Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Accidental Discoveries That Shaped Astronomy | Chris Lintott

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Science might seem opposed to chance discoveries due to its focus on meticulous methods. But surprisingly, serendipity, the art of fortunate accidents and happy discoveries, plays a big role, especially in astronomy. Some of the greatest cosmic discoveries were accidental. Unexpected findings have greatly shaped our understanding of the universe. In this episode, I had the pleasure of getting into the fascinating world of serendipitous astronomy with Chris Lintott, astrophysicist, professor, and host of BBC's "The Sky at Night." We discuss the delicate balance between speculation and scientific rigor, famous cases like the cosmic microwave background, and recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. Chris opens up about the role of citizen science in modern astronomy and how it's changing the way we approach cosmic mysteries. This episode might just change how you think about scientific discovery. Tune in!  Key Takeaways:   00:00 Intro 01:09 Many cosmic discoveries came about by accident 02:16 Importance of showing astronomy in action 03:40 Discussion of Oumuamua and interstellar objects 08:10 Importance of speculative research 15:37 Accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background 25:06 Success of the Galaxy Zoo project 35:45 Historical context of serendipitous discoveries 47:52 James Webb Space Telescope challenging cosmological models 52:48 Balancing scientific rigor with public communication 54:45 Chris Lintott’s perspective on dark matter and dark energy  —  Additional resources:  ➡️  Connect with Chris Lintott: Website: https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/lintott X/Twitter:  https://x.com/chrislintott The Sky at Night Program: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/4jgzzH6CBH7b5K0qblb73nZ/professor-chris-lintott Our Accidental Universe Book and others: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Chris+Lintott —- ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms:  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast    —   Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known.   Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How come so many of the greatest cosmic discoveries came about by accident? Should we communicate speculative scientific ideas to the public? Will we ever rebuild the public's trust in science? And is hype ruining astronomy? I had the pleasure of discussing these mind-bending questions with my fellow astrophysicist, fellow professor, and fellow YouTube and science communicator Chris Lenthal. Chris is involved in a number of the most popular science projects aimed at bringing science to the public, as well as communicating them on his

BBC program, The Sky at Night. In this delightful conversation, we discussed everything, ranging from the origin of life to aliens in the universe, to the origin of the universe itself, and how these discoveries can be best communicated to you, the public. You guys pay our salary through your taxes, after all. So sit back and enjoy this conversation through the cosmos as we explore accidental discoveries in astronomy. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. the pod bay doors. Chris, I want to start off with a possibly provocative poser to you.

And that's the following. Half of the discoveries that are so amazing in this wonderful new book aren't confirmed, will never be confirmed, have been disconfirmed. Isn't there a danger in relying on speculation and hype in astronomy, as has plagued many other science branches? I mean, your answers in the question, right? Yes, obviously if we accept there's hype and so on, then we have to be careful. I do think one of the problems with the way we talk about science inspired me to write the book,

which is that we tend to give the headline result, right? And there's usually some clever person on stage accepting an award or, you know, announcing a result. And it can seem like that was a very linear process, right? that my colleague Bill Keel at Alabama talks about the Hollywood version of science. And the Hollywood version of science is that we all sit in a big and surprisingly plush conference room. No one says anything. And then somebody suddenly goes, my God, I've got an idea. We go, well, we should test the idea. And then we test the idea, and it turns out they were right. And the thing is, that's not how it works. And actually, that's not the fun bit. Being right

is never the fun bit. So I think one of the things I wanted to do in the book was show astronomy in action and show how astronomy works as an everyday subject, particularly from the perspective of an observational astronomer, somebody who spends their life not writing equations necessarily and not building simulations, but somebody who is interested in trying to get the best out of the telescopes that we have and to see what's lurking in often the data that we've already collected. So I think that can help with the hype cycle,

because if people are seeing the sausage made, then they're more likely to understand whether to eat the sausage, or not, at the end, is a slightly convoluted analogy. But I'm interested, your question, I know you're trying to be provocative, but which are the ones you don't think are true? Because I think I would stand by most of the things in the book. Well, I know for a fact, Chris, you don't stand behind Omuamua as an interstellar garbage barge or a scout mission from extraterrestrial intelligence. Unlike past guest and friend Avi Loeb, you say quite clearly in the book, let me get the quote here,

something that it's been debunked thoroughly. So that's extreme hype. I mean, we love Avi, but he's not afraid of displaying a little bit of over-compet. But in the book, Umu-Mua is interesting regardless of the fact that it's probably not an alien spaceship. So the result, you know, so, so yes, I, you know, I haven't decided it would be fun if it was an alien spaceship. Look, this is the thing that I think sometimes when we get talking about Avi's ideas with people they miss. Like the rest of us want it to be an alien spaceship, too. It's not that we're sitting here going,

no, I don't have time for that in my schedule. Though there is a good story about Jocelyn Bell Bonael's discovery of pulsars, where she ends up pissed off, annoyed that aliens might have got in the way of her thesis. But we're not all Jocelyn, right? Aliens would be great. So, look, Omi Amu, it would be great for say it. But it's not aliens. It's a sample of another solar system.

It was the first of the things that we've ever found. It's kick-started, this renaissance, this new set of ideas about, what actually turned out to be the most common macroscopic objects in the galaxy. We think there are 10 to the 27, so a billion, billion, billion of these things floating through the cosmos. And we've seen two of them. And that's exciting. So to me, Umuamua, the story in the book is that it arrived from out of nowhere. It confound us, it was perfectly sensible to consider the alien hypothesis,

especially if you've read your rendezvous with Rama and the rest of it. But it turns out to be consistent with being a point. population of objects that we're now going to get to study. And so I was so excited by Ruma Muamua that I changed a whole direction of my research and have started working on predicting the properties of these interstellar objects, because I think they're amazing. They're uniquely sensitive to sort of all of astronomy. So to understand Muamua, you have to have the star formation history of the Milky Way right. You have to have how stars lead to planets, right? You have to understand the dynamics of planetary systems. You have to understand what happens when things go spinning around

the galaxy and you have to understand how the solar system interacts with all of those things. So it's a fun challenging problem that until Umuumu turned up, no one had bothered to think about. And now there's a group of us who are working on this. So yeah, not an alien space. I thought the one you were going to say, though, was I've had some comments about the chapter of the book about phosphine on Venus. That's my next one. Yeah. My next one is phosphine. Then it's, well, I'll quote you the, the quote that really kind of stuck in my craw, so to speak, as we say here, over in the former comment. colonies. So I speak American. I'm bilingual. It's fine. Okay. That's great. Yes. And you have multiple

copies of each one of your books. And she told you immediately, and I quote, that we quote, might have found aliens. But I think even then, I mean, Chris, that was the least, you know, likely explanation even back then. So phosphine, I've had on Sarah Seeger. I've had on other experts in that research. So I want to get your take. When you look at this and you see it an astronomer, be it, and let's conceal their name, so we know it's not Avi. Oh, I don't think we need to necessarily in this case. Okay, fine. I mean, she's an eminent astronomer and I'm very familiar with her work.

But, you know, when they say the first thing you jump to, you have to be quite cautious, right? So how did you react to that? I mean, did you say, wow, I'm really excited. Well, let's have some context, right? So this is Jane Greaves in Cardiff, who led the group who had gone looking for phosphine with first the JCP on Hawaii and then followed up with Elmer. And Jane, I've known for years, I should say, she's, we were,

she's a bit more senior than I am, but we became friends during a disastrous observing trip to Monarchya, where neither was so bad, neither of us got up the mountain. And so we sat in a bar and drank for most of a week, which is how a walk away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's the most miserable holiday.

We were the two people who were sulking about the fact we were on the beach. But so Jane had gone looking for Foscien, more in hope than expectation. It was the sort of proof of principle thing. And she did it explicitly because it is a biosignature on Earth. It's a thing that's only produced by life. So, you know, it wasn't that she had some hypothesis about the chemistry of Venus that would lead you to suggest those fossilists. She went looking because it on Earth, it's a sign of life. And then slightly to her shock, they found it. Like, there's the signature there. And we'll come back to whether it's real or not in a sec. But what do you do at that point? What do you say to,

whom. Now, the quote that you have was from a day-long interview that I did with Jane, and the story is that I was worried that, you know, Jane would be hypercautious, that, you know, there's a, there's a story that makes sense, which is we have detected signs of phosphine on the atmosphere of Venus. It's in the upper atmosphere. There's this nice intriguing bit that it's in a part of the atmosphere where the temperature and pressure is rather similar to that here on Earth, though it's still very acidic, so it's not earth-like conditions. And you know, you can imagine a sort of technical fudge. But the reason, with my journalist's hat on, we were excited, the reason anyone was excited about this discovery was that it is a biosegature. So I needed Jane to at least say that. And the

fact that at the top of the interview said it might be aliens was very important. But when they presented their work a couple of days later to the world, Jane in particular was very careful not to claim aliens. The excitement here is that there's something on Venus that we don't understand. And there is a, you know, her team, I think, have some internal tensions. There are people who are much more gung-ho about the alien explanation, people who, you know, the alternative is volcanoes and weird chemistry, right? And so it's about how well you think we understand those things. We had a marvelous, oh, I wish I could remember his name. We had a marvelous time with one of the chemists on the team who'd come to be interviewed. And you have to understand this is

post-lockdown. So we're in the Department of Physics at Cardiff. It's empty. It's like, you know, we're wandering around, James wearing a dinosaur dress, talking about aliens. It's like some low-budget post-apocalyptic British movie that will later be made into some Hollywood blockbuster with other people starring. But that's what it felt like. Her chemistry colleague, William, oh, I wish I could remember his son-in, and turned up and he bought his guitar. And so we did a serious interview. They said, I've written a song about this. And we said, okay, well, we'll hear the song. And it turned out it had about 30 verses about his journey to discover life on Venus. So he was pretty sure. Anyway, I think actually that group did a really good job

of standing on stage and saying, we found a thing. We don't know what it is. Here, it's a possibility. And I actually think they threaded that needle really well. And I hope I say that in the book. Now, they immediately got 17 people, 17 types of people jumping on them, re-analyzing the data and arguing that not only is it not aliens, that the phosphine doesn't even exist. Right. And it turned out there were mistakes in the pipeline, the software pipeline that processes data for Elma that hadn't been found before

because no one had looked with enough scrutiny. Looking at Venus is weird in the submillimeter. It's too near the sun. You shouldn't really be doing this. One of the reasons to do it was to test the capability. So there were these mistakes. but if you talk to random astronomer on the street, phosphine is the equivalent of the fast-than-light neutrinos from CERN a few years ago

that turned out to be a loose cable, right? This is a scary tale you tell graduate students about how things go wrong. But actually the phosphine's there. The results that Jane have got following up with JCMT, with particularly re-analyzing on Pioneer Venus data. Like, there is phosphine in the upper atmosphere. Is it aliens? I don't know. But again, I don't think that's a dud.

I think maybe I have a higher tolerance. the most to be excited about things that aren't aliens. I should tell you, actually, the title of the book was originally It's Never Aliens, and the idea was to list all the things that aren't turn out not to be, and then argue that they're interesting. But it got killed by a note from a publisher. I don't think it was either publisher we went with, but the note just said, but we wish it was.

Yeah, exactly. And so we had to make a broader argument. That's the problem. That's the Feynman's directive and invective, that you have to be careful not to fool yourself. And so here's a couple other ones. Planet 9 hypothesis that turned out to be largely discredited. Some of these are in the books. Some of these aren't.

No, Planet 9's not. I think that's interesting. And it's interesting. I mean, that's a really good example because we, I flew to the States, which is on a BBC budget, it's not something you do likely to go and interview Mike Brown and Constantine Betaken when they propose it. Because it's such a cool idea that there would be a large planet out there. And they still believe and almost no one else who studies the outer soul system does. So that's an interesting example of how, you know,

I think maybe you can get sucked down. I mean, I'm pretty sure that Constantine at this point has blamed Planet Nine for his socks going missing. You know, everything else seems to provide evidence for Planet Nine. But we'll see when we get Vera Rubin, and maybe I'll have to eat my own socks. Hey there, you impossibly brilliant geniuses. As we set out on this journey with Chris Linton,

I have a tiny favor to ask of you, and that's to make sure that you're subscribed to this channel. I've found that only 50% of you are subscribed to the podcast feed or to the YouTube channel. So please make sure to change. that I really really appreciate it and allow me to keep getting great guests like Chris Lentat and many many more to come all you have to do is subscribe follow like and share and comment that will really help a bunch now back to the episode

and there's a Boyagin star mystery so Tabby's Tabby Star yeah yeah yeah turns out not to be aliens again but it's still interesting it is inside a whole search for all sorts of interesting things yeah well we had on your your friend Lisa Kaltenegger not too long ago and it's all about finding aliens he had on Adam Frank. His book's all about aliens. Yeah, it's not a surprise that a publisher wouldn't want that to be in the title because, exactly, we wish there were.

But as scientists, you and I have to guard against that capacity. And actually, I love the fact that you highlight serendipity, not the least of which, Chris, because the bread is buttered around the keeping household by the cosmic microwave background, which chapter eight, you know, describes as one of the most significant serendipitous discoveries of all time. And in fact, I claim that there's something even better than serendipity, which is, which is, I think, the strongest form of collecting of evidence because by definition you didn't expect it. No one says, let's plan on serendipity and then we'll discover, you know, the origin of hydrogen. But I think there's actually something stronger than that, which is

serendipitous discoveries which disconfirm your hypothesis. So I'm thinking about the discovery of the accelerating universe. Can you talk about that? Why that's such a powerful thing? And what were actually looking for and what they found. This is a group of people, an Australian and friends team and an American and friends team, who were trying to measure the deceleration of the universe, how much it was slowing down, on the grounds that, I'll tell you how much stuff there is in the universe, this parameter, omega, M, that we'd like to constrain. And there's a bit of revisionist history here in which some people will tell you

that they were trying to measure whatever the change in expansion. was an acceleration, deceleration, perhaps they were neutral. But I've seen a talk from one of the groups where they showed their web page before and after the discovery. And beforehand, it said measuring the deceleration of the universe. And then after their results came back, because they discovered the unexpected that it was speeding up, they said measuring the acceleration of the universe. Now, there are a few people who predicted that. If you look in the papers at the time, there are, as you know, there are people who were writing about the fact that cosmology made more sense, in some sense.

if you have this expansion. But not many of them, and most people didn't expect it, didn't order it, and yet there the result was. It's one of the things that got me interested in, I was still at school at the time, and it kick-started. This idea, a lot of these things for me are reminders that discoveries can still happen.

The C&B1, I thought it was interesting to talk to you about this, though, because we have this discovery of the Cosmic Microw Background. In some sense, I think it's the best-known story in the book, which is Pensiersson Wilson, working at Bell Labs, who built their marvelous hunter. Have you ever been to see it, by the way? Yeah, I have. I brought my book to it.

Yeah, I took a picture of selfie in front of it. I had a deeply emotional experience in front of it. I resonate with that. In fact, in my first book, I call it a cathedral of science, of which they're very few of them. You know they're preserving it properly, because I know the leader of the effort. I know the leader of the effort. Oh, brilliant. Good. Well, do you say that it's fantastic because I think, I think partly because the thing looks like the photo, right?

Yes. In the sort of, the only other thing in my life that. Like the leaning terror of Pisa looks exactly like the postcard, it turns out. So it's quite strange to be standing in front of it. I felt that, but in a physics way with the antenna that Pensies and Wilson used. And, you know, the story is that they weren't sure what they were looking for and they found this background. And there's a crucial point in which they're persistent enough to care about this tiny background signal, as opposed to calling the drop of good on and going to whatever passes for a pub in Homdale, New Jersey,

to have a beer at the end of the week. So, you know, they get a lot of credit, but, you know, they weren't looking for this. for their signature. They didn't know that's what they were doing. But I actually think it's, it might be the one discovery that, that I get away with accidentally. So in the introduction, I report a conversation with a gin and tonic and Meg Yuri, who's the marvellous professor of astronomy at Yale, who helped understand how black holes fit galaxies. Meg's really wise. I try and have a drink with her whenever we're in the same place so I can get, you know, advice and wisdom and things. But when I was talking about the book, she said that she didn't think there was a single

discovery in 20th century astronomy that was major discovery that was made deliberately. And the thing is, we got lucky with the CMB, because down the road, there was the Princeton group, Dickie and Peebles & Co., who the story is that they pick up the phone, they find out this discovery has made, Dickie goes, boys, we've been scooped, and they publish their theory paper next to the discovery paper, which is true. But what I hadn't realized until I did the research for the book was that

they'd already started fundraising to build their own experiment, which would have detected it. Yeah, and more than that, sorry to interrupt you. But so Wilkinson is my grand advisor. Oh, there you go. Okay. You know this world. And Dickie, I never got to me, but I loved him by his work. But Dickie had predicted the CME that you could actually detect this.

And he invented the enabling technology. So I went into a little bit more detail in my book. There was a guy named Ome, not the famous Ome of resistance fame, but the guy's name was Ed Ome. and he had the measurement, and you mentioned that he basically said, oh, it's a bit of extra fuss, and then he went to the bar. So I always use that as an example of systematic error analysis can lose you a Nobel Prize. But the fact is, Dickie invented the enabling technology. It's called a Dickie switch.

We call it phase sensitive detection or lock-in amplification. He knew how to do it. He built it in 1943 for the war effort, and he had actually predicted the existence of the C50. And there weren't measurements for the 40s, right? And they weren't sensitive enough. at the time. And lest you think I'm doing too much hagiography, the reason that paper was published next to the paper by Penzias and Wilson is because they wanted to get the Nobel Prize still for the interpretation of it. The paper by Penzies and Wilson is excess in ten and temperature

at 40, 30 megastime. Who cares? Like, no one never think of that. But then you see like a primordial fireball in which, by the way, they never mentioned the word big bang in that paper. It's astounding. So go on. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. It's like the one that Hubble's like everyone. sites for Hubble for the expansion of the universe doesn't have the word expansion in it. But yeah, no, there's also, I forget who it was. I think it's a Pensias quote. It's one or the other, but you'll know the quote, where he says that he only realized how important the discovery was when he saw the coverage in the Nobel and the New York Times. Yes, and they were about to get scooped. They were going to get scooped in the, you know, in the New York Times. They feared,

so they had to publish it. So I do, I do have an asterisk next to that one in my head, I think, because that's accidental only because the physicist tripped, sort of like, but they, you know, That would have been the great glory. And I think there are others you can point to if you look around. I mean, the other great one that's not in the book that's obviously not an accidental discovery is the great triumph of LIGO and the gravitational wave observatories that be built,

which is 40 years of grinding away at a difficult problem, hoping that at some point you'll see something. And so that's sort of traditional physics as we're taught how it's done, right? But the rest of it, this buzzing around in astronomy, I think it's a lot more fun sometimes. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. and it's appropriate we're talking now because it's right after solstice and so in the northern hemisphere we just started summer

although in san diego you'd never know it it's very cloudy yeah i spent all of yesterday explaining to people that the solstice can be on the 20th of june uh but you know the stonehenge did its job the sun rose and we could good for the rest of summer now it's still intact i heard it suffered a grave a grave injury it got sprayed a bit orange there's a long tradition of using stonehenge for protest but The Henge scandal that people should be paying attention to is twofold. One is Stonehenge is not a henge for some technical archaeological reason. It's to do with the height of the ditch inside and out. And then second, Stonehenge was built for the winter solstice, we think.

So everyone who was there a couple of days ago was six months early. You're supposed to be there in the cold of an English winter, hoping that the sun will rise over the heel state. If you really had a commitment to your cause, climate defense fund people, you would have stuck to it. Well, I just, you know, I'm just fed up with it being so useless for setting my atomic clocks to. We have a version here, Chris, if we've ever been to San Diego. We actually have a miniature version of Stonehenge on campus. And then we have these on the beach here at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We have a pier.

And the pier goes directly west. Therefore, at certain times of the year, it's called Scripps Henge. Right. And there's Salt Institute. Yeah, I look at Chicago where there's Chicago Henge and, of course, Manhattan Hedge. But the one I've got to go. always wanted to visit is Car Henge, which I think is out in, is it Nevada? It's somewhere in the American West, but is made of 1960s cars, I believe, and it's a reconstruction. I don't know whether

it's astronomically accurate, but I think we should go and test. Yes, that's right. We'll see if we can, we'll take our sextants and our astrolabes, and we'll have a go of it. I like the idea of an astronomical inspection, just turning up, two of us, you know, with special hats or something. With our telescopes and our, uh, and our, uh, and our, uh, um, um, um, um, and all sorts of other things that we'll be talking about. So I made a list of, you know, serendipitous discoveries in history, and astronomy does pretty well. Penicillin, x-rays, which led to the first Nobel Prize in physics, pulsars.

Obviously, you talk about past guest, Dame Jocelyn Bell and Burnell, microwave oven, Velcro, Teflon, vulcanized rubber, and radiocarbon dating, just to name a few. But which of these discoveries, you know, are most deeply connected to you? you're doing with Zuniverse and all the citizen science project. Is that, you know, kind of to go against my claim, you know, planning on serendipity? Is that inspired by your kind of fascination as I have with serendipitous discoveries? I think it should have been, but that I think I stumbled over citizen science as well. So my own story is that I grew up as an amateur astronomer.

And my great serendipitous event was the discovery of comet Schumacher-Levy-9, which crashed into Jupiter in 94. which I remember watching with my back garden telescope and we weren't expecting to see anything. You couldn't see the impact site. But a couple of hours later, it rotated around and there was this bruise that I could see in a telescope that I'd bought with money that I'd obtain selling ice cream

just to give you a scale of the telescope. And, you know, I woke my parents up and made them drive me to school so that I could look through the big telescope that we were allowed access to. It was that week more comet fragments hit. So I think this idea of discovery of serendipity of the unexpected It went deep and early. But then as I grew up and dabbled, it got into professional astronomy, I learned that people do things with surveys now,

that astronomy is occasionally going to Hawaii and having drinks with drain graves, but mostly involves downloading data and making plots. I did an astrochemistry PhD with a side-helping of cosmology with Offa La Havre, working on large datasets and then started working on Sloan, which has had a database of a million galaxies, right? And you've studied their properties by making plots out of careful cuts through that database. And it was that effort that led to Galaxy Zoo, so the first of the systems and science projects I ran, where I got told off, actually.

I came for a job talk here in Oxford looking for a first postdoc, and I got about three slides into my seminar. And I said, we've divided the galaxies into blue and red, and that's spiral and elliptical. And about three people in the room stood up. but started screaming at me, because not all red galaxies are elliptical and not all blue galaxies are spiral. And one of them was particularly intense because this was Kevin Schwinsky, who was a student at the time, who just looked at 50,000 galaxies himself. And for the work I wanted to do, I needed another 950,000 classified. And Kevin wouldn't do it. So I tried buying him beer.

That didn't work. We put them online without really thinking about it, thinking that maybe, I give talks to local astronomical societies. We've got a great, culture of local astronomical societies here in the UK. So I thought, okay, talk to 50 people twice a month. Each of them goes and does 50 to 100 classifications. In five years, we'll have had all the galaxy seen. This is a great side project. I was scared of my advisor and just trying to get anything to happen. So I was like, I'm going to put two weeks into this with a bunch of volunteers. And then we got 70,000 classifications an hour, which I didn't expect. And this grew into the Zooniverse. But one of the things that happened really quickly was that we realized that showing people data means

they get distracted by it. And so people find things that you're not expecting. The early example from Galaxy Zoo was that in our naivety, in my naivety, we'd said, you know, you might find some rare things like ring galaxies, you know, these nice, beautiful things like the cartwheel. If you find them, drop us an email. And it turns out about 3 to 4% of all galaxies are rings. So we got quite a lot of email, which we eventually turned into a systematic search for

these things. But it was this crucial idea that people, and we can talk about some of the examples if you want, but people realize that they could get distracted by things. And so we had, my favorite example, still the green peas, these small round background galaxies that were discovered by the volunteers that turn out to be dwarf galaxies that are turning all of their gas into stars for reasons we don't really understand. They may be the local analogs of what's happening, what we're seeing in some of these James Webb, JWST pictures in the early universe.

These might be the last galaxies to go through that process. Or there's some weird type of local galaxy that we don't. I understand. There's 200 papers arguing about this stuff now. But as well as we've got green peas. They're now green bean galaxies as well. We've got most of a salad. But they were found by volunteers just noticing. They've been in papers since the 1950s, but no one had paid any attention. So it became clear that one of the things this sort of distributed citizen science, where you have hundreds of thousands of people online looking at data does for you is that

it lets you find unusual things. And as we've gone forward, we're in the age of machine learning now, of course, where large data sets can be processed by machine, but something very interesting is happening, I think, which is that finding how unusual things are, if you want to list the most, the hundred most unusual images in a large dataset, we've actually got quite good machine learning techniques that let us do that. And we're playing with those. We've got collaborators in computer science, and lots of people around the world are playing with this. There's just a whole conference on this in Tucson. But being unusual is not the same as being interesting. And as I know from my teenage years,

And so, you know, identifying whether something's interesting or not is a very human thing. And the bit that we haven't cracked yet is how to quickly identify unusual interesting objects. And so a lot of my work is on that, inspired by sort of these strands of my life, sort of an early search for serendipity, this book, and then the capacity that Zooniverse gives us. Well, I realized it was negligent in my duties that I promised you early on. and I always promise my audience, which is to do the thing you're never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. Chris, are you ready to judge accidental astronomy or our accidental universe, depending on which side of the pond you're on,

and explain the title, the subtitle, and the magical cover art that we see. Yeah, well, they're both good, I think. They're very different. I'm going to get my copy of accidental astronomy, which has only been out for a couple of weeks. So I'm still getting used to having this in the house, which is nice. So this is, should explain, this is the, North American edition. So it has a different title and cover, and it has one extra anecdote in it, which I can

either tell you about or I can leave your readers. Why not? Actually, why not buy both? And then you can compare. The audiobook is also the American edition, just so you know. But, yeah, accidental astronomy does what it says on the tin. You know, this is what we've been talking about. We're talking about stumbling over truth in astronomy.

And I really like the simplicity of the two words together. because when I talk to people and tell them I'm an astronomer, one of the three most common things they say is, you must be really clever. Or what's my horoscope? No, no, I don't get that so much. The other two are, have you found aliens and do you know Brian Cox? The second one's probably.

I guess you could translate to Neil deGrasse Tyson in the US, but, you know. Or Brian Keating. Yeah, yeah. I think probably you, maybe you and I are eighth or ninth on the list. Who knows? That's right. I think it's quite a surprising title. I think it's like this is not.

how people perceive what we're doing. And I think that that's quite fun. Subtitle is how random discoveries shape the science of space. Well, we've covered that, except that I had a long argument with the publisher about random. Because random is not the same as accidental. Yep. So let's get into that because there's a concept of different levels of luck.

And there's blind luck, which I interpret as random. Then there's something like increasing your luck surface area. I just went up to L.A., just a quick aside to go on a podcast. and I met this guy. He's like a TikTok influencer. And I had never really looked him up. I was going to be in L.A. anyway. I looked him up.

His name's Candy Ken. He's got like 40 million followers, more than you, Chris. And I'm looking at this guy. I have very few followers on TikTok. You'll be surprised. I was at a podcast earlier in the day. And this guy who was a little overweight, older, not in good shape.

And I found myself I was drinking coffee, eating like candy bars. And then I went up to this TikTok, you know, punk, model, candy. And I was like, don't even, I don't even want to have any water. And so the notion of surface area, of luck, of surrounding yourself by people and putting yourself in the position, you know, Penzius and Wilson had the exact literal same horn as Ed Ome, but they did something different. So what is luck? What does that mean? And what has randomness got to do with it? The randomness provides the opportunity. So, you know, if the microwave background had been

an order of magnitude less bright, you know, which we may exist in a universe one. There may be other universes where that's true. Pendium Wilson could have heard all the perseverance and scientific gnawes that the universe has to provide and not found it. So, you know, there is a right time, right place thing. Jocelyn, you know, Jocelyn Bell-Bernel's project was to look at the scintillation of radio sources to try and determine whether they were near or distant. This world that she was living in was one in which we first discovered there's a radio

sky, not just a few individual sources. you know, it was, in some sense, blind chance that she managed to find the pulsar that made her famous. And actually, for Jocin, there's this other slice of luck that I really like, which is that having discovered this source, which repeats really rapidly, they were worried that it could be something to do with the telescope, the antenna, the electronics. And so they rejigged a neighbouring telescope to be able to detect high frequency changes. And they, Jocelyn, Anthony Hewish, her supervisor and the rest of the team in Cambridge, which crowded into its observing hut to see if they could pick it up.

They knew when it was going overhead. They knew when the telescope should pick it up. And the pen that was recording the results did absolutely nothing. And for eight minutes, they were convinced that it was a glitch. And then the pen moved. And the thing that Jocelyn will tell you

is that if that had been, what had happened was they'd miscalculated. Somebody had made a mistake in the calculations about what was overhead when. You know, basic astronomy error. if that'd been 28 minutes, they may have gone home. They may not have been recording. And so that's blind luck, right?

That's random. Of course, the piece of the Jocelyn story that isn't there is that when she saw this signal for the first time, something in the back of her bright, she was attentive enough and she was awake enough and interested enough, that she realized she'd seen that thing before, and that she went back and found it and was able to follow up on it as a repeating source. So lots of the stories in the book, we haven't talked about it, the discovery of the fountains of Enceladus, which are, initially start off with a strange reading on a magnetometer that was only on as a test.

But the thing that's cool about that story is that the team were just testing their instrument worked. They got data. Most people, I think, would have said, okay, that worked. I'll have a quick spot check. Yeah, everything seems to be fine. They did a complete dry run of reduce the data as if it was going to be interesting. And then it turned out to be interesting. And then they went and advocated that maybe we should fly back and turn the cameras on or on the next pass. We should turn the cameras on and have a look. So lots of these stories have, yes, you need to be the random trance, but the reason we're hearing about the story is that somebody had that sort of persistence and ability to follow up. And I think one of the things that, you know, that we're

away from the cover and we will get back to it, but one of the things that, actually I can pick up, if we look at the UK cover, this is our accidental universe, because I think it sounds a little more sort of British and pretentious. But one of the things I love about this cover is you have a variety of interesting things at the top. There's Enceladus and there's Uma and a few other things. But you notice the telescopes are all looking the other way. They're deliberately looking away from the interesting stuff. And I'm slightly worried that in today's astronomy,

we've got very bad at giving ourselves time and space to follow up on the unusual. As things have become more efficient, it's much harder to chase the unusual. And so there's a subtle message for professional astronomers in the book, too. I'm said at you and your publisher for not putting Penguins. on the cover. I mean, how do we talk about phosphine? And I actually just went to, we have in a local aquarium here called the Birch Aquarium and they've got these penguins here. And I'm thinking I'm naming one of them, you know, donating the money to name it phosphine. Because I just think

that's incredible. You know, I got a call. I used to work at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. And if you know Chicago, just down, as I think you do, just down the road, there's the shed aquarium. Yeah. And for a while, the number one reason, I think it's better now, but when I was there. The number one reason people gave for visiting the Adler was that the line for the aquarium was too long. And our director of development used to say, look, it's an indoor zoo. What do you want me to do? So the phosphine story is a perfect excuse for the Adler to get penguins, and then we can compete with the shed. That would be phenomenal. I want to ask you about an accidental discovery by my hero, this gentleman here, not far away on the continent, you know, long before Brexit was a thing,

Galileo. And he took a device that had been invented by a guy named Hans Lipper Shea, about 300 miles away from him at the time. And he did something that old Hans didn't do. And I want to ask you, in your opinion, as an expert master of explaining the sky at night, how, why do you think that good old Hans never went like this and then like that at night? I mean, it's inconceivable that for seven years. It took seven years before anybody thought to take this thing above the horizon, the perspective, the

perspective tube. Why do you think that was? Well, I think the story is more complicated that, and I should say I'm not a historian of that period at all. So this is stuff I've picked up rather than any deep expertise, but it's true that you have to realize that Lipesche wasn't the only person who invented

this, this idea of putting lenses in a sort of interesting order to allow you to see just that things cropped up. It was motivated by a a technology development producing lenses had become cheaper and easier. So across the continent

there are people who, we think Lippe She was first, but there are people who have their claims to get their fast. So these things were all over the place. And then the other thing is that Galileo wasn't the first person to look up. There are other records to people doing it.

So in the UK, we tend to talk about Thomas Heriot, I think his name is, who mapped the moon around the same time that Galileo did. It's the same day, yeah. I think it was like the same day. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Talk about getting scooped. Right, Chris? Because you're right. Once you've got the instrument, it's an obvious idea, right? But I think what Galileo had was a publishing network, right? So he was in a way that lots of these other people weren't somebody who was thinking about science, who was making money from science. He had patrons who were funding him to do what he would have called something like natural philosophy,

but we'd think of as science. And so he had the better publication record and was plugged into the network of quite aristocratic people. So there's an interesting thing in this country what happens in the UK. I know a bit about this because I was mixed up. I was on the board of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich for a while. It's part of its museum existence and everyone should go and see it. But here, the people making the lenses are tradespeople, you see. They're doing it for military purposes, on commission.

But they're basically people who work for a living. Whereas science at the time, because we're a little before the foundation of the Royal Society, is done by gentlemen. And so there's this disconnect between the people with the time to write about and think about what they're doing, and the people who are making the instruments and presumably having fun at star parties, as far as I can tell. So I think it's this, but you're right,

that Galileo's discoveries were, I mean, one of the nice stories about Galileo is that he clearly saw value in the publicity in being first. I mean, people know maybe the Anagram story, right? Where he would publish first by sending really obscure anagrams to his rivals. And the idea was that... The highest planet is threefold. That's right. Yeah, yeah, which got translated as something like Mars or Venus has two bumps

or something, didn't it? There was some, yeah, there's the Saturn's Rings. He's interested in publicity in a way that some of the other people wouldn't, that wouldn't have come naturally. So, Gallow's many things, but he's not a patron of open science. No, he's not. Yeah. In fact, Cedarius Duncius was basically to consider. seal how the telescope was made. He never even gave one to Kepler, if you can believe it. Chris, let me ask you a question. How can scientists like me, professional scientists, increase our mindset and our surface area for serendipity? Yeah, I think it's a really good question because we don't live in,

I wouldn't come right back to start. We don't live in this Hollywood version of science, right? We're not sitting around waiting for ideas. I always, you know, I'm sure you do too. I get these correspondence who say, look, I've figured out what dark matter is. Could you just do the math on my idea. You know, or, you know, I don't understand why astronomers aren't considering my idea that dark energy could perhaps be quantum in some way or whatever the theory of the day is. They're often retired engineers. I quite enjoy engaging with them for a bit.

But they share this idea that we're in an idea poor space, right? That we have few things that we want to chase. Whereas actually, there are many more things that we want to observe, think about, theorize about, write simulations about, write papers about, than we possibly have time to. So I think you're a senior scientist these days, so am I. I think we need to keep space open for early career researchers, who, let's face it, do the work to try speculative things,

to investigate objects that might turn out to be boring. As you said, the ones in the book are the ones that turn out right. But imagine if Jocelyn was a PhD student now, and she spent three months on this weird scruff that she thought she saw, and it turned out it was something in the detective. A good advisor would say, well, we learned something about the detector. We could put that in the thesis anyway, and we'll find a way to publish it. A lot of people, under pressure, would say, well, it's a shame we've spent time on that.

And so I think it's about creating space for us to follow up on the unusual things. There was this conference I mentioned in Tucson. I went virtually, but organized by Noir Lab, who run the US Optical and other big observatories. And it was about, it was rare gems, because it's Tucson, about how we find unusual things. And it was fascinating. It was a completely unique conference to me in my career because it's clear that we have methods now that let us find unusual things in big data. We need to worry about whether they're interesting or not, but that's a separate issue. But what's also clear is that the overlap between the people who are doing that work and the people with the capacity to follow up

those things is almost zero. So there are papers from 10 years ago where people have said, look, these are the 20 most unusual galaxies in all of the Sloan Digital Size Survey and no one's written a single paper on any one of those because no one's had capacity to. So I think we need a bit of a step change to allow that kind of work. And there was a grants panel here in the UK, not an astronomy one, that used to have a system where 20% of their funding was for speculative work. And if you just ticked a box, you said this application is speculative. And if it was speculative, then you didn't have to explain what the outcome would be.

You would just have to say why it was interesting. And I think we could do really quite well with having 10 to 20% of telescope time, perhaps of funding on things that are speculative, where you can just say, look, no one's looked for this type of thing before. Or, you know, we've got this class of object, and we don't know what it is, so we need to look at it. I think we've lost the ability slightly to do that sort of thing. Hey there, it's me again.

Exploring the universe through the lens of accidents is something I never thought I'd be doing, but now I'm getting to do it. And I want you to know I've got a special, offer for you and it doesn't cost you anything. In fact, it may net you one of these beauties, a real meteorite, a real piece of the early solar system. And that's if you join my Monday magic mailing list at briancaidam.com slash list. If you have a dat edu email address, you're guaranteed to in one of these beauties if you live in the United States. Now back to the episode. I hope you're enjoying this romp through the cosmos and maybe you'll get a real piece of it yourself.

Yeah, I think you're right. I guess the follow-up question to the previous one about, you know, ways that scientists, professional scientists, like me and you and our students and collaborators can make use of serendipity, there's a dark side of it too. And the connotation of accidental as, you know, kind of making a mistake. Like, no one said, oh, I had a, I had a car accident. Isn't this great? The serendipity that brought the Ford Bronco into my Tesla. So are you worried a little bit about that connotation? Oh, scientists don't know if talking about Chris. Why should we trust you guys, as I asked Lisa, about alien. atmospheres, you know, about, you know, if we, if we, you know, make all these claims about alien

atmospheres, when there's all this controversy, as you might say, about our own atmosphere and global warming and scientists don't agree. Chris, are you worried about that? The connotation being misapplied. It's obviously important. And I think thinking about how we communicate about our science and about what we're doing is vital. One of the reasons to do astronomy is, I think, that we happen to be in a science that people care about. And so it creates a a place where we can have conversations about science in a way that's difficult in some of these more contentious areas, right? We can have a conversation about why you crazy cosmologists believe in inflation and we can learn about models and inference that way in a way that's a little lower

temperature most of the time than if we talk about climate change or environmental issues or medical issues that become very personal for people very quickly. And so I think it is important, but I think the way to build trust is to show our working. I think this is really fundamental because they're in the world that certainly your society and my society are in the middle. We're in the middle of an election campaign here in the UK. You know, we're in a world in which there's no shortage of people stating facts boldly that may or may not turn out to be true. And as scientists, we can easily get lumped with people who are playing that game. We can sound like the problem.

You know, the statement, the other party's tax plans will cost you. £2,000 a month sounds like the same category of statement as the Earth's climate is warming and the average temperature will go up by 1.5 degrees in the next 50 years. Those sound like the same category of statement, but one of them has an enormous body of scientific research and consensus building underneath it. And the other one was invented by a researcher because it sounded good on the news. So I think we're not going to win by sounding like another bunch of people with facts to sell. We win by getting people to be fans of what we're doing and pay attention. So that if you followed along with the adventures of Jane trying to prove that

phosphine is real or your search for proof of inflation or my, well, whatever it is that I do for a living, whatever I get distracted by next, then I think when you come to read a news story that says that coffee either cures or doesn't cure cancer, then I think you're equipped to know what questions to ask next. I'm really struck by the fact that I had a very different pandemic from many of the people I know because I have a set of skills involving going online. I'm no epidemiologist, but I could at least filter out who to trust and how to get information. And so I was better informed than a lot of people. And so I could make choices that were based on that.

And I'm not blaming anyone who suffered during the pandemic. Yeah, there's also life choices as though. But it was just very clear to me that I knew things that you weren't getting from the media. And so I think we in astronomy, by demonstrating that, can get people to the point where they have those skills. You said 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 ocean front 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. One of my favorite aspects of the book is when you talk about the Hubble Deepfield and the origin of that as sort of, again, you know, enforced serendipity or something like that. But I don't want to talk about that. I hate when I'm interviewed by podcasters and they, you know, can you explain the whole book in such detail that, you know, my readers and listeners don't have to buy it. We should just say that the deep field is a great story and it's not one, I knew bits of it, but I didn't know the half of it. And so that was another one that was fun. Yeah, you explain it so masterfully, I learned a great. deal. And again, I thought I knew it. But I want to talk about it in the context of a challenge again to the scientific orthodoxy, big cosmology, big NASA. With the James Webb Space Telescope, which made its own version of the HDF, we now hear claims that the Big Bang never happened. Or I'm running an interview with Regenda Gupta, University Ottawa, who claims the Big Bang

happened, but there's also tired light and it occurred 26 billion years ago, not 13 billion years ago. How do you react to these new claims based on evidence from new? instruments, but that claim that things as radical as the Big Bang never happened and the steady state and tired light models need to be resuscitated, also being done by citizen scientists, right, Chris? Yeah, I think we're certainly got people helping us sort through JWST galaxies and so on, so that's good fun. But, yeah, I think this is a really good test case.

So, you know, in my role as it's not aliens guy, I should probably say where I think we are, We've actually got a Sky Night episode coming out if you're in the UK next month in a couple of weeks' time that we'll cover some of this stuff. We're doing a JWST two years on story. But where we are is that we found, like we did with the Humble Deep Field,

that the early universe is filled with galaxies that are brighter than we expected. They've got more star formation. They have black holes, large black holes earlier, and mature stellar populations earlier than many people would have expected. So this is fascinating, really exciting. It's fun that it's the same mistake we made with Hubble 30 years ago.

So, 30 years ago? Blimey. Yeah, 30 years ago. So you can explain that by saying we don't understand star formation and galaxy assembly, or you can start to, the fun one, the one that everyone wants, because again, we want things to be wrong, is to start fiddling with cosmology. But what's been really interesting is that there's been a whole variety.

One of the fun things about it has been that different groups have got different parts of this story and lots of them have got publicity and people have, I think, followed along in the way that I'm advocating. But certain headlines have really flown. I haven't given a talk in the last six months without somebody asking me about that study that the universe is twice as old as we think it is. And, you know, I don't think the authors, I don't know that personally, but from what I've seen them say, I don't think they disagree with the statement that we have nowhere near the evidence we need for that to jump to such a radical conclusion, right? Maybe they would, but I don't think we're there yet. But again, we're bad at

talking about types of evidence, right? So it's a bit like the phosphine story. That got reported in some places as we might have found aliens. This is being reported as cosmology has been overthrown. Actually, we've got some galaxies doing some interesting things that we don't understand. We've got some molecules that shouldn't be there in Venus and that a complex model needs adjusting somewhere. And now the fun bit is to work out which spanner to turn which bolt with. So, but But it's certainly been true that the media, I'm normally a defender, usually I'm a defender of the media in these things. But in this case, I think the media's jumped very quickly to cosmology is broken. Sometimes with some prodding from our colleagues, sometimes, you know, there was a paper called Panic at the Discs, which was about the fact there were too many early, which is, what, an obscure 80s dance music reference, I think.

It sort of makes sense somewhere in the back of my head. This panic at the disco is a thing. But that was completely missed. And so, you know, that got reported as scientists in panic over... Panicking. It's a complex story and we're not used to telling the story of... We got this new telescope. We're basically having fun with it and we found some stuff.

Yeah, the fun thing about these galaxies is that we've got such good data that's slightly to people's frustrations, I think. We have to study them individually. Like, they've all got a history and a story of their own. So whereas, you know, I think beforehand people who prepare for, we will collect a box of red blobs and we will plot their overall proper, we'll measure their star formation rate, right? And maybe they'll all have the same star formation rate. Then we'll know what the star formation rate. Actually, it tells that just like the local universe, there's a whole variety. And so we're having to take them out of the box and sort of look at them closely and write a paper or two on each one. And in a few years time, we'll know what the general rules are. But it has proved this marvelous and complicated story that no one was really ready to talk about. Right, which is what makes it fun. Exactly. These are the fun bits, right? Yeah, I would say the flaws lead to new laws. You find some lacuna in your previous understanding.

That's the most exciting thing. Not like, yes, I've confirmed my hypothesis to seven dozen. That's right. Of course, there are many laws at play here, right? So jumping to fundamental cosmology doesn't quite, you know, we, we've only, one of the fun things is we, in Starformation is one of those things in astronomy, whereas if you write a one sentence description of how stars form, we know that. If you try and write a paragraph, it's all wrong.

Then you have to write a textbook. So there is this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I likened it too. I went on Joe Rogan podcast about a year ago and talked about this controversy. And I said it's like evolutionary biologist, looking at the earth and seeing, oh, well, there are these creatures that are, you know,

communicating on these slabs of silicon and glass and electricity. And that's not possible in our model. therefore the earth has to be 8 billion years old, not 4 billion. To allow times for such silicon things to form. Instead of saying, I don't understand how galaxies form okay, and that's okay. But sticking with this theme of being, because I have a lot of skeptics, I have the brightest audience in the known universe. You know, apologies to your audience, but they ask a lot of questions.

I want to get to those questions. But one of the things that comes up a lot, Chris, is this notion of, well, you guys in astronomy, cosmology, maybe you'll pass it the buck to me, past the pound. I don't know. Do you say that? We'd still say pass the buck, weirdly. Past the buck. Yeah, good. So, as you should. And so they'll say, well, you guys don't know what 95% of the universe is.

Why should we trust you on anything? I mean, dark energy. Give me a break, dark matter. These are like placeholders. And I've talked to, you know, Bob Kirchner coined the term, dark energy. I didn't talk to Zwicky. But the point is clear. We seem to have more that we don't know about.

How can we be trusted on things that we do claim to know about? Yeah, I think that's, I mean, but I think, I think that's a fair enough point, but I think it misunderstand slightly what it is to know something, right? Because it suggests that we think we know that there is a thing called dark matter. Whereas, you know, I just gave a lecture. I give lectures, they're online, or they're on YouTube for an organisation called Gresham College that since the 16th century has been giving lectures in the same seven subjects, one of which is astronomy.

So I'm the 39th professor at Gresham doing astronomy. Now they're on YouTube, which is not something that Christopher Wren was able to say when he was the sixth. But I just gave other things on his resume, right? Yeah, indeed. Well, he did very little astronomy. He got distracted by, you know, building St. Paul's Cathedral. London. Yeah.

He also, yeah, anyway, that's a whole other story. But I just gave a, it'll be online soon. I just gave a talk about your world, about Cmb and cosmology and so on. And I started by sitting on the edge of the stage and just saying, look, physics is hard. but it's not hard for the reason you think it's difficult. You think it's difficult often because no one's had the idea about what matter is. But actually, what's hard is we have all these constraints from many different measurements

that tell us what dark matter can't be. And so if you want to replace the idea, so if dark matter is the idea that there's a sea of small neutral particles that fill the universal account for most of the matter, if you want to replace that with something else, and lots of us would like to, you know, fiddle with gravity a bit, or prove Einstein wrong or, you know, have colliding universes, or whatever your theory is, that's fine, but you have to not break the solar system.

You have to explain galaxies. You have to explain galaxy clusters, which is different scale. You have to explain the cosmological model that seems to explain everything that's happened since the CNB. And doing all of those things at once, you know, down to the level where we, you know, we get into obscure arguments about, you know, whether the insides of dwarf galaxy, have slightly more, slightly less matter, because it turns out that's a really specific prediction

of the dark matter model. So we are stuck with dark matter, quite literally, because we're pushed on all sides. And every time we come up with an idea, we might have fun with it, we might play with it, we might see whether it could explain one aspect of the universe, but the reason we're still on dark matter is that we're sort of constrained by the observations,

because we've got really good at observing the universe. Dark energy, I think, is a bit, different. I think the evidence for dark energy is exactly as I've described with dark matter. We have these observations that tie together that tell us that something that seems to be making the universe accelerate and expansion is there and is real. There I think we do need a theorist to come along and have a big idea. You know, the Lintock-Kee-Tee-Ting field has yet to be discovered or whatever it is. Sorry, the Keating-Lintot field, because you can do most of the work. It's got alphabetically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. Fine. You know, we don't know what the Keating-Lintot-Field

it is, but we need to have the big... That is a place where there is a big idea waiting to happen. But the idea that we think that there's a dark matter particle and believe that isn't quite right. It's that all the evidence is best explained by that. But we're open to new ideas, but you've got to explain everything. Hey, there's a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer

or aspiring to be, maybe going to school, graduate school, or after school, or maybe you're a professor like me. If you're wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist. You might want to get my book into The Impossible. Think like a Nobel Prize winner with a forward by my friend Nobel laureate, Barry Barish. In it, we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate better, unlock your creative genius, and get over common pitfalls like the Imposter Syndrome.

I hope you'll take a deep dive into it, and I know you'll enjoy it. You can read a free chapter at my website, Brian Keating.com, slash books, and you can buy it at Amazon.com, an e-book, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot. I always say, well, at least dark matter. We have one example of dark matter. It's called a neutrino, weekly interacting and massive.

So until you can do that with your monde or anything else, you know, we can wait. We have claimed a serendipitous discovery recently that may excite you, and maybe we'll talk about some other time. But we've claimed to find tentative hint that the crab nebula, the pulsar, that you talk about in this wonderful new book, that its polarization access is slowly changing on a time scale of about two months. And there's no astronomical explanation. We can't think of something that's coherent on 60 light days timescales. So that would be some effect that's happening while the lights traveling towards us,

presumably. It could be, but the interpretation that some have used, we are not, we are, I'm cautioning people. I've had some. You're doing exactly what you said, you criticized Jane and Kay for saying, we found an observation. You know, is it, is it aliens? I did that. I did that, Chris, in this book, or my colleagues and I in Bicep did that. We were very much premature. No, we're actually saying the opposite. We're saying we're interpreting it as some either systematic. It's only two and a half sigma,

but we're interpreting the variation, the wobble periodicity of the polarization axis as some unknown systematic that we are dealing with, maybe some local contamination. Maybe there is some harmonic resonances, you know, with the lunar cycle. We think we've ruled a lot of these out. But some have claimed that this is the technique

that you would use to search, for axions. Axions modify, they modify the electromagnetic potential here on Earth, not in the cosmos, and they could distort the polarization. Because people have played this game towards the galactic center before, right? This is the people that

people have looked at sources down there. Yeah, well, we've got lots of pulsar measurements, right? So this is fun. And so if we're wrong that it's not that, we learn something about pulsars. I mean, which would be incredible. This object that you mentioned is the oldest, you know, continually studied object in astronomical history.

year from 1054. Again, we're trying to be cautious about it. We're trying not to overinterpret it. I want to ask you, you're renowned for explaining things as an educator. How do you balance, you know, kind of the passion that you have for telling stories? I mean, you're one of the most legitimate, highly published, highly cited scientist in the world right now. How do you balance that? You know, I get a lot of grief. Real scientists shouldn't do that. Our friend Carl Sagan never got into the National Academy of Sciences here because of his allegedly because, you know, he wasn't consider it as serious, even though he was an incredible scientist. But Chris, how do you balance the outreach you do and also make time for your students, your teaching, your hardcore, very,

very hardcore research? I think it's easier here in the UK, actually. I think there's a culture, which is spreading, I think. You could look at people like Katie Mack in Canada as well and so on, where universities and institutions that employ people to research and teach, recognize the part of the mission has to be to inform and educate as well. And so in the UK, there's a technical thing where all the universities are assessed every seven years. It's a terrible waste of everyone's time. But nonetheless, a third of your marks goes for your impact on the world beyond your research

and teaching. So lots of us in the UK who have dual careers like this have. have been able to find positions and be supported because we bring in money for the university that way. So there is this culture. If you go to the Oxford Physics Department website, I can't remember the mission statement we came up with, but it has three things in it. It's we do world-leading research. We educate the next generation of physicists and we engage with the public. So it's just seen as something that we do. How I find time for it all, I don't sleep a huge amount. But that's mostly because I have that I find that. I find

the whole thing fascinating. And as you'll have seen, I hope, in this conversation, my engagement is mixed up with the research that I'm doing. And I think that's been a nice thing ever since Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse that I couldn't tell you a lot of the time, whether I'm thinking about public engagement and writing a book or whether I'm thinking about grant proposals and the upcoming Rubin Observatories. So I think I am lucky that they combine in those ways. And being an infinitely distractible astronomer, you know, I think I currently currently have three separate research projects that started on the set of TV interviews, where I got distracted talking to the person and got told off because we went down a rabbit

hole, as scientists do when they start talking. You know, it took all my skill and confidence not to ask you lots more details about that pulsar just then, you know, but I've got lost occasionally. And actually, the stuff I'm doing on Installer Objects comes from an interview that we did about Rumauma. I did a search on the top Sky at Night episodes and all history. That's a long list. It is a long list, but you're in the top three or four, Chris. I want to ask you about the unveiling Titan episode from February 2005. Tell a story about that. What was it like to get 45 minutes of data from Hoagans? And you were at the center of history. I was, and I wish I'd ironed my shirt going back and watching that now. It was very early in my TV career. You kept your hair, Chris. I mean, I was at Mission Control in Darmstadt for Hoygens. So Hoygens was dropped off by Cassini and landed on Titan. And we did. Actually, there's a pre-story that a couple of months before we got the first Cassini images of Titan that had been tuned so we could see that there was stuff on the surface, that there were features there.

And Huygens came down through the clouds. We knew that it was sending back data, and it was supposed to last for a few minutes. And it actually stayed in touch with Cassini until Cassini disappeared over its horizon. So it's 45 minutes. I remember people's astonishment that they've got this much data. And then there were a few good stories from that night. So one of them was we got called. to the canteen to see the first images of Titan come up on the surface.

And there would be more to come. We'd get all the download from the display. But to see an alien world for the first time in the company of the people who'd made the mission happen was incredible. And they were exactly as you'd want a bunch of scientists to be. They weren't paying any attention to us. The image came up on the screen. And immediately they were like, right, what scale is that? Why is there a crack in that rock?

Is that liquid in the distance? Like, no, it can't be. Well, hang on. and they're pulling up specs for their camera, and it was just wonderful to see it was great. But then I went outside, and there was this queue across the car park. And at the front of the queue,

there were some local German amateur astronomers who'd set up a telescope and were pointing at Saturn. And I just stood near the head of the queue, and there were all these people, the engineers, the scientists who'd made this mission to land on Titan for the first time happen. I think none of them had seen Titan before. And they were all looking through a telescope,

looking at Saturn, being impressed by Saturn as one is when one looks at Sadduda, and then going, that dot, we've just landed there. So that was fun. And then the other postcript was the next morning. There was this press conference, which we got interviews. And John Zanecki, who's become a friend, who was the PI for Hoygens, gave the results from the penetrometer. So there's a little thing that stuck out the bottom of the probe,

and it told you how hard the surface was. And they'd had this confusing result. So it had been, initially, they got quite a lot of resistance, and then it was soft. And so he said in the press conference, he said, I don't know, maybe it's something like Crembroulet. And so that was the headline, right? The media took it right. Lans on Titan finds Crembrillet.

Brilliant. It's a great headline. It's a European mission. It sort of works. You know, this is all good. But the bit of the story that John didn't tell was that they ended up back in the lab. This got so widespread that he heard it people using it in conferences. So they did drop tests into Crembrillet with a flight spare of the penetrometer.

but it turns out it's not a good model at all, because the crust gives way too much. So, yeah, so those were some of the Hoykin stories. I've come to love, I've covered lots of things for the BBC. It's been such a privilege to do that. But the things that stick in my head, I think, are that one and the New Horizons fly by of Pluto. Oh, tell me about that.

How did that feel to be involved with that mission as well? Another planetary mission. Yeah, well, I was going to say they're both similar because they were transient events, right? It wasn't like going into orbit or something. It was like, you got what you got and then you were there. It was fun. We knew the New Horizons team pretty well,

and they were very generous with their access. So the good bit was, I got a great interview with Alan Stern, who I'm sure you've had on the podcast or should do at some point. And the best bit was sitting with Carly Howitt, who's now here in Oxford the next morning, and she was holding the first colour image of Pluto from the close flyby.

It's the one that you've all seen. and she just made it. Her and Alex Parker and others overnight, I hope I'm getting the team right. Certainly Carly and Co. Had spent their time pulling together different images that been downloaded, making this colour composite so we could see Pluto for the first time.

And I said, well, hang on, it's got more shade, you know, you do the scientist's thing. So hang on. So why is that so white? And why is, you know, there are these tholens on the top, these chemicals, but then why is there a difference in colour sheet? I don't know. I've just been making the image. And I thought to be there at that moment where the scientists were just asking those questions themselves was great.

I don't want to sound negative about New Yorkers, but there was also a strange aspect to it for me, which is that it was the team, I think, were very proud of what they've done, which made sense. And I think there's the weirdness around Pluto, so they had their jokes, they had their nine-sided logo and a nine-fingered salute to celebrate the ninth planet and so on. But it was, of all the spacecraft events I've ever covered,

it was the most explicitly nationalistic. So it was talked about by the team as an American mission to complete the American reconnaissance of the solar system. And at the moment of the flyby, not the moment the data came back, but at the moment of the flyby, there are people waving American flags and so on. And cultures are different,

and I'm not necessarily criticizing that, but it was notably very different from other missions that I've covered. And so normally there's a nice story, that one tells about internationalism in space. And all the people involved are international collaborators and Alan's worked with Rosetta for Issa and so on. So I don't think there's much to this.

But I remember I ended up writing at the time about this notion of an American expansion or conquest or exploration of the space, which as a Brit with a camera felt very interesting to be covering. Well, Chris, if you'll indulge my audience for a few more moments, They have tons of questions. I'll have to filter them out. I use Galaxy Zoo to filter out the 10 to the 9th questions that I got. So a lot of them are just praising you.

They love you in Sir Patrick. You're legendary. They love Maggie. Oh, yeah, my co-host, the legendary Maggie Adair and Pocock, who is a spacecraft engineer. She's amazing. First real question comes from a good friend from the UK, Joy Colbeck.

I enjoy the projects in Zuniverse. Great way to while away an hour here and there. That's pretty cool. instead of Netflix and chill, which is what I do. You can even do both, of course. Is space stretching as it expands, or is more space being created? If the latter, how? Talking about this in front of a cosmologist.

So the way I talk about the expansion of space is that it's space that's stretching, because that gets us away from the idea that the galaxies are rushing apart in some explosions. So I think it's a good way to think of it is that space itself is being stretched. That raises questions about how far you can stretch it. you start to worry about whether it's going to ping back or not, which don't quite apply. But I think a good mental model of the expansion of the universe is that it is space stretching. I think that's fair enough, yeah. And that avoids the question of where did the Big Bang occur, which you talk about in the book.

But they have to read the book. Don't give it away, Chris. Alex 79 asks, okay, if we want to travel through the galaxy, what is the best protection from cosmic rays? And the second question, can we build a spacecraft that protect the astronauts and allow them to function? Thanks, peace. Love the Gresham videos. You do a great job. Great. I'm glad to hear somebody looking at Gresham. I think if you can travel through the galaxy first, you can use the same magic technology that's propelling you at close to the speed of light to protect from cosmic rays.

So let's assume, like Star Trek, we have a magic shield. In the absence of that, I'm assuming you're building a big generational ship, like that you're going to be in for thousands of years, and water is a good shield. So I think, you know, the old sci-fi writers have this right. You have your ice or water around the outside, and then you live in the center of that. question comes from perhaps something more closely related to what you do. Brian Drawn asks how much research is going on for extra galactic stars and planets and what have you learned about it? Yeah, this is tricky. So galaxies we can do. But we only really see stars

themselves in the very nearest galaxies. So there have been my mate Julian Delcanton, who's now flatline in New York, has led big surveys using Hubble. to count individual stars and study individual stars in Andromeda and M33, which are the other two nearby galaxies in our sort of local group. What's fun about that is that we then get stars that have had a different history from the Milky Way. So we know that those galaxies have had different histories. They've encountered other galaxies at different times. And so we can sort of work out what is just stellar behavior

and what is the consequence of living in our particular galaxy. So those are great projects, but we'd love to look further, but it's pretty difficult. Planets and other galaxies, there are one, maybe two claims that there might have been the signature from microlensing where a planet gets in front of a star, but very difficult to confirm and very difficult. So planets, we're stuck to our own bubble around the sun at the minute. All right. A few more before we release you to the pub on a Friday evening. If Chris had a guest, Dennis asks, does he think we'll ultimately find microbial life on one of the first, of the moons like Europa or Enceladus, or might we see graphic evidence in an exoplanet sometime in the future? Where will microbial life evidence come from?

I think we're going back to Blind Luck. I think if there's our best chance of unambiguously finding life is there for to be microbes in one of the oceans on Europa, Organomedeemed or Enceladus, particularly Enceladus, where we can fly through the fountains and take samples. I've got this half-assed idea that the fountains of it. sell us. We know they're salty and slightly fizzy, the water that comes out. So I think we can sell the world's most expensive bottled water and fund our missions that way. And I think if you knew it

had alien bacteria in it, I think that would up the price. I think a few people would want to drink that. I'm trying to remember, there's a sci-fi trilogy in which somebody ingests an celadine in microbes. Not going to get that quickly. Anyway, that's where a Zimpic comes from, Chris. They got a Zimpic.

There you go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, actually. I think I've seen strange creatures in the bottom of a pint every so often as well. But so I think what's nice about that is it's clean, right? We can go and get a sample and either analyze it on board and bring it back. Exoplanet atmospheres, I have huge respect for people doing this. We discover so

much about these worlds. But look, there's a whole chapter in the book. We just spent 10 minutes arguing about politely about what is happening in the atmosphere of Venus and Venus is right there. So disentangling what's happening in a distant

exoplanet atmosphere to the level where we can say, yeah, there's life there. I think that's going to be really hard. That's a generational project, at least. But in the meantime, people like my mate, Hannah Wakeford, tell us that she's found an exoplanet where it rains sand in little harsh shards of glass. So, you know, we can imagine being on other places without having to look for life. But I do think the biosignature thing in exoplanet spectra is going to be held. They have soccer hooligans on other planets, I assume. Almost certainly.

Second to last question. You don't have to answer this. A very offensive question. question from Jim Evans. You're very tall. Is astronomy easy for you or do you still need a telescope? So I don't know. How tall are you? Sorry, I don't know if you can hear my dog going mad in the background. So he perhaps has reacted to the question. You don't have to answer. No, you know, if I've seen further, it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, even at six foot four. Let's go with that. Very good. Good. You're echoing and aping our good friend Isaac. Okay. Last real question. This comes from a viewer named Justin Pyle,

I'd love to hear your opinion on the slow modeling problem in galactic evolution simulations and how we might create a more accurate simulation without using a computer the size of the universe. I remember Brooks Simmons was here at UC San Diego, and I know she was involved in research like this. What do you think about this? Are advances in AI, quantum computing,

and the likely to supersede the need for a galaxy-sized brain? It would be nice to think so. I think the big challenge in simulation is always that you have to work out what you're simulating and what you're not. So, you know, the statements we made earlier about these confusing JWST galaxies, which have formed stars faster than expected. That faster means faster than when compared to a computer simulation that we'd previously trusted. But the thing to realize is that there isn't some poor postdoc who's written in the physics for star formation in great detail in that code. there's some recipe that they've invented

that says, you know, if the galaxy has this much mass, then forms some stars. Because otherwise you'd have to keep track of every single atom in the galaxy and its molecular behavior and its chemistry, all this gastrophysics that's really rather complicated. So the problem with

thinking about simulations and AI is that at least with the models that people are playing with at the minute, including myself, you slightly lose control over what you're simulating and what you're not You know that you might be able to show that you've got a realistic galaxy out, but you won't know the recipe that went in.

And so if I then compare that to the real universe and I find a discrepancy, I'm slightly lost, right? All I know is that I need to improve my simulation, but not what physics has changed. So I'm a slight skeptic about this stuff, other than, you know, the people who build big simulations are smart. And actually, I can recommend, I think it's out in the US as well. Andrew Ponson, who's from UCL to Durham,

just got a book called The Universe in a Box, I think it's called, I've just read, that that's great about what you can and can't do on simulations. And I think his book has suffered slightly because he's a realist. But if you want a primer on this stuff, that's really good. Yeah, and there's another book, I think, by Romeo Davy or Dave as well about simulations. Chris Lintot, this has been a joy. I hope someday we get to meet in person, and I can really see if you're truly six foot four or not in person. And we can enjoy a pint of some insubes. Celadian water and maybe a sprinkle of penguin poop and phosphine in it. That would be a lot of fun.

Perfect. I will serve that. We will call that cocktail a Keating in this household from evermore. So penguin poop versus saline water named in your honor. Enjoy the weekend. Enjoy your dog. And I hope to, as I say, meet in person someday. Thanks so much.

Right. Take care. Thanks for the chat. Bye. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're built. Fit for your ambition for citizens back.