Losing The Nobel Prize | Dr Brian Keating

Brian Keating is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Centre for Astrophysics & Space Sciences at University of California. How would it feel to almost receive the Nobel Prize and have it torn from your grasp? Today we're going to find out, albeit at Professor Keating's expense. Expect to learn what it takes to build a telescope that can detect the farthest regions of space in the Antarctic, what the Nobel Prize originally set out to achieve and how the politics of the physics community can often get in the way of progress. Extra Stuff: Brian's Website - https://briankeating.com/ Losing The Nobel Prize - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Losing-Nobel-Prize-Cosmology-Ambition/dp/1324000910/ - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends. My guest this week is Professor Brian Keating, and he almost won the Nobel Prize. And today, we're going to find out just what it feels like to lose it. It's a really cool story. He set up the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, and it looked like him and his colleagues had made a unique discovery. And there was a roller coaster of what actually happened and some disputes about the data and what it showed. There's politics from the Nobel Prize Association, and I didn't understand what it was or how it works, how it's chosen, and what the processes and the heritage of this particular organisation are.

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  But we're going to find all of that out today. It's a very interesting story, albeit at the expense of Professor Keating. But if you enjoy this episode, go back and check out the ones with Sabina Hossenfelder and Professor Adam Frank. They're both fantastic physicists, and they have a lot to add to this discussion about the politics of science. Obviously, if you love the episode, please share it. It makes me very happy. But for now, let's welcome Professor Keating. Oh yeah, PS. I've started to shorten down the intros to these podcasts because I respect your time, and I found myself skipping through a lot of the introductions to podcasts that I listen to as well.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  In future, I'm going to endeavour to keep them around about one minute. I think this should be enough time to tell you about the guest and inform you of any upcoming announcements which are important. But if you feel like you need to know more or less, if you want me to chop it down even further and just say hi friends, then let me know @ChrisWillex on all social media.

• 2:08Chris Williamson?

  Professor Brian Keating, how are you today?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I'm fantastic, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  It's an absolute pleasure. So what are we going to learn about today?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I kind of sought out your podcast, so I don't know how usual that is, but I heard my friend Mario Livio on your show about two months ago, a month and a half ago. And the interview that you did was phenomenal. And of course, he's such an engaging and erudite fellow that I felt like it would be a good opportunity for me to share some of the ideas that I've been thinking about in my work as a cosmologist. As I point out, I don't do hair and nails, but

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  Cosmetologist.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  A lot of people think I do until they meet me. Nor do I tell horoscopes, but but instead what I look for is really the earliest evidence for the beginning of the universe. And what I thought is so interesting about the perspective that colleagues such as myself can provide in contradistinction to those of, you know, these erudite brilliant folks you've had on like Mario, is that I'm an experimentalist. So an experimentalist as a cosmologist, it doesn't mean that we build the universes. I've got a healthy ego, but not quite that healthy, but to think that I could actually build the universe. But instead, we build telescopes that will allow us hopefully to reveal the earliest evidence for what's known as the Big Bang.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  And how we came to know what the universe is comprised of along the way may hopefully be revealed through the types of telescopes that myself and my colleagues built. And this is very different from those of the professions, you know, as practiced by your, your, you know, late countrymen and my distant late colleague, Stephen Hawking, or, or Sir Roger Penrose, who recently visited me in San Diego and Was part of our podcast that we run for the Arthur C. Clarke Center here in San Diego. And that was, that is, you know, to study the universe from a purely theoretical point of view is absolutely necessary. And I always say, you know, some of my best friends are

• 4:18Speaker 01

  theoretical physicists. But, but in reality, we have learned much more about the universe from people that build instruments, whether it be Galileo or Newton, or, you know, people that are connected deeply to instrumentation, because there are very few theories in the world. If you think about it, there philosophically, there can only be so many different descriptions of how the actual world works, many fewer than how possible worlds could work. And I'll give you one example, and maybe we'll talk about that at greater length today. For those in the audience who may have heard of something called the multiverse, this is a very controversial subject within physics and even philosophy. And it really revolves

• 5:03Speaker 01

  around the notion of whether our universe is alone, whether ours is the only universe both that exists now, or may have ever existed, or may will ever exist in the distant future. And that's quite an astounding thing to think about. It's motivated in some sense from the thought of people like Copernicus and Galileo, who showed the earth is just but one of many planets in the solar system. Now we know there's but one of the Milky Way is but one of many galaxies in the universe. So perhaps it's, it's natural to think maybe we're just the, not just the only universe in what's called the multiverse. So these are the kind of things we study, but, but in, in contrast to many other, you know, kind

• 5:48Speaker 01

  of more popular, maybe much smarter, better speakers than I am, but these, these folks that study things from a purely theoretical perspective, it's just a different perspective. I thought it would be great for your audience to get a taste of.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. How different is the, or how bipartisan is the world of physics when it comes to the experimentalists versus the theoreticalists?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the theoreticians, that's right.

• 6:18Chris Williamson?

  Theoreticians, wow.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, Republicans and Democrats.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  Is that really what it's like?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Tories and Labour, we never talk, no, it's much healthier than that. I would say it's like, it's much less of a rivalry than any, you know, sports team.

• 6:36Chris Williamson?

  Is it like the offensive team and the defensive team of American football?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, except, you know, I wouldn't want to wager on, you know, the theoreticians I know to be very good footballers.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  You'll edit that out, I'm sure.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  I think that, no, I think Mario, I wouldn't back going up against Mario Livio. He seems like he's probably got a bit of a vicious streak to him when he needs to get going.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  He's got a massive side, that's right. Indeed, yeah, there is a, I'd say a healthy rivalry, as there should be. So it used to be, I don't know how it is in the UK, whether your football teams there, but in America, there used to be laws, unofficial laws, within sports teams, for our version of football, that if you were playing against, you know, an opposing team in American football, you weren't allowed to socialize with them the night before the game, like they're called anti-fraternization laws. Like, well, that's not really very friendly, you know, that's not very gentlemanly. But of course, you know, our version of football, yeah, we wear helmets and you guys in rugby and football, you know, are kind of, you know, different that way.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  But, but there was a rivalry and you want to stoke that competition and that, those juices, because it was thought that competition would be compromised if they were too friendly. And, you know, I just, you know, contrast that to, the word fraternization means fraternal. I have three brothers of my own and I don't think we'd ever characterize our relationship, you know, as very, you know, friendly and a competition, even a physical one. So, so perhaps that's misnamed, but I think there should be a skepticism, you know, it's very easy to write papers and conjecture marvelous things like wormholes and extra dimensions. And the multiverse and things like that, it's it's it's easy in some sense, of course,

• 8:27Speaker 01

  intellectually, it's very challenging to actually be able to back that up. But it's it's sort of you when there's no um when there's nothing, no skin in the game, as Nicholas Taleb says, you know, there's nothing really that they're not going to go out there and build the experiment to detect it. And that's very different than the way things used to be, right? Galileo would have an idea that falling masses, you know, decelerate or accelerate towards the earth at the same rate or regardless of their mass or composition. And and he showed that and he built an apparatus, allegedly the Leaning Tower of Pisa, et cetera. But he did other things that we know are not apocryphal. Newton built telescopes and he built he built other apparatus. He was, of course, an alchemist and, you know, he was actually involved in the day to

• 9:11Speaker 01

  day events of the world, but and even Einstein had patents, which is quite amazing to think about. And and of course, you know, the great physicists of the 20th and 21st century, many of them, you know, had equal facility with experiment and theory. And I think that's the nature of a well rounded Renaissance man or woman physicist, that we should aspire to be capable of of forays into both the purely abstruse theoretical domain and what it actually takes to have skin in the game to go out and measure it.

• 9:44Chris Williamson?

  And so I get that completely. Is it um it it seems like the sky's the limit, really. Oh, actually, no, because that's probably a poor term to use in your field of work, right? But the something is the limit for theoretical physicists, as you've said, they can, if they can postulate it and back it up with an existing theory, which again can also be based on something which hasn't been shown to be true in experiment, but perhaps makes sense mathematically, given the constants that we know about the universe, et cetera, et cetera, that they can say it and put it forward and downstream from that, there's actually no real implications other than, oh, wow, you wrote a really cool theory about this particular thing.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  Let's run with it and see if anyone else fancies backing it up.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, exactly. So it's I kind of view in this, maybe your listeners and maybe you'll appreciate the analogy. It's kind of like I feel we as experimentalists are the bouncers in the nightclub of the universe. And that we actually are the ones that that squash and keep things out and keep the field honest in a sense. And and it can also happen to us, as I describe in my book. So my book is called Losing the Nobel Prize. And it's a story, it's really kind of like the dirty laundry or confidential, you know, kind of tell all about what it's like to be a professional scientist in this current era. And that also means that sometimes you get swept up in sort of the pursuit of things that are non-scientific in nature.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And that they may be related to benefiting your career or your pocketbook or what have you. And this is a relatively new affliction, you know, I don't think very many people in the olden days were concerned as much about fame and and fortune in science. And it's certainly true that, you know, Einstein didn't die a billionaire, right? I mean, he his ideas in some sense were responsible for a lot of the technology from GPS to the laser. And, you know, he made some money, but he wasn't born. But if you look at how much he could have contributed intellectually versus monetarily, it's vastly outweighed. So I think that it's important, as I say in my book, you know, we can write a book about the multiverse

• 11:58Speaker 01

  or the wormhole or the black hole, but you can't really put it on the cover of the book. Whereas the every single book comes with a dust jacket, right? And and what does it do? It's what? Keep dust out? I mean, I always hated dust jackets and I always thought they were useless and they'd get in the way of the book. But now I realize that they serve this vital purpose, which is to keep the dust out of the story. And the story in my case is intricately dependent on the role that dust in the cosmos in this case plays. And so I say to my friend, you know, try getting a wormhole jacket on the cover and I'll be very impressed.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  I get that. So Losing the Nobel Prize, tell us, where does the book begin? What's the story?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  So it's really a three-part story. One part is a memoir of what it's like to be a cosmologist, to work with some of the biggest minds, intellects and egos in the world at the cutting edge of astronomical discovery. In this case, we built the telescope that we put at the very bottom of the world at a location called the South Pole, which is the sort of central part of the Antarctic continent, reached for the second time in 1912 by one of your countrymen, Robert Falcon Scott. He famously arrived there just three weeks later than his Norwegian counterpart, Ronald Amundsen. And that three-week delay ended up costing

• 13:17Speaker 01

  him and five of his employees, if you will, their lives. And I draw some parallels between the quest to conquer Antarctica and the South Pole in particular, and the quest to be the first in science to make a discovery, to make a discovery that is as important, as is foundational and as is important career-wise to its discoverers as the finding of the South Pole was, or the landing on the moon in the 1960s was for America. So that's part one. What's it like to be a scientist at the bleeding edge of competition, collaboration, and in some cases, controversy?

• 13:56Chris Williamson?

  Is there not very many bits of low-hanging fruit? You've said it's kind of like a winner-take-all competition here. And, you know, if you want to be the first person to reach a pole in the world, you've only got two choices, right? Like, you're gonna, that's it. Once one's gone, there's only one left. And once that one's gone, you're fucked. So is it similarly, is it kind of needles in a haystack, so to speak, in terms of finding like the big winners?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there's a famous quote by John Archibald Wheeler, who was, you know, Feynman, one of Feynman's advisors and so forth. But that was, you know, our job is to expand the island of knowledge into the sea of ignorance, something to that effect. But when you make an island bigger, you're also making the coastline between the border between Ignorance and knowledge bigger and elongated as well. So I think that's sort of the job there. It's harder and harder to find new frontiers, certainly true, but there's so many mysteries. There's so many things that are just staring us right in the face that we know nothing about, that some have decried the stagnation in cosmology and physics in particular.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  And really this glorification of the past is a symptom of the of the relative backwater stagnation that's occurring within physics today, namely that there haven't been, according to a German physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, make a good guess someday for you as well.

• 15:24Chris Williamson?

  I've already had her on.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Oh, you have? Okay, great.

• 15:26Chris Williamson?

  I've already had her on. Yeah, I was gonna ask whether or not you'd heard it, but yeah, we we had a discussion I was gonna bring up. I was gonna mention some of that with you as well. So we'll get into that in a second. What was the quote that you had from her?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Well, it was really just the claim from her that there there haven't been any developments in nearly 50 years that rival the developments of, say, the preceding 50 years in physics. And that is, you know, and that is kind of depressing on one hand, but I note that she's a theoretician. She's not an experimentalist. And that's why I think it's it's so exciting to be someone who can build, interact and acquire data from these sentinels, whether they be located underground, in space, at the South Pole, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. And I think it's the most exciting time in history from that perspective. So I don't disagree with her that, you know, she may have chosen poorly in her field choice. We have a friendly kind of rivalry.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  She's awesome. I love Sabine.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's she's a she's a certain contrarian. And so what I really feel is that the it couldn't be more stark, the contrast and the kind of ebullience and excitement that I feel every day getting to do what I do versus kind of the depression and sullenness that I see from my theoretical colleagues. So I'm always trying to convert them, you know, get them there.

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  Across the aisle.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Get them on the other side of the team.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  I love it. So what's what's part two?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Part two is really a story of how we came to know what we know about cosmology. So a history of the universe from the first telescope ever used in astronomy by Galileo, up through the Bicep 2 telescope, which is a telescope that I conceived of and helped to build at the South Pole, Antarctica, that seemed to provide evidence for what was claimed to be the biggest discovery of all time, the day we made the announcement, and certain to rack up numerous Nobel Prizes for those of us potentially who built the instrument, and certainly for the theoreticians who made the predictions. And how did the, you know, the inflationary universe that I described, how did that come

• 17:30Speaker 01

  to be, and whatever its implications, as I said, the multiverse is a natural extension. It's a consequence, according to the founders of inflation. Without, without the inflationary universe, you know, being true, there would be no multiverse. And, and only if there is inflation can there be a multiverse in many of these theories. So it's incredibly high stakes for cosmology and for philosophy and all of physics that we get this right. And our experiment claimed evidence for this back in 2014 to global headlines and fanfare Nobel Prize whispers. We later had to retract that statement, that claim, and what that experience was like as a physicist and as a human being.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I think, you know, when you interview these brilliant people, I think the layperson is most interested in what are they like as, as a person, like, you know, what was Einstein like as a father? That's something that's always interested me. Like, what was, you know, Feynman like as, as a friend? Those are more interesting, like, I can learn the physics. The physics is sort of immutable. It's, it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's possible to learn the physics without knowing the, the personality behind it. But that's why these biographies of Einstein and Feynman that keep coming out, it's like, how many biographies can you have? You know, it's like, did he have a secret double, yeah, clones somewhere?

• 18:48Chris Williamson?

  I think if, if anyone was gonna have a double or triple or quadruple life, it would be Richard Feynman. The discussion I had with Mario Livio, I think as close as Mario Livio can have a man crush on someone, I think Richard Feynman just about might be it. What's super interesting you said there, talking as a perfect representative of the layperson when it comes to physics. I hadn't taken a massive interest in Isaac Newton until I found out about all of his very strange quirks and beliefs and how he used to love to go to hangings and he kind of had a little bit of a sadistic side to him and he spent more than half his career trying to prove a bunch of theological

• 19:30Chris Williamson?

  stuff to be true. And, you know, and I'm like, oh, I'm like, fuck gravity. Like, I want to know about what I want to know about like his weird quirks and all that. Do you know, like, it humanizes, you're totally right.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Did you, did you never hear what he claimed is his greatest accomplishment for the man who came up with calculus, the law of universal gravitation?

• 19:49Chris Williamson?

  Lay it on us.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  That he died a virgin. That, I remember hearing that he claimed this is great because it was as close as he could get to emulating Jesus Christ. And it shows you the esteem with which he held. Now, I'm not for, you know, deconstructing just to tear somebody down, you know, like, oh, George Washington wasn't great because he had slaves. No, that's, although I do kind of deconstruct the Nobel Institution in the book, and that's the third part of the book.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  As what does it mean? Because what what ended up happening was, I was, you know, we made this announcement, I'd kind of been edged out in a dramatic series of events from the, you know, basically denied the paternity of the experiment that I helped the sire.

• 20:31Chris Williamson?

  So let's just, let's just roll, roll back a tiny little bit. So we've got the Bicep 2 Telescope. First off, why is it called the Bicep Telescope? Why is it a bicep at all?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So the, the inflationary universe predicts that if inflation took place, the universe would be suffused with what's known as gravitational waves. These are waves of the gravitational force field. So as they pass by a person, say, if that was possible to imagine, the person would gain and lose weight alternatively as the wave propagates by. So it changed the force in which gravity is pulling on you. Obviously, on Earth, it wouldn't make any big difference, but, but say far in interstellar space, and, you know, potentially this thought experiment you could do. Now, you know that these gravitational waves were first detected directly in 2015, resulting in the LIGO experiment leadership, or at least three of the four people that

• 21:26Speaker 01

  did it, and winning the Nobel Prize, which is a problem that we can talk about. And then, that was for the coalescence of two black holes of the mass, each one about 30 tons the mass of the sun. They came together and made a black hole that was slightly less massive than a black hole with the mass of 59 solar masses, say. So, one entire mass was converted to gravitational energy. It couldn't be converted to light, these black holes, by virtue of their intense gravity are black. And so, they coalesced, they gave off, by Einstein's equation, E equals mc squared, they converted one solar mass worth of mass, you know, their gravitational binding energy, into pure gravitational wave energy.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  That, if you can imagine, all the mass in the universe, not just 30 mass black hole, 30 solar mass black holes, every black hole, every galaxy, every person, every single planet, everything in the universe exploding forth, not just over the course of a second, as these black holes coalesced, but over the course of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. How violent that process would be, that would create waves of gravitational energy. Those waves would travel at the speed of light, and they would influence the oldest light that we know to exist in the universe. And that's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's a type of microwave energy, radio energy, that comes to us in all directions.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  That energy would be twisted and curled in a certain way that I described in the book, with about 60 illustrations, custom-made for the book. And that twisting curling pattern was known as B-mode polarization, or curl pattern polarization. And so, when I made up the acronym BICEP, I wanted to reflect that we're trying to muscle our way back to the beginning of time, and get the jump on these curls. So, the bicep does the curling on your body, and so that's the origin of the name.

• 23:19Chris Williamson?

  That's such a good name. That's such a, that's a very clever way to do it. And there's Jim bros up and down the country that are applauding you for coming up with it as well. So we've got, we've got the telescope, I'm going to imagine it must have been an absolutely massive undertaking to be able to, to come up with something like that. And it's in the most inhospitable climate on the planet that is the most remote with the least supplies and all the rest of it. So what was the process like of actually creating it?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  So creating it, you know, I would say was less difficult than actually, you know, like coming up with the idea was harder than actually building the thing. Cause you can

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  Sorry, sorry for interrupting. Is that a, is that a reflection of the theoretical versus experimental debate again?

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  Very figurative, eh?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very hard to convince other people what a great genius you are, you know. So, but it turns out you need to in order to have the wherewithal, financial and the most valuable capital, human capital and getting young people to believe in your ideas and to follow you literally to the ends of the earth as they did. And then to actually build the instrument, you know, is, is an engineering challenge, but it's not an insurmountable one. Now I, I say so with a little bit of glibness, but in truth, I have to give credit to these hard, extremely hardworking people in the field, like my students and my collaborators all around the world, because this telescope was actually able to be cooled down to a temperature that's 10 times lower than the temperature of interstellar

• 24:44Speaker 01

  space, which is just unfathomable. So a quarter of a degree above absolute zero. So if you could cool something down to absolute zero, all of its motion, all the chemicals, all the molecules would stop, completely stop dead. And perhaps if there's no motion, there's no time, right? So time is really measured by the reckoning between successive events. Well, if nothing's moving, no time could elapse. And that's deeply connected with this theory of inflation. So how do you go from non-universe to universe? You know, it's kind of a big mystery, right? It's, it's like going from non-life, like just chemicals pouring chemicals together and getting something living. And so for me to go from non-experiment to experiment, although that's the zero to one moment in Peter Thiel's

• 25:25Speaker 01

  language, I know you like him, uh, you know, going to that, to that extreme is, uh, is very difficult, but it's not as hard as getting all the assets together, like a military campaign to the bottom of the world. So that took four or five years to do. Then by nature of the faintness of the signal, we had to observe for for a total of between the two experiments that I was a part of that made this announcement possible, six years of observation, and then another four years of data analysis on supercomputers, you know, just running nonstop, the biggest, most massive computers on earth. And that and then 50 people working, you know, at some points, day and night around the clock, to make this announcement that we had seen the spark that ignited the very

• 26:10Speaker 01

  big bang that we believe exists today.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  So you saw the six years of capture were done, then further four years of processing. And at the end of that, what what happened? Because someone someone at some point has come into the room and said something like, Professor Kating, I think we found it. Like, that point must have occurred. Can you can you talk us through that?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's the that's one of the ironies of the book and one of the things I think the book does a job, a good job at attempting to describe is how human scientists are. So what you just described is is the confirmation of a theory, right? You said someone came, I think we found it. So that's like eureka. What does eureka mean when Archimedes would say, I mean, eureka, I found it. So to find something means you were looking for something, right? Unless you're just like, ah, I saw something like, that's weird. And that happens a lot in science, too. And I argue in the book, that's the purest form of scientific discovery when it's serendipitous.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  That was like the like the deep, deep fields image, right? Like, there's this big blank space, we're just gonna point the thing at it, soon it happens.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, or closer to where you are now, Jocelyn Bell, discovering pulsars for the first time, completely accidentally. She wasn't looking for pulsars. It just showed up in her data and she did the hard work to unravel it. And eventually, a Nobel Prize was awarded for her work, but not to her, to her male advisors, as I point out in the book. But exactly. So there's serendipitous discoveries. Those are pure. Those cannot be found. And they're also not susceptible to what's known as confirmation bias. If you have some idea about me, or you know, you're what you're bouncing at a club or something, you have to have some notion about, you know, what's desirable or what you're what you're looking for. But in science, we like to think that scientists are completely dispassionate. But what if there are non scientific forces at work, such as, you know, people like me

• 28:02Speaker 01

  who at the time was really obsessed with the Nobel Prize and winning it? And and and being elevated to this very, very tiny pantheon of scientists who are household names, that that was so enticing, it really dominated a lot of my early career mental energy. And so when we, yes, when we did discover the signal that I knew if correct, even when I came up with the idea for the experiment would be the biggest, you know, home run, or what do you call it, century, hitting a century, I don't know, in cricket, the the idea of doing that was so intoxicating to both discover the purity of the scientific quest, but also being honest to win a Nobel Prize. When we did that, of course, then

• 28:44Speaker 01

  we just basically, you know, looked in as many places as we could to see if we were right or not. And it kept coming up that we were. And and but but the farther we went down, the more committed to the hypothesis confirmation we were as well. And then the ultimate revelation was done, not in a peer reviewed journal article, as typically required as the gold standard of scientific discovery, but only since the late 1800s, by the way. But nevertheless, that that discovery was announced, you know, at a press conference held at Harvard University on March 17, 2014, to, as I said, worldwide fanfare with Nobel

• 29:25Speaker 01

  laureates in the audience and and other Nobel laureates, speaking to those Nobel, you know, potential Nobel laureates, speaking to those past Nobel laureates. And I wasn't at that event. And and the the feeling of of, you know, creating something, being a part of something, only to see sort of the control taken away from me, that is a big element of the book. And furthermore, the the the quest that drives many scientists, you know, I say, not all scientists suffer from the same malady that I did, but many of us do. You know, just listening and the few podcasts that you've done with scientists, and and they're fantastic, you know, the word Nobel Prize comes up awful lot. And it's sort of

• 30:06Speaker 01

  a way of, subconsciously perhaps, acknowledging this authority bias that human beings have, that we want to have experts to listen to. We want to offload the responsibility of thinking for ourselves. It's just honest. We want to trust that Einstein knew better than us. So he won the Nobel Prize and he came up with the photon and special relativity. So I'm going to listen to him about world government being the ideal situation. And, you know, I don't know how you feel about that, but.

• 30:34Chris Williamson?

  People, I think you are totally right. We sometimes afford, we afford particular intellectual thinkers an almost universal level of admiration, which, you know, Sir Isaac Newton, there we go, like, fantastic, like, listen to him about physics, probably don't listen to him about what you should do with your Sunday afternoon, like.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. It's called the halo effect. It's called the halo effect. People want to believe that there'll be people, you know, so in America, every four years, we get this list of Nobel laureates that say, you know, which Democrat you should, I've never seen them once say they should vote for a Republican. Now, you can say whatever you want about Republicans or Democrats, but, you know, if it's scientific, there should have been at least like one who would, you know, you know, it's hard to believe this, the group think is so, but it is, and that's only.

• 31:23Chris Williamson?

  Wow, it's, it totally, totally is. This was the, the, I'll give you the 30 second synopsis to my podcast with Sabina. For anyone who is listening, if you go back, Sabina Hossenfelder, The Beauty in Physics, I think it was called, the episode. And the bottom line, the punchline of the whole thing was that I had discovered during the podcast that physicists were people too. And I always presumed that they were these input, process, output, robotic, kind of paragons of perfect intellectual pureness. And, and it turns out that it's just, it's just as political, if

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  not more political than so many, you know, it made me feel like my job, which is manipulating social networks to get people to go to nightclubs, almost felt like relatively kind of noble. And then on the flip side, there's all of the, you got to be in this right camp, you got to be, you can't be backstabbing this person. Oh, you, you've adhered yourself to this particular kind of theory. That means you can't be in this. And I couldn't, I couldn't believe just how bipartisan and tri partisan and all the rest of it, it was, it blew me away.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  It really is, and it's a way of just oversimplification, which is a natural human urge. And it just proves, yeah, that humans, scientists are human. And I think the cliche, the trope that we're just walking Wikipedias is really nonsensical. And I do my best to, you know, display the humanity of a scientist by both making many, many mistakes. Every day you can ask my wife about that. But also, you know, having a, having a real clear cut, you know, kind of image of what is, what is important about science. So if you look at science, the word science in Greek roughly translates into knowledge. But that's very different than wisdom, as I always point out to my colleagues. You know, just because you're a scientist, it has nothing to say whatsoever about your wisdom.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I mean, so one Nobel laureate, he was actually here at UC San Diego where I am. He said, "If you think that Nobel laureates are so brilliant, you should see them in the morning of the event when they're trying to find where the eggs are served." You know, which is, you know, another cliche. But at the same time, you know, again, I don't have problems with the, with the Nobel laureates who win. I have an issue with this, with the, with this process, with this establishment, which like what Sabina talks about, both of our books have a similarity in that we're taking on these sacred cows. And sacred cows are not always, you know, deserving of that stature. And I think in the case of the Nobel Prize is held to such high esteem that one should be careful about the outsized influence that it has on scientists, certainly.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  But especially on non-scientists, members of the public, members of your audience. When they hear Nobel Prize, oh, they're just gonna stop thinking. Like, I'll listen to what he, and it's mostly men, by the way, which is already a tip off that there's something rotten in Stockholm, right? I mean, you know, there's many, anyone who thinks that women aren't as bright as men. You know, so why is it true that, that only, you know, 1% of all winners of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry are women? There's something obviously at work that's systemic that needs to be changed. And yet the Nobel institution is incredibly ossified and, and really susceptible in my mind. To a vast reformation that they're very unwilling to do.

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  Can you take us through the what the Nobel Prize is? Because you know, the term of the Nobel Prize, I know it. And again, I am Mr. Avatar for the lay person. So I know, I know that the Nobel Prize is given in a number of different categories. I know that it's maybe once every year or once every couple of years. And I know that lots of Jewish people win it like those are those are kind of that's the beginning and the end of my knowledge. I don't know why it exists. I don't know where it started. I don't know who looks after it. I don't know what the process is or whatever it is. So yeah, give us, give us the Cliff Notes on what the Nobel Prize is.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  So my book begins with the story of how Alfred Nobel's younger brother blew himself up. And it's kind of weird like, what does that have to do with cosmology? So Alfred Nobel was a, was a Swedish, actually Russian, Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, who is the son of a, of a father who had invented some military applications for high explosives in the 1850s in Sweden and had mainly been selling them to the, to the Russian Empire for their many wars that they were conducting in that time period. But the goal of having a stable form of nitroglycerin, which is very, very powerful explosive, but also very mercurial and explosive,

• 36:09Speaker 01

  that and dangerous, that was a goal of many, many inventors. That would be the killer app that could be used to safely do construction if could be invented. So Alfred Nobel's younger brother, so he was one of seven kids, I believe, Alfred, and three or four of them died before they were 22 years old, mostly by, you know, natural causes. But in the case of his younger brother, he was experimenting with this compound nitroglycerin, and he dropped a vial of it and it blew up the laboratory in Stockholm where he was working. And the family laboratory killed about four other people that were his lab assistants. And that really drove Emmanuel Nobel, the Nobel brother's father insane.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  And he ended up giving control of the company to one of his other brothers. And one thing led to another, but Alfred went off on this quest. Single minded focus to find, to find a safe version of nitroglycerin. And he invented it and it made him perhaps one of the richest people of the world at that time in today's dollars worth, you know, billions of dollars. And, and this company that still bears his name exists, which is, which is amazing. There are very few companies, you know, that are based on an invention by an inventor from the, from the 19th century that still have that name that still exists. I mean, maybe 10 of them around the world. In this case, it made him incredibly wealthy, but it was still tied to the manufacture and

• 37:33Speaker 01

  sales of arms between, you know, different countries in Europe that were continually at war with one another. And then also dynamite and ballisite and all sorts of other military cordite explosives used to kill people. And one day, about 20 years after he invented dynamite, Alfred was walking around the streets of Paris, France, and he came upon a headline and said, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death is dead. And the man who had killed more people in history than any other person has met his own just reward. They were kind of gleefully celebrating his death. And it was very shocking to him. It must've felt like, you know, Ebenezer Scrooge or, you know, somebody like really celebrating their death.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  And it shocked him so much that he resolved to use his vast personal fortune after he died to endow a will, which would give out prizes in five categories. Literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and peace. And so peace is kind of the one that little that stands out, but all, all five of these awards, and they've since enlarged it to include economics about 80 years after he died. And they're given out annually. And what Alfred wanted, and he said explicitly in his will, which you can find on the Nobel commit, on the Nobel Prize website to this day. He said, I want these prizes to go to, to the person. In the singular, who created the most important or beneficial discovery or invention

• 38:58Speaker 01

  in the preceding year that has had the biggest benefit on mankind. So there are three stipulations. A single person would win it for an invention made last year and that had the greatest benefit on mankind. Now, unless you're a theoretical particle physicist, I don't know how much the Higgs boson improves your daily life or benefits your daily life. You know, if you, if you do, then, you know, please consult a psychiatrist, but because, you know, it's really not that relevant to our daily lives. It's very important in the grand scheme of the universe, but it would, it would exist whether we discovered it or not. Unlike, say, the x-ray, which was the subject of the first Nobel Prize in 1901, which has improved and bettered the lives of human beings.

• 39:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that what got the first Nobel Prize?

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I talk about that.

• 39:43Chris Williamson?

  That's a pretty cool, pretty sort of big, big impacts.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Discovery, right?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And there've been other ones. And so, so I plan on the book, because what happened was, as I said, Chris, I, I was, you know, created this experiment, which was immediately claimed to be Nobel worthy the day of the announcement in 2014.

• 40:04Chris Williamson?

  Which you weren't there for.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Which, uh, what's that?

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  Which you weren't there for. You weren't there.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  I wasn't there for, yeah. So I talk about that a very vast, I'm very honest in the book about, you know, my, my foibles and faults and the whole affair. But, um, but in truth, you know, I think it ended up being that there were competitions and there were discussions and polls on the internet and papers published, you know, that really claimed that of all the, you know, kind of people on earth, that I might have a decent shot, you know, better than one in, in five or something of winning a Nobel Prize, which is pretty high, you know, because there's, you know, billions of people on earth, right? And, and how often do you get to be in that very select group? And then, uh, as I describe in the book, it was not to be, obviously, the, the title will be different if I had won the Nobel Prize, not lost it. So the title is

• 40:49Speaker 01

  losing the Nobel Prize, but it has two different meanings. One of the meanings is how I personally lost it and lost out on this opportunity, although creating something Nobel worthy. And then having that slip away, I described the emotions of that and the personal side of that, but also the cosmic side of it. What does it mean to talk about things like the multiverse and like the inflationary universe and the creation of the big bang? What does that mean in a world and a universe that's polluted with contamination and with confirmation bias and with all these other foibles that human beings have? So that's one aspect of the title. But then, if you can imagine this, you know, so imagine, what is it, Prince

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Harry, you know, he and Princess Meghan, you know, they want to come to a club and you're at that club and they're about to come into your club and you hooked it up. They're just so, you're just gonna love it, you're gonna take selfies with it. And then right before they get there, they say, you know what, we're not gonna come to your club or any of your clubs. In fact, could you recommend a better club for us to go to, better than any of the ones here? So what ended up happening was, not only did I lose the Nobel Prize chance that I, you know, best chance I would ever have, but that same year that I potentially could have won it, I was asked by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize that, you know, I would have won had my experiment not been disconfirmed and our results retracted.

• 42:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Our claim, our claim of discovery retracted. The experiment was correct, it still is correct, we still believe it's true, but the interpretation of what we saw has been changed radically from detecting the imprimatur of God, if you like, or of the big bang of nature, to the most humble substance in the universe, this cosmic dust that I described at some length in the book.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, what's the specifics about, because you've gone from, you were there, you were at the finish line, ready to go, but it seems like there's kind of two elements to this story. One of them is the potentially systemic, more political, the side that I want to hear a little bit more about how the Nobel Prize is judged and stuff like that. But the, obviously, the sort of meat and veg of it is the fact that what you found was interpreted differently to what you originally thought. Is that correct? Can you take us through that?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when we set out to measure the universe's earliest light and this curling, twisting pattern that gives bicep its name, etc., the, the experiment was designed to see an effect. In other words, it was designed to see this leftover aftershock of the big bang via gravitational waves. And so it wasn't designed to necessarily rule out every other potential source of cosmic mimicry. So there could be sources that we did know about, say, the Earth emits a type of signal that could be mistaken for it. So we designed the experiment to block out the signal from the Earth, because we had to locate it at the South Pole on Earth. Similarly, say, the atmosphere could do it, or there could be emission from sources that

• 43:53Speaker 01

  are not cosmological, but they are in the solar system or in the galaxy. And we knew about those sources, and we did our best to eliminate them. But there was one source that we simply did not have enough information. And there was one group of astronomers that had this information. In fact, they were led from the European Space Agency. It was a satellite called the Planck satellite. And they had measured the sky, and we knew that they had information which could tell us if we had seen cosmic dust, which are particles, grains of carbon, nickel, iron, particles left over from a previous explosion of a generation of stars called a supernova that may have existed, that did exist in our galaxy prior to our solar system's existence

• 44:37Speaker 01

  and other solar system's existence. And without such supernova, we would probably not exist, because the iron in your blood, the hemoglobin molecule that carries iron molecules, iron atoms, that was forged, those iron molecules were forged in the core of a supernova that exploded in our local stellar neighborhood 4.9 billion years ago. So you literally, as Carl Sagan used to say, have stardust flowing through your blood, very poetically, but it also flows through the galaxy. And because it's made of iron, just like the filings, as Michael Faraday showed and others showed, they align themselves in magnetic fields. Our Milky Way galaxy has a magnetic field too, and it can produce the exact same curling,

• 45:19Speaker 01

  twisting pattern of microwaves as the Big Bang's inflationary epoch could. So. That was the signal that we mistook. And the reason that we didn't have access to information which would have disconfirmed our claim earlier is because it was held by our competitors. The Planck satellite did not want to share this information with us. We didn't know if they had detected it as well as we had and wanted to scoop us out of this discovery and potentially win their own Nobel Prize, or they didn't have a good understanding yet of their own deficiencies, so forth with their instrument. And it turned out to probably be a little of both. But there's this incredible competition that exists within science to get there,

• 46:01Speaker 01

  not only get there first, but to just obliterate the competition, like leave no doubt that you made this definitive measurement. We wanted that to be clear throughout the entire paper, press conference, everything we did, that there should be no doubt that what we discovered was what we claimed. And in the end, the results were correct, but we made a very exquisite measurement of the emission from dust particles in our local galactic neighborhood. Incredibly challenging, by the way, because the signals that we saw were just a few parts in a billion out of the temperature of the South Pole. It's exquisite technology. I describe how exciting it is, this technology, and how it's progressing and will progress based on the lessons learned

• 46:43Speaker 01

  from BICEP2 to build a next generation of instrumentation, such as the Simons Observatory, which is a big project that I am leader, leading here in San Diego, based with institutions around the world. Literally 250 researchers on every continent currently on the planet, which is amazing to think about. So the real discovery and its aftermath, and how it affected me and the field personally, is really tied up in this quest, at least personally for me, with the Nobel Prize. And I came to see it, in a sense, as almost a false idol. And I came to see the Nobel Prize, in a sense, as a religion, as a type of religion,

• 47:25Speaker 01

  ironically practiced by mostly secular scientists, right? Seventy percent of our National Academy of Sciences declare themselves to be atheists, not agnostics, but atheists. And yet, if you go to any website that supports science or any discovery where the upper echelons of authority need to be referenced, even in Sabina's books, and she's not really beholden to them, but she constantly is interviewing Nobel laureates and talking about things that were awarded with the Nobel Prize and saying, "Well, nothing's been awarded the Nobel Prize since, you know, and theoretical physics shows you how poor these predictions." As a scorecard, as a talisman, as an icon. And I make these parallels between a religion and the Nobel Prize.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  And I think they're quite, you know, I think that nobody really disputes it, which is kind of interesting to me. Nobody disagrees with the reformation. So I present five ways to improve the Nobel Prize before it's too late. Because I think if you have an institution that refuses to change its operating mode, that it's at risk of catastrophic, you know, kind of existential crisis.

• 48:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, it loses its purity, right? Like, the whole point, again, for me, as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, one of the only things that I want the Nobel Prize to do is for it to go to the right person.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  Do you know?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Poor people, right, poor people.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  I want to get on to what the process for the Nobel Prize consists of. But just the final thing that I want to kind of round off the story for you personally was, how did you find out about the fact that there had been this particular change in how your discovery had been viewed? And then what was the next, sort of, what were the next couple of days like? I'm fascinated to hear what that means to someone who's pushed so hard and come so close.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was it was a mixture of emotions, you know, first, obviously embarrassment, a little personal sense of humiliation that, you know, I had kind of gone along with this result, even though I had some doubts about it, as we all had doubts, but but certainly I had voiced a lot of doubts and, you know, a little bit of gratitude that, you know, I'd I'd not been, you know, so publicly associated with the face of this detection because I had been kind of eliminated, which which I described in the book and how this role, I wasn't eliminated completely, obviously, but but the way the announcement was made, I was, you know, prevented from being a part of it.

• 50:01Chris Williamson?

  So bizarrely, the thing, the thing that you felt a little bit maybe jilted at, you'd kind of been left at the altar, so to speak, when it came to the the glory, but in a roundabout fashion, that had also protected you from being the figurehead who upon whose shoulders most of the the backlash had had landed, I suppose.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly right. And yeah, so, you know, I just admit that, you know, how it felt, I wasn't, you know, glad I wanted us to be right. I wanted us to be right, even if I didn't win the Nobel Prize. But, you know, in the end, the denouement of the story for me became a recognition that, as I said, ironically, all these scientists are atheists, but they worship this golden crucifix of an icon, the Nobel Prize, which literally has a graven image, you know, a picture of Alfred Nobel on it, and you bow down to it on the day he was he died in in December, you know, December 10th, 1896. That's the day that they're awarded on his birthday. And and for me, this this kind of religion

• 51:04Speaker 01

  no longer holds the idolatrous transfiction that it had once before, and that it it no longer really consumes my my daily life in any way, other than, you know, to think that the privilege of getting paid to do the research that I get to do and work with the genius people, students, and other scientists around the world that I get to work with. That is reward enough. And when we make the Nobel Prize this paragon of scientific excellence, we are kind of reducing ourselves, sorry to say, you know, to kind of like entertainers in the Hollywood Oscars.

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  It becomes like Pop Idol or X Factor, right?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, and, and for us, I think, you know, scientists should be the most immune from that, right? Aren't we supposed to be hyper rational and these paragons of intellectual honesty? But I think, you know, we're human beings. And the problem is that, you know, as I often say, I did an interview with Scott Eastwood, who's, you know, Clint Eastwood's son, a very famous podcaster here in the, in the States. And, you know, saying like, well, you don't really expect, you know, a movie studio doesn't really expect that all of its films are going to win Academy Awards. I mean, some of them, you know, are going to be like The Fast and the Furious, and they're just not, and he's like, I was in The Fast and the Furious. That was a highlight of my podcasting career. But, but,

• 52:28Speaker 01

  you know, but he agree with me, you know, it's like, the, the actors and actresses who go into Hollywood, they don't go into it saying, oh, I'm only a good actor if I win a Nobel Prize. But, or an Oscar, rather. But the studios, you better believe, they want most of their pictures to get, that's why they have 10 different awards.

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  Golden Globe nomination, and this, and the other, yeah.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Tom DeOre, right. All these things, Sundance. And they're all about giving each other awards. And the note, there is no second, there is no Golden Globes or SAG comparison, you know, second runner up for the Nobel Prize. There's just nothing like that. So it puts the Nobel Prize under great scrutiny and holds it up to this level of, of really austere, of, of being, you know, just the augustness of winning it. I think that it does a detriment, has a detrimental effect on scientists. But to the extent it's going to survive, I wanted to preserve the purity of it by making certain reformations. I talk about, as I say, five of the ways that you could do it.

• 53:26Chris Williamson?

  One of those.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I've been invited to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize and coming upon it, you know, as a scholar would. So I received a letter a couple of weeks after we made, you know, the final nail in the coffin for our detection back in 2014. And I got a letter from the Royal Swedish Academy, which said, you know, Do not talk strictly confidential, you know, so I guarantee it's the last time I'll be asked to nominate winners of the Nobel, but, but it said, you know, here's what you need to do, look for the multiple winners, you know, who deserve the prize, it could be something done decades earlier, and it could, and it didn't mention anything about having a benefit on mankind. I said Alfred only said three things in his will, it has to go to one person in the preceding year who had the greatest benefit. And here they are asking me to do

• 54:10Speaker 01

  nothing of what he asked me to do. And I felt like, well, that's kind of the worst things you could do is not, is not have respect for the wishes of a dead man, right? A dead man has one chance, a one will, and imagine, you know, you know, you're going to live, you know, a hundred more years or whatever, but you write your will someday, and you say, I want all the money to go to Oxfam or whatever, and they give it to like, you know, whatever, I don't even know what they give it to. But they give it, or you know, Greenpeace, and they give it to ExxonMobil or BP, you know, you'd be pretty pissed off, but what could you do? Nothing, absolutely nothing, because you're dead. And, and so I felt like it's become, it's be, it's incumbent upon scientists like me to advocate for change

• 54:51Speaker 01

  from within. And I don't have any, you know, illusion, delusion that they're going to listen to me, but I felt the story was too important to ignore. And so far, I've gotten great feedback from people around the world, scientists and laypeople, about what it's like to really aspire to this, and, and to really make great, important discoveries, but not judge yourself on whether or not this, you know, three inch diameter gold, you know, medallion like a rap star would wear, you know, goes around your

• 55:19Chris Williamson?

  I could see you, I could have seen you with that raptor on your neck, which is a shame. But there's, there's a couple of things, a couple of things I've been thinking about as you've been speaking now. One of them, the first thing that you said was that the humiliation maybe came a little bit higher than the disappointment. And some listeners of the show will know that I came off a motorbike in Bali a couple of years ago. And I'm driving along, no. Driving a fifty pence per day Balinese moped, which is my, that was my first error. The second error is not really being very good at riding a motorbike. And a truck pulls out in front of me and I come off the bike anyway. And I'm wearing a tiny pair of swim shorts and a little vest. And I just, it's me versus Balinese road and it winds all day.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  Like I've got kind of like second degree burns on half of my body. And most of the left hand side of me is stuck in the Balinese tarmac, which is very cold. It's perfect for removing skin. It'd be a brilliant cheese grater. And the first thing that I felt, so I was riding with these two Aussie guys who I'd made friends with while I was out there. I was travelling on my own. I'd made friends with these two Aussie guys and they kind of knew me and I kind of knew them beforehand. But anyway, we relatively new friends. And I was in mortal danger. I'd just injured myself, like the forefront of my mind should have been my injury. And the first thing that I felt when I stood myself up and brushed bits of tarmac out of me was embarrassment.

• 56:43Chris Williamson?

  The head of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like forget the fact about like worried about I'm injured or is this going to scar or, you know, is another car coming? Is there going to be another car behind me that hits me? No, no, no, I wanted to stand up and think, oh, you twat. Like that's the first thing that I thought. And it's just so telling of the fact that we are, no matter how, as you say, these sort of paragons of beautiful intellectual truth and purity and all the rest of this stuff. It's born out of a flawed system and that system is human.

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  And the other thing is that I think is really super interesting is this, the journey that it's allowed you to go on, which I think is a lot of, a lot of people will be able to draw a comparison with, which is kind of that of discovering that the, the process of what you have created, that life is a process of becoming not being. And that as you've gone along the way, you're now able to look back on it and say, well, you know, like the fact that I was able to bring all of these people together and. In a very bizarre way, I wonder whether or not you would have the same level of nuanced and subtle appreciation for all of the different elements if it was overshadowed by a large

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  award. I don't know whether you'd be able to look back with the same degree of high fidelity, that granular kind of.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. No, I agree with you 100%. I mean, I always joke, you know, people say, oh, you're a hypocrite. You wouldn't turn a Nobel Prize down if you want. I say, well, if you want to see Humphamson's series, just get them to award me the Nobel Prize. In all seriousness, you know, I feel like, um, yeah, it's almost a blessing because it's sort of like a liberation. Yeah, I don't know if you're married or whatever, but I always say, you know, when I met my wife, I, I got to stop like going on dates. Like I never have to have a first date again, you know, hopefully.

• 58:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  And it's very liberating when you, when you free your mind of it. And so when I freed my mind of obsession about, I was told to get tenure or to get to a high level of promotion at the University of California, I have to win a Nobel Prize. I've been told by many people that they're basically judged in their careers on their prospects of winning a Nobel Prize. To be liberated from that and say like, well, you know, that is, that is completely an asinine metric by which to judge a human being. And I say in the book, you know, the journey is more important than the gilded destination. And, you know, we make fun of like, you know, I don't know if you, you know, whatever, how biblical you want to get. But, you know, back in the Bible, it talks about the Israelites worshiping a golden calf,

• 59:28Speaker 01

  you know, this, this icon made of gold that they made themselves, uh, you know, a few weeks after witnessing God allegedly, you know, wipe out Egypt with all these plagues, right? And I thought, well, that's so silly. But, but in truth, you know, 3,000 years later, here we are doing the exact same thing. We worship a golden icon with a picture of Alfred Nobel, and that is part of the way that we value our self-worth. I think that that's a shame in a modern scientific society to feel that way. And so I feel like it's part of my, you know, one of the lessons learned and how to handle it. It's not just about, you know, losing a Nobel Prize, which, you know, probably all of your listeners can sympathize with. But how do you handle not winning, you know, top 50 podcasts? Or how do you handle not, not, you know, getting to, you know, be high school class president?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  These are all things that, you know, you're far more likely not to get into your own personal promised land than than to get in it. And that's okay, right? You're not going to get in to be Manchester United or New Cat. What is your team? Newcastle, uh, the good, whatever. Um, so, you know, from my perspective, so how do you handle that? Cause that's the state. If you look at the probability distribution of what you're going to spend your life being, it's not being a Nobel Prize winner. It's not being.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  It's as burrito as it comes, isn't it?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  Won or done.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I hope that people, you know, will enjoy the, the, the journey and not fixate on the destination. Uh, let's hope the journey is a lot more successful than your Balinese motorcycle journey.

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that would be nice. I think it's, um, it's super, super interesting to speak to yourself, especially after having spoken to Sabina and to hear just how folly some of the elements of science are. And, you know, the, the, something that was super interesting that we kind of moved past was when you had the European Space Agency and they didn't supply you with the particular types of information that you needed that would have helped you further your research. And you think like, I think from my side, things like physics, especially when we're talking about making developments and learning about the universe is the same as medicine in that the goal should be as wide

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  and as vast progression as expedited as is possible. But you, that's not what happens. It becomes narrow and deep because there's certain information that will benefit one particular group and over another and et cetera, et cetera. I don't know. I think removing ego from the situation is is going to be impossible. And you can't litigate for it. You're not going to be able to have someone come in and and say, oh, you need to share your research with these people or whatever. And as well, we can talk all we want. And the listeners will be in the midst. Once we are broadcast, you'll be in the midst of some very mindful other guests that we've had Rick Hansen and

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  Corey Allen and all these meditation experts, you know, detached from the ego and all this sort of stuff. But on the flip side, like, telling someone who's won something fantastic, like, oh, man, like, you should have never even gone for that in the first place. You should detach from your ego. You're like, well, no, fuck off. Like, I worked really, really hard for this. And I'm the one that got it. And because that story is newsworthy, and all the ones of the runners up aren't, you inevitably, you inevitably end up with this asymmetry of glorification.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but exactly who is going to advocate for reform, right? There are people that win it have a vested interest in it. You know, I note that there have been peacemakers who turned down the Nobel Peace Prize, right?

• 1:03:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. I wanted, I wanted to ask that. What, what does the, what does the peace, what do you make a peace prize? How does that work? What do you have to do?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  I mean, some of it's been, you know, it's, it's one of the few prizes that anybody can nominate anybody for. So you could nominate me, I could nominate you.

• 1:03:16Chris Williamson?

  Let's do that.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, yeah, but the physics prize, you have to be invited. And one of the criterion to be invited is that you won a Nobel Prize. That's one option. So the rich get richer. If you won a Nobel Prize, your graduate student in postdoc is much more likely to get a Nobel Prize. Or conversely, if you work for somebody, you're likely to get. So I go through all these kind of different machinations within it. But, you know, I think like, there, there is sort of a vested interest in keeping. Look, the Nobel Prize is a monopoly. It's the most prestigious award of its kind, just like the Oscars are a monopoly. Yeah, there are other runners up, but it's, it's pretty head and shoulders above them, right? But the Nobel Prize, there is no real secondary competitor to it. I mean, I challenge, you know, people to know about it. And so as such, it has a huge responsibility to inform

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  the public about how science is actually done. I describe in the book some of the cruel aspects of the Nobel Prize wherein, you know, people that, you know, mostly women, but sometimes men as well, including just a year, two years ago, when one of Scotland's greatest scientists, Ron Drever, was basically written out of history because he happened to die, you know, six months before the Nobel Prize for LIGO was awarded. And it's all part of these crazy rules that they like to adhere to, that they themselves choose and pick what to apply. As I say, they don't follow what Alfred wanted. So I hope your listeners get a chance to engage with it. I welcome, we have a couple of websites we set up. One is just called losingthenobelpriize.com where people can suggest winners

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  and put a petition, kind of like the moveon.org strategy. And then I have a mailing list on my website, bryankeding.com, that people can engage with. I love hearing from people, how it's affected them, and it's gotten a lot of good attention. I used to think, well, you know, I shouldn't even care about like whether it wins these awards for best books of the year, but you know.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  You're just getting drawn straight back in again.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  I did, I'm like, yeah, I can't even be stoic anymore. It's like, I'm too fortunate. No, it's really, it's received a lot of lovely attention. And so, yeah, I'm really interested to hear what you think about it.

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  I'm excited to read it, man. I really, I really, really am. I think the minutia, and I'm looking forward to finding out the sordid details about what goes on behind the scenes and stuff like that. So, yeah, Brian, man, it's been a blast. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate your time.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, and let's keep in touch, Chris.

• 1:05:40Chris Williamson?

  I certainly will do. Links to everything will be in the show notes below. Please make sure that you follow Brian online. He has a very interesting Twitter feed and his website will be linked below. So, man, thank you. Catch you later on.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Chris.