Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - A Look Back on 2022 in Science With Brian Keating and Special Guest Eric Weinstein (#286)

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Here’s a recording of my X-mas day Twitter space. It was a discussion of a wide variety of topics including a few X-mas themes — the launch and controversy around the James Webb Space Telescope, inflation, dark matter vs. Monday and more. Eric Weinstein joined in towards the end. Follow me so you don't miss the next one 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Eric’s youtube @EricWeinsteinPhD  Find Eric on twitter https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein 00:00 Let the Space begin 01:00 X-mas science events from Newton to Steinhard to JWST 30:00 Was James Webb a homophobe — https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/us/james-webb-telescope-gay-rights.html 45:00 Eric joins in 59:00 Wrap up and CTA — calls to action! Please join my mailing list; click here 👉 briankeating.com/list 📝 for your chance to win a real meteorite! Find my audiobook of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue - https://BrianKeating.com/dialogue Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy New Year from all of us at Into the Impossible. Start your year right by listening to this masterful year-end wrap-up by your host, Brian Keating. Brian summarizes podcast highlights and some of the most controversial issues facing astrophysics and all of science. Can science break free of politics and culture wars? As 2020-3 begins, resolve to subscribe, rate, and write us a review. Professor Keating reads them all. And remember, stay curious all year. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the bad doors, please, help. So, it would be fun to chat about science, big stories of the year. I'm going to do a final year-end wrap-up on my YouTube channel. Dr. Brian Keating. You guys can join up over there. And I've got a phenomenal episode with Dr. Professor Stacey McGaugh of Case Western Reserve University, where I went to school as an undergraduate 30 years ago who does not believe in the existence of dark matter. So we had a great conversation about the discontents of dark matter and physics in general,

why people are so married to ideas and get so frustrated when the prevailing paradigms are challenged. Even as he admits that even his favorite alternate to dark matter, which is called Mond, modified Newtonian dynamics, he also admits that has some serious flaws in it as well that have to be reconciled or answered to. and I think we're kind of at the precipice of perhaps a breakthrough in physics, at least in maybe the sociology of physics, because I wonder if we can ever get past the precipice of you either, you know, agree 100% with my pet theory or my interpretation of data, or were sworn enemies.

And there's been a lot of that and push back to Mond, and even some from the Mon community pushing back on the prevailing attitude that dark matter is in the front of a particle. And I'm just interested to see where the data take us. I think it's perhaps, you know, among the top mysteries in all of science, not just in cosmology or astrophysics that I studied. And because of that, I think we're due for some real shake-ups. And it may be that we have to,

do away with the notion of dark matter, or we may have to get used to the notion that dark matter, even if it exists, can't be measured. It may only interact via gravity, in which case there's no hope for directly detecting it, as it would be if it was, say, a wimp, which is a weakly interacting massive particle. So we know of only one form of dark matter, and it is a particle. It's called the neutrino, and they only interact via gravity and the weak force, but the worst fear would be if gravity was the only force that a particle of dark matter would interact with. And then we'd be in a situation where dark matter is true, but it can never be detected, and it can never really be falsified either, because we simply can never collect enough of these incredibly low mass

particles, which everybody agrees they would have to be low math in order to have evaded detection already, and also be compatible with our observations of the structure in the universe dating back to the cosmic microwave background that I study, all the way up until the local galactic neighborhood and even our own Milky Way's properties are seemed to be dominated by an unseen form of matter, or perhaps a variation in the gravitational field. And so it's a fascinating scenario to be in. One of the not really breakthroughs that we have this year,

but maybe a personal breakthrough in that I got to talk to the two leading opponents of Dark Matter, namely Stacey McGaugh, a Case Western episode coming on Wednesday, and the founder of dark matter is alternative on the founder of the Mon paradigm Mordecai Milgram who's a professor in Israel who came up with this notion

that you could have no ordinary matter complement in terms of dark matter could just have ordinary matter in the universe and then on the scale of galaxies themselves the laws of physics would be modified hence the term modified Newtonian dynamic and it would change gravitational gravitational acceleration ever so slightly, and only on scales vastly larger than the size of our galaxy,

or of our solar system rather. So it would be impossible to detect locally and could only be detected, sort of speaking globally, by looking at ensembles, collections of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, et cetera. And there have been attempts to really pursue this, But moreover, I found that people are really either in the dark matter camp or in the Mon camp. And there are very few people that really want to broach the, you know, kind of elephant made by committee situation where you have some Mon, you have some dark matter.

And certainly Stacey is not in favor of that. At least that was my impression from the interview. Well, it was nice about the interview. And you'll see it on Wednesday. Please set your notification bells in my channel. It'll be also audio, as I have an audio podcast, into The Impossible. But if you only listen to it, you'll miss the slideshow. Very, very visually pleasing and informative slideshow that Stacey put together,

suitable for lay audiences all the way up to graduate students. So he goes through kind of the initial motivation for alternatives to Dark Manor. He goes through the paradigm, Dark Matter paradigm, the history. of it. I add in some of my own history and discuss the features that were actually discovered here in San Diego, where I am, by none other than Vera Rubin, who's credited by many as the discoverer of Dark Matter, although she really wasn't. She did discover it, but not for the first time. I think that honor in some people's minds goes back to people like Orte and others back in the early 1900s, but certainly Fritz Wickey at Caltech in the 30s and 40s

started to think about observations and their compatibility with matter being the only source of gravity. And that at the end of the day is the biggest concern that we have, that the amount of matter we see in our galaxy and most every other galaxy alone, not all of them, is incompatible with the existence of only barionic or ordinary math. And that existence of ordinary matter challenging the paradigm of gravity on the Newtonian scale, calling out for not a modification of Einstein, or even Weinstein, but actually calling out for a modification of Newton's Newtonian gravity. So in a sense, this is really startling because, you know, Newton is what gets us to the moon. Newton is the one who gets us to the nearby stars,

and it's fitting I talk about Newton. So give me a reaction if you know why it's fitting to talk about Newton today. I don't know, give me a thumbs up or something. Today, it is his birthday. That's right. There are two scientists that are actually born today that are quite familiar. One has been on the Into the Impossible podcast, and that is Professor Paul Steinhart, Princeton University, who is the Einstein professor of physics. And it's also an iconoclast in that he doesn't believe in the existence of inflation.

He does not believe that inflation took place. And he's claimed very vigorously on my channel and in discussions we've had that we need a true alternative to inflation. and the alternative that he's most fond of is also having a lot of discord in the scientific community in that it cannot be really ruled out or motivated the same way that inflation can't. So the experiments that I'm doing with the Simon's Observatory,

my colleagues, at 17,000 feet, and I just got back from Chile, I spent a week in Chile, my third trip there. We deployed the platforms on which these massive telescopes will be sitting for the next five to ten years. It's a $200 million project when all of a sudden done. And one of its primary goals is to study the formation of structure in the universe at the earliest moments. And that could, in most 99% of cosmologist's mind, that structure formation mechanism

was laid down by what are called inflationary quantum perturbations in the space-time metric at a time frame less than 10 to the minus 36 of a second. So the paradigm that inflation invokes is that a quantum field existed, perhaps eternally, and then there was a fluctuation in the region that we would later call our observable universe that ceded in it a curvature perturbation, which then led to an over-density of gravitational potential, onto which dark matter would then accumulate. So dark matter and inflation are intimately connected.

And it's thought that we'll have a coupling, if you will, between the pattern of structure that we see in the cosmic microwave background, and we'll also have an ability to probe the earliest fluctuation pattern that was ever produced. So the reason that we're all here on this Christmas Day, relates in some strong sense to inflation according to its proponents. What's so interesting to me is that the same kind of proponents in cosmology and kind of preponderance of working cosmologists seem to believe that the universe is dominated by a, by this, as I said, form of matter energy,

which is unseeable using visible light or ordinary, strong. or electromagnetic interactions. Therefore, it may only interact weekly and gravitationally, or it may only interact gravitationally. And so I want to tie together these different Christmas Day events. And there's one I've left out, which is the James Webb Space Telescope, and who can leave a comment in this comment section or leave a reaction? If you know why the James Webb Space Telescope belongs in this Christmas spectacular as well.

I won't belabor the point. The James Webb Space Telescope was launched a year ago today on Christmas Day. And it has also chimed in, if you will, not on inflation, not on really the formation of structure, but on dark matter and the dark matter paradigm itself. So it's fascinating that these three kind of Christmas intertwined figures or entities, such as James Webb, Paul Steinhart, and this dark matter paradigm and inflation, which is not really supported anymore by one of its founding fathers, which is Paul Steinhart, as I mentioned before. Paul's birthday today, James Webb was launched today, and Isaac Newton was born on this day. Although people don't believe that the Gregorian calendar as currently instantiated. I believe he was born on the 4th of January, according to our current calendar. It doesn't matter.

When he was born, it was Christmas. So I think he believed that he was born on Christmas. And he was also a very, very devout Christian. It's not widely appreciated that of all his accomplishments, the one that he claimed to be his most superlative, accomplishment was that he remained a virgin till his dying day like his hero, Jesus Christ. So it's pretty interesting, who was born on Christmas Day as well. So I think it's interesting to look at these different, through these different lenses, no pun intended, at the year that we just

had in science, where we have had significant challenges to prevailing paradigms. And even calling into question and the most controversial. I had two controversial events this year on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, where I'll have an upcoming video from the foremost kind of opponent to dark matter, Professor Stacey McGough, Case Western, and the relationship between that and the debate that I had are kind of exchanged back and forth with an opponent of the Big Bang theory itself. His name is Eric Lerner, Mr. Eric Lerner, who operates a YouTube channel of his own called LPPF Fusion, I believe, if I'm remembering the channel name. And he made headlines up the summer for a claim that the Big Bang itself did not happen. And where did he get

this claim from? None other than the telescope launched a year ago today. In Christmas, the James Webb Space Telescope. So Mr. Lerner claimed, that the new data on the properties of especially in particular spiral galaxies at extremely high redshift, meaning at extremely early ages of the universe, that those galaxies presented a fatal challenge, not just a challenge, but a fatal challenge to cosmology. And partially, in part, I think it was almost a clickbait type approach. And this is not a stranger. He is not a stranger to this type of presentation for he released in the early 90s, right after the Hubble telescope was released, he produced a book called The Big Bang Never Happened.

And so Mr. Lerner and myself and Professor Garrett Lewis of Australia, he and I had a discussion which we present the data and findings from the perspective of professional cosmologist, acknowledging that there are challenges to aspects of the Big Bang, as there always have been and always will be. And those gaps, lacuna, as I always call them, those are not to be unexpected. Those are to be expected in any theory of science. The theory of science, that science is complete, that's final, that somehow science is perfect and there's no gaps or missing information in any paradigm or any governing theory within a scientific field, I think is ludicrous. But nevertheless, I think it was instructive to analyze his claims. And so we went through his claims

and presented counterclaims, which he never responded to. Maybe he's out there listening now. Maybe he's not. But we had a lively debate over the summer and back and forth discussing the various flaws in his mind, fatal flaws to the Big Bang itself. So that would have been the biggest news, perhaps, maybe of all time, not just of the science year that was 2022. And again, I think it's fascinating that it's intimately related to the discoveries that the James Webb Space Telescope has unleashed. And Webb was also responsible for a very recent controversy

that I just kind of by proxy, participated in. And that was the, that was the notion that James Webb himself was a homophob and that he presided over a particularly onerous, difficult, disgusting phase of NASA's history called the, and our government history called the Lavender Scare back in the 50s when he was the chief NASA administrator, who would then later go on to put NASA on track to land astronauts on the moon in 1969, which we did do, and very successfully,

in large part because of James Webb himself. So there was a cadre of astronomers who presented their case, a lot of which is on Twitter, and they presented it on Twitter and in other media. And then just last week, a week ago

Monday, there was an article on the front page of the New York Times about a good friend of mine, Hakeem O'Sheae, who is a professional astronomer, a professor. And he and I had a conversation over the summer about James Webb. We also talked about his research in solar physics and as a professional astronomer. But he is the president of the National Society of Black Physicist.

And he, on his own, are some kind of concern that James Webb, Space Telescope, the most expensive project ever launched into space, would bear the name of a homopopop. And he was outraged about it. He's a black African-American. He's a black man. And he was outraged if that were true. Just as he'd be outraged if there was named after, you know,

the David Duke space telescopes or something like that. And so he took it upon himself to do a very deep investigation of James Webb, the history and politics of NASA, and investigate whether or not James Webb was a homophobe. And he came up the answer was negative. No, James Webb was not a homophobe, according to Hakeem, Professor Hakeem O'Shea. And then what happened was kind of remarkable.

There were a lot of LGBTQ and their allies on Twitter and even in the pages of Scientific American who launched a campaign to discredit not only Olishe He himself, but the findings that he had come up with, namely that James Webb was indeed a homophore. So the article on the front page of the New York Times was actually an investigation into the controversy itself and what happened to my friend Hakeem. And it comes up really not only exonerating Hakeem from any wrongdoing and character assassination attempts perhaps, and maybe that wasn't the intention of the folks who were writing about it, but that's the way it was perceived and presented in this article by Michael Powell,

who is often on Twitter as well. in the New York Times last Monday. So it's pretty fascinating. All these things have this Christmas conversions. And here I'm a Jew, okay? So I've just made some Chinese food, and I'm, you know, settling in for the night. The last night of Hanukkah,

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See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. But nevertheless, a lot of things do seem to happen on Christmas and related to Christmas. And if you've read my first book, losing the Nobel Prize, you'll know I was actually a Jewish, boy in the Catholic Church back in my teenage years. I'm not going to get into that there. If you're interested, I have a video about that, and I have a large chapter in my book about how I have come back and forth between different religious practices, and I have a great affection for Catholicism still. But the confluence of these things and the kind of hope of looking forward to the future, I think I do so with trepidation for 2023 in that this year's has really shown me this incident that I just described with my very good friend.

Imagine you're a good friend. And he or she is assailed online for doing something that he or she thought was just doing a good deed, investigating the characteristics in the background of somebody, maybe with the hope originally of taking this person down. and not being associated. And then he finds to the contrary, a great courage, a great risk, and threats against him and his career and other things.

And then the scientific community, a large part, acts as a mob and tries to attack not only his findings and his scholarship, but his character, making all sorts of accusations. You can read about those in the article from the New York Times last week.

So that's kind of scary. And that kind of was capped off another event that happened in the home of Catholicism and by the man who died the year that Isaac Newton was born, and that's Galileo Galilei, died in 1642, which is the year Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day. And Galileo ended his life in prison because of an injunction by the Catholic Church to never teach the true theory of the Copernican or the Copernican arrangement of our solar system, namely that the sun is the center of our solar system, not the earth, as the interpretation had kind of posited from the Bible. I go through

in some detail and other works that I've gone through, that there's no real evidence, at least in the Torah and the Jewish Bible and the Old Testament, that seems to suggest that the sun is not, you know, the center of the solar system. But nevertheless, there's not much science or cosmology. in the Torah and all. But I just found it interesting that the actual support that the sun is not the center of the universe comes from Aristotle, who maintained and Ptolemy, who maintained that the earth was the center of the solar system for purely physical reasons. And they weren't Christian, certainly. They lived 275 years before Christ. So it always puzzled me. Why did the Catholic Church punish and jail imprisoning Galileo for teaching?

that the pagans who lived in Greece and Egypt in the, you know, pre-first millennium, that they were wrong. Why, why did the church care if a pagan was wrong? I know if, if nowadays, if we say some pagan is wrong, I don't think, you know, Pope Francis will, well, sentence you to, you know, in life imprisonment, which is what happened to Galileo. And I traveled to his hometown and I did some research and did find out more about that. event and found to my surprise, maybe some in the audience know this, but that Galileo was really doing battle against a Christian saint in that eventually the Catholic Church and the Pope, thanks to some of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, basically canonized Aristotle as a saint. And so they kind of not only posthumously made him a Christian, they made him a saint, and therefore anything violating his teachings was literally. sacrilegious. And so in Galileo's defense of opposition presented first by Copernicus, of the Earth-centered universe, Leo was transgressing against a powerful, powerful figure in

Christendom. And I found that out this year in Galileo's actual prison, where I spent some time with Eric Weinstein, who was a couple minutes ago. Maybe he'll come back. And, and then Jay Batacharya, Dr. Professor Jay Batacharya of Stanford University. And he and I became friends over the summer. And that also illuminated a shameful event in the history of science in the past year, which was that he was basically censored and under the same type of injunction inquisition, not by the Catholic Church anymore, but by Francis Collins of the National Institute. suits of health, and by, of course, Anthony Fauci.

And that those two conspired with others, including eventually Rachel Lewinsky, who is the director of the CDC, to do what was described by a public takedown of Dr. Batacharya, that his findings and his recommendations, which would later be termed the Great Barrington Declaration, that those were fringe. Those were coming from a fringe epidemiologist. So they called him that, and they called for, in their words, a takedown of him and his cohorts, which included the very eminent Nobel laureate, Michael Leavitt, as well. So it was a number of laureate in chemistry.

And they rude that fact. They were upset at that fact that they had gotten the support of a Nobel Prize winner, as if that was sort of, you know, a bridge too far, and that might have pushed them over the edge. So this all happened this year, and I think it was quite a shock to me that scientific authorities that I, you know, naively would respect as a great scientist. Fauci was a renowned, you know, medical doctor and textbook author. Francis Collins, of course, played the largest role of any individual, at least in the government funding of the human genome project. and you can see video of him and Fauci and others. And the interview I did with Jade about Acharya about two weeks ago now, it's published on my channel.

So I kind of have become a little bit disillusion, at least in the past year. And I'm worried that the next year won't be much better. It may be that people fear science because we revere science. We think of science as this incredible tool, which is true, to gather and garner knowledge, and produce technology, but we don't look at the fact that science is done by scientists. And the scientists often have highly politicized agendas, agendas that don't actually comport with a scientific worldview, and are fundamentally, I think, in opposition. to the great dictum of Richard Feynman, who said that science is really the belief in the ignorance of experts, and that if you settled as a young patent clerk in 1905

for what Isaac Newton had done, again, celebrating his birthday, happy birthday, Isaac Newton born on this day in 1642, if we had settled for Isaac Newton, a young Swiss German patent clerk named Einstein would have said, well, he's an expert. and not as great an expert as he is. And I will just take his word for it, and we would have been stuck with Newtonian gravity forever.

Not even to mention this new controversy, which I think is healthy. By the way, I want to make a distinction between healthy controversies, healthy debate like that that's going on, and the debate between dark matter and the opponents of dark matter that call themselves modified Newtonian dynamics,

or Vaughn. We'll have a video about that on Wednesday on my channel, Dr. Brian Keating. That's healthy to have those debates, as long as it's not ad hominem and personal and so forth. And there's more, as a byproduct of the social media age, we now have more

kind of suggestions or claims of things like the Big Bang never happened and other claims that can't be substantiated. Yet they piggyback on the, on the skepticism that even scientists such as myself will have. And so I'm kind of, you know, just just

using this as a therapeutic tool to vent to those of you who are listening, that even for professional scientists, it's hard to know what to do. Because on one hand, you want to encourage debate. On the other hand, people's minds are rarely changed by debate. And yet, you want to strive for the focus to be on the flaws in the current understanding of science without having those flaws be those that sort of look for the, as Jesus Christ said, and the, you know, the log in your own eye while you're looking for the speck of dust in your enemy's eye. In other words, how can we look at scientists and be self-critical when we might be attacked? For example, Eric Lerner when he was attacking the Big Bang paradigm, which is fine. And you can certainly

question whether or not the Big Bang took place. But in so doing, he was claiming that he was heir to this tradition of Galileo and Giordana Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heretical views about multiple planets in the universe, which of course is true, but he didn't have any evidence for that. Nevertheless, to claim that you are at the same level or that you are suffering the same kinds of scientific censorship, as he called it, is really a calumny against the process of science. And even to talk about things like peer review as some sort of corrupt cabal of a cabal of disingenuous science grifters, you know, to really go through this community of people that are trying to do their best and understand things. So you have that on

the one hand, people attacking science using the well-known flaws not only in science but in scientists. Then you have eminent scientists attacking other scientists like Fauci and Collins attacking J. Vodacharya. And it's quite frankly, it's a very difficult situation to navigate. and I haven't really understood a way to do that in the best possible way. I do like the notion, at least of having a debate, and I've had on folks like Peter Bogosian who wrote a book called How to Have Impossible Conversations. And yet, I don't find that people's minds are ever changed. And it's possible to have your own opinions in science, but as it said, you can't have your own,

private fact. and there should be sort of a possibility of a debate, but it's almost impossible because of the academic hierarchy, what I sometimes call the academic industry complex, where we have things like the media that are not in a direct conspiracy, but they're in a symbiotic relationship with scientists, in that you'll get a news story, like I'll cover this, hopefully,

with one of the progenitors of the experiment, the recent announcement of a wormhole created using quantum computers, Google Sycamore's computer. I hope to have on Professor Maria Spiropolo at Caltech, who is the leader of this research, and, you know, she and I have been talking, hope to have her own.

And you have sort of this immediate tidal wave of hype that just washes over not only the scientific literature, but I should say in the popular science literature, before it's even had a chance to truly be digested by other scientists. So at least in that case, she published her paper in nature and that was released. And then it was kind of amplified by a friend of mine, Natalie Walkover, who's a great journalist won the Pulitzer Prize this year for journalism. And she wrote an article and it was very, very glowing. and I find those things very exciting.

Obviously, I was caught up in it and very excited about it. And I want to bring it to the attention of my audience and have a live chat as I do almost weekly with the world's greatest scientist. And sometimes I tag along too. But having those kinds of debate. Now, what if I were to have on somebody who is kind of very condemnatory in saying, look, this is total hype. You didn't discover what you're claiming. You know it's an approximation. You know it's a simulation.

you shouldn't have let the media run with this in the way that they have because once you ring the bell, you know, once you use the toothbrush, you can't bring it back. You can't take it back to the store. And I don't know the best way to handle that. I don't think it would be great for my channel.

I mean, let me know in the reactions if you think it's a good idea. Have on, you know, say someone who comes up with some great result, like the nuclear fusion result we heard about two weeks ago now, and then have on a vocal critic of that, like I did this week with Professor Charles Seif of New York University, who's not a physicist, but he's a journalist, and he has written, he's a journalism professor, and he has a science

background, but he's not a working scientist, but nevertheless he's been writing about books about fusion, and it discontents for over a decade now. So, you know, is it a good idea to have on, you know, bitter enemies? I don't think that really teaches the audience of laypeople, at least, how, you know, is it a good idea. a good lesson because we don't really do science like this anymore. We also don't really do science by peer review except for the fact that there's really no other way to do it. I mean, we can't do like a demonstration as they used to do at the Royal Society where Isaac Newton would stand up with a prism and they would let a beam of sunlight into the Royal Academy and then he'd demonstrate

what was called color theory, which is very brilliant by the way. He would take sunlight which is yellow, but it has all the colors of the rainbow. And that's why you see all the colors of the rainbow when there's a moisture in the atmosphere. And then he would diffract it. And then he would have another prism set up some distance away. And in between the two prism, my eye, he would blank out one of the colors, say yellow from the first spectrum diffuses the white light or the yellow white light into a rainbow. And then it kind of goes across the room a little bit. And then he focuses it. And then he would block out, just make opaque the yellow portion of the spectrum.

And then he would recombine the light with another prism, and he would show you don't get white light out. You get white minus red, white minus yellow, so it was a little bit greenish, you know, bluish, um, you know, some excess red. And it was fascinating to show the unification of physics

or light of theory. And they would actually do that in person. And then and only then, when you could actually demonstrate that you got a result, would you have it be, sort of accepted as a fact. And then you'd publish it in a book. And he did that in the book called Optics, spelled with a K, which is kind of funny. And they would do all this stuff. But, you know, peer review hasn't been around for that long. And, you know, as I said recently, it's the best system, it's the worst system, except for all the others. And so going into 2023, we have

not only assault on scientific theories like the Big Bang, like Dark Matter paradigm, like the notion of how a particular virus was created or escaped or, you know, was transmitted early on. I can't believe it was exactly three years ago I heard about this virus and I wasn't too concerned about it. And then the whole world basically shut down. For the last three years, we've been dealing with this, including in science, including the shutdown of travel to my observatory for the better part of three years. just resumed when I was there three weeks ago, down in Chile at 17,000 feet. You can find a video about that on my channel. And we have this controversy within science where you can't even defend the name of a telescope.

It's so hot button. It's such an affront to the community, calling it, you know, victimization and violence to have a telescope named after someone who is essentially disproven to be a homophob, or at least in the context of the milieu in which he was living, where the whole federal government could not

employ homosexuals. So it wasn't just, oh, NASA, this one bigot, and he had a chance he could just overthrow NASA and hire homosexuals left and right. That wasn't even conceivable. You know, it would be like, you know, someone hiring a foreign, you know,

a terrorist or something. I'm not equating anything like that, but I'm just saying from a foreign military say, let's just hire, you know, the Azov battalion into the CIA. You just can't do such things. They're, you know, even if, even if that was somehow righteous and, and he

had a reason to do it. It was impossible for him to do it. Moreover, there was actually evidence that he was supportive of one lesbian that he knew at that time, which is publicly supported, not just, you know, he was friends with a lesbian and, oh, Some of my friends are lesbian, he was actually supportive and promoted her research as well. So I think, and yet my friend, Professor Hakim Alashei, was assailed in the science community.

And to the point that even one of the largest journals in all of astronomy and all of science, really, monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society where I've published several papers, they apparently will not allow you to use the actual name of the telescope in an article about data from the telescope. In other words, if you measure that the Big Bang definitely happened, just kidding, but you measure something about some galaxy and you get it from James Webb Space Telescope data, you are not to say that it won't be published.

It would be like you use a slur according to the editors of that journal. So the editorial practice is not to publish it. There's similar support, and so you have to use the initials, JWST. And there's similar actions that were taken by the American Astronomical Society, who published the Astrophysical Journal, which is arguably the biggest pure astronomy journal in all of science. And that is also, they have taken issue and they have come out with very strong statements about Web based on their concluding similarly to the to the authors of the piece that condemned Professor Ola Sheet. So it's very kind of complex.

But if you check on my YouTube channel and have an interview with Hakeem, I tweeted about it, and then follow Michael Powell. It's the New York Times author who published the article that came out last week on Monday on the front page. So those were the big controversies, all in some way related to Christmas. And I thought it would be fun to just share these kinds of, of musings as I eat my chow main as a good Jew does.

Christmas night when all is quiet, not even St. Nick is around here. But I guess it's derogure to maybe see if anybody has any comments or questions or things are looking forward to. Inside or outside of science, make a request. I can put you on the stage, as they say. This is my first Twitter space, I think, this year. I don't know. I might have tried one last year. I'm obviously not that great at it. But if anybody would like to say anything, I will welcome that.

Otherwise, I will get back to my hot and sour soup and my spring rolls and start packing. We're going to get a big snowstorm here in San Diego. So I am going to go skiing this week with my family. And I've got to pack up my stuff. Fony Touchy. You are up, my friend. How are you? you, sir. How are you enjoying your meteorite? Hi, thanks for giving me the mic. And, yeah, first of all, thank you for sending me a meteorite in the mail.

I totally wasn't expecting that on Christmas Day. So, yeah, I mean, you bring up a really interesting topic, right? Like, I've been following the whole James Webb homophobia issue. And, you know, I've, I think my, I mean, I think my take on it is that, I mean, he was probably, you know, like, basically who was working within the constraints of his time. But I think, like, the thing that we get sidetracked with is a lot of people are really interested in fighting culture wars without necessarily focusing their attention on. improving the conditions of the people who they're fighting sort of culturally for

you know, like, how are you actually trying to make the lives of people who are LGBTQ better? Rather than you're just wasting your time on this meaningless name thing, like, it's already happened, okay? I don't know. I don't think it's meaningless. I don't think it's meaningless to name. I mean, I'm at,

Imagine if there was, you know, the Adolf Hitler space telescope. I would be against, I'm going to the extreme for this. And they weren't claiming that at that level, but they were doing something more pernicious in my opinion. Which is to smear, not only to smear the name of the telescope, but to smear the black man, Hakeem O'Shea, professor of astronomy, for doing the research, almost as if, you know, and actually some of the, some of the controversy surrounds the fact that he's black. In other words, black folk aren't supposed to come to the defense of white racist homophobes. And that was some of the claims.

I mean, I'm not making this as Professor Chonda Prescott Weinstein, who is a friend, and I've hosted her. And she and I, you know, are fresh. She's, you know, she's, she's, you know, an esteemed colleague in the field of physics. But she was essentially calling Hakeem and Professor James Gates, member of the National Academy of Science, He won the National Science Medal, that basically because of their race, which I don't understand what that has to do with homophobia from James Webb when the whole federal government was ensconced in it back in the 1950s. So I take more issue with that. How can a scientist, in other words, how can a scientist, you know, kind of who is logical, who is rigorous, who is rational, how can they claim such things? It's very demoralizing to me as a scientist.

And like I said, I don't know how do you separate the fear that I have for science, that you have only a few limited tools to grasp the universe. And then you have people that are your fellow travelers. And then they're using those very tools against you. In the case of the Big Bang never happened, in the case of people that are opposed to theories such as inflation, the vitriol that they get, not from the general public only, but from scientists. It's very, it's demoralizing at some level.

And I don't know how to teach my students what to do. Because, you know, we hear about this notion of allyship and you should be an ally. But what does that mean? I mean, should you, because I'm Jewish, should I just reactively just support Chonda Prescott Weinstein? Because she's Jewish or because she's black. Hakeem should have supported her. I just don't know what to do. So let's see.

I'm going to invite Erica. He always has something interesting. Oh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead, Fony. Yeah, sorry. I mean, before I go, I wanted to put this one question for you. I don't know if you've seen. There was this paper that came out that was questioning the result of the EHTCM87 black hole image.

That was by a Japanese group and was published in the astrophysical journal. And they said, he said that the image that the EHTC group came up with, that was the result of an artifact of the field of view. I was kind of surprised that most science communicators sort of shunned away from this topic. And so I thought that that would be kind of insightful to see what your take on this is. Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Fony. And, you know, I'm sorry that you called my good friend J. Bata Chari, a friend's epidemiologist. Please don't do that again. I won't send you another meteorite, phony. Okay, I'll get back to that controversy, but I do want to have Eric O'Pine about this controversy that we had in science this year, several things, Eric, just to recapitulate really quickly. We had situations where eminent scientists were using their privilege and prestige as scientists to both attack legitimate scientists. like J. Badacharya and condemning him essentially with the help of organizations and entities outside of the scientific establishment, namely Twitter and perhaps other entities, suppressing information that's purely scientific, as you know, and also the extra scientific, you know, basic character assassination attempts at people who are trying to simply engage and correct the historical record wherever it may lead.

if you have any opinions, Eric, it would be interesting to hear them. And you want to do this on Christmas? Well, it's Christmas, Eric, because a couple of things. James Webb was launched a year ago today on Christmas time. Jay Batacharya and I met in a place called Archetri, Italy, at the place where, as you know, because you were there, that Galileo was imprisoned for heresy by the Catholic Church. Galileo died in 1642, the very year that Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day. And last but not least, the attacks on opponents of inflation.

And I didn't bring this up yet, but the multiverse and the so-called string landscape led by Paul Steinhart, Einstein professor of physical sciences at Princeton, also born on this day in 1952. So there's a confluence of Christmas-related activities. So that's why we're bringing it up today. Wonderful. Well, Merry Christmas, Dr. Keating. Happy Hanukkah, as well. I guess what my take is that we've got to, how to put this politely,

it's too cheap to create controversies which force everyone to have opinions in areas that we really, I don't know what the evidentiary... case is for the idea that James Webb was a raging homophobic homophobic at NASA, it doesn't seem a very compelling story. And my feeling is that if something doesn't meet this threshold, let's say, it shouldn't be the case that individual members of the community simply by making a frivolous attempt to enmesh us once again

in relitigating the past, I don't think that we should all get taken off the line and be forced to debate what somebody decided was important for us to debate. And in the case of J. Buttigarya, this is preposterous. You know, you're now in a situation where you have the FBI saying,

who are you going to believe me or your lying eyes with respect to the Twitter files? and we now have Fauci and Collins' emails talking about the need for a swift and devastating takedowns of the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as this desire to reframe Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard as employing forensic epidemiologists. There's this concept of race I'm exaloquiter

in the law that I'm quite partial to, which is where a thing speaks for itself. This is now so dumb that we should be having a blast. I don't think we should be worried about J. Badachari. We should be making fun of Tony Fauci and Francis Collins because they're preposterous. But when you do that, Eric, I'm just sorry with respect. When you do that, say with Professor Prescott Weinstein, no relation, as I understand it, when you do that, you can then be accused of not being an ally.

You can then be accused of homophobia by proxy. You can then be accused of not being skinfolk, aren't kinfolk, to use her words. And so she's a scientist. So where can you draw the line and not be enmeshed in the con, and just do the science? Are you advocating, you know, I should just keep my head down and just do the science, or that I should devastatingly take down Chonda Prescott-Minds now, which I have no to- Wait, wait a second. I'm not even focused on the names in this case.

Oh, fine, fine. Well, you said Fauci, but... Well, no, because Fauci is representing an institution and Collins. I mean, NIH, NIAI-I-I-D, National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, and NIH are enormous institutions. I'm not aware of Dr. Prescott Weinstein heading an enormous institution. So I don't feel that we should be giving them all the same treatment. Well, I did mention, sorry, Eric, just because you dropped out for a second. I did mention that the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,

which has impact factor, you know, maybe third on the tops for fellow astronomers, they will not print the name James Webb Space Telescope. You can only refer to it as, that is an essential. Right. I understand that. This is all very dangerous stuff, right? It's going to derange society. What I'm trying to say is we've now been through what five years of complete insanity and including you can't use the word insane at Stanford. At some point, you have to, I think I'm done with 12th chances is what I'm trying to say. And giving everyone the time, well, what do we think? think, what do we, you know, okay, well, the whole point is that's paralytic. And it wastes our research time, and it wastes our focus. So instead of talking about antisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation, or, you know, looking at star nurseries or something like that, we're having one more discussion about allyship and homophobia. So let me just put forward

a really kind of a clearer idea. I think allyship should die. And I think it's because it diminishes friendship. It diminishes collegiality. It's some sort of very weak form of support where one party agrees to sort of lie prostrate before another, saying, I'm so sorry that we've wronged you. How can I simply support you in whatever it is that you do? And it's like, well, that's not going to be friendship. And you're not going to have children that way.

If we're really serious about multiculturalism and getting rid of racism, let's effing love each other and let's work together and let's tell our black colleagues when they're completely out of their minds, just as black colleagues should tell white colleagues when they're completely out of their minds. But this idea of creating a sort of intersectional, I don't know, kind of hierarchy where the most intersectional person is the only person who can comment on things is bananas. And we all know that. What I'm trying to get at is I think it's time to lower the courtesy level to unworkably bad ideas like allyship.

It doesn't work. Friendship works, love works, collegiality works, merit works. Let's use those. And let's give allieship, I don't know, the next few decades off. Let it figure out what it wants to be. And then it can come back and it can help us to investigate neutrino physics or extradile. T telescopes or what have you, but it doesn't seem to work. And I don't see taking all of civilization that has been shown to work in the past and passing it through a filter that appears to

destroy all adult, subtle, and kind of adventurous thought in this completely untrustworthy shredder machine for the human intellect. I just think it's a bad idea. You say this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

No, I agree. I am. I was saying also, Eric, that there's a, the media play a huge role in it, and it's not just Twitter, amplifying certain voices in the scientific community as if they have a phalanx PhD epidemiologist and astrophysicist on their, on their cuddary. But I wonder, what do you do when there's scientific criticism? Like this summer, I was saying, I engaged in a controversy of whether or not the Big Bang even happened based on a claim by an individual who says, based on James Webb's base telescope data. Again, James Webb has launched a year ago today on Christmas. That's why it's relevant to the space. No pun intended. The claim was that because of the properties of galaxies that we shouldn't take the Big Bang claim anymore as being legitimate. In other words, my bread being buttered by the Big Bang, this is what I get accused of, by the way, that I'm in the pocket of big cosmology. How do I separate, as a scientist, and you're a scientist, mathematical physicist too. How do we separate legitimate gripes against claims, including claims by this

individual, Eric Lerner, who claims that he's being censored like Giodarna Bruno and Gail? And I always say, by the way, if you ever compare yourself to Giodarna Bruner, your career's all over, but not because you're being censored, but because you're a numskull. So, but anyway, is there censorship? He's claiming peer review, you know, that the editors won't even look at his paper. Meanwhile, this is the same paper he tried to publish 30 years ago when the Hubble data were new. It's basically the same type of argument that the properties of spiral galaxies are too mature and developed to have done so in 400 million years, which is a legitimate claim. You can claim it, but there's no evidence except now that he says, well, Bruno was censored,

Galileo was censored, and now I'm being censored too, therefore I am like them. How do you handle that as a scientist? What do I tell my students? So first of all, you look at short interest. In general, we should be able to profit from shorting people who are completely wrong. You should be able to go short in the marketplace of ideas. The concept of a complete market is one in which you can find an investment instrument for any thesis that you might have. So if you have an idea about the world and you see that the world has not caught up with you, you should be able to bet it and profit. So I would be very curious if we opened an idea market. What is the short interest in this? Because quite honestly, I would love to make some money. I think it's also really interesting when you have far out there ideas that

turn out to be right. Like, you know, famously that stress doesn't cause ulcers. In fact, pathogens cause ulcers. So you have to be very careful about saying that somebody's just completely wrong, but you should be able to gauge. You see, you can't really go by the community because very often one person is right and everybody's wrong. That's what makes some of the most exciting science exciting. On the other hand, you can't afford to let any lunatic just say something and then have that, well, the court of public opinion is evenly divided. That's not true either.

So we have to get away from the idea that peer review works because we've shown that it doesn't. We have to get away from the idea that you can test everything in existence. experiment, obviously you can't run the big bang over and over again to get a high enough N. Science is a lot more interesting and complicated and complex than most of the attempts to turn it into a simple thing where, you know, if something doesn't match experiment, then it's wrong. Like, you know, you can find Feynman saying this, I think, at Cornell, and he's just, he's incorrect. Science is a really complicated endeavor, and in part we don't know whether our lunatics are correct

sometimes, and that's what makes it really interesting, is that we should be allowing this person to put their iron in the fire, and we should watch it, and we should make very sure that if the community picks this up later, that the heretics are lifted up, because one of the problems that I have is that the heretics often don't benefit when the community finally gets around to something and realizing that there were heretics talking about it, it is all too frequent. that the people who are the Johnny Come Lately's get all of the credit. So I think we have a really interesting thing. But let me just say something, Brian that I would really rather have.

I would love to hear Brian Keating talking not about the culture wars and not about some crazy idea about the Big Bang never happened. But I'd love to hear you talking about what you're excited about with respect to, let's say, CNB radiation and what you're looking for and what's going on in the Simon's telescope. And what I think we should get away from is the fact that there's a quick hit you get whenever you get controversy, but we lose out on the great adventure of science, which is often very slow moving. So I'm going to demote myself to the audience because I have to get back to some stuff.

But I wanted to just say, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah. I think we should learn to just silence our own desire to be good long enough to investigate whether or not, we need to be plunged into yet one more irrelevant controversy, which detracts from the science, and tends to build envy through invidious behavior between the communities. I think we need to get back to loving the shit out of each other, being collegial with each other, and realizing that we're all in this for the science, or it doesn't make any difference. I don't think we need to have a question about whether Orion identifies as female and that the constellation should be changed in the guys, it's just a waste of everyone's time. Thanks so much. Thank you, Eric. Happy

Hanukkah and Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Yeah, I too have to leave and finish my Chau Main in a few minutes, but we did have a chance to chat a little bit about the exciting developments, at least in the alternatives to the paradigm of what's called Cold Dark Matter that has pervaded cosmology since its first initiation by Fritz Wickey, who was a, you know, kind of a little bit of an unctious character at Caltech not too long ago. And there's still a great controversy about that. And so the thing that's most exciting me, as Eric mentioned, is, is, or I should say are the cracks, are the flaws.

As I think it was Cohen who said, you know, the cracks are where the light gets in. How does the light get in? You know you're onto something in science. If you find something that's flawed, say, and you know that it's mostly, say, the Big Bang theory is mostly correct, but it is only a scientific theory. and it's only made by scientists. Therefore, there's profit to be had in Eric's language from going long as well as shorting perhaps individuals, but going long the notion that you will find the most curious, the most fascinating, and the most impactful research directions when you look for things that

shouldn't be there, not for the thing that you expected to be there, as Feynman said, in that very same quote that Eric was mentioning, that you are the easiest person to fool, and the first principle in science is not to fool your side. So don't fool yourself, I think is good advice for this coming year. And the things that I'm most looking forward to are the Simon's Observatory, collecting its first cosmic photons from the site that I just visited. And I have a little tour of that site on my website, sorry on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating.

And that site, I show you around what we're doing up there. And it's gotten to be basically the world's highest operating astronomical observatory. and we'll be taking data for the next decade or so, aiming to uncover what was the universe like in its first few moments when it came into existence, whether there was a universe that preceded our universe, whether it be due to a collapse in a preceding universe, a big crunch,

maybe an infinite cycle of universes and what's called a cyclic cosmological model, whether or not we live in a multiverse, perhaps of infinite companion universes, these are the features. which the Simon's Observatory, which I co-lead with my colleagues at Princeton and Penn, UC Berkeley, and Chicago. And what we can do with that magnificent instrument will first come into view next year in 2023. I'm incredibly excited about that, as I may be a little bit dismayed by some of my colleagues and what they're doing in the field.

I have an interview with Stacey McGaugh, is a professor at Case Western Reserve University, one of the foremost opponents of dark matter. and so he and Mordecai Milgram, who was on the show this summer, discuss the alternative called the Mond, or modified Newtonian dynamics, which would change our interpretation of the most dominant form of matter that there is in the universe from existing to non-existent. That would be a revolution in modern cosmology, and it might be concomitant with our understanding of how galaxies got their spin on.

And so that will tie into the James Webb findings. and we will be uncovering the properties of the universe on its largest possible scales. So I want to encourage you all, yes, please do subscribe it. Be like Fony Touchy, not like Tony Fauci, but be like Fonie Touchy, who was up on stage for a brief moment. If you subscribe to my newsletter, there's a good chance you will win a piece of space schmutz, some cosmic dust, some debris from an exploded supernova. that existed in our galaxy about 4,500 million years ago.

And I send those out, and Tony received one, phony received one, just today. So just in time for Christmas. And I'm also giving away copies of my audiobook done with Frank Wilcheck, Jim Gates, Carlo Rovelli, and others, which is Galileo's only existing audio book called The Dialogue on Two World Systems. Find that on my website, Brian Keating.com, slash list. and you two may win. So for now, wishing you all happy Hanukkah to those that celebrate. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Joyous Kwanza. All the other things that you may celebrate. I can't wait to go further into the impossible

with all y'all in 2023. Thanks, everybody. Take care. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals. because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. For citizens back.