The Scientists Ep. 0: Obsessive Geniuses

Welcome to the debut episode of "The Scientists," a captivating new series from the Into the Impossible Podcast Network, hosted by Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. Each week, Brian takes us on a journey into the extraordinary minds behind history’s greatest scientific breakthroughs—not just exploring what these giants of science discovered, but delving deep into who they were, what drove their relentless curiosity, and the very human obsessions that shaped their careers and our world. If you’re curious about the messy, intensely human reality behind monumental discoveries—and how these stories can reshape your worldview—tune in as we venture into the lives, the questions, and the obsessions that made science possible. Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 - Key Takeaways: 00:00 Exploring Scientific Pioneers Podcast 06:08 Exploring Scientific Genius Insights 07:46 Visionary Inventors and Iconoclasts 12:48 Exploring Intellectual and Business Obsessions 14:35 Scientific Revolutions and Genius Insights - Additional resources: ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Scientist, a new podcast under the umbrella of the Into the Impossible brain. I'm your host, Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. And each week on The Scientist, I dive into the life and legacy of a legendary scientist, an experimentalist, a theorist, an observer, all of them uncovering insights you can apply to your own work and your own worldview. Science didn't appear fully formed. It was built by real people, solving real problems under pressure with very human desires. Their ideas still shape our future. We'll examine not just what they discovered, what drove them to make those discoveries, and most importantly of all, who they were, from their

• 1:05Speaker 00

  obsessions and honors, to their most spectacular ideas, their most brilliant blunders, and their most beautiful of all human flaws.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I've spent my life obsessed with the minds that have shaped our scientific understanding of reality. And I aim to do for science what the podcast guru known as Dave Senra does for business leaders on his Founders Podcast. This is sort of a version of that, a scientific founders, how they founded and forged our understanding of the cosmos, both on Earth, in the heavens, and even in the microcosm, the inner cosmos of our minds. We'll be talking about everything that we talk about on the podcast with our generative guests.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Except I won't have any guests on this podcast and I won't have any video. I'll push it to video channels just for distribution. But this will be an audio only podcast, which will hopefully let me go deeper into storytelling and kind of the backstories behind these wonderful books that shaped who I am. And I hope will shape who you are too. And if not you, maybe a young person in your life.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  And in fact, the very first book that we're going to encounter soon is Flatland by none other than A. Square. That was his name. Well, it was actually Edwin A. Abbott, Abbott, Abbott. His last name was his middle name. So he's sort of A. Squared. And we'll be talking about that book subtitle, A Romance of Many Dimensions. I can't get him on the podcast and ask him, as I often do, to judge his book by his cover because he's been dead for nigh on 100 years or more. But this book, more than any other, really made me a scientist. Age 12, I remember reading it on the New Jersey shore in a un-air-conditioned house

• 3:07Speaker 01

  that we rented for a couple of weeks to get some surf and sun in playtime at Asbury Park in Point Pleasant, which for us, Westchester County dwellers was like as exotic as going to Hawaii. And I still remember the great video games and funnel cakes of the mid and early 1980s. I hope it's still there. I haven't been there in many, many years. We'll be discussing these biographies and books by the greatest minds who ever lived, and Flatland is no exception. We'll get into that in just a bit, but the real obsession I have with these obsessive geniuses is what makes somebody a genius?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Is it raw intelligence, a capacity to see connections that others miss, or perhaps something deeper, an obsession with understanding that borders on mania? I've read over 400 biographies, memoirs, books about scientists and books by scientists, many of which I read before starting the Into the Impossible podcast in 2017 or so. And in that time, even long before that, reading scientific books and books by scientists, biographies and others, I've come to really believe that the quality of obsession is the sin a quan nan, the sole distinguishing feature that separates transformative thinkers

• 4:34Speaker 01

  from the merely brilliant ones. And I think it's the willingness to pursue a question relentlessly at great personal cost, will be describing their personal lives where we have access to it. And scientists are not perfect. They're human beings, not walking Wikipedias. So has the inability to let go of a problem, to hold fast to it tenaciously, even when conventional wisdom suggests it's unsolvable is what is the true separating factor. I know on the podcast, on the Into the Impossible podcast, you know, I've talked to 21 Nobel Prize winners and climbing, I think it's more than almost anyone on earth. I've written now my second book, where I distill their wisdom, knowledge and self-help

• 5:15Speaker 01

  tools and tricks into a guide. I'll be talking more about that. As the year goes on, it comes out on September 9th, which is my birthday. And that's the second volume of the Into the Impossible series. The first one was Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner. The second one is called Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner. It's really a productivity book based on the geniuses that are so obsessive with their focus. And that will be a thing throughout this mini-series within the Into the Impossible zoo.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  So this podcast is going to take you inside the minds of these geniuses, scientists who weren't content with incremental progress, but really reimagined entire fields of science. Each episode is going to immerse you in the life and mind of a scientific pioneer who embodies this obsessive quality. You'll hear their words, experience their breakthroughs, and understand what unconventional thinking led to them and enabled them to do and see what others couldn't or wouldn't. So it's not a typical history podcast, or a science podcast, or a science history podcast. We're not going to just recap facts and accomplishments and focus on the milestones in people's lives,

• 6:33Speaker 01

  or even in the history or philosophy of science. And that's not my intention. I really want to focus on their mental models, their habits, their cognitive frameworks that these geniuses affected, such that you can apply these tools to your own thinking, potentially, or be inspired by them, or see them as human beings, flaws and all. The episodes will fall into about five different buckets, I would say. Each one will illuminate a different facet of scientific genius. We'll talk about obsessive practitioners, people like Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Steven Weinberg, Enrico Fermi, scientists who were maniacal about their craft,

• 7:17Speaker 01

  often working themselves to the point of exhaustion, or even radiation sickness, in the case of Marie Curie. The second type of scientist we'll encounter are people like Galileo, Pierre Robin, underdogs who fought against all odds,

• 7:36Speaker 01

  battling a hostile orthodoxy to champion their observations with their passions and their theories and observations told them was true. We'll be right back after this short break.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Third bucket, or it'll be inventors, people who invented visionary technology like Alan Turing and John von Neumann, who built entirely new paradigms that forever changed the way we think about mathematics, computation, information, and even intelligence, consciousness, and reasoning itself. Fourth, we'll talk about famous failures, brilliant blunders, people that made mistakes, like Glenn Ismailing, who advocated for vitamin C as a cure-all, or the brilliant Fred Hoyle, who rejected the Big Bang even after giving in its name, showing us that even geniuses can become entrapped by their own theories, their own iases, their own foibles.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  This is not incidental to the definition and identity of a scientist. The point is to avoid these things, and I think by reading history, we can prevent bad history from happening and hopefully engender positive results and positive history and outcomes for the heroes and heroines that did eventually have their day in the sun. And the last bucket, so to speak, will be an iconoclastic thinkers segment, or a bucket of outsiders in the field, like David Deutsch, who I hope to have on the Into the Impossible podcast someday. I've communicated with him a few times. And the late, great Freeman Dyson, who was my very first guest on the Into the Impossible podcast.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  These are outsiders who really broke from scientific orthodoxy, not through rebellion for its own sake, but by following fundamental principles, first principles, logic, to their inevitable, if even uncomfortable, conclusions. So let me say just a couple more words about why I created this series.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Throughout my career as a physicist and science communicator, I have observed a disturbing trend. The sensationalization of science and the sanitization of scientific history. It's a phenomenon where we celebrate discoveries, but we strip away the messy humanity that produced them. It was part of the theme that ran throughout my first book, which is a memoir, Losing the Nobel Prize, about how, among other things, we always publish the discovery on the front page of the newspaper or record. Yes, the San Diego Union Tribune. And the retraction, if and when it comes, is published on the Weekend Edition, page

• 10:19Speaker 01

  B17, in small font, and a column next to the yard sale or upcoming President's Day Weekend Sale. We celebrate what is veneratable, lionize the lions, but we don't always react to the way science actually plays out. Science advances through obsession, but also through failure. And occasionally, pure stubbornness has to battle against the forces of truth. And that just because you're stubborn doesn't mean you're right. And so by erasing these elements, as we often do with our students, we just teach them the experiments that won Nobel Prizes in our lab classes, for example. We often misrepresent

• 11:04Speaker 01

  the history of science and rewrite it, as happened with the Nobel Prize itself, as I made clear in my first book. We make science itself, therefore, seem inaccessible, as if you can only do it if you're a fully-formed, superhuman brainiac from birth. And that's simply not true. Even Einstein wasn't Einstein in his earliest years. And I refuse to dumb down this complexity and just purely celebrate scientists for who they are. I think that's what David Sandler does well. He paints a picture of people like Warren Buffett. Of course, he's gonna paint their stories and demonstrate their phenomenal accomplishments. But he also will point out, you know, what is Warren Buffett like to live with? What

• 11:48Speaker 01

  was he like as a husband, as a father? Those things go into the complexity and the totality of a person. And I won't whitewash it.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  So when we'll study Feynman, we're not going to take him down, but we have to acknowledge his Nobel Prize winning work on electrodynamics was inextricably related with the compulsion, the compulsion that drove him to crack safes and get in trouble at Los Alamos as an iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian participant of the Manhattan Project. He was also not great to his female and male graduate students and their wives and so forth. Same with, same with the venerated Stephen Hawking. We talk about Einstein, we can't separate his stubbornness and his incorrect approach to quantum mechanics, to theories of everything. And these aren't footnotes.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  They come through in the many books about these great geniuses and by these geniuses. So as I said, where Senra focuses on obsessive business builders and entrepreneurs examining commercial obsessions that they enjoy, we'll investigate intellectual obsession, minds driven not by profit nor even by the Nobel Prize, but the need to understand reality itself while they still can.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Each episode is going to feature a dynamic pacing between reading scientific memoirs and other sources. Sometimes I'll draw from multiple books, paraphrasing complex concepts and sharing my own excited reactions to pivotal moments and my recollections of reading those books, some of which I haven't read in 30, 40 years or so.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  For those familiar with the work that I do on YouTube, you'll see a similar type of approach. And I never shy away from technical depth, but I ensure that every concept will be accessible.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And at the end of each episode, I'll do still what I call nature's laws.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  The three fundamental principles we can extract from each genius's approach. This is similar to what I used to do on the podcast, where I used to do the final four, the thrilling three, these existential questions. I haven't done it so much on the podcast. I might bring that back. These are meant to kind of evoke the human side, the scientists that I have the honor and privilege to talk to. But I can't talk to many of these people like Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and more. So I have to kind of conjecture. Maybe I'll conjecture how they would have answered the final four or the quintessential quintile.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  And as I said, we're going to start with a work that not only altered my worldview, but also none other than Albert Einstein himself. Flatland, the first science book I ever read, is a geometry book, but also a voyage, a romance of many dimensions that presaged Einstein's four-dimensional journey through spacetime by many decades and influenced him just the same.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  When we talk about Feynman, we have to explore his influential mentor, John Wheeler, his thought experiments that revolutionized our understanding of black holes. And when we talk about Einstein, we have to explore the influence of the great mathematician Emmy Noether and her brilliance that uncovered deep connections between symmetry and conservation laws and many other phenomena.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  So this is more than a podcast. It's an exploration of what happens when the human mind attempts to operate at its limits. When someone becomes so consumed by a question, they cannot rest until they've torn apart all of conventional wisdom, reconstructed our reality and how we understand the nature of scientific revolutions. If you've ever wondered how science progresses, not from funeral to funeral, as Max Planck said, but from revolution, from paradigm shift to paradigm shift, from revolution to revolution.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  What separates transformative thinkers from the merely competent? Or how you might apply the mental models of history's greatest scientists, your own thinking? This series is for you. I've spent four decades now, reading and studying and learning from these brilliant, obsessive minds, teaching their discoveries to my students, sometimes conversing with them, if they happen to be among the living, and I've applied their methods in my own research and my own writing. Now I want to take you beyond the equations and textbooks into the actual thought processes that changed our world. So join me each time as we explore and examine the lives of the minds and the methods of

• 17:03Speaker 01

  science's most obsessive geniuses and extract lessons that can transform how you think about problems in your life and your work. And if this approach resonates with you, if you believe we get closer to truth by questioning assumptions and pushing beyond the boundaries of comfortable consensus, I hope you'll consider again subscribing to the podcast wherever you're listening to it. And share it with others who shares your obsessions as well. I'm Brian Keating.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And this is The Scientist on the Into the Impossible Podcast Network.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.