Proving the Big Bang Happened on Fraser Cain

Prof. Brian Keating and Fraser Cain discuss the evidence for the Big Bang and the impact of the James Webb telescope on our current understanding of the Universe! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Well, today I'm joined by my good friend, Dr. Brian Keating. Hey, Brian, how's it going?

• 0:04Brian Keating?

  It's great to be with you, Fraser. How are you?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Good, good. It's been a couple of years since we talked last. Have you won any Nobel Prizes in that intervening time?

• 0:15Brian Keating?

  I did not, which is a good thing for sales of my book. You know, if I, if I win the Nobel Prize, I have to put out a retraction to the book, which is quite awkward if anybody has ever tried to retract a book. It's pretty damn hard.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, nobody wants to do that. So that's, that's probably best that you don't win a Nobel Prize.

• 0:34Brian Keating?

  I did win best father. I did win best father this past June.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Are you sure? Did the Plunk satellite perhaps provide some kind of counter evidence?

• 0:47Brian Keating?

  That's right. They found, you know, there was space schmutz dust. Oh, by the way, Fraser, so for your audience in the US only, I want to do a special giveaway because you have the best, well, second best audience in the universe. Come on, I gotta give credit to my, but for your members in the US, I'm doing a giveaway to the first 100 people that sign up to my mailing list at briankeating.com/list. I'm going to send them the villain of my last book, which is a piece of space dust, a tiny little meteorite.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 1:18Brian Keating?

  It'd be sent to anyone, but not in dangerous Canada. My, my shipping department does not allow me to send and export to the Great White North. But if you're in the US, you can enter briankeating.com/listed. You may win one of these 100 meteorites.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Fantastic. I've got a, I don't know if you can see it behind me, right over there. I've got a one pound iron meteorite.

• 1:40Brian Keating?

  I'll grab it. Well, your Boca, your Boca is so luxurious and lush.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Hold on one second.

• 1:45Brian Keating?

  Very hard to.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Oh, it's time to.

• 1:50Brian Keating?

  Nice.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  A little weather.

• 1:52Brian Keating?

  That is, okay, people out there, that is substantially larger than what you will receive. You will receive the, the logarithm of that if you win a little pieces, but it's the same one. Yeah, it's from Argentina. It's Campo di Cielo, probably.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's Campo di Cielo. Yeah.

• 2:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah, those are wonderful and they're highly magnetic susceptibility and you could play around with a magnet and you'll get some goodies and learn about meteorites.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love having meteorites, metal meteorites. It really feels like a chunk of space metal. Now, I

• 2:25Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  I give them away to people too, and I tell them that it gives them a superpower, like not a really powerful superpower, but something that is, you know, a mild superpower, like maybe it won't rain when you go on mountain bike rides, that kind of thing. So.

• 2:39Brian Keating?

  That's right. You will, you will avoid a derailleur accident, you know, your next downhill trip. Yeah, I mean, if nothing else, you can, you know, impress people at cocktail parties when they start resuming again after the pandemic.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  All right. So for people who don't know who you are, like the problem with us having talked many times is we know who each other is, but, but people might not know who you are. So who are you and what do you do?

• 3:02Brian Keating?

  Yeah. So I am an experimental cosmologist. So I work on hair and nails. I treated Fraser, you know, I made his haircut what it is today. Why so famous? His beard is the next, or his goat beard is on my list. No, so I'm not a cosmetologist, although the prefix is the same. And of course means beauty in Greek, as, as many of you know, but I am not a, an experimentalist in the classical sense, like my biology friends are experimental biologists. They can go down to the lab and take a frog and do some, you know, experiment on it and see if it doesn't happen or does happen to a control frog. I don't know what they're doing over there in the biology department.

• 3:45Brian Keating?

  I'm actually, the dean's got to take a look at those guys. But what we do is we build telescopes. We build telescopes and technology and detectors and deploy them all over the world to sites never before really utilized for capacity at this level, including the South Pole, Antarctica, including Chile and the Atacama Desert. We are operating with my colleagues and friends in the Simons Observatory. Not only the world's highest observatory, but the highest construction project. We have to build these telescopes. Thousands and thousands of tons of material and earth that have to be moved around. We have to build it. We have to move it. We have to design it, power it. Imagine getting all the diesel fuel up to seventeen thousand two hundred feet.

• 4:30Brian Keating?

  And then we have to get the data and analyze massive data set all in the service of trying to understand empirically. Observation. That's what science is, right? And you've had on many lovely theoreticians, you know, some of my best friends are theorists. I don't know if I'd let my my daughters marry one, but but but they're they're really good friends of mine. Brian Greene, Michio Kaku.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:50Brian Keating?

  I was just talking to Sir Roger Penrose on my podcast, which is my my night job, I guess. I don't know. I'm a podcaster, YouTuber, take, try to, you know, kind of learn as much as I can from Frasier and all the awesome work you do. You guys do at University Today. You guys really do a wonderful service to the community. And I felt as a paid scientist, paid by the community of taxpayers, at least here in the US, and supported at a public university here in California, I'm a state employee. So I've started to think, you know, how can I give back to the people that pay my salary? And one of those ways is to do outreach in the spirit of a of a of a Fraser Cain. So I think part of that gives me the joy that I don't always get to receive when I'm talking to a contractor

• 5:33Brian Keating?

  about why the diesel delivery, you know, was late and this concrete didn't cure. Those are conversations I have to have, but conversations I want to have are like these and with my guests. And I realize many of them are theorists, you know, theorists get a lot of attention. They get a lot of notoriety that there's, you know, new theories, wormholes, black holes, other kinds of holes. And and maybe there's parallel universes, multiverses, we'll talk about some of that. And maybe there's new particles and superstrings. I've had on all those folks. I've talked to fourteen Nobel Prize winners. And most of them were theorists, but not all. And and and, you know, to me, I want to get out there to a young Brian Keating or, you know, Brianna Keating,

• 6:16Brian Keating?

  that you can build stuff that takes the data, that allows these geniuses to do the theoretical investigation, to not prove their theory, right? I think that's a huge misconception. I'm not in the job of proving your theory, my theory, anything right. I'm in the business of proving everything else wrong. And that can only be done by having data and the data only come from telescopes of the kind that my colleagues can build.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, the experimenters are the unsung heroes of the science world. I mean, really, the theorists and the experimenters work hand in hand, but, but people don't know what the experimenters are doing and yet the day in, day out, the hard fought, hard won victories in science often come by the results that come from the experimenters.

• 7:05Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the most successful ways you can approach science as a practicing scientist is look for inconsistencies in what's already known. For example, the inconsistencies of the orbit of Mercury led Einstein to think about the theoretical implications of general relativity. But he wouldn't have had, you know, the, those data to even stoke his imagination had there not been very accurate telescopes and data built by very, very deep thinkers and constructors and project managers and leaders. It's just a different type of physics. It's as different, I think, as, you know, say, a theoretical physicist might be from

• 7:46Brian Keating?

  a biologist or something. It's almost a different, a different occupation. And it's just, we put the adjective experimentalist or theorist in front. But it is true that theorists kind of get all this glory and I think of it kind of as, you know, I tease my, my friends who work on software. You know, I can program BASIC or, you know, I can, you know, do those SWIFT studios to make an app or something maybe. But I'm like, you know, theory is kind of like software. Like it's very easy to make a ton of software. I mean, you can just make an infinite loop to make a stupid example.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Generate a bunch of data. Yeah, yeah.

• 8:20Brian Keating?

  Yeah, but to build an experiment, even, even like a simple one, it takes a lot of, of hard work and I'm not making value judgments at all, but, but I want to give people a glimpse into the daily life of it. That was my first book, Losing the Nobel Prizes. What does it feel like a memoir to? Approach the greatest, you know, questions in science. Did the universe have a singular origin? Are there multiple universes? What is the nature of the types of of alternative models from the microscopic to the macroscopic? And that gave me great joy. But you know, it's also kind of this niche that I don't think many people talk about. So a lot of what I'm doing on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, is to go through the latest and greatest experiments, not done by me. I mean, sometimes I'll bring in some footage

• 9:05Brian Keating?

  from me in the lab or my students in the lab. But oftentimes, it's something wholly different. The lifetime of the neutron, we didn't know the lifetime of the neutron to better than a few seconds. And we used to think about the Higgs boson, which could last for, you know, a trillionth of a second. We didn't know the age that the neutron gets to in ripe old retirement before it dies to better than a second, you know, a part in a thousand or worse. So I did a video about that experiment on Long Island and other places. And it's just really fascinating to to to explicate it in a way that a young person can appreciate, or even experts in the field. And so that's kind of what I do as an overall worldview.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  All right. Well, enough log rolling. I'm going to put you to work now. So, you know, in terms of experimenters, astronomers have gotten one of the most powerful experimenting tools, instruments in their hands in the form of the James Webb Space Telescope. And we've gotten a couple of months of of experience working with James Webb so far. From an astronomer's point of view, and especially someone who really studies the early universe, I mean, your focus is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the evidence for cosmic inflation. That's a little earlier than James Webb, but I'm sure there are implications. So what

• 10:26Speaker 00

  has been your experience with James Webb so far, just in terms of, you know, in the science that you're seeing coming out of it so far?

• 10:36Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, actually, not very much of what it's done has had, you know, direct implication for the exact type of science that I do. Just taking a very big step back, we think the universe began in an incredibly hot, dense phase. We don't know if that was a singular one-time event. We don't know if that was a singularity, a quantum divide by zero error, where there's infinite amount of of energy density or matter density. We don't know, those are open questions of the type that the cosmic microwave background can explore. But Webb can't really say that much about that phase in the universe. What it was designed to do is kind of be a Hubble Space Telescope with redder filters on it, with higher resolution,

• 11:21Brian Keating?

  more massive telescope. But as you build a telescope, you have to be cognizant of the size of the objects you're looking for, how far away they might be, how near they might be, but also what the expansion of the universe will do to those objects. So while it's true that Hubble's early observations of the of the galaxies and their recessional properties, of Estos Slifer and others, those did have an implication for an origin story, a cosmic big bang later to be called. But it didn't necessarily have, you know, and it's make anything quantitative about how the universe actually began. So to separate what Webb does and what I do, Webb is looking for, you know, actual objects. What I'm looking

• 12:06Brian Keating?

  for are not objects, but they're more properly called structures. They're loosely bound conglomerations of ordinary matter, dark matter, light, neutrinos, and other types of properties that because it's the oldest light that we could ever hope to see, it originates from 370,000 years after the fusion of the elements, which some people incorrectly, you know, conflate with the origin of time or the big bang itself. Really what astronomers and cosmologists mean is when do the elements form? Because that's the the literal first time we had fossils, we had hard evidence, we had chunks of matter, if you will. To actually look at and compare with what we see today, we could, uh, we could actually do

• 12:50Brian Keating?

  that in a quantitative fashion. After that comes the cosmic microwave background, which is followed by an epoch of extreme boredom and darkness, a plasma of unimaginable, you know, lack of, uh, facility and, uh, lack of, of interesting objects. Kind of like, well, I was going to say, you know, some parts of Northern Saskatchewan, but I, I'll say some parts of the Mojave Desert down here in California. It's just flat barren. There's a little ripples in it, but other than that, not very interesting. And then the universe lit up. Then it began producing stars and galaxies. And then much, much later, planets and people and podcasters. And where Webb comes in, not on the podcast side, but, uh, we'll, we'll probably get to

• 13:32Brian Keating?

  other aspects, but really this bound structures and including what's the most interesting thing that I'm hoping for from Webb, uh, since I don't use it, I can say what I want to see from it is, is evidence for life in the universe. Cause I'm actually very pessimistic that there's life, let alone intelligent life in the universe. We can get into that later. Uh, but, uh, but I'd be very open to it. And I think a good scientist should be open to all these different ideas. But, you know, in terms of what it can say about my day job, it can't really, it's not really a threat to my employment.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  But aren't there implications? Like you say, you're looking for structures, these large scale structures in the universe that are demonstrated by the fluctuations, the density fluctuations, temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Don't those, you know, evolve over time to the larger scale structures that we know and enjoy today? And won't Webb be able to try to fill in the missing pieces from there to now?

• 14:34Brian Keating?

  It, it will fill in some of the missing pieces, but mostly what it's doing is an astrophysics experiment. It's exploring how did the gas that was left over when the universe, you know, finished making the plasma and the hydrogen and the helium and the cosmic microwave background, uh, plasma that cooled and condensed until it became. So really, nothing much happened for millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. But, uh, but the actual import of it, it's kind of like looking at, um, a frog. Let's go back to my, my biology friend. So you got a frog. That's a biological structure. If you studied it and say you, you even understand how it evolved. It comes from a tadpole. The tadpole comes from a sperm and an egg cell.

• 15:18Brian Keating?

  I don't know how, you know, PG 13, we can keep it here. Uh, but, but anyway, it comes from frog, mommy frog. Yeah. Mommy frog and daddy frog. Right.

• 15:28Brian Keating?

  And, uh, but you couldn't necessarily say by watching the evolution. Let's say Webb pushes us from the, you know, mature frog of Hubble to the tadpole phase. It really wouldn't tell you much about the origin of life in the universe, or even of the theory of evolution, or even of DNA, right? I mean, we had frogs for thousands of years that people didn't uncover DNA. So we have to make a distinction. One is a predicate on the other. I don't need what Webb's doing to do what I'm doing, but it, it can be looked for for consistency checks on certain things. But here's another example. And of course, hopefully we'll get to this. There's a huge manufactured kind of clickbait controversy going on, courtesy of just one, uh, you know, team or type of, uh, of, uh, of player,

• 16:13Brian Keating?

  um, who's been doing this since the time of the Hubble Deep Field in the 1990s.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:17Brian Keating?

  He even wrote a book called The Big Bang Never Happened in 1991, uh, before the Hubble Deep Field. So, uh, we'll get into that because he has a new video out today where he's attacking me on his channel.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Oh, I like that term, the, the manufactured clickbait. It's, it is, it is a, it is funny. Well, so let's, let's talk, let's, let's get into that right now then. You know, the, the discovery that is being made in the images that are coming out from Webb, that it is seeing galaxies that are better evolved, more fully evolved, more modern looking than the kinds of galaxies that astronomers were hoping to see. So is that true?

• 16:57Brian Keating?

  Well, I wouldn't say hoping. I would say maybe expecting based on previous data. Yeah. Right, which came from Hubble, right? So the first question I asked when I saw this paper and actually on my video, I did a, I did a one solo video about the paper when it just came out or the article in this IAI newsletter or the website. And then I did another one with Professor Garant Lewis down in New South Wales and Australia, or Sydney, rather. Yeah. And we're good friends and we, we, we went through it. And then on that video, the lead author of, of the paper, Leonardo, of the paper that said panic at the discs, which is obviously like a joke, he is like commenting on why it's irrelevant, what his team showed.

• 17:39Brian Keating?

  I mean, you'd think a scientist would be really cheerful to know, look, I've over, I've overthrown this, this notion. The big bang has these problems in it and I'm the first author on this first paper to really, no, nothing of the sort is really true. Because a lot of the data that is seen there is 100% consistent with what Hubble saw. In other words, Hubble saw formed galaxies at high redshift. It couldn't go as high a redshift because it didn't have the infrared filters that James Webb has. But no one was taking seriously, in other words, this, this paper that are this article that claimed the big bang never happened. Could have been written, you know, 10 years ago. In fact, it was written 10 years, every 10 years it sort of comes out. Why does it keep doing that? Because we keep getting better and better, more and more accurate data.

• 18:22Brian Keating?

  And to quote, I think it was John Maynard Keynes, you know, when the facts change or when the evidence changes, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? Meaning that like he's, he's basically ascribing to the big bang features that have no pertinence to it on a professional astronomical scenario. And worse yet, the most fundamental observable in cosmology. Since and since the beginning of cosmology as a quantitative science, thanks to Hubble, is redshift. And there is only one thing that the models that are being proposed that so-called prove the big bang never happened. The one thing they cannot account for is redshift.

• 19:06Brian Keating?

  In other words, the most crucial observable is being completely ignored or not understood. And and the very highly accurately studied data by professional astronomers is being laughed at and called into question as if it disproves the Big Bang itself. So again, getting back to the analogy of these frogs, it's like now we see a tadpole. And it's the claim is being made that DNA doesn't have a double helix structure. And that Darwin is incorrect, there's no evolution. When it may be true that DNA is wrong or that the evolution is wrong, but these data say nothing about it because merely what's happened, and I say merely, but it's a tremendous amount of work, Webb can see back, say, twice as far in time.

• 19:50Brian Keating?

  So that when these galaxies were hundreds of millions of years old, 200 to 300 millions of years old, and Hubble saw when they were 500 to 600 million years old. If that constitutes a crisis, I think, you know, it might be good for for certain people to see a, you know, a therapist about this because it's really not a crisis whatsoever.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  But I mean, you, as a scientist, you're delighted when the when you discover that you're wrong because now you're closer to being right.

• 20:19Brian Keating?

  That's right. And I made the analogy in a couple of conversations I've done so far. It's kind of like the flat earth, right? If you think the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you think the earth is a perfect sphere, you're also wrong because it's not a perfect sphere. It bulges at the equator, has a little bit pear shaped nerpel on the top. I don't know. But it's not a perfect sphere either, but you're less wrong, as Asimov used to say, you're less wrong if you think it's a sphere than if you think it's flat. And putting all these things on top, as I said, a good thing to do is to look for inconsistencies. So there truly would be no one more excited than a professional cosmologist to learn that the Big Bang is missing. And we know it's missing thing. No theory is complete.

• 21:04Brian Keating?

  But when you point to inconsistency, so here's a good example that I think we might have even talked about a couple of years ago when I was last on honored to be on, and that's the Hubble tension. And I've had on Adam Reece many times and Brian Schmidt. And others on my podcast, we talk about it. And what's the crisis? The crisis there is that the cosmic microwave background measurements done by Planck and WMAP reveal a value for the Hubble constant that is about 68 in these weird units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. The measurements done by Adam Riess and his team using the Hubble telescope and Cepheid variables and Wendy Friedman's group and Tipper, the red giant branch, they are advocate

• 21:46Brian Keating?

  for a slightly bigger of value of the Hubble constant. Now, why is the Hubble constant important? Well, it's really how you get the redshift, which I said earlier is the most important number in cosmology, observable in cosmology. So you use, you want to construct the redshift distance relationship and the proportionality constant is Hubble's constant. It also gives you a handle on the age of the universe. The reciprocal of the Hubble constant has units of time. Kilometers divided by megaparsecs is dimensionless. And then you've got these seconds per second. So it ends up telling you the age of the universe. Now, these two experiments are off. One says 68, one says 72. They're off by a factor of four in these units. It turns out to be about 9% discrepancy.

• 22:28Brian Keating?

  That is incredible that you can make a prediction based on what this universe was like when it was 380,000 years, propagate that forward 13.8 billion years, and you agree to within 9%. And, and, and none of them are saying that the Hubble constant is, as, you know, is effectively zero, because that would be a static universe. And none of them are saying it's infinite. Who even exquisitely calibrated and knowledge about accurate knowledge about how fast the universe is expanding, and two different methods disagree. And that, that is a reason. But what was that a reason for? It's a reason for excitement.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:08Brian Keating?

  It's a reason to go deeper, as you say, to learn more about why this is happening. It's fascinating time to be alive and it'll turn out one of them is right, one of them is wrong, or it'll turn out there's some new physics that we didn't understand.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  And that's the most exciting one. Like, I think of all the choices, like the one you're like, we don't understand what the universe was doing at different ages, or we don't understand all of the, of the, the factors and variables that are feeding into the expansion of the universe. That is exciting. And it's weird to me, like, for you as a cosmologist. To, to receive messages from people who tell you that you're being close minded.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  What to, because you won't accept change and new theories and so on, has got to be exhausting. Because you can't wait to change your mind. You can't wait to get new evidence. The problem is not the excitement. It's not like you're being dogmatic about the, the, the theories that you understand them. It's that the counter theories have failed to deliver the evidence that is necessary to make you change your mind.

• 24:18Brian Keating?

  That's right. And in fact, in this case, it gets worse because Mr. Lerner, uh, who's just a private, you know, individual. He does operate a fusion, uh, research company, which is always mentioned, uh, for donations. Uh, and yet his, um, his, is kind of, uh, his audience will always condemn scientists like me for taking grants from, you know, private, uh, and public funding agencies that are based on peer reviewed submissions. And the, you know, kind of eternal tradition of science, which is to have advocacy, but also have some bit of, of contentiousness, but doing it respectfully. Uh, and instead I, I used to before I met, uh, this Mr. Lerner virtually.

• 25:00Brian Keating?

  I used to tell my students, if you ever find your, the words coming out of your mouth, that this referee report is treating me the same way as Giadano Bruno, um, you know, then just shut up because it's laughable to be that that level of grandiosity takes a level, as we say in Yiddish of chutzpah. Uh, that is not appropriate when doing science. Compare yourself to Bruno. Uh, so this gentleman, Mr. Lerner, uh, compares himself to Kepler and, and, and it compares others of us to Ptolemy, which is really quite rich because A, as I said, he is advocating and has a pitch for money at the end of all of his, and there's no oversight over that. I mean, I, I thought I had heard that he had raised millions of dollars at one point for this fusion research.

• 25:44Brian Keating?

  But again, he's advocating for a model of the universe that's not new, Fraser. It's, it's incredibly ancient. It's a static universe. It's an Changing universe, which then has to grapple with the plethora of literally billions of observations that are not only consistent with the universe not being static, but being completely dynamic, evolving, changing, rich, full of interesting features and things to study. So he literally cannot explain billions of observables. He admits that. He says, I have no explanation for redshift, but I'm confident that like, uh, you know, in 200 years from now, that like they laughed at, uh, they use collamaic epicycles. You guys are professional cosmologists are using expansion hypothesis.

• 26:28Brian Keating?

  So, so it's kind of fun to debate him virtually online. Uh, but there's a limit to how seriously you can take something that's 2,000 years old plus.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it would be, it would be nice if it could be kept civil and I, and it, and it's sad to me that it's not. It's sad to me. It's weird to me that, you know, like everybody loves space. Everybody's enthusiastic for space. I keep noting this, that it's just like, you never run into a person that isn't into space.

• 26:52Brian Keating?

  I know. I always say, Fraser, I always say, I love astronomy because it's not political. Like there's no Republican asteroid.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:58Brian Keating?

  I don't know what you have liberals up there or whatever. There's no liberal comet or, you know, it's, it's apolitical. It's a safe space for intellectual growth, right?

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And yet people do bring kind of, I don't know, uh, they get wedged in their worldview and lash out, which is, which is weird to me. So, so you as a practicing cosmologist, you are steeped in the latest findings, the latest information. What are the challenges that cosmologists are wrestling with right now? In the earliest moments of the universe that maybe the public audience isn't sort of up to date with and familiar with? What are the really interesting things that are happening right now in the field?

• 27:45Brian Keating?

  Yeah. And I, and I should say, you know, as, as, as it often is overlooked, that there are, you know, kind of lacune or gaps in our understanding, things that we lack an understanding of. Things like dark matter and dark energy. This is frequently trotted out by the big bang deniers saying, oh, you guys make up this fantasy substance called dark matter and dark energy. And I've always retorted to them in a couple ways. One is to say, yes, it's true. We don't, we haven't directly detected all the dark matter that we know exists based on multiplicative, multiple F forms of evidence. But we have evidence for dark matter. We've made exquisite detections of of its gravitational influence.

• 28:26Brian Keating?

  And we actually know of one form of dark matter that we've detected here in the laboratory on Earth. It's called a neutrino. It's a weakly interacting mass of particles. So we know that that's a form of dark matter. Happens not to be sufficient to close the universe. And to make it flat, rather. But in this case, they would have said, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years before we had evidence for neutrinos being massive. There was, oh, that's just, you know, another Ptolemaic epicycle you're putting on your theory. So just because you don't know something now, I think it's entirely anti-scientific, not just bad. It's anti-scientific to say that you don't know something now, so you'll never know it.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:01Brian Keating?

  And one of the most important things that we are looking for in my field is really to understand the earliest we could possibly understand. I always joke, my job is to find out what happened on the Thursday before the Big Bang. Because that question is either poorly defined or undefined, as Stephen Hawking used to say. It's like asking what's north of the North Pole. But scientists discovered what's north of the North Pole, Fraser, as you know, closer to the North Pole, there's Santa Claus, right? So we know there's an, so Stephen was wrong.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Sure, I'm gonna, I'm gonna

• 29:34Speaker 00

  sign on to that theory, but I'll, I'll, yeah.

• 29:38Brian Keating?

  Okay, all right, fine. But

• 29:39Speaker 00

  Don't send it to me for peer review. That's all I'm saying. Yeah.

• 29:43Brian Keating?

  But there are very well motivated theories that posit an existing universe prior to our universe, either in space or in time, like a previous universe that collapses in a big crunch. Or a universe that is parallel to ours in space and time in what's called a multiverse. And these things are testable using the tools of cosmic microwave background polarization for the very first time in scientific history. And I find that incredibly exciting. So the most, you know, kind of exciting thing to me is also kind of not really appreciated by Lay people that might be in your audience or my audience and that's that's that there is a controversy on whether or not there was actually a universe that preexisted our universe.

• 30:27Brian Keating?

  And it is coming a long way. There's a lot more research into what's called the inflationary universe that we spoke about and that's the big part of the subject of my first book, losing the Nobel Prize. That book was about this experiment here at the South Pole, if you're watching. Called bicep, which I designed and built along with my colleagues at Caltech and Harvard and University of Minnesota and Stanford. And that project initially announced evidence for inflation. What is inflation? Inflation posits a quantum field that's sort of eternal, like this forever. In a vast spacetime and all of spacetime. And that universe had a fluctuation in the inflaton that caused it to inflate and expand at superluminal velocities.

• 31:11Brian Keating?

  And now that event could leave an imprint on what's called the polarization of the microwave background. And that polarization is exactly what we study. So for those of your viewers who might not be familiar. Well, I said, I love to do experiments, Fraser. So a polarimeter is very simple. It's a telescope. In our case with bicep, it was a refracting telescope. And it has some kind of what's called polarizing filter. It has something that solicits only one polarization, allows only one polarization to propagate at a time. And if you have an identical one, you'll see as I rotate them 90 degrees and then 180 degrees. The light that gets transmitted, if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see it go through a complete darkness. Now it's completely, it's getting more and more transparent.

• 31:54Brian Keating?

  Then it gets completely dark and that happens twice for every physical rotation of one of the two polarizers. That is the sine qua non, the hallmark of polarization. So you attach one of these to one of these to a telescope. And then you rotate the telescope and to whatever extent you see the pattern of light's intensity increasing and decreasing twice for every physical rotation of the instrument. You get a measure of its polarization.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  And so your telescope bag is actually rotating? Physically rotating as is it is it like making an observation and then it's rotating and making another observation?

• 32:30Brian Keating?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  That's really cool.

• 32:32Brian Keating?

  100%.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:33Brian Keating?

  And we have, we have multiple, we also have something that we got from, from a very expensive source of rotation and that's God or Mother Nature, if you will. So when the earth rotates, imagine the full moon, or sorry, imagine that the first quarter moon is rising, okay? So it's rising, so half of it's illuminated and there's the lunar terminator, right? Above the horizon. Throughout the night, that terminator rotates around like this. So the rotation of the earth and causes the modulation of the angle of the terminator. The same thing happens with the polarization of the microwave background. So we have gods or Mother Nature's own polarization rotation mechanism. And then furthermore, we can also employ certain types of crystals that, you know,

• 33:18Brian Keating?

  you get from your astrologer friends. And these crystals also rotate the plane of polarization. They're much, much smaller. You could put them right at the focus, if you like, of the telescope or about there and rotate them extremely fast because they're very small. So you can see and disentangle the effects of true, honest to goodness cosmic polarization from instrumental effects or other sources of spurious polarization. And in so doing, we hope to make a map. You've undoubtedly seen the colorful maps of the CMB's temperature. We want to make a map of its polarization with enough sophistication to see whether or not there are waves of gravity, not wave, not just waves of light, not just waves of

• 33:59Brian Keating?

  matter or density perturbations in matter, but if there are waves of gravity like LIGO detected that cause the shearing and squishing and squashing, technical terms, of space and time itself, that will only happen if and only if inflation took place. There's no other mechanism to generate these waves of gravity. Therefore, it provides a very crisp test for those that do not believe that inflation took place. Even they, like Paul Steinhardt, who's the Einstein professor at Princeton, Anna Aegis, who's a renowned postdoc at NYU, and many others around the world have looked, so Roger Penrose, Nobel laureate, they have alternative cosmologies and they all admit.

• 34:39Brian Keating?

  If we see this type of polarization called B-mode polarization, it will kill their theories dead in the water.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Now, you so so you actually have a preference in this. I mean, obviously, as a scientist, you, you know, you're going to let the evidence take you wherever it goes. But you, your hunch is that you won't be able to find this this polarization. Um, am I right?

• 35:07Brian Keating?

  I don't I don't know. I don't think I've said that. I said, I don't think we'll find life in the universe.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  No, no, no, that's no, no, but like, you know, as you said, like, you're you're more on board with the Penrose idea of a cyclical universe than than other than other origins.

• 35:23Brian Keating?

  I wouldn't say that. Um, so what it what it comes down to is the excess of of evidence that we have currently suggests very highly suggests that inflation took place. But it's kind of like circumstantial evidence, like you come to a crime scene, you see a dead body, there's a gun, the gun is warm, but, you know, there's also a knife in the room. But versus coming into the room and you see like the person, the criminal, and the gun is smoking in their hand. So these waves of gravity are incredibly precise and very crisp in the Occam's razor sense. Discriminators of whether or not the universe began with a singular and so inflation is almost synonymous or concomitant with

• 36:05Brian Keating?

  the Big Bang and the singularity. It's very, very closely attached to that. Whereas these other forms of of the universe, origin, cosmogenesis, they don't have really require any singularity in spacetime itself. So it's fascinating to me. I'm actually, you know, for the first time in my life, I am agnostic. It is true that before, when I was, you know, A young scientist, as I recount in this book, I really wanted to win a Nobel Prize. I wanted that at all costs. I had a very tumultuous relationship with my father, who was a great mathematician, he had done some theoretical physics, won incredible prizes,

• 36:47Brian Keating?

  and was the youngest full professor at Cornell at age 27. And we always had this rivalry, but the one thing he never won was the Nobel Prize. And since I came up with this idea to test the gravitational wave origin in an inflationary process, thanks to my colleagues in theory and other places, then I thought this was my sure ticket to win a Nobel Prize. So, yes, in that sense, that I was very much kind of motivated by non-scientific reasons. I'm not especially proud of that, but it's the truth. I was, you know, it's the highest award, not only that you can win, you know, I think in, in, in science, but I think in society as well. I mean, every four years, there in America, at least we get, you know,

• 37:30Brian Keating?

  70 Nobel Prize winners tell you to vote Democrat, you know, or the Iran deal is a good thing. Nobel Prize winner here. And so it's, you don't see that in like Olympic hurdlers who have won gold medals, all say to support the Iran deal. No, you don't see that. So it's much more kind of disproportionate. And that was part of the unscientific reason I had. As I count, you know, this book is mostly a, it's mostly a memoir of what it feels like to be a young physicist trying to make a name for him or herself and building things as opposed to theorizing.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Right. But I, but I guess, I mean, the impression that I got is that you, you have a, a, and you, you say that you're agnostic today, when we talked a couple of years ago and when I read the book, I got the impression that you had a preference, just in the, you know, a preference for, in like coffee versus tea level preference, a preference for a non-inflationary universe. And by, by

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Proving inflation correct, you would win by getting a Nobel Prize and making an incredible contribution to science. And by failing to prove inflation correct, you would also win by essentially your preference continuing to hold and there being a glimmer as that being a possible source for the universe.

• 39:01Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I mean, some of that needs to be unpacked. I think the primary reason why I'd like to see something is because the alternative is that you see nothing. And, you know, when you see something, like I imagine you just never detected the Higgs boson because you could never build something as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider. That doesn't mean that the Higgs boson doesn't exist. It just means that you couldn't build it, or that the energy scale which is produced is far in excess of what could be measured with human technology. Would I be disappointed if I built the Large Hadron Collider and I didn't see anything? Yeah, because you always want to see something. A null result, which is what it would be if we don't see anything, and what the bicep

• 39:43Brian Keating?

  result turned out to be. So actually saw this play out, where we made a detection, claimed it was real, was whispered about for winning a Nobel Prize. And I should also say that concomitant with the inflationary paradigm is the multiverse. There's basically no way to suppress the formation of other universes in the vast spacetime that we used to call the universe, but is now called the multiverse. There's no way to shut that off in the inflationary paradigm. And therefore, you have what's called eternal inflation, where inflation is occurring in these various pocket universes throughout the cosmos. So the stakes couldn't be higher if you were to detect it. That is true. On the other hand, it brings up a lot of problems, too, because at least in

• 40:27Brian Keating?

  our universe, it would mean that time began, which is a weird thing to think about, right? We think about time and entropy as the change in measurable quantities and something. You think about it, as Einstein used to say, you know, very helpfully, "time is what a clock measures." But you need change. Well, how do you get change if literally, in the before time, there was no time? In other words, it's like time emerges into reality as a new property that we take for granted now.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  But doesn't a cyclical universe just push the problem back one iteration?

• 41:01Brian Keating?

  Does the, which universe?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Like a cyclical universe, like if there was a universe before this universe, don't you then have to ask yourself where that universe came from? And then the universe before that came from like at a certain point, aren't you still, don't you still end up with the same problem, which is how did you go from nothing to something?

• 41:19Brian Keating?

  Yeah, unless you know that there's either a single origin of the universe is a naive interpretation, the big bang would posit, or that there was only one cycle of the universe before our universe began, then you would be right. And in fact, in most theories, they, it's not necessary to support that there's an infinite number of them, but in Sir Roger's theory, there are, he calls them aeons. And Paul and Anna's theories, it is, it's not specified what they are, merely the properties they'd have to have. So yes, in a sense, it does, it's kind of like the question of, you know, who made God? And, you know, and kind of philosophy or theology.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I guess like,

• 42:04Speaker 00

  why is that comforting?

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Like, like, because, because for me, they are, they are exactly equivalent. Like, like, if you say, okay, the universe had a beginning, that's weird and unsettling. And so a less weird and unsettling idea is that there was, that there was a universe before this universe and that one died and this one formed. And after this one dies, a new one will form. That still doesn't resolve the issue. For me.

• 42:37Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so

• 42:38Speaker 00

  From an emotional standpoint, right?

• 42:40Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:41Brian Keating?

  But there's another issue, which is the multiverse. And then there's an allied concept, sorry, concept in string theory called the string landscape. And these are really kind of mind expanding concepts. In one, the supposition is that the universe has an infinite number of parallel or effectively infinite number of parallel copies, each potentially with different laws of physics. In the string landscape, it suggests that there are regions of spacetime that have different vacuum states and different values for the constants of nature. Et cetera, et cetera. And I think what the opponents of the inflation and therefore the multiverse paradigm suggests is that if you have an infinite possibility, you know,

• 43:26Brian Keating?

  if I'm hosting Universe Today and you're honored and blessed to host Into the Impossible, then anything goes. I mean, literally, anything goes. Any combination of events can happen, any combination of constants of nature. I've often speculated, you know, if the laws of physics and even the constants of nature can change, and even the number of forces can change, what prevents there from being changes in the laws of predicate calculus or logic? Or, you know, does, you know, if A then B and A not imply B, you know, in modus tollens in another universe? It seems to be nothing that would stop it. If you can create new

• 44:07Brian Keating?

  laws of physics, which are which are physical manifestations of mathematical concepts, surely you could create new mathematical structures, as Max Tegmark suggests, all mathematical structures exist in his level four multiverse. So there are people like Paul who find that distasteful, because then it is really possible to lose predictive power of a theory. If anything can happen in the overarching theory of the multiverse, then our measuring one aspect of it would be no more satisfactory than, say, the anthropic. I don't know about you, but I don't really care for, like, anthropic reasoning very much. It's certainly in the in the weak form of the anthropic principle. And so I think it's it's

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Wait, so you hold on. You don't care for the weak form of the anthropic principle?

• 44:50Brian Keating?

  Well, to say that, you know, it's always seemed very tautological, is all.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Like, we wouldn't be here, like, if the universe didn't support human life, we wouldn't be here to observe it.

• 44:59Brian Keating?

  Correct. Yes. And, you know, that's true. But but does it give you anything to predict? Can it tell me something about the mass of a particle or the location of a galaxy? Or, no, it really can. And what we would like, and all physicists, I think, admit this, we don't know why the electron has a mass of 511 kiloelectron volt. You know, we don't know why. It'd be great to have a theory that predicts that, right? And and if you were to say, there's a theory called The standard model, and let's say it could someday predict it, right? Let's say it comes up, but then you say that theory of the standard model is just a fluke of our particular instantiation of the laws of physics in our bubble universe. That then just that in your language pushes the problem back.

• 45:41Brian Keating?

  And so there are people, and it's so fascinating for you because a lot of the initial resistance and the current resistance of these big bang never happened people is that they claim it, it kind of smacks of theology, you know, that the big bang is like, and that's what Hoyle was a huge atheist and he came up with the name, the big bang is a pejorative insult. But, but that's not scientific, right? He didn't believe that it sounded like Genesis 1:1 and therefore it had to be wrong because there's no God. That's not very scientific, but it doesn't mean he's wrong, it just means that it's not scientific. So I think there is something to be said for those that advocate towards the predictive power being the judge of a scientific

• 46:22Brian Keating?

  theory and in so doing, claim, I think, you know, a little bit too often that a theory has to be falsifiable. So you really can't falsify inflation. That's a problem. Whereas, as I said, you can falsify Rogers' theory or the bouncing model because you observe B modes in the early universe, you kill those theories. It doesn't prove inflation. Again, it's the smoking gun, it's circumstantial evidence. But at a certain point, you get enough circumstantial evidence.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  There's no way to falsify, sorry, there's no way to falsify inflation, like there couldn't, like there's, huh?

• 46:55Brian Keating?

  Because if we saw, if we, if we don't, let's say inflation took place, but it takes place of what's called a very low quantum field energy. It won't, it will produce gravitational waves, but they'll be too small to measure. We'll never, and any conceivable technology due to what's called cosmic variance, where there's just too much random fluctuation in the different regions of the sky. We'd never know if it took place, even though it took place. So you can't prove it. And then if it took place, there's literally 500 different, you know, forms of inflation. And you wonder, well, which one is it? Yes, it took place, but it's not as easy as an inverse mapping. In mathematics, from a value to a uniform definition, you know, linear function.

• 47:39Brian Keating?

  So I think there are reasons to think that from a Paparian perspective, where falsification is the sine qua non of good science.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:48Brian Keating?

  That you couldn't really rule out inflation, but you could rule out these other ones, which would give it some, some advanced, you know, kind of precedent over the, over the inflationary model. And as Steven Weinberg said.

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• 48:30Brian Keating?

  You know, even after, long after the discovery of the CMB in 65, he wrote 1978, in the first three minutes, his apocalypse book on the early universe. Still a great, a great book, and I recommend it to all my students even. He wrote that this, that the static or steady state universe is preferable. A, because it looks the least like Genesis, and he was a big atheist, as you know. But also B, because it could be ruled out. Whereas even he thought the Big Bang could never be ruled in, proven, as we keep, you know, debating about, right? We don't debate if I drop this crystal ball, if it, you know, if it's gonna fall. Like, I always say, I don't believe in gravity.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:08Brian Keating?

  I have evidence for gravity. So that's what we want.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Right, but, but I guess, like, aren't there, I mean, you say Roger Penrose, there are other physicists working on this, that there are alternative ideas for, for the formation of the universe that are different than the Big Bang. They solve the, the issues with the Big Bang, the, you know, the lack of monopoles, the, the fact that temperatures are the same, et cetera, right? That, you know, that's what inflation was designed to do, was to, was to fill in the missing pieces of, of the Big Bang. And I'm, you know, and these other theories do the same thing. Shouldn't they leave some kind of trace in the universe that, that there could be evidence built that those things are the case? Wouldn't that, by having more evidence, lead the theory?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  You're not disproving inflation, but you can never disprove a theory anyway. You're, you are, the evidence is starting to build into some alternative hypothesis.

• 50:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, so um, so a lot of the work that's being done in bouncing or cyclic models is revolving around a more, I think, well, I don't know if it's more important, but it's a more technical question of whether or not you can have a universe that doesn't have a quantum singularity in it. Because the, you know, the Penrose Hawking singularity theorem suggests that in any expanding spacetime, you reach a point of where where you do obtain a singularity. But the caveat is often neglected, that that's only in classical GR. And it's only on scales that, you know, we consider macroscopic. So from that perspective, it isn't guaranteed

• 50:41Brian Keating?

  that there can't be a non-quantum or non-singular origin of the universe. So all these reasons are of course fascinating. The more things your theory predicts, the better, because it gives you more things to hang your theory on, you know, more hangman's nooses that it has to evade. And the more that it passes, like GR has passed, you know, numerous hurdles, even hurdles that Einstein didn't think it would pass, like gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, expanding universe, which, by the way, you have to deny that the universe is subject to general relativity. In other words, we know that there, if you believe the big bang never happened, because the big, the universe can either be either static, in which case it's stabilized

• 51:25Brian Keating?

  by a cosmological constant, as Einstein blundered, right? Or it will have to contract or expand, depending on what, you know, what the matter energy density is relative to the critical density. We know there's matter in the universe, we exist, therefore, the universe should be collapsing unless there were some expanding force, like dark energy. So these people have to instantiate a level of either lack of belief in general relativity, which has passed innumerable hurdles. I mean, it passes it every day in your cellphone GPS, right? A billion times a second. So I think it's kind of, it's extremely far-fetched, these notions, that you have to give up so

• 52:06Brian Keating?

  much to believe that. Now, it is true, we don't know, you know, we don't understand. Understand what's happening in the in the earliest moments and what quantum gravity would even look like. But there's no guarantee that it didn't emerge from a classical collapse or classical bounce. And that's what these alternatives are working on. And Roger doesn't have anything like that whatsoever. But they also, the the weak spot, at least in my mind, I would love a theory that's an alternative. That makes all the predictions or lack of predictions, in other words, doesn't predict waves of gravity that I could possibly detect with my colleagues. But doesn't feature either unknown forms of matter or energy like the inflaton field.

• 52:49Brian Keating?

  So the bouncing models posit a scalar field, a quantum scalar field. And that help that regularizes and controls the expansion and collapse of the universe. And in Roger's theory, he has these things called aerobons, which are like dark matter, dark energy, you know, who really knows? He has these magnetic fields, these Hawking points. And so there's all sorts of like new stuff, doesn't mean it's wrong. But I would like something, no quantum field, no aerobons, you know, just protons, neutrons, my favorite particle, the crouton. Which I'm gonna grab soon for lunch. And and and really went deep into that kind of something. It'll be look as different from inflation as is possible to imagine. But so far, I think it shows that my theoretical understanding

• 53:32Brian Keating?

  should be, you know, left to trying to predict, you know, horoscopes and stuff. And I should just stick to being an experimentalist.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I from my perspective, I think you've softened. That's my impression. Talking to you a couple of years ago, I think you were less ambivalent. If that's a thing that's possible, I guess you had more of a position that you held. And the impression that I get now is that you've become a little more ambivalent.

• 54:03Brian Keating?

  I think it's I I agree with you Fraser. I I think but I think I I think it's more of a condemnation of my I know it's great to be like this is definitely true and you're an idiot if you don't believe I mean I know that but I think a scientist you know at his best or her best should be kind of ambivalent. I mean, you know, there's so many ways confirmation by a snuck in. So I guess it's a condemnation of my previous self, you know, which which is fine because I've grown like to think I've I've grown in more ways and just physically gotten bigger during the pandemic, but but to think that um but to appreciate it more. And I think partially, you know, people like you and people like you have really inspired me that there is so much kind of um there's so much I want to say like nonsense. There's so much non-scientific stuff that's out there.

• 54:46Brian Keating?

  And I always feel like we scientists are given this script. It's like all we have to do is read it and we'll win an Academy Award. Like we have this wonderful and so few of my colleagues do anything like what you do or what I'm attempting to do or, you know, my friend Sabina Hossenfeld or Arvin Ash. All these guys and gals are doing and it's so important to do it. And I feel like in no other form of society would you have it be acceptable. If they, you know, I quit my job, you know, one of my students, former grad students, she works for Amazon. And if she said to Jeff Bezos's replacement, she said like, ah, you can't understand what I'm doing. I'm very specialized. I'm

• 55:24Brian Keating?

  very sophisticated. I'm I'm doing things that are so beyond your comprehension. Um, by the way, I expect my paycheck on Friday. Like she'd be fired in a second.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:33Brian Keating?

  And yeah, we kind of do that. We kind of say things like I always joke about Feynman. You know, there's this one quote where he says, um, you know, he says, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, then you don't understand it.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:44Brian Keating?

  And then when he won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him, what'd you win it for? He goes, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So like, which is it, Richard? But he did say, you know, the most important principle is not to fool yourself. And and the second principle is you're the easiest person to fool. And I think I was a fool. I I was a fool in the sense of Feynman. Like, I wanted to see this. I want to win a Nobel Prize. I wanted this is my quickest, maybe only shot at winning it. And now like, it's so interesting because I started my podcast, you know, probably since we really talked in earnest, I've talked to 14 Nobel Prize winners. And it's not like, you know, it's this whole, um, you know, combination of things like you really don't want to trade your life with anyone, Fraser. Like you don't want to say, I wish I was Mr.

• 56:26Brian Keating?

  Beast of science or Joe Rogan or like, no, are you going to take everything that they're dealing with? Are you going to like suffer through all the things that they have suffered from and like deal with it? And no, you don't want their problems. You want anything but your own.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  But I think so. So I think the key is, is that as a scientist, your job is to search and, and, and you're on these journeys of investigation. As a journalist, which is what you are as well, your job is to listen and to, he says, after interrupting you, um, but, uh, your job is to listen. Your job is to, is to let the person talk and, and you're not there to debate them. Um, and you're looking for clarification, but that you, you can't help but that influence the way you think then about the work that you do. And so you sit there and as you say, you in, you interview all of these Nobel Prize winners. I mean, you talk to John Mayther or, you know,

• 57:24Speaker 00

  they're all just amazing, right? And, and then you walk away kind of going, huh, I wonder what impact that has on my work. And, and it's got to have just, I would be, wouldn't be surprised if from the ground up, it hasn't, it hasn't completely changed the way you look at your work.

• 57:41Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Pitching my second book, which is called Into the Impossible. So these are interviews with the first of the nine Nobel Prize winners that I interviewed on my Into the Impossible podcast, including Barry Barish, uh, who kindly wrote the foreword to this book. And I realized this is a self-help book, Fraser. It's not a science book. There's no, there's, I couldn't resist putting in, you know, a type one, a supernova, you know, when I talk about Adam, and there are like amazing illustrations that I had a professional illustrator, you know, uh, concoct, uh, and I'm really proud of it. But what did I do in this book? I tried to distill. I try to ask the basic question. Can you acquire enough knowledge to become wise?

• 58:26Brian Keating?

  In other words, science, scientia in Latin means knowledge, doesn't mean wisdom. Sapienza, which is like homo sapiens, means wise. Or now knows that he knows or she knows. I want to know, if you got to be so smart, you know, could you actually have wisdom? Or could you be like Fritz Haber, the inventor of ammonia? And the Fritz Haber and the Haber-Bosch process, et cetera, et cetera. Who then went on to use his chemical engineering skills after winning the Nobel Prize in 1917 or so? To witness and personally observe the death by chlorine gas that his factories produced. And then later, the members of his family get annihilated by Zycon B, which his factory produced as well.

• 59:10Brian Keating?

  And he was a huge nationalist and belly koska. Like, he won the Nobel Prize, like, do I have stuff to emulate from him? But I sort of think, like, what would a graduate student, or even like a car salesman in Vancouver? You know, what could he or she learn from a Nobel laureate? And so it has nothing to do with their science. It has to do with competition, collaboration, and especially the imposter syndrome. Which I feel all the time, I feel it now.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  Totally, I feel it too.

• 59:37Brian Keating?

  You've grown so much. Your channel, I mean, you've like triple double, like, that's kind of like.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  I don't trust, I don't trust anybody who doesn't have imposter syndrome.

• 59:48Brian Keating?

  And then on the other hand, Fraser, of course, what's the opposite of the imposter? It's the Dunning Kruger effect, like, where you think, like, you learn a little bit and you think you're a genius. I always joke, I'm the world's biggest expert in the Dunning Kruger effect.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  So I think that's the gift.

• 1:00:01Brian Keating?

  But I was shocked, you know, when I talked to Barry, and the reason that he wrote the foreword, aside from him being such a gracious and wonderful individual, co-leader of the LIGO experiment. He told me, when he won his Nobel Prize, and you go to Sweden and you accept it and you meet the king and you have some reindeer buffet and whatever. But you also have to sign this book that legally testifies that you got your golden medal. And that you got your share, in his case, he got, you know, like three.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

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• 1:00:59Brian Keating?

  Hundred thousand dollars US of the Nobel Prize, one million dollar purse, or 1.5 million dollar purse. And he said, when you sign this logbook, it's impossible, as a curious person, not to look back, who signed it last year? Who signed it 10 years ago? So he saw Feynman. He saw, you know, Marie Curie. And then he saw, he saw this guy. He saw this guy over here, Einstein.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, Einstein was in there.

• 1:01:21Brian Keating?

  Einstein, favorite. And he said, I'm not worthy of being in the same universe, let alone the same book. And so this is during my interview with him. And I said, because I ask every one of my guests, and someday you'll come on, I'll ask you this question. I say, what advice would you give to your former self to go into the impossible as the only way of determining the limits of what's possible? Advice to your former self? And he said, to not have the imposter syndrome. I said, you have the imposter syndrome? And he's like, yeah, I have it worse than ever, thanks to Einstein. I said, guess what, Barry? Einstein had the imposter syndrome. He's like, what are you talking about? I said, he believed that Isaac Newton contributed more to math and physics, but not only to math and physics, to Western civilization, in his words, than he or anyone since. And I said, that's not all. Guess what?

• 1:02:05Brian Keating?

  Sir Isaac had the imposter syndrome. He's like, what? I said, yes. He lived in awe of a non-scientist, maybe, but a man by the name of Jesus Christ. He felt he was totally inadequate, complete imposter compared to... So, and I'm sure Jesus felt that way about Moses. You know, you could just keep going down the line, right? So, imposter syndrome, normal, natural, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with collaborating with people who are your competitors? That's a huge thing in this book. How do you listen to things to know you're wrong? Have rubrics to make decisions? So that's what that book is about.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  I mean, I feel like that is the gift that I get as a, as a person who gets to interview people, is that you just get to listen. That it's your job to listen and to... And to think about ways to get even more interesting information out of the person that you're talking to, you just can't help but it sort of percolating in. So we're almost out of time. Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:03:04Brian Keating?

  Can I stop? Just one question. I've always wondered from your perspective, you do so many interviews and I try to ape you and emulate you in a lot of ways. But in real time, it would be really helpful to know if I'm doing a good interview. Like, it's very hard to know until you see like, well, like, no, no, no. If, if like, as, as the interviewer, as the podcaster or host, how do you know when you're doing a good job in real time? If any?

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  You don't?

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, like, like, I think the most important thing for me is, is just being curious and letting your curiosity lead you and trying to think of the questions that are, that would be popping into the minds of the people who are listening, trying to figure out ways to clarify. Like, like, my job is to clarify, is to get people to clarify and to explain, you know, their hero's journey as best as they, as they can. And if I think they're being inconsistent, as I might have during this interview, I will hold their feet to the fire for a little bit. But I think it's just, it's just important to just listen and be curious and just let the story go and take you where it goes. And I think that, that

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  people who are being interviewed don't necessarily know what is interesting. They, because they're too deep in it. And so they just don't have any perspective. And yet, as a naturally curious person, I find wonder in almost everything that I see. And so I let that be the guide. But I don't know, man. It's just like, it's just like practice. You know what? You know what we need to do is you, you, it's only fair now. You need to have me on your show.

• 1:04:42Brian Keating?

  Yep.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  And then we can go into this, this side of it more, in more depth. So.

• 1:04:48Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I would love that. Yeah, let's set it up. I'll send you a calendar link this time.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  I'm on board. Let's do it. So for people who want to find more information and dig into that rich.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  Backlog of amazing interviews and seriously like like the guests that Brian has on his podcast are astounding. Way more Nobel prizes than I've ever interviewed and because you're a cosmologist, you're going toe to toe with these people and you're able to speak their language and it's been an absolute pleasure in in watching what you do. But where can people follow your work? What's the best way to do that?

• 1:05:22Brian Keating?

  Yeah, yeah, the two main ways are to, you know, my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And last year I started doing short 10 minute thesis, I call it, where I go through experiments. I do experiments in the lab. I've got a video coming out called "The Most Expensive Water in the Universe", where I sample different types of water, including some that is made of deuterium and some that is coming from a $50 bottle on Amazon from the Great White North.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Oh, you drank some deuterium?

• 1:05:50Brian Keating?

  I drank some deuterium, deuterated water.

• 1:05:52Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 1:05:53Brian Keating?

  Deuterium oxide. I drank some Berg water from your neck of the woods up in the glacier somewhere up north and then I drank. So I won't spoil it, but I drank some water that there's nobody out there listening that could ever get their hands on to very approximation. I'll explain that in the video. So yeah, I do a lot of short videos, dark matter, but it's from an experimentalist point of view. Podcast Into the Impossible is on, is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. And then my mailing list, as I said, for those of you, I can only ship to people in the US, but I will send a meteorite, an honest to goodness chunk of space dust. You know, I gotta get your cameraman.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gotta, yeah, you gotta.

• 1:06:31Brian Keating?

  There you go.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Well, the problem is that it's trying to focus on your eyes. So as long as you cover your eyes, then the camera will, will, there you go, will focus on the.

• 1:06:38Brian Keating?

  That's the pro.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Brian Keating?

  Pro.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, you block your eyes so that the camera doesn't try to focus on them.

• 1:06:44Brian Keating?

  So if you go to briankeating.com/list, you'll be entered to win one of 100 of these in the US only that I can ship to you guys. So please do that. And anyone who signs up with a .edu address automatically wins. So I like to give to, to students.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  All right. Well, thanks, Brian. Great to talk to you again and and good luck with all of your research and your work and your writing and your podcasting and all of that. I'm exhausted.