Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize | Lex Fridman Podcast #257
the following is a conversation with brian keating experimental physicist at ussd and author of losing the nobel prize and into the impossible plus he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called into the impossible this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with brian keating as an experimental physicist what do you think is the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device you've ever worked with or humans have ever built maybe for now let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic galactic polarization instruments yeah i'm slightly biased towards that particular instrument but talk about that in a little bit yeah but certainly the telescope to me is is a lever that has literally moved the earth uh throughout history so the og telescope og telescope yeah the one invented not by galileo as most people think but by this guy hans lipperche in uh in the netherlands and you know it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s 14 1500 1600s it was the beginning of movable type and so people for the first time in history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight so looking at a printed word now we just take it for granted 12 point font whatever and that's what the eye charts are based on they're just fixed height but back then there were no there's no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have uh you know perfect vision and there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the gutenberg bible and movable type and at that time people realized hey wait i can't read this you know my priest or my my friend over here he can read it she can read it i can't read it what's going on and that's when you know these people in in venice and in the netherlands saw that they could take this kind of you know glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer and what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device you know two lenses and go like let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there uh until galileo so galileo didn't invent it but he did something kind of amazing he improved on it by a factor of 10. so he 10xed it which is almost as good as going from zero to one is going from you know one to ten and when he did that he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it but also who we are as a as a species because we're using tools not to get food faster or to you know preserve you know uh our our legacy for the for future generations but actually to and increase the benefit of to the human mind somebody mentioned this idea that uh if humans weren't able to see the stars maybe there was some some kind of makeup of the atmosphere which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars that we would never develop human civilization or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there as opposed to um maybe this is an over romanticized notion but like looking at the ground it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival not being eaten by a bear slash lion if you look up to the stars you start to wonder what is my place in the universe you think i think that's uh modern humans romantic it's a little romantic um because they also took the tribe they took the same two lenses and they looked inward right they looked at bacteria they looked at you know hairs and in other words they made the microscope and we're still doing that and so you know to have a telescope is it serves a dual purpose it's it's not only a way of looking out it's looking in but it's also looking back in time in other words you can see a microscope you don't say oh i'm seeing this thing as it was you know one nanosecond ago light travels one foot per nanosecond uh i'm seeing it no you don't think about it like that but when you see something that's happening you know on jupiter the moon andromeda galaxy you're seeing things you know back when lucy was walking around the serengeti plains and for that i think that took then the knowledge of you know relativity and time travel and and so forth they took that before we could really say oh we we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain so i think that might be a little too much but but nevertheless i mean what's better than having a time machine you know it's like we can look back in time we see things as they were not as they are and that allows us to do many things including speculate about that but one of the coolest things i don't know if you're familiar with someone i'm a radio astronomer i don't actually look through telescopes very often except uh you know on rare occasions when i when i take one out uh to show the kids but um but a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral i mean it's much less cool because you look at it you're like all right looks cool it's kind of weird shape thing looks like it belongs in sci-fi it's going to blast you know the death star or whatever but when you when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object if that object fills up what's called the beam which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope is called this beam if you fill up the beam and you put a resistor just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that's looking at which is pretty amazing it means you're actually remotely measuring you're taking the temperature of jupiter or whatever in in effect and so it's it's it's allowing you to basically teleport and there's no other science that you can really do that right if you're an archaeologist you can let me get into my you know my time machine and go back and see what was lucy really like you know it's not possible so this the same thing happens this is where i learned about this from march of the penguins when the penguins huddle together they uh you know the the body temperature arrives to the same place so you're you're doing this remotely that's like the march of the penguins but remote we do it from antarctica too so there are some penguins around when we do it okay excellent you uh mentioned time machine i think in your book losing the nobel prize you talk about time machines so let me ask you the question of uh uh take us back in time what happened at the beginning of our universe ah okay usually people preface this by saying i have a simple question so uh you know is this so you know what happened before the universe began what happened teaching me about comedy i have a simple question for you let's take two i have a simple question what happened at the beginning of our universe there you go all right good so when we think about what what happened it's more correct it's more logical it's more uh practical to go back in time starting from today so if you go back uh 13.874 billion years from today that's some day right i mean you could translate into some day right so on that day something happened uh earlier than than you know than the the moment exactly now let's say we're talking around one o'clock so at some point during that day uh the universe started to become a fusion reactor it started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements um after that period of time you know going forward back closer to today less you know 10 minutes earlier 10 minutes earlier later rather coming towards us today we know more and more about what the universe was like and in fact all the hydrogen you know it's a very good approximation in the water molecules in this bottle almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period so i would say you know the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the tv show the big bang theory well done sir you know most of those light elements besides hydrogen aren't really used in your you know in your encounter right we don't encounter helium that often unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pilot a blimp um you don't need lithium hopefully uh you know but but other than that those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment the question became how do the heavier things like iron carbon nickel we can get to that later and i brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor and a different type of process explosion as well called a supernova however if you go back to the beyond those first three minutes we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable in other words going backwards from the first three minutes as famous stephen weinberg titled his book we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over in other words we can't speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe we just don't know enough about that epoch there are many people most people most practicing card-carrying cosmologists believe the universe began in what's called the singularity and we can certainly talk about that however singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove hope to confront or hope to observe as evidence and really only occurs in two instantiations the big bang and the core of a black hole neither of which is observable um and so for that reason there are now flourishing alternatives that say you can actually for the first time ask the question that day you know tuesday you know in the first moments of the our universe there was a tuesday a week before that 24 hours time seven days before that that has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today when i was in grad school over 25 years ago no one really considered anything besides that big bang that there was a singularity and people would have to say as i said we just don't know um but they would say some future in you know incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer but now they're people that are saying there is an alternative to the big bang and it's not really fringe science as it once was 50 80 years ago when these models by the way the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe the first cosmology in history goes back to akhenaten ra and and the temples of of egypt in the third millennium bc and in that they talked about cyclical universes so i always joke you know that guy akhenaten's court you know he'd have a pretty high h index right about now because people have been using that cyclical model from penrose to paul steinhardt and aegis and right up until this very moment can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to uh the big bang theory so there are many alternatives um starting with so the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding singular origin of the universe that stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning many of them feature cycles at least one cycle possibly infinite number of cycles um called by sir roger penrose and uh they all have things in common these alternatives as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis which is inflation inflation is sort of can be thought of as this a spark that ignites the hot big bang that i said we understood so it's an earlier condition but it's still not an initial condition in physics imagine imagine i i show you a grandfather clock or pendulum swinging back and forth you look away for a second you know i can come into the room pendulum swinging back and forth alex tell me where did it start how how many cycles is going to make before the er you can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions in a very simple system like a one dimensional simple harmonic oscillator like a pendulum think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions it's a tremendous lacunae gap that we have as scientists that we may not be able to in the inflationary cosmology determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch so you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch we can't because uh you can infer things about the panel before you show up to the room in our current epic correct right yeah so if you look at it right now but if i said well when will it stop oscillating so that depends on how much energy it got initially and you can measure its dissipation its air resistance you had infrared camera you can see it's getting hotter maybe and you could do some calculations but to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions battery conditions were here on earth has a gravitational field it's not going to excurse or you know make excursions you know wildly beyond the length of the pendulum it's not um you know it has simple properties um so but and this is like in other words you can't tell me you know when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now in other words when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now um now that's a pretty pedestrian example but what i'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended but it says nothing about how it itself took place and that's really what you're asking me i mean you don't real look what you care about like big bad nucleosynthesis and the elements got made and these fusion reactors and and the whole universe was a fusion reaction but like don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time at the first moment of time and the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the big bang we can't answer that in the context of these alternatives so you asked me about some of the alternatives so one is aeon theory the conformal cyclic cosmology of sir roger penrose another one that's that's um it was was really popular in the 60s and 70s until the discovery of the primary component of my research field the cosmic microwave background radiation or cmb the three kelvin all-pervasive signal that astronomers detected in 1965 that kind of spelled the death knell in some sense to the what was called the quasi-steady-state universe and and then there was another uh a model that kind of came out of that you hear the word quasi so it's not steady state steady state means always existed that was a cosmology einstein believed until hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe um and most scientists believed in that for you know millennia basically the universe was eternal static unchanging um they couldn't believe that after hubble so they had to append onto it concatenate this uh this new feature that it wasn't steady it was quasi-steady so the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space and that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant but because it was producing more and more every century as centuries pile up and the volume piles up the universe could expand and so that's how they develop slowly very slowly and it doesn't match observational evidence so but that is a an alternative by the way did i say i think the the the steady state universe is infinite or finite do you know um he i i would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really you know if if something had a no beginning in time then it'll be very unlikely we're in like the center of it or it's bounded or it has in that case a finite edge to it i wonder what he thought about infinity because that's such an uncomfortable is this a silly joke i'm sure you're familiar with a silly joke right a silly joke was that um there are only two things that are infinite um the universe and human stupidity and i'm not sure about the universe so well me saying i'm not aware of the joke is a good example of the joke it's very meta okay so uh all right so sorry you were saying about quasi all the alternatives in the quasi-steady state and and the most kind of promising although i hate to say that you know people say like what's your favorite you know alternative right this is not investment advice inflation is not transitory it is quasi permanent um so a very prominent sorry to interrupt we're talking about cosmic inflation so calm down cryptocurrency folks that's right although the first nobel prize uh and one of the first nobel prizes in economics was awarded for inflation not of the cosmological kind uh so most people don't know that inflation has already won a nobel prize it's a good topic to work on if you want a nobel prize doesn't matter the field exactly it's time translation invariant so when we look at um the alternative that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies these have serious virtues um according to some one of the virtues to me just as a human i'm just speaking uh you know as a human um one of the founders of the new version of the um of the cyclic cosmology called called the bouncing cosmology is paul steinhardt he's the einstein professor of natural sciences at princeton university you may have heard of it and he was one of the originators of what was called new inflation in other words he was one of the founding fathers of inflation who now not only has no belief or support for inflation he actively claims that inflation is baroque pernicious dangerous malevolent not to science not just to cosmology but to society so here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists such as it is not a huge universe but they're more podcasters than cosmologists uh some do both but uh but this this man created this this theory with collaborators and now he's like i joke i'm like paul you're denying paternity like you're like a deadbeat dad now you're saying like inflation's is is bogus oh and but he doesn't just attack see this is what's very important about um approaching things as an experimentalist you got a lot of theorists on and that's wonderful and i think that's a huge service an experimentalist has to say no he or she has to be confident to say like i don't care if i prove you right or i prove your enemy wrong or whatever we have to be like exterminators and nobody likes the exterminator until they need one right or the garbage collectors right but it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea like inflation is a beautiful idea but it also has consequences and what paul claims i don't agree with him fully on this point is that those consequences are dangerous because they lead to things like the multiverse which is outside the purview of science and in that sense i can see support for what he does but none of that detracts from my respect for a man um you know imagine like you know elon comes up with this like really great idea you know space and then he's like actually it's not it's not going to work and you know but like here's this better idea and he's like spacex is not going to work but he's now creating an alternative to it it's it's extremely hard to do what paul has done doesn't mean he's right doesn't mean i'm gonna like have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend or because i respect the idea or i respect the man um and his colleague anna aegis who works really hard with him but nevertheless this has certain attractions to it and what um what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology so it takes away 50 percent of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity you've talked a lot about quantum gravity uh you talk people eminent people on the show always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything there is a theory of quantum gravity but there's there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity so that that kind of uh implicit expectation has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory so in cosmic inflation so is that at the core so okay uh maybe you can speak to what is uh the negative impacts on society from uh believing in in cosmic inflation so you know one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation according to its other two patriarchs you know considered to be as patriarchs alan guth at mit and andre linde at stanford um although he was in the ussr when he came up with these ideas um uh along with paul steinhardt was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state uh it has to exist in this hilbert space and the hebrew space has certain features and those features are quantum mechanical endowed with quantum mechanical properties um and then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off so inflation can get started but then it's it's like one of you know spacex rockets it's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster right it continues the thrusting energy you need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times including now spawning an ever increasing set of universes some will die stillborn some will continue and flourish and this is known as the multiverse paradigm it's a robust seemingly robust consequence not only of inflationary cosmology but more and more we're seeing it in string theory as well so that you know sometimes two you know branches coming to the same conclusion is you know taken as evidence for its reality so one of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena that we can't uh that are outside the reach of experimental science yeah or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity like it makes us um maybe makes life seem more meaningless is that is that is that where he's getting at a little bit or is it not reaching that far well no i think those are both kind of perceptive the answer is a little both because in one sense it's meant kind of to explain this fine-tuning problem that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly fascine that has features can com you know consistent with our existence and how could we be otherwise you know the sort of weak anthropic principle um on the other hand it a theory that predicts everything literally everything um can be said to predict nothing like if i say lex you know you've been working out you you look like you know yeah you have been yeah that's great uh you look like you're you know about somewhere under 10 000 kilograms like all right yeah you're right but that's horribly imprecise so what good is that that's meaningless i don't contribute any what's called surprise or reduction in entropy or you know reduction of your ignorance about the system you know exactly how much you weigh so me telling you that tells you nothing in this case it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence um dictate that we would exist there has to be at least one place that we exist but the problem is um it's a manifestation of infinity so humans and and i'm sure you know this from your work with with ai and ml and everything else um that humans as far as we know really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity but we do so very imperfectly right so if i say to you like what's bigger the number of you know water molecules and and this thing or the number of real numbers or if i say what's bigger the number of real numbers are rational numbers they're all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be infinity to the infinity power you know when you have kids someday they'll tell you i love you infinity you have to come back i love you infinity plus one right so uh but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity let me illustrate that they say in the singularity the universe it had an infinite temperature right so let me ask you a question is there anything that you can contemplate in the observe you know einstein's little clip aside that's infinite like a physical property density pressure temperature um energy that's infinite and if you can think of such thing i'd like to know it but if you can how does it go to infinity minus one you know the opposite direction i go with my kids how does it go from like the half of infinity because that's still infinity how did it cool down how did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied so now it's only infinity over two in terms of past less infinite more infinite yeah i mean it's uh that's one of the biggest troubling things to me about infinity is uh you can't truly hold it inside our minds it's a mathematical construct that doesn't it feels like intuition fails and but nevertheless we use it nonchalantly and then use like physicists they're incredible intuition machines and then they'll play with this infinity as if they can play with it and the level of intuition as opposed to the level of math you know yeah maybe something cyclical you can imagine infinity just going around the same um kind of like a mobius strip situation but then the question then arises how do you make it more or less infinite uh yeah all of that intuition fails completely and i mean how do you represent it in a computer right it's either some placeholder for infinity or it's one divided by a very the smallest you know possible um you know real number that you can represent in the memory well that's basically my undergraduate study in computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer i think i took 17 courses on this topic it was very useful i came to the right place but um but you know in terms of what a physicist will mean you're right i mean physicists will blindly nonchalantly subtract infinity you know renormalization and do things to get finite answers and it's it's miraculous but you know at a certain point you have to ask well where what are the consequences for the real world so one of them you ask you know what what's the problem does it make us more meaningless they report many of the people that support it like andre linde in fact andre linde says you have a bias you lex me brian you have a bias that you believe in a universe but shouldn't you believe in a in a multiverse wha what evidence do you have that there's not so he turns it around whereas paul steinhardt will say no if anything can happen then there's no predictive power within the theory because you can always say well this value of the inflationary field did not pred produce sufficient uh gravitational wave energy for us to detect it with bicep or simon's observatory or whatever but that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen and that's logically a hundred percent correct but it's like it's like kind of chewing you know wonder wonder bread you know uh i apologize if they're one of your sponsors but you know wonder bread slash flex dot com typhoon code cleb right isn't it it's my favorite russian word it's like would you like a piece of wood by the way even that uh that word clip which means bread and russian as you say it like you're jokingly saying it now it made me hungry because it made me remember how much i loved bread when i was in the soviet union when you were like hungry that was the sor that was the things you dreamed about i don't know you know what's amazing is how many of the soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today and they were completely in hiding like there was no google they couldn't look up on scholar they had nothing they had to wait for journals to get approved by the communist party to get approved and then and then and only then if they weren't a member of some class i'm sure you know like jewish scientists you had a passport that said jew on your passport yeah and zeldovich the famous um yaakov he was the advisor one of my advisors alexander palmer of um and he had to only because he was like at a nobel level and you know was one of the fathers of the soviet atomic bomb program could he even get his jewish student he was jewish too but but only by virtue of his standing of his intellectual accomplishments would they give him the dispensation to let his student you know travel to georgia or something and it makes what we complain about and i complain about academia and it's like oh well what can i talk about we have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things like inflation completely isolated from the west i mean some of these people wouldn't didn't meet like people like stephen hawking until you know he was almost dead and they just learned this thing through smuggled in you know it's it's a work of heroism especially in cosmology there's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard probably because they were working the they could they could pass off as well we're doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well which they were at the same time there is uh interesting uh incentives in the soviet system that maybe you can take this tangent uh for a brief moment that because there's a dictatorship authoritarian regime throughout the the history of the 20th century for the soviet union science was prioritized and because the state prioritized it through the propaganda machine to the news and so on it actually was really cool to be a scientist like you were highly valued in society maybe that's a better way to say it and i i would say you're saying like we have it easy now in that sense it was kind of um beneficial to be a scientist in that society because you were seen as a hero as there's there's yeah there's hero of the soviet republic and that you know there's positives to that i mean i'm not saying i would take the negatives or the positives but it is interesting to see a world in which science was highly prized in um in the capitalist system or maybe not capitalists let's just say the american system the celebrities are the the athletes the actors and actresses maybe business leaders musicians uh and you know the people we elect are sort of lawyers and lawyers so it's interesting to think of a world where science was highly prized but they had to do that science within the constraints of always having big brother watching it's uh yeah the same in germany germany had you know highly prized i mean one of the most famous tragic to me cases is fritz haber who invented the you know hebrew bosch process that allowed us to i don't know have you eaten yet you look he looks i mean i know you fast intermittent fast every day and you do that you know i said cleb and you got it's a little drool but he says i'm lifting and i look slim this is amazing i'm gonna clip this out and put it on tinder i think that's a website you gotta go swipe left or right for that i don't know um but when you think about like you know what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day he was a german nationalist first and foremost even though he was a jew and he personally went to witness the application of ammonia chlorine gas applied during trench warfare in 1916 in battles in brussels and whatever and he was they had a whole conjure of nobel laureates in chemistry and physics you know that would go and witness these atrocities but that was also they were they were almost putting science above i don't want to say human dignity but but of like who the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his um relatives would die in auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called zyklon b and so it's just it's just unbelievable so i i feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of of science you know and listen to science and follow the science which is more like scientism um and there is still a danger you know i always say um just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion you know just because you you you know and in my case in my books i i talk a lot about the nobel prize it's kind of like a kosher idol it's something that you can worship you know it doesn't do any harm and and we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments because there is a core of america and the western world in general that does worship and really look at science predominantly because it gives us technology um but there's something really cool about that and so for me it's hard to find that balance point between um between looking to science for wisdom which i don't think it has they're two different words um but but also recognizing how much good and transformative power may be our only hope comes from science you open so many doors because you also bring up our ernest becker in that book so there there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the nobel prize it's fascinating to explore and we will and we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the of the universe which we'll return to but now since you opened the book wow pun unintended of uh losing the nobel prize can you uh tell me the story of bicep the background imaging of cosmic extra galactic polarization experiment bicep one and bicep two and then maybe you can talk about bicep three but the the thing that you cover in your book the human story of it yeah what happened yeah that book is in contradiction in the second book that's like a memoir it's it's really a description of uh of what it's like to feel what it feels like to be a scientist and to come up with the ignorance uncertainty impostor syndrome which which i cover in the later book in more detail but um to really feel like you're doing something uh and it's all you think about it it is all-consuming and it's something i couldn't have done now because i have too many other you know wonderful delightful demands of my time but to go back to that moment when i was first captivated by the night sky who was a 12 year old 13 year old and really mixed together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all which i think is the existence or non-existence of god so i call myself a practicing agnostic i do things that are that religious people do and i don't do things that atheist people do and i once had this conversation you know with my first podcast guest actually i shouldn't say oh i was just just having a conversation with freeman dyson but he was actually my first guest yeah and i miss him name drop name drop yes uh i'm sure there's going to be plenty of comments so in case people don't know brian keating is the host of into the impossible podcast where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists in uh history of science physicists especially in the history of science so when i talked to freeman i said you know freeman you're like you call yourself an agnostic too can you tell me something like what what do you do on saturday on sundays do you go to church he's like no i don't go to church and i'm like well imagine there was like an intelligent alien and he was looking down or she would see i don't know thing was looking down and i saw freeman and on sundays like a group of people go to church but freeman doesn't go to church and then there's another group of people that don't go to church and those are called atheists but freeman calls himself an agnostic but he does the things that the like richard dawk he doesn't go to the same church that richard dawkins doesn't go to right so i said how would you distinguish yourself if not practice so i'm a behaviorist i believe you can change your mentality you can you can influence your mind view your bodily physical actions so when i was a 12 year old i got my first telescope i was actually an altar boy in the catholic church it's kind of strange for a jewish kid who grew up in new york maybe we'll get into that maybe not uh but um i was just fascinated by these these can we get into it for a second okay yeah all right let's go all right let's go there all right let's go to uh baby brian or young young young brother brian the new sitcom on cbs uh young brian born to two jewish parents uh my father was a professor at suny stoney brook he was a mathematician eminent mathematician and my mother was an eminent mom and a brilliant um uh english major etc and they raised that but they were secular and they think you know we'd go to i always drop we'd go to we'd go to synagogue you know two times a year on christmas and easter no we would go uh yeah yom kippur rosh hashanah right that's the typical two-day year jews uh and you know we'd have uh we'd have matzahs once a year on pound passover uh and that was about it and um for years i was like that until my parents got divorced my mother remarried and she married an irish catholic man by the name of ray keating my father's name is james axe um so when she remarried ray keating i was immediately adopted i'm actually adopted into the keating family and he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious they you know did christmas and easter it was one of the most wonderful experiences i had and i do things with great gusto whatever i do i want to take it all the way so to me that meant really learning about christianity in this case catholicism so i was baptized confirmed and i said i want to go all the way i became an altar boy in the catholic church you're going to be the best altar boy there ever was i had like serious skills you passed that collection basket i could push people and get them to 2x their contributions um but in this case uh i was 13. i don't know if you remember you know when you were 13. but if you extrapolate the next level up you know it's like you go graduate student postdoc professor the next level up from you know confirmation altar boy is priest and i don't know if you're aware of this but priests are not entitled to have relations with with women and as a 13 year old boy kind of like future casting what life's going to be like for myself if i continue on my path um i found it maybe i the math net up that's right there was a there was a serious gap in uh in that future in that future um and instead when i should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah you know as most jewish boys would be a 12 13 year old boy i actually got a telescope and uh and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it it wasn't bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog's looking through is that a hedgehog that says it's a hedgehog hedgehog and the fog i should mention and we'll go one by one these things you've given me some incredible gifts maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope that put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look and uh using now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist by the way why experimentalist versus an engineer because you assembled this telescope you gave it a mount and you connected it to uh to a very yeah but there's no experiment going on it's just engineering for show okay it's very shallow so experimenters taking it to the next level and actually achieving something here i just built a thing for show well that's always a joke people say oh you're an experimental cosmologist i'm like yeah i build a lot of universes oh we actually most of my time is putting clamps on things soldering things you know it's not actually doing the stroking of my non-existent beard contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model yeah and just like uh most of robotics is just using velcro for things right yeah it's not like having dancing dogs and whatever right so telescope yes this telescope what's the what's the story of this little telescope this telescope's uh a very precious thing in some ways a symbol uh of what got me into you know what brought me all the blessings i have my life came from a telescope and i always advise parents or even people for themselves you right here wherever we are the biggest city on earth manhattan where i was growing up as a 12 year old outside of manhattan you can see the exact same craters on the moon the same rings of saturn the same moons of jupiter the same phases of v you can see the andromeda galaxy lacks two and a half million light years away from earth you can do that with that little thing over there one that's a little more expensive get one that has a mount and and you can attach now your smartphone what the hell is that i wouldn't have known what that was in 1984. and with that you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate maybe biology in some sense but you can experience the physical sensation that galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that to jupiter and saw these four dots around it or that saturn had ears as he called it or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth and and made of this heavenly substance the quintessent substance right so where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person ever make that discovery try doing that with the higgs boson you know get yourself an lhc and smash together you know high luminosity you know call a parry cliff and say you know i want to rep how did you feel he didn't feel anything none of them felt anything it took years to come you can't do it but with this you can feel the exact same emotions that's fascinating it's almost like maybe maybe there's uh another one like that is fire yeah like when you build a bonfire like can you actually get it see if you use a lighter i think if you actually by rubbing sticks together however you do it without any of the modern tools that's probably what that's like yeah and then you get to experience the magic of it of what like early humans say feel what og felt when he did it that first time by the way is this a gift this is a gift of course is this you need a little bit of a swag upgrade so i got you i will yeah this is a i'm uh i'm pulling a putin mike asked if this is a gift making a very uncomfortable feed feeds not really this is actually my childhood tell us come here you know but now i'm keeping it that's all right so looking through this telescope was when your love for science was first born changed my life because not only was i doing that i was replicating what galileo did but i was and yeah i'm 100 not comparing myself to galileo galilei okay if there's any confusion out there but i did replicate exactly what he did and i was like holy crap this is weird let me write it down so it had another effect which all good scientists budding scientists should do and all parents should do get your kid a book a little notebook tape a pencil to it write down what you see what you hypothesize what you think it's going to be not like in the high school you know like hypothesis thesis but just like wow how did i feel better yet astronomy is a visual science sketch what you see the lagoon nebula the pleiades seven sisters you can see them anywhere on earth and when you do that again you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain as i understand it and you're connecting them through your fingertips you literally have the knowledge in your fingertips in your connection between what you see what you observe and what you write down then you do research right the goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did is do something new and that's why we call it research and not just like studying you know wikipedia and in so doing you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks it's unbelievable and now we can do even better because you got share it on instagram or whatever and you can by doing so have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist and do so viscerally you know i often say i was taught this by my uh english teacher mrs tompkins in ninth grade that the word educate it doesn't mean to pour into let me pour in some facts into lex and you know it's not like machine learning you're just showing like billions of cats or you know you're not like forcing it in you're bringing it out it means to pour out of in latin educare and what more could a teacher want than to have something that the kid is just like gushing no you're not going to see like inspire the kid yes inspire yeah shout out to mrs tompkins yeah mrs thompkins she's watching yeah she's a big fan me she doesn't care but you yeah excellent would take those who love for granted uh this is in manhattan this is in westchester county new york yeah got it so okay so but then that's where the dream is born yeah but then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist so going to university graduate school post-doc and all the way to where you are today what's what's uh uh what's that what are some notable moments in that journey so i call that the academic hunger games you know because it's like you're competing against like these people you know who are just getting smarter all the time as you're getting smarter all the time they're they want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots like there's fewer slots to get into college than not in high school there's fewer slots in graduate school there's sure very fewer slots to be a postdoc and many many maybe infinitesimal number you know we just did a faculty search at uc san diego 400 applicants for one position it's almost getting impossible like i almost can't conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to become a assistant professor at a state university that they're doing like it takes so much courage to do that um so i went from you know this kid in new york uh thinking i would never be a professional astronomer a because i didn't know any i'd never seen any i didn't even know that they existed and i thought who the hell's gonna pay me to look at the stars like won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster like it's just not something i could conceive of getting paid to do even if i had the brilliance to do it which i didn't feel like did and then i went to graduate school and um and during graduate school i had this kind of um on-again off-again relationship with my father and i knew that he was a mathematician i he had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country i didn't see him for 15 years and in that time i learned a lot about him and i learned that he had gotten very interested not in pure mathematics which he had been a number theorist and contributed seminal work on the fantine equations which play a role in turing's work you may have seen but anyway he had become interested turned completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity which is physics and by that time i was at brown university and i was you know thinking uh maybe i'll be condensed matter physicist or experimentalist i never thought i'd be a theorist and i'm not a theorist so it was pretty prescient and um but it always appealed to me like why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old like we often forget about like those you know primitive things about us are probably the most sustainable durable and resilient attributes of our character so with my own kids i look like what are they interested now when they're young and it doesn't mean that's what they're going to do i mean some of them want to play fortnite you know like professional fortnite play which there are but you know the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor can i ask you is your father still with us no just in a small tangent yeah do you miss him do you think about him does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are oh yeah absolutely i mean it it did in very many ways and he's been gone for a long time now thinking back to that time with him he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time which is a limited quantity i don't think it's the most limited quantity maybe we'll talk about that later but um but to go into um only the most challenging interesting things with the limited time that we have while we're alive and for him it was the foundations of quantum mechanics for me it was the foundations of the universe and how did it come to be and i felt like well people been trying since einstein to outdo einstein really have made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics but this is an exciting time the kobe satellite had just released its data that the universe had this anisotropy pattern stephen hawking called it like looking at the face of god and so forth and so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what i'm gonna do and what i'm most interested in but always throughout that i wanted to understand i didn't want to be a wrench monkey no offense to people that just do experiment and no offense to monkeys no offense to monkeys that's right this little guy sorry man um but thinking back to what animates me it's not doing the engineering as much as it is getting the data but there's a lot of steps i want to be the guy um understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw so i always joke with my theorist friends you know call me a closeted theorist you know like i want to be you know what they call a guy who hangs out with musicians a drummer so i want to be like like that for physics right like for theoretical physics i want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing i love that formulation of a theorist is understanding the source of the signal you're getting like signal is primary like the the thing you measure is primary and theory is just the search of explaining um how that signal originated but it's all about the signal i mean i i see the same search for the human mind and like neuroscience in that same kind of way is it's ultimately about the signal but you kind of hope to understand how that signal originated that's fascinating that's uh that's such a beautiful way to to explain experimental physics because it it ultimately at the end of the day is all about the signal yeah yeah and maybe those two things the the neuroscience and like cosmos uh not getting too romantic but yeah maybe they're linked in some fundamental way some fundamental conscious cosmic consciousness but um we're gonna get to that yeah yeah no we definitely have to do that but getting back to yet so it's so my origins so i always say like and i want to try this on you you said you wouldn't answer any of my questions but i'm going to ask you some questions what's the most important day on the calendar don't tell me the date but what to you what is your mo what's the most important day to you every year do i have to answer or do i have to think about it no no answer like you don't tell me the exact date of the count it could be like your mistresses you know a birthday or whatever but i have so many i lose track even though i'm single how does that even make sense i know okay i'm sorry uh so i uh a day like like uh like a month and a day yeah i mean for me it would be december 31st yeah so i was going to say new year's eve new year's day uh some people say birthday anniversary kids birth they're usually signif signifying beginnings and ends right january means the portal between the god was the portal between the beginning and the end so you're looking back maybe because you're russian like the death side the light side looking forward to january the beginning right so um everybody's most important day is usually some beginning or something significant for me it was studying the most significant thing of all it's like when did the universe get born as i said before and i didn't think there again i didn't i just there was some mental obstruction that i didn't realize that i could get past because i didn't think like anybody does it like i knew astronomers knew these answers like the universe at that time between 10 and 20 billion years old now we know it's 13.872 billion years old it's incredible the five digits you know for significant five what is it again 13. 13.872 billion years 872 million so is there a lot of plus or minus on that is that what are the errors for me i'm 50. so it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old i am yeah it's a half a percent percent level accuracy there's the confidence behind that oh yeah i mean there's the significance yeah no it's extremely well measured i mean it's one of the most precise things that we have in contrast to again 25 years ago we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are about 12 billion years old or in the universe that were 12 billion so that would be like you being um older than your father it was embarrassing can we can we actually take a tangent on the tangent tension out of tangent how old is the universe can you can you dig in onto this number how do we know currently with those i guess you said five four or five uh significant uh digits so we can come about it from two different ways one uh basically they rely on the most important number in cosmology which is called the hubble constant the hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units it has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec so it's a speed per distance which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed and what is the speed you're measuring well you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away so a galaxy at one megaparsec away this isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects uh but if you go out say one uh megaparsico i would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers per second away from you and every galaxy except for the local very most local group surrounding us maybe a half a dozen galaxies out of 50 to sorry sorry out of uh 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies so 12 out of that number are moving towards us the rest are moving away from us so that number if you invert it if you say well when did those things last touch each other all those galaxies now they're really far apart we know how fast they're moving away it's a very simple algebra problem to solve when were they touching that's where you get that number from so there's the local 12 and then the rest ignore the 12 yeah and then ignore the 12 and then look at the others and yeah the then solve the algebra problem uh how does the and stuff in the beginning though the mystery of that beginning epic changed this calculation of very little because actually we understand um how there's some other ingredients that go into it namely how much dark energy there is in the universe how much dark matter there is in the universe how much radiation light neutrinos etcetera are and how much ordinary matter like we're made up of neutrons protons croutons okay so morons it appears that the universe is bigger than it is older how does that make sense oh oh yeah so you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe naively you would say that the the yeah so you're right if the universe were static um if the universe came into existence and you can conceive of this the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe so the universe just started off those galaxies were you know they could be moving towards us away from us who knows um that you could say i can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light that would be true but the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe so imagine there was some very distant past but we were near a galaxy it's going to produce some light and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us the light's going to be getting more and more red shifted as it's called it's going to be moving farther and farther away from us as time goes on there'll be some acceleration as we get into the era of dark energy the light signals there'll be some cone of acceptance if you will from which which represents all the events that we could have received information from we can't currently communicate with that galaxy it sent us some light and now it's moving away and it sent this some light and because the space is also dragging the photons with it if you like the photons are being participating in the expansion of the universe that's why they're redshifting that we can see things to out to where the universe first began expanding not just when it began existing and because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years with no sign of slowing down yet which is a huge uh surprise serendipitous surprise that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us so we can see if it's called the age of the universe 15 billion years just to make the math simple we see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction and we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away so that means we see things that themselves are are 90 billion light years away from each other that's sort of the diameter of the observable universe is there another universe beyond that we don't know some conjecture there's not only one there's an infinite number of them how are you emotionally okay with the fact that our universe is expanding so like it's gonna be like annie hall like with alvi uh singer uh i'll grow up in the soviet union we watched propaganda i realized that you did yes uh so there's a family paul is that some kind of what is this movie with woody allen um certainly cancelled but yeah but nevertheless back when he was uh uh not cancelled yet uh he made a movie called annie hall in which as a self-depiction he's like a larry david before larry david was larry david neurotic typical neurotic young jew he's in brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore he refuses to do his homework his mother says why it goes because the universe is expanding and it keeps on expanding uh everything will rip apart and no we'll never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless i assume these are some of the topics we're going to get to and she goes what are you talking about we're in brooklyn brooklyn is not expanding uh and that's true brooklyn is not expanding the solar system is not expanding oftentimes they get asked what is the universe expanding into that's one of my favorite questions what is it expanding into and i say it's actually an easy question if you think about it um you've seen your friend ilan he goes on space he's got a rocket right what's outside of the rocket if you take if you take this bottle empty out this bottle take the cap off it go outside the rocket you know sip in some tang screw on the cover of it what's in there is it empty uh that's just semantics i guess uh yeah no it's definitely not empty so you step outside the rocket yeah you're in the vacuum of space the quote-unquote vacuum ups and there's no more liquid in it there's no more liquid in it no it's just just a container one cubic centimeter let's just make it simple one cubic centimeter of a box and you take it out into space outside of the falcon whatever right um what's inside that box it's not empty there's actually i'm gonna say this is gonna set your friends up there's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave background inside that box at any second okay all right hold on a second what 420 that's uh i've heard of that number before all right let's it used to be 69 but then they changed wow physics works in mysterious ways and the millimeter box is 69. what what are we talking about here what uh what's inside what's what's in the box i'm gonna get it that's right let's think outside the box no we're thinking inside the way so if you have every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the big bang dark matter particles there's a little ordinary matter in the universe and every cubic centimeter there's some probability to find a proton a cosmic ray an electron etc there's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter now just imagine how many cubic centimeters there are in the universe it's enormous that's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe it's a very rich universe but now let's zoom in on that box so now inside that box there might be you know one let's let's say there might be one ordinary matter like a proton or an electron a baryon a lepton there might be a couple some a couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be a couple hundred photons as i said four hundred and twenty what's between those guys what's between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons like just zoom into a cubic micron now like imagine 420 things inside a box this big it's actually pretty empty like they're zipping around in there right so between them there's a lot of empty space and this is outside the kind of physics-based models of fields and all those kinds of things just like just actually asking the question of like what is this particle content in the universe in every cubic centimeter of the universe outside of the 420 so you have the 420 420 they have they have some you know they have some mass well they have energy they don't matter photons energy that's why they don't bring suitcases you know that's true right photons never bring suitcases with you with them because they're traveling light see i don't even get a lesson that's corny dad jokes okay you'll appreciate something pretty good it's just i'm laughing on the inside what's in the box what's the 420 what's between the photons that's what space is that's what the universe is expanding into okay that's not so that's that's the notebook yeah on which the photons are written that's beautiful but still thank you uh still i i i understand this but it's still uncomfortable that that if the uh the universe is expanding that this thing is expanding the the canvas is expanding it's very strange because like if we're just sitting there still i guess if we're in brooklyn nothing's expanding so our cognition our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we don't get to experience um this kind of expansion yeah and that intuition leads us astray but you know that gravity is the weakest of the so-called four fundamental forces um and yet it has the longest range pervasiveness gravity is you know we're being pulled towards the andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it uh so gravity is enormously long range but incredibly weak and because of that uh we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the as you said the no the grid lines on the notebook right gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points how far they are from each other and those can change those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity so it's weak and what we experience is gravity is the um changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear that's what we experience is gravity well you have this analogy when you talk to barry barish about bowling ball and a trampoline and uh that's almost right uh because it's actually you have to visualize that now in four dimensions like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object including on the sides and it becomes very hard to visualize so a lot of people use that um it's also fraught analogy because you're using gravity like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity so it's a little overburdening the analogy but okay so you mentioned barry bearish wrote the forward to your book yeah how do gravitational waves fit into all this how how do they on the emotional level how do they make you feel that they're just uh moving space time yeah so gravitational waves were the nobel prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time you know it's this this was discovered twice indirectly by two uh men uh uh named halsen taylor and that was given my first year of graduate school the ia i entered graduate school almost they they announced these two guys one and the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the nobel prize when he was my age is this in the 40s uh this was no this is the 19th that was a joke i got it i got it you know to a cosmologist age it means nothing um and to a tennis player not on tinder that's right all right sorry gravitational waves do fit in uh because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves the analogous properties that they have to photons that they travel at the speed of light that they go through everything they can go through everything and that they're directly detectable we're using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred so did inflation the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe and the expansion the initial expansion of the universe did that take place there's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves not these old you know newcomers that barry studies the ones that occurred a billion light years uh away from us uh a billion years ago but we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch however those we cannot build a ligo and put it at the big bang so if you want to measure let's say you have a the old-time firecracker let's say there's a firecracker and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you you can't see it so you can't see the imprint of it but you can hear it and what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the big bang not by using a camera or even an interferometer like barry used and his colleagues but instead using the cmb the light the primordial ancient fossils of the universe the oldest light in the universe we're going to use that as a film quote unquote onto which gravitational waves get exposed and hope you can uh so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy to to for the exposure so the the signal as i said it's um so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe however what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon how intense it is we're not looking for its color what wavelength it is we're looking for what its polarization is and we'll go let me just ask are you serious about the per cubic millimeter of 420 is the number centimeter but uh uh cubic centimeter 420 is the number uh i wonder if elon knows this and if he doesn't he will truly enjoy this yeah that's true oh okay funding security excellent um so i mean this takes us to this story of heartbreak of triumph of uh that you described and losing the nobel prize so describe what uh polarization is that you mentioned yeah you can describe what bicep one and bicep two are bicep three perhaps the instruments that uh can detect this kind of polarization what are the challenges the the origin story the whole thing yeah so well the origin story goes back again to like a father-son rivalry it really does my father won all these prizes awards etc but he never won a nobel prize and you know some parents in america they compete with their kids you know oh i was a football player in high school i'll show you and whatever wrestling whatever and some of us could be healthy too um but um with me and my dad it wasn't super healthy like we would compete and and you know he was much more of a pure mathematician and i was an experimental physicist so we had both different ideas and what was worth prioritizing our time but i knew for sure he didn't win the nobel prize and i knew i could kind of out do him so i feel pretty venal and kind of you know minuscule kind of character wise the only reason you could outdo him is because the fields medal is given every four years and only if you're under 40 which he wasn't so he's working under much more limited conditions that's right so even if i had which you know spoiler alert the book's called losing the nobel prize so i didn't do it um but i wanted to do something big and i wanted to do something uh that would really just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery for the ages as in fact it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful so you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions that's all i can so as an experimenter you were swinging for the fences that's all i wanted to do i felt like uh if it's not you know if it's if it's worth spending you know perhaps the rest of my life on as assigned as a scientist it better be damn well better be interesting to me to carry me through to give me the you know the you know i always say passion is great when people say oh follow your passion but it's not enough passion is like the spark that ignites the rocket but that's not enough to get the rocket into space so then you swung for the fences with bicep one what is this so bicep one was born out of um kind of interesting circumstances so i had gone to a stanford university for a postdoc so an academic hunger games stand for stanford university yeah it's this uh small little school it's it's not like that technical college in massachusetts that you're affiliated with um but um as i went there i was working for a new assistant professor she had gotten there uh only a year before i got there and she had her own priorities the things that she wanted to do but i kept thinking in my spare time that i wanted to do something completely different she was saying galaxies at high red shift and i wanted to study the origin of the universe using this this type of technology and uh i realized courtesy of a good friend of mine who's now at johns hopkins mark kaminkowski that we didn't need this enormous hubble telescope we didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope we needed a tiny refracting telescope no bigger than my head you know less than a foot across and that telescope would have the same power as a hubble telescope you know size telescope could have because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky they're enormously long large area signals on the sky and if we could measure that it would be proof effectively as close as you get to proof there could be things that mimic it but that we discovered the inflationary epoch inflation being the signal originally conceived by alan guth to explain why the universe had the large-scale features that it does namely that it has so-called flat geometry so there's no there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees you can do that with spacecraft you can do that with stars you can do that laser beams you can do that with three different galaxies all those galaxies no matter how far you go have this geometry it's remarkable but it's also unstable it's very unlikely it's very seemingly finely tuned and that was one of the motivations that guth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979 when he was a postdoc also at stanford slack and uh he was trying to get a permanent job i was trying to like make my name for myself and uh so i realized i could do this but i was also being paid by this this professor at stanford to do a job for her and i was kind of a crappy employee to be honest with you and then one day she couldn't take it anymore because i was like sketching notebooks and planning his experiments and i just i wasn't no i had big ideas in your mind you were planning big experiments and that was uh difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation yeah we have to you know publish basic papers deliver on some basic deadlines for a project all those kinds of things support your advisors paying actually and so one day i came in and um and it actually uh uh involved another friend of mine an astronomer named jill tarter one of the pioneers in the seti um science uh business of detecting extraterrestrials which i assume you'd never like to talk about aliens so i'm sure we won't get into aliens uh but jill was visiting stanford and i was like i really want to meet her can you introduce me and she said no in fact you're fired my my boss so i was like is this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me i didn't know where it would lead or what would happen to it but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path i mean literally that brings me here today in that because of that i ended up working for another person in caltech which is in pasadena and um and she my original boss sarah church she got me the job with her former advisor a man by the name andrew lang and andrew was like he was like this i don't know like um it's like any steve jobs or elon you know charismatic handsome uh persuasive idea man not the guy always in the lab you know doing everything but understood the where things are going decades from now and he had been involved in experiment that actually measured the universe was flat very close to flat um along with a preceding experiment done at princeton by lyman page and other collaborators so the shape of the universe is flat the geometry of the universe is flat how did he do that experiment so he used the cosmic microwave background and so what i said is you have to look for triangles in the universe so you can measure triangles on earth you can actually it's hard to show that the earth is curved but you can show the earth is curved using triangles mountaintops etc if you have an accurate enough protractor allegedly yeah yeah god you you're like auto cancelling this is great um my ratings are going to go up man this is going to be great uh if you want actual signs go listen to brian if you want all of these conspiracy theories or aka the truth about flat earth uh so he what he used was the following triangle there are um proto-galaxy sized objects in the cmb the cosmic microwave background has these patches and so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these uh blobs of primordial plasma the soup that constitutes the early universe it's just hydrogen it's very simple material understand hydrogen electrons and radiation very simple plasma physicist sun understand it the diameter is you know one base of the triangle and then the distance to the earth is the other two legs so he measured along with his colleagues at caltech and then university of rome and that's other group at princeton measured uh the angle uh interior angle effectively very very accurately and showed that it added up to 180 degrees can you localize accurately the patches in the cmb can you know like where they could like trace them back location-wise you can know where they are but more than that there's so many of these patches they're about one square degree on the sky the sky you may know a sphere has about 44 000 square degrees and a sphere so there's literally 44 000 of these size patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build up very good statistics that's not exactly how they do it or how they did it on this experiment called boomerang but they did measure very accurately the uh what was called the first doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma the primordial plasma that's fast so um the sphere has 44 approximately 44 thousand thousand square degrees so to cover a sphere that's a it's a very kind of important data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere and you're looking out into the yeah into the observable universe so there's a lot of there's a lot of patches to work with yeah and in fact a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and and machine learning in the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analysts using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles called heel heel heel picks is what it's called and just stitch all the stuff together and that's and stitch it together very accurately yeah get high statistical significance in order to reduce these statistical errors very clean signal and uh measurement device to produce the systematic errors those are the two predominant uh sources of error in any measurement those that can be improved by more and more measurement you know you take more and more measurements of this table you'll get slightly better each time but you only win as the number of the the one over the square root of the number of measurements but the square root of 44 000 is pretty big so they were able to get a very accurate measurement again it's not exactly how they did it they also have to do a fourier analysis decompose that do a power spectrum filtration windows there's a lot of work that goes into it image analysis and then comparing that with cosmological parameters very simple model just six different numbers that go into a model that made a prediction and one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out and that is the universe has zero spatial curvature and that was called boomerang so he had just come off of this now let me remind you who is the first person you know to measure the curvature of the earth it's a guy named aristophanes in the you know whatever live around aristotle's time his name is in the history book so this guy andrew lang i was like he's like the next aristotle aristothe like i just wanted to work for this guy you know he was clearly had this brand he was about 40 at the time california scientist of the year i i was sure he was going to win a nobel prize for that and i knew that he you know so i went down to caltech to give my job talk and he said you know i love it you got a job and before i could even you know before he finished the sentence i said i'll take it you know like it was too good to be true and i started working there at caltech and slowly but surely because caltech's a rich private university at that time run by a nobel prize winner by the name of david baltimore he just wrote us a check baltimore wrote us a check and said get started on this idea and so we started coming with the idea for what i later named bicep by background imaging cosmic extragalactic polarization which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization we'll get to that in a minute um but along the way the idea was very simple we're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make which is a refracting telescope your eyes you have two refracting telescopes in your head only way you know forward is making things more complex right and when you make things complex in science you introduce the possibility for systematic errors and so we want to build the cleanest instrument turns out a cleanest instrument you can build and astronomy is a refracting telescope we also had to unlike that telescope or galileo's we had to use very sensitive detectors that were cooled less than 1 20th of the temperature of the cosmic background itself which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe so we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees kelvin above absolute zero to do that we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very very special place called the south pole antarctica from which i retrieved for you a patch there it is over there so when you go there you get these bright red jackets bright oh yeah somebody was born in the soviet union we obviously like to call it red united states antarctic program the national science foundation and the base is called the amundsen scott south polar station so it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it now there is a treaty in antarctica you can't use it for military purposes for mining etc etc but i don't know if you know but about 12 years ago putin sent a submarine to the north pole there's no land at this at the north pole right so what did he do he stuck it on the ocean underneath but the south pole is on a continent called antarctica which was first reached about 110 years ago first time in human history um antarctica means the opposite of the bear that means like no bears there basically opposite of where polar bears are arctic is i mean it's polar bear that's where uh i did not know that yeah fascinating so antarctica means the opposite place of that so humans never even saw it let alone went to the south pole which is kind of in the middle of that continent we went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry it turns out the sahara desert san diego texas and there's no place like the south pole or chile those are the two premier places on earth of course you'd like to go into space there's no water in space so it's not about um it's not about cold it's about dry exactly so that's why for example you can take this uh vodka and you could put it in this cup right and we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up after two minutes the water's three minutes the water's boiling you can't touch it take it from me don't touch it but you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to right why because the mug is totally bone dry but the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies so we don't want these precious photons 420 of them traveling per cubic centimeter from the big bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the earth's atmosphere so you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per per square centimeter of surface area and that happens to be either chile or my other project the simon's observatory is located or you take it to the south pole we took it to the south pole and uh spent a couple of uh months of my life down there and it's like being on hoth you know it's like it's a completely otherworldly environment ice planer flat as a pancake you like and and the buildings are built up on stilts they're built up because the snow will otherwise cover them over the nearest medical facilities or 4 000 miles away if you have any issues with your wisdom teeth they yank them before you go down there if you have any issues with your appendix they'll cut it out of you before you go down there the russians at vostok base not too far away about 600 miles away the doctors there there's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself so harsh conditions science in the harshest of conditions on earth at least and we go to those great lengths because it's a pristine environment to observe these precious photons and we built this telescope and it weighs you know tens of thousands of pounds and it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot i mean it's scanning the sky almost unattended it needed uh that we have a guy who spends a year of his life down there a girl who spends a year of their life down there they're called winter overs they arrive in sometimes as early as november and they don't leave until the following december and we always joke we'll pay you 75 000 you just have to work for one night of your life that's that's all but it's a long night and what bicep is and uh i couldn't bring my my polarized sunglasses here so i brought these actual polarizers here so if you take this and put in front of your telescope there you have now made a polarimeter you've made a polarization sensitive telescope now you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing but one way to think about now take this guy and look at a light look at a light source put one up to your eye and now put the other one in front of it anywhere and now rotate them what happens to the light source it becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer yeah so it's called a quadrupolar pattern right so it's repeating it goes bright dim bright dim uh it double rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation and that's because of the property of the photon the photon is a spin one field but the polarization of light is it's the axis at which its electric field is oscillating its electric field is marching straight up and straight down and so therefore vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization and so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation so it's like a spin a spin two object so now if you put that in front of the telescope you can do one of two things now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers and then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one you can analyze it and change the amount of polarization or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here there's a crystal it's called calcite this is from lex luthor not lex friedman this crystal put it on top of your printed notes there and tell me what does it look like there's uh like i could see everything twice it's a double image it's a double image that is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction so light emerging which is unpolarized from the black ink comes out and it splits into two different directions and it could split even more if i made the crystal give you my more expensive crystal but that's all i have what is the crystal with this kind of property called it's called calcite this is crystal it's called birefringent crystal bi means two refrigerant means refracting so this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization pretty clean by signal yeah it's it's cleanly too yeah see i'm seeing two very cleanly it's very crisp right so that's that's yours to keep with every time you host me now take the polarizer underneath your left hand uh yep put it on top of the crystal and kind of move it back and forth wow this is incredible you can switch as you rotate you switch from one uh signal to the other so it's one of the refractions to the other whoa so that is now you are analyzing the polarization you are confirming the light comes out of the crystal two different types of polarization and effectively what we do is we have those two things if you like but working in the microwave so our detect that's where this the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum and we're coupling that to a refracting telescope but your eyes are refracting telescopes so you are a polarimeter right now the human eye can actually slightly detect polarization um but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color that's what we call color and intensity brightness so you're devising a instrument that's very precisely measuring that exactly and doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human eyes retina cells but of superconductors and uh things called balometers and and this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level so why is it that this the kind of device could win a nobel prize so when the cmb was discovered it was discovered serendipitously there were two uh radio astronomers working at the time at bell laboratories now why would bell laboratories be employing radio astronomers bell laboratories is kind of like um like apple or you know is it like a think tank or you know it's google let's say it was like google google has like google x it has this thing on that thing right um so they were working there but imagine if google was employing radio astronomers like they were actively recruiting why would they do that well it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s was the first commercial satellite launch for communication and so so bell labs which would later become the telephone you know part of a t and the tele early telephone company later invent the first cell phone the year i was born um and they would take that uh 1946 and they would take that uh telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal to noise of the satellites that they were seeing and they found they couldn't they found that they could not improve the signal noise ratio of the first telecommunications satellite it was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem and they were bouncing signals from uh you know from the west coast up to the satellite bouncing it down landing it um uh in new jersey of all places in northern uh northern new jersey holmdale new jersey and these radio stars couldn't get rid of the signal so they said well new jersey's not far from new york let's see if the signal is coming from new york nope not coming from new york let's see if it changes with the year maybe it's coming from the galaxy which was also discovered there by janski in 1930 something so in the the not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal to noise ratio the noise it was they knew the signal was right they couldn't get rid of the noise and there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them but had been measured by a previous guy a guy by the name of edward ohm he measured the same signal found that there was this hiss of static of radio static that he could not get rid of that had a value of about three kelvin so you can translate remember i said uh if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object it's a principle of radio thermodynamics so it's a really interesting thing it's a thermometer you can stick it into jupiter from here on earth it's amazing they were and so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity but by its temperature so he found this guy edward um oh there's this three kelvin signal i can't get rid of it it must be i did my era analysis wrong and i would give him an f if he was one of my you know first-year students um but he's just attributed to lack of of understanding these other guys penseus and wilson who are also radio astronomers they said no let's build another experiment put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration put inject a known source of signal every second that has a temperature of about four kelvin because the signal that they're trying to get rid of is about three kelvin and you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible they did that once a second so they got billions of measurements millions of measurements over the course of several months years and even by the end of millions of measurements for sure and they found they couldn't get rid of it either but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 you know degrees kelvin so uh how does uh having a four kelvin source how does the calibration work just that it could be it could be larger imagine like you're trying to calibrate the microphone like you could do it with like a really loud sound but the gain would start to compress so there are amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that i've ever worked on and they only have a linear region over a very small region and you want to keep it as linear as possible that means you want if you're trying to get rid of you're trying to compare like a voice and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine it's not as it's not going to be as as easy on the on the amplifiers as getting you know a slightly lo a gong or something you know so the idea if the noise is present in both there's a noise present in both and you get you measure what they did is they made a separate measurement just to the calibration system which they measured exactly very well four kelvin is the temperature of liquid helium that's a temperature that's not going to change and it's certainly not going to change over the time scale of one second and so they could compare unknown signal known signal an unknown signal known signal like a scale like a balance so another way to think about it is like this you've seen these libra kind of balances where you put two weights in a pan right what happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight and you don't get any measurement right but you do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight that's why they use four kelvin got it but just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic element to the fact that you're um arriving at the same temperature that's kind of fascinating and you're measuring stuff in terms of you're measuring signal in terms of temperature at the source yeah so you get to i mean there's something about temperature that's intimate yeah it's cool yeah especially since you know all life is basically you know conversion of energy and trying to control entropy which is then related to thermodynamics exactly in that way and this is um a very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't looking for the signal they found it accidentally these two scientists penzias and wilson and i like to think those kind of discoveries are the purest in science like when you see something isaac asimov once said like the most important reaction as a scientist is not eureka which means in greek as you know i have found it no he said no he said like that's weird like that's a much better reaction or that's freaking cool like that's a scientist not like oh i found one because surprise yeah yeah because if you find what you're going to find that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias which is deadly and so you know as close to deadly as possible so how does that take us to something that's potentially worthy of a nobel prize ah so penzis and wilson weren't looking for a signal they ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of uh helium from hydrogen etc and that was a serendipitous discovery they won the nobel prize in 1978 it was the first one ever a word in cosmology my reasoning is what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed but how the whole universe got formed and kill off every other model of science so if that weren't enough every scientist you know worth his or her salt had told me and andrew lang and our colleagues this is a slam dunk nobel prize if you could do it because it was really explaining again the stakes of this science is different than like super fluidity plasma physics when you talk about the origin of the universe it ties into everything it ties into philosophy theology you realize if paul steinhardt is correct that the bible can't be correct in other words the bible's correct now it isn't falsified if you like if you believe it i'm not i never use the bible as a science book obviously but the bible speaks of a singular beginning what if you knew for sure the universe was not singular it was it would be more like the cosmology of akhenaten and egyptians than the biblical torah old testament if you will narrative so in my mind the stakes could not be higher and again it's not an effect because we need plasma physics we need we need every type of physics except maybe biophysics and like we you literally use every branch of physics and thermodynamics superconductivity quantum mechanic all that goes into our understanding of the instrument and even further if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we purport to measure so i re i rationalize that if pensions and wilson won the nobel prize for this if hulson taylor won the nobel prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves this is decades before ligo by me detecting gravitational waves indirectly detecting the how the universe began detecting the origin of the input initial conditions for the big bang nucleosynthesis which won the nobel prize in 1983 these are like five nobel prizes you know potentially for that reason it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk to outdo what my father did to do you know really this impossible and at that time lex you know again i'm you know it sounds weird because people like oh you wouldn't you know you you don't really you know you still want the nobel prize you're still like greedy and look you wrote another book about um and i always joke i'm like well if you want to see if i'm a hypocrite just get them to give me the nobel prize in literature yeah and if i accept it then i'm a hypocrite but um wait well we'll get to your current feelings on the nobel prize in terms of hippocrates and so on but so there's this ambition let's say this device this kind of signal could unlock many of the mysteries about the early universe and so there's excitement there so let's take it then further i mean there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak not only was this possibly worth a nobel prize if the nobel prize was given you were excluded from the list of three that would get the nobel prize so why were you excluded maybe that's the place to tell the story of bicep 2. yeah so bicep two like you know iphones or i know you're an android fanboy but um you know every year they get a little bit better they get more megapixels they get more optics triplex zoom whatever okay right we upgraded our detectors as well the initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors they they have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale and we wanted to make them into uh into superconductors which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them why superconductors well again we're measuring heat so one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range that means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer and so my brilliant colleagues around the world in this case jamie pock and nowadays suzanne stags at princeton um they are just exquisitely making these these sensors tens of thousands of them the initial bicep one instrument of course we just call the bicep uh that only had 98 detectors simon's observatory is going to have a hundred times more just in one of our four telescopes we're going to have 60 000 detectors operating full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero in the atacama desert we'll get there but in the case of the getting back to what bicep did we upgraded made bicep two in january 2010 we had just installed in the exact same uh location at the south pole in the same building which is ominously called the dark sector laboratory dsl still operating to this very day we installed a new receiver on the same platform as before very similar identical optics cryogenics vacuum everything except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors so almost an order of magnitude very substantial upgrade um and it had certain other features that made it even more powerful but then just a naive factor of five and then we started observing with that and we knew we'd have years to go and maybe we'd never see anything again we're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of space time produced close to the origin of the universe as we could ever get to so i was playing a role in that obviously it had upgraded my version of the original idea that i had had for bicep uh with along with andrew lang and in january of 2010 uh we were i was at a meeting at uc berkeley and i got a call from andrew lang's uh or i was in a meeting with andrew lang's thesis advisor paul richards at uc berkeley and he said that andrew was dead he had taken his life by suicide and this is a man and i had already lost my father at this point in 2010 but he was like a father figure to me andrew he would give me advice on marriage on like how i should be with my kids and and um you know what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder again he was pretty naturally suited to win the nobel prize everyone always thought he would win it he still you know if he were alive he still could win it in fact his wife or his ex-wife won it francis arnold in uh 2018 and um you know his power couple and it destroyed me for a long time because you know he was uh he was just this magical person i mean i couldn't conceive of my career my life um even like you know these these aspects of raising kids and being married without him and to do it in that way it felt like again i'm not you know he's got kids and i feel terrible for for them obviously but it did feel like a betrayal i mean i'm just being honest with you it felt like why didn't the f did you not reach out you know i thought we were close and i couldn't you know i told him everything and i felt like he had told me everything and now he was gone and then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument i mean there's millions of dollars invested careers at stake young people working tremendously hard and then here we were and like who's going to take over the lead he was the lead of the project at caltech and then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom i had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well they had you know decided to form a collaboration in which i was no longer the principal investigator i was no longer one of the co-principal investigators as i was on bicep 1. so i continued on bicep 1 as the co-leader of it but not on bicep 2. and um you know obviously that was pretty painful this is all happening at the same time as you as you lose this father figure now there's this kind of just one betrayal in this in a way and there isn't another or something that feels like a betrayal yeah and he had you know kind of been the one the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment i had moved from caltech to uc san diego and there were other postdocs in the mix all of whom would come there to work with him to get the you know the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off as it did for mine and um you know so there was a competition i mean science is not free from egos and and uh and competition and and desires rightfully or wrongfully for credit and attribution was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist as a man i mean we're we're kind of alone in this world as when you take on difficult things we often kind of grasp but a few folks that give us strength yeah was he you're basically your only source of strength in this whole journey like primarily in terms of like this close knit as a scientist there were really two there's one there's russian cosmologist alexander polnarov who thankfully is very much alive he's it was a queen mary university now he's retired he was kind of the theoretical you know cosmological father to me and then andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me you need to have a brand as a scientist every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it some of them don't burnish it but some of the skills about being a scientist we don't teach our students involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona and he was the exemplar for that in addition to being the evonkular you know father figure type character that really you know was the person i would talk to i had issues with when i had issues with my own students and he would tell me how those were and he would tell me you know his misgivings about about people that he worked with or things in his personal life and it was it was it was devastating but again like who the hell am i i'm that's kid you know he lo his kids lost father you know it's so i feel guilty talking about it in that sense but it's just a reality you know well there is something that's not often talked about as people who collaborate on scientific efforts i mean that's i don't again don't want to compare but you know it's it's sometimes when the collaborations are truly great it sounds similar as when um veterans talk about their time serving together there's there's a bond that's formed so like comparing family and this kind of thing is you know it uh is not productive but the depth of the bond is is nevertheless um real because you're taking on something you're taking on the impossible you're you're trying to achieve something sort of like there's this darkness this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by which is um what the human condition is and you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science and you're doing that together with like a confidence you probably should not have yeah but you're boldly pushing through and then for him to uh to take his own life it can ask you about this kind of moment that combined i don't want to say betrayal but perhaps the feeling of betrayal that bicep 2 kind of goes on without you even though you're part of it you're not part of the leadership group can you describe those low points did um was there depression was there um a crumbling of confidence yeah i mean it was it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person you know like there's only a few different ways to have identity and you know unless you're unhealthy psychologically one of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist and that sometimes is their primary identity now i've got other husband and father um but but you know at that time that was my identity so to have that kind of taken away it you know what it reminded me of being you know kind of adopted in a sense like my like the one who created me or that i had played you know played a role in my life that he abandoned me in a sense it felt like these people are abandoning me and the only thing i'd correct about the analogy that you use is like in milit in the war they're all working you know for common good it's not like i want to be get the most kills i compare more to like a band like think about the beatles you know and what they did and then they like you know they ripped apart because of egos credit they had solo careers they had you know relations their intimates and and so forth and and there it's not only for the common good there is more of a zero-sum aspect like i would say science is not science is an infinite game you can't win science you never get today oh we won science and even the nobel prize they don't feel like oh we're done they feel like a lot of times they're imposters even to that day however science is made up of a lot of lot a lot of finite games where there is only one winner for tenure there is only three winners are only three winners for the nobel prize and because of that i think it's heterodox and it's very confusing especially there's no guide i never got a guide how to be a professor how to teach how to lead a research group how to deal with the death of an advisor how to deal with an unreally graduate student or two you know so we're all like reinventing it which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it because the academic system that i am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old dates back to bologna northern italy 1088 or so first universities were established and you know very little has changed there's some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece of rock and you know lecturing in front and there's only one better aspect nowadays is that back then the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor and then he or she wouldn't get paid probably mostly was he's back then nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced by 10 years so i'm okay but no it was a definite kind of uh feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me because you know here's he was like my consigliori he was a guy i you know sought counsel and counseled me and he's dead and i felt like there is no one who's gonna honor the agreements that we had and he was a very soulful person he was so much better at being a scientist than i could ever be and just a loss for the cosmos it just really hurt and you know i thought oh like you know it's so sad because he could have won the nobel prize i don't think like that anymore first i think about his kids felt at first now there goes my chance at winning a nobel prize and hence the title of the book was like i knew i would not win the nobel prize it also means that there's parts of the nobel prize that have to be done away with it's a double entendre like we need to lose aspects of the nobel prize to help science out we can talk about that a different time but in the context of like now thinking back on it that was such a miniscule part of it because let's say he did win the nobel prize or i did win or you know any of us did would that have changed anything without brought anything back it's so you know we say it's like vanity it's futility and and and i just you know for me the nobel prize is like it's i don't want to say it's like insignificant because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence and you know i went back i had neil degrasse tyson on my show i'm going to name drop okay and uh he prepares he prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show so you see him going on colbert report you think oh they just have a banter he's just naturally gifted no he said no no no you say that you're you're undermining what he does what he does he goes back he watches the last month of colbert reports or whatever it's called late show and he says how long does steven pause between questions how long in the news cycle does he go back what topics has he talked about with people similar to me so i took neil and i did that for you and i look back how many times does lex mention the words nobel and prize and i put it into google engram and out came exactly the same number of times as show notes show episodes as of this moment so you've said the words nobel prize over 240 times yeah i mean it is so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey right like um it's so it's both sad and beautiful that a little prize like a little award a medal a little plaque they'll be most likely forgotten by history completely some silly list um it's somehow uh a catalyst for greatness it it resulted in you doing your life's work yeah the dream of it would i have done it without the nobel prize you know i i can't necessarily counter factually state that that would have happened so no it definitely has a place um and for me you know it is valuable to think about it but the level of obsession that that academics have about it is really i think it is almost unbalanced becoming unhealthy and again i have no i make no truck with the uh winners of the nobel prize obviously i've you know now i've had 11 on the show and to think about you know like the one rule so by the way right after the denouement of the story which i'll get to in a bit um you know how our dreams went down to dust and ashes um i was asked by the royal swedish academy of sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 nobel prize in physics so like the one that i theoretically could have been eligible to win uh in in 2016 actually they asked me to nominate now imagine if i ask you lex you say brian you know instead of me inviting myself on the show if if you say brian would you like to come on the lex friedman podcast i think you know what lex um you know that guy rogan i think he might have can you introduce him to it to me you know like you imagine how that would feel like you'd be like after that you know i'm humiliated so i was asked to nominate the winners and the one rule that they say of all the rules that alfred nobel stipulated there's only one rule that they maintained in other words he he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to mankind made the world better right none of that was mentioned in the letter it said many people can win it for work done long ago they didn't mention anything in the letter to me signed by the secretary general nothing about benefiting mankind they said just one thing can't nominate yourself so none of these guys nominated themselves actually a little known fact they sent that exact letter just to you that rule was created just that's called the keating correlation yes exactly just to like good for them rub it in that's i mean it's uh in this particular case of course there's like some weird technicality or whatever but in this particular case it's kind of a powerful reminder yeah no the nobel prize leaves a lot of people behind yeah and there's stories behind all of that yeah i mean here's a good example again this is my friend barry barrish he's become like a mentor and a friend um he wrote the forward to this uh my book into the about he um he won the nobel prize because a different guy died and he admits it and he said it and actually it's funny with him because i've heard you talk you know very rhapsodically and lovely and romantically about with harry cliff and a wonderful podcast with him by the way um about the lhc and how wonderful it is and how in that you know we were about to build this super conducting super collider right here in texas and it didn't get built and it got cancelled by congress and i'd say to barry that was the best thing that ever happened to you and he's like what the hell are you talking about i'm like if that didn't get cancelled first of all the um even though it did get canceled the europeans went on to build it themselves saved the american taxpayers billions of dollars and we didn't we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the fact that as you and harry talked about nothing besides the higgs particle of great note has come out and actually he's had a recent paper but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators an lhcb experiment that i'm going to be talking with him about but but the bottom line is it was really built to detect the higgs so the ssc for twice as much money would have sucked up barry's career and he would have been working on that maybe not and then he would never have worked on ligo and then he wouldn't have won the nobel prize right so you look at counterfactual history that's not actually a big stretch right if the ssc had still gone on he would have worked out because he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment second thing if um imagine the following thing had happened they won the nobel prize because in september 2015 they detected unequivocal evidence for the in-spiral collision of two massive black holes each about 30 times the mass of the sun leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind so one solar mass worth of matter goku mask got converted to pure gravitational energy no light was seen by them this particular date uh september 15th september 14 2015. okay um that explosion because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us that actually took place uh 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far far away they actually don't know which galaxy took place and still then they never will okay that if that collision between these two things which have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million years or more if that had occurred 15 days earlier barry wouldn't have won the nobel prize because it's hilarious to think that there's one human that won the nobel prize because uh two giant things collided a billion 200 million years ago and if it happened eight you know 18 days 20 days 30 because that was the deadline for the nobel prize to be announced they announced the findings in february but you have to nominate the winners in january so i could have nominated them up until january 30th but they didn't announce anything and there were just rumors and so they he didn't he but the reason that he wouldn't have won it because there was another guy who was still alive considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers ray weiss who did win it kip thorne who did win it and the third gentleman at caltech named ron drever who passed away again he was alive in 2016. he died in the middle of 2017 and then he wasn't awarded the nobel prize and here we are several billion of hairless apes that strangely wear clothing uh celebrated uh three other clothed hairless apes with a metal with one with one particular element and then uh they made speeches in a particular language that evolved you know to get those medals in front of another guy who wears even fancier clothes who is the king of sweden and then they got some free food afterwards some reindeer meat that's right okay excellent um since you mentioned joe rogan in that little example uh what happened to you in terms of bicep too i want to kind of speak um at a high level about a particular thing i observed so i was a fan of joe rogan uh since he started the podcast just listening to the podcast i'm a huge fan of podcasts in general yeah and it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia so grad school getting my phd and going to mit and then google and then just looking at this whole world of research what i really loved about how joe rogan approaches the world is that he celebrates others like he promotes them he gets like genuinely and i now know this from just being a friend privately he genuinely gets excited by the success of others and the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing to me because the natural just on a basic human level there is an excitement but the nature of that excitement is more like i'm happy for my friend but i'm really jealous and i want to even outdo them i want to celebrate them but i want to do even better so even that's even for friends yeah so there's not a genuine pure excitement for others and then uh to couple that with just the you now as a as a host of a popular podcast know this feeling which is like there's not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others people in academia are often best equipped technically in terms of language to celebrate others they understand the beauty like the the full richness of why the the cool idea is as cool as it is and they're in the best position to celebrate it and yet there's a feeling that if i celebrate others they might end up on the cover of nature whatever and not me it's they turn it into zero-sum game what i the reason why i think uh rogan has been inspiration to me and many others is that it doesn't have to be that yeah and and forget money and all those kinds of things that i think there's a narrative told that academics are this way because there's a limited amount of money and so they're fighting for this i don't think that's the reason it's happening this way i think i think you you can have a limited amount of money the battle for money happens in the space of proposal there's networking there's private stuff public celebration of others and all and just actually just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do anything with money it has to do with you having a big ego not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey that we are all on and there's folks like joe rogan who in the comedian circles is also rare but he inspired all these other comedians to realize you know what it's great to celebrate each other we're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows yeah because everybody else gets excited about this whole thing and the pie grows right now the scientists by fighting like by not celebrating each other are not growing the pie and now because of that sort of science becomes less and less positive and exactly no and i want to point out two things one is that i remember you went on joe's show maybe a couple of years ago and um and then he gave you a watch he gave you like a rolex right yeah and i tweeted to you and i think mega omega sorry okay fine uh the watch that went to the to the moon which we will get to in a bit um i don't think he could give you what i gave you though by the way um and we'll get to what that final gift package is for you and by the way i also wanted to mention because when you said joe i would not be upset and you should definitely go on joe rogan and i we had this conversation with him yeah because i was like when i was uh uh so moving to austin and i had a conversation like don't you think it's weird like if we have the same guests at the same time or whatever he's like  that i want you to be more successful than me i want he he truly wants everybody like especially people close to him to be more successful like there's not even a thought like but you know why he does and this is what i tweeted to you and one of the few things i think you have retweeted that i sent you i said someday you're going to give that to somebody and today i wanted that to be me no no joe's omega no but but the point is he sees in you that same um you know grandiosity that same genuine spirit graciousness and i think that's true i mean you do do something very rare i don't turn this into too much of a love fest but i do want to say even back to andrew you know who i've almost been hate hagiographic about you know just treating him like a saint he said to me the same thing and a moment of peak said like god damn it like i have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the effing nsl you know that wasn't his that wasn't who he was um that was just an expression like i'm doing something which is fundamentally but you know what um when you have kids hopefully you know please god you will someday because i think and i hope we can get to talk about that later but part of investment and part of doing something with when you have a kid like you can get married you can marry someone because she's rich or he's rich you can marry someone because they're good looking or he's good look you can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish there's no way you can have a kid and be selfish nobody says like oh you know what i really want this thing that's three feet tall that doesn't speak english it craps on my floor that wakes me up all hours of the night that interferes my love life you know nobody says that because it doesn't benefit you for months and months a friend of mine who actually does the videos for me that does a lot of my solo videos he's having his first kid he's like what do i do because it always gets stupid i'll catch up on sleep now like yeah i'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bank like i don't think huberman and you talked about that right you can't do that that's stupid what you can do give the kid a bath feed the baby let the mother relax like in other words do the things and and this really relates back to aristotle once aristotle said why do parents love kids more than kids love parents as much as you love your dad and your mom they still love you more and because you love that what you sacrifice for here's a proof um i know a lot of families that have kids with special needs some some with severe uh my one of my uncles um the keating side had uh severe what they called mental retardation now it's probably has a different name that out of the nine other brothers and sisters he was their favorite because they had to sacrifice so much for him and i think of that you know in the small case like joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever you're going to mentor someone you love that which you sacrifice for sacrifice is reduction of entropy it's storing and investing and you want to protect that and you know that that to me really speaks to it so i you know i don't hold it against but it is true like scientists are you know when they're described again they're often said to be like children right you've heard this description they're inquisitive they're curious they're passionate they love that i'm like yeah and they don't play well with others they're jealous they're petty they're selfish they won't share their ball and go home yeah we you can't there's no such thing as a single-edged sword i wish there were you know because you we we need some more of that because you gotta dull it up but in this case he uh you know i i think when when you have this kind of investment in in science it's going to be natural but that doesn't mean we have to like you know feed the flames of competition you know i'm like really vendor if you go to the homepage of the nsf or the department of energy or the recently released national academy of sciences future of science for the astronomical sciences for the next 25 years or more they talk about how many nobel prizes these different science things could win exoplanets life uh the discovery of the cmb b mode polarization then i study you know that's figured too in this thing and i'm like what message is that sent to kids like to young people like that's what you should be doing so you win this small as you said this prize given out by one hairless ape to another wearing a fancier costume and using reindeer in the case of nobel prize it's only currently given to three people at most which was never one of his stipulate he actually said one you could only give it to one person so they change it why do they change it i talk about speculating by the way the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the nobel prize and it's its effect but you know one of the things that's been so interesting like um speaking actually this coming up in december is that the nobel prize is given out on the day of alfred nobel's death there's a lot of and and and they bring in flowers not from his birthplace but from his mausoleum which is in san marino mourinho in italy uh it's a lot of like death fascination you know denial of death features heavily in the nobel prize because it's like what outlives a person well science cannot live a person my father has a theorem named after him it's still you know in you know engraved in many places around the world you or i we can go to different places around the world people know who we are based on our publications we engrave things we want to store things we want to compress things and i think that's there's something beautiful about that but there is a notion of denial of death like there is a notion of what will outlast me especially if you're among the many 90 something percent of members of the national academy don't believe in an active faith you know and a creator and a god and um and science can substitute for that but it's not it's not ultimately as fulfilling i just i don't believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing but not believing in a religion can fulfill a person so it which is interesting because you do bring up ernest becker in the denial of death in losing the nobel prize book and there is a sense in which that's probably in part at the core of this especially later dream of the nobel prize or a prize or recognition i've interacted with a few um you know a large number of scientists that are getting up in age and there is the feeling of real pride of happiness in them from winning awards and getting certain recognitions and i probably at the core of that is a kind of immortality or um a kind of desire for immortality and that that was always off-putting to me as opposed to i mean i know it sounds weird to say it's off-putting but it's just rather than celebrating the pure joy of uh solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us just the the the actual the actual uh exploration uh of the mysterious sounds for its own sake yeah well that's what i said you know it's like a scientist should okay you have to be careful and not have any you know physical it has to be platonic but you can think of of scientists and mentor i have a chart in the book and then a plaque made by one of my graduate students former graduate students she's now a professor in new mexico darcy baron and she made this plot and it has 17 generations so here i am 17 you know levels down there's a guy labnets not the famous labness different live nuts 1596 he was born and i'm in this chain and i don't know if you know this but in the russian language the word scientist means someone who was taught i'll say it very slowly one who was taught right which only hachoni so um it probably means like i was taught right no i could just just speak no no it's some it's it's literally someone someone who is taught right so what does that mean to me it has a dual kind of meaning at least dual meaning one is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist because you have to learn from somebody else two you have to be a teacher you have to pay it forward if you don't i claim you're really not a scientist in the truest sense and i feel like with the work that i do in outreach and stuff like that i'm doing it at scale i'm influencing more than eight you know 24 kids i might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class and they potentially could reach thousands of people around the world and make them into scientists themselves because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial there is no competition there is no zero sum fixed a fixed mindset versus growth mindset um because it is an infinite game imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the soviet union or pre-world war one uh germany or imperial japan you know science celebrated and we're just making like a nation of scientists and like we're not doing it to become multi-billionaires or necessarily you know for any military purpose whatsoever but if we had that you know sometimes i'm flying you know home at night like when you fly into la you literally it's very rare you can see like the number 10 million like it's very hard to like visualize things you see a brick wall you ask how many bricks are there there might be a thousand two thousand ten million lights there's 10 million souls and you can see and they're discreet they're not like the milky way all blending together each lost in their own busy lives excited fall in love afraid of losing their job all that by the way people should know that you're a pilot so you literally mean fly yeah sometimes they get to do it you get to look at the the the eye of god perspective on these uh 10 million and these millions of and i have this age they're like constellations but upside down like the city this is like a constant hopefully i'll stay keep the plane the right way up but when you think about that like imagine they're all working together and imagine like you always talk about love and but like you don't know you don't know that they're not worthy of love like so you're looking down on them and it's just amazing because you think like what an amazing creation is man and humans and what can we do it's it's phenomenal it's so exciting and then i get to do it you know it's a job i say don't tell gavin newsom but i do it for free you know i love what i do and but to think about like oh if my student succeeds that i'm not no it's it's it it is unfortunate that you have experienced that i've certainly experienced it and i think there are ways around it i think it is it is a vexing problem because people want to you know it's very tempting to keep your own kind of you know garden fertilized you know one thing that's interesting is like you know people like why are you doing this thing and a podcast you're supposed to be a you know serious scientist leading this huge project and um collaborators and and i'm like well most of what i do as i said before it's yeah for you it's velcro for me it's like you know what is the deal with the with the safety standards on the truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that allow the concrete truck to it has nothing to do with the big bang inflation the multiverse god's existence has nothing to do with that right so those are people i say i have to talk to the people that come on the show those are people i want to talk to and that's super fun i mean it's it's a real honor that i get to do it i'm using i have some unfair advantages right i'm at a top university we have people that's affiliated with the arthur c clarke foundation you know brilliant scientists coming through and but i felt like it would be kind of a a shame if i didn't you know allow them to teach at scale because they're better teachers than i am let me ask you a interesting maybe difficult question have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would get the nobel prize for bicep 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is yeah i mean i'm still i'm still friends with them and they have still gone on to so i should we should say like why we didn't win the nobel prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it completely that i'm completely divorced from in a secular sense uh we're friends you know we we see each other you know we send each other emails and stuff like that i'd love to get their sense of like what the the natural heartbreak built into the whole process of the nobel prize what their sense is i would love to hear yeah an honest real conversation i understand your friends yeah yeah there's some hard truth that even friends will talk they weren't i mean i remember one of them you know was like well what's this i hear about a book and i mean a lot of people tell me not to write the book they said it's going to give you know too much attention to the nobel prize it's going to look like sour grapes again i say you can prove i have sour grapes or not just give me the next prize no uh so you would if you get a nobel prize for literature you would turn it down i don't know it's funny because sabine hassenfelder uh who is uh who's a fellow kind of youtube sensation and uh she's shoeing for the nobel peace prize you're right she's so gracious and so she has that that that german you know just just gentle and genteelness um she's a little too nice for my taste i would say i wish she could really say what she thinks not and be snarky on occasion so she wrote a review of my book when it came out three or four years ago and she uh she said well you know brian keating like she said well it's you know it's a good it's interesting he talks about about cosmology but you know um they can do whatever the hell they want and he you know presumably has this you know problems with it but it's none of his business basically it's a private and uh and at the end she said but you know if you want one good thing he's a really good writer and who knows he could win the nobel prize in literature someday and then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog which was kind of funny but anyway um no so getting back to the guys that we were you know kind of collaborators or frenemies and we're still look i you know we don't wish each other active ill i've visited them they're welcome to visit me they have visited me the thing i have to say is that i just wonder about introspection like for me literally i don't i don't care about the nobel prize other than what it can do to you know benefit science but i no longer i did but by the way i did seriously care about how i benefit brian keating early on in my career i'm just totally honest i'm not proud of it it's kind of embarrassing but now i would hope that people would say like okay the guy is like you know it's not he's obsessed with it my next book is not about this it's about something completely different and um you know i i do feel like people um lack introspection a lot of times in science like we don't think about why we're doing what we're doing and i think it comes down to curiosity um one thing about joe and again i've i've only listened to like i have to confess you know you're like my father now i'm confessing my sins it's your father left friedman um i haven't listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish okay with our friend mutual friend eric i've listened to a bunch of recent ones uh einstein weinstein uh weinstein weinstein that's what it is um and a few others i haven't ever listened to a full joe rogan episode but from what i've seen with him he has a pretty natural curiosity he doesn't have passion there are a lot of podcasts you have passion like i've been on their show he is curiosity like he's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it until he understands it until he gets it viscerally and i i respect that because as i say in this more recent book passion's like kind of like the the dopamine hit that gets you started like oh i'm going to be great maybe i could win a nobel prize like that's not going to sustain you the sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity and what i want to do is convert you know as many things as possible to cure to things that i can then because actually i've had on you know people that that discuss addiction and there is an addictive quality to you know doing doing podcasts or whatever but there's an addictive quality being a scientist and you get to do things that are very specialized and specialized locations with special people uh paid for by other people have no freaking idea what you do i mean imagine you worked in some like some job and you know feynman said he said all these contradictory things like when he was he was once said like he said if you can't explain it to your grandmother you don't understand it yourself then the day you won the nobel prize the reporter asked him what'd you win it for he said if i could explain it to you bud it wouldn't be worth a nobel prize so let's leave aside his inherent contradictions but um but in reality there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it but um but you know what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it so yeah i i do feel like um we have to find a way to to nucleate that i don't know actually i don't know if it's like can you can you turn someone into us i used to ask this question all the time like can you make someone creative like can you teach someone to be creative i don't know can you teach someone to be curious i don't know i do know that kids are naturally curious as they get older they get less curious just like i heard from the other forward authors james altitude he said once he did they did a study kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh adults five or six five or six no i'm just trying to get you to laugh but you're not gonna uh but anyway no it's true so somewhere you lose 30 you know to 50 i'm not entertained but that's because i'm an adult no and then i i do remember there's some some distribution on those studies with the happier adult small a little more but still the kids blow them out of the water russian so can you is it or should in other words should we invest our energy in getting the half-life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity for kids or should we try to reset the the dopamine hit and then you know i don't know it's it's an open question well i i think um it goes to david foster wallace the key to life is to be unbearable i think i think you could train this kind of thing which is in every single situation so like uh which i think is at the at the core at least this correlated with curiosity is in every situation try to find the exciting the fascinating like in every situation you sitting at the i don't know waiting for something at a dmv or something like that find something that excites you like a thought like uh watch people or start to think about well i wonder how many people have to go to the dmv every day and they try to go into the the pothead mode of thinking like wow isn't this weird that there's a bunch of people that are having to get a stamp of approval from the government to drive their cars and then there's millions of cars driving every day i could do this better maybe there's some blockchain and they could like vin transfer yeah exactly yeah no that is a good that is and then every situation i think if you rigorously like just practice that at a young age i think you can learn to do that because like sometimes people like ask me for advice and like to do this thing or that thing is i think you at the core really have to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness and everything because if you're able to find the awesomeness in everything like whatever journey you take whatever whatever weird um that you take through life is going to be productive it's going to end up in a in a great place so like that muscle is at the core of it and i guess curiosity is uh central to that but you didn't win the nobel prize the team of bicep that led the bicep two didn't win the nobel prize because of some space dust that's right uh which one is the moon which one is that one's uh dust the space dust yep what are we looking at so why why is space dust the the villain of this whole story well it's funny you know i wrote these books and i don't know about you but when you get all these books i'm sure you get books people send you books they always come in these dust jackets right i was like what the hell is a dust jack like how much dust is raining down at any moment i mean this is immaculate this room is russian tidiness galore but but in a normal household how much dust is raining down it's not not really pretty until i wrote a book and i realized you know i'm writing a story about the origin of the universe and the prologue you know to the cosmos and dust is going to cover this story it was actually it's actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than dust and this is the link between the cosmological and the astrophysical so what does that mean so astrophysics is broadly speaking the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens astronomical phenomena cosmology is concerned with the origin evolution composition of the universe as a whole but it's not really concerned with stars galaxies and planets per se other than how they might help us measure the hubble constant the density of the universe the neutrino content etcetera etcetera so we ten have a tendency to kind of look a little bit you know they're like not all astronomers and astrophysicists are equal they're all equal but some are more equal than others so we have kind of a prejudice a little swagger right and cosmologists are studying you know we're using einstein we're not using like you know boltzmann or we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures in so doing you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people you know would have not overlooked in our case when we sought out the signal we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe luckily only at three degrees kelvin approximately we're using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way and then we can use our polarized sunglasses but in a microwave format to detect the characteristic two-fold symmetry pattern of under rotation that's the technical way that we undergo i mean there's a lot more to it um but there more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal first of all when you look at the signal the signal if inflation took place big if but if it took place the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the cmb temperature itself so a few nano kelvin the cmb is a few kelvin the signal from these b modes would be a few nano kelvin it's astonishing to think pansies and wilson 1965 measured something that's a billion times brighter and that was what uh 60 years ago let's call it 60 years ago since they discovered it moore's law you're more experts let's call it every two years so you're talking about like 2 to the 30th power doubling or something like that at that so let's call 2 to the 20th something like that so that's like only um uh 2 to the 10th is a as a as a thousand all right correct my math i'm wrong to the 20th is a million right to the 30th is a billion so you we're outpacing moore's law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos and they don't have to deal with you know in the semiconductor fabric factory in santa clara california they have to deal with like you know meteorites and aspirin things like coming into the laboratory it's a clean room it's pristine they can control everything about it right we can't control the cosmos and the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz of failed planets asteroids meteoroids things that didn't coalesce to make either the earth the moon the planet jupiter or its moons or get sucked into them and make craters on them etc etc the rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum there's very few thank god chicksylub size you know impact uh or you know progenitors that will take out all life on earth um but there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains and then there's a fair number of intermediate-sized particles it turns out this little guy here is um is the end product of a collapsing star that explodes in what's called a supernova type 2 supernova so stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei protons into um and neutrons into helium nuclei and then from there can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium and carbon nitrogen oxygen all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel iron and nickel are endothermic it takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron when that happens there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier so the star forms goes inside out that's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun i don't know did you know that's why it's called helium yeah they went there at night and oh well done they went there at night no helium means helios is the god of the sun it was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago it wasn't discovered like when uh oxygen and you know iron was discovered um so it's only a relatively recent comer to the pure activity the helium came after oxygen oh no first first hydrogen forms into helium so that's the first thing that forms now in terms of discoveries oh yeah after oxygen yeah i think priestly and yeah and others dalton discovered it in the 1700s no helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and called fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum so but when it tries to make iron there's no longer any leftover heat in other words there's heat left over from fusing as you know the son of a plasma physicist you fuse to hydrogen nuclei you get excess energy plus you get helium so that's why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future and it always will be no no hopefully it'll come much sooner than that and so doing trying to make iron it takes more energy doesn't give off enough energy star collapses explodes and what does it spray out into the you know cosmic interstellar medium it sprays out the last thing it made which is that stuff luckily for us because some of that coalesced and made the core of the earth onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed and some of that made its way to the crust the iron made its way to the crust some of that your mother ate and uh synthesized hemoglobin molecules and hemoglobin has iron particles in it it's a quite amazing substance without it you know we wouldn't have a red blood we wouldn't exist as we are is this a very long complicated mom joke i've done enough dad jokes my quota's up um so i'm taking this this object uh you know seriously there's not all of it gets bound up in a planet in fact forming planets is very inefficient um and so there's a lot of schmutz left over some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time and some of those molecules like iron is used in compass needles right they're magnetized and magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for as if the compass needles get all aligned that's like the polarization of of the dust grain it's like that fill the polarizing filter that means light polarized like this will get absorbed and light polarized like this will go through so it's absorbing it's making 100 polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light source and that's what happened and what we ended up claiming we on on march 17th and i'm sure if you were there you might remember this at the harvard center for astrophysics there was an announcement there were like three or four nobel prize winners in the audience and the bicep2 team which i was no longer leading i was still a member of it in fact in the announcement the first person they mentioned besides you know thank you all for being here as me and my team at uc san diego although i wasn't invited to go to the press conference uh because that uh harvard complicated yes exactly um it's a little school up there in the in cambridge area um and so uh they ended up making this announcement that we had discovered the aftershocks of inflation we detected the gravitational waves shaking up the cmb and on that day past lex friedman podcast back when it was called artificial intelligence max tag mark said goodbye universe hello multiverse and hello nobel prize see he saw that as confirmatory evidence not only of inflation not only gravitational waves but of the multiverse goodbye universe hello multiverse multiverse is a natural consequence consequence of inflation yes according to its prominent you know supporters yeah uh yeah and of course leave the poetry to max which uh he does masterfully okay so that the excitement was there i mean maybe the initial heartbreak for you is there too that's that's some of the darker moments you're going through but broadly for the space of science there's excitement there and and i often note that this is a problem in what i call you know the science media complex because often times you'll see things like past gasser seeger venus life you know exists and that will be really i mean it's fascinating right and with the work that she's doing or her colleagues are doing uh or clara who's on your show as well and that will be on front page new york times boston globe san diego union tribune it'll be above the fold make headlines around the world and then six months 12 months later as a case for us retraction page c17 of the saturday edition that nobody reads you know and underneath the personal so we have a problem in science that the you know if it if it if it explodes it leads you know and we get this huge fanfare and this is not unique to my experiment this happened with the earlier discovery of so-called martian life uh of discovered in antarctica um which was announced after peer review we weren't peer reviewed at the point where we made the announcement we had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee it was unethical we thought we had done everything right but that's confirmation there's like levels to this yeah there were many levels and there were people you know me warning about you know how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out including the maps which we still haven't released and um so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical but the audi the the public never knows this yeah i think it's so i've made a rule that if i am ever in charge of you know doling out large amounts of science funding that when you you should keep kind of an option in other words you should have money for publicity it's fine have money for your press conference but hold in reserve in a bond to be used hopefully never but if it's to be used an equal fund for the retraction if it should occur so you would like to see um because that's a big part of transparency is the to me in the space of science at least that's as beautiful because it reveals the it's like it's uh it tells a great story there's a there's an excitement there's uh humanity there so there's a climax of the triumph but there's also a climax to the like the disappointment yeah because that also eventually leads to triumph again that sets up that's the drama that sets up the triumph like with andrew wiles bringing for mars last uh from us theorem as i guess it's not lasting whatever the is like the ups and downs of that the roller coaster the whole thing should be science that is science and when we don't do that then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists often from minorities or women back that you have to be eins like einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy was like curly no he wasn't he was he wasn't bad at math that was all that's all nonsense but he said that he you know when he said he attributed his success to lex he said i never asked my dad what happened when i ran alongside a light beam as a kid and thank god i didn't because had i he would have told me the best answer of the day which by the way you know he would create 20 years later as a 26 year old in in the patent office obviously in switzerland and in so doing by delaying when he asked these questions he said i approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist not a little kid and i wouldn't have accepted the same explanation so sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible inevitable omniscient you know being i think that really does a disservice jim gates said you know he's like einstein wasn't always einstein and we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans until we have artificial einstein which i don't think will ever exist you've launched the uh assayer project where you hope to assess theories of everything with experiments you have a youtube video where you're announcing that that looks super cool can you describe this project and you also mentioned kind of you give a shout out to a little known fellow by the name of galileo galilei as an inspiration to this project yeah so galileo is kind of my my avatar my hero the kind of all-around scientist that i would love to approach the you know logarithm of galileo he was not only a phenomenal scientist he was an incredible artist a writer a poet a philosopher and back then they didn't have distinctions between you know scientists and i was like a physician was like a physicist um and he would indulge you know kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy thinking about uh phenomena such as the earth's tides or the or you know the composition of the milky way and what's interesting about galileo is that he was almost as wrong often as he was right and galileo was not alone like this i always say like einstein had at least seven nobel prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true but he also had seven you know huge you know impossible to believe blunders in some sense um it's too bad because he could have had a good career as i would say uh and galileo was like that too in other words he would fall victim to i think this confirmation bias that all scientists have to guard their lives against their careers their brands their reputations against which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove for one reason or another or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it in order to bolster your confidence and both are equally intoxicating it's a you know confirmation bias is a hell of a drug uh because it it really you know reinforces this notion which is partially sunk cost you put so much time effort money reputation into it you don't want to be wrong and go back on it and with galileo he would uh he would be incredibly perceptive about things such as um you know the earth being not located at the center of the solar system and the sun being the center so called copernican hypothesis um and he would use as evidence very very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong basically and in fact we weren't able to prove that the earth orbited around the sun and i ask you like can you prove the earth is is not flat no well you're a flat earther anyway but um but but it's i asked my crowd uh flat earth society member t-shirts coming out soon merch slash merch but it's actually not trivial to do that but most of my students graduate students can prove that the earth is rounder explain how the earth it is actually not trivial to do though it's not yeah and much harder is to prove that the earth goes around the sun in fact that's extremely hard to prove and and almost none of my students even after they get their phd in the final exam i kind of like to just you know give them a little bit of humility because i think to be a good scientist you need to be humble you need to have a little humility and you need to have swagger you need to feel like a little cocky like i can do this i can do this thing that einstein by definition couldn't do i'm going to attempt it i'm going to attempt to do what was impossible just a generation ago how do you uh prove that the earth goes around the sun do you have to is it by the motion of other planets so there are many ways to do it i mean obviously you could take a spaceship park it at the north celestial pole of our solar system and and just watch what happens uh but obviously that wasn't how was discovered in the late 1700s so it's called aberration so if you look at stars um uh as the earth orbits around the sun uh the position of the stars will shift slightly because of the tilt of the earth and because the earth is in motion around the earth and around the sun and because the earth has a non a trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the sun the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses and those will correspond to the fact that we're moving around if they're at infinite distance which we assume that they are they're not really but for all intents and purposes and the scale of the solar system are infinitely far away so that's called stellar aberration and that was the first way it was discovered and actually we still use that we have to correct for that effect we measure the cosmic microwave background because imagine you're inside of an oven it has some temperature three kelvin a thousand kelvin whatever if you're moving towards you the photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue shifted hotter and the ones behind me will be redshifted i'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter or energy where you are and it's a extension of the doppler effect so we actually make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rust anyway um so you can do it but galileo said no no i'm not going to wait for that i have other proofs for it one of which is that the earth has tides and the tides come in and out twice a day high tide and low tide and it's he made the analogy of because the earth is moving around the sun say this is the sun here and it's moving around the sun but it's also rotating on its axis see how the water is sloshing up and down inside the vodka bottle um as that happens he said that's what the tides are caused by totally wrong most people listen to this podcast just just just so you know if you're listening to this he actually has a bottle of vodka in his hand half drunk and we're both drunk and whatever else is possible so as it sloshed around he claimed that was but now it has nothing to do with that the moon over there the moon pulls differentially on the earth and the earth's ocean that causes the oceans to bulge slightly towards and away from where the moon is and the moon is actually the source of the earth's tides it has nothing to do with copernicus the orbit of the center so he was totally wrong about that he also thought that the milky way was comprised only of stars when we know it's made of gas dust nebulae and things like that so he had a fair share of blunders now one thing i always kind of make note of and i'm actually producing along with jim gates fabiola giannatti frank wilczyk um and uh carlo revelli and my friend lucio picarillo the first ever audiobook of one of gal of galileo's dialogue the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the earth around the sun but it was an error so you're reading parts of this text yeah it's just incredible brilliant book so this book is uh was written in 1632 it was written and it was the one that caused him to go into house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured and that book um laid out his arguments for what was called the copernican or the um uh non-peripatetic aristotelian etc notion of the planetary dynamic and and eventually he was forced to recant that he believed in it and allegedly he said he still believes the earth moves anyway so we're making that it's written in the form of a trilog it's actually called the dialogue but it's three people there's one named salviati who is espousing galileo's notions about how the heavens were orchestrated and salviante means like the salvation the savior then there's a middleman segreto so carlo revelli is playing salviati brilliant one i am playing segredo who's like an intelligent interlocutor i'm you know kind of just i can appreciate aristotle i can appreciate copernicus then there's this guy simplicio the simpleton and he espouses the words of the pope so you can imagine like you know you're working in the putin's government or you're working in whatever uh and uh and all of a sudden you're you're kind of putting the words of of like the fool literally calling the fool but you're using the words of the all-supreme powerful being on earth at that time as the vatican church especially for an italian like galileo so he wasn't as brilliant you know politically uh as he was uh astrophysically and otherwise who's who's uh doing some cliche so plicio is a friend a friend of mine in university of manchester named luccio picciorello he's a irish guy but he has an attack no no he's he's a full-blooded italian but they all speak english and italian i only speak uh and that forwards are written by so one forward and this place has three four words uh which is like a 12 word okay uh the four words are written for me yeah that was a good one uh the four word three four words one of them is written by albert einstein in which he says galileo was not only one of the greatest scientists in history this is einstein telling galileo but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history that forward is read by frank wilczak who you've had um jim gates you've also had he reads the translation um uh the translator stillman drake is a renowned uh scientific translator and then fabiola giannatti she reads the introduction and dedication from galileo to the duke of tuscany and uh and some of the different introductions that galileo himself had it's just it's it's such a thrill to be able to do it i only randomly found out because i had i wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long and i was like let me get the book because i'm an audio medium kind of guy didn't exist so i said let's do it ourselves and so we did it and hopefully it'll be out on galileo's birthday uh which is february 15 2022 he'll be a ripe 457 but that's not the only one of his books galileo wrote many books one of which is called the military compass and this is an interesting book for my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados in this book he talks about a compass which is not a magnetic compass but actual like slide roll it's basically a slider rule and he he it's a manual it's like imagine if your phone you know came with a manual nowadays they don't right but this was a manual for how to use this slide roll which is like enormously important and it gives a whole bunch of work examples it's a brilliant book one of the examples is how do you convert money so he does a money conversion currency conversion between ducati and florentine ducati and scooty and whatever you know lyra whatever he does all these currency conversions one copy of this book or maybe maybe two exist first printings from 1600 still exist if galileo had just kept those in his family they're worth 100 million dollars nowadays you can't get a scooty a scooty's worth nothing like a ducati's worth not i mean maybe some collector wants a piece of paper right so it's a lesson like there are value in physical you know non-fungible tokens this original non-fungible token so um but then a third book is called the assayer so what is an assay so assayers were kind of like these alchemists you know physicists chemists that would uh would would be around a court and every so often for the treasurer they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script or you know paper money and to do that they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold that they knew to be gold and uh do some kind of semi-non-destructive evaluation of the purported object the metal that was supposed to be gold so they would take these pieces of gold theoretically gold and they would rub it on something called a touchstone touchstone was a special piece of rock granite whatever it has no intrinsic value it's just a piece of rock but with that rock you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth you know millions of lira or whatever right so it's incredibly important job and so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable what i want to do in the assayer project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything i said recently you know we should give a nobel prize to someone who doesn't come up with a theory of everything because there's just that's good there's just like it's just rotten with them and and and i think it's great you know i often say that um theory is kind of like software and i'm not denigrating software at all but like you can create a lot of software you can make a coin and it'll make its own quine and like you can make infinite amounts of stuff look it up kids that's one of my favorite videos and you can see you can replicate you can't replicate you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes it in other words hardware is kind of like the non-fungible token that's the ultimate minted you know limited edition the book the the compass book and so um it's very expensive that means you have to be very careful before you invest decades billions and humans into pursuing one of these theories of everything you have to have good intuition for it and lately what i've seen is not predictions but retrodictions so you see that the large hadron collider will come out with a measurement and then so-and-so will say oh this is uh you know this is compatible with string theory or g minus two of the muon it has these bizarre properties fifth force string theory predicts this um string theory solves this um neutrinos uh sterile neutrinos uh large hadron collider bottom or b experiment blah blah they'll say that it's compatible after the fact and it's not so bad right because look what did einstein do with gr general relativity the first thing he did was not predict something new he looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet mercury and he saw it was behaving strangely and people had said oh that's because there's another planet hiding behind the sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit of the planet mercury and it's always called vulcan um that was one approach that's kind of like the dark matter approach where it's like there's a clump of matter that we can't see that's influencing the planet that we can't see and we use that to divine and intuit the existence of the other planet that's actually how neptune was discovered neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior of the planet uranus so neptune was dark we couldn't see it it was tugging on uranus in a certain way and that led to laverie discovering the planet predicting where this planet should be found so it had a good heritage in physics right to predict this planet that you couldn't see that worked but einstein said no um it's caused by the warping and bending of space-time due to the presence of matter would later become known as the einstein equations so he he explained why mercury did that he didn't it was known since the time of newton that mercury was behaving in this really freaky way so he didn't predict it he retrodicted it that's fine but at some point you should come up with something new that's uniquely predictive of your theory as i just said the theory of dark matter in the context of neptune is actually a valid theory it just happens not to make sense in the context of vulcan and so um if he had kept doing that maybe you know maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions that he would later reject like he rejected the existence of gravitational waves you and barry talked about that he didn't actually believe it was the one peer-reviewed paper that he had you know he used to send back in those days he sent a letter to nature physical review publish this you know let me know how much it cost and they got it rejected because he said you can't detect gravitational waves and actually or they're not real and the guys show that they're real because he can't corrected a math error in einstein and rosen's paper um so it's fascinating what should the assayer do he or she should look at these theories look what things they explain that already exist and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build experiments to ch to test them so you have to kind of challenge yourself to think about what kind of predictions can they make such that we can construct experiments so that's like ultimately back going to this to the signal to the experimenters theorists essentially that's right so like very experiment centric exploration of the fundamental theory of everything that's right and the best scientists the best physicists were both experimentalists and theorists or at least that they if they were experimentalists they understood the theory well enough to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions they or if they were theorists they were like galileo like einstein has patents for things that he invented and then you know some of his work led to the laser and the mazer um so he had practical it wasn't just pure airy fairy you know quantum reality and expanding universe um so in this case what i want to do is look at you know there's 10 different theories of everything or cosmological models they make predictions they have advantages and disadvantages and i'm just asking the question why aren't we applying bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals why don't we have updates every time an experiment comes out we can update our credulity in that experiment or that theory rather based on the results of the experiment and we shouldn't do it after the fact or as you know michio kaku has said well you have to tell me what the initial conditions are that's not my job you're supposed to tell me if string theory is correct what should it predict if it's true there's one big problem which i should say that um to be a good assayer i think you have to you have to be worldly in the sense of um worldly and curious like we were talking about before with with you and joe and you can't only talk your own book you can't only understand your own pet theory of everything um you can't only say well i only understand string theory and i don't have time for these other theories or as if it's beneath me to even under uh you know go into garrett lisey or eric weinstein or stephen wolfram or aspects of you know m theory etc etc and there are some that say you know like why do we give um you know string theory so much um so much of an advanced pass when it we they're actually predictions that's made that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics like the dark energy should be negative and we see it as positive like that's a huge strike you know if you told somebody here's my 10-year application and what do you think oh i've made this pretty if it wasn't done by you know maldisana and you know whitten and folks like that i don't know if it would have had the traction the endurance the resiliency that it's had and that worries me because all these men and some women are making these fantastic brilliant beautiful ideas and they're not even looking at what their neighbors doing there's a thing that i really enjoyed seeing and i don't see often enough with these theories which is others who are also experts kind of uh studying them sufficiently well to steal man the theory to show the beautiful aspects of the theory you know i see that with stephen wolfram he has a a very different uh sort of formulation of physics with his physics project now i'm it's you know physics is a foreign land to me but uh his formulation especially in the context of cellular automate our hypographs just as objects as mathematical objects themselves are familiar and so i'm able to see the the real beauty there and it saddens me that others in the physics community can't also see the beauty like give it a chance give a chance to see the beauty and then your respect right so there is one person who does take time and is what i consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks he obviously has invested interest in his own theory and it's eric eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics and he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving others and i've witnessed this and i've had look first of all i think debate is pointless like i don't know about you but if you've ever voted like oh i saw this debate and you know because trump did so badly and i'm going to vote for but no it never happened you almost never change anybody's mind unless you debate with love unless you have almost like we're going to win together like the red team approach in the military they're trying to win a war so they may disagree on this on the tactics day-to-day but the strategy we have to win this war i love you and i want to protect you i don't see that in very many of these physicists from kaku i almost see it it's embarrassing in some ways because they'll they'll almost mock with the exception of eric you know garrett's interesting you know his theory is you know people have a lot of issues very technical uh but eric has taken the time to try to understand it eric has taken the time to understand peter white's theory and i i don't see i don't see the same graciousness extended from them i'm sorry yeah you're right you're right i mean with eric he hasn't he he wants to but he hasn't extended the same for stephen wolfram because i think no he did no actually no he did i had a debate with them live on my show no i did i listened to it but like i just think it's outside of the toolkit oh that eric is comfortable with so it's not it's not that he's not but you're the main thing that's often absent and eric does have is like the willingness and like not just like dismissing or mocking the that he's he's reaching out but okay i mean what if it's not you know i made a joke when they were on i was like how many theories of everything can there be you know highlander you know there can be only one you know i don't know maybe but he of course also like the other folks who propose a theory has um in ego yeah he uh he rides a dragon the dragon representing the ego well let me ask you about your friend eric weinstein so he proposed initial sketches of geometric community which is his theory of everything maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it that you find interesting but um what do you think about the response he got from the scientific community well you know some of the response came from people academicians professors some came from a lay audience and some came from trained scientists or no longer you know maybe practicing in universities um i thought it was there was a lot of vitriol which surprised me because i look at what he's trying to do and it was always the vitriol would always come with some element of ad hominem um and maybe that's his personality maybe that engenders this or whatever maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency you know i always get these emails professor keating um i have a new theory einstein was wrong i'm going to prove it i'm not good at math but if you help me i will share my nobel prize with you oh thank you have you read my books you know um in other words it's always taking down taking down the dragon it's always taking down the kung fu master right that you get the hit points from d and d you get their hit ones you take their cards you get their risk tokens from kamchatka and thinking about with eric it's like because what he's doing is so aspirational it is grandiose in a good sense what he's trying to do is is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of super symmetry instead of stuff embedded in it he's trying to meld that it has very um unusual features in that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions multiple time dimensions it uses new mathematical objects that he's invented and look i had uh you know had him on my show i've talked with him we've had consultations with other physicists you know where he'll come down and i have a visitor's office and he comes down to san diego sometimes and spends time there and we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists um eric's uh been out of the academic world for a long time and there is as i said before an aspect of persuasion that must take place in order to get anything through and i think there was a slight amount of good nature not ignorance naivete but just the sense that if this is right everyone will recognize it if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door as the expression goes that's completely untrue that almost that doesn't even happen with mouse traps i mean you know how many freaking mousetrap types there are it's like no they don't beat a path here you have to sell that freaking thing you have to sell it like steve jobs or elon you i have never i've had one paper out of 200 papers i've published in peer-reviewed journals i've only had one half a percent published with no referees comments in other words published like dream submitted it probably it happened to be an appreciative journal i was pretty psyched about that but you almost have to crave the response getting it back from a journal and i think he doesn't see first of all he doesn't subscribe to the peer review process he thinks that is anathema to the way science is at best interest in public in journals etc etc i think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable i think you have to learn from your critics one of my conversations with john mather he talks about loving your critics in this book but not being so open to their criticism that their criticism goes to your heart and not being so open to their compliments that their compliments go to your head it's a very tough scilla and charybdis to walk well there's something i mean i want to be careful here because i i'd like to talk to eric about this uh directly but i'll just from a perspective of a friend want to ask about the um the drug of fame so there's also the public uh perception of the battles of physics and so there's a very narrow community but then there's the way that's perceived the exploration of ideas is perceived by the public and so there is a cert certain drug to the excitement that the public can show when they sense that you have something big and that in itself might become the thing that gives you pleasure and um i think that with theories of everything or with any kind of super super ambitious projects and this is taking us back to when you were ambitious about trying to understand the origins of the universe if you convince yourself that you have an intuition about the origins of the universe and you have a platform like you do now where you start to communicate your intuition it's it's it's hazy like all the science you're still unsure but you have a sense i mean perhaps you don't have that as much as an experimentalist because you always kind of start going okay how do can of build a device that to me to see through the through the fog but if you're more like a theoretician who kind of works in the realm of ideas in the realm of intuitions it's uh it is also a source of pleasure you mentioned dopamine a source of dopamine that you can communicate to others that you're really excited by the possibility of solving the deepest mysteries of the universe so there's some aspect to which you want to be a uh grigori grisha pearlman and go into the hole and get the work done and shut the hell up about the let me speak about myself about you know talking about the dream and planning and exploring how great it will be if my intuition turns out to be correct that's right the sketches i have turn out to actually build the bridge that takes us to a whole new place as a friend of eric's or a friend of um or my friend what kind of advice do you give what is your role is it to be a supporter given that he has many critics or is it to be in private um a critic like a lot of my friends will say hey shut the hell up just get it done well first of all i want to ask you a question i've asked him and then it comes from uh animal farm by uh my probably my favorite book yeah so you remember benjamin the donkey yes and he's talking to the pig i forget the pig's name you probably know anyway the pig says to him you've got this long lustrous beautiful tail you're so lucky i got this short curly little squiggly thing does jack squat tell me how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail and benjamin says well the good lord he gave me a tail to swat away the flies but you know what i'd rather not have the tail if i didn't have the flies so i ask you as i've asked eric is it worth it you know you've got these you've got these beautiful tail but there are flies i'm not saying in a negative way i'm just saying you get unwanted distractions dopamine you know it's kind of the highlight the spotlight effect it's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone and i think you know first of all i'd love to know how you answer that because that's something i don't feel i can relate to myself well this has to do with more like platforms platform stuff yeah scale oh i um that has no very little effect on me i i enjoy it i enjoy meeting new people but that has nothing to do with platform yeah no that has no effect on me um do i want somebody that enjoys the act itself so this conversation the reason i'm doing this podcast with you today is because it allows me to trick you into talking to me for a prolonged period of time i don't care about platforms i assume nobody listens it really doesn't matter yeah if it got it right my whole test of it was a good podcast because how do you know like podcast been around what 12 years how do we know as podcasters were doing a good job like sometimes someone said that was the best interview i ever had but that doesn't happen that often at least for me but if you realize that you forgot to put the sd card in that little guy and the zoom didn't work would you do it again and i think if you say yes to that that was a good podcast yeah exactly that's that's exactly it so in that in that space yeah um all of it is worth it yeah but but the dream the the i'm more referring to the psychological effects forget the platform forget all that you know i maybe shouldn't even brought up the platform because it really has to do even in your own private mind which is what i'm struggling with i enjoy the planning the dreaming the early stages um so much that i often don't take projects to completion this is a psychological effect that i'm sure basically everybody every engineer everybody that does anything goes through i just uh in this case particular i think it also applies and i wonder as a friend what is the role so yeah i mean that effect has been documented everything from you know planning telescopes to dieting so there's a there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're going to feel you don't need to know this but you know you don't deal but losing five pounds i said i'm gonna lose five pounds and i'm gonna be able to do run you know a minute faster so there's a part of me when i'm planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that i get a little bit of that thrill and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually complete the task that will take me to that goal so that's a documented effect and that happens in um and project planning and project management it's a very very important thing to guard against as a manager of a big project with eric it's interesting because with him uh first of all we you know we relate extremely well you know on a friendship level and uh very close he does remind me a lot of my father and i i've told him that you know just as a mathematician as a big thinker as you know in his case as a father you know the father kind of figure that i didn't have in a sense but that he is he is a true lover of life he knows he's got a huge platform he knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does um and you know i jokingly say well it's one thing like how do you know lex that someone's an expert the experts say there's a good rule ray dalio writes about in principles he says an expert is someone who's done something three times successfully like you can do one something correctly once you could do something correctly it's very hard to pull off like three projects three telescopes three whatever right so um so look for uh it's arbitrary could be four it could be two right but the point is look at eric so how many things has he contributed to and made you know pretty substantive kind of uh paradigm shifts for different people i would say he's been right many times does that mean he's infallible that he's ineffable no of course not for me so what i'm saying is i get a little bit of the joy of kind of learning something purely as a as a scientist something completely outside of what i do mathematics gage theory um the the kind of very um very advanced geometry topology that he's interested in but every now and then i will sneak in that i want you know i've told him i'm going to turn your son into an experimentalist despite you you know like he is not going to be a theater zev is not going to be a therapist he is working with me he is learning from me it is we're trying to get him into he wants to bypass all of the you know kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go straight to graduate school and i've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it maybe he can't but there's no other way than to try and so we've i've prepared a whole curriculum for zev to basically bypass all of undergraduate and to his credit he he's earns all the credit he's learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates okay hold on a second i have to push back and this is me saying it and i'll yeah i'm sure i'll talk to eric about this but to say you said eric's done was right on multiple things i think eric has a great deep insight about human nature and how societies work and he says a lot of wise words on that world but i think if we're talking about experts you kind of have to prove you know it's like michael jordan playing baseball like he's proved it many times that he can play basketball but he's also got to prove that he can play baseball and i would say the whole point of i mean of radical ideas is you're not i mean it's very hard to be sitting on a track record of i mean you're when you're swinging for the is always you're uh there's not a track record to sit on and uh like max tegmark is an example of somebody who has a huge track record of more like acceptable stuff but he also keeps swinging for the fences in every other world so he has that track character with eric if you look at just the number of publications all this stuff he did really he chose not to travel the academic cross so there's no proof of expertise except sort of an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance but that's not how physics works there's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say he or she they really know the history of physics very well like this is always lovely like sean carr always jokes about like you know like physicists should never talk about history or physique but it's more than that so eric has certainly contributed in finance and finance specifically gauge theory and economics and um in inflation dynamics in the nominations hold on a second that's yet to be proven he has a lot of power he's got calculus calculus proven i mean he he has a gauge model for currency um for currency uh uh exchanges between different nations that is explanatory not not it's not um you know is it is it is this something in other words it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purposes and it might be okay but it's unique to him i mean him and pia yes it might be a powerful model it might be one that's actually deserves huge amount of applause and celebration but does not yet receive that and that's one of the things that eric talks about it has not received the attention it deserves but it has not yet received the attention it deserves and so like the the proven expertise thing i mean there's a lot of people that go to their grave without the recognition they deserve and it's a tragedy but the fact is like you have to fight for that recognition the tragedy happens for a reason you can't just say this person is obviously brilliant and therefore they deserve the credit um uh in every single domain it doesn't it doesn't like transfer immediately there's nobody that's well at least i wouldn't argue eric is one of the special minds in our generation but you still have to fight the fight of physics and prove it within the community and i think the same applies in economics you can't i mean as somebody that uh you know i've i've gone through the academic journey just like you said the peer review all of those things flawed as they are that's the part of the process you have to convince your peers the um the people that are as obsessed for whatever the hell reason about that particular thing that you're working on yes there's egos yes there's politics it's a giant mess but i think it's a beautiful mess through which you have to go through in order to [Music] reveal the power of your idea to yourself and to the world well let me use an example so um you know of james clerk maxwell and he invented the laws of electromagnetism which is the first example of a unification principle ever displayed by the human mind in history math purely mathematics um unifying completely disparate phenomena in one case electricity charges static electricity lightning and the other magnets bar magnets currents etc unify them you know what he did i like to do a thought experiment imagine twitter exists 1864. maxwell's working away and he goes i have this wonderful idea with fluctions and and uh inductive virtue and blah blah and it revolves on this thing called an ether and by the way there are these little vortices and gears and the gears have these planetary things and they suck up vortices and the vortices to determine the density of the electromagnetic potent you'd be like this guy's a freaking not a and and what would you do come on honestly you would say everything this guy does is wrong i mean he's got this idiotic idea and it would be proven falsified a couple decades later by uh michaelson and morley and in so doing you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater or imagine twitter imagine a twit storm you know clerk maxwell uh at clerk maxwell uh one would get it would be brutal right and to the detriment and that might even set back history imagine yang mills doing the same thing churn simon's all these things are very fantastic but but why lex why does ed witten what is juan aldo cena let me give a good example one guest brilliant guy i love him he is the reason that stephen hawking conceded his black hole information paradox loss uh issue what did he conceive it conceded based upon mile the same as calculation in ads cft and five-dimensional wormholes about is any of that first of all we don't live in an ads universe second of all we don't know if wormholes are traversable if they exist even uh you know these are devices you know kip thorn is popularized from movies like to say that this is something on which i will concede a bat now obviously hawking was doing that for publicity why does maldisana what is and he's got a pretty high h index pretty well respect guy ias loved talking to him brilliant guy by the way he also had uh made use of eric and pia's work on gauge theory and economics uh originally and one i believe the breakthrough i can't remember exactly what but partially you know credit some of the work that he did which appears there's a footnote to pia milani's thesis and some conversations with eric i think in it anyway getting back to that why why is there not the same skepticism is it because maldisana who's an eminent physicist obviously has published you know realistic work and done and what about whitten you know whitten gets a pass i mean if you wouldn't get so passed on which aspect the strength yeah the m theory is correct i mean here's let me just say hawking hawking gets the ultimate pass hawking would say things like m theory there's zero evidence for it i mean there's the famous meme that went around this weekend like what is string theory predicted and it's nothing and by the way that's actually wrong i talked to cameron i know you talked to carmen carmen says that string theory does make predictions it predicts the mass of the electron lies between 10 to the minus 1 planck mass and 10 to the minus 30 plagma okay whatever our electron it's a big range it's a huge range is that imagine qumran comes up and again he's just some nobody but he actually you know he doesn't have a profile he's not harvard has zero h index or whatever eric says why do we not like in other words why are we more harsh on people that are that are trying you know the answer to that so i get a million emails just like you said you yourself where they proven in my world is artificial intelligence the equivalence of that uh is i figured out how to build consciousness how to engineer intelligence how to in and awesome you should send your emails to me and i'll send my emails and we'll reply i mean i and i don't want to sort of mock this because i think it's very possible that there is either kernels of interesting ideas or and whole like there is geniuses out there that are unheard but the because of so much noise you do have to weigh like uh hire the edwins of the world when they make statements and that's why you build up a track record as you just said with ray dalio you have to show that you can uh like if you're pollock and you show us a painting of a bunch of chaos you have to and this is a bad example probably because he probably never showed this book he could do it right yeah it's much more conf it's much more comforting to see that they can paint a good accurate picture still life of still life of an apple on the table so there's a meteorite at a time because then i mean um uh because then there's something about the scientific community that they have perhaps an oversensitive sensor to where they're not going to give the full effort of their attention if you don't have the track record now you could say that's the kind of club that only you have to like you have to have 10 you have to this yes that exists but there's some aspect in which you have to play the game a little bit to get the machine of science going otherwise if you're uh always saying well i'm i have my ball and i don't want to play your game your game sucks then nobody's going to want to play with you that's true in there look inherent in all this is an underlying grandiosity look how could you talk about doing what cox said on on here and elsewhere you know we're looking for the umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one-inch equation that will surely win a nobel prize the mind of god that's like a prerequisite i guess to tackle these questions i think it's it's detrimental i think doing that first of all i think there's an element of almost snarkiness because none of these scientists are believing you know uh gnostics they're they're not theists right so they're using it as kind of a stand-in and they always talk about einstein didn't mean it was like a spinoza and he wasn't a you know a theater god doesn't play dice god doesn't play yeah he's mentions of god yeah yeah and then um stephen hawking says if when we come we get m theory understood we'll know the mind of god uh that's the title of kaku's book the god particle the god equation it you know do any of them really believe in that no is that a prerequisite no i'm not saying that but um but the point being you're talking about something has to do with god right i mean where else do you go from there i mean i think god for now enjoys a little bit more you know kind of pr than elon or joe or whatever right so so like it's you know god's got a pretty good you know h index himself he has a by the way a twitter account just so you know it's pretty good it tweets of god yeah um so if you look at that um you have to go in there again you have to go with some swagger you have to have a little bit of of arrogance but you should i agree mix with a little bit of humility so he's doing something he comes from outside of academia now if he rails against er i'm talking about eric if he's just railing oh the system and i'm not going to publish because f that and that's only created by by greedy journals i i don't think he's doing himself any favors on the other hand if he's shopping it if he's talking it if he's if he's willing to expose it to uh to to criticism and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions perhaps but in the sense of of like they're they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital t what they're trying to do is take down error hopefully those aren't those people aren't out there but on the other hand looking at what eric does for other people looking at the fact that he has courtesy he will look at wolfram he will look at lisey who's one of his closest friends i mean he calls him his uh as is not his nemesis nemesis right right yeah and i think that's interesting that they're loving friends i really enjoyed that portal conversation between guerrillas uh eric eric has torn about that conversation because i guess because of the nemesis of the beautiful dance of minds playing with these ideas and fears of everything some of these things you know look so fundamentally now i might disagree with him eric on a different aspect which is the only one i'm capable of but let me say one thing which is experimental but but let me say one thing i understand probably a third of what eric's talking about with gu i understand you know gr i understand mathematics i understand some group theory fiber bond i can get a little of the age theory um but i i also understand what i don't understand and i understand that there are people like witten maldisana uh nema other people that that can't understand it and they're not trying to understand sabine she can understand she makes all these you know oh i don't understand it i don't want to understand it i don't have time and then she makes a video a music video you know kind of mocking eric and stephen and garrett yeah i'm like oh you have a time to do and i love sabine and i've i've actually promoted my show on her and i i love her and she's doing a wonderful job but you have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish and you couldn't have spent you know 30 minutes two hours i brian keating have done it as an experimental cosmologist and i have enough to say like this is interesting it's part of the assayer project and it actually i shouldn't say that there are no people they're very serious uh alvarez gomez at suny stony brook simon center for geometrical physics so he and i are running this this uh seminar hopefully this summer we're going to reenact the famous shelter island conferences in the 1900s where you know feynman got together and they calculated the lamb shift but what did that feature the harmony the resonant minds behind the best experimentalist in cosmology particle physics condensed matter physics is now teaching us tremendous things about you know lower dimensional systems that can be applied um theorists and experimentalists observers cosmologists we all were get together and we're just gonna do it out of a spirit of love but if it's just like oh this guy's like a loud map i don't have time for that i really don't i don't i don't think it's interesting way to spend my time there is a aspect that i hope to see and it goes back to our sort of uh discussion with about joe rogan i do hope to see sort of love and humility in the presentation like let go of this kind of fear of your ideas being stolen and the ego that's inherent to the scientific pursuit and um right now that everybody's established and known entities let go of that a little bit so we can explore and celebrate ideas i would love to see more of that just because you're saying especially with these big ideas of theories of everything i mean this isn't talking tales out of school but i mean he has made claims that i fundamentally disagree with you know in terms of like you know he's had this twitter baiting you know loving trolling of elon you know why are you spending all this money to get to mars you know we should be spending money on interdimensional travel and we can unlock it if we and i said to him like and he makes the point you know that oh the atomic theory you know that unleashed the nuclear age and uh and that you know could lead to planetary destruction um but i make the point pushing back with love on him and i say look nobody looked into the equations you know like fermi didn't like look into all these equations of of the unification which still doesn't exist by the way we spend all this time lex and i don't know why it is it's a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics people are looking for the toe and they're overlooking the gut in other words they're spending all this time in the theory of everything that god equate and there's this gut that unifies the three stronger forces we don't have a single theory for that and people like lashound they've tried and failed at it yeah people don't know there's four forces gut grant unification theories that unifies the three forces stuff and done trying to get a shortcut to the theory of everything which unifies the four um and then there's this whole thing that may be quantum gravity is not even a thing right um so we're we're we're trying to solve uh we're trying to solve the puzzle of everything at the physics level and then already before solving it already saying once we solve it here's going to be all the beautiful just like time levels jumping in yeah going to level you know 256. yeah yeah yeah i mean i i suppose you need that kind of ego that confidence that ambition in order to even have a chance at some of these the only two people in this book of nine nobel laureates who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome were two theorists frank wilchuck and sheldon glashow and you know frank is pretty interesting and i know eventually we're gonna talk about the meaning of life but you talk about frank frank invented this theory along with his advisor and another a third person in the early 1970s which from 1974 through when he was at princeton all the way up until 2004 when he won the nobel prize every day of his life imagine this alex you're going to have this startup someone tells actually someone tells you you're going to win the lottery you're a lottery in 40 years what becomes your singular focus in your life from now until the next 40 years well i'm not sure i mean would it be winning the lottery or if i'm sorry i'm sorry if you're guaranteed to win a lottery yeah there's this here's this wallet bitcoin wallet it's going to guarantee i have this much money stablecoin whatever uh you're going to win it 40 but you have to wait 40 years to me it would be surviving for the next 40 years you wouldn't leave your house you would cover go out in a bubble wrap hat you wouldn't go out without 20 masks on right your whole life would be consumed with now imagine everyone's telling you you're going to win the nobel prize which is bigger than the lottery i mean many peop prizes are worth more than the nobel prize and every person who wins a prize that's worth three times the money like maldasena he would trade the breakthrough prize for a nobel prize in a heartbeat so these guys had to wait 40 years imagine the excruciating pain what got him through it he didn't feel like he didn't deserve it he felt like hell yeah i earned it he has that swagger and what i'm looking for in this asshair is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now because i don't know if i'm going to be here in 40 years i hope i am but can we bypass can we get shortcuts what's called the low energy regime and to me that's that's what's interesting like what can we do now i don't care like isaac newton came up with color theory and he did something really interesting next time i come i'll bring you some prisms so what did he do he took a white light he took a prism from the sun actually he put it through a slit put it through a prism and it made a beautiful rainbow like you've seen and then he took another prism and he put it upside down like you know dark side of the moon whatever and the light went through the first prism turned into a rainbow and then the rainbow went into a prism and came out a white light that's pretty cool then he took a popsicle stick or whatever his pipe tobacco and and he put it in the beam like blocked out the orange and it didn't make white light come out so he showed like colors of synthesis it's a combination he didn't use like uh the large hadron collider to do that you know he used a very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics and different kind of color physics than quantum chromodynamics but nevertheless can we find things like that are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider which even if it gets built will cost 30 billion dollars just to build by the way anytime from now on if i leave you with anything anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number always double it maybe triple it how much it's going to cost to operate it so like do we build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier do we build a nuclear reactor a semiconductor facility and the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10 per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity and in this case so in 10 years it'll cost double the cost so never believe a number whether it's from our mutual friend harry or whoever don't believe the number double it and then say is it worth it and so building a solar system size accelerator even if it were possible do we have to do that or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the the number of large extra spatial dimensions can we do that people are working on it i think it's fascinating so focus on building detectors experiments uh that like where the cosmos is part of the experiment i suppose that's doing the hard work because when you're saying low energy regime because for some of these especially big questions like theories of everything you need some high energy events and so somehow figure out how the high energy events that are already happening out there how to leverage them here on earth so one of the alternative theories of uh cosmology that is not a singular quantum gravitational requiring as the big bang and inflation are is uh are these bouncing models some of them feature a similar kind of entity called the quantum field and that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current after the bounce which is not a singularity it compresses to a classical kind of rebound and the universe starts expanding during that process the expansion is governed by what's called a scalar field of which we only know one that exists that's called the higgs boson i think this is a scalar um fundamental particle fundamental field um that field then later does double duty and it becomes dark energy so it solves two problems and i'm not saying it's correct we don't know yet but are there observations of and so dark energies manifest today it's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions um etc etc we see the effects of accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy is dark energy a constant or does it vary that has to vary in order for this theory to be true because that eventually has to decay so the universe can not support itself and collapse again again classically so we could use low energy phenomena it's hard to think of supernovas being a low energy phenomenon but you use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see does it change or is it a constant that's an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model speaking of things that cost a lot but are super exciting uh page two crap no we'll get we'll wrap it up and now calm down this is this there's more than page two what do you think this is this is uh jesus well louis de broglie's thesis was three pages long and he won the nobel prize for the wave particle duality so you know size matters in different dimensions in life i think the the lessons i've learned about life is the shorter the paper or the shorter the thesis uh actually the shorter the paper some of the greatest papers ever written are sure like i feel like uh some of the best ideas in this world not to sound like a contradiction of feynman a contradiction on top of a contradiction but it could be written on a napkin honestly um it which just kind of tells you something about ideas what are your thoughts about uh the james webb space telescope um is this as somebody who likes telescopes and this is one of the i think it says um it took 20 years to build 9.7 billion dollars is that way too much too little are you excited about this thing it's it's sufficiently different from what i do in my field that it's incredibly interesting to me because it's it's i have no you know horse in that race and so i'm not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever so i can purely be an advocate and an aficionado of science it is in some sense the successor to hubble it will do things that hubble can't do it will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral kind of artistic level that hubble had what are some of the most iconic things that hubble did the hubble ultra deep field the pillars of creation you know storms and and imaging and of these twisted deep galax deep sky galaxies those resonated with the public just visually they were beautiful yeah when you look at um these images the hubble ultra deep field you'll maybe put that in you'll show every speck of light except for one 4 000 blobs of light there's one star in our galaxy the rest of galaxies now that image is less than one tenth of your fingernail held out at arm's length it contains 4 000 galaxies so now you can figure out how many galaxies there are in the whole sky just by seeing how long does it take you to move your fingernail over the whole sky so we have another couple hours no so it comes out to be that's how we get 500 billion or more galaxies now it's not exact to the galaxy but it's it's it's a good order of magnitude estimate maybe even better um hubble produced that and it was basically serendipitous they pointed to some dark black piece of sky what they thought was blank and they saw it same thing that happened with the cmb they were looking they were something they didn't find same thing they found when they were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was accelerating um so what i sometimes hear is that we don't know what we're gonna discover i never think that's a good idea to spend billions of dollars on something like you should have some guaranteed low-hanging fruit and then there should be swinging for the fences and i think in this case it was really everything is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure if that telescope which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly and then orient themselves a million miles from earth beyond the earth moon distance by a factor of four and and still transmit telecommunity you know telecommunication back to the earth get solar energy keep it away from the sun you know you don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye and you do that and you cover it's going to be phenomenal i i um for science for sure if it works there are a lot of people think you know it's so risky it's such nasa sunk so much of their budget it ate up you know and what if it does fail i mean there's no guarantee yes it's insured but so what you're not gonna get back those 20 years of people let's start building it again like they didn't build two copies of it um and then if it fails it kind of has a dampening effect on the prospects and the inspiration of the public for the what science can do what science engineering can do is out in it will make a huge impact scientifically let's hope for the best let's assume it does succeed it's launched in a couple weeks and um and when it does it will transform our understanding of you know we just discovered not only like extrasolar planets that have moons on them an asteroid belt we discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy this will be able to see crazy stuff like that spectroscopy imaging um but but it's and it will be able to go back farther in time such that we will be doing cosmo like hubble did some cosmology and measured the hubble constant that was its key project when it was designed and launched um but because it is optical telescope it's sensitive to more you know close in redshift so shorter distances now james webb is much much higher redshift it can probe the darker deeper distant universe okay let's talk about not the distant universe but our neighboring planets first i gotta ask you about the moon um so there's a there's a piece of the moon on this table that you've given me yes uh that we didn't have to pick up that arrived here that's right so how did a piece of the moon arrive here on earth so this chunk of the moon if it were delivered by the apollo and nasa emissions uh you and i would be guilty of a felony right now because illegal to own pieces of the moon collected by the apollo astronauts so don't even joke about that when you go over to houston this piece of moon rock was delivered via the old-fashioned way by gravity so this was a chunk of the moon which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space and it will then orbit the common uh moon earth system and it will then eventually enter our atmosphere and if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper it can land intact and this one landed with a few uh 100 grams worth and they sliced it up and then it was delivered via us postal service to my house so you can buy these pieces and actually can buy a piece of mars you can buy a piece of mars delivered by the same route now what's so interesting about that well if a piece of mars can get here a piece of earth can get there if some piece of earth has some life forms on it it could get there and if that can happen in our solar system it could happen throughout the galaxy so i'm actually not of the opinion that there is life elsewhere in the universe at least technological life that we can see i see this look of horror on your face um i view it i am personally extremely pessimistic would be extremely surprised i'm just i'm curious by the transition because you just said that life could have arrived from mars or like from planet to planet but because of the meteorites striking and so on yeah and then you went to you don't think there there might be life out there in the universe technological life technological life like yeah advanced intelligence civilizations okay uh yeah okay so go on yeah so that's a the generalization of what uh the famous astronomer fred hoyle called i know this is a pg-13 it's called panspermia panspermia and uh beep that up yeah yeah please and uh that's the exchange of genetic life for material from other reaches on earth which explains the origin of life on earth but not the origin of life itself which i think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting how did life get here and you've talked with many eminent people about that i'm not going to add that much but but just thinking about the reverse process let's say life started on the earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe is there enough time for the whatever material went from earth via panspermic direction you know spraying the love gun out into the universe did that then have enough time to incubate and go on to a planet that could support it certainly not within our solar system which traveling at the meteorite speeds would require you know hundreds of millions of years then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to bach from you know rocks to rock mononof i don't know i can do this all day oh wow it's pretty good how do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to like i just simply think there's not enough time for earth to seed life technological life throughout the galaxy i don't think there's any evidence for that but so you you really think that the origin of of life on earth is a really special event yeah if it did originate on earth my question for those that search for life outside the earth is what if you had a letter from god and the letter said um life didn't originate on earth like would you choose a different profession like it would seem hopeless like in other words we only have a sample of one in fact we only know of one conscious life form let alone one planet that has life on it right what if you knew for sure it didn't start here that means that like there's almost nothing about earth that is um originated it didn't originate the life process so to study purely the origin of life not life itself i think that's still fascinating but how could we learn about you know the origin of of remember you have to go from inanimate object to a living object whatever that definition of life is and i'm not an expert in many definitions max sarah you know many different uh definitions but but how do you actually go from from from inanimate to animate it's a huge question yeah but then you don't have to be the place where life originated to replicate the origin or to under like uh yeah that's one way to understand something is to uh build it yeah but another way is to just observe it you don't have to truly re-uh re-engineer from scratch so you know i but then yes if it didn't originate on earth then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites of life are are off what's the governing principle right like me what is um and then you could have just an almost an arbitrary number of possible like if life didn't start on earth to me that's exciting because it's like we know even less than we thought the thing is it can prosper on earth though yeah so maybe the origin of life is fundamentally different from the maintenance of life right and maybe maybe the existence of the earth life symbiosis is critical i think sarah you talked about sarah walker um that it's a planetary phenomenon etc so doesn't that make it less like in other words like not only do you need special life conditions to create life but then sustenance of life as you say that also has to be maintained under very specific circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon and by the way you need a jupiter nearby you need an earth and a moon system so that you don't get bombarded too early and i always think like this like technological life i haven't said this before really soon i'm just speaking i usually like to write down before i say different things but one of the things i thought about somebody hosts a podcast you should probably accept the fact that you're going to say stupid things every once in a while not every once in a while every while i claim that you know to get to sending you know people to the moon you know our planet needed whales and and dinosaurs right like you don't make a solar panel from another solar panel like you made a solar panel from a factory that melted down glass silica you know aluminum extruded that using fossil fuels where do those fossil fuels come from like so any civilization that's going to be a dyson you know kardashev did they have dinosaurs like do they have like prebiotic life do they have a great oxygenation event did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic eukaryote all those hurdles they give each one let's say there's eight hurdles and each one of those has a probability of one in a thousand to go from you know uh eukaryotic prokaryote whatever let's say there's a one in a thousand chance i think it's like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever if you really do it but let's say it's first generous nature one in ten to the three let's say there's eight of those hurdles that means you have you know 10 to the to the to the 24th power uh different possibility and that's just with eight like the moon has to be there jupiter has to be there dinosaurs had to be there all the different things that we have to get to technological life there's only 10 to the 2 only there's 10 to the 22nd we think earth not earth planets in the observable universe not the galaxy so that's a hundred times fewer than the probability to get you know 100 percent clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in a thousand that's fascinating because now i really need to listen to your conversation with lee cronin who i believe you had because he believes the opposite yes yeah i want to have a debate with him he believes that the the way biology evolved on earth could have evolved almost an infinite number of other ways so like if you ran earth over and over and over you would keep getting life and it would be very different so it's the the fact that our particular life seems unique is just like well because every freaking life is gonna seem unique but you know be very different it's not like we shouldn't be asking the question of what's the likelihood of getting a human-like thing because that seems to be super special it's more like um how easy is it to make anything that has the skills of a human and i don't mean like something with thumbs but achieving basically a technological civilization and according to lee at least it's like it's it's trivial i know we fought i fought a little bit i'd love to debate him and i think it'll be a lot of fun because we debate with love when i talk with lee i love him and he loves me i think i hope but let me ask you a question i asked this of him and sarah on our clubhouse once so what do you think would happen the next day let's say we discovered life it's proxima centauri b it's um it looks just like slime mold like you got on your brie cheese or whatever we discover what would happen the next day and they were like oh this would be transformative and and i'm not trying to be like you know total cassandra about this but i said i don't think anything would happen what are you talking about transformational i'm like i stipulate that life exists go down to like the river you know i'm in san diego go out to the pacific ocean scoop up a glass you know um you're gonna find life in there and what are we doing what are we doing to our earth we're destroying it callously we're like pumping crap into there like we have this toxic waste spill a couple months ago in san diego i couldn't go to the beach let me take it a step further you know how many you know how many people i'm sorry that you do know but how many people died in the 20th century killed these are advanced civils this isn't slime mold we kill we maim we harm we hurt we hate i don't think anything would happen the next day then we go back to what we had and i said if that weren't proof enough life has been discovered at least two or three times just in my professional career once in 1996 these allen land hills meteorites in antarctica they saw like microbial respiration processes still we don't know it was a press conference held by bill clinton on the white house lawn that's featured in the movie contact um repurposed for that movie and um and then there's uh and then there's this um the this phosphorus life this this toxic life in the pools of mono lake many you know extremophile we don't give a crap we continue to so why are we thinking that like our salvati from whence will our salvation come as the bible says like it's not going to change how we are it's not going to magnify how i treat you or you treat me and and we're pretty knowledgeable people you and i compared to you know lay people okay that's interesting that's a really interesting argument i i wonder if you're right but my intuition is and i can i can maybe present a different argument that you can think about in the realm of things you care about even deeper which is like what happens once we figure out the origins of the universe like how would that change your life i would say there are certain discoveries that even in their very idea will change the fabric of society i tend to see if there's definitive proof that there's life and the more complex the more powerful that idea is elsewhere that i'm not exactly sure how it will change society um because it's such a slap in the face it's like a such a humbling force or maybe not or maybe it's a motivator to say um yeah i don't know which force would take over maybe it would be governments with military uh start to think like well how do we kill it if there's a lot of life out there how do we create the defenses how do we extract it or or yeah or mine it for for benefits i mean i just see like there's a hundred million literal counter examples about i mean right now there's like like 700 million kids in poverty and like we just how do we go about our life and just not deal with that i mean i look i put it aside i eat hamburgers and you know in 100 years i'll be canceled for being a you know a carnivore or whatever but you know so obviously to get through life you have to make certain compromise you're not going to think about certain things but i i i just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment like every time there's why are we going to mars and digging and flying this cool ass helicopter i'm we're looking for water like stipulate that water was there like i believe there was water i think we should invest again and see what the geology was like but but don't you think so so you're saying i don't think you're going to get meaning from it that's all i'm saying i i'm not saying it's not worth doing i'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning for life from science okay but there's a there's a complicated line here what what if it's this intelligent civilization living obviously probably not on mars but somewhere like uh in neighboring galaxy that we uh sorry in in in the name in a neighboring star star system that we discover don't you think that profound change in meaning i mean i guess again i assume that because of this pan ceramic process or whatever that the probability is much much greater than zero i mean it's not one a hundred percent but it's it's much likelier than that that at least some living material from earth has ejaculated itself into the solar system into the universe right into our guys please as well that's right so ice like the fact that that could happen and that you're holding a piece you know from a planetary body and one that couldn't support life as far as we know uh but i could get next time if you're if you if you play nice and you come on my podcast someday i will give you a tiny chunk of mars so mars theoretically could support stuff right now so yeah so i believe that there's there could be remnants of earth in this so so that means there could be evolution i don't think there's any chance that there's like you know people using iphones and having podcasts and stuff and probably so there's this interesting there's so much some chance though right so again yes i think the pro well obviously the simple state statement to say it's much much much higher probability that life exists and technological life exists right i don't think we can argue that um it doesn't mean it's forbidden again i'm not saying any of this is forbidden not worth studying not interesting it's a likelihood thing yeah and to answer your i think you're wise to push back and like what does it matter what i'm doing and i like to think about that you know because it's like what is the value of what you're doing like you have to answer that question or else at the end of your life you'll have these existential you know kind of crises right so when i think about like who i am part of my identity is answering and asking scientific questions for me though there is a religious kind of undercurrent that does undergird in some sense this quest again i'm not like a practicing i'm not like wearing a you know like i'm not like full-on into my birth religion judaism but at the same token i think as you know one of the things einstein did say is that you know religion without science is blind and uh or is lame and uh science without religion is lame it's blind and lame anyway the point is that like you can't get meaning um you know from just knowing facts like wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know right it has no wisdom you know wisdom it means you know sapien the word wisdom in latin and sapient we are wise and by the way do you know what we're what our real name is homo sapien sapien so it's man who knows that he knows do you know what he knows do you know what the knowing is it's that he's gonna die we're the only creatures that know that we are going to die we don't know when we're going to die but like you know i have a cat a fierce attack cat is beautiful um she doesn't know when she's going to die it doesn't mean i'm more valuable than surviving the survival instinct is much it's fundamentally different from like the knowledge of death and that's where ernest becker comes in with the terror of death and that that's a creative force that um seems to be more feature than bug but the human condition is that um i mean it's a gift of knowing our own mortality um yeah to me i mean that's that's why you know i i agree with you in some sense in terms of the aliens not being a thing that solves all mysteries that's why you know my love has always been the human mind so understanding who we are what the hell are we and i think your love has been an echo of that which is where did we come from yeah or basically as cheesy as the songs you know uh michio kaku is away with words i if you if you can just like enjoy the uh you know he speaks in complete he's like sam harris of cosmology i mean he speaks in complete paragraphs but like also unapologetically he says you know we will know god or we'll know the mind of god or whatever the quotes those kinds of things that's exciting that physics might be able to find equations that unlock our origins at the very core and like the fabric of it all too and not just our origins you know what's up you know what's at the beginning um something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand was at the beginning but i think we should be humble in that way i mean again another thing is you know you ever hear the saying like we shared 99 of our dna with chimps or bonobos or whatever i share like probably more than that you know sometimes i wish we shared like 100 like that would be so much more interesting like oh well there's 50 of a fruit fly or banana like no no there's something but that should make us feel more precious and i almost feel like discovering life on another planet whatever solar system would cause a diminution of humanity like the one thing i do hold fast to from religion i don't know where i am with god like do i believe in god i think that's an unanswerable question um but but i have some thoughts about it but by by the same token i think the one thing i do get from religion is that every human has infinite worth because we are in a religious capacity considered to be equal to god in other words we are gods not to be like you know but we can contemplate what god did we have aspects of god we have free will god had free will uh if he exists again i can't prove that god exists otherwise you wouldn't have any credit for believing in god this is interesting i mean it's like i'm talking to einstein here but let me ask anyway can you clip that for my eclipse shop [Laughter] for somebody who's looking at the young universe at the early universe and are talking about god and are agnostic who do you think is god so i thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with sam harris this past summer and um one of the things i liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation and he says something that's really resonated with me and i've been working around and trying to work out in my own way but he said like you can never you could never be you could only become happy and i'm trying to take a little bit further than that because i think it's it's interesting like meditation is like you're not like oh i'm happy and now like oh my kid came in and i'm not happy they're like no like you can be satisfied kurt vonnegut said like so you ever catch us sometimes alex you're like walking around you're like life is freaking amazing like i'm happy and kurt vonnegut said you should say to yourself every time that happens like a little mantra like if this isn't goodness if this isn't happiness nothing is just remind yourself how awesome it is every breath everything that you do when you make an impact even some of the bad stuff that happens good it's good so sam said that and it made me think because i was like well what does it really mean to to be happy uh because like i can think of um i can think of about you know two or three ways that right now i could double my happiness you know like when the lottery or whatever like i could double my habit there's only a few ways though right like you know i had uh this this kind of thought like how many boats can you water ski behind like you had twice as many followers now you got two million followers five mil whatever it doesn't do anything it's called the hedonic treadmill like once you get to a certain level it takes a lot more you know change and followers money impact women whatever you want to make you have one more quanta of happiness right on the other hand this is a concept from entropy i can make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways in other words there's more space space to make your life unhappy than happy and so i thought about that in the context of what sam said about happiness um so it's sort of like yeah it's an expression of entropy and that what you should be doing in life is doing that which will cause you devastation if it goes away because those are the things that like are where you're reducing entropy like a kid like anyone who's a parent knows instantly what i'm talking about like how to make your life a billion times worse but there's no way to make your life a billion times better and so thinking about that now turning into the question of god's existence i feel like there's no way that you can believe in god to quote misquote sam but there's ways that you can become a believer in god in other words you could increase the bayesian confidence level that there is some and let's not call it god because that's a freighted term let's just call it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe right simple things can do that you can increase your credulity in the goodness of life and we have this bias as humans towards negativity negativity bias well-known fact so what i want to do is let's call god good right that's where it comes from god good same words in german and when we think about what is good let's do those things that would devastate us and a lot of that could be relationships and there's a powerful concept from um from network theory which is that you know the number of connections in a network you know i'm just saying foreign it grows as the square of the elements in the matrix in the number right so you think of a matrix with n people you know person one two three four and then there's four other people there's 16 different pairs but two half of them overlap the diagonal is where you know each other you know yourself so there's but that still grows as n squared so those connections increase and decrease right you ever have two friends that are fighting and like you're kind of upset even though you're not fighting with either one of them so like a network grows like that so you want to increase your network as much as possible but only the kind of high quality interstices between them and i think in doing so you incr you you make yourself fragile not anti-fragile and i think that is where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of god can come from so that is a source of meaning maximizing the goodness in life and the way you know is good is if it's taken away it would devastate you that's one way think about it your brand your business your spouse your kids i mean parents can't contact i've known parents that have jim simons here's a perfect example he's one of my oldest friends and mentors he is one of the richest people on earth gulfstream mega yacht this is all documented books about um he lost two sons as adults and i hear people say i'm so jealous of jim simons would you take everything i don't know where he has that strength and his wife marilyn and his first wife barbara i'm not i'm not like that uh some people are there are angels that walk among us and you know i there's this famous prayer it's like you know uh god you know there's there's an old saying like one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be given a lot of money and you see it like happens with like lawyer like people that win the lottery or whatever or nfl football players after their career's over they get they're broke right and i was just like god please test me with money you know that'd be great but but in reality you should never say i'm gonna i want what x person has unless you're willing to take everything and you'll find you won't want to take everything yeah i think a lot about the altering effects of fame of money of power on people i it uh it blinds people and and i wonder about that for myself because it seems like in themselves these are definitely not the goals i'm pretty much afraid i'm not desirous and i'm definitely afraid of each of those things money fame and power but it seems the dreams i have as consequences can often have these things and i'm really afraid of becoming something that would disappoint me when i was younger that would um that i wouldn't recognize you know because change happens gradually but are you using yourself as the as the touchstone to use the assay or amount like what is your rubric to to a prize if you have lived up to that 12 year old whatever year old lex like how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down or like i always think live to impress yourself like i don't care if i have followers like it's nice or whatever but it's hedonic and it's just never ending because you'll always see the next level but i think it's pretty damn cool that like i've gotten to go to these places the south pole and i've done these things and i've made a family and and i'm able to teleport my values into the future um through my children and i've had ideological children that i so by what metric you know have you not already a impressed yourself and b could you let yourself down i don't in terms of the therapist i think some of it is psychology for me i'm very much just never i'm highly self-critical i'm never happy never happy with what i've done but i'm always happy in the way that you describe which is that uh the vonnegut thing where you just often during the day i will feel i don't know i just remember just eating uh beef jerky and being truly happy that was just last night and i have that all the time and that to me is why i mean that feels to me like a healthy way to live life and at least for me it's the one i really enjoy a lot of people tell me that maybe being so self-critical so hard on yourself is not a good way to go but more and more as i get older i realize it's just who i am i you have to a certain point accept this is how i'm always going to be this self-critical it's like the oracle of delphi right you know thyself but i want to leave you with one last thing it was just to say just on this topic you know it could be different right we could go down to the ocean and get some krill instead of the 7-eleven you know it could be that we have no other no other taste buds and and you know eric's talked to the four dimensions of you know the vibration of your tongue right it could be like there's one and it's just like not you know memphis barbecue or whatever you like in your in your in your slim gym it could be something it could be very boring similarly what if like that's a clue like what if that's giving us evidence here's another clue we there are many animals most animals have single mono color vision they only see in in in black and white intensity they only have rods and no cones we could be like that but we're not why is that not a clue like if like god's not gonna like hit you over the head and say like here i am because then everybody would believe in him and there's very simplistic i've had debates even with like famous atheists like lawrence krauss he's like self-declared militant atheist and i was like well i don't believe in the same god you don't believe in like some guy in a white beard and a chair like that's infantile like i gave that away a long time ago but what if there are clues what if yang mills theory and you know maxwell's equate like what those are beautiful if you've ever seen like you know expressed in tensor notation einstein's equations or or maxwell's equations or and then maxwell's equations riding on uh einstein's it's unbelievably beautiful doesn't have to be that way that we can comprehend it that's a crack maybe that's where the light gets in and the light is what reveals what's beautiful so i i don't believe in god i think that's a stupid notion like do i believe in god like sometimes i i wonder if god believes in me you know like more than if i believe it like he needs brian keating like you know what you know it's like one of my friends is a rabbit he's like um what would i be doing if i were god exactly what god's doing right now like you think i know more than god give me a prayer leaving cue clues of beauty for for these hairless apes yeah and to see what they do with this and then marvel at um at the both the tragedy of what the what those apes do to each other and the the rare moments of uh when they have when they understand understand deeply about how the world works brian you're an incredible human being i'm a big fan and i'm really honored that he was first of all shower me with rocks from the moon from space from space space dust dust and crystals magical crystals healing crystals yeah that you can you can use for good and tell me your story and spend your really valuable time with me today this is amazing it was a great pleasure for me lex thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with brian keating to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from galileo galilei in questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you