning? You know, it's these eternal questions. What happens when you come to the edge of the universe? That's another question people like to ask. So some of these are founded upon our intuition. But when your intuition is dealing with cosmology and the story of the entire universe, the beginning of what we call time, which we

• 28:58Brian Keating?

  don't have a great definition of, by the way.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  I was going to ask that, what's the definition of time?

• 29:02Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so there is no one accepted definition of time. There are many different types of time, right? There are time definitions that correlate with our experience, like right now, this coffee is cooling down. It's achieving, you know, I had some cream and coffee to mix together. We correlate the arrow of time with the direction of the increase of entropy. It seems entropy only increases in the universe. You could think of using that as a type of a clock, you know, measuring the temperature. But when it comes to equilibrium, there's no change. So once it, once something doesn't change, you can't measure elapsed time. So time is really the differentiator. So some people, I've talked to Nobel Prize winner, Bill Phillips, who, and Frank Wilczek, who, both of them won the Nobel Prize. They say,

• 29:45Brian Keating?

  oh, a time is just what a clock measures. No, it's a clock. Clock is something to measure time. So it's tautological, which means that we don't really have a great definition. That doesn't prevent us from doing a lot of, you know, really important, hard work. But certainly, it prevents us, you know, perhaps from speculating, you know, what came before the Big Bang? Because if time comes into existence, there's no marker with which to, that concept doesn't make sense. And a lot of people, including the late Stephen Hawking, did say that. He said it was actually, it was, it was, it was an incoherent question to ask what came before the Big Bang. It's like asking, you know, I've been to the South Pole twice. So it's like asking what's south of the South Pole? It's the end of the coordinate

• 30:27Brian Keating?

  system. So you reach, you know, a singularity, you can't go beyond it, but the things don't blow up. It's just that's not defined. Once you go south of the South Pole, you go north. Any direction you move from the South Pole, you're going north. It doesn't matter.

• 30:39Speaker 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.

• 31:05Brian Keating?

  Now, that's not really satisfying, right? You kind of want to know what it is. So the truth is that we don't really have a fundamental definition of time, any more than we have really a definition of any quantity. And that's why I said, we could be proud of ourselves for rightfully so, for measuring all these quantities, knowing the temperature of the universe to five significant figures, knowing the dark, the distribution of dark matter, you know, to unprecedented precision, to building sensors that can detect the change of a single photon, you know, from the Big Bang. Those are things to be rightfully proud of. My colleagues and I, you should be proud of that. However, if you ask what's time, mass, energy, space, we don't really, we can't really say there's definitive answer

• 31:50Brian Keating?

  for it. So a lot of it is built on, you know, kind of common acceptance of jargon, of language, of a lexicon, and that behaves through certain, you know, syntactical rules that we, you know, that are useful to us. I mean, a lot of science, you know, we didn't understand fully how, you know, transistors worked, be, you know, in terms of their quantum mechanical properties, until the 50s or 60s, and, you know, a decade after we started using them. So things can be very useful, and then that can give people the idea that we actually understand all these things, when in fact, we don't. There's a lot of things that are way more things that we'll never, ever understand, or poorly defined forever, than we can possibly know and describe with precision.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, there's this, there's this growing idea that reality itself may be computational, or even simulated. What are your thoughts on that?

• 32:39Brian Keating?

  Well, I know I've talked to some people about this, Don Hoffman, I know you guys have talked to recently. For me, there, there's challenges for all these things, because a lot of them define, or rather depend on the understanding of what human consciousness is, which I didn't even include in the project of cosmology, right? I mean, we're observing the universe, but we don't understand how the human mind works. We don't understand what consciousness is. You know, Don, with great respect to him, I'll talk about reality as this headset and this interface that's evolutionary designed to, okay, so where did evolution come from? Like, evolution didn't create itself, like, any more than, you know, the laws of nature created themselves. Like, a lot of people say, oh, the universe can

• 33:22Brian Keating?

  come from nothing, because it can emerge from a quantum fluctuation. Okay, what's a quantum fluctuation? Where did that come from? Oh, it's eternal, it's always been there. And so what ends up happening for me is it's very frustrating, because it devolves into something that's either tautological, or it's, it's truly equivalent to theological discussion, right? And so you say, well, who created God? Or you could say, you know, who created the universe? If God created the universe, oh, God's eternal. Well, the universe could be eternal. You just get into these pointless arguments. Theorists maybe like that, theologians, philosophers like that. I don't like that. I like to build technology and telescopes that allow me to see things I can't see, and use those to learn more about the universe in a practical sense, if you could call it that, than to debate, you know, these really

• 34:07Brian Keating?

  kind of esoteric, almost meaningless things that you can't make progress on. Because as I said, no one agrees with consciousness is. There's no definition of consciousness.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Hundreds of different views.

• 34:16Brian Keating?

  You said it better than me. There's not, no one agrees. Everyone disagrees, because everyone believes in their own theory, right? It's a very good way to put it. There's hundreds and hundreds of theories. Now, we are writing down equations. Who is we? The brain? An AI system? What's it doing? Is it conscious? Does it have free will? So I find those, these questions, you know, frustrating, maybe because I'm not, you know, good enough to do the theoretical, you know, hard work. But, but I, you know, for me, I'm very comfortable kind of downstream, like, what if we see these fluctuations in the fabric of space then? I know how relativity works mathematically. I know how quantum mechanics works up until a point. Again, quantum mechanics is another subject. We don't have a universal definition

• 35:00Brian Keating?

  of what quantum mechanics is. We don't have a framework for it. We have this same person, Einstein and Rosen, who disagreed with, who conjectured these wormholes that Kip Thorne would later use in movies, and Carl Sagan, et cetera. He didn't really believe in the, you know, kind of weird properties of quantum mechanics that we seem to be, you know, inevitably connected with, that the universe has these weird correlations and, and strange behaviors of what can influence what, causality, you know, locality. These are very, very different, you know, concepts. And in fact, physics will disagree on what it means that something is real, that something exists. And so, again, people do like to talk about these things.

• 35:44Brian Keating?

  I, you know, I could talk about them, but I feel like it's almost impossible to make progress into, you know, it's, you know, if I said to you, what is the number one? Like, you guys can do stuff with the number one. You know, you take flight number one, you could do, you know, we had, you know, I push one for coffee, two for cream, whatever. We know how to use one, right? You've never seen a triangle in your life, right? It only exists in the human mind, which only exists because of, you know, a huge overlay of culture and civilization and language and constructs that you guys and I didn't create. So, so I prefer downstream, you know, and I could say, I paid $1 for this coffee, or whatever you guys did. And from that perspective, I'm a pragmatist. I just like to do stuff with

• 36:27Brian Keating?

  it at much higher level than kind of debating what is the reality, what is consciousness, and, you know, what, what interpretation of quantum mechanic. For me, it doesn't make a difference, so I just go with what works.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we, we had done a podcast with the physicist Stephen Wolfram.

• 36:42Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I saw that, yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  I can't, I can't remember what his definition of one was, or one plus one, but he, yeah, he had his own separate view of consciousness. And that, we've done so many podcasts with different people, and like you said, everyone has the different view of consciousness. And sometimes it matters for them to be able to work on their project and theory. We, since, just to quickly bounce off the question, though. When people do say a simulation, what do they even mean by that?

• 37:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so, so what we observe now is a very, a very remarkable situation with technology that we seem to have reached a level where, you know, that we've, we've been able to take computational devices, computers, silicon chips, et cetera, not quantum computers, not, you know, things that are made of some exotic materials, but just ordinary classical computers, just giant versions of these transistors that were invented a hundred years ago. Not giant, minuscule versions of things, but assembled in giant numbers. And they then seem to emerge with properties not unlike the human brain. And because of that, because the capacity for simulation is increasing, where we simulate the weather, we simulate physical domains, we can simulate the vacuum of quantum mechanics,

• 37:52Brian Keating?

  we can simulate detectors and photons, we can simulate a whole host of different outcomes.

• 37:59Brian Keating?

  And that we tend to focus on things that are interesting to us, right? So if I told you, you could simulate like, um, what it was like to, uh, to, to live, you know, on Mars right now, okay, that's interesting. And, and, you know, we, we do like, I'm sure Elon Musk has some flight simulator somewhere to do that. But if I said, you know, you could simulate your 16th great grandmother, you know, in India somewhere, right? Or, um, or for me in Europe somewhere. And you could simulate them and like, and get to know them and, and be in their shoes and visualize their world. And like even for, you know, a few hours or something like that, like, how much did you pay for that? Like, pretty much, yeah, I pay a lot. I don't know, it'd be really cool, except because you, we all matter, right? We want to connect with our ancestry and our, our heritage.

• 38:44Brian Keating?

  And it's just like part of what makes us human, right? You ask, you know, what, what is this fascination? Well, what's a bigger fascination than like how you came to exist, your own personal origin of the universe, right? So then it's natural to think, well, if we simulate things that are interesting to us, like, we don't simulate, you know, uh, we don't spend as much time like simulating, um, you know, like I'm a pilot, so we do flight simulation every now and then to, to make sure that we're safe and we don't, you know, have accidents or whatever. We don't do things like, oh, we're going to land, you know, at the South Pole. The South Pole has a single runway. It's three miles long. It's made of ice, you know, just like scraped out. It has no relation to like San Diego Airport where you guys are going from. You know, has no relation to that. So yes, you could simulate it, but what's the point of it? Like, you're never going to go there, you're never going to be there.

• 39:29Brian Keating?

  And if you were there, it wouldn't make any difference to your safety or anybody else's safety. You're on a military pilot, that's the only people that can fly there. Whereas like, if you're learning to fly, you might simulate San Diego or New York, and, and I've done that, you know, my whole life. So you simulate things that are important, interesting, relevant, perhaps predictive that can tell you about the future, you know, or something, and, you know, help you understand the future, perhaps contextualize things. We simulate other planets, we simulate the origin of the universe. So why not simulate us? Why not like, instead of simulating your 16th great grandmother, why don't you simulate, you know, uh, your mother, like how she was?

• 40:05Brian Keating?

  Or your father, right? So you could do that. And then you could say, well, if I do that now, 2026 technology, um, you could do it. Uh, but maybe in 25th, 2050s technology be better, but maybe in 29,000 technology be even better, right? If things keep growing at this exponential pace, which there are questions about, can that happen? But if they do, I mean, the transition from the large language models of today to just four months ago, intelligence is doubling, the amount of intelligence doubling every four months. So that's hyper geometric growth. So there won't be, you know, theoretically, there could be no human on Earth that would know as much as like the base model that you get for 20 bucks a month from, you know,

• 40:50Brian Keating?

  Claude or whatever, right? So that could happen in four months from now, let alone in four centuries from now. So the idea is that we could be the products of a simulator who's in the future and are, and we might be what's called their ancestor, just as he simulated your ancestor, you might want to, I might want to, they might be simulating us. Now, is there, can you prove that? No. I mean, it's, it's a derivation of, of, you know, kind of Pascal and, and others who visualized in the 1700s and 1800s, yeah, the so-called, how do you know that you're not a brain in a vat? Basically said in the brain, I say Brian in a vat, you know? How do you know that you're not, because what is your brain? Your brain, I mean, I'm vastly simplifying this, but your brain responds to chemical and visual stimulation, sensory stimulation, which is conducted purely through electrical

• 41:35Brian Keating?

  channels, right? And they knew that. So what if you just take your brain up and it's here and you just feed in stimuli to it? Oh, I'm smelling this. No, you're not. You're just, the chemical receptor is firing because we're stimulating with the exact same tempo, exact same intensity, exact same spectral chirp, signature, whatever. And you could be hearing things, seeing things, smelling, but you're just a brain and you're just connected through a neural stamina, fed nutrients and, I don't know. Would you have a different experience? So then, if that's true, well, then what if that whole thing is then simulated in, you know, in silicon like this? And it's just a massive computer that has grown a Moore's Law, doubling every four months until five centuries from now. You can't comprehend it. So that's the appeal.

• 42:19Brian Keating?

  The objection to it is many fold. At some level, you have to wonder why, like, why that would be? And another level, you have to confront the argument that it's essentially recapitulating a religious, you know, like a religious framework, right? There's some god who's the master simulator, decided to simulate his ancestors or its ancestors. And the purpose for this is not really clear. Descartes and others, you know, gone out of it by saying, well, God is not malicious. And so, you know, the, I, you know, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. I can only think that I can think about thinking, this metacognition, because there's a god who's good, but how do you know there's a god that's good? Maybe it's a simulator, maybe there's no god, maybe there's a devil, you know?

• 43:02Brian Keating?

  So I, I think that there's fascinating questions that can be raised by it. There are people like Nick Bostrom who say, there's really only a couple of different, you know, scenarios that either, you know, there is a simulation or there's not, not a simulation, or that there is a simulation and the simulator doesn't care or does care about simulating their ancestors, or maybe, you know, has achieved or hasn't achieved their, their goals. Or, you know, there could be some weird causality thing, like they simulate us, but then we somehow destroy the simulator, you know, like the matrix or whatever, like we can escape the simulation. So, um, again, what are the practical downstream ramifications of it? Is it just rehashing these arguments from the 18th century? Maybe, and there's nothing wrong with it, but where does it actually get you? Can you distinguish between it?

• 43:47Brian Keating?

  Like, could you falsify the simulation? Could you, could you prove it? Actually, you might be able to prove that you're simulator, right? I mean, as the Truman Show is a famous movie, right?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 43:56Brian Keating?

  Matrix, yeah, I love it too.

• 43:59Brian Keating?

  And so, yeah, the light falls, oh, you go take two or whatever. And so he kind of proves that there's a simulator, right? Or there's someone manipulating him. What's the purpose of it? You know, they're watching him, they have someone, but the simulation of the entire universe, what kind of, you know, entropy demands that would create? What, what kind of limitations from the physical universe would it have? And then what if that simulation is simulated by another simulation is simulated by another simulator, you know? So.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  It's never ending.

• 44:26Brian Keating?

  You get infinite regress. Exactly right. So, again, interesting, unsatisfying, you know, like many things in life.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Because we are talking about the mystery of God. Um, I'm sure as a cosmologist and in your field even more so, um, you must have been intrigued by this idea of God. And I, I want you to talk about that. Before we do that, I want to show a short 30 second video. You can also share your reaction on that as well.

• 44:52Speaker 06

  Did you know that if gravity were slightly more powerful, the universe would collapse into a ball?

• 44:58Speaker 07

  I did not.

• 45:00Speaker 06

  Also, if gravity were slightly less powerful, the universe would fly apart and there'd be no stars or planets.

• 45:08Speaker 07

  Where are you going with this, Sheldon?

• 45:10Speaker 06

  It's just that gravity is precisely as strong as it needs to be. And if the ratio of the electromagnetic force to the strong force wasn't 1%, life wouldn't exist. What are the odds that would happen all by itself?

• 45:24Speaker 07

  Why are you trying to convince me to believe in God? You don't believe in God.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  I don't, but the precision of the universe at least makes it logical to conclude there's a creator. There are five billion people on this planet and you're the perfect mom for me. What are the odds of that?

• 45:40Brian Keating?

  Um, when he talks about like, if it wasn't precisely tuned for the, he's talking about fine tuning, which is a strong argument for God, even though atheist, even atheists will say, this is the strongest, you know, one of the stronger arguments for God. So the question is, you know, how, how finely mistuned could the universe be for us to be here? He made it sound, and I'll just ask you, if things were how much different that we wouldn't be here? Do you remember? Or what, what do you think? Is, is he saying like exactly about like, it's two scales and are totally in balance? Is that, is that kind of what he's like?

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably, I'm guessing.

• 46:17Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So, so obviously there's always some uncertainty, right? Nothing is exactly equal, even you guys, you guys are twins, you're not exactly the same, you guys are completely different, right? And, and that's great, that's what makes you guys unique. And if even twins can be different, I mean, it's like, how much more different is a non twin from a non, from another stranger, right? So, um, so actually, it's, it's actually quite coarsely tuned in many ways. So what, what, um, it's typically called apologetics, which is a fancy way of saying, you assume God's existence and then you reason back to the conclusion that will support the existence of God that you conjectured from the beginning, right? So we exist, you know, it's another version of, of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.

• 46:59Brian Keating?

  A good god wouldn't allow me to be hallucinate to deceive myself that I exist, but that's assuming the existence of God. To prove God's existence, to prove consciousness is real. So it's a circular argument, it's called begging the question. You assume, people think begging the question is like raising the question, no, no, begging the question means you answer your own questions, tautology typically.

• 47:18Speaker 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.

• 47:43Brian Keating?

  Um, so in this case, you're assuming these exists have gone. It has to be finely tuned. But what a scientist should do, and he's supposed to be a scientist. I like the fact that they said five billion people because we know there's eight billion people. So it must have been when he was young Sheldon. It's always a baby, but whatever. I don't, I could quibble with that too. Yeah. But, um, but A, you know, would he ask about his mother? You know, is it him? Is it his genetics? Like what made him become who he is that he thinks that she's the perfect mother? I mean, in some ways, like it couldn't be else otherwise, even if you had a horrible mother. Like you wouldn't exist if that mother didn't give birth to you. So by definition, anyway, in the case of fine tuning of the strength of these forces, that's completely nonsensical. So he talked about the universe would go into a ball. That's, there's no sense to that. There's no, there's no ball. I don't know what he's talking about.

• 48:28Brian Keating?

  I think he's talking about a black hole.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:31Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Which, you know, is, is, is reasonable if there's an extreme, you know, mistune. But the problem is people always do these things for like extremely special starting cases. Or like if right now, the universe is dominated by what's called dark energy. The dark energy dwarfs the amount of mass energy that we're made up of. I've been, though, we're very tiny sliver, less than a half of 1%. Ordinary matter like calcium, carbon. That's a very small amount of the universe's mass energy budget. Um, dwarfed by the amount of dark matter in the universe. But even more dwarfed by the amount of dark energy in the universe. Right now, we could change the, the, we could dial up the dark energy to a factor of 10 times higher.

• 49:15Brian Keating?

  Right at the second, nothing would happen to us. Life would go on existing. Our galaxy would be the same. The solar system would be the same. A trillion years from now, and that's a different story. Things would be different. But, but what is, he's, he's using this very special time that, that he exists. And he's saying, because of that, these things couldn't have been different in the universe today. But that's simply not true. If you can double or triple the amount of mass in the universe and nothing happens to you, your mother, you know, your, your, whatever you're doing, your podcast, nothing would happen. Absolutely nothing. So how fine tuned is that? So people like, oh, it's extremely finely tuned. You know, if these things didn't happen exactly the right order, exactly the right time. But I say, look, I can't play any musical instrument besides Spotify. Like that's all I can play, right?

• 49:59Brian Keating?

  Um, so my tuning is, you know, is, is pretty coarse. And yet, you know, I can, I could figure out how to make some symphony or make some sounds on my wife's violin, right? I could, I could do that. That would be much closer to like, there's an infinity of different frequencies, pitches you can make, right? From zero frequency to infinity, right? Of that bandwidth of possible, you know, frequencies that are theoretically possible, I can make a huge number of them, even though I suck. I, you know, I just pulling the violin across. Is that finely tuned? I mean, there's an infinite amount. And so people say, yes, it's an infinitesimal slice out of an infinite amount. But if my wife's off by 1%, like her A note on the violin, 444 hertz instead of 440 hertz, you can slightly tell a difference.

• 50:44Brian Keating?

  You could probably do it because you have a good ear. Um, but much like, so one or 2% is not finely tuned at all. That's actually extremely coarse. Like if you try to tune in, um, uh, uh, the, the wifi in this room is actually tuned to like a par and 10 to the ninth. Like the frequency spectrum is allocated extremely small amounts of, of, of bandwidth. And if that's changed a lot, they actually get a phone call from the US government. You're, you're actually violating the FCC regulations. Yeah. So that has to be much more finely tuned than a violin. And yet we wouldn't say the universe where it can be a hundred percent larger, not just, you know, 1%, a hundred percent larger. It wouldn't make a difference to us at all. So people like to cherry pick, they cherry pick, oh, if the universe was one proton heavier

• 51:27Brian Keating?

  per kilogram in the early universe, we wouldn't have existed. Okay, that's true. If it was one proton now, uh, it wouldn't have any effect whatsoever. So it could be completely the same quantity, just at two different times. And people just cherry pick. Like if you are, you know, if you're sitting in your seat, um, let's say you're, you're taking a flight a week from now. And you're sitting in your seat and I tell you, you're going to be sitting in your seat at this time, at this hour, right? And you're going to be there plus or minus one hour, right? Um, if that hour is one hour earlier than the flight, that's fine, right? There's one hour later than the flight, you miss it completely. So it's very crucial. People like to cherry pick that to make their argument stronger. I find that manipulative.

• 52:06Brian Keating?

  So that tender moment is cute for, again, that's another Hollywood, you know, kind of manipulation of human emotions to generate some ironically support for God, even though Sheldon's supposed to be an atheist. They're age five, whatever.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Has your view though on God for, and you can define what your view on God is as well, which I, I don't believe that the God is a person wide beard either. But what your view on God is now, and has it changed ever since you went into this journey of cosmology and science?

• 52:36Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I would say it's been a very circuitous and, and, um, and torturous uh, kind of relationship with God. I like to say, you know, God cares if Brian Keating believes in him. Like, you know, the tooth fairy cares if I believe in, in her. If God exists, I can think as a scientist, I can only say, you know, kind of a hypothesis of God. Is it a scientific hypothesis? Yeah, it is. You couldn't hypothesize God exists. You can hypothesize the simulation exists, but let's just stick to God. Within God, there's many different types of gods, right? There's multiple gods of single God, different names for God, different origin stories for God, prophets. There's so much cultural overlay on top of that, right?

• 53:20Brian Keating?

  But if you just describe a property to God that I can relate to the, you know, the question of science, you know, God is the ultimate arbiter of law, of logic, of mathematics, of physics. Um, and therefore has some domain expertise in the realm of cosmology. Then I can start to talk about, you know, well, how does this fit in? Now, that's a very bland God. Like, I don't really care. Like if there were multiple gods, one for each field and department at UCSD, I don't, it's not meaningful, right? We care about God because God then transgresses and transcends the boundary between the laws of nature and the laws of how you treat your neighbor, right? Those are very different concepts, right? We say to God, so I'm Jewish by birth, but I also practice Judaism.

• 54:05Brian Keating?

  And I'll say why I do in a minute. Uh, but, um, but from the perspective of, you know, of Judaism, Judaism, the Torah, the Bible, the whole testament begins with the creation of the universe, which is very strange, right? 99% of the book is not about the creation of the universe. In fact, there's 35,000 verses in the Torah and the Old Testament, just the five books of Moses. 35,000 verses of those 35,000, 35 verses about the origin of the universe, the creation of the days of the week, the Sabbath, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, like 35 verses. It doesn't talk about, you know, molecular biology and like, um, spacetime geometry and negative energy density, right? So obviously not meant to be a science book.

• 54:49Brian Keating?

  But, um, but people intend to use it as that. And, and why is it in the Jewish tradition? It starts with the origin of the universe because only the law giver that created the universe has the ultimate jurisdiction to say that you shouldn't sleep with your neighbor's wife. Right? So it then transcends the physical laws of nature to the interpersonal, the ethical laws of behavior.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Rality.

• 55:11Brian Keating?

  Exactly. So without that mandate, it was thought that God couldn't do that. So it was logical. Actually, the first commentator ever, you know, to ask this question was a commentator lived a thousand years ago. So, you know, why does God start with that? Not with another like kosher, like, you know, I can't eat pork, right? I don't eat pork. Um, other religions have different things, right? So it doesn't say like, here's why you can't eat pork. You know, it's delicious, but don't eat it. Like, it doesn't say why, it doesn't tell you at all. There's no reason for it whatsoever in the whole Bible.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Oh, is, is, I haven't.

• 55:40Brian Keating?

  Yeah, there's no reason for it. Um, it's not a deity. It's not something that we were, no, it's just, this is what you can eat and this is what you can't eat. But if it was a book about law, like the US constitution doesn't start with the beginning of the universe. Right? And, and we're coming out of 250th anniversary, right? So it doesn't start with that. It starts with here are the laws. We believe every person has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and declaration of independence. Those as a, a statement, it does, it says, but it does say endowed by their creator, God. So it does appeal to the same functionality, right? So. That's sort of a big preamble to say that, you know, the, the, my, the evolution of my viewpoint on God has changed a lot because starting off when you're a kid, you're born into a religion, right? Typically, people are born into it.

• 56:25Brian Keating?

  It's rare to see, you know, young Sheldon, right? It's rare to see someone at five years old, I'm gonna choose to be a Christian scientist. If their parents are Hindu, or you know, it just doesn't happen that much. Maybe it does, but everything's, you know, has some chance, I suppose. In my case, I was born to Jewish parents. Typically, that's, you know, you're, you're Jewish, you go to Sunday school, maybe. Uh, most Jews are unaffiliated. They don't really go to temple that often, uh, if at all. Um, then they typically have a bar mitzvah and then the pat mitzvah. And then maybe they don't go to temple again or anything ever again until they get married and they have, you know, so that's 90% of at least US Jewry. In my case, my parents got divorced when I was seven. And my mother married an Irish Catholic man.

• 57:08Brian Keating?

  And so I went from being completely non-observant Jewish to very observant Catholic. So much so that at age eight, I have, it's called a baptism where they put, you know, water in here. Then a communion where you actually receive, you know, the, you accept that Christ is your savior. Um, confirmation, you're older, it's sort of a rite of passage in a sense. And then I actually became an altar boy in the Catholic Church of Chapel Qua, New York, which is not far from where you guys live. In, um, Westchester County. So I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church as a Jewish boy, never had a bar mitzvah. A little bit unusual.

• 57:42Brian Keating?

  And around the time I was about 13, I decided, uh, I was, got really fascinated with astronomy. Actually, I got my first telescope, made observations and really fell in love with the, um, the, my scientific hero to this day is Galileo. So Galileo was a brilliant, you know, scientist, almost discovered calculus, you know, almost invented the telescope. Um, had incredible successes, was the first to use a telescope astronomically.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  That's the name of Avi Loew's project as well.

• 58:12Brian Keating?

  That's right. Yeah, the Galileo project. Right. So, uh, for many reasons, he became a hero to me, one of which is that he's the best scientific writer. In terms of the English language, even if it's Italian, but in translation. He's a poet, he's evocative, he's humble, he's arrogant, he's brash, he's reserved, he's introspective. And of course, he had this overlay narrative of battling against the superpower of the Catholic Church and being imprisoned for the last nine years of his life. Um, he wasn't killed, he wasn't tortured, but he was threatened to be tortured and that was enough back then. It'll be like, you know, every single, you know, the UN and every country on earth, you know, you're an outcast, Interpol. Um, America, everywhere, and you're gonna be punished for the rest of your life. So it was a pretty damning thing.

• 58:54Brian Keating?

  All for really using the telescope to support the claim that Copernicus made 80 years before on his deathbed, that the sun was the center of the, of the universe. And Galileo thought he had evidence to prove that it was, and he thought, be, you know, because of science is truth and God is truth, that the Catholic Church would accept that, but they weren't so happy with that. And so when I heard that as a Catholic boy at that time, I was very depressed because it was really disillusioning to a 13 year old to think that like, oh, this religion and you, I love being an altar boy. I love being in the Catholic Church, Sunday school, I actually liked it. And then to find out that like my hero, Pope John Paul and, and the popes at the time in the eighties.

• 59:35Brian Keating?

  They'd never really, you know, found Galileo not guilty and they never really, uh, you know, kind of, uh, pardoned him. It was kind of devastating, like finding out you're, you know, you're in this, you love this soccer team or football team, whatever. And they like tortured your grandfather, like a lot. It's just be hard for you to like, look at them in the same way. So little knowledge is dangerous. And at that time, then I became an atheist. So I stopped going to church. I really fell in love with science. That's all I wanted to do. Taught myself calculus, taught myself a lot about astronomy. And this is way before Google, you know, internet existed and nothing like that ever existed until a decade later, almost.

• 1:00:16Brian Keating?

  And, um, so it was very difficult, arduous to learn things, but I was able to do it. And I think that's what started in this path of research. And as I matured and got more, you know, powerful, you know, tools, telescopes, technology and insight. Then I started to think, well, maybe there's something to religion, let me investigate it, because they're certainly coupled together and I'm grateful for that. I'm really glad that I was, you know, kind of, uh, went through what I went through religiously, even my atheism experimentation. Because I think I came back to it as an adult, not as a kid forced into it. Like I had to go to temple, I had to go to church. No, no, I, if I did, I wanted to go, I wanted to learn. I realized I didn't know how to read Hebrew, so I taught myself Hebrew. I'd never read the Torah, the Old Testament, so I read it.

• 1:01:00Brian Keating?

  And read the commentaries on it. And it started to be what was much more appealing to me than the religious aspects was the social, communal, cultural aspects of it. Which I'd also kind of abandoned, just because I'd gone into different religions, you know, you get Christmas instead of Hanukkah, it's a big, it's hard to go back, you know, but, um, as a kid, but as an adult, it makes more sense. So now I say, I call myself a practicing devout agnostic. Meaning that what's an agnostic or what's an atheist? An atheist is somebody who declares there is no God, right? Atheistic and I believe. What's a theist or is it, I don't know, someone who declares that they know, they believe they know. So in science, we don't do that. We don't say, I believe in gravity. Oh, I believe in gravity. No, no, I have evidence for gravity. Now, could gravity change? Yes, gravity could change.

• 1:01:45Brian Keating?

  It may change in the universe, it may change in the galaxy. Who knows if it will change on the scale of this table, but certainly not today. Right? So we have evidence for it. We have replication, we have reproduction, we have peer review, right? We, fully scientific tools. So I don't say I believe in gravity, I say I have evidence for it. But God is different. We don't have evidence, scientific evidence, like falsifiable hypotheses. If you did, there'd be no need for faith and belief, right? Why would you say you believe in God? You know, if there was proof of God, like you say you believe in the traffic laws, you say, no, no, I know there's evidence that cops gonna pull me over. Or I believe in the speed of light. No, no, you don't believe in it. There's evidence for it.

• 1:02:23Speaker 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 require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  You know, one argument people often make is that if God really does exist. And if there's intelligence or purpose behind reality, then why is there so much suffering, right? War, disease, uh, childhood trauma, cruelty. Do questions like that make the idea of God even harder for you to prove from a scientific perspective?

• 1:03:13Brian Keating?

  Yeah, those, those are the most kind of challenging questions of all, but you know, I'm never afraid of a little hard work, right? So, so those are concepts called theodicy, like, you know, why do, you know, good things happen to bad people? Why do bad things happen to good people? Um, some of the things you mentioned are human made, you know, war. You know, famine, well, most famines are caused by human, um, you know, mistakes or corruption, uh, even to this day. Certainly wars are, right? You know, cancer's not, right? So, um, so there's a famous saying, you know, like the, the atheist has to account for everything. The existence of the universe, the existence of humans, the existence of goodness, like in a Darwinian, you know, scenario, pure Darwinian scenario, like maybe Hoffman believes or, or, and you know,

• 1:03:57Brian Keating?

  you know, it's very hard to see the wasteful energy spent on things like love and kindness and compassion. And in fact, many cultures and, you know, for example, in the ancient Greek culture. You know, if a baby was born deformed or, you know, had some illness, they would leave it to die. I mean, it was just Darwinianism in action and, and it wasn't considered to be, you know, horrific. It was kind of expected. I mean, life expectancy maybe wasn't that great or whatever. So, um, so it's not like these are foreign concepts to the human mind, the cruelty and, and so forth. So there has to be some accounting and then, yeah, it said the believer has to account for the only one question, why do, you know, the existence of evil in a world created by God.

• 1:04:40Brian Keating?

  Now, I don't think that those are really, again, these are the kind of questions like what is consciousness? What is time? Um, it's another version of that, right? Cause we, cause we could say, well, everything happens for a reason, right? So God created cancer cells. I'm just making this up, but I've heard arguments that, you know, cancer cells are, are byproducts of the, of the, you know, facundity and the, and the ability for life to reproduce, right? So without cancer, without, you know, um, without, without cancer, that would mean there are fundamental alteration of the human genome, right? There'd have to be some process in nature which has no perfect reproduction, replication. Never making too many copies of itself like cancer does, right?

• 1:05:19Brian Keating?

  But that would then preclude other things, like the, the ability of a cell to divide, like you guys are two cell, one cell, split apart, right? Um, or two different, you guys are two different cells, because you guys are not identical, right? Um, so, uh, so two, but developing exactly at the same time, dividing at the same time. I mean, why weren't, why didn't one of you come out like 30 pounds and one zero? Like, it's amazing how exquisitely finely tuned that is. Perhaps there's some relationship, like you couldn't have that unless there were these things that we've now think of as, you know, purely harmful like cancer. On the other hand, we may also overcome cancer, like we're, they, you know, if you listen to these AI guys. Uh, I just installed this AI package that Claude makes to write scientific

• 1:06:00Brian Keating?

  papers and when it's like all biology, it's like 36 different biological tools with protein folding and then cancer genomics and incredible stuff. There's nothing about cosmology, so I'm gonna try to change that, but um, all this effort getting into it, and the companies are saying they're gonna cure cancer like in a few years. Part of that is the human need to understand things. Now, chemical warfare and weapons and biological, that's another thing. We invented recombinant DNA in nineteen seventy one. That was, you know, thought to be, you know, almost immediately recognized it could be a horrible horrific weapon that could kill, be targeted, be manipulated, you know, and yet it could be, you know, very, very potent and it could be used for good as it has been to make vaccines and so on.

• 1:06:43Brian Keating?

  CRISPR is another thing. And CRISPR has some relation, I think, to, you know, gene editing, splicing and even to cancer. Um, these bacteriophages, these viruses that we seem, we use those for drug delivery. Um, RNA, you know, we use. So it's not clear, like, but you certainly have a point. There's no, there's no, there's no easy way out of that question. Um, you can appeal all you like and say free will. And if you didn't have, you know, cancer, maybe you wouldn't live life the same way. I, I think it was kind of reductive like, you, if you want the laws of physics to operate in a logical, consistent world, you're going to have things that are unintended consequences.

• 1:07:21Brian Keating?

  But you could still say God is a part of it. I don't say this, but people could say, well, God set the world into motion, created the world with, you know, you know, God designed DNA and then disappeared. Now he's off in the multiverse somewhere else, right? But all the laws of physics are just operating and evolving and Darwin, Darwinian evolution is taking place. Okay, fine. It doesn't mean that you have a personal God that you can confess your sins to, or no, can tell you, has the authority to tell you not to covet your neighbor's wife, right? But, so, but again, these things are so like abstract. Like for me, it's like, okay, do I treat, do I give 10% of my income to charity? Like, that's a commandment. It's not. So in Hebrew, you've heard of bar mitzvah, like mitzvah, oh, it's a good deed. No, it's a commandment, actually.

• 1:08:05Brian Keating?

  It means you must do this. It doesn't mean it's optional, right? So you have to give 10% of your salary before taxes to charity. That's one of the rules, right? Would I do that? I don't know. Maybe, maybe you would. I, you know, maybe you're more kind of moral person than I am, but, but I know just every year I have to do that. I'm just gonna write January 1st, just write it out. I'm gonna do it. I don't like doing, I love doing it, you know? Some things I give money to, I like to do. Um, but I do it. And I think like, a lot of people, having a scientific framework that you can then adjust. Okay. So you, you don't believe that eating, you know, bacon is, is wrong. Okay, fine. But maybe you're going to treat your parents in a certain way to honor the fifth commandment, for example, which is very hard for some people to do.

• 1:08:49Brian Keating?

  Um, I think there's, there's a lot of wisdom to it. So I take, I'm a pragmatist. I take the good stuff. I've seen the benefits of it. For example, here's a huge one. Uh, if you guys wanted to do this podcast on Saturday, I would have said no. As much I like you guys, as much as I'm hoping for the, for the, for the, you know, the twin bump, um, I wouldn't do it. Because I'm commanded to rest on the Sabbath. And I know personally, it makes me much more productive during the other six days of the week. I'm connected to my family, to my wife, to my kids, to my community, uh, to philosophically, I mean, who else sits around for four, and when else you get to sit around for four hours, you know, on a Saturday afternoon, just talk with your friends, your community, your rabbis, your, you know, friends and everything, just together,

• 1:09:31Brian Keating?

  thinking about a higher purpose. Now, you may say it's nonsense, it's fairy tale, whatever. I mean, I've talked to the greatest atheists alive. None of them have lives that I particularly want to emulate. And all of them would benefit from the type of, you know, suggestion that, that I make. I, I was just on one of the biggest podcasts in the world, with a, with a brilliant guy and, and, you know, I was talking to him about like, my prescription for him is that he takes the Sabbath. He just works 24/7. I said, if you did this, you'd actually be able to work hard. And he's like, oh yeah, I will, but you know, I just gotta hit this number, like, I don't know, subscribers, money, whatever. And then I'll be, then I'll do it. I'm like, no, you'll just get to another number plus one. There's always a bigger natural number.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  The desires never end.

• 1:10:11Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm curious though, with your current, of course, with a scientific mindset, but your current religious or spiritual view, do you pray at all during hardship?

• 1:10:20Brian Keating?

  I, I, no, I don't. I have a very challenging relationship with the prayer aspects of things. I tend to, but I do view it as a chance to meditate. So like, I will, ordinarily, I can't meditate. Just too distracted, too many kids, too many, you know, classes, students, whatever, just work, travel, research, podcasts. Um, so I found it very difficult, but when I'm on the temple on Saturday, I'm like, there's nothing, I don't have my phone. I'm not like on the internet. I'm not tweeting, podcasting, texting, whatever. I might as well meditate and think about what really means something to me. In fact, the word, uh, Jew comes from the Hebrew word Yehuda, Hodeh, and that means thankful. So thankfulness, gratitude is inherent in the word Jewish.

• 1:11:03Brian Keating?

  So what I typically will do is, is I will, I, I don't believe God is like my butler in the, in the sky and that hell do, oh, you know, like, you know, I, I shouldn't get cancer, but they should get cancer. You know, like, I don't think that's, that makes any sense. Like I see the World Cup, you know, I'm like, these guys at Morocco was like, they, they won yesterday and, and, you know, I was kind of happy to see them beat, I think they beat Germany or they beat one of the really great European teams. I was like, yeah, that's good. And then they like, they just started like praying, they got down on their knees and, and one says it's humbling to see it, but on the other hand, like sometimes I see like, my Padres here, like they're, they're just like so frustrating, but like, I love the, you know, some of the players just love them. Um,

• 1:11:45Brian Keating?

  and, uh, like Manny Machado will hit a homerun. He'll make the side across. I was just like, okay, you know, so like, Jesus was helping you with that. I mean, I don't think that's what he's saying. I think he's saying like, he's grateful that he has this gift, right? So I do that too. I do that too. I do that to myself, to God, to think about all my kids, my wife, you know, my, my mother, you know, still alive, my brothers, you know, and I'll just kind of expand the circle out. And I found that there is a practice, actually it's a Zen practice, you know, samsara and, and like, um, loving kindness of a pasana, these thoughtful meditations and it, these traditions have a place in Judaism, so might as well do it. Like Sam Harris doesn't believe in Judaism is true, even though he's born, you know, raised Jewish, I guess.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Meditate as well.

• 1:12:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he's the whole thing. Waking up, he's got an app, he's got, um, you know, courses, he's, you know, it's a huge part of his life. And so, you know, he and I can agree on that, even though we might disagree about the value of religion versus not religion.

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  Um, you know, I, I wanted to, we were talking about this before you mentioned AI. I did want to talk about, um, AI a little bit, you know, artificial intelligence, it's, it's advancing unbelievably fast right now. Do you think there will come a point where, where machines actually surpass human beings and understanding reality better than we do? Like you were saying, uh, lots of AI, um, uh, software is all these, they're doing research on cancer and you're, you think that there's a possibility that in a couple of years, using AI, you know, cancer can be cured.

• 1:13:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I think they're very good at doing things. These LMs plus GPUs are very good at solving problems that are told to them to solve is valuable. They're less convincing in terms of creating new breakthroughs, innovations on things that we haven't conceived and told them what to do. They're very, they're, they're language followers. So you can talk to it. You can program it using English or any language, right? Um, anything that has a logical structure, even like babies can talk to it and I'll try to like figure out what a baby or a dog, I mean, I've seen like crazy things, right? But it's not inventing new languages. My favorite example is like it beat chess in nineteen ninety-three, the last human being that will ever win in chess, you know, played IBM's version of this machine. It was a machine learning, but very similar to AI.

• 1:13:57Brian Keating?

  Um, and that was the last time humans will ever be able to win, but people still play chess. My kids play chess, right? Um, you might play it or your listeners might play it. So it's still intriguing. Now, my example is then, yes, no human can ever, you know, beat, but will their computer ever invent an algorithmic, you know, kind of game with structure and rules that's in place for 4,000 years? I, I doubt it, right? Or go. Well, you know, it can write like Shakespeare, sort of, but you know, can it ever do something as evocative or as, as like tender and connected to the human soul and spirit? No. I also don't think it can do novel things in physics. I've yet to be convinced that you can create truly new knowledge, like, you know, the holy grail in physics is what's called the theory of everything that unifies

• 1:14:40Brian Keating?

  all the forces of nature into one master force. This, the same way that we unified electricity and magnetism once thought to be separate forces. Now we know they're one force, electromagnetism. The hope is to unify the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity into one master equation, you know? Uh, and it's, it's not clear that it could do that. Um, it's not clear that that such a thing exists, by the way, but if it exists, it's not clear how these things would come about. And I've actually done research with some students here and, and talked to other researchers. Unfortunately, I got scooped by some other AI researchers, because this isn't my domain. Uh, but I had this idea about four years ago,

• 1:15:20Brian Keating?

  um, to, uh, to take an, a large language model, but cut off its knowledge base in nineteen eleven. Like just say, anything that happened after nineteen eleven, just erase it. Anything that happened before, keep it. You know, um, Newton's laws of gravity, um, the equations of thermodynamics of even relativity was around, a special relativity. Um, but not general relativity, and that's important. And quantum mechanics wasn't really understood until nineteen twenty-six. So, um, lobotomize it, tell it, nothing beyond that point and see, can it come up, just can it re-derive what Einstein did four years later?

• 1:15:56Brian Keating?

  And no, it doesn't seem that it can. It can, it can replicate, it can try to, it'll keep doing, it'll keep forcing a solution until it gets an answer. Um, and it can get arbitrarily close numerically, but it can't come up with the insight that, actually, gravity is not a force, it's a manifestation of the curvature of space and time. And that Einstein had, um, and it is very poetic to me that when Einstein realized that gravity is not a force in the common sense. He said it was the happiest thought of his life and he, he came to it through uh what he called the Gedanken or thought experiment that if you were and you've all had this experience, I'm sure. You go over a bumper, you're in a roller coaster for a little bit, you're weightless.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Brian Keating?

  Like you go over this bump and you can visualize, even now, you could probably feel it. Are you in a plane and you got turbulence, you're going up in there, right? Um, or in space, but if you were in space and that happened, it would be the same. You'd be freely falling, you'd be weightless, you'd experience no gravitational force. He said, or the elevator, God forbid, breaks, the cable breaks and you're plummeting, all right? Uh, he said that was the happiest thought of his life, not that he died, but, but that, that you experience no force of gravity, you're just floating in space. You don't feel a pulling down on you at all. And he said, that was the most um happiest thought of my life. Now, I always say like, how does a computer have a happy thought? Like what, you give it more power or you take, give it some more processor? Like, what does it mean for a computer to be happy? It could have, and then like, could a computer visualize the whoa, that sensation that we have all had? When we jump in, into space.

• 1:17:24Brian Keating?

  So for all those reasons, I'm not optimistic. I wish I was more because I think there's so many things, but I think uh the limitations imposed not by the number of processors we have, but just that that's not the way that physics works. Physics is not a language like English or uh COBOL or FORTRAN or Python. It's very different from, it has language elements, just like we can describe consciousness. Is consciousness a language? No, I think that's ridiculous.

• 1:17:50Speaker 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.

• 1:18:15Brian Keating?

  So um I'm very worried, you know, but in some sense I'm excited because it means that physicists will have a place in the future to actually do stuff.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  You, you do talk a lot about um falsifiability and I, I do wanna ask, do you think modern physics is drifting into these ideas that are mathematically, they sound very interesting and beautiful, but they are very difficult to explain?

• 1:18:37Brian Keating?

  No, I mean, I think there's a lot of uh kind of, you know, gnashing of teeth and, and, and wringing of hands that, oh, physics is over because uh string theory has been so um such a bad force of, of, of, on physics and it's really polluted and contaminated physics and, and it's really destroyed the ability. And I think that's a very narrow parochial way of looking at, uh, first of all, the long arc of science is not based upon like what model of particle physics is the most important one. It is true that a lot of the famous, you know, physicists that we know about from Feynman to Einstein, Schrodinger to Bohr, you know, they worked in quantum mechanics or particle physics, Oppenheimer, you know, but at the same time, you know, there's far more as, at

• 1:19:21Brian Keating?

  least as interesting, if not more interesting, you know, gravity, black holes, um, the cosmic background radiation that I study, neutrinos, other things that are, have nothing to do with string theory at all. Um, that, you know, but, but people are obsessed with doing what Einstein could not do. So Einstein allegedly, you know, wanted to construct this theory of everything and in Stephen Hawking's words, that would then give you the answer to what is God thinking? The mind, you know, the mind of God, was his exact words in A Brief History of Time. Um, I don't believe that's true. I think he used that to sell, but he was also an atheist, you know, Hawk. So people talk about God like Young Sheldon, that doesn't mean that they believe in it. Um, or Einstein.

• 1:20:01Brian Keating?

  Uh, and so, yeah, there, there is an overabundance of, of kind of these um, you know, curmudgeonly approaches as science is, you know, hampered by this, you know, false quest to find a theory of everything and string theory is corrupted. I don't believe that. I think there's a, you know, that it, it hasn't been successful by the ordinary definitions of falsifiability because it doesn't get into the arena of being testable, right? It predicts the existence of things that are unobservable. So in that sense, maybe it's not part of science, but I don't, I don't see it as monopolizing. I mean, it has zero relevance to what I do. I mean, we have nobody at UCSD, which is a top 20 physics department in, in the world or country, certainly. And uh, we don't have anybody like works on string theory and is like obsessed with string theory, he's gotta be right.

• 1:20:47Brian Keating?

  You know, people are working on particle physics and we consider it, but no, I don't, I don't think that is, is a fatal, there's, you know, 50 Nobel prizes since string theory was created. It's not like physics just stopped, but it's a popular narrative because it paints things as, you know, kind of quasi-conspiratorial, like people are only working on string theory. And I know Avi Loeb has talked about, you know, how bad, you know, string theory could be and that's true, but it's not stopped him from doing what he's doing and he's written 757 papers. So, you know, it's not like it's hampering the output of scientists in general.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  And, and Brian, you know, this is a topic that we've discussed in podcasts before, so I really wanna get your take on this. You know, physics often makes the universe, right? It, it sound incredibly deterministic, like everything is just particles following laws. That being said, do you think human beings have any free will?

• 1:21:37Brian Keating?

  Oh, um, undoubtedly. I've never met someone, I've talked to everyone from, you know, Sam Harris, like I said, to, and I don't, you know, people are always, oh, he loves to drop names, but no, it's important that you recognize that you're not the authority on everything, right? So, you know, in this realm, I'm a podcaster, but I'm also a thinking, you know, we're, you know, practicing physicist as well, right? So I have some things to say about the physical aspects of it. Um, so typically, the reason that's important to name drop, so to speak, these people is because these are supposedly the greatest thinkers alive um on the subject, Robert Sapolsky, um, yeah, Sam Harris, uh, late Dan Dennett, uh, his final interview while he was alive was with me.

• 1:22:19Brian Keating?

  So um, I've had a lot of, you know, the top people interacting in this space and David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and I've yet to hear a convincing definition of what free will is, other than, you know, the kind of simplistic notion that determinism is, is obviously assertible because you cannot control, you know, the charge in the electron and you cannot control the conditions of the big bang. And yet, to a person, I've asked them, have you ever met somebody who is normal and acts like they don't have free will? No, they don't. Do you, have you ever met somebody whose actions, if committed against you, who doesn't believe in free will, would accept as with, without reservation?

• 1:23:03Brian Keating?

  You know, Sam Harris has two daughters, Sam, your daughter gets murdered by a crazy guy in Malibu, um, you know, or a guy burned down Malibu, almost killed you and you're, burned down your house or next to our neighbor's house, whatever. Um, what would you like done to that person? I've never had anybody say, oh, no, it's fine, you know, like, oh, I, I would like to say that I wouldn't wanna do anything. That's what Sapolsky told me. Um, I think it's a total cop out. It means that there's no, that you, you don't believe in practice what you're preaching. Like you don't believe that these people deserve no punishment because their actions are predetermined at the time of the big bang. Um, or by the laws of physics that we can't comprehend. Um, but you asked about determinism and randomness and so people can misabuse some

• 1:23:44Brian Keating?

  things, there's difference in like the ability to know something and the knowing of things. There's certainly a lot of things we can know, right? That we don't understand, you know, the human mind, as I said, uh, we understand, you know, the coffee in this cup better than we understand the human mind, that's for sure. But um, and certainly this doesn't seem to have free will and yet we do. So I believe we operate as if we have free will. I believe the super deterministic, you know, kind of ideas, um, they fail the most basic test of, you know, like have, have you ever known someone normal? Like I believe there are abnormal people. Um, and it was certainly people with chemical imbalances and you can make the argument, maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't. My favorite thing is, is in the Torah.

• 1:24:27Brian Keating?

  Uh, so an animal, let's say you have an ox, which is very common, like you live in an ox, kinda like a car, right? Um, in, in today's parlance, but you know, did some stuff and it was alive for sure. They, they gave it rights, you couldn't abuse it, it had to not work on the Sabbath, which is very unusual, like for an agrarian economy to take as huge a one-seventh of their economic impact, once a week, you can't let your animal work, it's crazy. But it was done so that you, the owner, wouldn't take the day to work as well. So it was protecting you as well as it was protecting the animal, your slave, you had a slave, he or she couldn't work on that thing. Um, but let's say you have this ox and it goes next door and it kills um your neighbor's kid. What do you think happens to the ox in Judaism?

• 1:25:12Brian Keating?

  That's an animal. Like, the kid got in front, it was like, maybe it was throwing rocks at it or whatever, right? Maybe the kid deserved it, but the ox steps on the kid, kills the kid. What should he do with the ox?

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 1:25:22Brian Keating?

  Didn't mean it. It's an animal, right?

• 1:25:25Speaker 04

  It's not like he was intentional.

• 1:25:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah, right. So, so actually, what happens is you kill the ox. You kill the ox, yeah.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  In Judaism.

• 1:25:33Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's humiliating to a human being. Imagine like, your next door neighbor for the rest of your life, the rest of his life, he has to see your ox walk. Oh, that's the ox that killed little Jimmy. That's humiliating. It's degrading to the human, to the human spirit. That's what the Torah suggests. That the, the weight of a human being is infinity. And that's one, that's another reason I love this notion of, you know, of the, of religion and theology in general. You have to prize the human being. And I think a lot of the atheists that believe, the people are most likely to not believe in, in free will are atheists. Right? Because they believe, you know, God didn't do anything, you know, special if he created us and we don't have free will. Like, why would I worship this thing that create these automatons? Like, I don't worship my GPU, you know, the Nvidia main, right?

• 1:26:18Brian Keating?

  It's just automatons doing some useful work.

• 1:26:22Brian Keating?

  So, that the Torah prizes the human life because it's created in God's image. No other kind of thing can come close. I don't care if it's an ox, if it's a, if it's a, um, uh, bonobo, which is very similar to a human being, or dolphin, you know, like, beautiful dolphin eats my, you know, neighbor's daughter. That dolphin should be put to death. I mean, it shouldn't be that my neighbor has to suffer for the rest of his life, looking at this creature that took the life of a infinitely valuable human being. I think we'd all like that. Like, I hear a lot of times, you know, Israel outlawed the death penalty for many, many years after the Holocaust. They did kill a couple of Nazis that were still alive, and then they stopped and they felt, oh, it's really tragic. And guess what? They reinstated it after October 7th.

• 1:27:04Brian Keating?

  Because they realized this is like, this is a cruel thing. The people are allowed to live and exist. And that you pay for these people, like, they get formulas a day, they get conjugal visits, and you're paying, not only, like, in California, you're not only like, not put to death, like, you're allowed to live and get married and have, like, concubines and do whatever. And, and have, uh, watch, you know, TV all day and, and exercise. Like, is that moral? Is that a society that we should want to live in? Or should it be, yeah, the death penalty had? And, and what the, what the Torah also said is, it didn't say, thou shalt not kill. Because most people think it says, says thou shalt not murder. So, from the context of, of, you know, valuing human life, that's something that actually seems divine to me. Again, it's not proof.

• 1:27:50Brian Keating?

  Could it be used as evidence? Maybe.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. You, you've talked about consciousness several times throughout this podcast so far. And how we've, we've figured out how there are so many views. But what is your view right now on the definition of consciousness? You mentioned earlier about David Chalmers as well coined the term, uh, hard problem of consciousness.

• 1:28:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  So what is your take on?

• 1:28:10Brian Keating?

  Um, it's so, it's so frustrating, you know, again, these are not things you can really understand, um, even by their definition, right? These are qualia, like the sensation, what is the, you know, what does the color orange look like?

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Subjective experience.

• 1:28:23Brian Keating?

  Completely subjective. Again, you guys are twins, like, you, your photonic retina and cone and rod cells perceive the intensity of this light, of this table, of this telescope, slightly differently. You don't even know. Like, what you think of as this goldish color, um, you may, you both call it gold, but you may see it as what you call red, and you may see it as what you call green, but you'll never know.

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Brian Keating?

  Right? So, from that context, it seems like, okay, so these are, yeah, these are these kind of unknowable questions, which physicists are more comfortable, like, we don't know why the mass of the electron is 10 to the minus 28th kilograms or whatever it is, right? We don't know why it is, but once we have its mass, we can do particle accelerators, we can make Fusion React, we can do all sorts of incredible things. We can create antimatter. And these are, these are phenomenal technological achievements. So, from my perspective, it doesn't trouble me, but it doesn't make me eager to wade into those waters of, you know, I want to go to a consciousness seminar. It's just, um, my, my, my current, one of my many, many side projects that AI is enabling

• 1:29:26Brian Keating?

  is probably one of the sins of AI, and the future will be recognized as, um, as I'm, I'm writing kind of an essay and like, um, there's a famous essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel. So I'm writing a different essay, like, what is it like to be Thomas Nagel? Like, how would a bat visualize Thomas Nagel? And it's actually influenced by one of the books that influenced me the most, actually a book that you get when you join my mailing list, briankeating.com. It's called Flatland. Flatland is a book written by A. Square. Like, it's a square, and he's moving around this two dimensional world. And by moving around this two dimensional world, he encounters a three dimensional being who comes into his existence and his universe, and creates this havoc. And it's like an alien invasion. Uh, they didn't talk, it was written in the 1860s.

• 1:30:10Brian Keating?

  And it has some, like, social commentary in the Victorian era, like, slaves and women are treated really badly, and they have different shapes than priests or circles. They have the infinite number of sides, and a square is okay, but not great. But a trying, a woman's, uh, a straight line, uh, and she's very dangerous, they can hurt you. It's a brilliant story, but it helps you visualize what it would be like to be in the fourth dimension. So actually, it, it allows you to extend your consciousness or your awareness or whatever. So, that's kind of the only waters that I'll wade into, have to do with, like, yeah, what would it be like for a lower dimensional being like a bat to try to perceive a higher dimensional being like a human? That's an interesting question to me. But what is a conscious hard problem? I don't think I can make any progress on that.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  I don't know if this is a question that you've been asked before, if you've thought of, but I guess, as a human, I would think that, like, we're trying to figure out what happened before the Big Bang, what was the origin of anything at all? But why not nothing? Like, why, why anything at all? Why not nothing?

• 1:31:10Brian Keating?

  Yeah, and there's glib answers to that. So, in physics, emptiness or vacuum state is not empty. It's, it's, it's actually very rich structure in terms of the quantum mechanical properties that allow the existence or annihilation of different entities like electrons, like photons, quantum fields. If it didn't have that, if we didn't have the ability to have, you know, creation, destruction, matter, antimatter, then we wouldn't have matter. So it's often said that nothing is unstable, right? So you can't have nothing lasting forever. It's a point of unstable equilibrium. So, in physics, if you have that situation, the vacuum is unstable, and it tends to create fluctuations, out of which theoretically is possible to create something.

• 1:31:54Brian Keating?

  So people think, oh, matter is conserved. Like, if I, if I get rid of this coffee cup, vaporize it and turn it into nothing, um, that's impossible. No, you can actually do that. You can't destroy energy, but you can destroy matter. In fact, antimatter and matter both have mass. Combine them together, you get no mass, you get photons, pure energy. And you get the energy equivalent of E equals mc squared for each one of the matter and antimatter particles. So, nothing can come from something, and the reverse process can happen too. Two photons can come together and create positron and antimatter and matter pair. That happens all the time. And so, we know that that's possible. In the early universe, it happened at extremely high rates. But the question is, where did the energy come to begin with, out of which the matter could later come out?

• 1:32:40Brian Keating?

  That's an open question, related to where my research is leading me. Like, what came at the beginning of big, of, of time? Or as close as we can get to with instruments, telescopes, optics, detectors that we talked about.

• 1:32:53Speaker 04

  And, and Brian, we, we touched upon this a little bit before, but I want to talk about it more. So simulation theory, you know, it's, it's become so popular now, the idea that our whole reality could be running on some deeper layer of code. As a physicist, do you think that's something science should take seriously, or is it mostly just a fun thought experiment?

• 1:33:14Brian Keating?

  Um, I don't see the practical benefit of taking it seriously. Again, you could, you could make the exact syllogism, you could, um, equate God, right? There's nothing that happens in The Matrix or in The Truman Show that is beyond the capability of an omnipotent God, right? And yet, you'd never have a physics conference talking about God, like, that would never happen, right? Um, at least not anymore. So, uh, so that kind of tells me, it's, it's, um, it's like cotton candy or something, like, it, it's, it's tastes good, but it has no value. It's, it's like, it's interesting to speculate on, and it might lead you to some conclusions. And people do work on, like, Um, what would be the computational

• 1:33:58Brian Keating?

  cost of studying the properties of the simulation? Like, how much RAM does it need? How many GPUs does it need? And so I think that's interesting in the same way, like, um, my kid collects Pokemon cards.

• 1:34:13Brian Keating?

  I don't think Pokemon is like that interesting, like scientifically or culturally. But, you know, there, there's this huge market of like trading cards and like grading. And there's this culture and how sociology behind it or baseball cards. When I was a kid, I had Yankee cards. I used to be a Yankee fan. Um, and I still have one or two and I think my mom threw out one, a really valuable game. Oh, come on, Reggie Jackson.

• 1:34:38Brian Keating?

  So baseball cards are frivolous, but the study of baseball cards, the market, the economics behind them. It's big business is very serious stuff. I mean, my friend just paid $1,200 for Fernando Tatis, you know, rookie card, right? Um, so that's serious business. So in other words, the meta study of something may be more interesting than the topic itself. Comic book cartoons, like the history of cartoons is actually more important than the cartoons itself. Right? Like cave paintings are cartoons, right? That's more interesting than like, oh, is that a really good giraffe by, you know, modern, you know, artistic history style? No, of course. Um, so the study of something may be interesting in itself, even though the base layer of it may not be interesting to me.

• 1:35:18Speaker 04

  And, you know, hypothetically, if we were inside a perfect simulation.

• 1:35:23Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:23Speaker 04

  Would there be any way for science to prove it? Or, or would it be like a character in a video game trying to figure out whether their world is real from inside the game itself?

• 1:35:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so there's only one way. Um, you know, that I've thought about and others have thought about. And it really has to do with the properties of mathematics. So, um, like I said before, you've never seen a triangle, right? But you can conceive of a triangle, right? So the human mind can conceive of things that don't exist. We could define it, but like I said, I mean, you can make it three points, but they're not microscopic, they're not one dimensional, they're not zero dimensional, right? So, um, you can approximate things, so the human mind can do that. But computers can't, they have to be finite at some level. They have to be discrete, even the quantum computer. It can have a large number of states, but, um, in, in practice, to realize the different states will be quantization of those different outcomes, right? Now, if you think about all the things that are continuous variables, like, um, you know,

• 1:36:20Brian Keating?

  any number that's a real number that has any value, there's an infinite number of real numbers between any two real numbers. So you pick, you know, a pi and pi plus blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, one over 10 trillionth plus pi. There's an infinite number of numbers between. So that means if you were like, let's say you're looking at something, a star, you know, and there's some angle like at some level, you would expect that unless you have an infinite amount of RAM or infinite amount of storage or infinite amount of CPU power, quantum or otherwise, you'd be, there'd be some fundamental discretization of the arrival of these objects, either the wavelength or their, their, their period or something like that. Wavelength is another thing. And if you can have quantization of energy, but wavelength is a continuous real number. So you can have infinite number of real numbers between 500 nanometers and 501 nanometers.

• 1:37:06Brian Keating?

  Like there's in, so if you could, if there was some experiment and there are people that propose such experiments, that would effectively prove that you live in a simulator. You see these discretities, it'd be like land falling off the ceiling in the Truman Show. That would prove that you're in a simulation, right? Um, now people would then argue about that. Well, is that part of the simulation? Right? Cause if we know that, then the simulator knows that. And so, but again, this is just like talking about God, right? God could make you think that God doesn't exist. You cannot disprove the exist, the hypothesis that God exists, right? So all these things, again, it's like chewing on cotton candy. It'll last for a second and then for me, it doesn't, it doesn't satisfy.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  Humans are, happen to be unique in the sense that we are essentially only ones who are fully aware that one day we are going to die. And that does make me think that awareness of death, I guess, also is a place for us to create meaning in this life. Has studying the universe also changed your perspective or your thought on this idea of death as well?

• 1:38:02Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of what homo sapien means, right? It's like, um, man who is wise or knows and the knowing is that you're gonna die. We're the only entities, we think that know, yeah, and elephants supposedly will kind of know like, oh, this one's about to die. And they'll, but they don't know when they're four years old that death is, you know, responding is a possibility, right? So yes, of course, as life, you know, teary years to know that they're finite, you know? If you had this infinite lifespan and, and in some sense, that would be torturous unless everyone had an infinite lifespan. In which case, like, where do you, where do you drop in on that continuum? Like when you're 10, 30, 90, 100, what does it, what does it really matter? So no, having that finite, finitude, and I think, you know, for me, the kind of, um,

• 1:38:47Brian Keating?

  recognition of, um, milestones in life that is marked by certain seasons of life. Like when I was your age, I wasn't thinking about like, there's a lot of things I wasn't thinking about, uh, including podcasts. And then they didn't exist, but, um, you know, like family or, you know, like professorship or. But now I think as you get older, you start to live less for yourself and your accomplishments. Like, I always wanted to be like freaking awesome and like win the Nobel Prize. I mean, that's why my book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, not Winning the Nobel. Um, I just wanted to be awesome and like have all these accomplishments, PhD, be a professor. I didn't think I could be, but, but maybe I would be.

• 1:39:27Brian Keating?

  And, but it wasn't like the really meaningful things. It was kind of like in, um, in, in some writing, I think it was David Brooks, who's echoing some famous rabbis in the 1800s. He talks about like, there are two different types of resumes, like that you have. You have like your resume that you present, you know, for grad school or getting a, getting in a show or something like that. And then there's things that people say at your eulogy, like people probably won't say at your eulogy, like spending that much time that you went to Columbia, like they'll, they'll say, I mean, yeah, she went there, it was really cool accomplishment. Or you were in this play, that's amazing, like great accomplishments. But they'll talk about, you know, how she was as a sister, a friend, a brother, sister, you know, all these things, mother, hopefully, you know, if that's what you're interested in.

• 1:40:08Brian Keating?

  Those are the things and those have time, natural seasons for it, like, you know, my mom's in her eighties, you know? She's, she's not like, oh, I really want to go to grad school and become, you know, no, she wants to be a grandmother. And, you know, I'm at that stage now, you know, my oldest is, you know, interested in dating and stuff. And, you know, but at the same time, I'm like, you know, it's natural and they kind of have to apply the intelligence that you've accrued, the knowledge, you know, homo sapien is, is really like knowledge man, but it's not wisdom man, just like artificial intelligence, like, I don't, there's like 85 different L L Ns that you can choose for.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:40:44Brian Keating?

  But where's the artificial wisdom? Like, I want wisdom, like if you wanted knowledge, you can go anywhere and for a long time. And like, all these things are just trained on human knowledge from the internet effectively and training sets, right? What differentiates them, nothing, they're, they're all the same. But wisdom is unique, as anyone who's ever met someone who's like truly wise. Now, they might be wise in one small domain, like, I really understand how to catch fish off the coast of Coronado, you know? Or they just, you know, they know how to interact with their, you know, with their spouse who's a difficult, has a difficult mother in law, whatever. There, there are so many things that you come to in different seasons. And I think the recognition that, um, you know, maybe my third out of four seasons, I hopefully I'll live a long time. But, but, you know, I've accomplished a lot, I feel, I'm happy with what I've accomplished.

• 1:41:28Brian Keating?

  I still have things ambitiously that I want to do, but there, I have way more ambitions for the people that I love than for myself. And that was never true when I was your age, like, I just wanted to get my PhD or you get my masters and just like get on to the next thing, achieve, achieve, achieve, make this, you know, write these papers, get this job, get tenure. And it's just like an, they call it the hedonic treadmill for a reason. You just never get off of it. The more you try to approach that, so for me, yeah, as I get older, as I think about, yeah, death and things in the horizon, hopefully long in the future. You know, as Woody Allen said, what did he ask him? What do you want people to say about you when you're, you know, 100 years from now? And he said, I want to look good for 150 year old. Yeah, I'd like to live as long as possible. Um, but I feel like

• 1:42:13Brian Keating?

  was more important than transmitting your biology is your ideology. And anyone could do that and hopefully I've done that and my writing and my work. I'll continue to do that, but, um, but now it's about, you know, kind of rounding around the corner to think about, how can I give back? And that's more satisfying, you know, at, at this stage of my life.

• 1:42:34Speaker 04

  You know, if tomorrow, you know, we received undeniable proof that an advanced civilization had contacted Earth, what do you think would be the single biggest thing that changes about humanity overnight?

• 1:42:44Brian Keating?

  You know, that's a really good question. Um, in a sense, we've been there a couple of times. Uh, we've discovered life that we thought was actually alien. Um, in 1996, uh, I don't think you guys were alive, but 1996 on the White House lawn, Bill Clinton came on the White House lawn and he talked about this meteorite. And I don't like this meteorite here, um, that was found in Antarctica. And the meteorite, uh, was thought to have, uh, the, um, microbial life on it that came from Mars. This is actually from the moon, but the earth and the moon and Mars exchange material, meaning that impacts on asteroids on these other bodies kickoff debris into the solar system.

• 1:43:29Brian Keating?

  After enough millions of years, they eventually can land on other bodies, including the earth. And in fact, some of them have, so we know that this is from the moon. I have another slice from Mars. Um, so we have Martian meteorites. They happen to be easier to find in Antarctica because you see a rock on top of ice. It's pretty obvious and there's nothing, no other sources of those. Um, and so it was found in the Allen Land Hills and it was, uh, looked under microscopy and tested and originally thought to be life. And immediately Clinton made this thing. And in fact, if you watch the movie Contact, he was the president in Contact. And they show a video at the White House, Jodie Foster's there, uh, Jill Tarter playing the, you know, whatever, the real scientist. And he's saying, this rock, you know, it speaks to us across the, you know, the galaxy and tells the story of our origins.

• 1:44:14Brian Keating?

  And if it's confirmed to be, and so that net, it really wasn't retracted that that was a mistake and that wasn't, it was incorrect. It's sort of disputed still to this day, well, maybe it doesn't, but nobody really takes, takes it seriously that has, you know, serious evidence. But for, let's call it 10 years, like earth knew or a lot of people on earth thought there was life. And obviously a lot of people think there's not only alien. Spaceships, but beings, you know, interdimensional beings and non-biologic humans and non-human biologic interdimensional, it's pretty astounding if those are sure. Has life changed at all? Like, I don't know, not for me. I have a, now you, you added the important caveat, indisputable, undeniable proof.

• 1:44:57Brian Keating?

  Yeah, they haven't brought out the alien yet, you know, like I mean,

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  We haven't seen them.

• 1:45:01Brian Keating?

  We haven't seen it.

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  Unfortunately.

• 1:45:03Brian Keating?

  People claim, oh, they can't bring it out because it's, you know, they're going to get arrested if they do, and they can't say what they know, but that's pretty convenient. That's a way of being unfalsifiable. So a scientist needs to be able to do experiments on it. Should have some international tribune, you know, group of people from countries around the world. You have to ask, why do they see these things near military bases or off the coast of oceans? And they are military operating areas. Um, not really clear. So, uh, there are a lot more questions than answers, but and the, and the counterfactual we do know, like say, we have discovered indisputable proof. I think it could be potentially one of the biggest discoveries of all time.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:45:39Brian Keating?

  But you also have to look at history. I mean, for me, it would be this incredible thing for you would be, uh, you know, the average person and, you know, in, uh, Chula Vista or wherever, will they care about it? Like, we discovered the origin of the universe in 1965, you know, that, that the big bang, you know, occurred billions of years ago. I don't, you know, some people change their lives, religious, you know, people tried to co-opt it and say it was part of the, you know, biblical narrative atheist said, no, we don't need, you know? I think it'll be disputed. I think anything will be disputed. I think it'll be inconclusive, uh, for a long time. And then it'll be just accepted as mundane fact about the universe that we're not alone. I, I believe that there's life in the universe to some degree of credulity.

• 1:46:20Brian Keating?

  I don't like to say believe, but I believe that there's a possibility of it, but there's zero evidence for it. Like, we don't have any evidence, hard evidence, you know, visual data, uh, you know, spectroscopic data, hard evidence of, you know, alien craft that scientists have had any chance to interact with.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  Avi Loeb has presented a lot of evidence from his side, but it's,

• 1:46:40Brian Keating?

  Yeah, but even he doesn't, he doesn't believe that those are aliens for sure. He believes that they could possibly be from another solar system, which would be alien. But again, if discovering life on Mars alone in our own solar, we don't need it to come from Omu Omu or, you know, um, Atlas, we don't need that. We just need it to be here in our solar system. We have yet to discover that. So the question is, how likely is it in a universe teeming with life? That we should find no other life just in our own solar system? We find abundant life on Earth, we find zero life elsewhere for now. They've looked everywhere, but you can never look everywhere. You can never look, oh, you could always say, well, there's an aliens on the north pole of Titan. You know, some moon of Saturn. Okay, that doesn't do me any good, I'm never going to get there. You know, there's a unicorn on Neptune's north pole.

• 1:47:25Brian Keating?

  Okay, fine, but you can't get there, you can't explore it, you can't falsify it. So is it part of science? That's the thing that troubles me. People conflate like eyewitness reports, which I believe that they had. But some of those things are very unreliable. You know, we don't accept a lot of eyewitness testimony because it's human beings are fallible and they see things, they mistake things. Uh, but the underlying answer to your question, if it was discovered for me, it would be probably the greatest discovery of all time. Would it make me rethink all my life? Not necessarily. I don't tie my, you know, kind of, um, scientific epistemology to like my interpersonal, as I said, I'm a pragmatist. I'm a, I'm a behaviorist. How does this religion, how does the aliens change my behavior? Would I start, stop giving to charity? Would I treat my neighbor's wife differently?

• 1:48:09Brian Keating?

  No, not at all, not in a microsecond.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  Hmm, you brought your book, though I want to talk a little bit about that, your experience around the Nobel Prize. Um, did that also change your view about how you saw academia?

• 1:48:21Brian Keating?

  Definitely, but, but it more changed my life and how I saw religion. Because for me, it was sort of an idol. It was, it was an idol that was acceptable to worship, like the World Cup or an Oscar. Or, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize was all that wrapped into one. It was God-like figures of scientific history and lore, going back to Einstein. And over time, I had to confront that in myself, that I did worship it. So it's a memoir of what it's like to aspire to this thing that you, you know, the emperor and then find out it's naked at some level, that it has these foibles and flaws and, and the people that win it aren't gods. They're normal men and women, uh, mostly men, unfortunately, but, but, but now there's a few women that I've interviewed that have won it.

• 1:49:03Brian Keating?

  And, um, and because of that, I no longer see it as this thing. I, I no longer need it as this talisman, you know, like my kid asked me the other day, you know, what if you win daddy? Like, you have to take back your book. I'm like, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I don't think it's necessarily going to happen because I'm so critical of it and the damage it does, but also the wonderful people that win it. So it's a very complex thing, you know, it's like Schrödinger would have a field day with it because it has good and bad aspects amalgamated into one.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Hmm, yeah. As we close, um, you obviously spend so much of your time, your work, talking about the universe, studying the universe. What's your project that you're currently working on? If you, tomorrow you were told that the universe will end and you have to say goodbye to the people you love. How does that, how does that make you feel personally? Because I'm sure these are questions that you wonder about. I, I think about it as well.

• 1:49:55Brian Keating?

  My answer is that I try to live in a state of being that I don't regret the things that I do. I celebrate, like I told you, I'm very proud of what I've accomplished, but the proudest things that I've accomplished have nothing to do with science or money or podcasts or downloads or views. You know, it's, it's, you know, it's people, it's connections, it's community. It's the things that make me uniquely human and part of it, part of who I am as a scientist. Yeah, that is a dimension of it. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, I know it's not satisfying, you know, like, oh, I'm going to cry, I call my life. Um, but you know, suffice to say, I, I think I try to live and comport myself in a way that, you know, I wouldn't want to, but I could not be here, you know, in the near future.

• 1:50:40Brian Keating?

  And, and I hope that the impact that I made, I know that the impact, I'm not going to be humble. So I hope that I've, you know, I know that people,

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  Not a big impact.

• 1:50:47Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I know there'd be a lot of tears at my funeral and I know the next day people will get on with their lives. I mean, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm open to the idea that, uh, that life will go on without me. Uh, and, and I know that, that it will, but, but the hope that I made the, I know that I made an impact on a certain subset of people. And I hope I get a chance to continue doing it through, you know, appearances like this and, and through my own work and teaching and research and, and writing. And I'm glad that, uh, I get the opportunity to be here with you guys and share it with your audience.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It's always a wonder when we talk with scientists because it always ends up crossing bridges with philosophy.

• 1:51:21Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  And this purpose of life, human existence, what it means to be a good life. It was wonderful to see this side of you as well.

• 1:51:27Brian Keating?

  Great.

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  It was such an honor. Thank you so much.

• 1:51:29Brian Keating?

  Glad you guys could be here, yeah.

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  Thank you for coming on the show.

• 1:51:32Brian Keating?

  Thanks.

• 1:51:34Speaker 05

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