Answering Your Cosmic Questions: The Multiverse, the Big Bang and Life on Exoplanets

Please join my mailing list here 👉 ⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠ to win a meteorite 💥 In this electrifying episode, recorded live at UC San Diego, Brian pulls back the cosmic curtain to explore some of the deepest mysteries in science—and what they might mean for our understanding of everything. You'll learn how scientists use the mysterious property of light called polarization to uncover secrets from the dawn of the universe, chase evidence for the Big Bang, and even perform your own light experiment along the way. The conversation ventures into the origins of our universe, the search for other forms of life, and the tantalizing possibility that our universe might be just one among countless others in a sprawling multiverse. But it doesn't stop at science. Brian and his audience wrestle with the blurry boundaries where facts confront faith: Can scientific discovery ever answer the big metaphysical questions, such as the existence of God or consciousness after death? What does the intersection of cosmology and religion tell us about our place in reality? With detours into modern cosmological theories, debates about inflation, the search for life on other planets, and even the role AI might play in future discoveries, this episode keeps curious minds on their toes. - 00:00 "Polarization: Unlocking Cosmic Secrets" 04:36 Wave Polarization Explained 09:11 Questioning the Big Bang Singularity 10:52 Detecting Gravitational Waves' Cosmological Impact 15:39 Pope Endorses Science-Bible Alignment 18:52 Gene's Role in Evolutionary Drive 19:55 Deepak Chopra: Preparing for Death 26:03 "Universe vs. Multiverse Debate" 26:50 Debating Multiverse in Astronomy 31:39 "Geometric Social Commentary Revealed" 34:24 Extraterrestrial Life Evidence: Near Zero 36:54 "Expensive Material Suggests Earth-Mars Connection" 39:29 "AI-Powered Creativity and Research" 45:11 "Choosing Enrichment Over Leisure" 45:49 "Never Stop Learning" - Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: ⁠https://a.co/d/03ezQFu⁠ My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: ⁠http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA⁠ The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican ⁠https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un⁠ 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw - Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast ⁠#universe⁠ ⁠#podcast⁠ ⁠#briankeating⁠ ⁠#intotheimpossible⁠ ⁠#science⁠ ⁠#astronomy⁠ ⁠#cosmology⁠ ⁠#cosmicmicrowavebackground⁠ ⁠#intotheimpossible⁠ ⁠#briankeating⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG: HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  What I told you a universe holds secrets written in a language where only just now, beginning to understand. In this talk, I'll pull back the cosmic curtain and show you how scientists, myself included, use a mind-bending property of light called polarization to reveal hidden messages from the very dawn of time. Together, we'll explore how this powerful tool lets us hunt for traces of the Big Bang and unravel events that happened billions of years before human history even began. But that's not all. You'll actually be able to do an experiment yourself using this mysterious property of light called polarization, and I'll show you exactly how that works. And the story doesn't stop with physics. I'll take you right to the edge with me,

• 1:15Speaker 01

  where science meets spirituality, where facts confront faith. Can the universe's mysteries ever answer the age-old question, "Does God exist?" I'll share why the line between evidence and belief is both blurry and fascinating, and why it matters for anyone who's ever looked up at the stars and wondered if there's more, if there's anyone looking back at us. Just when you think we've reached the limits of what we can, now I'll invite you to consider something even wilder: whether or not we're alone in the universe, and whether or not our universe is alone. Or, could it just be one among countless others? Expand your mind with me as I break down the jaw-dropping idea of the multiverse, life on other planets,

• 2:00Speaker 01

  and what they could mean for our place in reality itself. Curious yet? Good, because once you start down this path, there's no turning back. Come along with me on a journey. Together, we'll chase down the answers to the biggest questions of all, unlocking mysteries that will change the way you see the universe forever. Don't just wonder. Dive in with me and my brilliant students, recorded live at UC San Diego in May 2025, and discover what's possible. Come on, let's go into the impossible.

• 2:33Brian Keating?

  If you were to look up at any star in the galaxy, you would have to be really have some outrageous mountain of evidence to point to a star and say it has no planets around it. Or say it has one planet around it, or 152.3 planets or any number is ridiculous. But the most ridiculous thing is to say they have no planets around it. That zero, nothingness, flatness, zero, is a special number and needs to be explained. What is there evidence for life other than life on Earth? They would have to say as close as possible to zero. The question is, is there any life that started elsewhere at an issue and has come to our attention, either microbial or not? Two weeks ago, there was a claim

• 3:15Brian Keating?

  that there was a detection of the compound molecule called dimethyl sulfide, discovered in a planet orbiting another star 123 light years away.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Texas, Georgia. And I guess I'd like to just say a little bit more about polarization. And there is no Big Bang anymore.

• 3:41Brian Keating?

  Yes. You usually get that as this, I have a simple question. It's a big bang never happened. What's beyond the big bang? So first question is, what is polarization? So polarization is the least familiar property of light. Light has two other properties that you're very familiar with. It's intensity, how bright it is, and it's color. The red sign or green or whatever. That's called its spectrum. So there's intensity and its spectrum. And both of those can vary, right? The intensity over there is dimmer than the intensity outside. The color can have intensity too. And we can have a continuum of colors. There's an infinite number of colors in the rainbow. Now, that's just a very small sliver of electromagnetic radiation. What James Clerk Maxwell,

• 4:25Brian Keating?

  the father of electromagnetism realizes that light is actually electricity and magnetism oscillating alternately in what are called electromagnetic waves or radiation.

• 4:37Brian Keating?

  All waves of radiation, electromagnetic radiation, whether they're radio waves or microwaves or infrared light, X-rays. I used to come to this very building and get blasted with X-rays because my dentist was here. But they buried her and he... No, no, she's fine. So X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, optical light, they all travel at the same speed, the speed of light. It's a wave.

• 5:04Brian Keating?

  It can also act like a particle. That's what will confuse them. But when it acts like a wave, it has a defined orientation, up and down, left and right, like a rope. If you have a rope and two people hold a rope, and they shake it up and down. The plane that it's oscillating in is called a plane of polarization. Water waves can go up and down. That would be like their plane. Light, when it oscillates like this, it's the electric field. And we can tell that the light is polarized by looking at it with things that filter out one of the two different polarized components. It can only have a component up and down or left and right. And from that, you can make any pattern you like with it. That's how your glasses work. Because they don't have polarized sunglasses. Pay a little bit extra, they got a little P on there.

• 5:47Brian Keating?

  Why that occurs, or why that's valuable, is because light, when it interacts with matter, like water or the road, becomes slightly polarized. Therefore, you can get rid of some of the unwanted light, called glare, by putting on polarized sunglasses that reject and suppress one of those polarization states, the one that causes the glare in light. So if you ever take your polarized sunglasses, look at the surface of the ocean. You're actually able to see into the ocean with the polarized sunglasses because they defeat and get rid of the glare. So that's what polarization is. The reason that it's important for what we do is that light...

• 6:30Brian Keating?

  Gets polarized when it interacts with matter. Light from the sun is unpolarized. It hits the surface of the ocean, i.e. matter, becomes polarized, right? You can also get polarized from other types of matter. But when it hits the surface of the ocean, you get polarized. In the early universe, there was a primordial light that would become the cosmic microwave background. It was a form of heat that filled the entire universe. And that light and heat interacted with the primordial matter, the primordial soup. I showed you that can of Campbell's pork soup. Light was interacting with it, therefore it can become polarized. We then use the properties of the observed polarized light to reveal the matter, the

• 7:13Brian Keating?

  light, and the interaction between them. Polarization of light is used by satellites in space. A satellite in space can look at the ocean and the polarized light that comes off of it and learn about the direction the waves are going, learn about the salinity of the water, learn about the temperature of the water. Because the interaction of light with matter produces polarization. So that's why polarization is important. It's very unfamiliar because humans actually can't see it. About 1% of the population can see polarized light. And it's a phenomenon that actually could be bad if you do see it. It means that you've been on macular degeneration. So I won't do that. I'm not an optician. I'm not that kind of a doctor that helps people.

• 7:55Brian Keating?

  But you will notice when you look at certain things, like the screens are polarized too. So I left my polarized glasses at home. They don't have their polarized sunglasses with them. Nobody has them. You guys are all half of them. It really prevents cataracts and things like that. You have a pair? Yeah, can I see it? Okay. So I'll do a live demonstration. So there's light coming out of these screens. The light is coming from little tiny shutters that interact the visible light with the matter of the screen. And if these are really polarized, we're about to find out if he got ripped off because they do charge more money. Okay, so we're going to cover up Jonathan. And then you see when I put it like this, Jonathan goes away. That's because the, these glasses are only letting in light that's polarized like this. The light from the screen is polarized like this.

• 8:40Brian Keating?

  So it's completely orthogonal. So it blocks out all the light from here. Now, when I rotate it 40, 90 degrees, it goes to be completely transparent. But that's not all. Watch this. I don't have to rotate it 360 degrees to repeat that pattern. I only have to rotate it 180 degrees. So watch this, now it's completely transparent, or it's 50% transparent technically. Now it's 0%, right?

• 9:05Brian Keating?

  And now it's gonna go back, we're gonna put it this way. Now it's back to transparent. And now it's back to opaque. It darkens and lightens twice every time I rotate this once. That's because it's a wave, the wave only has an orientation, up and down. If I show you this wave going up and down, and you're looking from the edge, you can't tell if it's instantaneously going up, it's just like a straight line. So I'm gonna say that I could go like this. This is like a picket fence, it only lets in one polarization state. And that's why, a good friend do not get ripped off. Congratulations, thank you very much. Your next question was, what if there was no singularity in the Big Bang? If I interpret the question correctly, is that correct?

• 9:50Brian Keating?

  So it's a very difficult question to answer, but those are the alternatives that we're left with. It's akin to saying, what if the Earth is not flat? There's an infinite number of non-flat shapes for the Earth, do we agree on that? You could have a perfect sphere of any radius, and the number of different radii that are possible for the Earth or any sphere is infinite. Those from 0 to infinity, right? And I don't mean different shape, spherical, or donut shape. But it's like saying, how many different types of non-dogs are there in the animal kingdom? There's a lot, right? There's a lot of non-dog animals, it's not very specific. But if you say something specific, you're saying the Earth is flat.

• 10:33Brian Keating?

  There's only one flat Earth, right? It's perfectly flat. Okay, not saying that again out there listening. You know, Pradeep Kozla, my chancellor's listening, I don't believe in the flatter. But you're not able to, to actually disprove an infinity of other alternatives? You can disprove the one that makes the most precise claim. Actually, it's more precise to say, or you're saying something very specific when you say the Earth is flat. The curvature is exactly 0. If you make a triangle, all the plane, all the angles add up to be 180 degrees. Parallel lines do not meet, the laws of Euclid hold. So there's an infinite number of alternatives, but there are only a handful that are actually studied, and very few that have the kind of firepower of money,

• 11:18Brian Keating?

  of attention, of scientific researchers working on it, as does inflation. So we are actually looking for these waves of gravity, because if we detect them, it will rule out these other alternatives. One of which is the universe is eternal. Another one is that our universe came from a previous collapse of a single universe before it. Another one is the universe keeps cycling into and out of existence for all eternity. Another one is that the universe has exist in this temporary phase that we're in, where it had a big bang, but it will continue expanding forever. Another one will had a big bang, but that big bang is not a singularity. So there's many different alternatives. This is designed to basically refute as many of those as possible, because none of those predict

• 12:03Brian Keating?

  that this B-mode polarization pattern in the microwaves from the heat from the big bang will exist.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  A simple question, right? There's a question, but then does God exist? We've had some discussions about this issue of there being more than just the earth and so on. And this is just an outstanding kind of discussion that you gave.

• 12:26Brian Keating?

  Thank you.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  But I'm wondering, you know, as we get older, we're also thinking about what's going to happen for us in the future. And when we begin to think about religion. So now the question is, so you look at a Bible, and you look at it when it was written, God and Jesus saw. How does all of this relate to religion?

• 12:46Brian Keating?

  So literally, we're asking about this. So I always say, again, I say I believe in gravity, right? I have evidence for gravity. I'm actually Jewish, and my religion is Judaism. I actually practice Judaism. And but I was a Catholic altar boy in the Catholic Church. And I didn't have a bar mitzvah at age 13. I was an altar boy in Doutary, New York, in Westchester County. Then read the book. There's still seven more copies left. Thank you all very much. Kids are gonna eat some kosher food tonight.

• 13:16Brian Keating?

  Oh, um, I always say that I didn't have evidence for God, and that's fine. If you had evidence, you wouldn't need faith, right? It would be as foolish as not believing if you step off this second floor balcony, third floor balcony, that you'll end up in a pretty bad condition. The end of your life, as you've mentioned, will come much quicker than anticipated. So you want to have belief in things is where you don't have evidence. You can only have faith. In fact, the word for faith in Hebrew is amunah, which is where we get the word amen from in Christian and Judaism and Christianity and Judaism. And that is something by nature that's not necessarily provable.

• 13:57Brian Keating?

  And in most religious contexts, these big two that I'm familiar with, Judaism and Catholicism, you don't get credit for believing in things that are obvious. Like, you don't get credit for loving your child. You should love your child. It's not like a hard thing. It's hard to love your parent, though, right? I mean, for many of us, I mean, I made a joke the other day that I'm very familiar with divorce because my parents had three of them between us. So, you know, you don't have, and so it wasn't an easy child. It's, it's hard to do something, so therefore you have to be commanded to. In the Jewish tradition of the Torah, you're commanded to love God. That's kind of strange, right? God, it means that God doesn't see himself as intrinsically lovable.

• 14:42Brian Keating?

  Because again, you don't have to be commanded to love a beautiful puppy or your infant grandson, right? You just do. It's the natural order of it. So I don't look for my science. I don't look to the Torah for scientific reasoning. In fact, I mentioned that the actual creator, if you will, of the Big Bang Theory was a Belgian Catholic priest, in other words, a Catholic priest. He was a father, Le Matra. He was from Belgium. I actually knew, I know, one of his students and interviewed one of the students, who's an eminent cosmologist and an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin named Francis Halsin. He knew the originator of the Big Bang. It's amazing how many people you can know or be connected to. And that man knew Einstein very well. And Einstein knew people before him.

• 15:27Brian Keating?

  And as soon as you get back to Newton and Galileo, and it's not that hard to go hundreds of years back. But when you think about these, these people, they didn't want the scientific discovery that he made, unpredicted, really. He was predicting a theory. He told the Pope at the time, "Do not use this to justify Christianity or Catholicism. It's beyond the scope of what I'm conceding to be true." And it's good, because actually, some of the things he did predict are wrong. The universe didn't start as a primeval atom. There was no nucleus somewhere, sitting somewhere, and then it exploded. That whole concept makes no sense. The universe was denser and was like a primeval atom everywhere in space. But he didn't say that. So imagine the Pope surprising him by saying,

• 16:10Brian Keating?

  "This proves that the Big Bang's account is that consistent with the Old Testament." And he did do that, the Pope at the time, Gregory, I think it was. So it was a very uncomfortable thing. When later, it turns out, was God wrong? And there's actually scientists now who are in the Jewish tradition. There's a rabbi, a famous one named Gerald Schroeder, who tries to make the biblical account of the first seven days of creation match up with things like inflation, the formation of the elements, the hot density of the CMB. And it's complete and utter nonsense. And I tried to have him be in contact. I actually spoke on his home territory, Ashlatourah, at the Old City of Jerusalem two years ago,

• 16:54Brian Keating?

  when I finally did have my bar mitzvah. I actually had my bar mitzvah, 52 instead of 13. Better late than never. I'm told I'm not the first bar mitzvah kid to have his wife and kids with him. It's kind of weird. Apparently, someone had just done it, who was 13 in Auschwitz. So it was a pretty amazing experience to have at the Old City in the coat home. Anyway, all this is to say, I love to have them thought about. I love thinking about both of them. But I never let the science kind of impact my quest to understand God, if God exists. I admit, scientifically, I have to be open to the possibility God may not exist.

• 17:36Brian Keating?

  But you also have to be open that there's a possibility that God could exist.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Of course, I'm telling you, I laughed at the crude thought. Spoiled the intro. I'm gonna ask the impossible, which is, I'm gonna ask you to pull a negative. You said in the very beginning that the only Homo sapiens are the only ones who are aware of their own death. But I would suggest that that is perhaps not true. Because there are animals who plainly show a sense of danger. And they would only be able to show a sensitivity to dangerous situations.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  And it would seem to me that they would not be able to do that unless they had some concept of the results of dangerous situations. Which would mean they had some kind of concept of their end.

• 18:35Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that is a very interesting plane or response. I have heard similar complaints and responses. I have also heard it said that there are animals who actively appeared to engage in death like rituals. Elephants reportedly, when one is about to die, you know, they encircle the other ones when there's danger. I guess there's a famous thing that happened a couple of weeks ago, right after, right before Easter or after Passover. There's an earthquake and then at the San Diego Zoo, former Vice President Kamala Harris said that this was very inspiring to see the elephants circling around because they knew there was danger. I think danger and evolution are certainly related to one another, that the creatures that are most likely to persist in their germ line to disseminate their genes

• 19:19Brian Keating?

  are those that have a survival instinct. Whether that is extendable to the lowest animals on the, on the, you know, kind of pyramid or hierarchy of life. All animals or all creatures that have evolved, you could say, have some essence of wanting to extend their genes into the future. I talked to Richard Dawkins many times. I hosted him for an in-person conversation last fall. And he believes that the gene is the fundamental unit that has a desire to extend its existence and propagate. That means the gene, according to, is it Susan asked the question, who asked, okay. That means that in your conception, which I'm not vehemently disagreeing with, that even genes, which are assemblages of chromosomes,

• 20:04Brian Keating?

  which are themselves only assemblies of amino acids, which are the, so at what level does that actually get instantiated? Is it at the gene level? Well, the genes are just made of chemicals. So do chemicals have a perception? I think it's a stretch to say that they're aware of death in a way that my gentleman asked before, like, oh, we're thinking about our death. I interviewed Deepak Chopra, not someone that you think of as a great scientist, maybe perhaps, but he actually has written papers with multiple Nobel laureates that I've had the honor to speak to. And he said that the last 25 years of his life, he's just been preparing to die. Wasn't, he wasn't morbid about it. He was just thinking, I need to make plans for the preponderance of the state of my atoms will be in a state of death, which is a fact, right?

• 20:50Brian Keating?

  We spend more time, our atoms will recycle back in one way or another. So just think the, the letter of what you're saying is true, but the spirit of it is that we are imbued with a sense of what the Stoic philosophers called momentum more. That you should be aware that you're going to die in order to invest your likely, meaning now. I don't think an elephant is thinking, well, like, I'm gonna die someday, therefore I'm gonna, you know, they're, they're reacting on instinct or a coral fish or an octopus. You know, octopuses have existed for 60 million years without brains, in the same way that we have brains. There are jellyfish, sorry, jellyfish have existed for millions of years without brains, which gives hope to many of my colleagues.

• 21:32Brian Keating?

  That they too will have a long existence. So do they also, because they have a desire to preserve their genes, do they also have an awareness of death? I'm not disputing, you know, I'm not arguing. I'm just saying there's a distinction between the letter of what you're saying, which I agree with, and I think the deeper spirit or philosophy of it.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  I'm Charlie's account here in New York. Thank you, Brian Furtbury, and there's any perusion. I long to draw your attention to a graphic that showed up on the cover of the New York Times that you've presented in previous lectures to us.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  So it was the initial expansion, and then we have what we have now. And in between, there was this enormous inflation where many dimensions expanded by 10 to the 26th and so on and so forth. And so the question is, is that something that was stuck in there because they have no other way of getting from point A to point B? Or is there proof that such a rapid inflation took place?

• 22:32Brian Keating?

  It's really related to the first question, which is, you know, the alternatives to inflation. So we exist, and there are people that say everything is conscious. I'm not, I'm not interested in entertaining those, those kinds of discussions, but suffice to say, people believe that consciousness is elemental, literally. We exist, and so we are naturally wanting to explain how we came to exist. We are made of matter. They're materialists who believe everything can be explained by laws of physics, laws of matter, energy, assembly, thereof. Even if we can't explain it ourselves with our limited knowledge, we don't have to invoke something supernatural or whatever. Many people believe that, as I showed the final couple of slides, Paul Davies in particular, who is religious, he's a religious Christian, who says that actually a lot of what the

• 23:14Brian Keating?

  multiverse, which is an inescapable conclusion that comes from inflation theory, we cannot have inflation without the multiverse. And if the multiverse is true, it kind of looks like a lot of religion, but dressed up in scientific language. That's what he literally said. So the alternatives to it don't invoke that. That's why Stephen Weinberg found the other models much more tasteful because they didn't have at least the rhyme, as Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." It didn't seem like Genesis, and he liked that. And he was an atheist. It didn't influence us scientifically. So inflation, again, so what was the Big Bang designed to do? If you were back then, Jerry, you might say, wasn't the Big Bang just designed to explain why these galaxies were moving away from us?

• 23:59Brian Keating?

  In a sense, yes.

• 24:00Speaker 00

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• 24:30Speaker 06

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• 25:00Speaker 07

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• 25:30Brian Keating?

  Yes. In science, you could do one of two things. You could, you can kind of inductively understand observational data that you saw. Oh, Mercury doesn't orbit the way we think it should. Therefore, either gravity's wrong, or there's some planet closer to the sun than Mercury. And you can induce that there might be a law, like the law of general relativity. That's how it happened. Or you can make a prediction of something. You could say that because this, these equations also predict the universe is going to either expand or contract. It's not going to be static. That there's an inevitable deduction from observations, from empiricism. So if you were around back then, you might rightfully say, the Big Bang itself was created to patch up this problem that the universe is expanding. Fine. But then we have problems with the Big Bang.

• 26:15Brian Keating?

  There are things in the Big Bang that we can't explain. Why is the universe so uniform, so isotropic, so homogeneous? Why does it appear very stable, admissible, admissible to life? So we have to add on something to that to explain why that's happening. There's no such like first axiom that's given to us by God like the so-called piano axioms of arithmetic. No, we don't have those things. But we can say that there are simple explanations in the Occam razor sense. And those might be more likely to be true. Right now, there are some huge glaring problems with inflation. But it also explains a great deal of information about the universe, including theoretically, why did the universe start expanding at all?

• 26:59Brian Keating?

  It could have started expanding or contracting rather than expand. We wouldn't be here to answer that question. So, yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 08

  Actually, I got a couple of questions. I want to double check what I think you just had, which was, it would be, you know, how do you close it? Yeah, um, you have to have a multiverse if you have inflation.

• 27:23Brian Keating?

  So the reason I say the multiverse, and it is, again, it's not me. It's two fathers, founding fathers of inflation, at least in this modern sense, Andre Linde and Alan Guth, who actually came up with inflation to begin with. By the way, when inflation was created, it also had these huge flaws in it. And some people that have objected to inflation were some of the very first people 45 years ago who said that inflation isn't perfectly right. It needs to be corrected. And then they came up with their own theories that don't even have inflation whatsoever. But the two founding fathers that most people associate are Andre Linde and Alan Guth. They both seem to agree that you can't, um, you can't start off assuming there's a one. Universe means uni, one. Verse means to roll. And I don't like, but the most means I'm lying again.

• 28:07Brian Keating?

  I love et, I love etymology and I love etymology. Um, and apparently that's what it means. So Andre Linde screamed it and said, why do you assume that's a universe? Why don't you start with there being a multiverse? After all, if you were to look up at any star in the galaxy, you would have to be. Really have some outrageous mountain of evidence to point to a star and say it has no planets around it, or say it has one planet around it, or 152.3 planets, or any number is ridiculous. But the most ridiculous thing is to say they have no planets around it. That zero, nothingness, flatness, zero, is a special number and needs to be explained.

• 28:49Brian Keating?

  You couldn't explain it. All the evidence we have from a Kepler telescope is that every star has at least tens or hundreds or maybe thousands of planets, comets, icy bodies, asteroids, meteoroids, etc., etc. Except for the lucky few of you that got your own meteorites here. And so because of that, they say you are universe biased if you claim the multiverse is unnatural. And actually, 34 of them, including six Nobel Prize winners, wrote articles to like Scientific American to criticize the people that say the multiverse is wrong. It was like this Inquisition battle between the heretics and the true believers. It's a very contentious thing. That makes it very interesting to be a scientist to

• 29:31Brian Keating?

  possibly shed light, if you will, excuse the pun, on whether or not the universe did start with inflation. Because if it did, there would be a period of inflation, would lead to these gravitational waves. That would lead to the B-mode polarization that we thought we saw that was really dust. Now we think we can get rid of the dust and see if it's really there. And then that would mean we live in a multiverse, according to most people. Second question out of the James Webb Space Telescope, not as much as influential. It's not impacting the origin of the universe or inflation, because it sees back only, quote unquote, to when there was light that it can detect. Because like it's redshifted, a wavelength of light that's associated with visible light is younger, from younger galaxies

• 30:15Brian Keating?

  that are closer to us. And that's what the Hubble Space Telescope saw. The Webb telescope can see twice as far back in redshift, if you will, than the Hubble Space Telescope, because it can see infrared light. That's what it was designed to do. But none of them could see microwave light, which is what the oldest light in the universe is. The Hubble Deep Field that I showed you earlier on with Baby Einstein and Big Einstein, that's from about a billion years after the big. Webb made its own version, that's from about half a billion years, so 500 million, 1 to 500 million years after the big bang. There were actually galaxies around 100 million years or so, 200 million years after the big bang. The microwave background goes back to 100,000 years after a thousand times farther back in

• 30:59Brian Keating?

  time. So the web can't really tell us anything about inflation. Only the CMB could. Next question.

• 31:06Speaker 09

  Hi, my name is Janet Gwynn. This is probably a super silly question, but every time I hear about the universe expanding. So if the universe is everything that we can see out there, what is it expanding into?

• 31:19Brian Keating?

  Another very simple trivial question. This is why people always ask this question. And for a while, I was like, well, I could really spend a lot of time talking about it. But in reality, it's a very good question. It's a very fundamental question. It goes back thousands of years. I think it was like, his name sounds like Achilles, but I can't remember. It's not Achilles. It's somebody else with stronger feet. But he said, if I go to the edge of the universe and I throw a spear, what is it going to? It's exactly like what you're asking. So it turns out, there are a couple of ways to answer this question. One way is to be flippant and say it's not expanding into anything. And then people will make these analogies of balloons. And the balloon will be the following. I'll

• 32:02Brian Keating?

  have these little dots on it, on the surface of the balloon. And then I'm blowing up the balloon. It's getting bigger. The space between the dots, you could draw them looking like galaxies, they'll be moving apart from each other. Do you agree? And then every galaxy could say, every other galaxy is moving away from me. Therefore, I'm the center of this two dimensional universe. Okay, does that make sense, Janet? So that's a two dimensional analog. Unfortunately, there's a lot of problems with that because you're blowing up a two dimensional object inside of a three dimensional room. So it is expanding somewhere. The balloon does have a center. But now imagine that you had this infinite sheet, which the human brain really can't visualize infinity. But imagine this two dimensional sheet, and you just keep stretching it out. But it goes in all directions. You can't see the end of it. You can't see, and

• 32:45Brian Keating?

  you're just sitting on one part of it where there happens to be someone painted a galaxy on it. But your eyes can only see light that goes along this sheet. That's the concept. It was actually introduced by this wonderful writer in the 1880s. I'm doing a special podcast this tomorrow about it. I'm called Edwin Abbott, and he wrote a book called Flatland. It was the first book on science I ever read. And the book is written by a character and his name is A Square. And he is a square and he lives in two dimensional world called Flatland. And there are creatures that live in there and their their number of sides on their polygon, because that's all that could fit in there are polygons. The number of sides determines your social caste.

• 33:27Brian Keating?

  So a square is kind of like, you know, a little bit above average IQ. Triangles are low IQ. They're considered to be like laborers and they get the lowest, they get the lowest status of the men. I'll get to what the women are in a second. And then the high priests, the presidents, the governors, they're circles. So the number of sides of your polygon determines your social caste system, your stature. Women are lines. Now, he was writing in Victoria era England to point out how sexist that culture was and how racist it was. Because the laborers were basically Indians and blacks and from Africa. So he was writing a social commentary about how incredulous that that was and how bad that was for society. But leave those aside.

• 34:12Brian Keating?

  He teaches you what it's like. One day, he sees this shape come into existence. And at first, he thinks it's a little baby circle coming towards him. And then the circle gets bigger in real time, it's like he's growing. And then the circle shrinks like he dies and goes away. And over time, he realizes what he saw. It was a sphere that came from the third dimension. Oh, and by the way, it's forbidden, it's illegal, it's a thought crime to consider or talk about the third dimension. And in so doing, he reveals a narrative and teaches us how it is to visualize the fourth dimension. Our brains are amazing. We take in two dimensional information. Our retinas are two dimensional, right? There's just these lab, like detectors on your phone. There's a camera on your phone, it's a two dimensional array of transistor.

• 34:57Brian Keating?

  But your wet retina, your wet CCD camera in your, in your head is basically two dimensional. We have two of those and from the two of them, we can make a stereographic image and kind of reconstruct them. But I can't see into you. I can't really see three dimensions. I see the surface of a three dimensional object. So too, we can't make a perfect analogy for the expansion of the universe into anything, because it's not expanding into another dimension, like the third plus one dimension. It is already the third plus one, it's the fourth dimension. So space and time together, and humans cannot really visualize that. But listen to the podcast tomorrow, and you'll get this example of what it's like to imagine

• 35:38Brian Keating?

  yourself as a square, or a triangle, or a line, a very dangerous creature, because the lines can, the sharper, the more acute your angle is, the more dangerous. In this hutch. Okay, next question.

• 35:51Speaker 10

  We should have spoken further aside from your topic today, more things that you see bring up on your podcast. I just finished a book by Sarah H. Walker and her Assembly Apophisis, which, you know, argues that we may be the only life of the type of intelligence that we are in the universe. I also know from your friend, basically, what are your thoughts about the existence of life and us having it?

• 36:24Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so thanks, Eunice. So the question is, if you didn't hear it, what are my thoughts about the existence of life outside of the Earth, presumably? Although you guys do know what the SD in UCSD stands for? Does anybody know? The University of California, Socially Dead. Socially Dead, because the students are still brilliant, they only work on snow. They don't have as much of a social life as probably they deserve, but then again, they're much more. So if you asked me right now, if you said, "I'm going to kill your pet orchid," or whatever, your cuttlefish, if you don't answer truthfully, and you put a gun to any scientist's head right now and said, "What is there evidence for life other than life on Earth?", they would have to say as close as possible to zero.

• 37:09Brian Keating?

  There's almost no evidence. The only evidence in fact for life outside of the Earth is in space, and it's from the venting of excrement from the International Space Station. And there are microbes that can survive in harsh radiation and low vacuum and cold temperatures. There are also probably those microbes on Mars, or creatures called water bear, pyrograves, they can exist without, you know, basically be dormant, but they originated from Earth. So the question is, is there life that started elsewhere, not from the earth? And it went out to the solar system. And right now, despite all the searching, according to me, there's been a lot of searching. According to my friend Jill Tarter, who is really the inspiration for the movie Contact with Jodie Foster.

• 37:54Brian Keating?

  It's a great movie. I just watched it recently. Again, with my kids for the first time. It's kind of cool. Thirty years old, alright? But there's a scene in the movie, if you remember, when Bill Clinton makes an appearance. And he comes out and he's talking about the discovery of life in the universe. And it's not CGI. He actually did talk about the discovery of life in the universe. And what had happened was in 1996, there was a meteorite, not unlike the meteorites that you got if you buy one of the many copies of Listen Above Cry. And it was found in Antarctica and it had what was claimed at the time to be microbes, embedded fossils of microbes. Embedded in it, meaning that there was life that had originated on Mars that made its way to Earth, landed in Antarctica,

• 38:38Brian Keating?

  and then was dead. It wasn't alive anymore, but there was evidence of fossil life from Mars. And it was clear it came from Mars. I actually have a fossil on Mars. A fossil, not a fossil on Mars. I actually have a Martian meteorite, which is very expensive. Much more, I can't give them away because they're thousands of dollars per gram. But if you have a large podcast invitation for me, I might bring one on. I gave it to Joe Rogan and I gave him a little sliver. And I think he tried to think it was like a drug or something, so he smoked it or drank it or ate it. Anyway, and these are very expensive, but it shows that material goes from the earth through Mars and Mars to the earth and vice versa. The question is, is there any life that started elsewhere at the initial and has come to our attention, either microbial or not?

• 39:23Brian Keating?

  Two weeks ago, there was a claim that there was a detection of the compound molecule called dimethylsofend, discovered in a planet orbiting another star 123 light years away.

• 39:37Brian Keating?

  And then it was pointed out that that only is produced on Earth by humans and chemistry laboratories here at UCSD and you can buy a gallon of this stuff apparently, or it's produced by algae and microbes in the sea environment. And so it got a lot of attention. It was in the New York Times and people made a big deal about it. And then people started to point out, including people like Sarah Walker, who you mentioned, Adina, and others who I've had on the show, started pointing out that it was actually discovered on comets before that. And it's been in our own solar system. Now, clearly, there's no chemistry factory, there's no life, there's no microorganisms on that. So it's very premature to think about that. But even if it existed, this planet is five times the size of Earth, the size of Neptune.

• 40:20Brian Keating?

  There's no advanced life, there's no Netflix coming from this star or this planetary system. And so far as we've detected, there's no proof that's beyond, you know, a credible amount that life exists anywhere but here on Earth. So it's an open question. So right now, I say it's a very low probability. It may only exist in one planet, in one instance in every galaxy. And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, so there might be tons and tons and tons of planets and life, but we are so far away from them, we'll never encounter them. As Carl Sagan said, if that's true, it's an awful waste of space, but, you know, the universe is under no obligation to make, you know, high efficiency use of its space.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  This is fascinating, thank you. So if studies really depend on the brilliant minds and the physical equipment that you have at the time of the study, what's your take on how AI will affect your studies?

• 41:16Brian Keating?

  I'm really curious, how many of you use AI? Okay. Um, so, yeah, someone asked me about the movie that I showed where the opticians in the Netherlands in 1600. Uh, that was made purely from AI. I actually had a prompt, I said, sketch, you know, a Dutch practical maker, you know, taking classes and then that, meaning the printing, the printing press then being used as an ice axe. And it starts with an image and I said, animate this, and I couldn't know, so it's like cool stuff. And it's not perfect, it made some weird, there's some weird choices that it made that Steven Spielberg probably wouldn't make, but it was free. Or twenty dollars a month. I use it all the time and it's really leveraged and allowed

• 41:58Brian Keating?

  me to do a lot more than I could have done otherwise in terms of supervising students, analyzing research papers. Every single, when I started in graduate school, there is this website, it's called the archive. And every day, they would be published four papers about cosmology, maybe. Nowadays, it's like 400 papers, sometimes a thousand papers in my specific field. And there's literally 400 different fields that are listed on the archive with an accent at the end. And it's also a sponsor of Edge and Simon. It's an incredible resource. I use it all the time. The question is, can it do the things that physicists do? Is my job in danger? And can it expand upon what we can do? Again, I'm kind of a little

• 42:41Brian Keating?

  bit of a contrarian, or people call me a downer. I don't believe that there's abundance of life in our galaxy, or let alone beyond our, our local corner of Earth and solar system. I also don't believe that AI is going to reproduce the laws of physics in a way that are produce new laws of physics. And for example, predict new particles, or observe dark energy and detect what it is or dark matter without an intimate partnership with people. There are stories abounding about how scientists were able to do things purely on intuition, which we don't really understand. It's almost like art. Like, have you seen some of the AI art? It's nice, but there's also something uniquely missing from it that

• 43:24Brian Keating?

  is seemingly human. On the other hand, I took my kids, I took my son last month to, after I went on Neil deGrasse Tyson's, I took my son to meet him. And Neil is his favorite astrophysicist. Very painful. And then I took him to the Guggenheim. Because that's, yeah, I went there when I was a kid. I tried to ride a skateboard down those, the rotunda, they kept me out permanently on them. And the rotunda's closed. But I took him and we're walking past this thing. And we walk past it. It's about the size of this logo. It's black lines, and there's a stripe, and it's behind glass, and there's an armed guard next to it. And it's a $68 million Mondrian. Beautiful to some people. And then literally, we're going down the staircase to go to that gift shop. And there's an electrical access panel.

• 44:09Brian Keating?

  And it looks identical, and no one's guarding it. And it's so subjective. So I'm not saying that there's this machine and humans do this uniquely thing. AI can do much better art, in my opinion, than that piece of monitor. I didn't care for it. I'm not here as an artist, but I didn't care for that. There was other stuff, too, that was like a dinner plate set up with a TV in the middle. And I was like, 100 million of them. But there is a modern art. And the point is, the kind of missing ingredient that no one's been able to do is say, set AI loose and do what a human can do. And I'm not saying it's impossible, just like I'm not saying life is impossible outside of the earth. But what I am saying is that we have developed a very specific type of AI. And like the iPhone, it's going to be a victim of its own success.

• 44:53Brian Keating?

  Does anyone ever, does anyone have an iPhone here? Does anyone gone, does anyone have an Android here that used to have an iPhone? Has anyone, in other words, migrated, you have, wow, you have my, I'll start. It's very hard to do that. They get you locked into this garden, and I can talk to your wife, and you could, oh, I know where she is. It's very hard to, I'm sure you could teach me how to do it, I'm just too lazy. But that's called lock it. When you get something, the technology is so successful, it's very hard to break out of it. AI is like that, in my opinion. And what is AI right now? It's computer processing chips called graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are very good at making, solving math problems that are good for games. That produce images like Minecraft and rendering this extremely fast, extremely efficiently.

• 45:37Brian Keating?

  It does those called matrix and linear algebra, very accurate. That means it has to discretize the universe in order to make it seem accurate. And the more densely it can discretize the universe, the more pleasing it looks, the more realistic it looks to the human eye. So too, there are LLMs, ChatGPT. I use it to make those pictures. But it's very different to use a language than to use pure. Imagine a creature that doesn't know English or Mandarin, but it does know all mathematics. It somehow knows all and is able to construct proofs and arguments, which by the way, no AI can do right now. No AI can prove Fermat's Last Theorem or the Pythagorean theorem without a lot of input given to it ahead of time. You don't just turn these things on. So I'm optimistic that at least for the foreseeable future, because of the success

• 46:22Brian Keating?

  of GPUs plus LLMs, that'll be very hard to get new types of physics engines that solve physics.

• 46:29Speaker 08

  Okay, last question. I'm David Nausi. As a kid, I was ambitious. I wanted to know everything that I was to know. I did well in college. I did well in medical school in retirement. I continued to read. I was stymied and humiliated by Schrodinger's camp. So in my disney, I asked the professor what to do. And he said, draw a circle and then put a dot in the middle of it. Well, my question to you is, in comparison, my mental skill, how large is Brian Keating's job?

• 47:11Brian Keating?

  Uh, wow. I wish my mother-in-law was here to refute that question. I am very impressed just saying it. I'm looking out at you guys. You probably are successful enough and have done well enough in your life, in your families, in your careers, and in your retirement to devote what could be leisure time spent, you know, on the beach or doing whatever you want on the golf course, not to say anything negative about it. But he chose to enrich your life by coming to a talk, which I've hoped to deliver some value to and inspire some questions. And I think there could be a selfish purpose to that in that you actually do maintain more mental agility the more that you learn. And I love the fact, I think that's one of Oscar's missions, is to never stop learning. There's

• 47:54Brian Keating?

  no point in stopping learning. I think when you stop learning, I'm also a pilot and I'm always trying to learn new types of airplanes or systems or get new ratings. And I've worked my way up pretty far. And one of my flight instructors said, the day you stop learning is the day you stop living.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG: HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.