Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize
Guests: Brian Keating
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents31 chapters
§01Transcript · 00:00–07:32§02Transcript · 07:34–15:27§03Transcript · 15:29–23:55§04Transcript · 23:57–32:11§05Transcript · 32:13–39:37§06Transcript · 39:38–46:35§07Transcript · 46:37–54:05§08Transcript · 54:09–1:01:11§09Transcript · 1:01:13–1:08:46§10Transcript · 1:08:48–1:16:34§11Transcript · 1:16:35–1:23:58§12Transcript · 1:24:01–1:31:14§13Transcript · 1:31:17–1:39:39§14Transcript · 1:39:40–1:48:09§15Transcript · 1:48:12–1:56:50§16Transcript · 1:56:52–2:04:27§17Transcript · 2:04:28–2:12:02§18Transcript · 2:12:05–2:19:52§19Transcript · 2:19:55–2:27:36§20Transcript · 2:27:39–2:35:11§21Transcript · 2:35:12–2:42:38§22Transcript · 2:42:39–2:50:20§23Transcript · 2:50:22–2:58:33§24Transcript · 2:58:35–3:06:53§25Transcript · 3:06:55–3:14:10§26Transcript · 3:14:13–3:21:14§27Transcript · 3:21:18–3:29:27§28Transcript · 3:29:31–3:37:57§29Transcript · 3:37:58–3:45:47§30Transcript · 3:45:51–3:54:30§31Transcript · 3:54:32–3:59:35§01Transcript · 00:00–07:32
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 extragalactic polarization instruments.
- Yeah, I'm slightly biased
towards that particular instrument.
- We'll talk about that in a little bit.
- Yeah, but certainly the telescope to me
is a lever that has literally moved the earth
throughout history.
- So the OG telescope?
- The OG telescope, yeah.
The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think,
but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.
And 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 was no way to adjust your eyesight
if you didn't have 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.
"My priest or 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 these people in Venice
and in the Netherlands saw that they could take
this kind of 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, two lenses,
and go like, "Hmm, let me go like this
"and look at that bright thing in the sky over there,"
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 10X'd it, which is almost as good
as going from zero to one as going from one to 10.
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 species,
because we're using tools not to get food faster
or to preserve our legacy for future generations,
but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
- Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able
to see the star, maybe there was 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, maybe this is an over-romanticized notion,
but looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit
too much focused on survival,
not being eaten by a bear/lion.
If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder,
"What is my place in the universe?"
You think that's modern humans romanticizing?
- I think it's a little romantic,
because they also took the same--
- That's right.
(laughing)
- They took the same two lenses and they looked inward.
They looked at bacteria, they looked at mares,
and in other words, they made the microscope,
and we're still doing that.
And so, to have a telescope serves a dual purpose.
It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in,
but it's also looking back in time.
In other words, if you can see a microscope,
you don't think, "Oh, I'm seeing this thing
"as it was one nanosecond ago."
Light travels one foot per nanosecond.
"I'm seeing it in a--"
No, you don't think about it like that,
but when you see something that's happening
on Jupiter, the moon, Andromeda galaxy,
you're seeing things back when Lucy
was walking around the Serengeti Plains.
And for that, I think that took then
the knowledge of relativity and time travel and so forth,
it took that before we could really say,
"Oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes
"in the human brain."
So I think that might be a little too much,
but nevertheless, I mean,
what's better than having a time machine?
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,
so I'm a radio astronomer.
I don't actually look through telescopes very often,
except on rare occasions when I take one out
to show the kids.
But a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral.
I mean, it's much less cool 'cause you look at it,
you're like, "All right, it looks cool.
"It's got a weird-shaped thing.
"It looks like it belongs in sci-fi.
"It's gonna blast the Death Star," or whatever.
But 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,
it's called its 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 it's looking at, which is pretty amazing.
It means you're actually remotely measuring,
you're taking the temperature of Jupiter
or whatever in effect.
And so it's allowing you to basically teleport.
And there's no other science
that you can really do that, right?
If you're an archeologist, you can't.
Let me get into my time machine and go back and see,
what was Lucy really like?
It's not possible.
- So the same thing happens,
this is where I learned about this,
from March of the Penguins,
when the penguins huddle together,
the body temperature arrives at the same place.
So you're doing this remotely.
This is 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 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,
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.
What happened before the universe began?
- Brian Keating 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 happened,
it's more correct, it's more logical,
it's more practical to go back in time,
starting from today.
So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today,
that's some day, right?
I mean, you could translate it into some day, right?
So on that day, something happened earlier
than the moment exactly now,
let's say we're talking around one o'clock.
So at some point during that day,
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.
After that period of time,
going forward back closer to today,
less 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier,
or later rather, coming towards us today,
we know more and more about what the universe was like.
And in fact, all the hydrogen,
to 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, 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."
§02Transcript · 07:34–15:27
- Well done, sir.
(laughing)
- Most of those light elements, besides hydrogen,
aren't really used in your encounter, right?
We don't encounter helium that often,
unless you go to a lot of birthday parties,
or pilot a blimp.
You don't need lithium, hopefully.
But other than that, those are the kind of things
that were produced during that moment.
The question became, how did 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 Steven 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 a 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.
And so for that reason,
there are now flourishing alternatives that say,
you can actually, for the first time, ask the question,
that day, Tuesday, in the first moments of our universe,
there was a Tuesday a week before that,
24 hours times 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.
But they would say, some future incarnation
of some experiment will tell us the answer.
But now there are 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 the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.
And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.
So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten's court,
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 the Big Bang theory?
- So there are many alternatives, 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.
And many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle,
possibly infinite number of cycles,
called by Sir Roger Penrose.
And 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 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 I show you a grandfather clock
or a pendulum swinging back and forth.
You look away for a second, you come into the room,
pendulum swinging back and forth.
Alex, tell me, where did it start?
How many cycles is it gonna make before the,
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 lacuna 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.
'Cause you can infer things about the pendulum
before you show up to the room in our current epoch, 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 could 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.
Boundary conditions, we're here on Earth,
it has a gravitational field, it's not gonna excurs,
or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.
It's not, it has simple properties.
But this is like, in other words, you can't tell me,
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?
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, look, you care about
like big bang nucleosynthesis, and the elements got made,
and these fusion reactors,
and the whole universe was a fusion reactor,
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, it 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 what was called the quasi-steady state universe.
And then there was another 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.
And most scientists believed in that for millennia,
basically, the universe was eternal, static, unchanging.
They couldn't believe that after Hubble,
so they had to append onto it,
concatenate 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 developed it.
- But slowly. - Very slowly.
And it doesn't match observational evidence,
but that is an alternative.
- By the way, did Einstein think
the steady state universe is infinite or finite?
Do you know?
- I would assume that he thought it was infinite
because there was really,
if something had a no beginning in time,
then it would be very unlikely we're in 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,
'cause that's such an uncomfortable--
- I guess it's a silly joke.
I'm sure you're familiar with that silly joke, right?
The silly joke was that there are only two things
that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the universe.
- Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke
is a good example of the joke.
It's very meta.
Okay, so, all right, so sorry,
you were saying about quasi--
- All the alternatives.
- All the alternatives in the quasi-steady state.
- And the most kind of promising,
although I hate to say that,
people say, "What's your favorite alternative?"
- This is not investment advice.
§03Transcript · 15:29–23:55
- Inflation is not transitory, it is quasi-permanent.
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,
and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics
was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
So most people don't know that.
Inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.
- It's a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.
Doesn't matter the field.
- Exactly, it's time translation invariant.
So when we look at the alternative
that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,
these have serious virtues according to some.
One of the virtues to me, just as a human,
I'm just speaking as a human,
one of the founders of the new version
of the cyclic cosmology 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, it's not a huge universe,
but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.
Some do both, but this man created this theory
with collaborators, and now he's, I joke,
I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity.
You're like a deadbeat dad.
Now you're saying like inflation is bogus.
But he doesn't just attack.
See, this is what's very important
about approaching things as an experimentalist.
You've 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, you know, imagine like, you know,
Elon comes up with this like really great idea,
you know, space, and then he's like,
oh, actually, it's not gonna work,
and you know, but like, here's this better idea,
and he's like, SpaceX is not gonna work,
but he's now created an alternative to it.
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 and his colleague,
and he just works really hard with him.
But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.
And what it does most foremost is that it removes
the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
So it takes away 50% of the motivation
for a theory of quantum gravity.
You talked a lot about quantum gravity.
You talked to 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 no law that says we have to have
a theory of quantum gravity.
- So that kind of implicit expectation
has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory,
so in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?
So okay, maybe you can speak to what is
the negative impacts on society
from believing in cosmic inflation?
- So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,
according to its other two patriarchs,
considered to be its patriarchs,
Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford,
although he was in the USSR when he came up
with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt,
was that the universe has to eventually
get into a quantum state.
It has to exist in this Hilbert space,
and the Hilbert space has certain features,
and those features are quantum mechanical,
endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
So inflation can get started,
but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets.
It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?
It continues the thrusting, and 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 sometimes two branches coming to the same conclusion
is taken as evidence for its reality.
- So one of the negative consequences
is it creates phenomena that we can't,
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, maybe it makes life seem more meaningless?
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 of 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 façade,
that has features consistent with our existence,
and how could we be otherwise?
You know, the sort of weak anthropic principle.
On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,
literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
Like if I say, "Lex, you know, you've been working out,
you look like, you know, yeah, you're having,
yeah, it's great.
You look like you're 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.
You don't contribute any, what's called, surprise,
or reduction in entropy, or reduction of your ignorance
about the system, or 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
dictate that we would exist.
There has to be at least one place that we exist.
But the problem is, it's a manifestation of infinity.
So humans, and I'm sure you know this
from your work with AI and ML and everything else,
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 water molecules in this thing,
or the number of real numbers?"
Or if I say, "What's bigger, the number of real numbers
or rational numbers?"
There are 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, but the human brain
can't really contemplate infinity.
Let me illustrate that.
They say in the singularity,
the universe had an infinite temperature, right?
So let me ask you a question.
Is there anything that you can contemplate in the,
Einstein's little quip aside, that's infinite?
Like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature,
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 to half of infinity?
'Cause 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 pascals.
- Less infinite, more infinite.
Yeah, I mean, it's, that's one of the biggest troubling
things to me about infinity is,
you can't truly hold it inside our minds.
It's a mathematical construct that doesn't,
it feels like intuition fails.
§04Transcript · 23:57–32:11
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 on the level of intuition
as opposed to on the level of math.
You know, it may be something cyclical,
you can imagine infinity just going around the same,
kind of like a Mobius strip situation.
But then the question then arises,
how do you make it more or less infinite?
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 possible,
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.
- So I came to the right place.
But in terms of what a physicist will mean,
and you're right, I mean, physicists will blindly,
nonchalantly subtract infinity,
renormalization and do things to get finite answers.
And it's miraculous.
But at a certain point, you have to ask,
well, what are the consequences for the real world?
So one of them, you ask, what's the problem?
Does it make us more meaningless?
They purport, 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 multiverse?
What evidence do you have that there's not a,
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 produce sufficient 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 100% correct,
but it's like kinda chewing Wonder Bread.
I apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but.
(laughing)
- Wonderbread/lex.com.
- Type in code Kleb, right?
Kleb, that's my favorite Russian word,
is like, would you like a piece of Kleb?
- By the way, even that word Kleb,
which means bread in Russian,
as you say it, and 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 hungry, 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 only then, if they weren't a member
of some, I'm sure you know, Jewish scientists,
you had a passport that said Jew on your passport.
And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich,
he was the advisor, one of my advisors,
Alexander Polnareff, and he had to,
only because he was like at a Nobel level
and was one of the fathers
of the Soviet atomic bomb program,
could he even get his Jewish student,
he was Jewish too, but only by virtue
of his standing of his intellectual accomplishments,
would they give him the dispensation
to let his student 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 didn't meet
people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead.
And they just learned this thing through smuggled in,
you know, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard,
probably because they were working,
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 interesting incentives
in the Soviet system that maybe we can take this tangent
for a brief moment, that because there's a dictatorship,
authoritarian regime throughout the history
of the 20th century for the Soviet Union,
science was prioritized.
And because the state prioritized it,
through the propaganda machines, through 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 would say, you're saying, like, we have it easy now.
In that sense, it was kind of beneficial
to be a scientist in that society,
because you were seen as a hero, as there's--
- Yes, Lvovich was 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 the capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist,
let's just say the American system,
the celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses,
maybe business leaders, musicians,
and, you know, the people we elect
are sort of lawyers and lawyers.
(laughing)
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.
- Yeah, same in Germany.
Germany had, you know, highly prized science.
I mean, one of the most famous, tragic to me, cases
is Fritz Haber, who invented the Haber-Bosch process
that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet?
You look, I mean, I know you fast,
intermittent fast every day, and you do that.
You know, I said chleb, 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 swipe left or right for that, I don't know.
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 cadre of Nobel laureates
in chemistry and physics, you know,
that would go and witness these atrocities.
But that was also, they were almost putting science
above, I don't wanna say human dignity,
but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed.
And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz
because of the chemical that he invented also
called Zyklon B.
And so it's just unbelievable.
So I feel like that does have resonance today
in this worship of science, you know,
and listen to science and follow the science,
which is more like scientism.
And there is still a danger.
You know, I always say, just 'cause you're an atheist
doesn't mean you don't have a religion.
You know, just because you, you know,
in my case, in my books, 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 we want those people that are so significant
in their intellectual accomplishments.
'Cause there is a core of America
and the Western world in general that does worship
and really look at science predominantly
'cause it gives us technology.
But there's something really cool about that.
And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point
between looking to science for wisdom,
which I don't think it has, they're two different words,
but also recognizing how much good and transformative power,
maybe our only hope comes from science.
- You opened so many doors
'cause you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book.
So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science
and to the Nobel Prize that's fascinating to explore.
And we will, and we still haven't finished the discussion
of the beginning of the universe, which we'll return to.
But now, since you opened the book,
wow, pun unintended, of losing the Nobel Prize,
can you tell me the story of BICEP,
the Background Imaging of Cosmic
Extragalactic Polarization Experiment,
BICEP I and BICEP II,
and then maybe you can talk about BICEP III.
§05Transcript · 32:13–39:37
But the thing that you cover in your book,
the human story of it, what happened?
- Yeah, that book is, in contrast to the second book,
that's like a memoir.
It's really a description of what it's like to feel,
what it feels like to be a scientist
and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty,
imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book
in more detail, but to really feel like
you're doing something and it's all you think about.
It is all-consuming.
And it's something I couldn't have done now
'cause I have too many other wonderful,
delightful demands on my time.
But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated
by the night sky, who has 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.
In other words, I do things that religious people do,
and I don't do things that atheist people do.
And I once had this conversation,
with my first podcast guest, actually,
I shouldn't say, oh, I was just having a conversation
with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.
And I miss him.
- Name drop.
- Name drop, yes.
I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of comments
about how many agnostics--
- 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 the history of science,
physicists especially in the history of science.
- So when I talked to Freeman, I said,
Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too.
Can you tell me something?
Like, what do you do 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
an intelligent alien, and he was looking down,
or she, I don't know, thing was looking down,
and it saw Freeman, and on Sundays,
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 Richard Dawkins,
he doesn't go to the same church
that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to.
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 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 a Catholic church,
which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid
who grew up in New York.
Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not.
But I was just fascinated by these--
- Can we get into it for a second?
- Okay, yeah, all right, let's go.
- All right, let's go there.
Let's go to Baby Brian, or Young Brian.
- The new sitcom on CBS.
- Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents.
My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.
And my mother was an eminent mom
and a brilliant English major, et cetera.
And they raised, they were secular.
We'd go to, I always joke,
we'd go to synagogue two times a year,
on Christmas and Easter.
No, no, we would go, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, right?
That's the typical two-day-a-year Jews.
And then we'd have matzahs once a year on Passover.
And that was about it.
And 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's James X.
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 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 wanna 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 wanna go all the way."
I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.
- And you're gonna be the best altar boy there ever was.
- I had like serious skills.
You pass that collection basket,
I could push people and get 'em to two extra contributions.
But in this case, I was 13.
I don't know if you remember when you were 13,
but if you extrapolate the next level up,
it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.
The next level up from 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 women.
And as a 13-year-old boy,
kinda like future forecasting what life's gonna be like
for myself if I continue on my path,
I found it, maybe I--
- The math is not up.
- That's right.
There was a serious gap in that future.
And instead, when I should have been preparing
for my bar mitzvah, as most Jewish boys would be,
a 12, 13-year-old boy, I actually got a telescope
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?
- It's a hedgehog in 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 I put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look.
- Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist.
- Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
- 'Cause you assembled this telescope,
you gave it a mount, and you connected it to a very powerful--
- Yeah, but there's no experiment going on.
It's just engineering for show.
It's very shallow.
Experiment is taking it to the next level
and actually achieving something.
Here, I just built a thing for show.
- Well, that's always a joke.
You're an experimental cosmologist.
I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things,
soldering things.
It's not actually doing the stroking
of my non-existent beard, contemplating the cyclic
versus the bouncing cosmological moment.
- Just like most of robotics is just using Velcro
for things.
- Right, yeah.
It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever.
So telescope.
- Yes, this telescope.
What's the story of this little telescope?
- This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways.
It's a symbol of what got me into,
what brought me all the blessings I have in my life.
Came from a telescope.
And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.
You right here, wherever we are,
a 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 Venus.
You can see the Andromeda galaxy,
that's two and a half million light years away from earth.
You can do that with that little thing over there.
Or one that's a little more expensive.
Get one that has a mount
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 made of this heavenly substance,
the quintessence substance, right?
So where else can you be viscerally connected
with the first person to ever make that discovery?
Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity,
call up Harry Cliff and say,
"I wanna replicate."
How did you feel?
He didn't feel anything.
§06Transcript · 39:38–46:35
None of them felt anything.
It took years to come out of it.
You can't do it.
But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
- That's fascinating.
It's almost like maybe there's another one like that
is fire.
- Yes. - Like when you build
a bonfire, can you actually get it?
See, if you use a lighter,
I think if you actually, by rubbing sticks together
or however you do it without any of the modern tools,
that's probably what that's like.
And then you get to experience the magic of it,
of what early humans, homo sapiens did.
- You feel what Og felt when he did it that first time.
By the way, is this a gift?
- This is a gift, of course.
- Okay, I'm, is this--
- You need a little bit of a swag upgrade,
so I got you some gifts.
- I will, yeah, this is, I'm pulling a Putin.
Like, ask if this is a gift.
I'm making it very uncomfortable for you to say.
Not really, this piece of black paper.
- This is actually my childhood telescope here.
- But now I'm keeping it.
- That's right. - 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 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 gonna 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,
'cause you got to 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 English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade,
that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into.
Let me pour in some facts, intellects,
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, the kid is just like gushing.
No, you're not gonna see like--
- To inspire the kid.
- Yes. - Inspire.
- Yes. - Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.
- Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins, she's watching, yeah.
She's a big fan. (laughing)
Me, she doesn't care for, but you.
- Yeah, excellent.
We take those we love for granted.
This is in Manhattan.
- This is in Westchester County, New York.
- Got it.
So, okay, 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, postdoc,
all the way to where you are today.
What's that, what are some notable moments in that journey?
- So I call that the academic hunger games,
'cause it's like you're competing against these people
who are just getting smarter all the time
as you're getting smarter all the time.
They wanna get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
There's fewer slots to get into college
than not in high school.
There's fewer slots in graduate school.
There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
We just did a faculty search at UC San Diego,
400 applicants for one position.
It's almost getting impossible.
I almost can't conceive of doing what these new,
brilliant young people applying to become
an assistant professor at a state university
that they're doing.
It takes so much courage to do that.
So I went from this kid in New York
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 I did.
And then I went to graduate school.
And during graduate school, I had this kind of
on-again, off-again relationship with my father.
And I knew that he was a mathematician.
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 thinking, oh, 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.
But it always appealed to me, like, why not do
what made me happy as a 12-year-old?
We often forget about those primitive things about us
are probably the most sustainable, durable,
and resilient attributes of our character.
So with my own kids, I'm like, what are they interested in
now when they're young?
And it doesn't mean that's what they're gonna do.
I mean, some of them wanna play Fortnite,
like professional Fortnite, which there are,
but 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 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 wanna 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 to go into 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 have 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 COBE 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 wanna 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.
§07Transcript · 46:37–54:05
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 wanna be the guy understanding
what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
So I always joke with my theorist friends,
call me a closeted theorist.
I wanna be what they call a guy
who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
So I wanna be like that for physics,
for theoretical physics.
I wanna be like the guy who 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.
Signal is primary.
The thing you measure is primary,
and theory is just the search of explaining
how that signal originated, but it's all about the signal.
I mean, I see the same search for the human mind
and neuroscience in that same kind of way.
It's ultimately about the signal,
but you kind of hope to understand
how that signal originated.
That's fascinating.
That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics
'cause it ultimately, at the end of the day,
is all about the signal.
- Yeah, yeah, and maybe those two things,
the neuroscience and the cosmos,
not getting too romantic, but yeah,
maybe they're linked in some fundamental way.
Some fundamental cosmic consciousness,
but-- - We're gonna get to that.
- Yeah, yeah, no, we definitely have to get to that.
(laughs)
But getting back to, yeah, so my origins,
so I always say, and I wanna try this on you.
You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions,
but I'm gonna ask you some questions.
What's the most important day on the calendar?
Don't tell me the date, but to you,
what's the most important day to you every year?
- Do I have to answer or do I have to think about this?
- No, no, answer.
You don't have to tell me the exact date on the calendar.
It could be your mistress's birthday or whatever, but--
- I have so many I lose track.
(laughs)
Even though I'm single, how does that even make sense?
- I know. - Okay, I'm sorry.
So a day, like a month and a day, yeah.
I mean, for me, it would be December 31st.
- Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.
Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth.
They're usually 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 'cause you're Russian,
like the death side, the light side,
looking forward into January, the beginning, right?
(laughs)
So everybody's most important day
is usually some beginning or something significant.
For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all.
It was like, why 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 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 digit, you know,
for significant, five--
- What is it again, 13 point--
- 13.872 billion years.
872 million.
- So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
Is it, what are the error bars on that?
- So 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.
- Half a percent, percent level accuracy.
- There's a confidence behind that?
- Oh yeah, I mean, there's a 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,
it's about 12 billion years old,
or in the universe that were 12 billion.
So that would be like you being older than your father.
It was embarrassing.
- Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent
on a tangent on a tangent?
How old is the universe?
Can you dig in onto this number?
How do we know currently with those,
I guess you said four or five--
- Significant figures, yeah.
- Significant digits.
- So we can come about it from two different ways.
One, 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.
But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away,
I would say that that galaxy's 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, out of 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, yep.
- And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others
and yeah, then solve the algebra problem.
How does the stuff in the beginning,
the mystery of that beginning epoch
change this calculation of--
- Very little because actually we understand
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, et cetera,
and how much ordinary matter, like we're made up of,
neutrons, protons, croutons.
- Okay, so the--
(laughing)
- Morons.
(laughing)
- 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, yeah.
So you're right, if the universe were static,
if the universe came into existence,
and you can conceive of this,
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,
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,
we were near a galaxy, it's gonna produce some light,
and that galaxy's going to be moving away from us,
the light's gonna be getting more and more red shifted,
as it's called, and it's gonna 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 us some light, and because the space
is also dragging the photons with it, if you like,
the photons are participating
in the expansion of the universe,
that's why they're red shifting,
that we can see things out to where the universe
first began expanding, not just when it began existing.
§08Transcript · 54:09–1:01:11
And because the universe has been expanding
for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing down yet,
which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise,
that we can see things approximately three times
the age of the universe away from us.
So we can see, let's call 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 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.
So I'm 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 Alvy Singer.
- I grew up in the Soviet Union.
We watched propaganda films.
- I realize that you did, yes.
So there's a famous--
- Annie Hall, is that some kind of--
- It's a communist party, a propagandist movie
with Woody Allen, certainly canceled,
but nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet.
He made a movie called Annie Hall,
in which, it's 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?"
Goes, "'Cause the universe is expanding,
"and it keeps on expanding.
"Everything will rip apart,
"and we'll never have anything in contact,
"and everything is meaningless."
I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to.
And she goes, "What are you talking about?
"We're in Brooklyn.
"Brooklyn is not expanding."
And that's true, Brooklyn is not expanding.
The solar system is not expanding.
Oftentimes, I 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.
You've seen your friend Elon.
He goes out into space.
He's got a rocket, right?
What's outside of the rocket?
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?
- That's just semantics, I guess.
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 of space.
- And there's no more liquid in it.
- There's no more liquid in it, no.
It's just a container, one cubic centimeter.
Let's make it simple.
One cubic centimeter of a box,
and you take it out into space,
outside the Falcon, whatever, right?
What's inside that box?
It's not empty.
There's actually, I'm gonna say,
this is gonna set your friends,
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, I've heard of that number before.
All right, let's--
- It used to be 69, but then they changed it.
- Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
- In a millimeter box, it's 69.
- What are we talking about here?
What's in the box?
I'm gonna get, that's right.
Let's think outside the box.
No, we're thinking inside the box.
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, et cetera.
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.
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 one,
let's say there might be one ordinary matter,
like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
There might be a couple hundred neutrinos,
and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420.
What's between those guys?
What's between the protons and the neutrinos
and the photons?
Just zoom in to a cubic micron now.
Imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
It's actually pretty empty.
They're just zipping around in there.
So between them, there's a lot of empty space.
- And this is outside the physics-based models of fields
and all those kinds of things.
- Yeah, and dark fields. - Just asking the question,
what is this emptiness?
- What is the particle content in the universe
in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
- Outside of the 420.
So you have the 420.
- 420.
- They have some mass.
- Well, they have energy.
They're not mass.
Photons are not mass.
- Energy or mass. - That's why they don't
bring suitcases.
You know that's true, right?
Photons never bring suitcases with them
'cause they're traveling light.
See, I don't even get to laugh at you.
Corny dad jokes.
Okay, you'll appreciate something.
- No, this is pretty good.
I'm laughing on the insides.
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.
- Yeah, so that's the notebook
on which the photons are written.
- That's beautiful work.
- But still, thank you.
Still, I understand this,
but it's still uncomfortable that
if the universe is expanding,
that this thing is expanding.
The canvas is expanding.
It's very strange.
'Cause if we were 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 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,
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.
So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
And because of that,
we can think about these effects of expansion
as the relationship between the, as you said,
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 as gravity
is the changing of those trajectories
from being rectilinear to curvilinear.
That's what we experience as gravity.
You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish
about a bowling ball and a trampoline.
That's almost right, 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.
It's also a fraught analogy because you're using gravity,
like the notion of gravity pulling something down
§09Transcript · 1:01:13–1:08:46
to explain the notion of gravity.
So it's a little overburdening, the analogy.
- But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish
wrote the foreword to your book.
- Yeah.
- How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
How do they, on the emotional level,
how do they make you feel
that they're just moving space-time?
- Yeah, so gravitational waves were,
the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves
discovery the first time, it was discovered twice,
indirectly by two men named Halston Taylor,
and that was given my first year of graduate school.
The day I entered graduate school, almost,
they announced these two guys won it,
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?
- This was, no, this is--
- That was a joke.
- No, yeah, that was good, that was good.
- All right, thank you.
- I got it, I got it.
You know, to a cosmologist, age means nothing.
And to a tennis player.
- Not on Tinder.
(laughing)
- That's right.
- All right, sorry.
- Gravitational waves do fit in
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 newcomers like Barry's studies,
the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us,
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 wanna measure,
let's say you have the old time firecracker,
let's say there's a firecracker,
and you wanna 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 gonna use that as a film, quote unquote,
onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
- And hope you can,
so what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy
for the exposure?
- So the signal, as I said,
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,
420 is the number?
- Centimeter.
- Per cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
I wonder if Elon knows this,
and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.
- Yeah, it's true.
- Funding secured, excellent.
So I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak,
of triumph, that you described in losing the Nobel Prize.
So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
Can you describe what bicep one and bicep two are?
Bicep three, perhaps, the instruments
that can detect this kind of polarization?
What are the challenges, 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, et cetera,
but he never won a Nobel Prize.
And some parents in America, they compete with their kids.
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.
But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy.
Like we would compete and he was much more
of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist
so we had both different ideas
in 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 outdo him.
So I feel pretty venal and kind of minuscule
kind of character-wise saying that.
- 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 was no longer under 40.
- 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.
But I wanted to do something big
and I wanted to do something
that would really just unequivocally be realized
as 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 cared about.
- As an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences.
- That's all I wanted to do.
I felt like if it's not, you know,
if it's worth spending perhaps the rest of my life on
as a scientist, it better be damn well
better be interesting to me, to carry me through,
to give me the, you know, I always say,
passion is great when people say,
"Oh, follow your passion," but it's not enough.
Passion's 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 BICEP1.
What is this?
- So BICEP1 was born out of
kind of interesting circumstances.
So I had gone to a Stanford University for a postdoc,
so an academic Hunger Games--
- Stanford?
- Stanford University, yeah, it's this small little school.
It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts
that you're affiliated with.
But as I went there, I was working
for a new assistant professor.
She had gotten there 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 studying galaxies at high redshift,
and I wanted to study the origin of the universe
using this type of technology.
And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine
who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Heminkowski,
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, less than a foot across.
And that telescope would have the same power
as a Hubble telescope, sized 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 of 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 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 with 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, at Slack.
And he was trying to get a permanent job,
I was trying to make my name for myself,
and so I realized I could do this,
§10Transcript · 1:08:48–1:16:34
but I was also being paid by 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
'cause I was sketching notebooks
and planning his experiments,
and I just, I wasn't, no, I actually--
- You had big ideas in your mind,
you were planning big experiments,
and that was difficult to work with on a small scale
for like a postdoc type of situation,
where you have to publish basic papers,
deliver on some basic deadlines for a project,
all those kinds of things.
- Yeah, and support your advisors, paying,
and she was paying me.
And so one day I came in,
and it actually involved another friend of mine,
an astronomer named Jill Tartar,
one of the pioneers in the SETI science 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.
But Jill was visiting Stanford,
and I was like, "I really wanna meet her,
"can you introduce me?"
And she said, "No, in fact, you're fired."
My boss.
So I was like, "This is possibly the best thing
"that could ever happen to me."
I didn't know where it would lead or what happened 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 she, my original boss, Sarah Church,
she got me the job with her former advisor,
a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know,
like, he's like a Steve Jobs or an Elon,
charismatic, handsome, persuasive, idea man,
not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything,
but understood where things are going decades from now.
And he had been involved in an experiment
that actually measured the universe was flat,
very close to flat,
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, et cetera,
if you have an accurate enough protractor.
- Allegedly, yeah. - Yeah.
(laughs)
God, you're like auto-canceling, this is great.
My ratings are gonna go up, man, this is gonna be great.
Take out the-- - If you want actual science,
go listen to Brian.
If you want all of these conspiracy theories,
or AKA the truth about flat Earth, listen to him.
And so what he used was the following triangle.
There are 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 blobs of primordial plasma,
the soup that constitutes the early universe,
which is hydrogen, it's very simple material.
Understand hydrogen, electrons, and radiation,
very simple, plasma physicist's son, understand it.
The diameter is 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 University of Rome and that other group at Princeton,
measured the angle, 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 where they,
could trace them back location-wise?
- You can know where they are, but more than that,
there's so many of these patches.
There are about one square degree on the sky.
The sky, you may know, a sphere has about
44,000 square degrees in 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 in this experiment called Boomerang,
but they did measure very accurately
the, what was called the first Doppler peak,
or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
- That's, so the sphere has 44, approximately,
44,000 square degrees.
So to cover a sphere, that's a very kind of
important data collection thing
when you're sitting on a sphere
and you're looking out into the observable universe.
So 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 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 picks, is what it's called.
- And so it's just stitch all this stuff together,
and that's, and stitch it together very accurately.
- Yeah, get high statistical significance
in order to reduce the statistical errors,
very clean signal and measurement device
to reduce the systematic errors,
those are the two predominant 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,
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 was the first person
to measure the curvature of the Earth?
It's a guy named Aristophanes in the, you know, whatever,
lived around Aristotle's time.
His name is in the history books.
So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like,
he's like the next Aristotle, Aristophanes,
like, I just wanted to work for this guy.
You know, he clearly had this brand,
he was about 40 at the time,
California Scientist of the Year,
I was sure he was gonna 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, 'cause 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 up with the idea
for what I later named BICEP,
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,
but along the way, the idea was very simple,
we're gonna 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 wanted to build the cleanest instrument,
turns out the cleanest instrument you can build
in 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 .1
or .2 degrees Kelvin, above absolute zero.
To do that, we needed 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.
- You fly down. - As somebody
who was born in the Soviet Union,
we obviously like to call it red,
§11Transcript · 1:16:35–1:23:58
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, et cetera, et cetera.
But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago,
Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole.
Now there's no land 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.
Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
It means like no bears there,
basically opposite of where polar bears are.
Arctic means polar bear, that's where, in Creek.
- Oh, did not know that, 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 cold, it's about dry.
- Exactly.
So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka
and you can put it in this cup, right?
And we can 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,
'cause 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 square centimeter of surface area,
and that happens to be either Chile,
or my other project, the Simons Observatory is located,
or you take it to the South Pole.
We took it to the South Pole,
and spent a couple of 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, planar, flat as a pancake.
You, like, and the buildings are built up on stilts.
They're built up, 'cause the snow
will otherwise cover them over.
The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth,
they yank 'em 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 'em operating on himself,
taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter
by himself.
- It's a harsh condition.
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 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, 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 all.
(laughing)
It's a long night.
And what Bicep is, and I couldn't bring
my polarized sunglasses here,
so I brought these actual polarizers here.
So if you take this and put it in front
of your telescope there, you have now made a polarimeter.
You have 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 it, 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?
- Becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
- Yeah, so that's called a quadrupolar pattern, right?
So it's repeating, it goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
It rotates twice in intensity
for every single physical rotation.
- Wow.
- And that's because of the property of the photon.
The photon is a spin-one field, but the polarization
of light is 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.
It's just like 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 a...
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, refringent means refracting.
So this is a special type of material
that separates light based on its polarization.
- Pretty clean bi-signal.
- Yeah.
- It's cleanly two.
- Yeah.
- I'm seeing two very cleanly.
- It's very crisp, right.
So that's yours to keep with every time you host me.
Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand.
- 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 signal to the other.
So 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 detector, that's where the cosmic photons
are brightest in the microwave regime
of 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,
but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light
and the color, that's what we call color,
and intensity of brightness.
- So you're devising an instrument
that's very precisely measuring that polarization.
- Exactly.
And doing so in the microwave region,
with detectors not made of biological human retina cells,
but of superconductors, and things called bolometers,
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 kind of device
§12Transcript · 1:24:01–1:31:14
could win a Nobel Prize?
- So when the CMB was discovered,
it was discovered serendipitously.
There were two radio astronomers
working at the time at Bell Laboratories.
Now why would Bell Laboratories
be employing radio astronomers?
Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple,
or it was like a think tank, or it was Google.
Let's say it was like Google.
Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing.
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 Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone,
part of AT&T and the early telephone company,
later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
And they would take that 1946,
and they would take that 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-to-noise ratio
of the first telecommunication satellite.
It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem.
And they were bouncing signals from the West Coast
up to the satellite, bouncing it down,
landing it in New Jersey of all places,
in northern New Jersey, Holmdel, New Jersey.
And these radio astronomers 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's 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 Jansky in 1930-something.
- So not being able to reduce the signal
or increase the signal-to-noise ratio,
the noise was-- - It was noise.
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, 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 radiothermodynamics.
So it's a really interesting thing.
So a thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter
from here on Earth.
It's amazing.
And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal
not by its intensity, but by its temperature.
So he found, this guy Edward Ohm,
oh, there's this three Kelvin signal, I can't get rid of it.
It must be I did my error analysis wrong
and I would give him an F
if he was one of my first year students.
But he's just attributed to lack of understanding.
These other guys, Penzias 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.
Inject a known source of signal every second
that has a temperature of about four Kelvin
because the signal that they were trying to get rid of
is about three Kelvin.
And you wanna 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,
millions of measurements for sure.
And they found they couldn't get rid of it either,
but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
- So how does having a four Kelvin source,
how does the calibration work?
Just out of curiosity.
- It could be larger.
Imagine you're trying to calibrate the microphone.
You could do it with 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 wanna 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 gonna be as easy on the amplifiers
as getting a slightly, a gong or something, a violin.
- So the idea of the noise is present in both?
- There's noise present in both.
And you measure, what they did is they made
a separate measurement just of the calibration system,
which they measured exactly very well.
Four Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
That's a temperature that's not gonna change.
And it's certainly not gonna change
over a time scale of one second.
And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal,
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?
You don't get any measurement, right?
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 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 all life is basically
conversion of energy and trying to control entropy,
which is then related to thermodynamics exactly in that way.
And this is 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 that those kinds 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.
- 'Cause if you find what you're gonna 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 Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal.
They ended up discovering the heat left over
from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera.
And that was a serendipitous discovery.
They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
It was the first one ever awarded 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, what the Bible is correct now
isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it.
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 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 offense,
'cause we need plasma physics.
We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics.
§13Transcript · 1:31:17–1:39:39
Like we literally use every branch of physics,
and thermodynamics, superconductivity, quantum mechanics,
all that goes into our understanding of the instrument.
And even further, if you wanna understand the theory
that predicts the signal that we purport to measure.
So I rationalized that if Penzias 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 how the universe began,
detecting the origin of the initial conditions
for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis,
which won the Nobel Prize in 1983,
these are like five Nobel Prizes, 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 really this impossible.
And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird,
because people are like, "Oh, you don't really,
"you still want the Nobel Prize, you're still greedy.
"And look, you wrote another book about it."
And I always joke, I'm like,
"Well, if you wanna see if I'm a hypocrite,
"just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
"And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite."
- Wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings
on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite 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 a place to tell the story of BICEP2.
- Yeah, so BICEP2, like iPhones,
or I know you're an Android fanboy,
but every year, they get a little bit better.
They get more megapixels, they get more optics,
triple X zoom, whatever, okay, right?
We upgraded our detectors as well.
The initial detectors were based
on what are called semiconductors.
They have certain properties that make them
very difficult to replicate at scale.
And we wanted to make them 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 Bach,
and nowadays Suzanne Staggs at Princeton,
they are just exquisitely making these sensors,
tens of thousands of them.
The initial BICEP1 instrument,
of course, we just call it the BICEP,
that only had 98 detectors.
Simon's Observatory is gonna have 100 times more
just in one of our four telescopes.
We're gonna 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 getting back to what BICEP did,
we upgraded, made BICEP2.
In January 2010, we had just installed
in the exact same 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.
Had 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.
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 universes 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 along with Andrew Lang.
And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley,
and I got a call from Andrew Lang's,
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 how I should be with my kids,
and what was the most important way
to move through the academic ladder.
Again, he was preternaturally suited
to win the Nobel Prize.
Everyone always thought he would win it.
If he were alive, he still could win it.
In fact, his wife, or his ex-wife, won it,
Frances Arnold, in 2018.
And it was this power couple,
and it destroyed me for a long time,
because he was just this magical person.
I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life,
even like these aspects of raising kids
and being married without him.
And to do it in that way, it felt like,
again, he's got kids,
and I feel terrible for them, obviously,
but it did feel like a betrayal.
I mean, I'm just being honest with you.
It felt like, why the F did you not reach out?
I thought we were close, and I couldn't.
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 who's gonna 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 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 BICEP1.
So I continued on BICEP1 as the co-leader of it,
but not on BICEP2.
And obviously, that was pretty painful.
- This is all happening at the same time
as you lose this father figure.
Now there's this kind of,
this one betrayal in a way,
and then there's another,
or something that feels like a betrayal.
- Yeah, and he had kind of been 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 approbation that would then lead
to their careers taking off as it did for mine.
And so there was a competition.
I mean, science is not free from egos and competition
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 kind of alone in this world.
When you take on difficult things,
we often kind of grasp at a few folks
that give us strength.
- Yeah.
- Was he 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 was one, this Russian cosmologist,
Alexander Polnareff, who thankfully is very much alive.
He was at Queen Mary University.
Now he's retired.
He was kind of a theoretical, 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 avuncular,
father figure type character,
that really 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 his misgivings
about people that he worked with,
or things in his personal life.
And it was devastating.
But again, like who the hell am I?
§14Transcript · 1:39:40–1:48:09
I'm not his kid.
His kids lost father.
So I feel guilty talking about it in that sense,
but it's just a reality.
- Well, there is something that's not often talked about
is people who collaborate on scientific efforts.
I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't wanna compare,
but sometimes when the collaborations are truly great,
it sounds similar as when veterans talk about
their time serving together.
There's a bond that's formed.
So like comparing family and this kind of thing is,
you know, it's not productive,
but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real,
because you're taking on something,
you're taking on the impossible.
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 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,
but you're boldly pushing through.
And then for him to take his own life,
it can ask you about this kind of moment that combined,
I don't wanna say betrayal,
but perhaps the feeling of betrayal
that BICEP2 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?
Was there a depression?
Or was there a crumbling of confidence?
- Yeah, I mean, 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, you know, I'm a husband and father,
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 the one who created me
or that I had played a role in my life,
that he abandoned me in the 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 the war,
they're all working, you know, for common good.
It's not like, I wanna be, get the most kills.
I compare it 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 of their intimates
and so forth.
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 to the, 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 of,
lot of finite games where there is only one winner
for tenure.
There is only three winner,
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 unruly graduate student or two.
So we're all like reinventing it,
which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it.
'Cause 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 very little has changed.
There's some guy or gal scratching a rock
on another piece of rock and lecturing in front.
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 it was he's back then.
Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced
by tenure, so okay.
But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug
getting pulled out from underneath me
because he was like my consigliere.
He was a guy I 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 the loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
And I thought, oh, it's so sad
'cause 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.
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 now thinking back on it,
that was such a minuscule part of it
because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize
or I did win the, or any of us did.
Would that have changed anything?
Would that have brought anything back?
It's so, we say it's like vanity, it's futility.
And I just, for me, the Nobel Prize is like,
I don't wanna say it's insignificant
'cause obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence.
And I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show,
I'm gonna name drop, okay?
And 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 undermining what he does.
What he does is 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 has Lex mentioned
the words Nobel and Prize?
And I put it into Google Ngram
and out came exactly the same number of times
as 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?
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.
It's somehow a catalyst for greatness.
It resulted in you doing your life's work.
The dream of it.
- Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
I can't necessarily counterfactually state
that that would have happened.
So no, it definitely has a place.
And for me, it is valuable to think about it.
But the level of obsession that academics have about it
is really, I think it is almost unbalanced
becoming unhealthy.
And again, I make no truck
with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show.
And to think about the one rule.
So by the way, right after the denouement of the story,
which I'll get to in a bit,
how our dreams went down to dust and ashes,
I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
So the one that I theoretically
could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually,
they asked me to nominate.
Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say, "Brian,"
instead of me inviting myself on the show,
if you say, "Brian, would you like to come
"on the Lex Friedman podcast?"
I say, "You know what, Lex?
"You know that guy, Rogan?
"I think you might have heard him.
"Can you introduce him to me?"
You imagine how that would feel.
Like you'd be like, "Ah, 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 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.
§15Transcript · 1:48:12–1:56:50
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, little known fact,
they sent that exact letter just to you.
That rule was created just for you.
- That's called the Keating Correlate, yes, exactly.
- Just to like-- - Good for them.
- Rub it in.
I mean, in this particular case,
of course, there's some weird technicality or whatever,
but in this particular case,
it's kind of a powerful reminder.
- Yeah, no way.
- That the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind.
And there's stories behind all of that.
- Yeah, I mean, here's a good example.
Again, this is my friend, Barry Barish.
He's become like a mentor and a friend.
He wrote the foreword to my book, "Into the Impossible."
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 very rhapsodically
and lovingly and romantically with Harry Cliff,
and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way,
about the LHC and how wonderful it is,
and how in that, we were about to build
the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas,
and it didn't get built,
and it got canceled by Congress, and blah, blah, blah.
And I 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 canceled,
first of all, even though it did get canceled,
the Europeans went on to build it themselves,
saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars,
and 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 gonna be talking with him about.
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 on it,
'cause he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment.
Second thing, if,
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,
got mass, got converted to pure gravitational energy.
No light was seen by them.
This particular date, September 14th, 2015, okay?
That explosion, because of the miracle of time travel
that telescopes afford us,
that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago
in a galaxy far, far away.
They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in,
still, and they never will, okay?
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 two giant things collided.
- A billion, 200 million years ago,
and if it had happened 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 he didn't,
but the reason that he wouldn't have won it,
'cause 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 was awarded the Nobel Prize.
- And here we are, several billion of hairless apes
that strangely wear clothing,
celebrated three other clothed hairless apes
with a medal, with one particular element,
and then they made speeches in a particular language
that evolved-- - They bent down
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.
- They get some reindeer meat, that's right.
- Okay, excellent.
Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example,
what happened to you in terms of Bicep 2?
- I wanna kinda speak at a high level
about a particular thing I observed.
So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast,
I was just listening to the podcast,
I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.
And it also coincided with my entry into grad school
and this whole journey of academia.
So grad school, getting my PhD,
then 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 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 wanna celebrate them, but I wanna do even better.
So that's even for friends.
So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others.
And then couple that with just the,
you now 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, the full richness
of why 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 or whatever,
and not me. - It's a zero-sum game.
- They turn it into a zero-sum game.
The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me
and many others is that it doesn't have to be that way.
And forget money and all those kinds of things.
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 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 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
and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey
that we're 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
'cause everybody else gets excited about this whole thing,
and the pie grows.
Right now, the scientists, by fighting,
by not celebrating each other, are not growing the pie,
and now because of that,
sort of science becomes less and less popular.
- It's a flywheel, exactly.
No, and I wanna point out two things.
One is that I remember you went on Joe's show
maybe a couple of years ago,
and then he gave you a watch.
He gave you like a Rolex, right?
And I tweeted to you, and I think it's--
- Omega. - Omega, sorry.
Okay, fine.
The watch that went to the moon,
which we will get to in a bit.
I don't think he could give you what I gave you,
though, by the way.
(laughing)
And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.
- And by the way, I also wanted to mention,
§16Transcript · 1:56:52–2:04:27
because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset,
and you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
And we had this conversation with him,
'cause I was like, when I was,
so moving to Austin, and had a conversation,
like, don't you think it's weird
if we have the same guests at the same time or whatever?
He's like, fuck that.
I want you to be more successful than me.
I want, 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 gonna give that to somebody.
And today I wanted that to be me.
No, no. (laughing)
Joe's Omega.
No, but the point is, he sees in you that same grandiosity,
that same genuine spirit graciousness.
And I think that's true.
And you do do something very rare.
I don't wanna turn this into too much of a love fest,
but I do wanna say, even back to Andrew,
who I've almost been hagiographic about,
just treating him like a saint.
He said to me the same thing,
and in a moment of peak, said like,
goddammit, 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.
That wasn't who he was.
That was just an expression.
Like, I am doing something which is fundamentally,
but you know what?
When you have kids, hopefully,
please God, you will someday.
'Cause I think, and I hope we can get
to talk about that later, but part of investment
and part of doing something when you have a kid,
like you can get married.
You can marry someone 'cause she's rich or he's rich.
You can marry someone 'cause they're good looking
or he's good looking.
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, "Oh, you know what?
"I really want this thing that's three feet tall,
"that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor,
"that wakes me up all hours of the night,
"that interferes with my love life."
Nobody says that 'cause it doesn't benefit you
for months and months.
A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me,
does a lot of my solo videos, he's having his first kid.
He's like, "What do I do?"
'Cause it always gets stupid if I,
"Oh, catch up on sleep now."
Like, yeah, I'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bank.
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 this really relates back to what Aristotle once said.
Aristotle once 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 which you sacrifice for.
Here's a proof.
I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
Some with severe, one of my uncles,
my uncle on the Keating side had 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.
'Cause they had to sacrifice so much for him.
And I think of that, in the small case,
like Joe's kind of mentoring you or whatever,
and you're gonna mentor someone else.
You love that which you sacrifice for.
Sacrifice is reduction of entropy,
it's storing and investing, and you wanna protect that.
And that to me really speaks to this.
So, yeah, I don't hold it against.
But it is true, like scientists are,
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, and 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 they'll go home.
There's no such thing as a single-edged sword.
I wish there were, you know,
because we need some more of that,
'cause you gotta dull it up.
But in this case, he, you know,
I think when you have this kind of investment in science,
it's gonna be natural.
But that doesn't mean we have to like,
you know, feed the flames of competition.
You know, I'm like really,
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, the discovery of the CMB,
B-mode polarization, the nice, you know,
that's figure two in this thing.
And I'm like, what message does that send to kids?
Like, to young people?
Like, that's what you should be doing
so that you win this small, as you said,
this prize given out by one hairless ape to another
wearing a fancier costume eating reindeer?
- Especially in the case of the Nobel Prize,
it's only currently given to three people.
- At most, which was never one of his stipulate.
He actually said one, you can only give it to one person.
So they change it, why did they change it?
I talk about, I speculate in the book.
By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11
about the Nobel Prize and its effect.
But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting,
like I'm 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 they bring in flowers,
not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,
which is in San Romino in Italy.
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 can outlive a person.
My father has a theorem named after him.
It's still 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 wanna store things,
we wanna compress things.
And I think 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 National Academy
don't believe in an active faith,
you know, in a creator, in a God.
And science can substitute for that,
but 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, which is interesting,
'cause you do bring up Ernest Becker
and 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, you know,
or 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 a mortality
or a kind of desire for mortality.
And 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 just, rather than celebrating the pure joy
of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us,
just the actual exploration of the mysterious.
- For its own sake. - For its own sake, yeah.
- Well, that's why 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 scientists and mentor.
I have a chart in the book and a plaque made
by one of my graduate students, former graduate students,
she's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron.
And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations.
So here I am, 17 levels down.
There's a guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz,
different Leibniz, 1596 he was born,
and I'm in this chain.
And I don't know if you know this,
but in the Russian language,
§17Transcript · 2:04:28–2:12:02
the word scientist means someone who was taught.
I'll say it very simply, one who was taught, right?
- Uchani. - Uchani.
So it probably means a guy who was taught, right?
- No. - Okay, it'd just be a person.
- No, no, no, it's literally someone who was taught.
- Someone who was 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,
'cause 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 the 24 kids I might have
in my graduate class or undergraduate class,
and 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 mindset versus growth mindset,
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 I Germany, or Imperial Japan,
science celebrated, and we're just making
a nation of scientists.
And we're not doing it to become multi-billionaires,
or necessarily for any military purpose whatsoever.
But if we had that, sometimes I'm flying home at night,
when you fly into LA, you literally, it's very rare,
you can see the number 10 million.
It's very hard to visualize things.
You see a brick wall, you ask how many bricks are there,
it might be a thousand, two thousand.
10 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 I get to do it.
- You get to look at the eye of God perspective
on these 10 million, on these millions of helpless apes.
- And I don't think they're like constellations,
but upside down, like the city.
This is like a, hopefully I'll stay,
keep the plane the right way up.
But when you think about that,
imagine they're all working together.
And imagine, you always talk about love,
but you don't know that they're not worthy of love,
so you're looking down on them.
And it's just amazing, 'cause you think,
what an amazing creation is man and humans,
and what can we do?
It's phenomenal, it's so exciting.
And then I get to do it, it's a job I say,
don't tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free.
I love what I do.
But to think about, oh, if my student succeeds,
and I'm not, no.
It is unfortunate that you have experienced it.
I've certainly experienced it.
And I think there are ways around it.
I think it is a vexing problem,
because people want to, it's very tempting
to keep your own garden fertilized.
You know, one thing that's interesting is,
people are like, why are you doing this thing?
And a podcast, and you're supposed to be
serious scientists leading this huge project,
and collaborators, and I'm like, well,
most of what I do, as I said before,
for you it's Velcro, for me it's like,
what is the deal with the safety standards
on the truck that we're driving up
to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator
that will allow the concrete truck to,
it has nothing to do with the Big Bang,
inflation, the multiverse, God's existence,
it 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 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,
but I felt like it would be kind of a shame
if I didn't allow them to teach at scale,
'cause 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 friends with them,
and they have still gone on to,
so we should say like why we didn't win the Nobel Prize,
and then what happened with the group
that is now leading it, that I'm completely divorced from,
in a secular sense.
We're friends, you know, we see each other,
you know, we send each other emails and stuff like that.
- I would love to get their sense of like
what the natural heartbreak built into the whole process
of the Nobel Prize, what their sense is.
I would love to hear an honest, real conversation.
I understand you're friends, but there's some hard truth
that even friends will talk about it till you put a mic.
- No, they weren't happy I wrote the book.
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 told me not to write the book.
They said it's gonna give, you know,
too much attention to the Nobel Prize,
gonna look like sour grapes.
Again, I say, you can prove I have sour grapes or not,
just give me the next prize.
No, if I--
- So you would, if you get a Nobel Prize for literature,
you would turn it down?
- I don't know.
It's funny, 'cause Sabina Hasenfelder,
who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and--
- And a shoo-in for the Nobel Peace Prize.
- You're right, she's so gracious and so good.
She has that German, you know, just gentleness.
- She's a little too nice for my taste, I would say.
- I wish she could really say what she thinks.
And be snarky on occasion.
So she wrote a review of my book when it came out,
three or four years ago.
And she said, well, you know, Brian Keating,
like she said, well, it's good, it's interesting.
He talks a lot about cosmology.
But, you know, they can do whatever the hell they want.
And he, you know, presumably has problems with it,
but it's none of his business, basically.
It's a private, 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, no, so getting back to the guys
that we were, you know, kind of collaboratemies,
or frenemies, and we're still, look, 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 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 it would 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.
You know, it's about something completely different.
And, you know, I do feel like people 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.
One thing about Joe, and again,
I've only listened to like, I have to confess,
you know, you're like my father,
now I'm confessing my sins to you, father Lex,
father Friedman. - Go on.
- 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,
a bunch of, Einstein, Weinstein,
oh, Weinstein, Weinstein, that's what it is.
- I get them confused with the brother.
- The brothers, the brothers,
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 preternatural curiosity.
He doesn't have passion.
There are a lot of podcasts that have passion,
like I've been on there, show you.
He has curiosity, like,
he's not gonna stop talking about something
until he hops it, until he understands it,
until he gets it viscerally.
And I respect that,
because as I say in this more recent book,
passion's like, kind of like the dopamine hit
§18Transcript · 2:12:05–2:19:52
that gets you started, like, oh, I'm gonna be great,
maybe I can win a Nobel Prize.
Like, that's not gonna sustain you.
The sustenance comes from the passion
converting to curiosity.
And what I wanna do is convert as many things as possible
to things that I can then,
because actually I've had on people that discuss addiction.
And there is an addictive quality to doing podcasts
or whatever, but there's an addictive quality
being a scientist.
And you get to do things that are very specialized
in specialized locations with special people,
paid for by other people who have no fricking idea
what you do.
So imagine you worked in some job,
and Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things.
Like, when he was, he was once said,
he said, "If you can't explain it to your grandmother,
"you don't understand it yourself."
Then the day he won the Nobel Prize,
a 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 in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush
that you get from it.
But what is ultimately gonna be the sustenance of it?
So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way
to nucleate that.
I don't know, actually, I don't know if it's like,
can you turn someone into a,
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 Altucher, 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 laugh.
But anyway, no, it's true.
So somewhere you lose 30 to 50%.
- I'm not entertained.
But that's 'cause I'm an adult.
No, and then I do remember there's some distribution
in those studies with the happier adults
smile a little more, but still the kids
blow 'em out of the water.
- Just crush it.
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 dopamine hit,
and then, I don't know.
It's an open question.
- Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace,
the key to life is to be unboreable.
I think you could train this kind of thing,
which is in every single situation,
so like, which I think is 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 watch people
or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people
have to go to the DMV every day.
And then try to go into 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.
- Or like, how can I do this better?
Maybe there's some blockchain,
and they could like, VIN transfer.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
No, that is a good, that is a good move.
- 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 in everything,
because if you're able to find the awesomeness
in everything, like whatever journey you take,
whatever weird--
- Meant for Japan, I think that's what you meant.
- That you take through life is going to be productive,
is gonna end up in a great place.
So like, that muscle is at the core of it.
I guess curiosity is central to that.
But you didn't win the Nobel Prize,
the team of Bicep that led the Bicep 2
didn't win the Nobel Prize, because of some space dust.
- That's right, it's mixed schmutz.
- Which one is the moon, which one is--
- That one's the dust, the space dust, yeah.
- What are we looking at?
So why is space dust the villain of this whole story?
- Well, it's funny, 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 always like, what the hell is a dust jacket?
How much dust is raining down at any moment?
I mean, this is immaculate, this room is Russian tidiness,
but in a normal household, how much dust is raining down?
It's not really pretty, until I wrote a book,
and I realized, I'm writing a story
about the origin of the universe,
and the prologue to the cosmos,
and dust is going to cover this story.
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, et cetera, et cetera.
So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit,
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, we're using Einstein,
we're not using Boltzmann,
we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures.
In so doing, you can actually become blinded
to otherwise obvious effects
that people 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 twofold symmetry pattern
of under rotation.
That's the technical way that we undergo it.
I mean, there's a lot more to it.
But there are 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,
Penzias and Wilson, 1965,
measured something that's a billion times brighter,
and that was what, 60 years ago,
let's call it 60 years ago since they discovered it.
Moore's law, you're more expert,
let's call it every two years.
So you're talking about like two to the 30th power
doubling or something like that, at that.
So let's call it two to the 20th, something like that.
So that's like only two to the 10th is a thousand,
correct my math, I'm wrong.
Two to the 20th is a million,
two to the 30th is a billion.
So 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,
in the semiconductor factory in Santa Clara, California,
they don't have to deal with meteorites and astronauts
and 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,
§19Transcript · 2:19:55–2:27:36
the planet Jupiter or its moons,
or get sucked into them and make craters on them,
et cetera, et cetera.
The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum.
There's very few, thank God,
Chicxulub sized impact or progenitors
that will take out all life on earth.
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 the end product of a collapsing star
that explodes in what's called a supernova,
type two supernova.
So stars spend most of their life
fusing helium nuclei protons and neutrons
into helium nuclei.
And then from there it 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.
And 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, you know, 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.
Now, 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 oxygen
and you know, iron was discovered.
So it's only a relatively recent comer to the periodic table.
- So helium came after oxygen.
- Oh no, first hydrogen forms into helium.
So that's the first thing that formed.
- No, in terms of discoveries.
- Oh yeah, after oxygen.
Yeah, I think Priestley and yeah, and others,
the 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 sun of a plasma physicist,
he fused to a 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 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 synthesized hemoglobin molecules.
And hemoglobin has iron particles in it.
It's a quite amazing substance.
Without it, you know, we wouldn't have our red blood,
we wouldn't exist as we are.
- Is this a very long, complicated mom joke?
(laughing)
- I've done enough dad jokes, my quote is up.
So I'm taking this object, you know, seriously.
There's not, all of it gets bound up in a planet.
In fact, forming planets is very inefficient.
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 the dust grain.
It's like that 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 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 is me
and my team at UC San Diego.
Although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference
because that-- - Harvard.
- Complicated, yes, exactly.
It's a little school up there in the Cambridge area.
And so 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 Tegmark said, "Goodbye universe, hello multiverse,
"and hello Nobel Prize."
See, he saw that as confirmatory evidence,
not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves,
but of the multiverse.
Goodbye universe, hello multiverse.
- Multiverse is a natural consequence.
- Consequence of inflation, yes.
According to its prominent supporters, yeah.
- Yeah, and of course, leave the poetry to Max,
which he does masterfully.
Okay, so that, the excitement was there.
I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you
is there too.
That's some of the darker moments you're going through.
But broadly for the space of science,
there's excitement there.
- Huge excitement.
And I often note that this is a problem
in what I call the science media complex.
Because oftentimes you'll see things
like past guest Sarah Seger, Venus Life 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.
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 is the 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 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 discovered in Antarctica,
which was announced after peer review.
We weren't peer reviewed at the point
when 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 who's unethical.
We thought we had done everything right,
but that's confirmation bias.
- There's like levels to this.
- Yeah, there were many levels.
And there were people, you know, me warning
about 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 so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical,
but the public never knows this.
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,
'cause 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 tells a great story.
There's an excitement, there's a--
- Humanity.
- So there's a climax to the triumph,
but there's also a climax to the disappointment at the end.
Because that also eventually leads to triumph again.
That sets up, that's the drama that sets up the triumph.
Like with Andrew Wiles, Fermat's theorem,
I guess it's not the last thing, whatever,
§20Transcript · 2:27:39–2:35:11
is like the ups and downs of that, the rollercoaster,
the whole thing should be documented.
- That is 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,
that you have to be, like Einstein came out of the womb
and he was just like this guy with curly, no, he wasn't.
He wasn't bad at math, that's all nonsense.
But he said that he, you know what 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, he would create 20 years later
as a 26 year old 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,
ineffable, omniscient, you know, being,
I think that really does a disservice.
And 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 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 avatar, my hero,
the kind of all-around scientist that I would love
to approach the 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, scientist and, you know,
it was like a physician was like a physicist.
And he would indulge, you know,
kind of these really intellectual flights of fancy,
thinking about phenomena such as the Earth's tides
or the, 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.
That's too bad 'cause he could have had a good career,
as I would say.
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 in it.
And both are equally intoxicating.
It's, you know, confirmation bias is a hell of a drug
because 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 wanna be wrong and go back on it.
And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive
about things such as, you know, the Earth being
not located at the center of the solar system
and the sun being the center,
so-called Copernican hypothesis.
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 not flat?
No, well, you're a flat earther anyway.
But I ask my graduates.
- Proud Flat Earth Society member,
t-shirts coming out soon.
Let's Screamer.com/merch.
- 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 almost none of my students,
even after they get their PhD and the final exam,
I kinda like to just, you know,
give them a little bit of humility.
'Cause 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 gonna attempt it.
I'm gonna attempt to do what was impossible
just a generation ago.
- How do you 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 just watch what happens.
But obviously, that wasn't how it was discovered
in the late 1700s.
So, it's called aberration.
So, if you look at stars,
as the Earth orbits around the sun,
the position of the stars will shift slightly
because of the tilt of the Earth,
and because the Earth is in motion around the sun,
and because the Earth has a non-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,
in the scale of the solar system,
they're 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
when 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 I'm 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 red-shifted.
I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount
of matter or energy where you are,
and it's an extension of the Doppler effect.
So, we actually make use of that
and construct what's called a local standard of rest.
Anyway, so you can do it.
But Galileo said, "No, no, no,
"I'm not gonna 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 he made the analogy,
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's sloshing up and down
inside the vodka bottle?
As that happens, he said,
"That's what the tides are caused by."
Totally wrong.
- Most people listen to this podcast.
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 what,
no, 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 sun.
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 his fair share of blunders.
Now, one thing I always kind of make note of,
and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates,
Fabiola Gianatti, Frank Wilczek,
and Carlo Rovelli and my friend, Lucio Piccirillo,
the first ever audio book of one 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.
§21Transcript · 2:35:12–2:42:38
- So you're reading parts of this text.
- Yeah, it's a brilliant book.
So this book 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 laid out his arguments
for what was called the Copernican
or the non-peripatetic Aristotelian, et cetera,
notion of the planetary dynamic.
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 trilogue.
It's actually called the dialogue with three people.
There's one named Salviati,
who is espousing Galileo's notions
about how the heavens were orchestrated.
And Salviati means like the salvation, the savior.
Then there's a middleman, Segredo.
So Carlo Rovelli is playing Salviati, brilliant one.
I am playing Segredo,
who's like an intelligent interlocutor.
I'm a, 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 Putin's government
or you're working in whatever.
And all of a sudden you're kind of putting the words
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, it was the Vatican church,
especially for an Italian like Galileo.
So he wasn't as brilliant, you know, politically
as he was astrophysically and otherwise.
- Who's doing Simplicio?
- Simplicio is a friend of mine
in University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarello.
He's a Irish guy, but he has an Italian,
no, no, he's a full-blooded Italian.
They all speak English and Italian, I only speak.
And that four words are written by,
so one forward and this place has three forwards,
which is like a 12 word.
Okay, the four words are written by--
- Can you explain that joke for me?
- Yeah, that was a good one.
The four word, three forwards,
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 Wilczek, who you've had.
Jim Gates, who you've also had,
he reads the translation, the translator,
Stillman Drake is a renowned scientific translator.
And then Fabiola Giannotti,
she reads the introduction and dedication
from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany
and some of the different introductions
that Galileo himself had.
It's such a thrill to be able to do it.
I only randomly found out,
'cause I wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long.
And I was like, let me get the audio book
'cause 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, which is February 15th, 2022.
It'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 an actual slide rule.
It's basically a slide rule.
And it's a manual.
It's like, imagine if your phone came with a manual.
Nowadays they don't, right?
But this was a manual for how to use this slide rule,
which is enormously important.
And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples.
It's a brilliant book.
One of the examples is how do you convert money?
So he does a currency conversion
between Ducati and Florentine Ducati
and Scuti and whatever, you know, lira, whatever.
He does all these currency conversions.
One copy of this book, or maybe two exist,
first printings from 1600 still exist.
If Galileo had just kept those in his family,
they're worth a hundred million dollars.
Nowadays you can't get a Scuti.
A Scuti is worth nothing.
Like a Ducati is worth nothing.
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.
But then a third book is called the Assayer.
So what is an Assayer?
So Assayers were kind of like these alchemists,
you know, physicists, chemists
that 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 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 was an 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 a good,
there's just like, it's just rotten with them.
And I think it's great.
You know, I often say that 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 quine and it'll make its own quine.
And like, you can make infinite amounts of software.
- Look it up, kids.
- Yeah, and 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 a telescope.
In other words, hardware's kind of like
the non-fungible token that's the ultimate minted,
you know, limited edition, the book,
the compass book, like I talked.
And so 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, 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.
String theory solves this.
Neutrinos, sterile neutrinos,
Large Hadron Collider bottom or B experiment.
Blah, blah, blah.
They'll say that it's compatible after the fact.
And it's not so bad, right?
'Cause 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.
It's called Vulcan.
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 Le Verrier discovering the planet,
predicting where this planet should be found.
So it had a good heritage.
§22Transcript · 2:42:39–2:50:20
And physics, right, to predict this planet
that you couldn't see, that worked.
But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping
and bending of space time due to the presence of matter
who would later become known as the Einstein equations.
So he explained why Mercury did that.
He didn't, and 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 if he had kept doing that,
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.
Ewan Barry talked about that.
He didn't actually believe it.
It was the one peer-reviewed paper that he had.
He used to send back in those days,
he'd send a letter to Nature, physical review,
publish this, let them know how much it costs.
And they got it rejected 'cause he said
you can't detect gravitational waves.
And actually, or they're not real.
And the guy showed that they're real
'cause he corrected a math error
in Einstein and Rosen's paper.
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 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 the signal,
to the experimenter's theorist, 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.
Or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo.
Like Einstein has patents for things that he invented.
And then some of his work led to the laser and the maser.
So he had practically, it wasn't just pure airy-fairy,
quantum reality and expanding universe.
So in this case, what I wanna do is look at,
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 Michio Kaku has said,
"Well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are.
"And 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 to be a good ass-heir,
I think you have to be worldly in the sense of,
worldly and curious,
like we were talking about before with you and Joe.
You can't only talk your own book.
You can't only understand
your own pet theory of everything.
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 go into,
Garrett Lisey or Eric Weinstein or Stephen Wolfram,
or aspects of M-theory, et cetera, et cetera.
And there are some that say,
why do we give string theory so much of an advanced pass
when there are actually predictions it'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.
That's a huge strike.
If you told somebody, "Here's my tenure application,"
and one day it'll be, "Oh, I've made this prediction."
If it wasn't done by Maldacena and Witten
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 neighbor's doing.
- There's a thing that I really enjoyed seeing
and that I don't see often enough with these theories,
which is others who are also experts
kind of studying them sufficiently well
to steel man the theory,
to show the beautiful aspects of the theory.
You know, I see that with Stephen Wolfram.
He has a very different sort of formulation of physics
with his physics project.
Now, physics is a foreign land to me,
but his formulation,
especially in the context of cellular automata or hypergraphs
just as objects, as mathematical objects themselves
are familiar.
And so I'm able to see 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.
- Give it your respect.
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 because Trump did so badly,
now I'm gonna vote for Biden.
No, never have.
You almost never change anybody's mind
unless you debate with love,
unless you have almost like,
we're gonna win together,
like the red team approach in the military.
They're trying to win a war.
So they may disagree on the tactics day to day,
but the strategy, we have to win this war.
I love you, and I wanna 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,
'cause 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.
But Eric has taken the time to try to understand it.
Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White's theory.
And I don't see the same graciousness extended from them,
I'm sorry to say.
- Yeah, you're right, you're right.
I mean, with Eric, he wants to,
but he hasn't extended the same for Stephen Wolfram,
because I think--
- No, he didn't.
No, actually, no, he did.
I had a debate with them live on my show.
- No, I did, I listened to it,
but I just think it's outside of the toolkit
that Eric is comfortable with.
So it's not that he's not,
but the main thing that's often absent
and Eric does have is the willingness,
and not just dismissing or mocking the other,
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 an ego.
He rides a dragon,
with the dragon representing the ego.
Well, let me ask you about your friend, Eric Weinstein.
So he proposed initial sketches of geometric unity,
which is his theory of everything.
Maybe you can elucidate some aspect of it
that you find interesting,
but 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.
§23Transcript · 2:50:22–2:58:33
Some came from a lay audience,
and some came from trained scientists,
who are no longer, you know,
maybe practicing in the universities.
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,
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, I have a new theory,
Einstein was wrong, I'm gonna prove it,
I'm not good at math, but if you help me,
I will share my Nobel Prize with you.
I'm like, oh, thanks, have you read my books?
In other words, it's always taking down the dragon,
it's always taking down the Kung Fu master, right?
That you get the hit points from D&D,
you get their hit points, you take their cards,
you get their risk tokens from Kamchaka,
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 construct
a geometric theory of everything
that has aspects of supersymmetry
and stuff embedded in it.
He's trying to meld that, it has very 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 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.
Eric's 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 doesn't even happen with mousetraps.
I mean, you know how many frickin' mousetrap types
there are?
It's like, no, they don't beat a path to your door.
You have to sell that frickin' thing.
You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon.
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 a dream,
I submitted it, it happened to be in a prestigious 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, first of all,
he doesn't subscribe to the peer-review process.
He thinks that is anathema to the way science is,
it invests interest in journals, et cetera, et cetera.
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 scylla and charybdis to walk.
- Well, there's something, I mean,
I wanna be careful here because I'd like to talk to Eric
about this directly, but I'll just,
from a perspective of a friend,
when I ask about the
the drug of fame,
so there's also the public
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 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 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 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
'cause you always kind of start going,
okay, how can I build a device
to see 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 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 Grigori Grisha Perlman,
and go into the hole and get the work done,
and shut the hell up about the,
I'm speaking about myself,
about talking about the dream and planning and exploring
how great it will be if my intuition
turns out to be correct.
If 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, 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 a critic?
Like a lot of my friends will say,
"Hey, shut the hell up.
"Just get it done."
- Well, first of all, I wanna ask you
a question I've asked him.
And it comes from Animal Farm by George--
- 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 got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail.
"You're so lucky.
"I got this short, curly, little squiggly thing
"that 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 wanna ask you, as I've asked Eric,
is it worth it?
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, 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, first of all,
I'd love to know how you answer that.
'Cause that's something I don't feel I can relate to myself.
- Well, this has to do with more like--
- Platform.
- With the scale. - Platform stuff.
Oh, I...
That has no, very little effect on me.
I enjoy meeting new people,
but that has nothing to do with platform.
Yeah, no, that has no effect on me.
I'm one somebody that enjoys the act itself.
So this conversation,
the reason I'm doing this podcast with you today
is because that allows me to trick you
into talking to me for a long period of time.
I don't care about platform.
I assume nobody listens.
It really doesn't matter.
- Yeah, I forgot to write.
My whole test of it was a good podcast.
How do you know?
Like podcast's been around, what, 12 years?
How do we know as podcasters we're doing a good job?
Like sometimes someone will say,
"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 exactly it.
§24Transcript · 2:58:35–3:06:53
So in that space, yeah, all of it is worth it.
But the dream, I'm more referring
to the psychological effects.
Forget the platform, forget all of that.
You know, maybe I shouldn't even brought up the platform
'cause 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
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, 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 planning telescopes to dieting.
So there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get
visualizing how you're gonna feel.
You don't need to know this, but you don't deal,
but losing five pounds.
I say, oh, I'm gonna lose five pounds
and I'm gonna be able to run 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 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,
first of all, we relate extremely well
on a friendship level and very close.
He does remind me a lot of my father.
And I've told him that just as a mathematician,
as a big thinker, as in his case, as a father,
the father kind of figure that I didn't have in a sense.
But that 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.
And I jokingly say, well, it's one thing,
like how do you know, Lex, that someone's an expert?
So 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 something correctly once,
you could do something correctly.
It's very hard to pull off like three projects,
three telescopes, three whatever, right?
So look for, it's arbitrary,
it 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 pretty substantive kind of 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 scientist, something completely outside
of what I do, mathematics, gauge theory,
the kind of 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 gonna turn your son
into an experimentalist despite you.
You know, like he is not gonna be a theorist.
Zev is not gonna be a theorist.
He is working with me, he is learning from me.
We're trying to get him into, he wants to bypass
all of the 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 I've prepared a whole curriculum for Zev
to basically bypass all of undergraduate.
And to his credit, he's earned 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'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 radical ideas
is you're not, I mean, it's very hard to be sitting
on a track record.
When you're swinging for the fences always,
there's not a track record to sit on.
And 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 record.
With Eric, if you look at just the number of publications,
all this stuff, he really, he chose not to travel
the academic route.
So there's no proof of expertise except sort of
an obvious linguistic demonstration of brilliance.
But that's not how physics works, right?
- 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, physics is always lovely.
Sean Carroll always jokes about,
physicists should never talk about history of physics.
But it's more than that.
So Eric has certainly contributed in finance specifically,
and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics
and non-cosmological--
- But that's yet, hold on a second,
that's yet to be proven.
He has a lot of powerful--
- But gauge theory is calculus, it's calculus proven.
I mean, he has a gauge model for currency exchanges
between different nations that is explanatory.
It's not, you know, is this something,
in other words, it's a model,
and it's used for pedagogical purposes.
- And it might be, okay.
- It's unique to him, I mean, him and Pia.
- Yes, right.
It might be a powerful model.
It might be one that actually deserves
a 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 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
in every single domain.
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,
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 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 reveal the power of your idea
to yourself and to the world.
- Well, let me use an example.
So 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.
Purely mathematics, unifying
completely disparate phenomena.
In one case, electricity charges,
static electricity, lightning,
and the other magnets, bar magnets,
currents, et cetera, 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 fluxions
"and inductive virtue and blah, 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 determine the density
"of the electromagnetic potential."
You'd be like, "This guy's a freaking moron."
And what would you do?
Come on, honestly, you would say
everything this guy does is wrong.
§25Transcript · 3:06:55–3:14:10
I mean, he's got this idiotic idea.
And it would be falsified a couple decades later
by Michelson and Morley.
And in so doing, you would have thrown out
a very beautiful baby with bathwater.
Or imagine Twitter, imagine the twitstorm
@ClerkMaxwell1 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,
Chern, Simons, a lot of these things are very fantastic.
But why, Lex?
Why does Ed Witten, why does Juan Maldacena,
let me give a good example, Juan Gast,
brilliant guy, I love him.
He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded
his black hole information paradox loss issue.
What did he concede based upon Maldacena's calculation
in ADS-CFT and five-dimensional wormholes?
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.
These are devices, you know,
Kip Thorne has popularized for movies.
Like, to say that this is something
on which I will concede a bet,
no, obviously Hawking was doing that for publicity.
Why does Maldacena, and he's got a pretty high H-index,
pretty well-respected guy at IAS,
love talking to him, brilliant guy.
By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work
on gauge theory and economics,
originally and won, I believe, the Breakthrough Prize,
I can't remember exactly what,
but partially credit some of the work that he did,
which appears there's a footnote to Pia Malani's thesis
and some conversations with Eric, I think, in it.
Anyway, getting back to that,
why is there not the same skeptic?
Is it because Maldacena,
who's an eminent physicist, obviously,
has published realistic work and done,
what about Witten?
You know, Witten gets a pass.
I mean, if you--
- Well, Witten gets a pass on which aspect,
the string theory?
- Well, yeah, that 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.
By the way, that's actually wrong.
I talked to Cumrun, I know you talked to Cumrun.
Cumrun says that string theory does make predictions.
It predicts the mass of the electron
lies between 10 to the minus one Planck mass
and 10 to the minus 30 Planck mass.
Okay, whatever, you know, our electron.
- It's a big range.
- It's a huge range.
Is that, imagine Cumrun comes up,
and again, he's just some nobody,
but he actually, you know, he doesn't have a profile.
He's not at Harvard.
Has zero H-index or whatever Eric's is.
Why do we not, like, in other words,
why are we more harsh on people that are trying?
- You know the answer to that.
So I get a million emails just like you said,
you yourself, where they provenize,
in my world, it's artificial intelligence,
the equivalence of that.
I figured out how to build consciousness,
how to engineer intelligence, how to, and sometimes--
- You should send your emails to me,
and I'll send my emails to you.
- And we'll reply to you.
I mean, 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 in whole, like, there is geniuses out there
that are unheard, but because there's so much noise,
you do have to weigh, like,
higher the Ed Wittens of the world
when they make statements,
and that's why you build up a track record.
As you said with Ray Dalio,
you have to show that you can,
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 proof.
- I think he could do it, right?
- Yeah.
- Impressionist master.
- It's much more comforting to see
that they can paint a good, accurate picture--
- Of still life.
- Of still life, of an apple on the table.
So there's--
- Meteorite and a--
- Because then, I mean,
because then there's something
about the scientific community
that they have perhaps an oversensitive bullshit 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 a kind of club
that only, you have to, like,
you have to have 10, you have to have 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 always saying,
"Well, I have my ball, and I don't wanna play your game.
"Your game sucks," then nobody's gonna wanna play with you.
- That's true, and look, inherent in all of this
is an underlying grandiosity.
Look, how could you talk about doing what Kaku said
on here and elsewhere?
We're looking for the umbilical cord
that connects our universe to another universe
that will then reveal in a one-inch equation
that we'll surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God, the--
- That's like a prerequisite, I guess,
to tackle these questions.
- I think it's detrimental.
I think doing that, first of all,
I think there's an element of almost snarkiness,
'cause none of these scientists are believing Gnostics.
They're not theists, right?
So they're using it as kind of a stand-in,
and they always talk about Einstein,
and he was like a Spinozan, and he wasn't a theist.
- God doesn't play dice.
- God doesn't play dice.
- Yeah, Einstein's mentions of God, yeah.
- Yeah, and then Stephen Hawking says,
"If when we get M-theory understood,
"we'll know the mind of God."
That's the title of Kaku's book,
the God Particle, the God Equation.
Do any of them really believe in God?
Now, is that a prerequisite?
No, I'm not saying that.
But the point being, you're talking about something
that 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
kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right?
So God's got a pretty good H-index himself.
- He has, by the way, a Twitter account,
just so you know, it's pretty good.
- The tweets of God.
- Yeah, the tweets of God.
- So if you look at that, you have to go in there.
Again, you have to go in with some swagger.
You have to have a little bit 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, I'm talking about Eric now,
if he's just railing, "Oh, the system,
"and I'm not gonna publish, 'cause F that,
"and that's only created by greedy journals,"
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 willing to expose it
to criticism and to even embrace people
who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps,
but in the sense of they're not arguing solely
to get to the truth, with a capital T,
what they're trying to do is take down Eric.
Hopefully 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, not his aunt.
- Nemesis. - Nemesis, right, right.
And I think that's interesting,
that they're loving friends.
- I really enjoyed that portal conversation
between Gary Lisey, Eric is torn about that conversation
because, I guess, because of the nemesis
of the beautiful dance of minds playing with these ideas
and theories of everything.
- Some of these things, you know, look,
so fundamentally, now I may 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 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,
§26Transcript · 3:14:13–3:21:14
I understand some group theory, fiber bone,
I can get a little of it, the age theory,
but I also understand what I don't understand,
and I understand that there are people
like Witten, Maldacena, Nima, other people
that can't understand it,
and they're not trying to understand it.
Sabina, she can understand it.
She makes all these, you know,
oh, I don't understand it, I don't wanna understand it,
I don't have time.
And then she makes a video, a music video,
you know, kinda mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett.
I'm like, oh, you have a time to do,
and I love Sabina,
and I've actually promoted my show on her,
and 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.
There are very few.
Louis Alvarez-Gomez at SUNY Stony Brook,
the Simon Center for Geometrical Physics.
So he and I are running this seminar,
hopefully this summer.
We're gonna reenact the famous
Shelter Island Conferences of the 1900s,
where, you know, Feynman got together,
and they calculated the Lamb shift, and all that,
but what did that feature?
The harmony, the resonant minds
behind the best experimentalists in cosmology,
particle physics, condensed matter physics
is now teaching us tremendous things
about, you know, lower dimensional systems
that can be applied.
Theorists and experimentalists, observers,
cosmologists, astronomers, we all 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 loudmouth,
I don't have time for that.
I really don't.
I don't think it's an interesting way to spend my time.
- There is a aspect that I hope to see,
and it goes back to our sort of discussion
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 now that everybody is 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.
- And I've talked, I mean,
this isn't talking tails 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,
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.
And I said to him, and he makes the point,
you know, that, oh, the atomic theory,
you know, that unleashed the nuclear age,
and that, you know, could lead to planetary destruction.
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 look into all these equations
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 a theory of everything, the God,
and there's this gut that unifies
the three stronger forces.
We don't have a single theory for that.
And people like Lashon, they've tried and failed at it.
- Yeah, for people who don't know,
there's four forces, gut, grant, unification theories
that unifies the three forces, stuff,
and Donald trying to get a shortcut
to the theory of everything, which unifies the four.
And then there's this whole thing
that maybe quantum gravity's not even a thing.
So 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--
- Or just like, level jumping it,
going to level 256.
- Time-exiting thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, 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 Wilczek and Sheldon Glashow.
And Frank is a 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, three, when he was at Princeton,
all the way up until 2004 when he won the Nobel Prize,
every day of his life, imagine this, Lex,
you're gonna have this startup,
actually, someone tells you you're gonna win the lottery.
You're gonna win the 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 so confident--
- You're guaranteed to win a lottery.
There's this, here's this wallet, Bitcoin wallet,
it's gonna guarantee to have as much money,
it's a stable coin, whatever.
You're gonna win it, 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 gonna win the Nobel Prize,
which is bigger than the lottery.
I mean, many prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize,
and every person who wins a prize
that's worth three times the money, like Maldecena,
he would trade that 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 asset
is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now,
'cause I don't know if I'm gonna be here in 40 years,
I hope I am, but can we bypass, can we get shortcuts
to what's called the low energy regime?
And to me, 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,
it's probably, you know, pipe tobacco,
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, 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 in 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 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 is it gonna 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.
§27Transcript · 3:21:18–3:29:27
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-sized 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 number
of large extraspatial dimensions?
Can we do that?
People are working on it.
I think it's fascinating.
- So, focus on building detectors.
- Experiments.
- That, like, where the cosmos
is part of the experiment, I suppose.
That's doing the hard work.
'Cause when you're saying low energy regime,
'cause 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 cosmology
that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring,
as the Big Bang and inflation are,
is, are these balancing models.
Some of them feature a similar kind of entity
called a 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.
Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle,
a fundamental field.
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 energy is manifest today,
it's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions,
et cetera, et cetera.
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 that the universe can not support itself
and collapse again, again classically.
So, we could use low energy phenomena,
it's hard to think of supernova
as being a low energy phenomenon,
but we 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.
- Page two.
- No, we'll wrap it up.
- No.
- There's more than page two.
What do you think this is?
This is--
- A thesis.
(Lex laughing)
Actually, well, Louis de Broglie's thesis
was three pages long,
and he won the Nobel Prize for the wave-particle duality.
- So, size matters in different dimensions in life.
I think the lessons I've learned about life
is the shorter the paper, or the shorter the thesis.
Actually, the shorter the paper,
some of the greatest papers ever written are short.
I feel like 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.
Which just kind of tells you something about ideas.
What are your thoughts about the James Webb Space Telescope?
Is this, as somebody who likes telescopes,
and this is one of the, I think it says,
took 20 years to build, $9.7 billion.
Is that way too much, too little?
Are you excited about this thing?
- It's sufficiently different from what I do in my field
that it's incredibly interesting to me,
'cause I have no 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,
storms and imaging of these twisted deep sky galaxies.
Those resonated with the public.
- Just visually, they were beautiful.
- Visually, yeah, when you look at 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 are galaxies.
Now, that image is less than 1/10 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.
But 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 a good order of magnitude estimate,
maybe even better.
Hubble produced that, and it was basically serendipitous.
They pointed to some dark, blank piece of sky,
what they thought was blank, and they saw it.
Same thing that happened with the CMB.
They were looking for something they didn't find.
Same thing they found when they were looking
for the deceleration of the universe
and found it was accelerating.
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.
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 'cause 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 still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth,
get solar energy, keep it away from the sun.
You don't wanna look through the telescope of the sun
with your remaining good eye.
And you do that, and you cover, it's gonna be phenomenal
for science, for sure, if it works.
There are a lot of people think, it's so risky,
NASA sunk so much of their budget, it ate up,
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,
well, let's start building it again.
They didn't build two copies of it.
- And then if it fails, it kinda has a dampening effect
on the prospects and the inspiration of the public
for what science can do, what science engineering can do
is out in space.
- 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 when it does, it will transform our understanding of,
we just discovered not only extrasolar planets
that have moons on them and asteroid belt,
we discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy.
This'll be able to see crazy stuff like that,
spectroscopy, imaging, but it'll be able to go back
farther in time such that we will be doing,
Hubble did some cosmology, it measured the Hubble constant,
that was its key project when it was designed and launched.
But because it is an optical telescope,
it's sensitive to more close-in redshifts,
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.
So there's a piece of the moon on this table
that you've given me 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 missions,
you and I would be guilty of a felony right now,
'cause it's 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.
§28Transcript · 3:29:31–3:37:57
Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon
into space, and it will then orbit
the common moon-Earth system,
and it will then eventually enter our atmosphere.
If the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper,
it can land intact, and this one landed
with a few hundred 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, you 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.
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,
I see this look of horror on your face.
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 meteorite striking it and so on,
and then you went to, you don't think
there might be life out there in the universe.
- Technological life.
- Technological life, yeah,
advanced intelligent civilizations, okay.
- Okay, so go on.
- So that's the generalization
of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called,
I know this is a PG-13, it's called panspermia.
Panspermia.
- Beep that out, please.
- Yeah, yeah, please.
And that's the exchange of genetic life form 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 gonna add that much,
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 whatever material
went from Earth via panspermic direction,
spraying the love gun out into the universe,
did that then have enough time to incubate
and go onto a planet that could support it?
Certainly not within our solar system,
which traveling at the meteorite speeds
would require hundreds of millions of years.
Then looking at the evolutionary history
from bacteria to Bach, from rocks to Rachmaninoff,
I don't know, I can do this all day.
- Oh wow, that's pretty good.
- How do you get from those very simple,
inanimate objects to life?
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.
- So you really think that the origin 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 life didn't originate on Earth?
Would you choose a different profession?
It would seem hopeless.
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.
What if you knew for sure it didn't start here?
That means that there's almost nothing about Earth
that is 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 the origin 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, many different definitions.
But how do you actually go 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.
Yeah, that's one way to understand something
is to build it.
But another way is to just observe it.
You don't have to truly re-engineer from scratch.
But then, yes, if it didn't originate on Earth,
then your intuitions about the basic prerequisites
of life are off.
- What's the governing principle?
- And then you could have just 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 the existence
of the Earth-life symbiosis is critical.
I think Sarah, you talked about Sarah Walker,
that it's a planetary phenomenon, et cetera, et cetera.
So doesn't that make it less like, in other words,
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 this, technological life,
I haven't said this before, really, so I'm just speaking,
I usually like to write down before I say a different thing.
But one of the things I thought about--
- Somebody host a podcast.
(Lex laughing)
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 to get to sending people to the moon,
our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right?
You don't make a solar panel from another solar panel.
You made a solar panel from a factory
that melted down glass, silica, aluminum,
extruded that using fossil fuels.
Where do those fossil fuels come from?
Like, so any civilization that's gonna be a Dyson,
Kardashev's, did they have dinosaurs?
Did they have prebiotic life?
Did they have a great oxygenation event?
Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic, eukaryotic?
All those hurdles, let's say you 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,
eukaryotic, prokaryotic, 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 10 to the three.
Let's say there's eight of those hurdles.
That means you have 10 to the 24th power,
different possibility, and that's just with eight.
Like the moon has to be there,
Jupiter has to be there, dinosaurs have to be there,
all the different things that we have
to get to technological life.
There's only 10 to the, only,
there's 10 to the 22nd, we think,
Earth, not Earth, planets in the observable universe,
not the galaxy.
So that's 100 times fewer than the probability
to get 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles
of one in a thousand.
- That's fascinating, 'cause now I really need
to listen to your conversation with Lee Cronin,
who I believe you had, because he believes the opposite.
- Yes, I know.
Yeah, I wanna have a debate with him.
He believes that 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 the fact that our particular life seems unique
is just like, well, 'cause every freaking life
is gonna seem unique, but it'll 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, (laughs)
how easy is it to make-- - Slime mold.
- 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 trivial.
- I know, we fought, I fought a little bit.
I'd love to debate him, I think it'd be a lot of fun,
'cause 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 discover life, it's Proxima Centauri B.
It looks just like slime mold,
like you got on your brie cheese or whatever.
We discover it.
§29Transcript · 3:37:58–3:45:47
What would happen the next day?
And they were like, "Oh, this would be transformative."
And I'm not trying to be like total Cassandra about this,
but I said, "I don't think anything would happen."
And they're like, "What are you talking about?
"It would be transformational."
I'm like, "I stipulate that life exists.
"Go down to the river, I'm in San Diego,
"go down to the Pacific Ocean, scoop up a glass.
"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 pumping crap into there.
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 people, I'm sorry that you do know,
but how many people died in the 20th century, killed?
These are advanced civilization, this isn't a 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, 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," repurpose for that movie.
And then there's this phosphorus life,
this toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake.
Many, you know, extremophile, we don't give a crap.
We continue to treat.
So why are we thinking that like our salvation,
from whence will our salvation come, as the Bible says?
Like, it's not gonna change how we are.
It's not gonna magnify how I treat you or you treat me.
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 wonder if you're right, but my intuition is,
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,
because it's such a slap in the face.
It's such a humbling force, or maybe not.
Or maybe it's a motivator to say,
yeah, I don't know which force would take over.
Maybe it would be governments with military
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 yeah, or mine it for benefits.
- I mean, I just see like,
there's a hundred million literal counter examples of that.
I mean, right now there's like 700 million kids in poverty,
and how do we go about our life
and just not deal with that?
I mean, look, I put it aside.
I eat hamburgers, and in a hundred years,
I'll be canceled for being a carnivore or whatever.
But so obviously to get through life,
you have to make certain compromise.
You're not gonna think about certain things.
But 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?
We're looking for water.
Like stipulate that water was there.
Like, I believe there was water.
I think we should investigate
and see what the geology was like.
- But don't you think, so you're saying--
- I don't think you're gonna get meaning from it.
That's all I'm saying.
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 complicated line here.
What if it's this intelligent civilization
living obviously probably not on Mars,
but somewhere like in a neighboring galaxy that we,
sorry, in a neighboring--
- Star system.
- 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-subramanic process
or whatever, that the probability
is much, much greater than zero.
I mean, it's not one 100%,
but it's much likelier than not
that at least some living material from Earth
has ejaculated itself into the solar system,
into the universe, right, into our galaxy.
- Beep that, please.
(both laughing)
- As well.
- That's right.
So the fact that that could happen
and that you're holding a piece from a planetary body,
one that couldn't support life as far as we know,
but I could give next time 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?
- Moving on up.
- So yeah, so I believe that there could be remnants
of Earth in this, so that means there could be evolution.
I don't think there's any chance that there's
people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff
in proximate and term.
- No, there's some chance though, right?
So it's--
- Again, yeah, I think the, well,
obviously the simple statement to say
it's much, much, much higher probability
that life exists than technological life exists, right?
I don't think we can argue that.
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 where I am, 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 or is lame
and science without religion is lame, is blind and lame.
Anyway, the point is that like you can't get meaning,
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 sapien,
the word wisdom in Latin is sapien, 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 gonna die.
We don't know when we're gonna die.
But like, you know, I have a cat,
a fierce attack cat, it's beautiful.
She doesn't know when she's gonna die.
Doesn't mean I'm more valuable than her, I think I am.
- The survival instinct is much,
it's fundamentally different from like the knowledge
of death and that's where the Ernest Becker comes in
with the terror of death.
And that's a creative force that seems to be more feature
than bug about the human condition is that,
I mean, it's a gift of knowing our own mortality.
Yeah, to me, I mean, that's why, you know,
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 do we come from?
- Yeah.
- Or basically, as cheesy as it sounds, you know,
Michio Kaku is away with words.
If you can just like enjoy the, you know--
- Oh, 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,
§30Transcript · 3:45:51–3:54:30
we will know God or we will 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 at the beginning?
Something tells me we're too dumb to truly understand
what's 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 share 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'd be so much more interesting.
Like, oh, there's 50% of a fruit fly or a banana.
Like, no, 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,
but I have some thoughts about it.
But by the same token, I think the one thing
I do get from religion is that every human
has infinite worth, 'cause we are, in a religious capacity,
considered to be equal to God.
In other words, we are gods, not to be like,
but we can contemplate what God did.
We have aspects of God.
We have free will.
God had free will 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 clips, John?
(both laughing)
- 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.
It was Sam Harris this past summer.
And one of the things I liked about that conversation
is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation.
And he said something that's really resonated with me,
and I've been working it around
and trying to work on it my own way.
But he said like, "You can never be happy.
You can only become happy."
And I'm trying to take it a little bit further than that,
'cause I think it's interesting.
Like meditation is like, you're not like,
"Oh, I'm happy and now like,
oh, my kid came in and now I'm not happy."
They're like, "No, you can be satisfied."
Kurt Vonnegut said like,
you ever catch this sometimes, Alex?
You're like walking around, you're like,
"Life is fricking 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,
'cause I was like, "Well, what does it really mean
to be happy?"
Because like, I can think of about two or three ways
that right now I could double my happiness.
Now like, win the lottery or whatever,
like I could double my happiness.
There's only a few ways though, right?
Like, you know, I had this kind of thought,
like how many boats can you water ski behind?
Like you had twice as many followers,
now you got 2 million followers, 5 million, 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 to make your life
unhappy than happy.
And so I thought about that in the context
of what Sam said about happiness.
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 it to the question of God's existence,
I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God,
to 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 'cause 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 wanna 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 network theory,
which is that the number of connections in a network,
you know, I'm just saying it for your own,
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 half of them overlap.
The diagonal is where you know yourself.
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 kinda upset,
even though you're not fighting with either one of them?
So like a network grows like that.
So you wanna increase your network as much as possible,
but only the kind of high quality interstices between them.
And I think in doing so, 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 it's 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, 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.
Gulf Stream, Mega Yacht,
this is all documented, books about him.
He lost two sons as adults.
And I hear people say, "Oh, I'm so jealous of Jim Simons."
Would you take everything?
I don't know where he has that strength
in his wife, Marilyn, and his first wife, Barbara.
I'm not like that.
But some people are, there are angels that walk among us.
And there's this famous prayer, it's like,
God, there's an old saying,
one of the hardest tests there are in life
is to be given a lot of money.
And you see it happens with people that win the lottery
or whatever, or NFL football players
after their career's over, they're broke, right?
And I always joke, "God, please test me with money,
"that'd be great."
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 wanna take everything.
- Yeah, I think a lot about the altering effects
of fame, of money, of power on people.
It blinds people.
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 I wouldn't recognize.
You know, 'cause change happens gradually.
- But are you using yourself as the touchstone
to use the assay or not?
§31Transcript · 3:54:32–3:59:35
What is your rubric to apprise if you have lived up
to that 12-year-old, whatever-year-old Lex?
How will you know or not know if you've let yourself down?
Or, I always think, live to impress yourself.
I don't care if I have followers.
It's nice, or whatever, but it's hedonic,
and it's just never-ending,
'cause you'll always see the next level.
But I think it's pretty damn cool
that I've gotten to go to these places,
the South Pole, and I've done these things,
and I've made a family,
and I'm able to teleport my values into the future
through my children, and I've had ideological children.
So by what metric have you not already, A, impressed yourself
and, B, could you let yourself down?
I don't wanna turn this into therapy.
- 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 the Vonnegut thing,
where you just, often during the day,
I will feel, I don't know,
I just remember just eating 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.
You have to at 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 wanna leave you with one last thing,
which is to say, just on this topic,
it could be different, right?
We could go down to the ocean and get some krill
instead of the 7-Eleven.
It could be that we have no other taste buds,
and Eric's talked, the four dimensions of,
the vibration of your tongue, right?
It could be like there's one,
and it's just like, not Memphis barbecue,
or whatever you like in your slim gym.
It could be something, it could be very boring.
Similarly, what if that's a clue?
What if that's giving us evidence?
Here's another clue.
There are many animals, most animals,
have single monocolor vision.
They only see 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?
God's not gonna hit you over the head
and say, "Here I am,"
'cause then everybody would believe in him.
And there's very simplistic, I've had debates,
even with famous atheists like Lawrence Krauss,
who's 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.
"That's infantile.
"I gave that away a long time ago."
But what if there are clues?
What if Yang-Mills theory, Maxwell's equation,
those are beautiful.
If you've ever seen, expressed in tensor notation,
Einstein's equations, or Maxwell's equations,
and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's,
it's unbelievably beautiful.
It 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 don't believe in God.
I think that's a stupid notion.
Do I believe in God?
Sometimes I wonder if God believes in me
more than if I believe in,
he needs Brian Keating.
It's like one of my friends is a rapper,
he's like, "What would I be doing if I were God?"
Exactly what God's doing right now.
You think I know more than God?
Give me a break.
- Leaving clues of beauty for these hairless apes.
- Yeah.
- And to see what they do with this,
and then marvel at both the tragedy
of what those apes do to each other,
and the rare moments of 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 you was,
first of all, shower me with rocks from the moon.
- From space.
- From space.
- Space dust.
- Space dust.
- And crystals, magical crystals, healing crystals.
- Yeah.
- That you can use for good.
- And tell me your story,
and spend your really valuable time with me today.
This was amazing.
- That 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.
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