Brian Keating’s Journey: Nobel Dreams and Cosmic Questions | Cheltenham and UK Philosophers

Brian Keating sits down with Matt Gray for a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and entertaining conversation that explores the intersection of cosmology, philosophy, and mysticism. Together, they tackle some of the universe’s biggest mysteries—from the origins of the cosmos and the mechanics of the Big Bang, to the challenges and philosophy behind scientific discovery. Timestamps: 00:00 "Science, Nobel Near-Miss, and Humor" 07:26 "Passion for Science and Sharing" 12:00 "Chasing a Nobel-Worthy Discovery" 20:42 Limits of Scientific Falsifiability 22:18 "Origins and Concepts of Cosmology" 32:28 "Galileo, Einstein, and Scientific Progress" 34:16 "Nobel Prizes and Collaboration Challenges" 38:58 "Galactic Dust and Panspermia" 48:15 Agnostic vs. Atheist Questioning 51:44 John Lennox: Faith, Science, and Scripture 58:35 Equations, God, and Belief Dynamics 01:03:12 Belief Nuances and Perspectives 01:06:07 Maxwell's Ether and Light Waves - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

  Hey guys, Matt here. Yeah, so I interviewed Dr. Brian Keating, actually Professor Brian Keating, although it says doctor here, so I suppose he's a doctor and a professor. But, you know, setting that aside, the guy's just a fantastic human being. He's an amazing science communicator. I mean, just look at, he's got some serious junk in his trunk here. He's interviewed 22 Nobel Prize-winning guests. He of course has his own sort of slightly frustrating Nobel Prize story, which we go into in some detail in there. He came very, very close to obtaining the title himself. But, you know, we discussed the possibility of the negative impact of some of these sorts of processes on real science.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  But, setting that aside, we discussed sort of early universe formation, sort of opinions on the Big Bang and stuff like that. We had a good laugh about English food and different names of breakfast. He's just fantastic because he's approachable, he's fun. You know, just look what we got here, right? So he actually says in the description of his website that if you have a look here, right, so this is the podcast Into the Impossible. I've been watching this stuff for years, many of us in Cheltenham, UK philosophers have been following his work, it's just fantastic. And because he's so smart and he's kind of on the inside of physics and science, he just asks brilliant questions and gets brilliant guests as well, right?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  He's interviewed most of my guests, so Donald Hoffman, you know, Mike Levin, Philip Goff, amongst others. Although I did suggest Jenny Nielsen, and I think that he was quite keen on talking to her with her topological unified field theory, should be of interest to Brian and some of his followers. But yeah, it says here, look, "Every week I provide you with long-term interviews, long-form interviews rather, with a brilliant thought leader and deep dive into a fascinating STEM subject." I mean, every week he does this stuff, right? He works really hard on this. These are really, really good quality, well-produced interviews. You know, here's an example. Look at that! Look at this!

• 3:05Brian Keating?

  Earth's been hit before, and it'll get hit again. Sixty-six million years ago, a rock from space erased a dinosaur in under three minutes.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is the quality that we're talking. This guy is a professional science communicator, educator. Look, he gets all these fantastic guests on. You know, this is something to aspire to for me. I wish I had the know-how and the expertise to be able to deliver this kind of quality. But yeah, here he is, Brian Keating. I'm so honoured that he would speak to me for an hour. He said he was on to another call straight after that, which is unsurprising, given his charm, wit, intelligence and goodness of character. We even touch on religion and God and all that stuff as well, which seems to be quite a common thing these days with my guests. So, you know, we always said we wanted to be there at the intersection of philosophy,

• 3:57Speaker 02

  science and mysticism and, you know, the nature of the guests and the breadth of their interest and sort of almost sort of cosmopolitan intellects in a way. You know, it seems to be supporting that journey or directive. So, yeah, it's a fun interview and I hope you enjoy it. Speak soon, take care, bye.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Hey Brian.

• 4:26Brian Keating?

  Pleasure to see you Matt. Thanks for staying up late and getting me up early here in California.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I imagine it's sunny where you are over in California at the moment, but yeah, thanks so much. It's a massive privilege to have you here because not only are you a sort of for running physicist, leading thinker in science, but you're also a podcast, you're a popularizer of physics and science more broadly, philosophy. I mean, you've interviewed half, at least half of my former guests. So, you know, first of all, thank you from everyone within the Cheltenham UK Philosopher's Community that you're doing a great service. And that actually sort of, I mean, could we, could we start just by getting a bit of a kind of origin story, you know, because perhaps not all of our members are as familiar with you, but I mean, for me, you're rock and roll. You know, I get beers and pizza and watch you guys on Friday night. It's just fantastic stuff, right?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  But could you tell us about how you ended up, you know, doing this and why it's so important to you and, you know, why physics? And yeah, tell us about your journey, Brian.

• 5:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Well, obviously I did it for the money, you know, as something I always wanted to be wealthy and famous and earn the respect of podcasters everywhere. No, I mean, it's funny because a podcast didn't exist, you know, 25 years ago. And you see behind me, if you're watching it, I don't know, this will be on video, right? So you'll see the open the pod bay doors. So that's my catchphrase, but that is actually the origin of the word podcast. It comes from 2001, A Space Odyssey story, Arthur C. Clarke, his famous pod, you know, pod in the pod bay doors. That led an engineer at Apple named Vinnie Sorico to come up with the idea for the iPod. And then literally the rest is history. Once that became, you know, kind of a noun. So the, you know, journey that

• 6:09Brian Keating?

  we're on now, both of us, didn't even exist, you know, literally 20 years ago, until 20 years ago, I think this, this year. So there's no way I could have, I could have expected it, predicted it coming up on a third of a million subscribers just on YouTube, another 100,000 on audio. And it really came as a, as a result of the pandemic. It really the only good thing that came out of the pandemic. Besides more time with my kids and wife was the, you know, kind of ability to, you know, middling people like me to get top guests like, you know, 22 Nobel Prize winners and multiple authors, Pulitzer Prize winners, Fields medalists, you know, it's, they were,

• 6:50Brian Keating?

  you know, confined to their homes as everyone was on this little, you know, you know, 1080p screen that we're on. So it's sort of a miracle that led to the fact that all these book tours got canceled. And as an author, I knew how important book tours were. And I said, well, let me do a thing where I can do a virtual book tour from these big names. And I ended up getting, you know, kind of the Matthew effect, rich get richer. And the more good guests I had on and great guests I had on, and that would lead to more and more. And I can't think of anyone, you know, that I really, you know, haven't had on that I'm just dying to come on and he or she won't come on. So it's, it's been, it's been wonderful. And but, you know, my actual origin story started, you know, over 50 years ago in New

• 7:34Brian Keating?

  York State on our island, you know, it competes with the British Isles. It's called Long Island. I was born there. My father was a professor of mathematics at SUNY Stony Brook. And that was my, my personal big bang occurred there. I guess, you know, maybe it occurred nine months earlier, if you count my parents, but we'll keep it PG 13, of course. And the, the journey to become a scientist, you know, was, it was like being, you know, a wizard or something, or an ice cream taster. I never thought, oh, this is something I can actually do for a living to be an astronomer, a professor at a top university in the world and travel the world and go to, you know, six of the seven continents, including Antarctica. I

• 8:18Brian Keating?

  still have to go to Africa. That's on my bucket list, of course, but, but I've given speeches on six continents. And, you know, never would have thought it would be possible, but for the fact that, you know, kind of by luck and hard work, I think I worked really hard and always have to really, you know, be a, be in the mix of the most interesting aspects of physics and astronomy and cosmology. And now science popularization is a great honor that I get to do. And, you know, normally on a Tuesday morning, Like we're talking, you know, I might be on one of four different telecons, you know, talking about, you know, some strike in Chile or, you know, some shipment to Antarctica

• 9:00Brian Keating?

  or whatever that went awry and, you know, uh, those are all conversations I would say I have to have, but conversations like this and with my guests are conversations I want to have, you know, to share the intellectual, you know, kind of energy that I get is, is a process that, that really is, is truly exciting. And there's no better time, I think in history to be a, a cosmologist or an astrophysicist like I am. And then all the more so to get to talk to, to great minds all, all over the world, you know, at the speed of light. So it doesn't get any better than this. I'm so blessed to be able to do it.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  It doesn't. And, you know, that, that's the rock and roll sort of element for me as well. And COVID affected me as well. Time with the kids, time to do what you wanted to, you know, it's like go for walks and stuff and get some fresh air, get some exercise and, and watch guys like yourselves on your podcast, sharing some of the most complex, deep, profound ideas you could possibly imagine. That's just, it's blissful, isn't it? And it's, it's so cool. And for all of my guests, I do a bit of research as much as I'm able to, given my time constraints and, you know, and, and obviously, you know, part of your big story is this sort of Nobel Prize thing, isn't it? You know? And, um, and I think that's really, really cool, the way you've responded to that. And you've talked about the whole process and you, you've got a very, you know, you're, you're sharing, you know, but it, it hasn't defined you. Do you know what I mean? There's, there's

• 10:15Speaker 02

  a hell of a lot more to, to, to you than, than just that. But, um, do you want to talk about a little bit about that? Because

• 10:20Brian Keating?

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, as a, as a young scientist, so my father, you know, was a professor, as I said, mathematics and a good, and a, you know, very top notch mathematician. And later he went into, to physics as well, foundations of quantum mechanics and all sorts of interesting aspects of physics that a mathematician could tackle. And we were kind of competitive, you know, here, uh, you know, like many fathers and sons and, you know, I always kind of wanted to outdo him and, and win prizes and awards that he never won, you know, like, You might do with your kids playing football or, or you know, whatever you guys call it football. We call it soccer, but uh, playing football here, American football. It's often, you know, the father was, you know, capital of football team in high school and he's, you know, trying to relive his glory.

• 11:03Brian Keating?

  Now here's a son and, and they're trying to compete with each other. So we had that rivalry. Um, wasn't the most healthy, but, but I knew for a fact he never won a Nobel Prize. So I knew case closed if I could win a Nobel Prize. Permanent bragging rights, right? Yeah, yeah. And so that kind of led me down a dark path because it became, you know, in, in, uh, in Judaism, there's, you know, grave sin, which I'm Jewish and, and the, and the practice of idol worship is very common. And there are many different types of idols. I mean, I've already mentioned a couple of them, you know, from YouTube subscribers to university professors to, you know, what college your kids go to, what, um, you know, how many subscribers you have on Instagram or followers.

• 11:44Brian Keating?

  Uh, these are all idols, right? Money, obviously famous, but in academia, it's, you know, if, if, if you get 10 citations to a paper, as you know, it's, it's like considered a decent paper and a pretty, pretty well regarded one. And, um, but you know, the stakes are, are so, you know, small compared to all these other metrics that I think a lot of academics such as myself look to other ways of validation and, and part of that validation was, you know, winning awards and prizes. And the biggest one of all, I mean, we're talking early, you know, mid-December, uh, and every year on December 10th, which is Alfred Nobel's death day, uh, you know, with these worshippers go to Sweden and bow down and accept the gilded graven image with the

• 12:29Brian Keating?

  visage of Alfred Nobel. And I mean, it couldn't, and it couldn't be more scatological. It couldn't be more, you know, kind of cultish and, Yeah. But it's all in good fun, right? I mean, it, it doesn't really harm anyone, except what it does, right? If you, if you, if you look at it from the perspective of it determines funding decisions. It determines who gets hired at universities. I was told by my department chair at the time when I was hired that whose father, his father had actually won the Nobel Prize for inventing the laser in Russia. And he told me, well, we kind of hired you because we, we think you're going to win a Nobel Prize. And if you don't, you know, to disappoint a lot of us. So I was told that in no uncertain terms. That was kind of the path that I was on because of the experiment that I co-invented.

• 13:11Brian Keating?

  When I was in this purgatory of being a postdoc at Caltech in Pasadena, where I spent three years. So that experiment was, you know, kind of designed by me and my colleagues to take the earliest baby picture of the universe, using what's called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the oldest light in the universe, but it's not the oldest radiation if the universe began in a singularity, a big bang singularity of the kind that Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose and others have talked about in singularity theorem. So the question of whether or not the universe had this explosive origin came out of the result of a singularity or sort of a singularity in reverse. That was, that was an obsession

• 13:55Brian Keating?

  of mine that I designed the first experiment ever to tackle it. And that was in the year 2000 or so. And because of that-

• 14:02Speaker 02

  That's freaking unbelievable, Brian, isn't it?

• 14:04Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  You designed the experiment to detect the earliest freaking photons from the big- I mean, come on.

• 14:10Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it would be great if we succeeded, right? If we actually, you know, detected it instead of detecting microscopic grains-

• 14:16Speaker 02

  But even driving forward the technology in that direction, framing the problem, defining the concept-

• 14:21Brian Keating?

  Look, we're still doing it now. And there's a huge component of the United Kingdom that's playing a big role. You know, Michael Brown at Manchester, my colleague Lucio Pichirillo. There's a UK, you know, investment of 20 million plus pounds to lead the observatory to double, you know, some of its capabilities in the next five years. And that's called the Simons Observatory. The previous experiment I invented at Caltech that took us to the precipice of a Nobel Prize. And then spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize. So, you know, that did not pan out in that sense. But yeah, you're right, to seek, to strive, and not to yield, as Lord Tennyson would say, right? And that's actually on the, on the plaque in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, where the commemoration

• 15:05Brian Keating?

  of the deaths of Roald Amundsen and his team is memorialized. So that, you know, kind of striking without yielding and striving without yielding is at the core, I think, of good science and adventure and- It's been it's been incredible and and like I said, we're continuing. We haven't given up. In fact, the bicep kind of debacle in some sense led to the birth and and eventual, you know, progress that we're making with the Simons Observatory, which is about a $200 million experiment now. So this is just, yeah, beyond any of my wildest dreams for a kid in Long Island, New York. You know, had a tiny little telescope looking at the craters of the moon back when he was 10 and never thought, oh, this is going to be a job for me someday, right?

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Is that what really drove you, though? Was it sort of wonder at the majesty of of creation itself? And and just what is going on?

• 15:55Brian Keating?

  Yeah, you you may know that.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Questions drive you, Brian? What what are you trying to find out?

• 16:00Speaker 00

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• 16:30Brian Keating?

  You are you're you're undoubtedly aware of the love affair that physicists have for philosophers, right?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Look, maybe love hate, you know?

• 16:39Brian Keating?

  Actually, yeah, so I actually do love philosophy and I've always been interested in the biggest questions there are. And philosophy is the entree into those discussions, right? So there's no there's no better place to kind of endeavor to understand the biggest picture aspects of of life. And actually, my hero of heroes, you know, is this guy Galileo Galilei. See my finger puppet of him holding a little telescope? And he used to say that the telescope had the ability to transform the vexations of philosophers into utter certainty. In other words, you philosophers would speculate, what is the nature or makeup of the Milky Way galaxy, for example? And you talk about, you know, it could be this, it could be that.

• 17:23Brian Keating?

  And then he could prove with his telescope. A little bit of confirmation bias at work, but uh, but the, he could prove that it was made of stars and that all it was. In fact, it's not, as I say, but um, but the, the virtue of the philosophical questions being resolvable using instrumentation. So I'm an experimental astrophysicist. I'm a cosmologist. I study the origin, evolution, composition, eventual fate of the universe using tools and telescopes that my colleagues and I, my students and I build, deploy, collect data from, and then analyze data and then write papers. And this process can take 20 years.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:59Brian Keating?

  Not uncommon. So it's a, it's a long-term endeavor, but the philosophical core at heart has always been to only address the questions I find most interesting that affect the biggest picture topics in the universe. So, origin of the universe, pretty big topic. And so I try not to get led astray by things like, you know, are there aliens? Are there, yeah, life forms on other planets? As interesting as those are and as philosophical as those are, I have to stay focused, no pun intended, on what I can do uniquely so, which is to measure and, and report on what we see.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, reality is magical enough without these other phenomena, isn't it? So do you know what I mean? It's exciting enough to try and understand what our substrate is, you know, without aliens, man.

• 18:42Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  You know, but um, you know, but you know, physics has become quite speculative, hasn't it? And um, I mean, this, this reminds me of a question that um, one of our members, Linton Cox, has raised. I haven't got the detail in front of me, but it's to do with um, you know, has cosmology got a little bit like speculative philosophy in some areas? And are there areas of it that just are simply not testable anymore? Or is that unfair?

• 19:05Brian Keating?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I've sort of lamented the fact that a lot of what we do in the future of cosmology might be relegated to social proof, not, not actual scientific proof. And the reason I say that is of the dominant theories of cosmogenesis, so- Cosmology isn't necessarily, you know, required to come up with the origin of the universe any more than, say, an evolutionary biologist like my friend Richard Dawkins, and I'm sure your listeners are quite familiar with, I've hosted him here in North America. His, you know, that he's not responsible for explaining the origin of life, I mean, he may be interested in it, and it may be extremely, exquisitely, you know, fascinating,

• 19:49Brian Keating?

  as it is to me, but it's not really a part of evolutionary biology on Earth necessarily, whether or not some enzymes formed on a comet that impacted the Earth, you know, 12 billion years, 10 billion, 4 billion years ago, can't be older than the Earth. So, the question of the origin of the universe is, is a very fascinating one. It may belong, theories of cosmogony may belong within cosmology, I certainly am obsessed with them, but, but the, the fact that we sort of treat them as, as sort of synonymous, that the, the origin of the universe, and therefore the Big Bang itself, is, is sort of the default explanation, when in reality, you know, I've had a good friend of mine,

• 20:33Brian Keating?

  Nish Asher Shorty, at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, you know, he wrote a book called The Battle of the Big Bang with, with a colleague, Phil Hopper, and that book, you know, traces 32 different types of Big Bangs, so it's a misnomer to say, you know, I often give talks, was there a Big Bang, with the letter A capitalized, because that, to me, is the real, is the real sorting point. Was there one Big Bang, were there infinite Big Bangs, was there even a Big Bang, you know, in other words, was there no Big Bang? And so, the question of, of those may not be amenable to the Popperian kind of investigations, not that Popper is the last word either, but it certainly gives a framework.

• 21:16Brian Keating?

  And in this case, you know, if you look for falsification as your rubric to assess the validity of a scientific claim, then, then you would have to say that where there are singularities and event horizons, as there are with black holes and with the origin of the universe, uniquely, I mean, those are the only two. Binecly, I don't know, there's two, two instantiations of, of singularities and, and advanced physics and, and those are black holes and, and the big bang. Neither one of those can be witnessed, right? So those are enshrouded in an inscrutable layer of, of protection. So if we can't assess a model because we can never observe it and we can never acquire

• 21:57Brian Keating?

  physical data from it itself, and only have mathematical speculation and, and some corroboration that's circumstantial, what do we do? I mean, we can't falsify and we can't prove it. So I'm drawn to models that make definitive predictions that can be disproven because at least you can say something. The problem though, Matt, is that you may not be in a position to ever have the sensitivity by instrumentation standards. In other words, that even that theoretical perfect experiment, because of certain limitations we can talk about, called cosmic variance and the intrinsic uncertainty that we have in trying to make a statistical claim about a unique universe that we have access to. We may never be able to falsify the dominant model that predicts the singularity, and

• 22:41Brian Keating?

  we may never be able to prove it either. So we're in this like purgatory of no man's land where we're in, you know, unable to disconfirm or to confirm. So what does science do in those situations? It's very, uh, it's a very unusual time. And it's courtesy of the advancements in technology that my colleagues have really developed in, in our tools and techniques.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Hmm. I mean, that's certainly thinking as an experimentalist as opposed to sort of theory, you know, because you're, you have to engineer something that tests these claims. And, you know, there's almost, for me, you know, the, the idea that something can be engineered lends validity to the claims in and of itself, right? Uh, but I'm, I'm just thinking, you know, the, the conditions near a black hole just wouldn't allow for any, any testing equipment, you know, this is the problem, isn't it? You need, you know, you need something half the size of the, the known universe to be able to do it or something, you know, so. But, but, you know, is it possible, do you think, this is a bit philosophical, do you think that singularities, the big bang, is there a possible that they represent more of the limits of our understanding or perhaps the limits of the mathematical modeling capability that we have within our gift? Is, is that possible?

• 23:45Brian Keating?

  Well, certainly in broad strokes, both the the Big Bang and black holes have been comprehen- comprehensible, you know, at least for, you know, hundreds of years in the case of black holes, uh, maybe a hundred years in the case of of cosmological origin, a Big Bang, and, uh, that, you know, kind of was ushered in by Le Maitre in 1929. And then, you know, people like, um, uh, there there are scientists in in England using Newton's laws to calculate the escape velocity from an infinitely massive object and found that it was, you know, even greater than in- infinite speed or would require infinite velocity. And that was before they measured the speed of light even. So there were concepts of

• 24:27Brian Keating?

  of black holes that were dark stars. Mitchell, uh, John Mitchell in in the UK made up, um, you know, discover these these sorts of ideas. And then, yeah, the cosmological singularity. So we've been able to grapple with them and think about them, but, um, but seemingly, you know, philosophically, they're, uh, they're they're testable using, you know, thought experiments, Gedanken experiments and so forth. Uh, but but in reality, yeah, you're right. We can't actually approach them. Now, where they do provide some potential long-range signals, as they do in the case of of, you know, even Hawking radiation, in the case of a black hole, or gravitational radiation from binary black holes, it's not the same

• 25:08Brian Keating?

  as the event horizon, but, uh, we we've imaged the the photosphere, not actually the event horizon, but the photosphere around a black hole. It's it's a little technical to describe all the different, you know, black holes have, you know, as many different, uh, properties as as, you know, the Brits have for naming, you know, breakfast items. I mean, there's just an R or T or something. There's there's so many different, uh, you know, qualifiers we get into, but but they did have, they do have an ability to to exchange information with the outside world. Therefore, we can hope to make measurable. Another thing Galileo said is let us measure what is measurable, but make measurable what is not yet so. And and don't forget, he was a natural philosopher. They used to call physicists, they didn't have the word physicist until a hundred, two hundred years later.

• 25:53Brian Keating?

  But now, you know, he was called a a natural philosopher. So he, you know, he engaged in it. And the the point is, the ability of a scientist to make make something amenable to our senses is a crucial part of the scientific method. I mean, without it, it's pure math, and I don't think there's anything wrong with pure math, but but you're right, there there are precious few things, and therefore, when nature affords us, you know, a peek under her veil, or, you know, lift up the the curtain, uh, uh, we should take advantage of that and and use whatever tools we can. And in the case of what I do, we don't use the, we can't use light, because, not just because the universe didn't have the types of light that we're looking at right now at each other. Um, it was microwaves, but or it is now in the microwave region.

• 26:39Brian Keating?

  But because the the process by which the elements, you know, in the upper left of the periodic table form, the helium, hydrogen, and so forth, when they form, they obscure the processes that came before them. So essentially, it's like a fog. Like here in San Diego, the only you know, kind of malevolent weather we get is in uh, is in June, we get something called June gloom, which is usually preceded by May gray. And and this is a low layer of of basically coastal fog. Um, and it's caused by a different temperature between the ocean and the surrounding land and the condensation. And so I can't see an airplane flying, you know, ten thousand feet above me, but I can hear it. So

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:19Brian Keating?

  if we use something other than light, we can see be, we can see, quote unquote, perceive things other than what produced that light and what came before what produced that light. So when you look in cosmology, you look back in space, you look out in space, you're looking back in time.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:34Brian Keating?

  Uh, because of the finite speed of light. So we look back to a time before half a million years after the Big Bang, and that could be A singularity, it could be a previous cycle, it could be a variety of different things, but some hot dense phase, the early universe. If we try to look, you know, earlier than 500,000 years or so, we can't use light. We can only use other types of radiation. And there's only two other types of radiation that are long range and could potentially provide a signal, and those are neutrinos, which are notoriously, you know, nearly impossible to detect and, and, um, you know, interact only weakly and, and via their gravitational effects. So they're not really that great, but, um, but actually we want to go back and use waves

• 28:18Brian Keating?

  of gravity, gravitational radiation. And so if inflation, which is the, the theory that a quantum field fluctuated into existence, the energy density needed to ignite the big bang, then it would have also concomitantly produced gravitational radiation, which would exist before the cosmic microwave background, earlier times at time equals, you know, 10 to the minus 36 of a second after the origin of our observable universe. We seek to measure that signal via its imprint on the light of the microwave background that we can see via what's called its polarization, which is a lesser known property of light, but we can do it. And we've measured a lot of the polarization of the CMB exquisitely accurately with experiments,

• 29:00Brian Keating?

  including bicep and, and the Simons Array and now the Simons Observatory. Uh, but we have yet to measure definitively, that is without contamination, a cosmological signal. With bicep, we did measure a polarization signal that exactly mimicked what the inflationary epoch would predict. And that was called, uh, uh, the B-mode polarization of the CMB. But that was produced by these microscopic grains of dust, these actually microscopic meteorites, uh, not unlike the kind you can get at my website if you're in America, unfortunately, man, I'm sorry, I can't ship. I tried to ship to the UK and, and I do bring them when I go over to see, I was at Stonehenge this past summer in Manchester and Scotland. So I brought a bunch of meteorites with me, but the US Postal Service will not allow

• 29:45Brian Keating?

  me to ship them to the UK. But if you're listening anywhere else, go to briankeating.com/x and you can be entered into it unless you're an academic like me in the US, then go to briankeating.com/edu and I'll definitely send you one of these meteorites. So these are four billion year old objects that were present before our Earth formed from the preceding star that occupied this corner of our galaxy. And that, these micrometeorites get magnetized in the Milky Way's magnetic field and they can align like little tiny compass needles and they produce the polarization signal that exactly mimicked what we thought we had seen with the CMB. So this was an incredible kind of detective story, but in the end, yeah,

• 30:29Brian Keating?

  it resulted in a disappointing, obviously disappointing and wanting, you know, kind of to be hopeful without having a sense of confirmation bias. So it led to, it led to a lot of things, yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. What were you doing down at Stonehenge? That's literally just sort of 50 miles away from, from me.

• 30:47Brian Keating?

  Oh, is it really?

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Were you there with the Druids or?

• 30:50Brian Keating?

  I went there, yeah, it was around, it was in July. I was with my family. I'd never been there. I felt like an astronomer should, you know, spend some time there and, and hang out there. And so I went there with, with my family. I did a video on my, on my YouTube channel. It's actually called From Stonehenge to the Space Age or something like that. So I went from there to Jodrell Bank in Manchester.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  So is it, is it an astronomical, is it a clock?

• 31:17Speaker 00

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• 31:48Brian Keating?

  Well, it's it's not clear. There are certain astronomical attributes of it where it does, you know, have these alignments and um, the question is, you know, if it aligns with stuff now and it was built 5,000 years ago and do the procession of the earth's axes, you know, where did it align? When did it align? When it was built? Um, there's a great deal of mysteries about it. Um, I think it's safe to say it was used, you know, in conjunction with, you know, with observations of astronomical objects as, you know, fi- you know, 4,500 years later, you know, uh, if you, if you went to Tico Brahe's island, you know, off the coast of Denmark, uh, you would also find these things or, uh, north, north, the North Sea, wherever he was.

• 32:30Brian Keating?

  Um, he basically had this kind of similar thing with like, basically built this giant chair on a protractor where he could slide up and down and look at the positions of, and he was the last naked eye astronomer. And so there's similar things that line up there on his observatory. And, uh, and so, yeah, there's quite likely it was used in part for that, you know? How it was built is a great mystery too. We don't really understand.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, what else is there to do when it's dark, other than just sort of look at, you know what I mean?

• 32:57Brian Keating?

  Supposedly like the mounds, you know, the earthworks is actually even more impressive. I mean, it's, it's a huge structure. The stones are very small. I was very disappointed that they didn't let me touch it. I guess they knew my kids are not trusted. Um, so I ended up, uh, uh, going through it, uh, and taking in a, uh, taking a drone with me and and flying around it, but I wasn't able to, uh, to get up and actually touch it. So that, that'll have to, you know, I'll have to get special permission someday.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  But have you been to, um, Glastonbury? Uh, there's a, there's a, there's a hill there.

• 33:29Brian Keating?

  I know there's another one there. Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. They, they, the hippies and druids say that it's on a network of ley lines and there's this magical sort of property there and it does seem like a magical town. It's a, yeah, it's fantastic place. Okay. I mean, if you, next, next time you're in the area, go to Glastonbury. That's an amazing place. But I've got some, because I'm just a little bit conscious of time.

• 33:47Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  But some of our members' questions are so much better than the ones I came up with. So I'm just gonna, I should have just led with them, to be honest. But yeah, so here's an interesting one. In pursuit of, so this is from Linton Cox. So Linton is our brain box. He said, I like Keating, he's thoughtful. And from Linton, that's absolutely, that's extremely high praise from him. But he said, in pursuit of fundamental truths about the universe, scientists often endure extreme stress, failure and isolation. Do you think the culture of heroic science sometimes sacrifices mental health or ethics for prestige?

• 34:24Brian Keating?

  Well, you know, again, consulting my friend Galileo here. He could say a thing or two about it. I've been to Galileo's, you know, final resting place is prison outside of Florence, Italy called Archetria. I've had a conference there about the theory of relativity on its 100th anniversary of general relativity. Because Galileo came up with Galilei in relativity, which is, you know, basically what happens if you're on a boat and you throw a tennis ball or whatever. And he thought about these issues very deeply, you know, 300 years before Einstein would come back.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:55Brian Keating?

  So it does, it can, it certainly can. I mean, I think it was more common in the heroic age, you know, of exploration and of intellectual pursuits that people would be driven to these kind of, you know, manic, you know, modes of operating. And certainly now, you know, in modern age, when it's impossible, I say with pretty high confidence, it's almost impossible, if not maybe it's strictly impossible, for a single scientist to do anything now.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:26Brian Keating?

  I mean, there are no, you know, Einstein, you know, and without an at all after it. Because the low hanging fruit is gone, right? A lot of the low hanging fruit is gone. There are new discoveries being made and serendipitous things all the time, but those are made by enormous instruments like the, you know, dark energy survey instrument or the Vera Rubin observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope. You know, these are enormous billions of dollars. Of the Large Hadron Collider, you know, these are just enormous, super coming conde. So it's essentially, and another way to see this as someone who does study things like the Nobel Prize, is that there hasn't been like a single winner, a lone winner

• 36:10Brian Keating?

  of the Nobel Prize in many decades. I forget the exact last person to win it solo, but it was very common, you know, 100 years ago, or you know, when it's been around for 124 years now. So it was very common, or you know, much more common, but now it's basically, you know, kind of huge collaborations and then people get all mad because, you know, LHC had 5,000 people that discovered the Higgs boson and yet, you know, at most three people can win it because of their refusal to change their rules and their obstinance to Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, which I've had the honor or whatever, the shame of nominating winners for the Nobel Prize. And that's why I kind of went off on this

• 36:55Brian Keating?

  quest to see, does it really represent how science is done nowadays? You know, maybe it was done that way 124 years ago when William Rentgen invented the X-ray, you know, and that did provide a single person in the previous year who conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. But, you know, seven years after that, there was Gustav Dallen who invented the lighthouse regulator for buoys and so, you know, does that really affect you over there? You know, I know in San Diego, I use lighthouses instead of the GPS to get around, but I'm unique. So, yes, to answer his question, I do believe that that epoch is mercifully coming to a close, if it really does exist anymore. Because of these, now, that's not

• 37:40Brian Keating?

  to say that there aren't a tremendous number of people that aren't tortured, you know. I get dozens of emails. I'm looking at emails I got, you know, yesterday, the day before, people writing me, Professor Keaton. You know, I need your help. Here's this paper I've written. I've checked it out with ChatGPT. ChatGPT agrees with me. It's brilliant. It's gonna change the world. It's gonna resolve the black hole information paradox. It's a new theory of everything. It breaks the second law of thermodynamics. And this is just one paper, right? I get five of them. And they all say the same thing, like, I've checked it out with ChatGPT. It verified, you know, they have no awareness that that's what these things are designed to do. Because if they don't, the user experience is horrible, right?

• 38:23Brian Keating?

  If you use a thing that says like, you're an idiot, Matt, you know, or Brian, you should not be like submitting this drivel. Like, I have a lot of ideas too, but, you know, not a lot of them would pass muster outside of ChatGPT. So it's been a real boon to people working alone. And therefore, it's encouraging a lot of them to, you know, perceive themselves as having this lone genius rec, you know, resurrection from the bygone era in which it harmed people's mental health. So I do worry about that sycophantic attribute of them and the hallucinations that come along with it. So it may come again, but in mainstream science, less so.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not healthy, locking yourself in a dark room for five years and coming out with a theory of everything. It's just, that's just, you know, it's, we're done with that. It's a social network now, isn't it? Inevitably, you know?

• 39:10Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Um, there's another question here. So, oh yeah, this, this points to cosmology, the speculative philosophy. I mean, have you ever worried that your own work approaches that boundary?

• 39:21Brian Keating?

  Of being a lone genius? No, I don't.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Well, no, no, no, not being, not being.

• 39:25Brian Keating?

  Your mother-in-law will make me clear.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  You're a sociable genius. But have you worried that your own work might be approaching speculative philosophy?

• 39:34Brian Keating?

  Uh, speculative? No. I would say that what I try to do always, my philosophy of experimental cosmology is to do, always never do one thing. Okay? Um, so.

• 39:48Brian Keating?

  And that means in the following sense, if you build an experiment, it should at least be able to solve more than one problem. It should solve at least two problems. In other words, not only look for the origin of the universe. So the Simons Observatory has the ability, or let me just go back to biceps. So bicep was a failure, right? It would, I mean, I know you, you said a lot of nice things about it and I agree with you. But I'm just saying, you know, a, a cynic could say, oh, it was a failure. It cost 10 millions of dollars. You made this huge announcement. It was on the front page of The Guardian, The New York Times, The San Diego Union Tribune. It was on CNN, NBC, ABC, NPR. And then you had to retract your claim, right? Okay, so fine. But look what else it did. It also showed us that the galaxy is incredibly messy, dirty, filthy place.

• 40:33Brian Keating?

  Um, and I was going to say like New Jersey or Los Angeles here. But I'm sure you've got, what, what's your neighboring town that you hate? That your football club, that's your rival football club there, Matt? What?

• 40:45Speaker 02

  I can't believe you told, you got me to say Gloucester.

• 40:47Brian Keating?

  Gloucester, okay, good. All right, those buggers in Gloucester, okay? Let, let's, let's, let's look at them, okay?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Savages, the savages.

• 40:55Brian Keating?

  It's a filthy place, right? So the galaxy is like Gloucester, okay? It's full of dust and smog and soot and grime and a bootlick should never even set foot in it, right? Matt, I mean, no, no person would be there in their right mind. But we learned about that, so much so that there's huge careers and new studies about the galactic chemistry, cosmology, the even tiny particles. Your, your, uh, you know, countryman Fred Hoyle was a big believer that meteorites carried life to the earth. And perhaps that it could cause a, you know, the, the flourishing of life due to what's called panspermia carried on meteorites. Um, so now we've learned a lot about, you know, some of the parameter space. So this is all to say, we set out to do one thing, but we did something much more practical.

• 41:40Brian Keating?

  And of course, we would have preferred that. We didn't do the practical thing and learn so much about dust, right? It's, it's like, uh, uh, you know, a lot of things in life you'd prefer to be ignorant about, maybe. But now that we know about it, now it's informed all these other experiments like the Simons Observatory and how to optimize it. So we won't make that mistake. And that's what science is. Science is a, a process of always being wrong, but quantifying how wrong you are. So I, I don't worry about that. So even in my experiments, you know, that, that are going after similar topics, no. I always make sure that we're, we're able to do many other things, including some things that on their own would also win a Nobel Prize. Like for example, One of the things that we can do with the Simons Observatory that for technical reasons we couldn't do it by some is look for the impact of neutrinos, these massless particle,

• 42:25Brian Keating?

  near massless particles, they have a tiny bit of mass, but they're the only form of dark matter that we know exists for sure. We may detect what they're actually made of and what the, how they behave and what their masses are. That would be a huge achievement that no one's ever done in history. We may detect planet nine, you know, the ninth planet in our solar system, another huge thing that could be done with this. So there's like forty-five or fifty different things that I can do with this experiment that guarantee, and only one of them, or two, I'll say two of them, because I have another one that's very speculative, called Searching for Lorentz Invariance Violation. But, but if either one of, even if either one of those two don't pan out, so to speak, which were the main reasons that we built the instrument, we are building instrument, but we have forty-eight

• 43:08Brian Keating?

  other consolation prizes that are each, you know, in some sense, worthy of the, of the greatest prize you can imagine.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Brian, something's just occurred to me because you've spoken to so many guests. I mean, what was it? You said sort of thirty-odd Nobel Prize-winning guests. You've had such a

• 43:23Brian Keating?

  Twenty-two, yeah, twenty-two.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Sorry, man. But you've had such a plethora of different opinions on philosophy, the nature of reality, mysticism even in cases, you know. So has this informed your own sort of metaphysical outlook? And, you know, or, or can it make you, I mean, sometimes for me, being exposed to all of these deep and sort of complicated ideas, it kind of drives me a little bit crazy. You know, and sometimes I can't, I can't sleep for days, you know, after researching some of this stuff. So I don't know, just how has it impacted you as a person and how, does it change the way you think about reality?

• 43:53Brian Keating?

  Well, you know, I do feel, you know, I, I have an unusual for, you know, professional cosmologist, I think I have an unusual curiosity, and I have an outlet for that in that I have this podcast that I can talk to people about very speculative things from philosophy, AI, to, you know, extrasolar life, to cosmology, theories of everything, the philosophy of cosmology. I would say for me, you know, it's, it's less sort of, you know, philosophical crises or conundrums that I suffer from, but it's more than I get pulled in so many different directions. I'm so interested. So acutely aware of the finitude of of life.

• 44:38Brian Keating?

  And I'm so torn by wonderful distractions in my life, you know, called my kids and my wife and my family that, you know, I don't really suffer from that, you know, it's it's said that a man like, you know, who has to hunt his own game for food every day and and some tribe somewhere, you know, he's not really having a metaphysical crisis, right? He's not having, uh, for me, it's more the, you know, kind of the, the battles that I have, you know, and I've come to be, you know, if I if I suffer from any kind of crisis of confidence, it's been the, it's been the recognition that science can sort of, you

• 45:20Brian Keating?

  know, have a little bit of too big of a, of a notion of its own importance. And I think, uh, the way that this manifests itself is that most scientists, myself included, or most prof, let me say, most professors, myself included, are, you know, kind of important, but not significant. And I'll say in the following, like, we're important because we train the next generation, we contribute novel things, but we're not like, we know we're not significant, like, we're not changing social policy, like, my colleagues are all mad at Trump, you know, for example, cutting all these funds and so forth, they can't do anything about it, like, there's no way they can do it, so they take out, you know, the rage and online and so forth, and, you know, I can be sympathetic to it, but, but the point is, they know that they can't really affect any change as a scientist, nor really, I mean, I wouldn't

• 46:05Brian Keating?

  want to be led by scientists and and and pol, uh, instead of politicians, I, I wish the politicians had a better grasp of science.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:12Brian Keating?

  But the degree to which the scientists and professors, more professors, I mean, some of the dumbest ideas come out of academia, and almost any, you know, kind of thing that's preposterous to believe, uh, you know, could could never be, you know, foisted upon my, my, my friend who's a gardener or something like that, but, but, you know, my academicians will start to think about, you know, these things in great detail, so, and I think that's because we have this luxury of, of, of, you know, being paid to to think and having tenure. And permanent employment. And so we don't, we've lost sight of the fact that we have customers. The customers are the public and they pay our salaries, no matter what you are. If you're at Harvard, a private institution, I don't care, you're still supported by public funds.

• 46:54Brian Keating?

  And to the degree you alienate your customer by saying they're not intelligent enough to grasp the brilliance of your arguments, uh, then you risk your livelihood. And I think you should. I think it's quite right that the public should demand accountability from scientists as well. And we saw a tremendous failure of that, obviously during COVID and and many other, you know, instances where people have been, uh, kind of led, uh, down the primrose path. So I, I do feel like I don't have any, you know, major, uh, you know, uh, kind of, uh, you know, metaphysical crises in, in regarding cosmology. But I sometimes do, when I think about the profession of being a cosmologist. So those are distinctions I like to make.

• 47:33Speaker 00

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• 48:02Speaker 02

  Hmm. Right. Um, what's, what's your position on religion then and God? If I may ask, Brian, because you know, it's sort of some, somehow the last sort of 23 years, it felt traditional that science was about materialist atheism. And it would seem contradictory somehow to sort of go to church and believe in the black, you know, the big, big bang and all that. But these days, not, not so. I mean, I was chatting to Philip Goff recently. He said, he says he's, um, what is he? He's a, he's a heretical Christian, you know, and he's made it made a home in the Anglican church who are very metaphysically cool and progressive, you know, so, and I'm kind of quite mystical these days, having come from quite a sciencey maths and compute computational background. And it seems like everyone seems to be on a journey these days with this, you know,

• 48:44Speaker 02

  quite a lot of metaphysical traffic, you know. So where, where, where are you with this stuff? How does God and physics work?

• 48:49Brian Keating?

  I like to say that, you know, science, the word science, you know, comes from Latin scientia, which means knowledge. And, uh, you know, my phone has a lot of knowledge and, you know, chat GPT has a lot of knowledge. It has no wisdom, right? What we really would like is artificial wisdom. Like you ask a question, you don't want to get like 10 different links or 10 different, you know, opinions, or say, you're so brilliant, Matt, for, you know, wondering where you can get the best, you know, blood pudding for, you know, Christmas, Christmas breakfast, you know, bangers and mash. I always say like the, the quest, you know, I gave a talk at the Royal Institution, which was, which was incredibly fun. And I put up, you know, the, the big controversy is, uh, you know, is if you, if you have a big bang, you know, who's the big banger?

• 49:31Brian Keating?

  And I put up a picture of a bangers and mash, as you call it, and the crowd went wild.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Just briefly, there's, there's a great lyric from a Frank Zappa song. It says, Lord have mercy on the people in England and the terrible food these people must eat.

• 49:46Brian Keating?

  And such small portions, Matt.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:49Brian Keating?

  Down there, it's terribly small. I'm like, I'm an American, I need, I need a big banger in the morning.

• 49:56Brian Keating?

  So you're right, there, this is, and this has always been, I mean, Fred Hoyle coined the term big bang. And he did it as a pejorative because he smacked to him of religion and, and the creation and so forth. So I think it's natural and, and certainly you can't falsify the existence of a God. But you asked me like personally, like I always say, I don't believe in God the same way I don't believe in gravity. Like I have evidence for gravity, but God is sort of much more inscrutable. I mean, there, as I said earlier, I'm Jewish. I call myself a deeply very orthodox, practicing agnostic. And I think, um, agnostic in the sense that I'm searching, not in the sense that I can't know. Like my first guest on the podcast was again, your late, great countryman, uh, Freeman Dyson.

• 50:39Brian Keating?

  And Freeman and I used to talk about religion. And I said to him one day on a podcast, I said, Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic. But imagine, you know, hyper intelligent alien species watching you on a Sunday morning. They look at you and they look at your neighbor, Richard Dawkins. You both don't go to the same church, right? You both stay home, right? You both don't do the same thing. So how do you distinguish yourself from an atheist? Are you just copping out and saying you're an agnostic? So you don't, you know, he won the Templeton Prize, which is given for, you know, religious, you know, kind of philosophy and writings and so. So he didn't really have a good answer. I mean, I love Freeman. I miss him a lot.

• 51:19Brian Keating?

  He used to visit here and see me and come to my house in the winters from Princeton. But, uh, but, you know, he didn't really give a great answer. And I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that if you were to believe, then you have obligations, which you don't have if you don't believe, right? So if you, if you do believe in one of the, you know, standard monotheistic religions, at least, um, the only ones I'm familiar with, uh, then you have certain obligations. So I, I practice Judaism. In other words, I keep the Shabbat, the Sabbath. I don't work on it. I don't send emails. I don't do podcasts. I don't, I, you know, I, I do things, uh, I go to a, a temple. Um, I keep kosher, you know, uh, to the letter of the law of kosher, not, you know, perfect kosher, I'm sure.

• 52:04Brian Keating?

  I fall short of what a rabbi might do.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  But these are kind of healthy things. These are really healthy things. I reckon a day without technology would be a great thing for me, to be honest.

• 52:12Brian Keating?

  Oh, it's a wonderful thing. Yeah. I mean, and people are talking about it all the time, even non-Jews as a sabbatical. I mean, we have the word sabbatical in academia for the very thing that you get refreshed, recharged by changing, slowing down, uh, and, and manipulating your, you know, reactive monkey mind. So you don't have to always be, you know, in, in pursuit of the next shiny object in academia, which is plentiful. So I think that there's a great deal of wisdom in religion. It may not be, you know, uh, knowledge. It may, it may have zero scientific knowledge. I mean, the Bible, the Torah, which I study and I read Hebrew fluently and I study the Talmud and all these other documents and religion. It's very clear the sun and the moon are created on the fourth day.

• 52:52Brian Keating?

  And and so you're like, well, what does that mean? Like, how could it be possible that uh that they didn't know what a day was back in, you know, that the day was caused by the orbit of the sun around the earth, right? They're so stupid. They're so primitive. But when you, if you, if you take off the Sam Harris, and I've debated Sam Harris about this on my podcast, which is not very pleasant uh for either one of us.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  I've not, I've not actually seen that one. I should go and check that out.

• 53:15Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It's three and a half hours. It was supposed to be one hour. We were having such a good time. I said, Sam, I know your producer said you only have one hour. Can you go longer? We went for three and a half hours. And then at the very end, I asked him, you know, about, he made a statement about, you know, slavery and and how illogical the the Bible is and how he and I in five minutes could come up with a better document than the Bible. And I started to, you know, kind of gently, you know, nudge him in in a respectful way, but I don't think he liked it. And he so far has not uh shown willingness to come back on my podcast. But that's okay. I'll need to talk to him once. But but the point is, even if you, if you don't have such a jaded cynical hostility towards a religious document, and look, I I'm Jewish. I can read the Koran. I mean, I've I've, you know, I don't have a hostility towards it.

• 54:00Brian Keating?

  I can read it as a religious document. I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church in in New York. That's another thing I've done, you know. I can read these documents that I don't practice, and I can react in a respectful way. I talked to John C. Lennox last week. He was a lovely guy, a very devout Christian, as you know, maybe, uh, Christian apologist and and mathematician of the highest order at Oxford. You know, he and I talked about, you know, some of my challenges that I have for him when it came to things like the ascension of Jesus and and the the resurrection from a physicist's standpoint. Anyway, but the point is, if you can talk respectfully, then you could know that, for example, you'd be willing to the, open to the idea that at least when the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament says the sun is created on the fourth day,

• 54:44Brian Keating?

  it's doing that for a reason. It has nothing to do with science. And you're an idiot if you read it as a scientific interpretation, because you're only trying to substantiate, you know, and straw man it. But but the way, and I'll just say for, you know, a lot of Judaism is centered on the Exodus from Egypt where Jews were Documented to have been slaves in Egypt, none the number and the exact nature of the Exodus. We can debate that scientifically. I don't really care about that. But the point was when the Torah was written by, you could say, men, multiple people. You could say by Moses, whatever you want. The dominant culture of the time, the superpowers, there were two superpowers. It was Babylonia and it was Egypt. And those two powers were at war. And what did they both worship as their key sustaining godhead? It was the sun. It was in both cases, it was the sun.

• 55:28Brian Keating?

  And the second god was the moon. And even in Arabic words, the notions of these things are present still hundreds of years after Jesus lived. So the Torah is coming to tell us that these things that we say that nature was created. So therefore, don't worship nature. And the Torah is plenty hard on Jews and people that purport to believe this and be sanctimonious and so on. But what I'm bringing up is that the Torah has some wisdom in it. And if you just suspend the fact that you're always looking for knowledge. Knowledge is abundant, but wisdom, to kind of paraphrase Einstein, encircles the world. If you can have wisdom, I'd much rather have A W than A I.

• 56:13Brian Keating?

  I mean, there's plenty of A I, but there's very few people I consider wise. So that for me is the reason for at least my own personal resuscitation or resurrection, to mix metaphors, to mix religions, of this interest that I personally have. I find it fascinating. It's such a rich thing to study. And people that dismiss it as Bronze Age, like our friend Lawrence Krauss, now semi disgraced here in America because of his involvement, we've learned with Jeffrey Epstein.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  Oh, crikey.

• 56:47Brian Keating?

  But he used to say, it was Bronze Age peasants. But you would never say like, that, well, Archimedes was basically just post Bronze Age. But Aristotle sure did get a lot of things wrong about science.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, the pre-Socratic's were quite a bright bunch as well, you know?

• 57:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly. Plato, right.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:08Brian Keating?

  We wouldn't want to emulate them. So anyway, Matt, that's sort of where I'm at. I do find that there's Uh, potential for meaning. If you grow up without it, though, if you grow up with a parent, as I did, who is a devout atheist, who hated religion, never set foot in a temple or a church, you know, then I think it's very hard to at least be open to the idea that religion can provide you meaning, let alone believe in God, you know, whatever that means. I don't, like I said, I don't believe in God. I don't think God is like upstairs in a white beard. But, but, and that's where I have things in common with Richard Dawkins, you know, and he and I can talk about that.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:42Brian Keating?

  But, but, you know, at least it has to be done with an intellectual honesty. And I find that's lacking from people like Sam Harris and others.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Hmm. Yeah. You know, in some sense, they're more absolutist than sort of the mystics, you know? I mean, for me, for me, atheism atheism is one of the most fundamentalist positions you can get.

• 58:00Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  Because you've just told us that we can't prove one way or the other, whether there's a God, and now you're telling us there certainly isn't one. I mean, I think that I think one of the chapters in Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, was actually entitled, Why There Almost Certainly Is No God, right? And that was, that was before the chapter where he looked for this thing in the brain called the God Spot, which is responsible for all of our mystical experiences and all this kind of stuff. I mean, you know, it was fashionable back then. I remember I'd been on this kind of journey. I was raised Catholic myself. My, my parents and aunts and uncles didn't have a great experience with Catholic school, and they were like whipped and beaten by nuns and things like this, you know? So it was pretty harsh, you know, very Victorian kind of mentality in some of those places. So I, you know, I drifted away from it. And it was like me and my mates were just damn with Richard Dawkins, Stephen

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Hawking, it was all the scientists, that kind of stuff. This, these guys will have all the answers, right? I mean, I remember there was a time in sort of mid 90s where we thought, you know, we're going to get the unified field theory, you know, we're going to unite, you know, sort of like Einsteinian mathematics with quantum field theory and all this kind of stuff, and we're going to get them. But we haven't, have we? We haven't. So when, when will, when will we get ever? I mean, I, I spoke to Jenny Nielsen, who's also another, um, she's a practicing Catholic. She's, so she talked about mysticism, religion, and also the physics. But have you, have you come across her work? She's working on a topological.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  She lost me at fiber bundles, but she's a very interesting character.

• 59:26Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:27Brian Keating?

  Well, if she has any books and interest in coming on my show, I'd like to talk to her. Yeah, I haven't encountered her work, but to answer your question, yeah, there's been this, you know, kind of consistent search for it. And even in Stephen Hawking's, you know, most famous of all books, A Brief History of Time, he says at the end, you know, when we, when string theory, you know, turns out to be the, the, the theory of everything for quantum gravity and the reconciliation of the quantum with the macroscopic gravitational.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  But notice he said when, not it.

• 1:00:00Brian Keating?

  Yes, yeah, it's basically when, then we will, then we will know the mind of God. And obviously, he was an atheist and his wife at the time, you know, he's a very sordid person, by the way, not to denigrate his memory, but, but he had, there's a book written by Charles Sif, who's a professor at New York University, called Hawking Hawking, like Selling Hawking. And I do remember going to a speech that he gave at the Royal, uh, uh, Royal Academy, and he could still respond to questions, 1995, you know, it would take 10 minutes, but he would type out with his eyes, you know, amazingly.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Brian Keating?

  Um, and he was certainly, you know, inspirational in that sense. But someone in the audience said, like, you know, Stephen, why did you write A Brief History of Time? Like, it's rumored that almost nobody has ever gotten all the way through it. And, uh, and he said, very slowly, I remember saying, um, because I needed to pay for my daughter's private school. You know, he was very funny and, uh, but yeah, at the end, I think he had this battle with his wife, and he says in the book that every equation cuts the readership by half, but every mention of God doubles it. So he was trying to kind of play these forces off of each other. I don't think he was cynical about it, but I, I think he, you know, I think he truly, and I don't fault him. I mean, if, God forbid, I mean, I shouldn't say, whatever, Zeus forbid, you know, anybody's

• 1:01:21Brian Keating?

  in that state, but, you know, they might justifiably have violent, you know, kind of beliefs. If God exists, why did he do this to me, right? Uh, but I think if you look at God as a celestial butler, you know, if you look at him as just this wish-making, you know, slot machine that just, of course, you're going to have a childlike view of it. I mean, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, when he was interviewed, he said, um, as soon as he landed, like, they asked him, what'd you see up there? He said, well, I know what I didn't see. I didn't see a man in a white beard. I don't believe that there's a guy in a white beard floating at 200 kilometers above the earth's surface. I don't believe that either. I think that's stupid. I think it's childish. But, but the question is, what is the fruit? You know, as Jesus said, you know, judge the

• 1:02:04Brian Keating?

  tree by its fruit. And so what do these religions produce? So I'm not going to speculate, but look at what Judaism has contributed, like Christianity, look at Islam, look at the different contributions, and then look at atheists. Don't not look at atheism, but but you have to look at like, are these people generally happy? Are they generally promoters? You know, because the, you know, the fourth commandment, sorry, the third commandment is, you know, don't carry the name of the Lord in vain. What is that? It's not really clear what King James meant by all these things. But, but in Judaism, it means like, don't profess to be religious and, and do things wickedly by the excuse of the fact

• 1:02:45Brian Keating?

  that you're doing things godly. But also, don't like ascribe like your personality problems and your traits to my religion. You know, basically, if, if you want to be a good ambassador for the religion, and you're in, you know, horrible mood and you're an unhappy person, you might want to think of another religion, right? Yeah. I want to just to say it's- Don't be grumpy with them, yeah. Exactly. So I do feel like there are very important questions to answer and to think about, but you have to be comfortable knowing that you won't get cognitive closure on all these things because they're not epistemically amenable, right? There's no, there's no microscope that will find God. I've had debates with people, even like, like John Lennox and Stephen

• 1:03:29Brian Keating?

  Meyer and all, you know, Christian apologists. And, and they, they can be guilty of cherry picking certain things too. So I do believe that there's, you have to be humble, epistemic humility, and that we won't have- Necessarily ever have all the answers, Matt, but the point that we have to always remind ourselves of is that we must not, you know, shy away from the pursuit of of attempting to answer them. We may never answer them, but don't step away because it's too hard.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Hmm. I love that. That's beautiful. But could could I just, I mean, do you think that the sort of deterministic mechanistic stance of scientism, if you like? Is that softening? And are there there's new players in in town now in in neuroscience, you've got people like sort of Donald Hoffman, talking about consciousness being fundamental, you've got emergence of different metaphysical systems, Philip Goff, talking about Panza. Apparently thirty three percent on Phil papers now, thirty three percent of the philosophers published there are now non-materialist, you know, and that figure seems to be going up. So are we going through a kind of Thomas Kuhn style, you know, paradigm shift in science writ large or in physics? I mean, what do you think?

• 1:04:35Brian Keating?

  It could be. I mean, I don't I don't have my, you know, kind of finger on the pulse of that, you know, kind of ideological or philosophical. Um, you know, kind of a universe, to be honest with you. But in my own, you know, sense, I do believe that there there there is no meaning in science, like, science is is a beautiful thing, just like I don't think that there's a meaning that you can ascribe to life from pure mathematics, where you can actually at least prove some things. You can't prove everything, as Gödel showed, but you can prove some things, uh, you can't prove everything. But in science, we can't prove anything. I mean, there's there's no saying that gravity won't be negative tomorrow due to some you know, modification of dark energy, right? So there there there's no provable fact.

• 1:05:18Brian Keating?

  Right? Because we can't falsify all the alternatives. So in my sense, that that means that you shouldn't look for meaning uh, in science, which is fine. I get meaning for my job of being a scientist. But I don't find meaning in in like, well, here's this, you know, star with with a certain, you know, magnitude and color diagram, you know, okay, it's it's an interesting fact. Um, but I also think it's it's dangerous to kind of go, you know, too far on the other side and say that, you know, everything as as John Lennox might say, you know, like, everything is guided by not only religion and God, but but Jesus Christ himself. And I mean, that, as I told him, you know, like, I don't, you know, we Jews don't subscribe to the fact that Jesus was

• 1:06:02Brian Keating?

  you know, the son of God, and that he was the Messiah and all these other things that that John believes in. On the other hand, you know, there are lesser claims that we do establish and we do believe in. So I think that that but but does that mean I can't get mean? I already quoted from Jesus a few times today, right? So, you know, one of my favorites is don't, don't, you know, don't criticize your your neighbor for the mote of dust in his eye when you have a log in your own eye, right?

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 1:06:31Brian Keating?

  That's not Jewish, that's Jesus, right? So and the dust, as I said before, go to briankeating.com and you can get your own piece of dust, Matt. So I'm, I'm, you know, kind of a pragmatist. I come from the school of, you know, shut up and and measure, you know, and and the philosophical interpretations. I just got done teaching quantum mechanics to advanced undergraduates. We don't spend much time on, you know, interpretations of quantum mechanics. But in another sense, it was very delightful to, you know, encounter these things and be able to measure things to 13 decimal places. That to me is a beautiful thing, but it's not meaningful.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Mmm. Gosh, that's actually quite, I wasn't expecting that, Brian, you know, from a physicist, because because I'm thinking, you know, if you've got two different sort of sub-disciplines of mathematics or physics that arrive at the same number and things like that, there's something so beautiful and profound about that, isn't there? Um, you know, wasn't the speed of light arrived at slightly differently through studying electromagnetism and things like that? Was it Faraday? I'm not sure.

• 1:07:32Brian Keating?

  Well, yeah, I went to, yeah, well, sir, and I spoke at the Royal Institution where Faraday was, and that was incredible, and I had his actual original equipment, and he was the one who came up with the lines of force and force fields and that whole concept.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  And then his original equipment there, you had his.

• 1:07:47Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I actually used his original, like, iron filings suspended.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:52Brian Keating?

  It was incredible. Yeah, you can find it on their YouTube channel.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 1:07:56Brian Keating?

  100,000 views or something by now. But no, I went to Maxwell's, I haven't published this video yet, but I went to Maxwell's birthplace on India Street in Edinburgh. And I went to the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh and did some videos and interviews there. And no, it was incredible what he... But, look, this is a perfect example of how, you know, science and wisdom, like, don't really go hand in hand. So imagine Maxwell had this idea for electromagnetic radiation. He proved it, thanks to Oliver Heaviside and others, that it actually was these four equations then could be unifying electricity and magnetism. And as a side benefit, you know, as a... On the side, they also predict, you know, waves of radiation that travel at this universal speed.

• 1:08:41Brian Keating?

  But Maxwell couldn't understand how that was possible, without there being some medium, which we would later call the ether, and then that would later be disproven. But he had this mechanistic idea, where there were these vortices and gears and whirlpools. And so imagine you're back in 1862, and you see this paper on Twitter, you know, and it's like, "Oh, well, there are waves of light that travel at a universal speed, and they're carried upon gears and vortices and whirlpools and..." This guy's an idiot. Like, Chet Chet, he would say he's wrong, even Matt. So there's a danger, you know, in kind of being too right and being too married to this explanation, even from a philosophical point of view.

• 1:09:24Brian Keating?

  But, anyway, this has been great, and I had a great time talking with you, my natural philosophers in the audience. Very much enjoy it. And I'm being called to go to another meeting, so I gotta run.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  It's been a massive honor and a privilege. Thank you so much for talking to me, and hopefully we can speak again sometime.

• 1:09:43Brian Keating?

  That'll be great. Maybe I'll bring a meteorite to see you next time I'm visiting some stone piles in a mound outside of your... Just to go to Gloucester. I'm just not gonna set foot in Gloucester.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  You can wear a Druid robe. We'll definitely avoid Gloucester. Take care, Brian.

• 1:10:01Brian Keating?

  All right, and Merry Christmas to you, too.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  And to you as well. Merry Christmas.

• 1:10:05Brian Keating?

  Thank you so much, my friend. Bye-bye.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Bye-bye.

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