Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Adam Riess: A Nobel Mind on a Cosmic Quest (#058)

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

  Nobel Prize-winning astronomer Adam Riess is my guest on this episode of INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE. Adam was an essential character in my book, Losing the Nobel Prize. Though at the top of his field, Riess is relentlessly passionate about perfecting his craft and he credits curiosity as the force that sustains his career. Riess and I discussed cosmological controversies including inflation, the Hubble tension, and primordial magnetic fields. We also discuss legacies, prize money, Albert Einstein’s ability to transfix physicists and laypeople.  07:02 Curiosity is the key to a fulfilling career in science. 18:22 9% and why it matters. 26:00 Einstein was a victim of bad data. 33:02 Resolving Hubble tension. 40:56 The pursuit of extraordinary evidence. 52:03 What ethical will does Adam plan to leave behind? 53:28 What would Adam put on a billion year old time capsule? 55:44 What wisdom would Adam share with his younger self? 57:53 How did Adam spend his Nobel Prize winnings? Adam Riess was a recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, and the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. He is also an Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He received his PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard University with Bob Kirshner. Adam Riess talks about his latest paper on the podcast “Cosmology Talks” here: https://youtu.be/2LN6dJi0og Find Adam Riess on the web: https://www.stsci.edu/~ariess/ Into The Impossible is a Production of the Arthur C. Clarke Center For Human Imagination. http://imagination.ucsd.edu @imagineUCSD Our four areas of exploration are: The neuroscience of imagination Science fiction and speculative culture Space and the cosmos Art and science as tools of the imagination ️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to the Into the Impossible podcast, a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I am your very fearful host, Brian Keating, co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center. And today, it's a great privilege and joy to welcome a friend from a completely different discipline in cosmology. and that's none other than Dr. Martin. I just had a PhD student graduate. His name is Martin. So my 16th student got slipped in there, confused with you.

Dr. Adam Reese, Adam, sorry for that slip-up. How are you doing today? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing good. You know, we first met. I was trying to think back when we met, and I realized it was a while ago, and that was probably during this Templeton Foundation-sponsored,

young scientist competition, blah, blah, blah to find the best scientist under age 40, which, you know, I have to say I did win. And what I'm curious about, I think all my listeners are curious about, are you ever going to get over that, Adam? Are you ever going to be able to live that time? I'll tell you, I've had kind of an inferiority complex since then, especially around you. Yes, yeah, sure. Yeah, no, it was what I remember, right, it was it was Charlie Towns's 90th birthday. Yeah. and it was at Berkeley.

And yeah, and it was an interesting time, lots of intellectual discussion. And I remember you were presenting results, I think, early Bicep results. Yeah, it was designed a Bicep. We were about to commission it at the South Pole. And that was right a couple months before we actually ended up shipping it out of town and bring it down there.

And, you know, I have to say they did a pretty good job, the organizers, because I think the subtext of the, of the symposium was to identify Nobel caliber discoveries, and at least between the two of us, we have one Nobel Prize. So I think they did a good job with that. I was thinking about you and I was preparing for the show. And there's a quote, and I have it in my book, and you're a major character in the book, as you know.

But in the book, I say a quote from T.S. Eliot, who's a Nobel Prize winner in literature, he said, the Nobel is a ticket to one's funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it. Now, I have to say, I think you're a counter example to this laureate, Elliot. Hopefully, rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. But the other thing I remember about you is every conference where we've ever been at together, I always note that you listen with one ear, but you're always typing, you're always working,

you're always thinking, pondering. And I wonder, you know, first question I have, you know, because I want to get into some of the weeds, technical weeds, but I think I asked my listeners for some questions for you. And a lot of them want to know what's it like personally, what kind of routines, what kind of habits. And so first of all, can you just tell a little bit about where you grew up, where you're from? And talk us through a day in the life of Adam Reese. Sure. So I grew up in New Jersey, kind of central New Jersey, you know, pretty normal, I guess I would say typical period, played a lot of soccer in school, you know, hung out with friends,

was always interested in science, though, without a doubt. And certainly the big, I would say catalyst for me really was a summer program that they ran in New Jersey called the Governor's School of Science. And so they'd pick 100 students throughout the state to come for a month during the summer between, I think, junior and senior year, and that during that time, you would take sort of advanced courses and get exposed to certain kinds of material. And at that time, I took a course in relativity, my first sort of exposure to really weigh out science. And, you know, I found special relativity to be just mind-blowing. I mean, I thought it was just, I mean, anybody, whoever

takes, you know, a little relativity knows, or anybody who's watch star, track knows, these concepts of, you know, aging, changing as you travel through space at great speeds and lengths contracting. And that whole thing seems like science fiction. And yet that's the real science. So that got me pretty fired up to pursue physics. And then I went to MIT, got my PhD at Harvard, and worked my way from Berkeley as a postdoc to the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins. And a typical day for me, I sort of wear two hats. I work on calibrating the Hubble Space Telescope, which I really enjoy and is important

for the kind of work I do. And then I teach at Johns Hopkins. I teach the sort of big intro to Astro, sort of Astro 101-ish sort of course. I have a number of postdocs and graduate students, and mostly we're just engaged in research, trying to understand the nature of the universe. And a question that people wanted me to ask is, what would you do if you weren't an astronomer in the parallel universe? Wow, that's, yeah, that's tough.

I really like history quite a lot. So I was a minor in history. I'd certainly thought about something in that world. I also have a number of friends who made the jump from doing data analysis about the universe to data analysis of, various kinds of financial and market data. And I don't know. I mean, there's so many interesting things out there.

It's hard to say. And another kind of, this is the Barbara Walther section. So if you break down in tears, I'll edit that out. Outside of work, you mentioned soccer, do you still play that? What kind of hobbies do you have outside? Yes, I like sports. I love music. And so I spent a lot of time listening to music, movies, books.

Also, I'm a young family, two kids, third grade and 10th grade. And so, you know, there's, as we all know, especially during this time, there's a lot of homeschooling going on. So I'm, you know, interested in quite a lot of things. And in terms of how you got to where you're at and career-wise, et cetera, what would you attribute it more to? Is it something that you had innately or something that was something that was, kind of brought out in you, maybe by an educator or a mentor. Well, first of all, did you have mentors? I know about Kirchner, et cetera, was your PhD advisor.

And we are friends as well. And he's a renowned for his mentorship. But have you had mentors, mentors and other people? I mean, I've been very fortunate. I've had wonderful mentors. And I've also been lucky to be at some great institutions and to work with fantastic facilities and even great colleagues, even people who weren't formerly my mentor, but I was on one very large team in the beginning, the Hisei Supernova team,

and there were some really great mentors just to sort of, you know, you learn the way science is done was so important. But, you know, I would say for me, curiosity, a very strong curiosity has been a driving force. You know, I don't consider myself the smartest person in the field, but I feel like I make up for it in being fairly dogged in my pursuit of puzzles. Yeah. Yeah, as I said, I mean, literally I don't know of anyone who has a harder, you know, working reputation than you. And in terms of actually just witnessing you, you know, they say a man's character, a woman's character is revealed when they think nobody's looking. I remember once, you know, watching, I was driving down the street near a synagogue that I was going to, and I saw the rabbi

pull out and I was wondering, you know, is he going to cross the double yellow line? Nobody's watching. He had to go the opposite. And he didn't. He waited for the, and I was like, you know, that's a true sign. So I think it's certainly true that you have that. I wonder, you know, when you get to the high, and this will be kind of the last question. Well, there's one more question from my wife that I hope she wants to ask you. Do you ever get this, you know, in academia, we have this kind of hunger games that I call the academic hunger games where you start off, you know, you're at MIT, one of those competitive places in the world. Then you have to beat out, you know, get good grades there. Get letters.

recommendation, go to graduate school, get a good, you know, thesis project, work really hard, write some papers, get first author, do this, get a postdoc, get a faculty job, and then eventually the Nobel Prize or get promoted. Do you ever feel like that scheme is maybe broken or detrimental mental health-wise? And I'll have one follow-up to that. But yeah, let me, I think that is not a great scheme, as you describe. I feel lucky in that I did not feel compelled by that scheme. Early on, I decided science was really interesting to me, and I would pursue it as long as it was fun and engaging, but that I wouldn't pursue it, you know, for, you know, checking certain boxes along some path. It was not part of my success plan that I had to even, you know, become a

professor. I sort of wanted to get a PhD and spend some time in the field. And so I think that if people find themselves trying to, you know, check boxes, you know, complete a list to get to a certain place, they're probably in the wrong field because science is a lot of fun if you're driven by your own sort of curiosity and passion. I would say like most things, most occupations. And so, you know, if you feel that way, you might work really hard from the outside people will think you're working hard. But, you know, from the inside, you might feel like you never work a day in your life because, you know, if what you're doing is so compelling, interesting, and, you know, as I said, we're blessed that science is one of those kinds of fields that

draws people who are just sort of curious and passionate. You know, we don't have to, you know, undertake some of the things that we do in science. We do them because we want to know the answers and other people do too. Do you ever feel this kind of contrasting set of emotions that some academics have told me about, and even I felt myself, you know, kind of there's a contrast between fear of missing out, fear of not being cited, not being credited, attributed, and then there's kind of the imposter syndrome, which is almost the opposite. You ever, you know, kind of, what are your feelings about those two conflicting? Yeah, those are great questions. You know, I think early on, in terms of the imposter syndrome, right, I sort of realized,

for most of us in science, there's a, you know, very narrow niche that we really, really become quite knowledgeable about. And so, you know, I was able to sort of recognize, you know, it's really just that niche that I know. It's not, you know, the broader picture. And then, you know, when, you know, the Nobel Prize happened, you know, first of all, as I said, it was never really my goal or target. And second of all, I quickly realized, you know, it's not an IQ test. It's not a, it's not a ranking of great physicists. It's for people who, for the most part, we're lucky. that they were in a right place at a right time and contributed to a discovery. And that really could be, you know, almost anybody in the field.

And so I feel like I, you know, I'm not Einstein and I would never pretend to be. And I'm sort of satisfied saying, you know, I have expertise in a tiny niche and I was lucky. And that's, you know, I don't have to impersonate anybody. That's the truth. So, yeah, well, it's rumored that Einstein made a couple of blunders that I want to get in. Yes, we did correct some of those. That's right. So, yeah, very few people can say that they actually, you know, superseded Einstein.

I want to get into that. But first, I want to take a step back. When did the astronomy bug, so to speak, first bite you? And where do you view sort of your place in this history of astronomy, starting with the first optical observant, observational, astronomer Galileo and then you and Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter won really the first Nobel Prize for an optical observational astronomy discovery, if I'm not mistaken. Right. How do you view that?

Is there a weightiness to that? Or is it just, well, you know, like you said, you're kind of doing it for fun. You might be a, you know, pro soccer player if this wasn't. I would not have been for sure. But, yeah, so, you know, in terms of astronomy and my first interest in it, you know, I was like a lot of kids, you know, standing outside looking up at the stars. and really being unable to fathom what was really out there. But, you know, it was a casual conversation I had with my dad when, you know,

maybe I was seven or eight with him pointing out that stars are so far away that what we're seeing is really the way they were millions of years ago. And some of those stars may even be gone now. And that just wrapping my head around that, this kind of image of a star not being there, but the light traveling, it just gets into those juicy issues. about, you know, physics and these really fascinating aspects of it.

And then in terms of pursuing optical astronomy, you know, again, that's to me where some of the most interesting questions just happened to be at the time that I was going to graduate school, these questions like, how old is the universe? I mean, who would have think in graduate school? You could even begin to tackle a question like that. Or, you know, what is the ultimate fate of the universe? And then a number of things happened sort of right at the right time, the development of certain tools for measuring the universe,

like these exploding stars called Type 1A supernovae. So my thesis involved improving the measurements and their ability to calibrate the universe. And then that quickly led to these projects that our team and Saul Permutter's team did, which was to push those measurements further back in time and look at how the trajectory of the universe, the expansion rate, what we thought would be slowing down, and instead we found to our great surprise it was speeding up. Right. And in that context, you know, I want to take our listeners and viewers back in time. So behind me, if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see an image of Galileo Galilee's prison,

where he was imprisoned in 1634 or so after writing the Dialago. And there's a wonderful new book we had on Mario Livio recently to discuss Galo Leo in this book. But, you know, I noted when I was talking to Mario that, you know, Galileo didn't, you know, it's pretty beautiful prison. I think Bernie Madoff would trade. Like, Bollard. And what is it about astronomy, you know, or kind of the cosmological that, without offense to our friends who study, you know, convective flows and condensed matter of physics, you know, really excites the mind and really does things to piss off people like Einstein. When he's reputed to have said, when he first saw, you know, La Maitra's,

conjecture that there could have been a big bang. Your physics is atrocious. And what is it about astronomy in particular, maybe the connection to cosmology, specifically, that irritates and is so provocative, in your opinion? Yeah, I think that cosmology has a kind of audacity to address these really big questions. Like, how did this all start and where's it all going? And first of all, you know, there are a lot of people who feel that, well, that's not a question for science. That's a question for philosophy or for religion. And, you know, there is a, you know,

there's a certain realm in which cosmologists address these things. We don't say why there should be a universe or, you know, what one should do in the universe, but, you know, the sort of, the kinematics, the motions, the distances, these are things that we can address and questions of, well, how long has this been going on? And so, you know, people like Fred Hoyle getting, you know, very upset at the idea of a big bang moment, you know, having a strong philosophical view about that. And so cosmology draws us to the possibility of addressing those really big questions, which, you know, is where a lot of controversy can be as well. Yeah.

So moving into controversies, the kind of immediate aftermath of Einstein's theory of general relativity in the early 1920s was something which I think would make. be nice to revive as a tradition and something called the Great Debates. And they took place not far from you in Washington, D.C., and this is famous, the Curtis-Lyfer debates. And you've actually written a wonderful treatment, I think, in Physics Today magazine, and, you know, you've done some writing and expository work for the public. So in that context, it was really professionals debating, you know, the kind of the

size and the structure and maybe the kinematics or evolution of the universe. Nowadays, we, you know, proof if anybody needed it that you aren't just resting on your laureate laurels is that, you know, you're deeply involved in pointing out that there may be a need for perhaps a second series of great debate. So I want to move now to this article that you and I were both quoted in in the symmetry magazine. I think it was about a year ago called the 9% difference. And this is really a startling discovery, which I think, you know, you, in all honesty, you were played perhaps the first and foundational role in bringing at least attention of cosmologists. And then you went through and have been doing some of the most yeomen, workman-like work towards understanding what's happening. So very brief, I know you've

spoken about this non-sium, but, and I'll have a link to folks in the article in the show notes. Can you explain what is this 9% difference? Why does it matter? And yeah. So, you know, over the last 20 years, we have sort of arrived at what we call a standard model of cosmology. You know, this is sort of our greatest hopes and dreams is to say we understand the universe. And when we say that, we really mean we have a model, a story, there's physics, there's components, we can explain from the beginning to the end how the universe would expand. And I would say that's been very successful. And so ours today is called Lambda CDM, as you know, stands for dark energy. cold dark matter and the other physics that we know. But the truth is we don't really understand

very well the nature of dark matter and dark energy. So it's very important to keep testing this model. And as you know, and maybe some of your listeners know, some of the most precise measurements we get of the universe ironically occurred just after the Big Bang in the cosmic microwave background radiation. You get a very precise picture of the universe and very precise measurements of how fast it's expanding. And it's a little bit like if you had a child, you know, they're born, maybe they're two years old. You can measure their height extremely well. Now, if we understand this model of the universe, then we ought to be able to explain then how that process continues, how the universe expands over the next 13 billion years. And we should be able to predict how fast it should be expanding today, just like with that child.

You could predict how tall they will become eventually. And then you go out and say, okay, let me ask. actually go measure how fast the universe is expanding today. And what we're finding, I would say with pretty high consistency through multiple techniques and methods, is whenever we measure how fast the universe is expanding today with different methods, we always get a higher number, and quite significantly so, than this very precise measurement at early times coupled with the prediction based on our understanding of the universe.

So it's like you predicted the height of that kid, and then he or she or she, grew to be, you know, two feet taller than, than you expect it. Now, that would be really weird with a person because we've seen many people grow. We know what the growth chart looks like, but we only have one universe. We don't get to say, well, this is what's normal for a universe. And, of course, on top of that are these unknown parts, 95% of the universe in the form of dark matter and dark energy. And we don't really understand the physics of them.

You know, cosmologists are very good at giving names for ignorance and, you know, making it sound like we sort of know what's going on. We say the simplest version, the most vanilla version of dark matter and dark energy, would have these properties. And what we're seeing at some level is the universe isn't quite matching that vanilla description. So, you know, is this going to tell us about a new wrinkle in the universe? You know, I don't know. I mean, it's a very hard problem, as you know, to even understand, you know,

what exactly that could be. And so many of us continue to work on improving the precision of the measurements. and sort of this, you know, the way science works between theorists coming up with ideas of what might explain it. And experimentalists and observers like myself trying to get finer and finer measurements to sort of parse those different possibilities. And what do you say that, you know, there are a lot of tensions in cosmology. And I think, as I said, in that article, you know, the field as a whole could use some good psychoanalysis, perhaps. But there are something to say that not only is the tension overwrought, you know, perhaps there is no tension. I'm speaking of in particular group in Oxford, led by Severe Sarkar and others that say, you know, things like, is there really a Hubble tension?

So. Right. And Sarkar actually goes even further and says, is there really dark energy at all. Right, right. So what do you make? I mean, he's, what is he the lead of theoretical physics at Oxford? I mean, he's a very esteemed, you know, professor in this. field, the researcher, what do you make of these kinds of attacks from eminent scientists?

So, you know, the fundamental problem with dark energy or the cosmotronst constant is the naive explanation is 120 orders of magnitude off from our sort of naive explanation of what it should be or how big it should be. And so in a way that gives infinite rope to people who are going to express doubts, particularly about the data, and say, look, you know, I'm going to not use this data, and I won't use this data, I'm going to throw away this data, I'm just going to cherry-pick this piece of the data, and I'm going to do this kind of funky analysis that one normally doesn't do, but I can do in this situation. And as I said, they sort of have infinite rope, because, you know, it seems so preposterous that there would be, you know, this 120-order magnitude match.

And yet, that's what the data actually says. I mean, I'm a big believer in not censoring the data in that way. And so when Severe looks at the data, he discards this cosmic microwave background data and barryonic oscillation data and lensing data and knowledge of the mass we have of the universe and ultimately ends up with the closest he can get to get away from dark energy is to actually have an empty universe, whether there's zero matter or dark energy. and that's still in tension with the data. And so, you know, I think we learn the most by sort of letting the data sort of guide us through the universe

because our ideas have not been very successful sort of amnitio. You know, Einstein himself, you know, was sort of fooled early on in his career in trying to understand the universe and how it would expand and what the dynamics were. Yeah, and do you think as I, you know, as I've kind of spoken out with some obviously, authors and intellectuals on the show, there is this notion that scientists are somehow immune from the very biases that make human beings human beings, such as confirmation bias, being one of the ones that's pretty prominent, going back all the way to Galileo and even his own imprisonment was somehow related to the fact that at all cost he wanted to kind of

holster the Copernican hypothesis, even when the examples he used were wrong, and he didn't use the best data that he had already collected, as Mario points out in his most recent book. But I think nowadays, you know, we kind of have this, you know, clinging to your priors or a reversion to your priors. And it's almost like the priors are becoming, you know, it's almost like confirmation bias is now entering in as a part of Bayesian methodology because of this priors that one must apply. And I wonder, you know, with people like Einstein, the thing about him, although it's not really clear if he's actually said, you know, is Lambda was his, as big as blunder, the cosmological term. I think Mario goes through and maybe debunks that in an earlier

book. But nevertheless, he had the magnanimity and the intellectual honesty to say that, yeah, he was wrong about this expansion. What do you make of the kind of the passion that, in particular, the work that one does, I get these letters every day. You know, Professor Keating, I've discovered Einstein was wrong. You know, if you help me publish this, I'll share the note. I'll prize with you. I imagine you don't need those. You don't reply to too many. I answered one of those letters, and it all worked out.

You know, Einstein was given bad information. He was told at the time that the universe was static, that it wasn't expanding or contracting. And at the time, you know, astronomers didn't understand the difference between the Milky Way and the universe. And so, you know, Einstein was not really a victim of his own biases so much as a victim of bad data. And, you know, he was trying to make the best of bad data,

given this, you know, incorrect information that the universe was static. You know, he sought a way to bring balance, the tendency of a universe with matter in it to start to collapse if it was static and some way to oppose that. And he made this remarkable discovery that the gravity of empty space itself can be repulsive and hold that back. you know, in a way, right, he discovered the greater possibilities, another feature of his theory of general relativity, which then, as you know, sort of went into hiding or dormant for a while as we knew the universe to be expanding, that Einstein wasn't given the right data at the time. And then we sort of re invoked it. So, you know, I've never really seen it as a blunder of Einstein. I've always sort of seen it as another statement of his sort of brilliance to be able to in 1916, you know,

discover the possibility that empty space can have repulsive gravity. And for us in 1998 to say, you know, I think he was right. So, well, to provide evidence that it looked like he was right. Yeah, I always say his biggest blunder was saying it was his biggest blunder. Thanks to you and your teammates. So showing on the screen here for those watching online that this model of so-called big crunch. And you may know there's another cosmic controversy, as our friends might say across the pond, which is, you know, whether or not inflation took place.

And this isn't a set of crackpots. You know, I always say the people that email me, Einstein was wrong. I always write back, well, let me know what you think about Boltzman. You know, it's always, they always choose Einstein. Like, you ever played Dungeons and somebody else? Yeah, when you were, when you're a kid, I don't know if you ever played Dungeons and dragon, but, you know, you kill somebody and then you get their hit points or you get somebody's army and risk and you get all their armies, you know, it doesn't work that way.

Right. You become, right. Do you become, you get Einstein's mantle if you knock Einstein's mantle? And sometimes I see that, you know, there's more than one person who's, you know, come out and said, you know, there's problems with the data. There's problems with the supernova data. There are these issues. I think, you know, again, with the higher you fly, as my Italian friend told me in Italian, but I can't remember, you know, the easier you are to shoot down. Right.

Because. But what people should understand, and I just want to point this out, that, you know, cosmology is hard. There's no question. The data is difficult to acquire and analyze. What leads to consensus in our field generally is when, as you know, many different kinds of data that probe the universe in very different ways come to the same conclusion. Likewise, for theory, when, you know, many different theorists thinking about things in very different ways come to similar conclusions. And your friends who write you these messages about, you know, I have this theory of the universe and, you know, and you wonder, you know, is this right? Is this person a crackpot?

you know, we wonder this all the time. I tend to notice many of those people, each of them has a completely different idea. They don't succeed in convincing anybody else of their sort of, you know, outlandish ideas. So, you know, this is part of the science process is we are able to reproduce the truth, the reality, whereas, you know, a mistake or an error here or there is generally not reproduced in dataset, likewise with theory, you know, different mathematical ideas are not something that you can develop and come to from a different direction, keep arriving at the same place. And so it's this reproducibility that really defines what is special, I think, about science, and generally leads us to think we're on the right track.

And so getting back to this, you know, discussion of another controversy, the existence or lack thereof of an inflationary epoch. This has come alongside it. I think both the discovery of dark energy and the discovery, or cosmic acceleration, and the discovery of inflation or things that are consistent with inflation, bring up very startling conclusions about, in one sense, the very early universe, which has a concomitant, you know, kind of co-equal prediction that we live in a multiverse if the inflationary model is correct, because it's almost impossible to develop models of inflation that don't feature multiverse-like extensions to them. You can, but it's very difficult, according to the two or three foremost proponents of it. And so that's led people,

as it has with the discovery of the accelerating universe, to speculate about the implications of the theory. I want to get into that a little bit later. But first, you know, on the technical side, do you feel that some of these implications of just acceleration itself, do you feel like they will be found to be related to, say, the inflationary epoch. I mean, they're both exponential, potentially exponential expansions over operating over different timescale. Yeah, I'll even throw a third in there, which is, you know, the Hubble tension right now is the appearance that there's still some sort of anomalous additional expansion. And, you know, we feel like there could be maybe as many as three episodes, you know, inflation, acceleration, and whatever's causing

the Hubble tension, which could have been, you know, anomalous expansion is sort of at an in-between time shortly after recombination or before recombination. These are things that are not easily addressed in our understanding of gravity without invoking some kind of energy of empty space. And so, you know, it just may be that, you know, this is really an area of physics that we're just beginning to sort of scratch the surface of that, you know, we see the universe go through occasional periods of this anomalous expansion, we're attributing it to excess energy and space. And, you know, maybe at some point we will understand

how they have some relationship between each other, you know, some ability to even predict or connect them. I mean, I'm not aware of it right now, but it's very compelling when you see something happen, you know, for the certainly second, if not the third time, just start saying, you know, haven't I seen this movie before? You know, sometimes, you know, our colleagues like to talk about anytime you invoke something strange going on, well, you're invoking the tooth fairy,

and you know, you're allowed to do that maybe once. And, you know, my question becomes, you know, how many invocations of the tooth fairy is it exactly to have inflation and acceleration and maybe even Hubble? Tension. Is that one? Is that three? I don't. It's hard to count. Yeah. And certainly, you know, our colleagues are nothing, if not creative in the theoretical sense and coming up with ideas. And I do want to talk to you about one idea that's my pet favorite for a resolution potentially of the Hubble Tension. And that's the existence of primordial magnetic fields. And her talk three gave recently on another competing YouTube channel. So I'm not going to mention this.

I just, I can't pronounce his name, but, but cosmology lecture you get. And you were sort of a little bit dismissive of the idea that, you know, you made a kind of an offhand quip that, you know, when we were in graduate school, we were off. And you can't explain something. Now, you may remember from my talk. But we did that only because it was so hard that it was sort of like cover for anything. It was like, uh, and in the area we all know we don't understand, there's magnetic fields, right? And so that, I mean, you know, there's a, there's a certain sensibility to sort of say a phenomenon we don't understand the excess hubble expansion and a thing we don't understand, you know, maybe they explain each other. I mean, I don't know.

Right. Well, I- One of the leading ideas now may be that, you know, if you have primordial magnetic fields, then these can change the way the early universe operates. And this quantity we like to calculate called the sound horizon that lies underneath the ability to predict the Hubble constant or expansion of the universe. Yeah. So that's, yeah. So for my little quip and retort to your quip, you know, as Arthur C. Clark said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. So for every quip, there's an equal and opposite clip.

kind of view primordial magnetic fields as the parents instead of the tooth fairy, because we know that magnetic fields exist on all structures that are gravitationally bound today. We have yet to discover a truly, you know, all-pervasive cosmological field that's not gravitationally bound, but you might give a talk at Hopkins last May, I guess it was. And I mentioned that there's a lower limit on a primordial magnetic field strength from the non-observation of these TEV blazers that do not have these GEV halos around it. And so now, the lower limit is pretty breathtakingly small. You talk about fine-tuning.

It's about a micro-nanogous, as I like to call it. And the limits that we're making from CMB experiments, such as Polar Bear, Simon's Array, Act, SPT, bicep, etc, are on the level of about a nanogouse, maybe a little bit lower than that. But a lot of the tests that we're looking for that probe a magnetic field strength are relying on the CMB's what they're called the CMB's power spectrum. So you make correlation functions, you four-a-transform them, and you get the power spectrum. That's sort of sensitive to the magnetic field to the fourth power, I believe. So it's very hard to make progress against things that scale

is a fourth power. It's sort of the first measurement you do, you pick all the low-hanging fruit. But there's another complementary approach that we're starting to invoke with our colleagues and the Simons Observatory and other projects around the world, which is to look for Faraday rotation, which is linear in the magnetic field strength. So that will produce a signal that would cause polarization rotation. And for those reasons, I think... You need a background source for that? Well, use the CMB's E-modes.

So we know the C&B has e-modes, and then we know the plasma had free electrons. And so the question is, do those fields survive? And it's exactly the epoch that you care about. You always have this really prescient observation that, you know, how do you define the early universe? Well, it's when neutrinos are important. Exactly.

And I think you could say, you know, if you could find these magnetic fields, which are ubiquitous, I mean, we have them in our bodies and we have it in our solar system and beyond. So, you know, if you could find that, I think that would require the least modification to the laws of physics. I always feel like, you know, Nima Akhani Hammed always says, like people that look for violations of the standard model, people like me, you know, looking for these departures from the so-called standard model, really, you know, maybe going down to fool's errand because it's very hard to break the standard model. is. Even when we talk about things like the Hubble tension, you know, we're looking for a wrinkle, not, you know, a paradigm change. And so like you said, something like a magnetic field in the early universe, you know, I think probably magnetic fields is sort of in the same position that the cosmontrol constant was 20, 30 years ago. That's right.

Well, I don't know really how to calculate or figure out what it should be a priori. I guess it's zero. And, you know, zero wasn't a good guess, and it was not really, we didn't have a profound reason why that ought to be. But, you know, physicists like simplicity. So if something isn't rearing its ugly head at the moment, right, then we say, well, it's zero. So maybe magnetic fields primordial have been, you know, zero for so long. And then at some point we'll go, you know, actually, we don't. There's this meme that I know that part of your productivity stems from the fact that you don't use social media.

Yes. Unlike me. Yes. So there's a meme on Twitter. my secret secret weapon. There's a meme on social media that when everybody says something about like new cure for COVID or whatever cancer and that you should always add just say in rats or you know, just say mice. It's always in mice and it's always like 8,000 cups of coffee equivalent in a mouse will kill you. So I always say, you know, the equivalent in cosmology should be just

say dust. And you know, one of the things I did the research for my book and I came upon some papers that you wrote with Bob Kirchner and others back in the 90s. or mid-90s, again, very, very trenchantly observing that there could be prosaic explanations for what we were seeing. And I wonder, you know, and even things that come about now, like this Tabby Star, or you see things, you know, these, these Omuramura or things like, you see all this evidence for literally the litter of the cosmos, basically dust. I interviewed And Rurian, who's Carl Sagan's widow on Friday, last Friday as well.

And, you know, we were just talking about, you know, the pale blue dot is really the, a speck of dust floating on a sunbeam. And it's really just highlights the pervasive kind of ability for dust to stymie observations on one hand. And on another hand, to kind of point directions to new fields of research. So I wonder, do you, you've done some research in a really wonderful paper I'll put a link to as well, which is just like this, you're just doing the work. I mean, you're saying like, is Sepheid crowding?

I don't want you to get into it now, but you're actually looking at the, you know, at the systematic errors. So the difference between a statistical error, which can be reduced with more data, and a systematic error that's intrinsic to your system or the cosmos itself is very profound. And it's much harder, I think, to get rid of these systematic errors. So are there still systematic errors that you would point to? I mean, I always wonder, like, how well do we know the astronomical unit? You know, like, it's off by one percent or half a percent. Pretty good with that. We've done radar ranging off the sun. You know, the way you find systematic errors is you give talks and you listen to your colleagues and your colleagues generally ask good

questions. And instead of just dismissing them, there can't be that, right? You kind of after the talk, okay, make a little note of that, you know, and you sit around, you try to think of ways to answer your colleagues. And, you know, they might seem at the time, especially, you know, when you're first starting out and research, oh, those are such unfair questions, you know, how can you. Or when you're about to publish a paper, that could be startling it. Right, that's right. But, you know, you really will do well to listen to those critics and then try and come up with an experiment or a measurement or a test. And if it succeeds, go back to them and say, you know, is this convincing or not? And then, you know, continue the process, basically, until, you know, we'd like to say, and it's true, you know, Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So, you know, I always thought that I actually had his daughter on and as well as Michael Shermer on. Yeah. recently and I said, you know, I don't like all of a sudden, my students comes to me with some data and I say, that's data, but I need extraordinary. Like, it's either good or it's bad. It's just

how much, how tight in the kind of Bayesian prior does it? But it's right. And in a way, how large a claim are you making? How, you know, how much supports this? And so, you know, I've been fortunate to be around a few things that required extraordinary evidence. And it's, you know, it's hard. And it takes, you know, it's more than any one investigator or team or group can do. It takes really the community, you know, firing at things in different ways. And, you know, we've all seen, you know very well, you wrote a book about a result that, you know, sought the extraordinary evidence and, you know, learned about, you know, the difficulties of dust. And, you know, the community is pretty good at, you know, digging into these things, asking these questions. And, you know,

it's rare, I don't know, in my experience, that something that's just flat out wrong survives that onslaught very long. Yeah, exactly. So I want to turn now, we've discussed that. I think you go through in your talk on this cosmology channel, I'll put a link to it, you know, what your kind of pet theory is. I mean, to the extent that you're willing to even say there's a pet theory, but I've always wondered, like, what would you, how much would you pay for a supernova to go off at, like, redshift of five? I mean, wouldn't they just settle everything? in your feelings? Well, say, that would be nice.

It might even be better if one went off in the Milky Way. Because if we've been off in the Milky Way, we could measure parallax to it, right? And so we would skip some of these steps. We use intermediaries to calibrate things. But, you know, if one went off, I mean, not too close. I don't want to singe anybody. Exactly. I was thinking, like, does he want to take out some colleagues there?

No, no. Well, if I could beam it at certain places. But anyway, no, you know, if we had some in the middle, Milky Way, we'd measure parallax and we would calibrate these great standard candles, you know, even better probably than we have. Yeah, exactly. So we talked about different tensions and so forth. Any other tensions that are particularly interesting to you? Yeah. You know, there are, I mean, to my view, the Hubble constant tension is probably the largest insignificance. But there are other kind of what we call curiosities. You know, there's something I've always noticed in the

cosmic microwave. You fit the power spectrum as a function of frequency or L. You tend to get somewhat different parameters over different ranges of L. So when two different experiments basically measure the power spectrum over the same range of L, they tend to get consistent results, which tells me that the experiments actually look pretty good. It makes me wonder if the underlying model is the thing that actually changes with L. And you've probably seen this as well. You look at the cosmological parameters around L of 1,000 and maybe you get a Hubble constant closer to 70. Then you do it more like at L of 2000 and it kind of drifts down to 64-ish.

Then you go out to even higher L, 2,000, 3,000, drifts back up into the low 70s. And, you know, as I said, when other experiments remasure the same patch of sky on the same frequency, they get consistent results. So I'm not as concerned about the experiments as I am wondering. And all these sorts of hints and tensions are more at the two and a half sigma level. They're not something that all on their own, you would draw a lot of attention to. But if you're trying to solve a larger puzzle and you found a solution or a story that weaved in a few of these things. So some of the people who work on, you know, ways of altering the composition of the early universe have made claims. Not only does it solve the Hubble tension, but it explains some of these variations with L in the parameters.

Or not only does it explain the Hubble concept, but it helps with so they call the Sigma 8 tension, which has to do with the sort of chunkiness of matter in the universe. Some things make it worse, in which case, you know, you go, well, that doesn't sound very promising. But so, you know, you do well to pay attention to sort of all these clues. You know, a lot of people say, well, it's not, you know, five sigma. I don't want to hear about it. Well, yeah, but if you're trying to actually figure out the next step, you know, you piece together a bunch of three and four sigmas. And, you know, if you can find a story that ties them all together, then, you know, can have the equivalent significance. Yeah, absolutely. I think about that in the context of, you know, these topology

measurements. I did a podcast with Jan 11, who wrote a book called, you know, how the universe got its spots about the topology and structure of the universe. Those are still outstanding questions. Access of evil, different effects. Yes, access of evil, the dark spot, the cold spot. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a, you know, there's certainly a few funnies that are hanging around. And, you know, I think smart people, you know, go to talks and, you know, write in their notebook and draw a circle around the funnies and they have their own collection of these. These are the ones, I believe, look legitimate. And, you know, they spend time thinking, how can I tell a story that leaves through a number of these? Yeah, that's wonderful advice.

And that segues nicely into a segment I'm going to call the big picture segment when we take a step back. I mentioned that we met first time 2005 at this Templeton, John Templeton Foundation, search for young scholars. And, you know, of course, the Templeton Foundation is heavily associated with searches for spirituality and the conciliance between science and religion. Not that it's to the exclusion of atheists, who won the Templeton Prize. But one question that I've had, you know, for you, the character of your discovery is a little bit different than, say, a blue LED or even a transistor or something

like that, or explaining a phenomenon that was known to exist, sort of retradicting it, as had been done in different cases throughout history. It was really a serendipitous discovery. I mean, you weren't looking for it. I claim in the book, as you might remember, that, you know, those are the purest discoveries. But I'm curious now in relation to the story. so Templeton is, you know, does your work have any influence on you, maybe the way that you think about your place in the history of science, or does it affect you personally, religiously, philosophically in any way? That's a good question. That's a really good question.

You know, I would say not very much. I mean, I certainly feel lucky or fortunate to be living in interesting times, as Confucius says. And, you know, I think there's no question that, you know, we will look back on the last 20 years in cosmology as a very special time. You know, we like to call it the era of precision cosmology. But you and I know, right, we went to graduate school, and at the time, people were saying, yeah, nobody knows whether, you know, there's enough matter to close the universe or not what the change. The age of the universe, yeah.

Who knows, you know, what the ultimate fate of the universe is, whether it's going to recalapse or not. You know, nobody knows, right, the age of the universe and the expansion rate to a factor of two. And I don't know about you, but I just sort of thought, like, if you show up in a cloud, and they tell you nobody knows these things, you know, probably nobody will ever know those things. I mean, it's just like they're the swords and the stones that are, you know, cast in there, you know, a thousand years ago and you're just going to have to live with it. And, you know, you and I got to see a lot of those topple over the last 20 years. We don't know the answers to everything, but I would say we went from, you know, almost like the pre-Magellian view of the world to, you know, post, ah, okay, this is the, this is the basic parts on the map. And, you know, I just feel lucky that, you know, we've been around during that time.

I would be pretty much just as happy just to have gotten to witness it and just see it and learn about it and get to go back to the last class and go, actually, we know this stuff now. Now we know this. All, I think, as humans, are fortunate to be around during the times when we've learned so many profound things that, you know, address people's basic curiosity about the universe. Absolutely. So these are questions from lay persons. First one is, do you feel differently in your approach to science now that you have won the Nobel Prize, or do you still feel the same as before? I don't think I have changed my approach to it very much. You know, it may be to a small degree it inspires me or reminds me, wow, you never know what's lurking around any corner. You know, do a basic measurement, do a basic test. You know, you might feel. find something. But no, I mean, I think, you know, science is science. I mean, whether you're, whether you're doing, you know, your physics freshman lab experiment or, you know, something with the Hubble Space Telescope. I mean, there's a process. You state a hypothesis. You collect evidence

for or against as you find out when you analyze it. I mean, that's that procedure. It's a beautiful procedure. It's, you know, science really has, I think, just about the best way of getting to truth and things. I mean, we can't answer everything, but, you know, our procedure, if we follow it, is really, really powerful. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. I agree 100%. Last question about the Nobel Prize, since I cannot resist, I've got you here. I can ask anything I want. You don't have to answer anything. Is there anything about the Nobel Prize that you would change, or is it pretty much okay as it is? Yeah. I guess the thing I would change is the size of the group that can be recognized. I mean, you know, I think it's, you know, this is a holdover from a time when science was literally done by a few people that, you know, it probably was not very limiting in the year 1900 to say, all right, what are we going to pick?

And we don't want it to include more than three people. But today, as you and I both know, science has done generally in large groups or teams working together. and that kind of division of labor allows us to do bigger and better, more exciting things. We build off of each other's work. We don't just start out like an Einstein say, I was just having a beautiful thought and I realized something amazing. You know, we really were like, I went to so-and-so's talk and I heard this thing and I thought I'll do one thing a little more. So, you know, I wish that the Nobel Prize could go to recognize teams, you know, sort of without limit in size. Fantastic. Yeah, the Peace Prize does that already, as you and I know. Okay, final questions,

and then I can take questions from the audience, meaning you. First question I have, as there's a concept that Alfred Nobel, of course, was aware of when he endowed his prize of a will, a material will, where he left his monetary and other possessions, physical possessions to other people. But there's also a concept called an ethical will, which is also composed. comprised within of Alfred Nobel's will, which is a notion that you have a certain set of values or higher thoughts or wisdom that you want to communicate. And for Alfred, of course,

it's the famous catechism of the Nobel Prize themselves, which is for the betterment of mankind, and these discoveries should agitate towards, not just in the Peace Prize, but even in the physics prize, it's to better mankind. So I want to ask you, in 120 years of life,

you leave your ethical will, not your material will, but what do you leave in your ethical will? Yeah. You know, I think the best sort of guiding advice or light that I think comes directly from science, from physics, from sort of everything I've gotten to experience is to be curious. That curiosity, it's sort of the antithesis, unfortunately, of what I think many people in the world suffer from today, which is a kind of extreme ideology where, you know, that's sort of the opposite of curiosity. You go and you say, you know, I know everything already, and I'm just going to beat other people over the head until they know it too, and it never works out that way. And scientists go in with a curiosity, and then you actually open your eyes and actually learn

about the way the world actually works. And often you're surprised. I mean, in our Nobel work, you were extremely surprised about, you know, what the universe was actually doing. And so I feel like as long as people in the future can hold on to that curiosity to go out sort of every day question their assumptions and go and look to see, you know, what is real, what is right, what is reality, what is rational, you know, that they'll be well served. Very nice. So then last of these questions, actually there's a second question. So that's kind of what you would leave in time.

Now I want to ask you, hearkening to Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous movie, 2001 Space Odyssey, There are, of course, these structures who are not quite sure what they are. They're these monoliths that actually exist and are meant to be encountered by human beings, perhaps. And, in fact, some of them drive the plot line forward. I've asked many people this question about if you had to make a billion-year time capsule like such an object, what kind of things would you put on it or in it? It could be material. It could be an equation.

I'm going to put up an image that some friend of mine's suggested that they would put up. It's based on the famous wall. This is at Sunnybrook University. It's actually made by Eric Weinstein's team. Yes, I've seen that. Yeah, you can actually go to his portal website and click on it, and it takes you through. Now, some people have said that some of these equations would be what they carve into the wall and to their monolith. What would Adam Reese carve into his?

You know, there's this very compelling idea I've seen. before about storing all the seeds of all the, you know, every kind of plant vegetation that's ever lived. And you consider the complexity of the process that evolution went through to realize each of those. You know, I might put, you know, an example of a seed, a kind of Noah's arc of the plant world into my monolith. The equations, of course, are very appealing, but if somebody took that answer already, I'm going to go with seeds. That's cheating, right? Yeah. So the actually that connects nicely to Angerian's book. She talks about the Russian scientist

who first came up with this idea. In fact, during the seat of Leningrad, I believe, when they could have, they starved to death, many people starved to death, they were still collecting seeds for this project, and they could have eaten them, they could have done whatever, and yet they didn't. So, you're among a very, very esteemed

intellects throughout history in that choice. Last question also harkens to Sir Arthur C. Clark, and that's actually the name of the podcast. The name of the podcast is, into the impossible, which is R.C. Clark's third law. His first law is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from me. The second one I already said. And the third one is the only way to find out what's possible is to venture beyond them a bit into the impossible. So my question

to Adam is going now. We went forward in time. Let's go back in time. What would you tell sort of a 20-year-old, 30-year-old Adam Reese, what wisdom would you say that seemed impossible to you at the time? Yeah. But then you went ahead and did it. Yeah. You know, to be very honest, you know, I, I knew I liked science. I found this subject very fascinating, but I didn't really think there'd be a place or a career, you know, an actual way to do science to be there very long. I just thought these are great courses to take. I love going to, you know, my physics courses and I love learning about these things.

But, you know, you can't mean, you know, at some point I got to, you know, grow up and get a job. And I guess I would say to myself, you know, keep following your passion. know it's cliche, but in my case, it was literally true. You know, don't give up until, you know, the door's been slammed 100 times. And so, you know, I guess it would be that. That's great. Okay, Adam, I think that brings us to the end of our discussion. Are there any other things that I could have asked you, should have asked you,

didn't ask you that you'd like to bring up? Let's see. So what happened? So you won, so when we were at that, a contest, you won first prize, and I think you got some prize money or something. What'd you do with the, what'd you do with the prize money? Oh, I spent it on my yacht. The SS key, no, what did do I do with that? Well, actually, to be honest, I did, so I'm a practicing Jew. I'm not an Orthodox Jew, but we have a tradition, a mitzvah, if you will, to give away 10% of our winnings, and I did

do that. I think it was like 20,000, actually, and this is in $2,000.5. Right. not the funny money we used to it. I think I gave some of it away, and I think I did buy a pretty nice bike. I actually still have the bike that I bought who is pretty fancy. And I can't remember. It was before kids. So, you know, I probably would all be gone now, you know, on some iPads or whatever. What did you do with your share of the Nobel Prize?

Oh, yes. That's a great question. I guess, you know, money's kind of fungible. You sort of like, you know, what I do is this piece of money. You know, believe it or not, I mean, it's a lot of money, but, you know, it's still at the level. You go, well, you know, both my kids go to college and, you know, want to retire someday or whatnot, you know, better kind of, you know, keep that in the bank. So, you know, I didn't do too many dramatic things with it. Okay, great.

Any other things you want to discuss before we sign off? Hopefully we'll get another chance to do this again soon. Yeah. No, stay safe. Yeah, thanks, Adam. Adam, thank you so much sincerely. You are, again, a role model, even for people that are basically your age like me, that the work that you do has great meaning and the fact that you do it with such consistency,

regularity, you have great habits and these tactics and so forth that we talked about. You're really one of the menciest mentions that I know, and I want to just thank you for sharing so much your time with us today. Thank you. Take care. advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review.

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of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Viri, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.