Inflation, B Modes and Losing the Nobel Prize | Brian Keating on the Cool Worlds Podcast

Join Prof. Brian Keating as he delves into a thought-provoking conversation with Prof. David Kipping about the fascinating world of cosmology, focusing on inflation, B-modes, and the thrilling quest for the Nobel Prize. Explore the highs and lows of scientific discovery, the allure of the multiverse, and the ethical intricacies behind groundbreaking research, all while examining how human ambition and curiosity drive the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Don't miss this compelling exploration of cosmic mysteries and the dynamic challenges that scientists face in their quest for truth! 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

  Welcome one and all to the Cool Worlds Podcast with me, your host, David Kipping. This week, I am joined by Brian Keating, who is a professor of astronomy at UC San Diego and also a popular author. He wrote the Losing the Nobel popular science book and also, most recently, the Into the Impossible book, which of course, maybe that name sounds familiar because it's named after his podcast, the Into the Impossible podcast, which I was on fairly recently and so we're kind of returning the favour of him appearing on the Cool Worlds Podcast. Actually, he's probably a familiar face and a name to some of you because he's been on so many great, wonderful podcasts. He's been on, let's see, Andrew Huberman just last week, I think he was on there. He's been on Jordan Peterson. He's

• 0:42Speaker 00

  done, of course, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, all of these big ones. And so now, he's finally made it to the pinnacle of the podcasting world, the big, you know, the elusive moose that he hasn't been able to hit yet. He is here. He's finally reached the peak and he's on the Cool Worlds Podcast this week. So, very grateful to have his time. And of course, as you might guess from his experience, he's a wonderful conversationalist, but also has a really interesting story to tell. In the Losing the Nobel book, which we get into during this conversation, he tells the story that has really been a career-defining moment for him, I think, of being involved in this mission, this programme that was attempting to discover something that would have really been a guaranteed Nobel Prize had they seen it. Something called a B-mode, we'll explain in the podcast what that is. It would have

• 1:26Speaker 00

  been essentially the signature of cosmological inflation had it been detected, and how the team really got excited about this possible signal and maybe lost some of the precious objectivity that we need in science and ended up making a wrong step. I think it is a fascinating story. There's so many lessons in it, not only for scientists, but I think for all of us in life about how do you check that you're on the right track? How do you, what are those internal balances and those external balances that can fix those, those ideas which are going in the wrong direction? So, I really enjoy talking to him. And of course, we also got some ideas about the future of academia with the AI revolution and potentially

• 2:08Speaker 00

  the changing shift in culture of how we think about academia. So, lots of fun discussions. I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you at the back end.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  I just wanted to start with you, Brian, just by talking about your journey into science. How did you, what was your origin story? How did you find yourself into astronomy?

• 2:41Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's always the most, we arrive on Earth in meteor rays and, you know, people tell us what happened before we got there. So I really got interested in astronomy at age 12. I was randomly awoken one night, awakened one night, and I looked out the window and I saw the moon and it was, you know, brighter than these floodlights that we have in here. And it was just so amazing to look at the moon. I know you're captivated by it. And then there was something next to it and I was like, what the hell's that? It was like equally bright as the moon, except it was just a little fragment. And I was like, what could that possibly be? You know, it didn't move, so I knew it wasn't American Airlines, you know, flight coming into LaGore. I live, you know, not too far north from here, in Westchester County. And so I couldn't, you know, wait to figure

• 3:23Brian Keating?

  out what it was. There was one problem, you know, Google would take another 16 years to get invented, you know, Sir Gay and Larry's dragging their feet. You know, it was the mid 80s, so I didn't really have an opportunity to figure out what the heck am I actually seeing? So it was, it was, it really led me to do actual research and I, you know, I'd go to the library, get a newspaper, and the New York Times used to, they don't anymore, unfortunately, I don't think, print this section called cosmos. And it showed the pictures of different celestial objects. And this was, you know, two or three days later, I figured things didn't really change that much, night to night, you know, at least as far as I could tell. And so I saw, they showed the moon, and then they showed this label and this black dot next to it, and it said Jupiter. And I was like, what the heck? You could actually see another planet with your naked eye? I couldn't believe it

• 4:08Brian Keating?

  because it was one of the voyagers, you know, cruising by.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  And you're in New York, so you would necessarily expect that.

• 4:12Brian Keating?

  Exactly, right. And so I was like, wow, if this is what I can see with my eye, imagine if I could, you know, afford a telescope, which I couldn't barely, you know, maybe scrape together some nickels. But I was, I was working in a deli in Dobbs Ferry, I think it still exists, called Venice Deli. And I was stocking shelves and it was like a dollar and 80 an hour. I was like, this is gonna take forever to get a telescope. But fun fact, you know, telescopes are like, they say- Men's suit and an ounce of gold and something else, but also telescopes. Their price is fixed as a medium of exchange. So a telescope today, about two inches in diameter, say.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:46Brian Keating?

  A little bit bigger, smaller than the ones you guys have here. Refractor is about seventy five dollars today and it was seventy five dollars, you know, forty years ago. And so I eventually saved up about half and then I got a small grant from a three letter funding agency, the M O M Foundation. My mother, she ended up giving me, you know, the other thirty five bucks and I ended up getting a telescope.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I dipped into that, that source a few times. Yeah.

• 5:09Brian Keating?

  Yeah, there's only so much you can dip into it. Now it's the other way around. We have to support it. So we um, I'm getting a small telescope. I forget, crazy eddies. You won't know this because they don't exist anymore and it predates you here in this part of the country. Um, so about telescope and then took it and it's amazing because when you see a tell through a telescope, you don't know that you're not the first person to make a discovery. Of the fact that the moon has craters and moons on it and mountains on it and that Jupiter has these four dots that seem to, you know, go around it. And that Saturn has these rings. It's so obvious and that those smudges up there are actually galaxy, but you feel that same thrill of discovery.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  You were Galileo. Yeah.

• 5:50Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So it's, and I always say it's the only type of science that can be done, like unless you have twelve billion euros, you know, you could build your own large hadron collider. And even so, you don't know what it, it quote unquote, felt like to discover the Higgs boson. I mean, nobody knows it because nobody did it. But, you know, these historical events, the Herschels discovering like night after night, just like incredible. That thrill, you're connected to them not only through what you see, but through what you feel and astronomy is unique. We don't think of ourselves as kind of emotional creatures. But I think that's part of the thrill and it has always been part of my origin story.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  So I wonder, that's really interesting. You kind of almost have this like classical romantic origin story of getting into astronomy.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I remember also looking through a telescope and being inspired by it, but I felt I feel like when I was younger, I was more into fundamental physics. And it was more reading the books about fundamental physics that really got me excited. And it was only actually later in college that I sort of turned back to astronomy. But to have that origin story of really looking with the naked eye originally at the night sky. It makes me wonder whether you have a specific view about star link and potentially future satellite constellations, mega constellations, which, you know, if it keeps going to hundreds of thousands of satellites, it will become difficult to distinguish Jupiter from an artificial object in the sky.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Is that something that you have a particular concern about, given it was an inspiration for you?

• 7:19Brian Keating?

  Well, I think anybody who's, you know, has even a modicum of romance towards the night sky, just to look at it. Be concerned about it, but you know, I have to say for optical astronomers, they, you maybe even could, I can say, have it, it's trivial compared to what we as microwave astronomers have to do. And I actually had the opportunity to bring this up with Elon himself on my podcast for like 10 minutes once. About a year ago now, I come to think of it. But I asked him, you know, you've gone to some lengths to darken these satellites. But A, you can't microwave darken, thanks to a lot of thermodynamics. You can't shut off the physical term. I have almost everything in Earth's orbit has about the same temperature as the moon. It's about 290 Kelvin, 270 Kelvin, something like that.

• 8:02Brian Keating?

  And, um, and we're looking for something in nano Kelvin level signals. I'm sure we'll get into with the B mode polarization of the CMB. So it's billions of time, but not only that, they're not only just emitting their thermal radiation, which is unconceivable. Not inconceivable, but unconceivable, you can't mask something's thermal radiation. But they're emitting in the exact microwave wavelength regimes that we need to look at. And not per se to see the CMB at its, at its brightest, that occurs at about two millimeter wavelength or 150 gigahertz. But, um, but to rule out foregrounds, which have flummoxed us and it's the reason to the title of my first book. And that is we need to exclude. From the signals that we see, the presence of galactic synchrotron radiation,

• 8:45Brian Keating?

  which is this emission that's highly polarized due to the motion of electrons gyrating by the earth, by the Milky Way's magnetic field. And so that's a very pernicious signal. And they're broadcasting in those exact wavelength bands, low frequency called KA band, about 26 to 36 gigahertz. That's, that's basically what 5G is.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Is that polarized as well?

• 9:05Brian Keating?

  Yes, extremely polarized. Yeah. So it's polarized, but it has the equivalent temperatures. So if you take a radio signal and you ask, what is its equivalent black body temperature? When it's that narrow band, it's incredible. It's millions of degrees Kelvin. So we've got these screaming satellites. So I said to Elon, and he got it immediately. I told him, you know, he has some physics training from his days at a lesser Ivy League school. We won't mention which one, because we're both associated with far superior ones. Just kidding out there, UPenn. Come on, I've got one of my good buddies there, Mark Devlin. Shout out to Mark. But, but, but the point is, these cannot really be massed. So I said to him, Elon, you know about the laws of thermodynamics, but, and he's like, he didn't, he didn't know that that was true, that it was so, it was going to effectively close off. It would be like putting a signal at 1400 megahertz,

• 9:50Brian Keating?

  you know, in the 21 centimeter band. It's just, there should be bands that are excluded from used by commercial satellites, because they're astronomically incredibly, you know, precious. And he said he'd look into it. You know, it's been a year, he hasn't looked into it. I haven't yet, you know, twisted the strings, pulled the strings, you know, because I, I never wanted to be like, oh, can you also come on my podcast and talk, you know, I'd love to talk to him. As I said, you know, he's the second most requested person on the Into the Impossible podcast after, after Professor David Kipping out there. Go see that episode. You have to, you know, catch that one. But yeah, so the, the question of whether or not he can actually deactivate them over called selective availability. There's only two sites on earth, really, where the CMB is

• 10:32Brian Keating?

  observed from now, South Pole and Chile, where we operate. And there's some hope to do some stuff in Tenerife and, and actually in China, Tibet. And so I said, maybe four locations when you're over the horizon, can you turn them off? I mean, not that many people there. No one at the South Pole, effectively. There's 49 people there in winter. So it's not going to, you know, impact his business bottom line too much. I think he understands that. It's just a matter of getting it on his radar.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  It seems a sentimental problem, because there must be some way they could. You know, oscillate, modulate the signal in a way that would be clearly artificial. And as long as you have some access of separability, you you could potentially identify it.

• 11:12Brian Keating?

  That's right. Exactly.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  So, yeah, we mentioned B modes and the this is obviously one of the major science drivers that you've been pursuing throughout your career. It is one of those terms that I think a lot of the public are very confused about.

• 11:26Brian Keating?

  It's a horrible term.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, so B is magnetic field, obviously, B B modes, but maybe I'm sure you've given this spiel many times before.

• 11:35Brian Keating?

  Not in this building. It's important, actually, to to bring up why this building is so important. So there used to be a professor here, Mark Henkowsky. He's one of my, you know, friends. Yeah, I call him a mentor, but he's like four years older than me. So he really, he's now at Johns Hopkins after going from here to Caltech for many years, which is where I met him as a postdoc. I was a postdoc. He was a young faculty. And now he's at Johns Hopkins and he's a National Academy member, just an incredible intellect. And one of my favorite people, great sense of humor. If you can ever get him on, you should.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:06Brian Keating?

  He was working with a postdoc, I think, Liman Wang. And then there was another guy, Andrew Jaffe, who is now at Imperial. And the the three of them wrote a paper and they called it the polarization pursuers guide. And that was about what you would need to detect different types of the microwave background's polarization. And what Mark and his team had done earlier with another very good friend of mine and colleague.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  So this is just really rewinding. This is this is leftover.

• 12:32Brian Keating?

  This is 1990s.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Radiation.

• 12:33Brian Keating?

  Correct.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  From the big bang we're talking about. Okay, so this is that that beautiful map that we see that's kind of blue, yellow and reds that you see the kind of polka dot kind of thing. That is the radiation that's been traveling for 13.8 billion years. And we are detecting it sort of 2.7 Kelvin.

• 12:51Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  In that radiation, this paper was asking what kind of signals would you expect to see?

• 12:56Brian Keating?

  How would you best optimize a detector system or how how could you best detect such a signal? With a particular emphasis on what heat. So the the the problem is sometimes in in astronomy, as in business relations, as I understand it, there's a phenomenon called the second mouse. Gets the cheese, you know, so like Xerox invented the mouse, but then literal mouse, the computer mouse, not the animal. And then Apple popularized it, et cetera. So the first company that actually do something isn't always the one that profits the most from it.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Especially if it's Apple.

• 13:29Brian Keating?

  Great for coffee. That's exactly right. Facebook. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Actually, you know, there's another one. MySpace. That's right. Anyway, so Mark and his team at the exact same time, along with a colleague named Arthur Kozowski, who's a very good friend and collaborator. Now, he's actually the current spokesperson of the Simons Observatory. They came up with a framework based on work by one of my great mentors, a Russian physicist, who was at Queen Mary in London. And this was to say, if you have gravitational waves present during the first moments after the Big Bang, what will they do to that three-degree, 2.7-degree cosmic glow that itself is the result of one of the earliest possible processes

• 14:11Brian Keating?

  that one could observe. So we are, as cosmologists, we're basically archaeologists. We're fossil hunters. We're looking for different fossils. They come in different shapes and those different shapes and kind of techniques, they trace different physical conditions present at the time of their formation. So the very earliest things in the universe to be created that leave fossils that we can detect today is right here. So most of the hydrogen in this glass of vodka, no, in this water cup here was created during the Big Bang. Now, we're not making tons and tons of hydrogen. It's actually very relatively difficult to make hydrogen. And so most of the hydrogen is here, but not only hydrogen has isotopes. Hydrogen has two different isotopes that are heavier than normal protium, as it's called, tritium and deuterium.

• 14:56Brian Keating?

  And those isotopes and their ratios of their abundances to one another in a glass of water can actually tell you about the physical temperature of the universe about a microsecond after the Big Bang. Now, we don't think of the Big Bang as synonymous or concomitant with the formation of time. That's sort of a misconception. People say, oh, the Big Bang is when time began. And not necessarily. It could be, but it's not necessarily the case. So as you go later and play the clock, you know, forward in time. You know, run the movie forward. The next major event, really, nothing happens from the first three minutes after The Big Bang, a famous book by that name.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:34Brian Keating?

  And it sort of ends within about 20 minutes of the temperatures cooling down enough that the actual quarks wouldn't get shattered apart by the radiation present. And eventually enough protons and neutrons and electrons and stuff can coalesce 380,000 years later. And when that happens, heat can then propagate, light can propagate, it would have been ultraviolet light at the time. And now it's free to propagate, and in fact, it can suffuse throughout the universe. And so we see that heat left over that wasn't, that was no longer sufficient to keep hydrogen ionized and to make the first atoms break apart. So that light also could have been suffused alongside with gravitational waves.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  So this is thermal radiation, which would normally be, by the way, unpolarized, right?

• 16:22Brian Keating?

  It would be, yes, just like light from the sun is mostly unpolarized. Candlelight is unpolarized. So in order for polarization to take, if we had a laser here, I don't know if you've got a laser in your laboratory.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 16:32Brian Keating?

  In the Cool World Laboratory. By the way, thank you for turning down the temperature of this world for me today. This is great. Early January in New York City, it's so nice to get out in the cold, fresh air compared to 70 degrees.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  We cooled it down for you.

• 16:44Brian Keating?

  I left this morning, 70 degrees, sunny. So if you have a laser beam and you shoot it off this water, it will, the laser might be polarized or not, or you can actually make it unpolarized. But after interacting with a dielectric, liquid surface in this case, it becomes partially polarized. So you can actually take that, you can take sunglasses and, it's one of my questions I give to my graduate students on their final exam, you know, can you prove that laser light is polarized or that polarization occurs from reflection, which it does. So the lesson is, you can take unpolarized light and make it polarized. And that's the whole point behind polarized sunglasses, you know, when you go to the ocean, if you look just straight at the ocean, like the glare on this table here, if you wear glasses, one of those modes of polarization will get suppressed by the glasses, and that

• 17:27Brian Keating?

  will leave the more contrast will allow you to see into the ocean, you know, below the ocean's surface. So these scientists realized this back in the six- Actually, Lord Martin Rees was the first to kind of think about these ideas. That if there was light and if there were some matter that could scatter that light, that even though the cosmic background itself is unpolarized, the resulting interaction would produce polarized light. And that would tell you, just like you can learn about, actually, the Navy does this thing. They learn about salinity and the water pressure and temperature from looking at the polarization of light from a satellite, looking at sunlight.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  So this is reflecting off hydrogen atoms?

• 18:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah. So it's reflecting off the very first hydrogen atoms and whatever else was there to make those hydrogen atoms aggregate in one location versus another. So dark matter is one of the things that can do that. But also gravitational waves could do that. Now, where do they come from? Well, there's a theory called cosmic inflation, which was, has been around for, you know, it's over 44 years now. On Guth and eventually Andre Linde and others, including, you know, Paul Steinhardt, who's at Princeton now. They had ideas about what it would take to effectively create a universe in a purely quantum state from no thing, as you know, has been said, from no material thing, from pure quantum energy, if you like.

• 18:47Brian Keating?

  A quantum field called the inflaton, which would possess unavoidably fluctuations in its amplitude and its, versus its position. And that would cause not only there to be densities of curvature, excess amounts of curvature, where the universe was expanding faster or slower. That's what that value of the inflaton does. It controls the local rate of expansion throughout spacetime. So it would control what we call curvature perturbations, which would mean deeper gravitational wells for dark matter to fall into. But it would also produce waves of gravity, reverberations stretching and squashing of spacetime and perpendicular planes.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  And that... The decaying of the inflaton field, which is the gravitational waves?

• 19:31Brian Keating?

  It's actually the oscillations of it. Basically, the incommensurability of measuring, you know, effectively Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can't know exactly at, it's just like photons in this room can be described by photon field. Creation and annihilation operators. They would be produced during this extremely early epoch, about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the origin of what we call our observable universe. Not necessarily time equals zero, it could be, we don't know. In many models, it's not. But in the inflationary universe, it is. It's basically, there's a singular origin of the universe that occurs in our region of spacetime that we can now access today. We call that region the observable universe.

• 20:14Brian Keating?

  And the fluctuations in gravitational waves would produce unique patterns. And now we're getting back to Mark Kamenkowski, Columbia University.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  So that these primordial patterns, they get essentially kind of exploded and blown up into massive scale, right? During this inflationary period. So they might start off as these little quantum fluctuations, but they end up as macro scale things.

• 20:36Brian Keating?

  Yes. The entire horizon gets expanded, so everything gets expanded. If we're there, we get expanded effectively. But it's really, it's actually spacetime itself can be endowed with ordinary curvature, like a gravitational lens can distort the positions of spacetime, but it can also produce traveling modes that travel at the speed of light. So this is one of Einstein's discoveries in GR, is that there are propagating modes, and those propagating modes are gravitational waves. The ones that would survive to be detectable today would be the ones that are very shortest at this extremely early time, because as you say, everything gets inflated, everything gets amplified, and that's a bad thing when it comes to radiation.

• 21:18Brian Keating?

  So redshift, as you undoubtedly encounter many times, the redshift of an object decreases its energy as well as decreasing its frequency. But the photon's energy is related to its frequency. For gravitational waves, the same thing happens. So by increasing, stretching them during the inflationary process, their energy goes down by literally 10 to the 23rd power or something like that. So only the smallest, tiniest ones really behave themselves to be observable today. But that's great, because those are the ones that are closest to, say, the Planck scale. Those tiniest ones are the ones that are going to be the fossils, like the water here. They're going to trace the earliest moments of the universe. Now, we don't see those directly like LIGO.

• 21:58Brian Keating?

  LIGO detects, you know, a gravitational wave comes into this room, shakes up their detectors, their laser beams measure, right? We don't directly detect it. We have a different kind of detector. The detector is the CMB photon shell of light. So it's kind of, it's easier for older people to think about this, actually. I envision it as if the CMB is a photosphere. It's a shell that surrounds us, fictitious, a different one, slightly different one would surround you. Someone on Neptune would see a slightly different one. And when you look at it, that's a shell of photons all released roughly at the same time. They're coming towards you. They're tracing their properties in their intensity, their color, and their polarization of what their physical conditions were

• 22:41Brian Keating?

  when they started on their journey 13,800 million years ago. And that physical conditions are traced in those three properties: polarization, color, and intensity. But if you look at the whole sphere of the last scattering surface, we call it, we're really using that shell of photons as our LIGO detector. You know, LIGO uses these mirrors, they get squished and squashed. We're using that whole shell, and it will show these patterns of distortion, of basically this squishing and squashing on alternative planes. And that's exactly what Mark Kamikowski...

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Is it nano Kelvin, you're saying, these are the distortions you're looking at?

• 23:22Brian Keating?

  The equivalent of nano Kelvin, yeah. So on top of the CMB, the CMB's intensity is 2.8 Kelvin. If you take away, that's the monopole, what's called the constant temperature, that's the average temperature. If you then remove the average temperature, the largest fluctuations from isotropy just in temperature are at the level of about 100 microkelvin. The polarization's another factor of 100 down, 10 to 100 down, a few microkelvin. And then that's the polarization not associated with gravitational waves. And the gravitational wave polarization's a factor 10 smaller than that. So it is really the hardest, you know, challenge in all of cosmology to measure these exquisite signals in the presence of, you know, a room temperature or even the South Pole or Chile or space.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  So it really is, from an observer's perspective, it is a pattern in the CMB by which we mean there is a strip or a, yeah, some kind of form, however you want to draw it on there, where it is hotter by... You know, a nano Kelvin than the ambient conditions. And you're looking for that on over the entire sky.

• 24:25Brian Keating?

  It's even worse for that, worse than that, because what, um, so when you see these, these beautiful balls, you know, the NASA team made, maybe you have one, I got a couple.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:33Brian Keating?

  And they depict the temperature, the temperature is a scalar quantity. It just has a value, no direction, it's not a vector. Polarization is kind of like a headless vector. So I think about as little tiny spaghetti sticks or iron filings, even better. Sprinkle some iron filings on that ball. But then you're only looking for a specific orientation or a pattern that has a parity asymmetry. You, you know that you're going to see many of them that have asymmetry wherein their, this pattern is, is exactly related to the fact that these wells of dark matter are established themselves in places where the inflatons potential was deep, allowed for a deeper gravitational well.

• 25:14Brian Keating?

  So matter is falling into it and you can like, if you like, it's dragging electrons and dragging the hydrogen atoms with it. So you're going to get a pattern that looks either radial or purely tangential. That's great. And it was first detected in 2002. That's called E mode polarization. Now I hate that name because people are like, well, I thought light is electromagnetic field. So isn't it always in E mode? Like, where is the B mode? So Mark's team, Arthur Kazowski and others, they had a more evocative name that I actually prefer to this day, but it got beaten out. So it's, it's, it's called grad and curl. So the gradient modes are the ones that look like they're from a gradient of a scalar potential, because they are the density flow.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:55Brian Keating?

  And then the, uh, the curl pattern, they look like they're the cross product of the curl of a vector field. So it's exactly analogous to, um, to Helmholtz's theorem and vector calculus. That's why I always like Mark and his terminology better because it's more physically related. But, you know, it's fine. And the other team, you know, got the more notoriety. So yes, they are called B mods now, much to my chagrin.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Okay. So this signal, I mean, we'll get into bicep two a little bit, has not been. Convincingly detected, is that fair to say?

• 26:29Brian Keating?

  Well, here's where, so there's actually two different types of B-mode polarization. And, and there's one that comes from the fact that as light propagates through asymmetric lenses, even if it had pure E-mode to begin with, if it looked like it was a pure converging or tangent, purely circumferential field, as it goes through this glass, the asymmetry of the optical, of the gravitational potential will cause a slight shear, which will cause some of the original E-mode polarization to acquire a tiny bit of B-mode polarization.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  That's not primordial B-mode.

• 27:07Brian Keating?

  It's not primordial, that's the key thing.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Which is what you want.

• 27:09Brian Keating?

  So it's really cool, very interesting, and that's been detected. Actually, my team with Adrian Lee at Berkeley and others, and other team at the South Pole, did measure that effect, actually around the same time as the bicep result, and became very convincingly studied. So now we've measured this, this particular pattern, which is interesting, but it's not as sensitive as the measurement of temperature gives you on gravitational lensing. It doesn't give you additional information, but the, and that's at small scales, the sky scales of clusters of galaxies, arc minute scale. What we're looking for from inflation would be, as you said before, those modes that just could barely survive, the ones that just entered the horizon, roughly the hot size of the horizon or twice the size of the horizon at the time of decoupling, when the CMB was produced.

• 27:54Brian Keating?

  These are about two, a degree or two on the sky. So these are huge modes, they're about the size of the moon on the sky, or twice the size of the moon. So they're actually much, much larger than the arc minute or even arc second fluctuations that we have seen for a very long time.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Okay, so those primordial ones are still up for grabs?

• 28:10Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  I guess my question is, if you had a, if, if we keep building more and more sensitive, and you are building many more sensitive instruments to do this, and we keep coming up flat and we don't detect it, what does that mean? Would we, would that put pressure on inflationary theory?

• 28:29Brian Keating?

  Well, so part of the reason, it's a very interesting field in cosmology that I inhabit. There are many personalities. I'm sure it's like that in your field too, but, but the personalities are so big and for some reason, the stakes feel much, much higher. I imagine that if life is detected, or if, you know, you can really, you know, blast through, you know, with, with exo moons and so forth, that it'll also attract a kind of subculture, where you don't only have to study the physics, you have to study the psychology of people, which is much messier, right? I don't study psychology of my department chair, my former department chair is now here,

• 29:07Brian Keating?

  by the way, Dmitry Basov. But, but the point is, when you get these larger-than-life personalities, they start to really ascribe extra-scientific or meta-scientific import to what we're measuring. So for example, Paul Steinhardt, who was one of the founding fathers of new inflation. So around the time in the mid-eighties, after inflation came about, Paul and others realized there was a fatal flaw, that inflation would be occurring so fast, that the, no structures could ever form. It was just the universe expanding super-luminally. You could never get enough matter together to form a universe. And he corrected that, and he improved it and made, came up with this called new inflation.

• 29:49Brian Keating?

  And then there were add-ons by Andre Linde called chaotic inflation. That leads to things like the multiverse. I'm sure we'll talk briefly about that. So, but Paul came up with, for, for a while, he was very much a champion of inflation. But then he starts to realize, well, wait a second, we can't prove inflation wrong, because if you don't, if you fail to detect it, then you can't say that inflation didn't occur. You could always say inflation just occurred, but it occurred at such a low energy. Just adjust the parameters. Yeah, it's just such a low energy, we'd never measure it. There doesn't have to be a guarantee from God, or Gaia, whoever, that you're guaranteed to detect it, and that we have the technology to do it. Look, if, if the, if the CMB, if the universe was something like twice as old as it is, which, you know, okay, that's a big number, but, but in terms of, you know, physicists thinking

• 30:33Brian Keating?

  factors of, you know, exponentials, right? So factor two is not that much, right? So the CMB temperature would Been way too cold to measure using the tools that the Pennsylson Wilson did. So we might not know about it even to this day. And it happens that it was at that temperature and it was actually discovered. People claim in absorption of cyanogen molecules in the galactic.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  It's amazing how many things are all like that in science that seem to just to line up perfectly. To let us decipher the universe.

• 30:58Brian Keating?

  I was thinking about that, like, right, we don't, the only reason we know so much about the spectrum of helium and the properties of the of the solar corona is because of this accident that the moon's apparent diameter is the same as the sun. So it's like, and that's the only moon in our whole solar system, right? That where that occurs. So now you could say it's God. Some people do say things like that, but I'm not going to say that, especially not about inflation. Although it's incredibly beautiful theory and it has a ton of circumstantial evidence for it. Still, the true smoking gun would only have to be. And this is agreed upon by Paul Sternhardt, by all the competitors and enemies of inflation, including Hawking. Not Hawking, including Sir Roger Penrose, for example, and many, many others.

• 31:43Brian Keating?

  That it would be indisputable evidence for inflation, not circumstantial, if we were to detect gravitational waves. A background, it has to be a background. It can't just be, oh, there's some gravitational waves over there. It has to be seen over a cosmic scale, maybe over the full sky, perhaps. Once you remove the galaxy.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Which is what the B modes encode, right?

• 32:01Brian Keating?

  It's the B modes. Well, you can actually see the smallest you could ever get down to is a few degrees and few degrees, which is, which is huge for an optical astronomer, but it's very tiny compared to, you know, the full sky. Our, let me just say, our measurement of the CMB patches that we look at with BICEP and with Simon's Observatory, percent, tens of percent of this 44,000 square degrees on the sky. It's just enormous, tens of thousands of degrees on a side. So it's, it's really just like doing an all sky survey.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  The full sky is 40,000, right?

• 32:30Brian Keating?

  Yeah, about 44, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so we're measuring, you know, good 40% of that. It's enormous numbers with these telescopes now. It's equivalent, it's almost like a full sky survey effectively. So, and that's because you, if you have a phenomenon that itself only manifests itself on several degrees to.

• 32:49Brian Keating?

  Few degree scales, you don't get that many samples of it unless you measure the full sky. So, um, sir, I think your question was, um, you know, what would be the, you know, what is the sort of ultimate quarry? Or how, how we're going to actually obtain?

• 33:02Speaker 00

  I guess, is inflationary theory falsifiable? And vice versa, is it, it sounds like the answer to this is yes, that you could definitively prove it to be true. Those two sides of the coin.

• 33:12Brian Keating?

  You can't, yeah, so you can't, you can't prove inflation to be true. But you can falsify the other rival theories. It's a very interesting.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Do you mean you can't, you can't prove it to be false?

• 33:23Brian Keating?

  You can't, well, you certainly, you can't rule it out. That's true. But you can't prove that only inflation caused the phenomenon that we observe. So let me just focus on what it can do because that's a little confusing. So all the alternatives to inflation, they all predict we will see no B modes. So, so either we see B modes or we don't. Let's do your favorite, you know, P Kipping given David. Okay, so we'll do all that. So there's this different, you know, quadrants that we can look at. So you see B modes and inflation did occur. You see no B modes and inflation, you know, so you go through the only of all the theories. The only one that predicts you'll see B modes is the inflationary model.

• 34:04Brian Keating?

  A cosmological and let's say we get rid of foregrounds, which, you know, spoiler alert, you know, losing the Nobel prizes. Cause we didn't get rid of the foregrounds the first time. But we've learned lessons and we're applying those lessons. And so is the bicep team, which I'm not a part of anymore. So the, the main kind of thrust of your question is a good one. It is Popperian, you know, in that sense that like good science should be falsifiable. But, you know, even Popper, interestingly enough, he was not.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  This is Carl Popper, yeah.

• 34:31Brian Keating?

  Yeah, Carl Popper, he was not really, he was not as Popper centric as we would think now. Like he agreed like, well, astrology makes, you know, falsifiable predictions. So is it science? No, of course not. So it's, it's squishy. We don't really know exactly what we can say other than the fact that these alternative models like Sir Roger Penrose has this conformal cyclic cosmology. Paul Steinhardt, I almost called him Sir Paul Steinhardt because I love him so much. But Paul Steiner has. This idea in Anagius, who used to be here in this building, they have this idea of these colliding, or not these colliding, they had this notion called epipiratic cosmology, but that it's bouncing cosmological model, which doesn't have a singularity, and therefore it doesn't produce gravitational waves. There's no inflation.

• 35:16Brian Keating?

  So those could all be ruled out by a positive definitive detection of these gravitational waves putative producing these tensor perturbations that we call B-modes.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  So you, and just to extend this a little bit deeper, because we mentioned the idea of multiverse, and I think this is a topic I've, I think I, at one point I want to do a video on Cool Worlds about. And something that's always bothered me, and to some degree you can make the accusation about string theory, although there's been some recent studies claiming you can falsify string theory. But yeah, the, the idea of a multiverse in particular seems like one of the most egregious examples of something that really is like, you can never disprove that. So what are we doing? Do you think, but I know proponents like this, yeah, don't worry about the proper definition. Throw that out, because in the same way that the universe has a particle horizon, it doesn't mean the universe ends at that point, right?

• 36:10Speaker 00

  We, there is a certain distance we can see to, just because the finite age of the universe and the finite distance that light has traveled. But that doesn't mean the universe ends, whatever it is, 96 billion light years away. There is surely something else beyond that, and it's not non-scientific to propose that. And the multiverse feels like you could maybe make a similar argument to that. I guess I just want to leave this up open to you. Where do you land on the multiverse? Do you feel like it is a, besides the, the scientific arguments for it, do you feel like it is a credible posed problem in science to say that there is such a thing?

• 36:46Brian Keating?

  It's an interesting question because it, it really only can arise. Of course, there are people like, you know, my friend Max Tegmark will say there's many different types of multiverses, from Everready and Many Worlds type interpretations to what he calls the mathematical universe. But leaving those aside, let's just fixate on the cosmological multiverse. It has several interesting features. One is that it's intimately related. Unlike the particle horizon, there's an anthropic connection. In other words, the weak anthropic principle that we're here to observe these queer futures of our universe only because we live in a universe that has those queer futures, right? So from any other perspective, we could say, well, we wouldn't be here to observe them.

• 37:28Brian Keating?

  Okay, there are many coincidences that you can kind of fixate on that may or may not be interesting. But just to point out that, you know, if you just talk about the horizon on the ocean surface, or you talk about the particle horizon, it doesn't necessarily concomitantly with an anthropic justification. So that's one thing. The other thing is that there's no models of inflation. There's no really well-studied models or accepted models of inflation. And this is straight out of the mouth of Guth and Linde now, the biggest proponents of it, where you have inflation, but you don't have the multiverse. So, I hate to plug my book, but in my... I love to plug my book.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  No, this is why it's here.

• 38:06Brian Keating?

  So I have this example, which I want to, if you don't mind, I can show a plate for it. It's very meaningful for me in a couple of reasons. Okay, there we go.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  That's my daughter's birthday card.

• 38:18Brian Keating?

  She's been reading it. Wow, she's my youngest fan. Even my kids won't read my books, David. This is embarrassing. Okay, so here, show a picture. In this book, I speak about a thing called the Petri-verse. And it's meant to give sort of an analogy of what it is we're looking at. This was actually taken by a friend, Ashul Ben Jacob, who passed away long before the book came out. It was very hard to get that. He studies bacteria, or he did. He's passed away, as I said. So he studies bacteria, and he would study and take these incredibly beautiful artistic portraits of these different bacteria colonies. And they would be stained and beautiful, and they'd produce these fractal shapes exactly like is proposed for the chaotic multiverse, where the universe would grow in these kind

• 39:01Brian Keating?

  of islands of, you know, facinity where life, or perhaps the laws of physics were compatible with life. And they would proliferate. And ones that wouldn't had too many black holes or too much curvature, they'd collapse instantaneously. No one would be there to ask why they're not there. And so the analogy I made is like, if you're a bacterium, a single guy, you're floating around, you're stuck in this colony here, you have no idea. And they actually secrete toxins. These different colonies all have slightly different chemical toxin levels that they're sensitive to. And they actually go to war with each other and they produce, you know, they basically do battle on a, on a microorganism scale.

• 39:40Brian Keating?

  And so they sort of know about the existence of other ones, but they're not sure because they'll never contact them because to contact them would mean the end of their anthropic existence. So what kind of bacterium who's really bright, a young, you know, bacteria kipping, you know, he's sitting there and he's on, he at least knows that he exists, right? Because there's this agar gel. There's this, there's a slurry of, of organic compounds.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Keggeta ergo something.

• 40:02Brian Keating?

  Yes, exactly right. So Keggeta, exactly right. So he would know that he exists. So that means that the potential for everything to exist. When we were kids, when I was a kid, the universe was everything. Now we, proponents of the multiverse say the multiverse is everything. And you have to convince me that it should be a universe. That's literally Andre Linde has told me. Why should it be a uni- a one universe? Why shouldn't you have to convince me of that? And I take for granted that it's a multiverse. In other words, our existence can, can initiate, you know, this, this notion that life is, is, or our universes are common and we're not thinking about life yet.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Isn't that a little bit of a cop out argument? Because you could say, well, it's your job to convince me that the universe doesn't live on the back of turtles, right? That, why shouldn't that be, like, you could just kind of create anything you want in that point, in that space, right? I'm not sure.

• 40:51Brian Keating?

  Right. We have to be scientific, you and I and our colleagues, right? So, so how do you appraise it? Well, to get inflation to start is, is a trick, but it's possible. To get inflation to stop is very difficult. Brian Greene, you know, a couple floors away from here, he often likens it to a type of rocket fuel, like the solid rocket boosters on a, you know, on the space shuttle or whatever. You couldn't shut them off, unfortunately, and that led to many disasters, right? So, uh, so it's so good at producing universes that you really have to work hard to suppress it. Meaning that everywhere. At all times, universes are being spawned into existence. Some don't last very long. But, um, but again, and then, yes, we find ourselves in a universe, which again, it could be a cop out as well.

• 41:36Brian Keating?

  Right? So the, the, the only notion I want to suggest to you and the, and the viewers and listeners is that, uh, it's a very hotly debated thing because it's not only a question of cosmology. It's, it's partially related to the scientific method itself. If you say you can't test these things, then yes, it is effectively turtles or, you know, angels on the head of a pin. So if you, so my job as an experimentalist, uh, is to say, well, what is measurable? You know, as Galileo said, our job is to measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not yet so. And so we can have tools to do this. Unfortunately for us, we're going to reach the end of the road. Like you asked the question, you know, a few minutes back, you know, what happens if you just keep measuring and you don't detect anything?

• 42:20Brian Keating?

  That's something that keeps me up at night, especially when we have a 200 million.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  I worry about it too, with Xymies, right? We just keep finding no Xymies everywhere.

• 42:28Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Um, and, and we have a proof, you know, we know our moon exists, right? So it's, it's a proof that they definitely exist. Um, so yes, I, I think that it is a sociological question. It's almost a psychological question. People have said, you know, there was 31, you know, Nobel Prize winners and other luminaries wrote an op ed in Scientific American about six years ago. Basically assailing Paul Steinhardt and Anna Agius and Neil Turok and others, who had suggested that the multiverse is, is effectively, as they call it, dangerous. Not just to science, but to society, because a scientific society that loses faith in science is one that's destined for the ash.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. I really want to talk about that, um, a little bit later on, actually. There's, there's a lot to unpack there.

• 43:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  We've, so before we drift too far into the, into the, into the philosophical, as, as much fun as that is, I did want to, um, loop back a little bit to bicep two, which, so you were the PI of bicep one. I guess it was just called bicep at the time. And then in your wonderful book, you sort of described that journey of how you were sort of. ousted almost from that leadership position into bicep two. So that's kind of part of the losing the Nobel title. So I love, I love the fact you, you get into this kind of personal story in the book. Cause what is science if not done by people? It is, it is, it is done by humans and we sometimes forget that. So I really appreciate that part. There was one part of the story I just wanted to touch on. There's lots, lots to get into here.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  But one part I've always found fascinating was this slide by Jean-Philippe Bernard. Right? So the, the brief setup here is that there was a, a dust correction that had to be done to the, to the data that you'd collected. And there was a satellite called plank that the Europeans had launched that had the ability, in fact, they had the data, I believe, to provide that correction for you. And an interesting thing we'll get into is, is why they didn't provide that to you. But anyway, there was a

• 44:34Brian Keating?

  Very good reason.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Okay. So there was, there was a slide that was presented at a conference by Jean-Philippe Bernard and someone in the team took a, took a screenshot or something or grabbed that somehow. And that was used. Can, can you just walk us through that story? Cause I think there's a fascinating of like really pushing, pushing things as hard as you can to get, to get to

• 44:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah. It's almost like, I, I never thought, David, I would write a book. Actually, I didn't want to write a book. People would say, oh, you're good at teaching. You're good at explaining things, you know? But I never, I felt like I have one criterion for writing a book and I have like, I have all these different rules. Like, how do you know when you should get married? Like, that's another one I break out on my friends, you know? And I have different heuristics for that. But my heuristic for the book was the following.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  It could be another book.

• 45:21Brian Keating?

  It just might be. The criteria I had for writing a book at any time, which was the following. If there's a story and there's only one person on earth who could tell that story, I'm talking about nonfiction here. I'm, and fiction is different ball of wax altogether. But if there's a story that I and I alone could tell uniquely so, and be fair and be honest and be vulnerable in that telling of it. Then, you know, it's like an autobiography, like everyone, you could write an autobiography and you're the only person that could read it. I mean, I'd be interested in it. But like, you know, the random grocer down the street may not, he can or she can write it, but it may not be of interest to many people.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 46:00Brian Keating?

  And that's something to be aware of. When you're writing a book, you don't wanna, people say, I don't care how many books it sells, or I'm writing it for everybody. No, no, no, don't kid yourself. Like, that's not the way any serious publishing, you know, process works. And so I said, if I'm ever in a situation where that happens, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna write a book, but I'm definitely not gonna write a book if that never, I'm not gonna write some, some, you know, ego stroking, you know, waxing. People do it, and fine, if they can do it. But I also wanted to write a book, because many peoples, many of them have been in this building and maybe here right now, I mean, you know, that have written books, just brilliant theorists, Janet Levin, Brian Greene, you know, in these buildings, right? But what do they have in common? Stephen Hawking, they're all theorists.

• 46:43Brian Keating?

  And to my mind, there really hadn't been a truly, you know, sort of an autobiography mixed with an experimental physicist book. The books by George Smoot was kind of like that, but he was also angling to win a Nobel Prize many times. And so I wanted to write the opposite of, in fact, I put on the, you know, basically on the cover, you know, my, it's, it's, it's not

• 47:05Speaker 00

  The humility's up front, yeah.

• 47:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah, well, it's just that, you know, it was, it was, it was originally very much my intention to win a Nobel Prize. I was more or less, as much as you could be obsessed about it and not like, have it be an addiction that takes over, ruins your family, or it was something that drove me from an early age, because I had this relationship with my father, and it was very contentious. He abandoned me and my older brother as kids, and I didn't see him for 17 years, I mean, those formative years of my life.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  He's a famous mathematician, right?

• 47:32Brian Keating?

  Yeah, he was. And he, but he, and he was great. He ended up doing physics, and, but I knew for all the prizes, awards, and honors he had, he was the youngest full professor, he was a full professor at age 24 at Cornell, another lesser Ivy League school.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Is his name Jeremy Axe? Was that the?

• 47:48Brian Keating?

  James, James Axe, yeah. That's my father's name. And so, but the one thing he didn't have was a Nobel Prize. So I grew up thinking, I didn't even You know, have any relationship with him, but I was gonna beat him. I was gonna beat him in this quest to win a Nobel Prize. And he finally realized he made a mistake by abandoning me and giving me up for adoption, right? I don't know his last name. And so that drove me for a long time. And then coming to, you know, become a professor one day, and I'll say it now because the statute of limitations has passed. But Dmitry Basov, who is now a professor here, is one of my closest friends. I just love him so much. An experimental physicist, devastatingly, he's here now. He was at UCSD for many years. And, you know, I really love him and, you know, I can't wait to see him again. I saw him just a month and a half ago.

• 48:32Brian Keating?

  And Dmitry told me once, and his father was Nikolai Basov. Nikolai was one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the laser. Brilliant scientist, this incredible person. And he took me aside one day, he said, you know, Brian, we hired you because we think you have a very good shot at winning Nobel Prize. And I was like, okay, no pressure. You know, this is like my first year of being at UCSD. And so it was kind of like woven into the culture. Literally at UCSD, we have a street called Nobel through campus, and then the one that's Le Ban, which is Nobel spelled backwards. We have our physics department named after Maria Gephardt Mayer, Nobel Prize winner. York Hall, we have just all the, you know, so many buildings.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think Cambridge has the same kind of obsession, right, back in the UK?

• 49:18Brian Keating?

  It's just rotten with it, right?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:20Brian Keating?

  So that was impressed upon me. And actually, some of the readers I had that made a huge impression on me. One young lady wrote me and she said, you know, I'm so glad that I read your book, which is, you know, I wanted to call it a cosmic confidential after one of my heroes, Anthony Bourdain. He wrote this book, A Kitchen Confidential, about like the seedy underbelly of New York City cuisine and world cuisine. It's one of my favorite books of all time. And I kind of wanted to do that like a tell-all, but not like make it so self-serving, right? And so she told me, like, when she showed that to her, when she read my book, she said her, you know, it was like a weight had been lifted because her father convinced her not to become a scientist. Because he said, only, you know, only someone who wins a Nobel Prize is a really good scientist.

• 50:02Brian Keating?

  And let's face it, you're never gonna win a Nobel Prize. I was like, who could say that to their daughter? But anyway, this was my obsession. It was incredibly important to me. But getting back, I think to the roots.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  I'm sure many people in the team also had a similar drive, maybe not quite as obsessive as you, but

• 50:17Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  I think from the outside, it seemed like the bicep two were really. Uh, gunning very hard.

• 50:23Brian Keating?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Cause it felt like it was, it was realizable. It was possible.

• 50:27Brian Keating?

  The first person to fund the experiment, when I had this idea, I brought it to my postdoc troll advisor at Caltech. I'd been fired from Stanford where I was a postdoc. This is not like an advertisement to get fired. And that's, that's a great, there's actually, I'm here despite that fact. I wasn't a very good postdoc when I was at Stanford because I was obsessed with this idea of winning a Nobel Prize by inventing an experiment. That would take us to the beginning of time to measure the earliest moments that could possibly be measured with physical evidence, namely inflation. And eventually landed at Caltech. Andrew Lang is my mentor, a postdoc advisor, and he thought it was crazy idea, but he's like, let's, let's try it. And along with Jamie Bach, who's now a professor at Caltech, was then a scientist at JPL.

• 51:10Brian Keating?

  They, um, we, we convinced David Baltimore, another Nobel Prize winner, who was the president of Caltech. He was like, I think this could win a Nobel Prize, so give him the money. I won this competition at UC Berkeley. It's always funny when I meet with Adam Reese because I came in first and Adam came in third. And it was on celebration of Charlie Towns' Nobel Prize and his 90th birthday. And it was to identify winners that were young scientists under age 40 who are likely to win a Nobel Prize. So my brother always reminds me and says, you know, you, you won that battle, but Adam won the war.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. And check out Adam's podcast. He was on, he was on recently.

• 51:47Brian Keating?

  So, uh, so this was an obsession. Now, when we designed Bicep one, we had the capability to see in different colors. Again, microwaves, like any form of light, radiation, have three properties, intensity, how bright, color, their spectrum and polarization. We had to measure polarization. We, we were going to measure intensity no matter what. It's part of what comes with these detectors. And then the question of would you measure the color in multiple bands? Would you have any color sensitivity whatsoever? Bicep one had three different colors, uh, really primarily 100 gigahertz and 150 gigahertz. That meant we could see at most two things. So if you have two unknowns, you need two equations, right? So we have two, two data sets.

• 52:31Brian Keating?

  One at 100 gigahertz, one at 150, so we could measure both the CMB and dust, which we knew would be a problem, but we didn't know how much. Bicep 2 didn't have that. Bicep 2, the philosophy was we'll go as deep and fast as we can because there were competitors, namely the Planck satellite had been launched. Bicep, we started in 2001. I mean, it's the 25th anniversary, almost of Bicep 1, and never thought we'd make a detection. I knew we had to upgrade it, just like you upgrade your iPhone or whatever every couple of years. You need more detectors, better pixels, better camera. Bicep 2 only had one color sensitivity, just at 150 gigahertz, which makes sense because that's where the CMB is the brightest.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  So it seems like by design, it was kind of a gamble almost. It was like, let's put all of our eggs in this one basket of maximizing.

• 53:13Brian Keating?

  And that was partially attributed to Andrew Lang. So Andrew was a genius. I mean, he was one of the most brilliant people. It's just like, I said he has it all. I described in the book, there's a TV show called Mad Men. It was like this handsome guy, I forget his name, John, whatever. And he's just like, just classy, smart, debonair, urbane, you know, schooled, Ivy League, travels Europe, won all these prizes, didn't win the Nobel Prize at that time when I started working for him. He was like 40. Everyone wanted to work with him. They stole him from Berkeley to Caltech, his wife Frances Arnold, who'd gone to win the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were the Power Cup, all this is incredible. He believed in me, you know, he thought we could try this. He got us funding. We were together. And he was like a father figure to me.

• 53:58Brian Keating?

  And his thought was, look, we'll just try to measure it. If we ever see something, we'll go back and measure, but we're probably not going to see anything. Andrew killed himself in January 2010. It's exactly 15 years ago, I think today. And, you know, devastated me. I didn't, you know, I wasn't as close to him as his family, you know, of course.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  But also probably some anger there that he chose to do that because it kind of leaves you in the wild a little bit.

• 54:29Brian Keating?

  I say, I was never angry at him. I mean, I cried over it. I, you know, was devastated by it as everyone who knew him was because he was just like, you wouldn't expect it unless you really knew him. And separated from his partner, you know, from Francis at the time, they were actually, I don't think they were actually ever married officially, but they were common law and then they were separated. But um, it was more like just some kind of emotion where it's, there's so much frustration uh combined with pathos. Like you're so sad, you couldn't do anything and you're frustrated, but it's not your fault. And but I look at it and you know, maybe there were warning signs, maybe there weren't.

• 55:08Brian Keating?

  But but the fact is, you know, when he died, there were a lot of consequences for, you know, the whole planet. But but you know, thinking just perspective of the experiment, which he loved. He went to the South Pole. I mean, a lot of scientists don't ever even go down there. And he loved it. He had so much fun. He was like a kid in a laboratory. I mean, as you know, as you get older, you don't get as much time to spend time doing the stuff you did that got you interested in becoming a scientist. For me, being in lab or using a telescope, I don't have as much time to do that anymore. And so when he would go to the South Pole, he's just like a kid in a candy store and rekindled this beautiful fire in him. Everyone loved it. And um, you know, when, when he left, we didn't have anyone with the gravitas, the leadership.

• 55:52Brian Keating?

  And kind of the, the, the perspective that he had, I'm almost convinced, I can't say for sure. Well, I'd like to say that it wouldn't have happened, like what wouldn't, you know, what we ended up doing, which is to release data to use that slide as you talked about. Now, there's one other wrinkle in this, which again, I have to be honest, I am not as good a scientist as some of these people that I describe in the book. And I, I'm candid about that. Um, I also don't know if I have the same integrity. Let me give you an example. Jamie Bach, um, after Andrew, so Andrew and Jamie were responsible for building the high frequency detectors on plank, which had the capability of measuring the dust for their own mission, but also that we needed desperately.

• 56:35Brian Keating?

  So here's Andrew and Jamie, and they're both working on building detectors for BICEP, BICEP2. And then also for plank for this billion euro mission that was going to be, you know, the be all and end all and clean up everything. And measure the B modes and, and, and get all the glory, right? So they measured, now Andrew was gone. By the time we had the press conference to release the claim that we detected inflation and gravitational waves is in 2014. Andrew died four years before. Jamie was alive and Jamie was intimate and Jamie's one of the hardest working, most brilliant scientists I'd ever, I've ever worked with. He's just incredibly, he's, you know, he's one of these preternatural, you know, just, just, I call him, you know,

• 57:16Brian Keating?

  the, the kind of like super boy or whatever, but he's like older than me now. He's not a boy anymore. He's a PI of Spear X. I mean, this guy's incredible. He's done everything from, you know, space missions to ground based stuff, stuff, and he never stops. And I was like, Jamie's on Plank. He is inside. He's in their inner sanctum. He built their freaking detectors. He must know that what we saw is pure CMB or as close to pure as CMB as possible. Cause I know for sure as, you know what, I would have looked at their data. Like, I don't know that I could resist. I have to be honest with you, Dave. I don't know. If I knew that there's this thing standing between me and a Nobel Prize was in my email box, I could just look at it.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  So all you have to do is download that, that map and then you'll know yes or no.

• 58:01Brian Keating?

  Tell the grad student, you know, I think we're good. Let's go ahead with it. Yeah, you can publish that because we're going to come out with that data anyway. I mean, what's the point of launching the mission if you're not going to publish it? I would have done it. I mean, I think I would have. I don't know. I really don't know.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:13Brian Keating?

  I don't think I'm, you know, I have high, high integrity in my personal life, in my scientific life and my students and so forth, but like that.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  Especially in that moment of the, of the fever of trying to.

• 58:24Brian Keating?

  Cause Jamie would have won a Nobel. I mean, there's no doubt about it.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:26Brian Keating?

  If we were successful. I don't, I don't know that I would have. In fact, that's why it's called losing the Nobel Prize. The night before the press conference at Harvard, which I wasn't invited to, remember Andrew was gone, my protector, my, my, my guide, my mentor, he was long gone. And now.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  You were pushed out.

• 58:40Brian Keating?

  PI ship had been taken over by John Kovak at Harvard, Clem Pryke at Minnesota, Challen Quo at Stanford and Jamie Bach. And, you know, Jamie had made, you know, he was the original one. None of them had been on the project as long as Jamie. And Jamie and I came up with this project more or less together.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:56Brian Keating?

  Playing tennis in Pasadena as we would every Thursday night when I was a young post guy. And he believed in me too. And you know, I'm forever grateful to that to him for that. So I don't know if I could have resisted it, but Jamie did. He never looked under the curtain, must never have looked at it because we went ahead with that.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  So at this point, yeah, so you have this slide, you have this preliminary dust map.

• 59:17Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  You take this this map and it seems like the signal is legit. And that's, that's that temptation point right there where you know,

• 59:30Speaker 00

  the team must have known that was a little bit questionable to take a slide.

• 59:34Brian Keating?

  It wasn't the only set of evidence that would exclude dust. So I think we had something like six or seven different models of what the dust could be.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 59:42Brian Keating?

  Remember, we didn't make a blunder. We didn't like forget to plug in a fiber optic cable. We didn't leave the lens cap on and say we saw, you know, whatever. Uh, we didn't detect, you know, um, some resonance and some quark, you know, that, no, no, we didn't make a blunder at all. Or, um, you know, claim dark matter exists with 20 sigma. Instead, we measured exquisitely a signal with a very, very high precision. That was astronomical, but not astrophysical. It wasn't cosmological, rather. It was from our galaxy. It was in space, you know, it's incredibly different and it's the most sensitive measurement, still is. Far more sensitive than where we're at with Simon's array or Simon's observatory at this, at this point, we're going to overtake them eventually.

• 1:00:23Brian Keating?

  Soon sooner rather than later, hopefully. So next time I come on, if there is a next time, we'll talk about the actual data. But, but the point is, we, we had this lacuna, we didn't, we couldn't measure dust and the CMB. We could only measure one. The combination of dust plus the CMB, but not either or. And so we couldn't separate and tease out those signals. Uh, but we had six or seven different models based on other, you know, scaling up from Planck that had already been released, but not in this level of sensitivity. They also had kind of pitched it that they were going to detect the B modes. You asked like, I don't know what, you know, what they. They originally, George of Stadiu wrote a paper where in the early part of the year 2010, right after Andrew passed away.

• 1:01:04Brian Keating?

  That Planck was going to measure these B modes, um, if they were above this threshold. The level that we claimed was something like four or five. Five times bigger than that level that George had predicted they could measure down to. So we figured if we saw it at four, you know, they easily would see it. So that was this pressure. Now, why didn't they share it with us? I think that they still felt like they had a chance to to prove, you know, to detect inflation for the first time.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  I guess that's my confusion because I would assume if they've already done this, they're at the stage where they have this dust map and they've just not decided to share it with you. I would assume they would have the sensitivity at that point to to have seen the same thing you would have seen, right? That's what the team was presumably worried about. So they must have known they hadn't seen it. In hindsight, we know they didn't report one either.

• 1:01:50Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  So.

• 1:01:50Brian Keating?

  Nowhere near what they.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess I guess the maybe maybe I'm misrepresenting it, but if I'm in the Planck team, we know we haven't detected anything. And that another team who's trying to find the thing that we know we haven't found asks to share a dust map.

• 1:02:05Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  What's the risk? Because they they they know they haven't, there's nothing there.

• 1:02:10Brian Keating?

  Have you ever heard of something called the Bannister effect, related to Roger Bannister?

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  So, yeah, the four minute mile.

• 1:02:15Brian Keating?

  The four minute mile. So so no one had ever run a four minute mile. Then all of a sudden, everyone runs a four minute mile.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  High school students, everything, yeah.

• 1:02:21Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So, you know, so there's there's that thought. They were about midway through their mission. So I'm sure they thought if this is if they're right, then we can we can still scoop them because they won't publish without actually having these data that only we can give to them. And if they're wrong, well, we don't want to also, you know, kind of go down in flames to prove them just, you know, to duplicate them being wrong. But by the way, there was only a six month delay between when we published, and I think this also rubbed them the wrong way. The the leadership team, again, I wasn't part of it, they had a press conference at Harvard, you know, Center for Astrophysics, where John Kovak is a professor. They decided to not submit it to publication for fear that it would get scooped.

• 1:03:04Brian Keating?

  Now, what they what I think they should have done, and many of us, I mean, I have emails where, you know, saying, well, are we worried about dust and Planck published this thing? And and other people were too. I'm not I'm not saying I'm some hero, but but we all knew that this could be a problem. We all knew this was the most likely explanation other than, you know. Seeing inflation, but once you start going down a path and you start saying now there's a press embargo. Now we're gonna not talk to the press. Now we're not gonna share it with anybody else. You can't talk to your, your home media institutions anymore. You know, circling everybody around your graduate students. You have to coach them what to say and what not to say. It became very, meanwhile, they were going to the press because they, there were articles published in the New York Times that day. About, you know, Alan Guth and John Kovak and all these things and Andre Linde.

• 1:03:50Brian Keating?

  They had made a movie at Stanford with three million views that same day that they had recorded a couple of weeks earlier. Right. So they were kind of going down this, this path and it's very hard. Once you're down that hole.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  To turn back.

• 1:04:01Brian Keating?

  To turn back. And it's a natural instinct. And I think the major fault in it that wouldn't have occurred. Had Andrew still been around perhaps, or had maybe I spoken up more, others spoken up more. We never had like an independent audit, like a board, somebody made up of other people. They did take it to people. They took it to Andre Linde and Alan Guth, but what do you notice about them? And Lawrence Krauss, they're all theorists. They didn't take it to a single experimentalist, David Spiegel.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Yes, Spiegel, of course, spoke about it quite openly afterwards. Yeah.

• 1:04:32Brian Keating?

  Exactly. So, so it's a very interesting dynamic. And that's why I feel like, yes, only I could write this story. I think it's interesting. It kind of gives you a glimpse of what it's like to be a scientist, but it's not only about that episode. I think it's about, you know, how we do science and why we do science. It's often very unrewarding. Many, many years go by between having an idea. You were telling me about this Terra Telescope or whatever. I just think, oh, so cool. Like, how do we do it? And they're like, that's a great idea. It's a hundred percent feasible to do it. Will it ever get done? Maybe not, right? But it's so frustrating.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  It's a long journey.

• 1:05:06Brian Keating?

  But when you have this thing and it's on the tip of your tongue or it's just right there. I want to just, you just have this propensity. Cause we're finite creatures. We don't, we don't live, we don't last, we don't get paid that much. This is our kind of currency. This is what we do. It's very hard to turn back. I don't fault people.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  I love, I love this story. I mean, it's a tragic story, but I think it's a really important story to share. I think we spoke about this before, but in my own work, I remember once thinking I'd found an exo moon. And this was in the Kepler data, probably. Like maybe five or six years, no, probably longer than that, probably ten years ago. And I remember I got so excited about it, I couldn't, I couldn't even stay in the office, you know, I was like physically like almost shaking with excitement. So I had to go for a walk. And I sat at a desk and I remember I sat at a bench and I remember thinking, uh, this could be like life changing, you know, if this is real. I mean, I wasn't thinking of Nobel Prize, but I was thinking this could be life changing for my career and be a big news.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  And you get kind of easily seduced by your own machinations of glory that that you see in your future. And I guess the soberness in my case came over me because I hadn't, I consciously decided not to tell anyone. Because I was, I, I mean, there is another psychological effect that when you, when you write something down or you post it on Facebook or you say it to a colleague, you kind of feel an obligation to double down upon that, right? You don't want to admit you were wrong. And maybe that was the problem that happened with, you've gone too far. The team had gone too far to back, to back away from it.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. The sunk cost fallacy. And so then I, I sobered up a little bit and I said, you know, if anyone wants this to be true, it's me. And therefore I'm the most biased person in this whole debacle. So I have to be the most skeptical of myself. And so I, I applied to every single thing I could think of trying to kill it. And eventually I did successfully kill it. But it's a fine line to walk because then you could also, I've also wandered too far. Maybe I'm so overly skeptical that nothing will ever appease me, you know, nothing will ever be good enough to be that confirmed slam dunk signal because I'm always going to be my own worst critic. So I think as scientists, it's a, when you're trying to find something completely novel and new, but yet there is an expectation it should be there.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  It is a very difficult psychological game you're playing of, am I getting seduced by the glory? Versus, am I over correcting too far the other way? And I know, I'm sure you guys struggle with that.

• 1:07:42Brian Keating?

  I think, I think it's a hundred percent accurate and it's, it's, people think that we scientists are just walking Wikipedia. And we have no emotion. There's nothing fundamental at stake. I mean, you just look at these are human beings and we're doing things that are at the by definition at the boundaries of human comprehension and and ability. So of course, we're going to fail and and you'll fail more often than you'll succeed. And so the only reason I would say, you know, it's it's actually warranted to be biased as you were on the pessimistic side because most things are wrong. Like, you know, it's even hard. I did something. It was just very simple, like Monte Carlo simulation or something the other day. And, you know, I kept coming up and it was just, you

• 1:08:23Brian Keating?

  know, supposed to get like 99.9% accurate. It wouldn't it wouldn't converge. There's something wrong. But I'm like, okay, that's just the way it is. There's no way you're going to be able to make this detection or, you know, and it was some miniscule thing, not like bicep or not like an exo moon. But all the more so when you have that pressure. And I remember, you know, thinking at your colloquium when you gave it at UCSD Astronomy last month, you were, you know, like, you had the audience kind of suggesting reasons that you should be not as pessimistic as you are. Like, they're saying, well, couldn't it actually be because of this, this, you know, this lag effect? And and maybe you're being, you know, and it was just interesting to see that. And also pointing out, like, there's so many things beyond your control. Like, you you had every

• 1:09:04Brian Keating?

  right to expect that Webb would have the sensitivity in its camera that was advertised. You know, this thing only costs 10 billion bucks to build. By the way, I always talk about how much it costs to build as if like, that's all you got to do is build that thing. No. Rule of thumb in experimental physics is you need about 10% of the construction cost every year just to keep the damn thing running. So that means in 10 years, you've doubled the cost. It'll be 20 billion or more, hopefully, it'll last. But like, how would you know that the sensitivity would be what like 10, you know, 10 times worse than they had advertised?

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  We'll see. We'll see on that. Stay tuned on that. Yeah, this isn't obviously an ongoing ongoing work. So it's hard to predict the end of that story. But I definitely take your point that you you have to you have to.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Play this psychological game yourself a little bit about keeping yourself honest. And it's hard. And I think, yeah, you're right that having, I think maybe a good lesson then is having not just yourself, having other skeptics in the team.

• 1:10:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Who are there to check you because otherwise you can, if it gets too small and too insular, you can talk yourselves into, into believing something's real.

• 1:10:10Brian Keating?

  One of the greatest things that Jim Simons did, and many, many things that he did, and I miss him tremendously, is that he, you know, basically put, he put Paul Steinhardt on this external advisory committee for the Simons Observatory. So Paul's an inflation skeptic, a multiverse, you know, critic of par excellence. He was the, one of the most, you know, biggest champions of the experiment because he said, I want to be, I want to know the truth. I don't just want to know that I'm right. You know, he's been right a lot of times in his life about many things. And so the, the point of putting a very, very good, you know, high quality person who's as much of a critic as David Spiegel, who's one of the founders of Simons Observatory was, as, as a proponent. Those two guys are very different attitudes and orientations towards inflation.

• 1:10:54Brian Keating?

  And having both of those perspectives, the military calls it a red team perspective. You really want that, but you want it to be, you know, I always say debate with love. Like you can't just purely attack somebody and just purely be pessimistic and criticize. You'll never have the enthusiasm that it takes to endure those long years, decades sometimes of, of just coming up completely empty. It's just natural.

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you guys obviously are pursuing this still with future observatories like the Simons Observatory.

• 1:11:24Brian Keating?

  And Bicep Array, the fourth generation of Bicep.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I guess we should stay tuned and it seems like this detection will still eventually probably win a Nobel at one point.

• 1:11:35Brian Keating?

  Well, again, so again, I wouldn't say that. I, we really, I mean, the most likely thing is we, we just keep setting upper limits. I mean, there's no guarantee whatsoever. There's no truly good lower limit in this field. There are lower limits in other fields, like something very exciting and that is the reason that I won't abandon the Simons Observatory ever is that we get all this other science for. Um, for free.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Brian Keating?

  So one of the things we're going to guarantee to detect, you know, more as much as you can, as long as, you know, an asteroid doesn't hit, um, is the, uh, we know that there are three neutrinos, three flavors of neutrinos. We know that at least two of them have mass, um, but we don't know what that mass is. We actually have a lower limit. Neutrino masses can't be lower than a certain limit, but they also can't be bigger than the upper limit. So we have an upper limit and a lower limit, but we don't have a detection. It's like saying.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  So the oscillations, the sort of, do they measure primarily the delta masses?

• 1:12:27Brian Keating?

  They're measuring the delta mass squared. That's right. Exactly right. Um, and so you've got two pairs of delta m squared, uh, and then you've got a limit on the sum of those masses. And then, but only by making a detection of that, of the actual sum of the masses, not just the upper limit on it. Can you resolve the three different masses? And there's so-called neutrino inverted mass hierarchy versus what's called the normal mass hierarchy.

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Brian Keating?

  Uh, but we know that the neutrino mass must be greater than point zero one five milli- uh, electron volts. So an electron volt is the, yeah, let me just say the lightest, um, the, the, the lowest mass of all the fundamental elementary particles, the electron.

• 1:13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Brian Keating?

  And it has a mass of 511,000 electron volts in the Einstein mass units. And the neutrino has something lower than a millionth of five millionth of that.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Brian Keating?

  Already spelled.

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  It barely exists.

• 1:13:18Brian Keating?

  So yeah, it doesn't even exist. They call them ghost particles, right?

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:21Brian Keating?

  Uh, and so, but here's an example of something that's a guaranteed result to get from the, from the Simons Observatory. We can measure that some mass signal. Um, and so even if we never detect inflation, we're going to do something. I mean, look at it. There's only 17 elementary particles, right? We know the masses of 14 of them, the Higgs and the, you know, tau neutrino, tau, um, uh, tau lepton, newon, whatever. Uh, so we know all that, but we don't know three, we don't know almost a quarter of the mass of the elementary particles. It's embarrassing, right?

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Brian Keating?

  But we're going to do that. So, so I think that I couldn't keep doing it if it's all, so bicep only can measure gravitational waves uh, from inflation. Uh, so we're different. We can measure gravitational, but we also have the Large Aperture Telescope, telescope that can measure extremely fine scaled signals. So I'm very excited.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  With this with this experiment we're doing with J D S T, of course, it'd be great to get the exo moons, but we're pretty much guaranteed to measure the blateness of these exoplanets, right? For the first time. So it's that kind of baked in secondary science that gives you a lot of soberness, I think, when you value your results, because your whole experiment isn't riding on this on this gambit, right? There's that's a danger.

• 1:14:31Brian Keating?

  Diversification. It's good for your portfolio on Wall Street. It's good for science as well.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  So we're kind of getting a little in time. So I want to skip ahead to some stuff I really want to ask you. But as a science communicator and as a scientist as well. So I'm sure you've noticed this as well. I've been feeling recently, over the last sort of decade, I think, a growing sense that the public is losing trust in scientists. I think it's especially during, you know, COVID, that we had this kind of surge of distrust in scientists. But it's not just anti vaxxers and it's not even just flat earthers. I think, you know, the idea of, you know, string theory has become increasingly under attack by, you know, popular scientists and science communicators in recent years.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Even dark energy, dark matter. I mean, dark matter is one of those topics whenever you talk to the public about. So many people just hate it. They just they just do not want to. They think that scientists are just making stuff up, right? So but it feels like that has become more and more of a problem. And so I guess I'm curious, because obviously you have the Into the Impossible podcast. It's a very successful podcast that everybody should check out. I was on there not not too long ago, just a few weeks ago.

• 1:15:45Brian Keating?

  Number one this week.

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  Okay, great. Okay, this this episode of probably a couple of weeks later.

• 1:15:51Brian Keating?

  January, early January.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Right, right. But I guess I'm just curious about your opinion on this. Do you feel as if the public is?

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  Becoming antagonized almost by scientists, losing trust in scientists. Do you agree with that sentiment? If so, what do you attribute the the source of that to be?

• 1:16:12Brian Keating?

  I think I think it's it's our fault in some sense, not you and me specifically. I'm not meaning to absolve myself. I don't think I do nearly as good a job as you and other people do in terms of, you know. First of all, let me take a step back because because I think I've said this a few different venues. But I do believe that scientists in general are given the gift of, you know, that a Shakespearean actor would have killed for. You know, it's literally the most interesting script ever written. I mean, I we already went into like, this book is just one tiny infinitesimal slice of science. And yet it's got everything jealousy, drama, greed, envy, love affairs, suicide. It's just incredible.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Like a Greek story.

• 1:16:57Brian Keating?

  And there's like literally every single room in this building in my campus. You could find similar stories. And so we've got this incredible manuscript. And yet, and yet, most of our colleagues are some of the worst ham handed, you know, terrible actors and actresses. And for no wonder because they devote 0.0% you know, attention to this side of their their their, you know, kind of personality and their responsibilities in their job. I talked to Jana Levin, your wonderful colleague.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  She was on the podcast recently as well.

• 1:17:27Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I talked to her maybe three or four years ago, it was during the middle of COVID. And I said, you know, like, I loved your first book, you know, and even in your second book, like, did your university give you any time off? And she's like, no, but they they at least they didn't punish me. And I remember talking to Dmitry Bassov and telling him, asking him for time off. He's are you kidding me? You're not paid to do that. So whatever I did on my sabbatical, I did it when I was on parental leave, right?

• 1:17:54Speaker 00

  That's my plans next year.

• 1:17:56Brian Keating?

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Book, doing my sabbatical.

• 1:17:57Brian Keating?

  Oh, but you parental leave now.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  Uh, no parental leave was real parental leave for me.

• 1:18:02Brian Keating?

  Good. You're a better dad than I am. Uh, so, uh, so when I, um, when I, when I think about what we're given, I always kind of jokingly say that we have a, we have a moral obligation. You know, if you told your chancellor, your dean, or your, you know, like, you can't understand what I do, dean, you know, curmudgeon, or whatever their name is, uh, you can't understand what I do. It's very sophisticated. I use very special tools and like, no, no, no, I'm pretty smart. Like, the public is pretty smart. And, and to say that I'm not going to break it down in a way, at least that you can understand it and just appreciate how cool is science? And I think I had that when I was a kid. I thought, wow, this is amazing. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson says this frequently, you know, something like, if you ask the average person, like, how much the SpaceX, you know, how much of the budget is SpaceX or NASA?

• 1:18:46Brian Keating?

  Let's say like trillions of dollars. And it's like, less than Americans spend on lipstick every year, right? It's a miniscule amount, but why do they think it's so big? Because it does such cool stuff. And science that gets done in America and throughout the world even, it's, it's just, it's the most interesting story. It's a never ending story. You can never win science. It's, it's what's called an infinite game. But it happens to be made up of all these little finite games, like tenure, getting into grad school, getting a Nobel Prize. Those are finite games where there's only one winner, one loser roughly, uh, versus science. Like, you don't win science. So the perspective that we have to have, I think, is that if we don't pay attention to our bosses, it's natural they're going to turn on us. And our bosses are, you can't tell me just because someone's incredibly brilliant that they,

• 1:19:31Brian Keating?

  unless they're self-supported, I don't see many self-supported scientists, you know, that are actually doing experiments or building telescopes, you know, Jim Simons could have done it, but, you know, it's very rare. But that don't answer to the public, that don't interact with the public. And you may say, and people have pushed back, Sabina Hossenfelder, you know, pushed me on this one. And she's like, no, I'm good at doing calculate. And she happens to be great at doing science channels, as you know. She's, she's definitely an inspiration, fun and incredible person. But she's like, no, scientists should be paid to do what they do. And they, but I, I would say, the reason that they're not doing it is because they feel they're not good at it, which I understand. I wasn't good at it. You weren't good at it. Practiced that. You had, I talked to Brian Greene a year ago. He, they, they practiced. They have training.

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. My first videos, if anyone goes back to the channel, you'll see, you'll see that it's not, does not come naturally.

• 1:20:20Brian Keating?

  I love it. And that's, but that's great. You leave it up there. You're not embarrassed of it.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:20:24Brian Keating?

  Um, you know, if you did it tomorrow, you would be, but no, that's, that's part, if you make 1% improvements, you know, every day, every video, it adds up so quickly. But the other thing that I love to point out, it's fun. It's fun to communicate with the public. It's fun to see something in a kid's eyes when you explain it to them for the first time, or when they actually get something. My son, my oldest son is going through a science fair right now and he's got this whole project using like kelp. And so I'm like, can't you do something with astronomy? Like, you know, they're actually not allowed to get any help from their parents. So I'm not helping them at all. He's doing something like kelp in the ocean at Sandy, you know, whatever he's doing. It's really cool. And he kept saying like, he was like almost in tears when he's like, the kelp keeps dying. I can't even keep kelp alive. I'm like,

• 1:21:05Brian Keating?

  this is teaching you a very valuable lesson. In fact, if all your kelp dies, it might be better than you getting the answer that you expected of, you know, salt water levels cause, you know, kelp to die or whatever, like you're just killing them all. And maybe there's some fact, and he found out, yeah, actually, the, the water temperature that he's using is way too warm and kelp actually prefer a lower temperature. So they were all dying and that taught him something. And when he's, when he got that, it was like, when you solve a Rubik's cube, or you get a Sudoku puzzle, or a Wordle, like you get a little taste of that thrill. When we're kids, we get that thrill. As we get to be adults, we have things we have to worry about, but they still deserve it. The people that are making a living, like cleaning the laboratories here, whatever, and mine, University of yours, the people that work at the restaurants, they deserve it, David.

• 1:21:50Brian Keating?

  You know, we owe it to them. And if we don't, you know, one of my late great colleagues, Hans Parr, actually did his PhD here at Columbia with, late great Leon Letterman and others. Um, he used to say, we serve at the pleasure of the public until there's a war. Cause eventually they're going to need us to do real things, not to look for exo moons or multiverses. And we want to stave that off as long as possible. We want peace. We love peace. But the fact is we owe something to the public. And I just find it's natural that they get skeptical. Now, do I agree?

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  You're actually, essentially scientists are not engaging in science communication sufficiently.

• 1:22:30Brian Keating?

  And the ones that are, look, this is what I hear. When I came, when I had Neil Grass Tyson on, uh, Brian Greene on, Michio Kaku on, the ones that are, they're. I won't say the word. I hate the word. G word, you know, the ends of the rift, right? I hate that word. These are people, but they assume, so they're not doing actual scientific research, like Neil's not doing scientific, he's, he's doing communication. So he's not a real scientist, so I don't have to listen to him and I can actually criticize him when he says something. So you, you get this like infinite, you know.

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  He's not a research scientist.

• 1:23:02Brian Keating?

  No, he's definitely not a research scientist, but the point is like, like who made him and Bill Nye and like who made, and it's true, like their careers, unlike yours, yours and mine, we are paid very well and to do the stuff that we do. As a scientist, we give back because I think it, it does something for us. We love, there's something about this, you know, side hustle that you and I do, that's very fulfilling, not just monetarily. I mean, you give back most of your money. I don't make as much money, so I can't really give as much back, but, but the point is, it does something for you and it provides you with, with, with an additional dimension of your personality that didn't exist 20 years ago. And it's really fun to do it. But at the same time, you know, if you were

• 1:23:44Brian Keating?

  to only do this, then people would say, well, this is your grift. This is all you're doing. You're just doing this to make money. They say this about Sabina, for example. I don't think either direction is fair. I think there should be some outreach to the public. The public are not our bosses in the sense that they can tell us what to do. Even at a public university, they can't tell me what to do. But, but I do feel an obligation to give to them, to keep them, to keep them notified and, and aware of the great, you know, precious nature of how we treat the money that they give us.

• 1:24:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I tell you, I certainly feel doing public outreach is a responsibility.

• 1:24:22Speaker 00

  I guess the thing I, we've talked about this before privately and I, maybe we'll talk more about it, maybe after this conversation as well. And I still sort of evolve my thinking about it, is whether every scientist has an obligation to do that. Just because. You know, sometimes we admit students or postdocs here who are brilliant, but they're very introvertous and they just don't, I mean, I'm a bit of an introvert, actually, believe it or not, but you know, I think some people, they really lack social skills, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for them in science, just because you don't have that skill set. And maybe with a lot of mastery and training, they could get to that point

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  of being a valid science, you know, useful scientific communicator, but it's not, obviously, that's the best use of their time, because maybe an adjacent colleague to them who works in the same field and they're collaborating together, could equally explain that paper they worked on together, much more skillfully, without necessarily forcing everybody to duplicate effort. You know, I guess that's maybe a concern as well.

• 1:25:25Brian Keating?

  I guess, but if I were to push back with respect, you know, what if I said, you know, YouTube doesn't exist and, you know, we live in a multiverse branch, you know, in the, in the chaotic universe, and it didn't exist, but you knew about this and you knew that you couldn't do it. Or say Columbia says, David, you gotta choose. You can't do Cool Worlds, you have to do this, or you could do Cool Worlds, but you can't be here. I imagine that would be a gut wrenching thing. You wouldn't want to do it. I'm sure you'd figure out something to do because you're so bright. But, but the point is, it, but if you didn't, if I had told you about this 20 years ago, you'd be like, what the hell's YouTube? Like, the point is, sometimes you have to fertilize a field before you know it's going to grow. It's just a reality. I have had students, foreign students, domestic

• 1:26:10Brian Keating?

  students, incredibly painfully introverted. I think Sabina's incredibly introverted. And yet, when you get her on stage, when you talk to her in a, in a podcast, or I've met her in person several times, she, there's a certain energy that she gets. Another example, I heard Yitzhak Perlman. He was asked to do something with a donor after like some performance here. And he just said, no, I'm not going to meet with some donor. They're like, he's a billionaire. He gave all his money. We only have the car and whatever. And you're here on the same. He's like, if I met with him, it means that I'm not the person who practiced for five hours that very day before the performance and left everything out there. But it's ironic because he's also performing for the, he's literally in the

• 1:26:55Brian Keating?

  public eye. You know, so does he have to do more? I don't know. But, but for us, yeah. Yes, I agree. There's something, you know, that, that is, it could be taxing and introverts might not do it. But I always push back when people like Sabina said this, you know, it's very specialized knowledge. And, and I usually say, and, or I'm not that good at it. Like, it's kind of an argument that adjacent argument to what you're saying. They're not that good at it. They're, they could, they're better at other things. There's someone who's better. But I always say, look, did you know how to do, you know, Newtonian, you talk to me about, you know, Trojan orbits or whatever. Like, were you born knowing that?

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so differential equation or something.

• 1:27:29Brian Keating?

  Yeah. You, you dedicated time to it because you felt it was of value to you. How do you know, or how does a student know, you know, a student X know that he or she won't be good at it? If she or he doesn't devote a bit, a, you know, a minute to make just a YouTube video, like, it would be cool if you had every paper had, like, here's a simple YouTube video. Just imagine as a thought experiment, they have some budget at AppJ. And they're going to make it one minute video animating this thing or that thing. Like, they might really love it. And it might bring out something to them. And the only, the last thing I'll say about this is, I've had students that are foreign students that like, they're, when they came, they could not speak English. I don't know how they got in to UCSD. This is many years ago. But then I would say, look, there's this Toastmasters Club.

• 1:28:11Brian Keating?

  Go to it. And not only did they come out like making good friends and speaking like, you know, proper American, you know, gentlemen and women, but they, they, it ignited something in them. Because communication is that unique thing that we do as human beings.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I guess, you know, coming up to this idea of, of growing distrust. It makes me wonder about the future. And we've spoke about this again privately a little bit, but let's let's do it on the air a little bit as well. What is the future hold for academia? And I think, you know, one force is the changes with communication, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, people putting things online, Twitter, X as a way of doing science communication. There's also the growing wave of distrust that we've talked about. And on top of that, the big probably elephant in the room is is the influence of AI and machine learning.

• 1:29:07Speaker 00

  Enhancing the productivity of scientists, sure, that's already definitely happening. I did a video about that recently, showing that that's that's irrefutable at this point.

• 1:29:15Brian Keating?

  I think I was in that video.

• 1:29:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're in that video.

• 1:29:19Speaker 00

  But also, it is something that maybe some of us are worried about the potential threat of of AI. Like, it could displace jobs. Certainly, that's a common thing people talk about in the general workplace, white collar jobs, but also potentially academia, it could end up displacing some jobs as well. What do you see as the future of academic institutions? As a result of the this confluence of sort of unique forces which it's facing, which is a very modern problem, it's never really faced before.

• 1:29:48Brian Keating?

  Yeah, there's this there's this concept, I guess, in like, social economics called the Lindy effect. Basically, it says if like, you see two things at this, you know, if you see an old man and a kid walking together, like, you basically know that the old man will be around, you know, the next day. Or a good example is like DOS, like Windows is going to be around for a really long time. Like, whether Huawei's latest, you know, like innate operating system or Claude AI or these AI pendants, are they going to be around? I don't know, but I know Windows is going to be around.

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  The doomsday argument, like you take how long something has lasted for, and it's probably going to last that long again.

• 1:30:23Brian Keating?

  Exactly that long again, exactly. Yeah, yeah, 100% correct. So I thought in my weaker moments that that COVID basically was was going to be maybe the death knell for the traditional academic setting. Look, we're in a monopoly. Monopolists, you know, were protected by the biggest brand, the the brand on earth that has the most social cachet. You know, no one will like basically mortgage their house to buy like a um an apple, you know, iPhone or a Hermes Birkin bag.

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  They really shouldn't.

• 1:30:56Brian Keating?

  Yeah, no, they shouldn't, and they do. And and ca- it tuitions have gone up three times exponentially, you know, third power more exponentially quickly than than salaries have gone up. The attendance of Columbia, I bet, has got has grown two or three percent per year. Um, most of the Ivies have have been like that. And uh, and and they're they're trying to represent and kind of add on these D E I initiatives that don't really address like true diversity. It's more like racial diversity rather than economic diversity. So they're doing all these things, a huge social experiment. And and then we were doing everything on Zoom. And I was like, there's just no way, like paying, they charge the same tuition. Like, we charged the same tuition for that couple, a year or a year and a half of Zoom, um, wearing masks.

• 1:31:41Brian Keating?

  I was like, if this doesn't kill the university, then basically Lindy's right, Lindy's right. It's not Linday, this, the cosmologist Lindy, L A N D Y. And that's that um universities, more or less in this form, have been around since the year ten eighty. Like, the first Western university was in Bologna, Italy.

• 1:31:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's.

• 1:31:59Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And and Oxford is not not too much farther behind, but it's a little bit younger. But these are seven, this better part of millennium, right? And they're still here. And it's not like so different, like it's it was back then, there was some guy with a rock and he was scraping on another rock and a chalkboard. And now, and there was a bunch of rap students. The only thing I point out is back then, the students could go on strike. And then the professor wouldn't get paid. And and now we have tenure. So thank God for tenure. Barbarity, you know, it's barbarians. But um, but but COVID didn't kill it. So where do we go from here? I don't think AI is gonna do it, even though I was kind of optimistic. I actually made like, um, because uh, I went on this, um.

• 1:32:40Brian Keating?

  I was making a series of videos and and a and an in-depth um series about Galileo. And I love audiobooks and, you know, even reading my own book, as you saw a couple of minutes ago, I couldn't really. Find my but so I I list I love audiobooks and I was like ah I want to read Galileo's dialogue for the first time never read it before. Um but I don't want to read it read it and I want to listen to it at 2X so I can you know drive my kids to school or do it work out and listen to it. Didn't exist so I was like shit what am I gonna do uh so I ended up recruiting Carlo Raveli and my friend Lucio Piccirillo is my you know. Kind of uncle from graduate school uh Jim Gates from uh he was at Brown at the time Fabiola Gianotti and Frank Wilczek.

• 1:33:23Brian Keating?

  And we recorded the first ever audiobook of the dialogue surely trialogue between these three characters. Setting you know Venice and in uh in ancient you know not ancient but Renaissance Italy. And it was one of the greatest experiences of my life and I was like hmm now I've got. The definitive English translation by Stillman Drake incredible translator. Uh all of Galileo's you know a million words of Galileo I'm gonna make a Galileo bot. And then down the hall at the at the engineering department they're working on um 11 labs they're doing these you know it's very accurate synthetic voice reproductions. Uh they're doing with video games very high accurate uh fabric modeling which is very difficult to do apparently. Uh not AI just just actual you know high resolution GPU intensive uh um operations.

• 1:34:09Brian Keating?

  And I was like I'm gonna make a Galileo bot why should I why should I teach my kids students I say. Uh about inclined planes I can have Galileo teach them he's much better than I am or Einstein teach relativity. Or you know David Kipping teach you know whatever there's enough words that you've written and said. That we can digitize you make a perfect avatar headless YouTube channel whatever but people don't care for it they don't resonate with it. And I think the future is actually gonna be more in person it's gonna it's gonna entrench universities you know. Much to my dismay in some level because I I don't think it's healthy to have monopolies I really don't. And and the way that universities fail to innovate to do things I mean. You don't teach a different branch of astronomy or physics than we do even though Ivy League versus public school.

• 1:34:54Brian Keating?

  But why is that? Like the tuitions, like what would it take? What would a different university look like? I think it's going to be less virtual. I think it's going to be in-person events. Like, I think it'll be cool, like, you know, do some in-person, more in-person. Like Brian does that with the World Science Festival. People love that stuff. They want to be in public because I think they were denied that. And humans are social creatures. We're mammals. We want to be feeling each other's, you know, pheromones. I don't know what they do, but but the point is in-person, I think, is the future. And that means more and more in-person universities. I think the brands are only going to get stronger and more entrenched, and that will discourage innovation, unfortunately. So it's up to people like us, or even younger people like you. And, you know,

• 1:35:34Brian Keating?

  think about how can you leverage these tools to truly improve the educational outcome? I don't know. I worry more the next, our kids' generation. How is this going to affect them? Is it going to be screen-based? Is it going to be, you know, holograms? I mean, I've been hearing about this for a long time. I still don't think there's a killer app for it. You know, chatting is not a great interface. People don't like that. Conversing is good, but people like to multitask. It's hard. It's hard to, it's really hard to say. I think in-person is the future, which is like kind of ironic because it's a thousand-year-old model.

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's hard. It's actually hard. You know, we watch Sim lectures all the time from different universities, of course, even now. It's it's much harder to maintain concentration than just being, you know, sat in an audience, seeing the performance is it's much more engrossing. It's weird. It's there's something built into us that prefers that that nature of communication. And it's the same with podcasts. I mean, there's you can, I think there's something on Spotify or something now where you can, you know, the wrapped thing. Yeah. And I think there's a way you can, is it Spotify or another app where you can get like a, an auto-generated podcast of all the stuff you listen to. So it creates two AI bots. They're like, hey, let's talk about all the stuff you listen to this year.

• 1:36:47Brian Keating?

  It's a Google notebook. You can upload your paper and be like, hey, Kepler 1601B is like, really, and David really brings it home.

• 1:36:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. You can have that. And it's impressive. It is impressive to listen to for a couple of minutes, but but you're like, this isn't real. I mean, like, who, why am I listening? To two robots or to each other. I don't really see the point. So I whenever I detect and there's so much about YouTube, you see something that looks AI generated. I'm like, I'm out.

• 1:37:14Brian Keating?

  Yeah, it's the uncanny valley. I mean, they kind of skip past the uncanny valley now. Like, it's so realistic and you can see, you could have like, and again, it's some of this is really detrimental to society. The AI girlfriends and and people, you know, committing suicide allegedly from from but so I think what are we going to know is real. It's going to be in person. And I think that resonates with your previous question, which is trust in science. Like, if you're just getting this stuff and it's coming from these, you know, people on high through a video channel on a two dimensional screen, it's not the same. I don't know how you can scale that up in pub. I was, you know, kind of honored to do in person hosting of Richard Dawkins in Vancouver in October. They flew me up there and we spent, you know, two hours on stage and, you know,

• 1:37:55Speaker 00

  That was his last tour, right?

• 1:37:56Brian Keating?

  It was, yeah, he calls it the final bow. The guy's amazing. Eighty three, he's had a stroke relatively recently. He's cruising from city to city, you know, and then he went to Europe and did a whole other tour. He went all down, I think, as far as like Bulgaria. Amazing, amazing endurance. I hope, you know, at that age, I can do the same. But people just loved it. And we were in a theater and it was like, no one was like looking at their phones or, you know, like we do on Zoom, unfortunately. And they had the chance to ask questions. I think interactivity is going to be a big positive. But there's something about that, that you know this person's authentic. He's right there. She's right there. Janet does this great at Pioneer Works, not too far from here.

• 1:38:37Brian Keating?

  But the problem is it's very hard to scale those things. I don't know. I don't like, can't imagine how to do such a thing. You know, other than these few people that are really good at it. But I think that's a way to kind of restore the trust, like scientists or people. You know, we do these bar night, what do they call the tap, whatever.

• 1:38:53Speaker 00

  Astronomy on top.

• 1:38:54Brian Keating?

  Astronomy on top. Yeah, those are cool. Yeah, those are cool. But it's very, it's hard to scale. And as I get older, I'm like, well, you know, how many people, you know, it's like the the life raft, you know, there's only so many seats. You want to get as many people as possible because I only have so much time and.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  We'll take it, Brian. Well, me and you will sell out a stadium, right? We'll get to the biggest stadium we can find. We'll do a show.

• 1:39:15Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 00

  You do take on the cosmology, I'll take on the exoplanets. We'll see if we can fill it with hundred thousand people.

• 1:39:24Brian Keating?

  Exactly, right.

• 1:39:25Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, that gives me some hope and I, I think, uh, it's gonna be, we live in very interesting times. That, that is certainly for sure. So it, either way, we're gonna probably find out in our lifetime. And just like how the Victorians could not imagine people walking on the moon

• 1:39:40Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  in their lifetime, the world transformed around them. And it, there is certainly a feeling that we live in similar times. So

• 1:39:47Brian Keating?

  I do, I wouldn't want to

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  What a time to be alive.

• 1:39:49Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I wouldn't want to be alive at any other time. It's, it's quite incredible. I mean, if you could go back in time, what, what would you change with anything about your past?

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  No, I, I mean, I, I don't think you can.

• 1:39:59Brian Keating?

  At least your journey in this way.

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  You can't. You could maybe have misgivings about things you did, but, um, you can't, you wouldn't be the same person anymore, would you? So I don't think you can change anything. But, uh, I think, yeah, I'm, uh, I, I just hope I get to live a long life to watch this, this wonderful show play out in front of me, right? It's, it seems like the world is gonna, I, I can think that the greatest tragedy of being mortal is that you don't get to see how the story ends.

• 1:40:26Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  That's for me has always been the greatest, greatest annoyance of my life. I want to know what happens to humans in a hundred thousand years.

• 1:40:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 00

  Like, where do we end up? Like, what happens to us?

• 1:40:37Brian Keating?

  Reminds me of Feynman said something like that. If you ask an ordinary person, you know, would they want to live forever? They're like, hell no, I, I don't want all my, you know, pets to die and people I love die and I'll just be alone. And, you know, well, well, I guess this guy Brian Johnson is, you know, half a

• 1:40:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, he has to try to live forever.

• 1:40:51Brian Keating?

  But maybe, maybe a lot of work. But, um, but he said, you ask a real scientist, no, they'll want to live forever because they want to see all the discoveries and like, imagine conversing with Newton. That's the only kind of really killer thing I would love to do with like AI. And I, I've tried to do this with, with, um,

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  Go to the holodeck.

• 1:41:06Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that and, but, but also like, could you like train this bot on all of Galileo's writings and then teach him quantum mechanics? Like, is it possible? Or Einstein and, and teach him string theory or whatever? Can you, you know, or, or conversely, like, could an AI do the unique things that they did to, to, you know, consider the tides of the earth or, you know, um, the perihelion of Mercury and And look at these in this unique way. And if not, you know, like I said in the video short clip I did on your channel. You know, what, what is the threat? Like, I actually don't think, I don't know about you, maybe we're, we're running out of time, but, but I would say,

• 1:41:43Brian Keating?

  I'm not threatened by AI, simply because I think there's this, there's this notion called the lock-in effect. Basically,

• 1:41:52Speaker 00

  Training on, training on data that you've generated, basically.

• 1:41:55Brian Keating?

  Not only that, but like, it's, it's sort of a first mover disadvantage. Let me give you an example. Have you heard this thing that's allegedly not true, but I actually think it's true? That the space shuttle's orbit was determined by the width of a horse's arse. Have you ever heard this? Okay, so.

• 1:42:15Speaker 00

  Wasn't expecting those words to come out of your mouth like that.

• 1:42:18Brian Keating?

  I promised I would say bollocks, okay? So, um, so there, uh, the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle are made by a company called Morton Thiacall, which are located in Utah, and the shuttle would launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. So you had to get these boosters from Utah to Florida. Okay, that sounds easy, except you have to go through tunnels along the way. There's no route, you know, across the country, uh, in which the boosters will not have to traverse through a tunnel, at least at one point. Tunnels are a certain width and a certain height. There's not like just a hundred foot tall tunnels and it makes no economic sense. So the, the tunnels are roughly the size of the roadway. Now roadway is roughly the size of a railway.

• 1:42:57Brian Keating?

  It's basically two railways and a railway, uh, was the, was based on the width of, uh, the original Roman chariots, which were, uh, two horses pulled by two horses. So the width of the wheels on a railway right now is about the width, the diameter 1.3 meters of a, uh, of the, of two horses side by side. So, uh, so that people say, okay, so now that's at the size of the railway. The railway set the size of the roadway, the roadway set the size of the tunnel, therefore the tunnel, which determine the area of the solid rocket boosters, which in turn determines the altitude against it. Okay. So this is a lock.

• 1:43:32Speaker 00

  So it's proxy, proxy, proxy.

• 1:43:33Brian Keating?

  Exactly. Another thing is, um, Qerty, the Qerty keyboard that you are a master of. That's actually was designed to slow down typing because you type too fast, the keys on a typewriter. Have you ever seen a real typewriter?

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure, when I was a kid.

• 1:43:47Brian Keating?

  I know, yeah, so I had one too, but a lot of our younger viewers don't. So they had these keys that would come up mechanically and they would strike a ribbon coated with ink and that would press on two pieces of paper. And when they would come up, if you hit too fast, they would start to expand or whatever. They'd jostle and they'd get stuck. And then that was bad because you couldn't type as fast.

• 1:44:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Brian Keating?

  So they made the Qerty keyboard, the positions of the letters are optimal to slow down your typing, not to speed up, and yet every keyboard on earth uses them, right? So that's a lock-in. So what you, it's the first mover determines kind of almost all the trajectory of everything that comes after it. And so with these GPU plus L L Ms, that's kind of what people mean with AI nowadays. It's very different than what the brain does or physics does. And so I don't know, because and where's the money going to go? Like OpenAI is trying to raise, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. They're building nuclear power plants not far from here, you know, cooping Three Mile Island down in Pennsylvania. They're doing all this to have more GPUs, which use the same energy,

• 1:44:47Brian Keating?

  which are two dimensional processors that were used to make video games, not to do like physics problems. So are we going to be threatened by that? Is that going to come up with, you know, general relativity and, you know, Riemannian manifolds? And, you know, supersymmetric groups? I don't think so. There's something different about that. It's not going to need the training data from like, the reason that we don't have string theory right now, or theory of everything, is not because we haven't yet trained it on Fast and the Furious 11, which comes out next month or whatever. It's because there's something completely orthogonal to that architecture needed to get to a theory of everything. At least, that's what I think so.

• 1:45:25Speaker 00

  But I think, I think you can't, I guess my slight pushback to that would be. I agree, if you had made a neural network that was not an LLM, but there was, I mean, I guess the original neural networks did have this in mind, to be inspired by the brain. If you really did believe you were imitating the structure of the brain, it was just a question of scaling that up until you reached a human brain-sized number of neurons and connections. Then perhaps you could have confidence that, you know, if a flesh version of this thing can do it, then surely a digital version of it, a silicon version of it could do the same thing. But you're right, with LMs, it's such a different, it doesn't think the way we think.

• 1:46:07Speaker 00

  There is no guarantee, but it also doesn't preclude it either, right? It's kind of similar to the, you know, the B-modes, right? You, it may achieve that, but there's no guarantee it would achieve that either.

• 1:46:19Brian Keating?

  Very good, I can imagine tying into that better myself. Yeah, I agree, I guess the thing that fascinates me is the work of N. Chomsky. I'm not a fan of him as a person, but as a thinker, you know, he has this notion that embodiment, like when your kids first learn how to speak, there's something about the embodiment of a mind, of a soul, whatever, not just a neural network. And that computers certainly lack, right? So there's just no way to mimic that eviscerating feeling of being in a body. And how that may be crucial for us to express language, rather than tokenization.

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  Well, one day they could have a body though, right? They could, you know.

• 1:47:00Brian Keating?

  I mean, they have bodies now for like, you know, robots, but we're the, there's something generative about the graphical structure and learning it. Rather than just, I'm trained on seven billion tokens, seven trillion tokens now. And I can turn up the temperature of how much correlation, you know, two, three, four pairs of tokens have to have. And just the sheer amount of data, like right now, we're taking in, you know, terabytes of data. It's just like, a lot of it we're excluding, we're focusing very narrowly. But, you know, will computers have that ability to do it? All I'm saying is that there is something different about a fundamentally two-dimensional architecture that was made from GPUs. I'm not disagreeing at all that someday, quote unquote. AI can do what Einstein or you know you do or I do.

• 1:47:44Brian Keating?

  But but the point is in their current form LLM plus GPU. I'm skeptical about it. Just I do think the lock in. And because the financial incentive is just build more of that, have bigger GPUs, more terabytes, more tokens. And and go down that realm. Will things emerge, literally emerge, probably, but I don't know if it'll be novel. And I think it's fascinating. I think it's one of the most interesting. You know, we have Nobel Prize winners, you know, winning Nobel Prizes for AI stuff, but you know, will there be AIs? Just pure AIs.

• 1:48:15Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, if you believe the the latest open, of course, they believe they've already reached AGI essentially.

• 1:48:20Brian Keating?

  I keep hearing I hear people say, hey, they have, they haven't. I talked to Jan Le Cun not too long ago. He doesn't. He doesn't think it's it's it's by any means assured. Max Cargmar, then they do. It's very interesting. I mean, we're certainly not ready for it, but it's the genie's out of the bottle. And we kind of have to react to it. So in our local neck of the woods and being in faculty and professor. I don't know. I just I don't know. You know, I love it. I actually enjoy interacting with them. It's it's brought a new kind of reinvigoration of like capabilities for me. And and allowed me to go into different fields, but you know, is it essential to the instructor? You know, how much I think of myself as being a professor, a teacher, I don't know yet. I just don't know.

• 1:49:03Speaker 00

  Well, we have a interesting times ahead.

• 1:49:07Speaker 00

  Brian, I've had you for long enough and I appreciate your time very generously. You've just come off an airplane and come straight for a podcast. It was very generous of your time to do so. I know you've got a busy day tomorrow with the Times Observatory. So yeah, thank you so much for coming in and I hope to have you again. This was great.

• 1:49:22Brian Keating?

  Okay, next time the temperature will be a little colder. It's a little too warm for me.

• 1:49:34Speaker 00

  So that was my conversation with Professor Brian Keating of UC San Diego and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Definitely check out that podcast if you've not seen it before. Here's so many wonderful, great guests on there, including yours truly. Maybe not his most famous guest, but I was on there fairly recently. So. You can check that out if you're interested in hearing our conversation over there and all the other great conversations he's had. You know, I really enjoyed talking with Brian because he is one of those few people who openly takes on this elephant in the room, that science is done by people and people have egos and make mistakes and we cannot assume therefore that science is this pure objectivity pursuit. There are always going to be mistakes, but,

• 1:50:15Speaker 00

  but that does not mean that science is somehow in jeopardy or is a flawed enterprise because the other beautiful element of science is that it's self-correcting. And that's what happened in his story of losing the Nobel, right? There was this claim that they made and it made lots of headlines and for a few months, maybe a year, that was what everyone thought was the real deal. And then it didn't take too long, of course, for other teams to investigate it, to be skeptical. That's how science works. We're always skeptical of such claims. And they found out that something was wrong and didn't make sense. And it ended up being this whole dust map thing. So I think it is a kind of a wonderful example of how huge stories will

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  be made in science in the future. There will probably be, I think, in my field, there'll probably be like the detection of life one day, right? There'll probably be a story that says, we've kind of already had it a few times, but we'll probably have another one in the near future saying, we detected either, you know, a UFO or something, or an alien spacecraft, maybe, probably more realistically, a bio-signature or something like that. But in any case, I think we should always be very skeptical because there have been many, many claims in the past. And that does not mean just because the claim has been made that it is true. Science has this peer review process, which is definitely a first check, but it's not the last check. There is one or two people that do those referee reports, right? That's just not enough. You really need

• 1:51:40Speaker 00

  the entire community, which is hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, to skeptically interrogate that claim, especially when it's a huge claim like the discovery of essentially inflation, in the case of Brian Keating's work. So I think it's a wonderful. Example of how just don't, as soon as you see a story, assume it's true. It's true. There is always other people out there who want to be a bit more cautious and careful. And quite often, these things do disappear. They evaporate under greater scrutiny. But over the long time span of science, the truth is kind of boils out, right? It's like a crucible where you boil away all the irrelevancies, all the things which can't survive that scrutiny.

• 1:52:25Speaker 00

  And what you're left with is this pure product of science, the scientific truths. And those are the things which have gone through not just one or two reviews, but hundreds, thousands of people, many experiments, people trying to rip it apart. Scientists love nothing more than to try to rip apart things. And yet it remains, it survives. And those are the things, those are the gems, the precious examples of knowledge that we're really seeking of. And that might really advances human knowledge is when we get those types of information. So it's a wonderful story. I really enjoyed that conversation. If you are enjoying these conversations in general, then the best way to support what we do is to head to coolworldslab.com/support.

• 1:53:10Speaker 00

  That is coolworldslab.com/support where you can become a supporter to my research team, the Cool Worlds Lab. And that helps not only support our research, but sort of indirectly it supports all of the podcasting work and the videos as well. So head over there if you're interested in supporting us. Thank you so much for listening in today and I'll see you in the next episode.

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