Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Barry Barish – Black Holes, Nobel Prizes & The Imposter Syndrome (#100)

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Barry Barish is an emeritus professor at Caltech, where he has worked since 1963. He became director of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project in 1997, which led to his Nobel Prize in 2017. He has many other awards and is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Physical Society, of which he was also president. Barry joins our Nobel Minds playlist on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rai Weiss and Kip Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” We discuss Barry’s long and remarkable career that covers many disciplines within physics. It’s not the standard model, but he has a confidence about himself, and his contributions that make it seem perfectly natural to have been part of such varied, noteworthy projects during his career. Despite that, Barry also admits to feeling like an imposter at times, especially when singing the same Nobel register as Einstein. What a moment! 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:55 Starting out at Cal Tech with long time collaborator Kip Thorne. 00:11:47 Changing from particle physics to gravity astronomy. Change or stagnate! 00:17:13 Was the sad demise of the US supercollider really fortuitous? 00:20:00 How did the discovery of the Higgs Boson by CERN make you feel? 00:22:07 What detector technology enabled the discovery of the Higgs Boson? 00:23:00 What fascinates Barry the most about gravity astronomy? 00:27:50 The feedback cycle between theory and experiment 00:28:45 Does there need to be a unified theory of everything? 00:29:54 Can/will LIGO detect primordial gravitational waves? 00:37:40 What is your philosophy of experimental science? When do you stop an experiment? Why peer review is too conservative. 00:41:00 What skill sets can be applied from one branch of science to another? Lessons from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, and Managing big projects. Change Management. 00:57:45 How Barry began in particle physics at Berkley. How students learn today. 01:03:45 What is your vision for the future of LIGO? 01:10:10 What would most like to leave as an ethical will for future generations? 01:13:45 About curiosity 01:14:50 What have you accomplished that you once thought was impossible? Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this, the 100th episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. I am your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating. And today, it is an exceptionally important milestone in addition to the 100th episode. But it is the first time that we are having on a real live, Nobel Prize winning experimental astrophysicist on this podcast. And our guest today, Barry Barish,

is fitting because he's been a mentor to me and I try to act as a mentor to my students and those that I get the privilege of interacting with, both at UCSD and around the world from the South Pole to South Africa to South California to all points and places in between. And I hope that you enjoy these very interesting interviews that I get to do with thought leaders and other people around the world. But this one is very special. Barry is an avuncular figure, as a mentor, and as somebody who really represents a role model to me and to literally millions of people around the world. We spoke today for a nice episode that's slightly over an hour. And it's just chock full of nuggets of wisdom that only Barry can provide, including what it was like to,

think about his career being over when the superconducting supercollider was canceled in 1993 to the stunning turn of events that led to his Nobel Prize only because the superconducting supercollider was canceled. We get into that and other details such as what it's like to see Albert Einstein's name in a book that you get to sign. And finally, one of the most interesting tidbits of any of my guests on this past 100 centenary episode of The Into the Impossible podcast. Barry describes his battles that wage even until this day with the imposter syndrome. And I think it's quite startling and amazing and revealing in its vulnerability that

even a Nobel Prize winner can feel the imposter syndrome and be afflicted with it more or less his whole life. And I think that really serves the purpose of what I'm trying to do in this podcast, which is to humanize these maximum minds of our multiverse of ideas. And these people that I get to have the privilege to interview really reveal themselves in a way which I'm hoping is unique. And I hope that you too will enjoy it and come along with me as we go further and further into the impossible. And the survey like Alexander the Great, hopefully I won't weep for the lack of discovery of new. intellectual worlds to conquer as I try to recreate the work of Alexander the Great. Maybe I'm Alexander the mediocre.

But in any case, I wish that you will continue on this journey. Please do subscribe. I read every review on iTunes, every comment and critique, helpful or not on YouTube. I try to do that as well. So I want to express my sincere gratitude for all of your support, the listening audience, and the viewing audience, you really make this possible and inspire me. And I hope that these guests inspire you. So please sit back and enjoy this episode with the one and only Professor Barry Barish of Caltech

and the University of California, Riverside. You'll find out why Barry made the move there in just a second. Enjoy this episode. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. Now, I want to start with how you Barry got to be involved in that way. It all started in 1994 after the cancellation of the Super Connecting Super Collider. You were involved with that, Ray. Officially, officially, but I was actually in Caltech,

where my whole career, other than getting a degree in Berkeley, degrees in Berkeley, have been at Caltech. And the one unique thing about Caltech is it's basically a zero-growth institution. It's within 10 or 15 percent, the same size. as it was when I came and I lost all my hair in the meantime. So the question has always been how you stay at the forefront of science without growth. It's a difficult problem. Caltech doesn't have a wonderful formula for it,

but I think the underneath scheme is that no appointment, new appointment, whether it's from a retirement or somebody just leaving, is, belongs in any particular area or at any particular individuals. So we always, basically, it's a completely open search. And which means that there's a lot of discussion about what areas we might go in or what individuals we might attract and so forth. I started on the Caltech faculty the same year as my colleague Kip Thorne. And so we've been good friends since the, you know, opening,

receptions and stuff you go to when you start on the faculty. And I was interested in his work on gravitational waves, which was purely theoretical in general relativity from the early days. But then at some point, we talked about whether and when to try to get such an effort at Caltech itself. And I was against it in the early days because I didn't like the technique. The technique that was being pursued was what are called resonant bars. And it turns out there's long history in that, which I won't go into.

But that's not the point. The point is technically I thought it was a bad idea because if you have a big bar, it's a great big bar of aluminum. And that big bar gets excited by basically a gravity. rotational wave going through it, changes his shape a little bit. And if your sensors are good enough, you can sense that change in shape. But I think any of us know if you walk up to a big bar of metal and you bang it, it rings at some frequency.

So that the bar has this feature that it likes some particular frequency and not other frequencies. And it's usually around 1,000 hertz for a big bar of aluminum. And the problem I always felt was it's, why would gravitational waves pick to be at a thousand hertz that you really wanted to search broadband? And so I didn't like the technique, even though I followed it from the very early days. And although it was pursued by a scientist who was very good technically and had good ideas, but was not a very good scientist, so he thought he discovered, or maybe he wanted to discover too much gravitational waves.

So there was a, there was a, yeah, yeah, there was a sort of, history, but it didn't involve me. I was in particle physics, so I was more involved with KIPP and the fact that it was the wrong technique. When the alternate technique, which we used, which is kind of behind me, an interferometer emerged, I liked it immediately because of the fact that it's broadband. Basically, there's nothing that picks one frequency over another, except where you're able to work technically. And so in our case, we work on the Earth's surface. And on the Earth's surface, the evolution has been pretty good at picking where you can work. And so our ears, we communicate with each other in what we call the audio band, where we can talk to each other. And that's because the Earth is much too noisy if you go to lower frequencies. Animals go a little bit lower, but not much.

the shake, the earth just shakes too much. And at the highest frequencies, you can't sample very well. So kind of like music, we go from 10 hertz to 10,000 hertz, and that's where you can work on the Earth's surface. But the same technique can be used elsewhere, like in space, and different frequencies. So to me, it was really the right technique if you could make it work well enough. And there was some promising work done early.

some by Kip Thornt, by Ray Wies at MIT, but in particular in Germany where they had built a small test interferometer. And so the question came up when we were talking about making the early 1980s, making a new experimental appointment in our department. I kind of teamed up with Kip and some others to make that appointment be in, an experimentalist or maybe two in gravitational waves. So it wasn't me doing it. And from that day on, we first, we attracted Ron Drever and then we had a couple of assistant professors, but they didn't get tenure.

It's hard to get tenure when you don't discover something and you're just doing technical work. And that went on for a kind of a decade. date of R&D where Caltech was one of the players, but it was done a lot of places in the world. And at some point, it became competitive with the bars. The bars kept becoming better and better because you could make them quieter by cooling them to low temperature,

and then they got quieter. But they still only worked at this one frequency, our small frequency band. But so by, you know, the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was pretty clear to me that the future was with interferometers and that you could, at least from the R&D that had been done, compete technically of making it as quiet. And so I was part of kind of Caltech when you have something that's pretty big and has a lot of resources. We had an oversight group, so I was on the oversight group of this, but I was practicing particle physicists during this whole time. And then, as you said, I was working on the supercollider. I was a co-leader of one of the two experiments that was to be done there.

So I should have been discovering the Higgs boson, which was our great goal. but we didn't get canceled, but the collider got canceled. And neither my colleague Bill Willis from Columbia and I were the leaders of it decided to go on to CERN whether they were doing the same thing. Not the same thing exactly, but I mean the same physics school. And at that point, it turned out that they wanted new leadership in LIGO at Caltech. and that's when I came in. It wasn't an approved experiment yet.

I mean, it had been on the verge, but it wasn't funded. How was it to leave the field that you had, you know, grown up in, matured it in as a scientist, as a age, as a particle physicist? Was it scary to that change? No, invigorating. Why would it be scary? I think the only reason that things get scary is if you're just so comfortable in what you're doing, which probably means you're not pushing yourself or doing anything very interesting.

So I've always done different things. I've worked on designing accelerators. I've worked on all kinds of accelerators. I've worked underground on a very different kind of experiment, looking for magnetic monopoles. And then I've worked on the superclider, but not on the accelerator on the experiment where the big challenge was how you could actually, we thought that.

And it ends up being true, but not because I had the great insight that the most sensitive way you could look for the ex boson was to look for the production of it to decay into two photons. That's a very difficult challenge because photons convert to electrons if you go through any material and you need material to make detections. So there's this battle of making a good enough detector, but basically, making it not have any material or as little as possible. But anyway, changing to gravitational waves first. Theoretically, general relativity is as, you know, kind of abstract as it seems, is actually easier than quantum field theory to understand for me as an experimentalist. I can at least write down the equations of general relativity and try to solve them.

quantum field theory is abstract because it has quantum mechanics buried into field theory and it's very, very difficult. So as an experimentalist, you like to understand as well as possible and as deeply as possible. The science that you're doing, change into gravitational waves didn't put me into a worse problem there. I mean, it's difficult to understand Einstein's equations, but I felt as comfortable or more comfortable than with quantum field theories. So that part was okay. Technically, I had followed it quite closely for a long time. There was nothing about it technically from my background that scared me. I know the challenges that we had,

but I didn't think that I needed some 30 years in this field or something to be able to attack those. They're quite different. Fundamentally, they're different in that in particle physics, we've collided particles together for a long, long time on different kinds of accelerators, and there's all kinds of things that happen. And you look for something that happens on top of a lot of physics. So if you remember the discovery of the Higgs boson, it was a very tiny effect.

They usually suppress the zero when they show it, a very tiny effect on a background. But the background is very well understood by a lot of physics that's been measured. And so you can look to see a small effect and see that it has statistical significance over a physics background. And that's comfortable in the sense that you understand what's there other than what you detect. But it's very limiting because the signal the noise can never, ever be made any better than what happens. And that's the problem they're dealing with now at CERN. So they discovered the Higgs boson, but pursuing the Higgs boson itself will take another kind of device in any real deep way. And in looking at what else is going on, they're limited by the fact that maybe they're missing everything because it's below physics that drowns it out.

Gravitational waves is a different problem. We're not limited. There is no physics underneath. So we're completely limited by how well we can see a signal over technical background. And certainly dealing with technical things that limit you is I can reduce them. I can't reduce physics. And it's the reason why we've done so much better than, say, CERN after a big discovery. So if you look at since the Higgs, they're really struggling to go past that.

A lot of my colleagues work in that. And that's not because they're not smart. and they're not doing great technical things, but it's because there's a fundamental problem. They're limited by the physics. In our case, we're not. We're limited by how much the ground shakes and how much RF pickup there is,

all kinds of just technical problems, which we know how to make better. We've done pretty well to get where we are, but we know how to make it better. And each time we make it better, the signal stand out more and we see more things. So we've seen a lot since the discovery, which is only a few years ago. We have the feature that we're measuring an amplitude and not of power.

And so if we make it twice as good, we see twice as far out. And that's eight times as much of the universe. I want to make a controversial claim that, from my vantage point, I remember very well Jerry Garalnik, my professors at Brown, in 1993, when the superconducting superclotter was canceled. It was like a wake on the particle physics floor at Brown University where I was a grad student. But I want to make the controversial claim that perhaps it was good for you because, A, it freed you up to do LIGO. And B, maybe a lot could happen between, say, the Nobel Prize that you received for LIGO and then Nobel Prize that wasn't received by those working on the Large Hadron Collider, which ultimately did detect the Higgs.

Since the Higgs, the SSC was also designed to detect the Higgs, the Europeans detected it instead of the Americans, so maybe perhaps the Americans didn't get much of the glory. But none of the experimentalists got any of the share of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the so-called Higgs boson. Unlike LIGO, where the experimentalists, with the exception of KIP, did win. Leaviers did win, you and Barry, you and Ray Weiss win the Nobel Prize. So looking back, serendipitously, maybe it was one of the best things that ever happened to you. Well, I think it would you, yeah, as soon as there's kind of a game playing, I don't know. But I think what you say is true in the sense that I, at least I like to think that we detected gravitational waves when we did, that partially because of myself. And we, that's measurably true because this was incomprehensible.

with the Italian trench collaboration and Virgo who were approved in that actually a half a year before we were. And we were in a race to detect gravitational waves that took them three years long than us, even though it took us a long time. And they're still not kept caught up. And I think that's a lot to do with the way we approach the problem because they're using interferometry as well. and they had as much resources as we did. And they had some smart people, but I think we made some decisions that enabled us to do better. And they're not all due to me, but I think some of them are due to me and some of them are maybe due to the atmosphere that enabled us to develop that way that I was at least partially responsible for. when you look at the challenges of running a big project like this, like LIGO, as you say,

science is fairly, this type of science is really classical physics. It's easy to understand. And yet, I wonder if you know at a personal level, if we get a little bit less technical, how did you feel on July 4th, 2012, when this announcement was made that the Higgs was discovered by two teams at CERN, knowing that you guys were years away, you on LIGO or years away, and maybe never would detect the signals that you were seeking? Did you ever feel at that particular moment back in 2012 before the Nobel Prize was awarded that maybe I made a wrong decision? No, I don't, maybe it's my personality. I don't really look back at maybe at some level, but it wasn't really very evident.

I was really, I was in Melbourne, Australia at the time of the official, but they had three Sigma before that. It was built because they had to build up this signal. So it wasn't as much of maybe a surprise. I was really happy to them. It's a lot of my close colleagues. And I think what I don't like, and I know it's one of the things that you criticize in your book and so forth. I think the experimental feat was a big one.

And the credit completely went to theorists that did something 60 years ago. So I think that I'm not just talking about the Nobel Prize, but that's an example of it. And I think that it's hard to do because in this case, there wasn't one individual that you could pick out very well in the way it's done. But if skipping the topic, I know you love or hate or something, that if Nobel Prizes were given like the Beast Prize, that certain are the experiments that have gotten a Nobel Prize. And in a sense, even at that time in 2012, I felt that that many of my colleagues had gone there. They've done well. I mean, young people got tenure and it's a big thing and so forth.

But it wasn't any magic in doing it. It was just really hard. It was the technical development of silicon. using silicon detectors that enable them to get the resolution you needed close to the vertex. We may have had trouble doing it earlier at the SSC because silicon was such a key in the final detection, if you actually look at it technically. We use silicon too, but silicon detectors weren't developed as well in the time when I was working on. So it was new silicon detectors had been used to discover the top core.

And we grabbed it for the SSC, but they were being developed by physicists, not by industry. And what changed is silicon became something developed because of other uses for circuitry and stuff by industry. And then it really changed in being able to get very low amount of material and very good spatial resolution that you needed on these detectors very close to the vertex. What fascinates you the most about LIGO? Is it the gravitational wave aspect of it? Is it the technical challenge? Is it the black holes themselves? Is it the neutron stars?

All of which has been discovered really directly for the first time. My attraction to the field is that I think I always thought, I mean, that a discovery is a big thing itself, but I always thought that it represented a new way, a brand opening up a new way that you could do exploratory. science. Basically a new way to look at the sky using gravity instead of using photons. And that meant that we could look at the sky in principle to do a new kind of astronomy. Well, I'm not an astronomer, so that's great, but still, I can appreciate it. I always thought more

that closer to your field, and I still don't know how to do. do it, that it's the ultimate way to study the early universe. The reason, of course, being that the cosmic microwave background is only good to look a few hundred thousand years after the big bang. And if you want to look earlier, you need something that's not absorbed. I had been interested in that from the fact that earlier I worked with neutrinos, and I used to think that was the key, but the trouble is the, it's technically almost impossible, I think. And this, this, this Although we don't know how to do it, it's not going to happen in the next few years unless something's really different than we expect. We look for it.

We look for signals from the early universe, but we don't think we'll see them because we work as such high frequency. But I always thought that that was an attraction. I also thought there was another attraction, which again, I can only speak about romantically. Like the early universe, I can't tell you we can do it, but you said, well, why was I attracted? that I think this is a general approach that eventually may give us the key to actually, because gravitational waves aren't absorbed, if we can see them directly from the early universe,

we can see back to the first instance of the early universe instead of a few hundred thousand years after. And we also, in another way, should be able to see something equivalent of the cosmic microwave background with Nicotremus if we were able to do it. So both ways that is, is good. I also, as coming from quantum physics, have always felt that we should be terribly

embarrassed with physicists that we think we understand physics, but we have two wonderful theories of physics, quantum physics basically, or quantum field theory that explains almost anything that happens at CERN, or when you collide particles together. Then we have another great theory called general relativity, which is great at relativistic effects and long distances. So we have a great theory at long distances and relativistic effects. We have a great theory in short distances, and never the twain shall meet. And somehow theorists have been working on how to bring those together for decades. And I always have felt that what we miss, obviously, as a bias, experimentalist is the experimental clues to actually do it, that somehow thinking you invent string

theory to do it or something may work, but I think it's much more traditional that we find clues. And so, again, I don't know how to do it, but I think maybe the way to really study black holes is, for example, someplace where both worlds have to come together, might be with gravitational waves. So it looked to me even beyond what I can see to do in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years, that it's just a new approach. So I was romantically attracted in these kind of ways. My late colleague at Caltech, my mentor, Professor Andrew Lang, who was your colleague, used to say that part of making a successful experiment work is that you fall in love with it

and you kind of lose all sense of rationality, at least of first. Because there's sort of an irrational attraction that happens in the beginning. Because I can't resist this. I had on Sir Roger Penrose last month. And I gently chided him. I said all these figures in all these topics in Shelley Glashow's book interactions, which I discussed with Shelley Glashow recently. He talked about the way that theory and experiment,

in the case of at least quantum gravity, which you just brought up, Barry, there's this kind of feedback cycle between theory and experiment that we often hear the same story, that we need to understand singularities in space time because where they occur, namely in the Big Bang and also at the center of black holes, these phenomena seem to require the union of the very small with the very strong gravitational fields. I've played this out to Sir Roger and to Shelling and to other people, but we actually don't know if there are such singularities.

It could be that a singularity at the early universe's creation could be forever firewalled off from our observations, the same exact way that black hole is singularity, These are firewalled off from our observations as well as Sir Roger Penrose has described. So I asked Roger Penrose, and I'm going to ask you, who says there has to be a unification of quantum mechanics and gravity? Maybe it's just our prejudice that we want to unify things. I think you're right. But, you know, as scientists, it's attractive enough to think that you develop the theory of physics that can describe physics and you don't have too discrete, ones that you can't somehow make talk to each other.

And so it's attractive enough to think there must be a bridge between them, I think, that it's worth pursuing. Can you really, can you really say that that absolutely has to be the path, the path to truth? I don't think. So I think Penrose is right or your right or whoever says it. It may be that that that's a false direction. but, you know, searching for gravitational waves or cosmic microwave background,

all these things that we do that haven't been seen before are, we don't know absolutely, we wouldn't be looking if we knew absolutely that the direction is a right, so it has to be promising enough, promising in that it might be the right answer and promising in that you can actually make progress. Actually, Lenny Susskin points out that Blackholt's horizons are as interesting as the singularity itself, and they are just as quantum mechanical, he claims. perhaps even more quantum mechanical, this event horizon and what he calls the stretched horizon, sort of like a firewall.

And you have a effect that manifests themselves at the plank length above the event horizon that he claims will be visible someday with instruments not too dissimilar from LIGO. And it brings me to a question that Shelley Glashow wanted me to ask you, and that's about contributions to astrophysics with LIGO. and that this notion that you mentioned in your Nobel lecture last year, or rather in 2017, about the prospects of measuring primordial gravitational waves, which you did mention is sort of the ultimate, represented the ultimate achievement in gravitational wave science.

And obviously, as you think, as you must know, I think experiments like the Simon's Observatory will be hot on the trail of these primordial gravitational waves. But Shelley wants me to ask you about another form of gravitational waves, useful in cosmology, perhaps to solve the Hubble tension. Well, I mean, we measure the Hubble constant, actually, and we have. In a few years, I mean, if this remains a tension a decade from now, I think we'll resolve it. Basically, we have a way that doesn't rely on some without going in the technical thing,

some of the biases of doing this ladder business and so forth. Basically, it's a pretty direct measurement that you can make and complementary with gravitational waves. We have made a poor measurement of it that looks consistent with the whole thing. But that means, you know, we need a thousand times more data or something to pursue that. I don't think we're limited by systematics, it's limited by getting enough data. We can't get that much data by continuing just to run LIGO, so we have to make it better. We are working on making it better.

I would say it's kind of to get enough data on our measurement, independent measurement of the Hubble constant to resolve that in a different way or get a third measurement. At the level that they're doing it, and with the systematics that they talk about, is a decade away. But doable in LIGO, not a future instrument. And I think the improvements that we have to do in LIGO, it's not like what I said about early universe or this or that, which is going to require a different instrument. But that'll be done with the improvements that we will make in LIGO. Along those lines, Ray Weiss, he's coming on the show soon, and he wanted me to ask you a little bit on the technical side of things, which I could translate into our own language.

And I'd like to know of these two different properties, which would you want to add most currently to improve LIGO if there's no obstacle technologically or financially. And I don't think there is. Would you rather double the sensitivity of LIGO or add on polarization detection capability? I think for me, I think the clear, pat, the clear reason for sensitivity, which is what I favor and what we're working the hardest on, is not what I just said for the Hubble, which is getting more. data, getting enough data to resolve it, but basically being able to look further out,

which is equivalent to looking at higher Z or higher red shift, which means that we can start to at least think that we can start to approach doing cosmology and not just astrophysics with gravitational waves. So when I say it's a new probe of the sky, right now it's astrophysics. but if we can get to larger Z, then we start to be able to do cosmology with gravitational waves. And to me, that's the biggest advance in the coming 10 or 20 years that I feel is the biggest driver, romantically, is to start doing cosmology, something you love, of course,

so you probably like that answer. Yes, definitely I approve of that answer. If anything, we found it interesting, as Jim Gave, Gates has written a book about Einstein as well. And, of course, was one of the founding fathers of string theory. He was a postdoc at Caltech in your early days. He asked me to ask you about the prospects for funding perhaps scalar tensor evidence for scalar tensor vector gravitational waves in LIGO.

I don't know if that's something about LIGO's potential capabilities that interests you. Of course, it's interesting to Gates. That's kind of his thing. And we've communicated about it quite a bit. It's not my deepest interest because trying to look at alternate theories of general relativity to Einstein. I'm much more pragmatic as an experimentalist. The problem is when we look at different, a step back for a second, if we look at different theories in particle physics,

whether you're looking at the Higgs or you start looking at different more dynamical theories in particle physics, we're able to make predictions and then compare them with the data. Okay? The trouble is, including Gates' work, in general relativity, what right now,

we're making some pretty damp, sensitive tests of general relativity, for example, putting in a simple dispersion term in these detected many wiggles in gravitational waves in the merger of two waves, if we put it in a dispersion term,

which is equivalent to putting in more generally something like a graviton, okay? Then we can set a very small limit on it. But the spirit of what I'm doing there and the spirit of what I do when I'm testing general relativity right now is just looking more and more sensitively of the terms that Einstein's calculates and looking for a deviation. When I do something in particle physics, I'm used to comparing two theories, and one of them

may fit the data well, and the other one not. Here, I'm looking for some breakdown in Einstein. It's not satisfying to me to look for a breakdown in Einstein's theory, therefore there must be some alternate. The kinds of theories that Gates is interested in and other people are don't predict what we detect at the level that we actually can test in the data and compare with Einstein's theory. So theory is too far behind, I think, and not capable of making it attractive to me as an experimentalist. It's a very unsatisfying kind of tests that we do now.

May I ask you a question about the philosophy of experimental science? There is an aspect of Karl Popper's demarcation philosophy, which is that you should only pursue scientific things is those things that can be falsified. I want to ask you a slightly different question on the experimental side. When do you stop an experiment? I mean, it's not like you know or for sure when you should kill an experiment the way you might kill a diseased worm, pet, or something like that. So you have to have a certain amount of judgment to know that it's better to turn off the experiment and move on to the next one, then to slowly and slowly get better monotonically and just run experiments. and be experiments forever.

And the question is, you know, is there any sort of criterion as a Popper might have? Is there a barish criteria rubric that we can use? At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light. I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live.

There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials, no credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. It's a good question. I don't, you know, I can answer it personally, but trying to answer it in a way that's not personally. I mean, I do what turns me on kind of, which is not as deep. as that I think the general problem that we have

and why science, our kind of science doesn't move forward faster than it does, is that the system is too conservative. We love something called peer review, but peer review is actually very conservative because we basically turn in proposals to do something if they're to get funded, for example, if they're offbeat. I mean, the theorists can do anything they want,

and they throw in the waste basket, but you and I can't. We have to go and get some resources, and we turn in a proposal. And if it's offbeat, it doesn't get all outstandingings in the reviews done by peer reviews. So peer reviews to conservative. And then if you get money, your money's private, but my money came from the NSF. The NSF is answerable to Congress. And so if you do something that, doesn't, that is not very defendable, then you're not, so the NSF, something as wonderful as the

NSF to support science is far too conservative. We have to be able to tolerate failures, many more failures than we do. And experimentalists should be basically turned loose to follow our dreams. And I think science would move forward much more. Some of us would fail at things. We'd have a lot more fun. And I think there's, we don't have to be so analytical about how we move forward. I've never kind of had that in what I've done. I mean, I spent a decade chasing magnetic monopoles and underground in Italy. And that was a problem that I was interested in in high school. So, and I, you know, it was nice to be in Italy, but I basically, before I work on the Super Collider, that's what I did. I spent 10 years in Italy.

chasing magnetic monopoles. But I could do that. It didn't take very many resources. Actually, the Italians supplied a good part of it. But that's the kind of thing that we should do is, I mean, I would love, I like the business anyway, but it would be better if I didn't have to be so goddamn conservative. Hey, everybody. I just want to stop in the middle of this podcast as you're super excited and super interested

and all the cool stuff we're hearing about from today's guests, and I want to do so to make an advertisement. No, this isn't for manscaping or some other type of product that I've been pitched to pitch to you. I don't think I've found quite the connection and resonance with manscaping, but maybe other things will fit the bill. But I do want to advertise on behalf of some other podcasts, and why would I do that? Well, it's kind of like when I get asked to blurb a book. After all, books are zero-sum games, too.

If you're reading somebody else's book, you're not going to read Losing the Nobel Prize or my upcoming books, which I hope to be announcing shortly on this very podcast. But instead, I do want to recommend to you that you listen to some podcasts by my good friends, some of whom gave me a start on their podcast long before the Into the Impossible podcast.

First one is a young man, a graduate student named Brandon Dratchler. Dracler. You can find him on Twitter. a T-S-O-T-U pod. And that stands for the State of the Universe podcast. And just recently in late November, he interviewed Dr. Daniel Whiteson, who's one of the other podcast hosts

that I'm going to recommend to you. So Daniel and his colleague and friend Jorge Cham, they host the Daniel and Jorge explain the universe podcast. You're going to hear a lot of universes here. And these podcasts are really interesting and valuable contributions to the scientific podcast world. And I really enjoy listening to them,

and they've had me on their podcast. Both of these podcasts have hosted me as well. And the last podcast that I want to recommend is a podcast by two up-and-coming podcasters who started a podcast over the summer. And they are named Daniel Hooper, are Daniel. And Shauma, his co-host, Shama, is a graduate student. I believe she's at Columbia, is Shama. And Dan is a physicist at Fermilab. And so what makes them so interesting is that they go deep into the podcast world. And this is Shama Weggsman. I'm sorry, I forgot to mention her last name,

but she's soon to be a PhD, or maybe she already is a PhD at NYU. And she is a co-host of the Why This Universe podcast with Dan Hooper. They do tremendous work. Also, is a podcast Twitter account called Why This Universe, and they claim to discuss the biggest ideas in physics broken down. And they come out with episodes every other Monday. So please turn into these podcasts and I hope you'll stay subscribed to the Into the Impossible podcast, where we do cover things in the universe and beyond into the multamers. But we also do other things that I hope you'll find fascinating as well. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with many more Nobel Prize winners, as well as with maybe even a solo episode or two about my ideas as to where I think

experimental physics should be going. I've had a lot of guests on the podcast, and I will continue to do so, folks like Eric Weinstein, folks like Garrett Lise, Stephen Wolfram, and Julian Barber is coming on the show. But I want to think maybe a little bit less in 2021 about theories of everything and more about experiments of everything. So stay tuned for that, as well as guests totally outside the realm of the physical sciences. Look for an interview with psychologists and with lifestyle optimizers and maybe some brand name podcasters that you know and love.

So with that, I'll end this quick quote unquote advertising break, return you to the action on today's podcast episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you so much for being a friend of the show. Please do help me out. the biggest help you can do. Cost you nothing is to rate the podcast and share it with other people. So I hope you'll rate it highly. I read each and every comment. So if you want me to check out your theory of everything, leave me a comment and I'll at least read it. And that will be one way that we can continue to grow and share the love of this wonderful, magical, mysterious multiverse,

perhaps that we inhabit. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. And now, please enjoy the rest of this podcast of Into the Impossible. Yes, I think that's partially why institutions like the Simon's Foundation and other private institutions like the Moore Foundation are more nimble. Absolutely. Foundations are succeeding not only because they're supporting in projects like the Simon's Observatory, but also because they can be more agile. They can take more risks and they can take more rewards and do more experiments and get

those experiments done early, even if that means failing. And so, have you heard this rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, but were based on the study by Anders Erickson, about becoming an expert. So how do you become an expert? Well, according to Anders Erickson, at least maybe apocryphally or not, you need to spend 10,000 hours doing a particular craft. So it turns out that he studied Bill Gates and maybe other people like the Beatles, for example, and talks about this in Alken Glauil's book,

that the Beatles played about 10,000 hours' worth of shows in Germany long before they ever got famous. People like Bill Gates had access to computers for 10,000 hours in their youth, that when the time came for them to apply the kind of unique amount of training they had done, they were well positioned to do so. And so I'm wondering about your opinion. Do you think that you need some specific skill set?

Because it takes a lot of time to not only become expert enough in one branch of science, as you did with experimental particle physics to become a leader, and then to also apply it to lessons learned for a completely orthogonal branch of science in the gravitation wave astronomy. And I remember when you were here last year at UCSD thinking about how do you make decisions on who to hire. It's not like you can't, you can say, like, here, give me the pamphlet and how to run a super project like LIGO. And last year you told me, you know, when I asked you for a shortcut, for a hack, said, sorry, Brian, there is no shortcut. So I want to ask you, how did you develop this skill set?

Well, I think, you know, you have anything that you do in life, you have a combination of whether you have the right ingredients to do it. I probably have both the personality, maybe the analytical ability and so forth to do it. But I'm also humble. So when physics started to require a fair amount of resources, I think I mentioned this to when I was in San Diego, I went and actually studied how you build a bridge and how you organize things and read the kinds of books that they have. It just doesn't take very long to understand that there's a kind of organization to build a bridge that, look, the dangers in building a bridge are mostly that it's going to take

too long and it's going to have technical problems, maybe occasionally that it'll fall down. But usually the risk part isn't the big part. it's kind of carrying it out. So there's a little bit on the risk part, but that you do by over designing. That scheme doesn't work for what you do or I do. It was very clear to me, and yet aspects of it are essential

to make sure that you can reach the goals that you want when it involves lots of people. So I was attracted. I didn't mention this to you last time. I was attracted to something that you may or may not know about, which is called the Skunk Works. Lockheed. And Skunk Works was named the Skunk Works

because it was named after Little Abner's cartoon where there was a, this was a 1940s cartoon, which had an old warehouse that smelled because it had what it had in it was called Skunk, S-K-O-N-K. And Lockheed, when they made the skunk works, which developed the U-2, for example. when they developed the skunk works, it was a guy named Kelly.

And when he developed the skunk works, he called it S-K-O-N-K, and they, he got sued by the little Abner people, and now it's called Skunk-Works, S-K-U-N-K. Well, that's the history. But what's in it, the idea of it, is that they took a part of Lockheed and they broke it out,

and they left these guys alone, and didn't require all the things that we were talking about in an organization, all the accountability and so forth. And to me, that had some of the ingredients that you want, which is that you bring people together and they interact and they have the freedom to pursue things that are different

from just the straight paths and make bigger steps. So it's the closest I could come to anything, but it's wrong too for what we want to do. And it's wrong for a couple of reasons. One is that it's still a hierarchical organization. And basically, you and I live in physics departments, which have emerged after a long time to be a pretty effective place to do science. And that organization is completely flat. It's not hierarchical at all.

There's a department chairman who probably can't tell you what to do even if they try. And there's all these professors and they do what they do what they want. want. And the only difference is now you have to bring it together to some sort of common goal. So it's important, I think, in trying to do what people have to do in building a bridge, but a highly technical bridge, first to not be, to mimic this totally hierarchical organization, which DOE tries to impose, for example, on the Dune project at Fermilab. The main problems in succeeding technically, and in terms of the way an organization works, are that two things, I think, are absolutely essential. First, it has to be done by scientists because there's too many scientific decisions,

so having a bunch of managers doesn't work. So if you look at LIGO or you look at what we were doing at the SSC, all the key spots were, scientific. Sometimes in the same box if you want, you can put an engineer, but basically you're doing a science experiment in these scientists. So you have to find ones that can live in this kind of environment. There's two things that I think are crucial, and I've worked on a lot of experiments. The first is that you have scientists, not engineers. We have plenty of really super engineers in LIGO, but it's a scientific organization.

The key to me, which is not there at all in Kelly's Skunkworks, is integration. So the big problem is, for example, on LIGO, we have the world's best laser people. And we have, you know, we have a fantastic group of people who do controls and so forth. But how do you bring it all together to sing together as one instrument? And what that requires is not doing what is done in building a bridge. So the key flaw for us in taking that style is that they have a very important role that they call systems engineering. Systems engineer, if you go to JPL or something, is a guy who's a very well-trained engineer who does all these interface documents. Yes, which to one side and another side is just exactly the wrong thing, which is.

need for integration and what we did in LIGO is have the best scientists we can find have the job not of building some subsystem but integrating. In our case it was Albert Lazarene, was the chief one in LIGO. A very, very smart guy, very broad technically. And in anything where you had to bring two things together, you needed the controls and the laser to work together to run the laser or whatever it was. And somebody that did the internet, to the interface is just in a bunch of diagrams. It's somebody that's able to make sure that these two sides work together and the control system's going to control the laser the right way and stuff. And so that requires, and so I think the biggest, so you can draw all kinds of diagrams and stuff,

but I think the real key to success is integration. And the key otherwise is that scientists have to work in the different parts, and then you have to do something to kill our, to mute the change control system that exists in an organization because it again inhibits change. Anything that takes a long time to build like LIGO, or even the CERN experiment, silicon, requires that you stay up to date. If you want to do something that you couldn't do today, and it's going to take you a few years to do it, you want to be able to be as current and forward-looking as possible at all times.

There's an inhibition against that when you have a formal system that requires you to go to a board and change it and all this kind of stuff, which is built into these standard organizations. So you need to have some variant of that, but it has to be, again, run by scientists that has to have a mission that basically enables and encourages change, but it's responsible to make sure that change is worth doing, that it isn't a dream, that it's going to work, and it isn't going to increase the cost. much and so forth, but that's a practical part of it, but you should be assuming change. If you look at the LIGO we ended up with compared to what we took to the NSF in 1994, there's a lot of really big change. Even the laser itself, for example, the laser that existed in 1994 was the gas laser. I didn't like that from the beginning. I inherited that when I came in, and I always thought the future of this was solid-state

lasers, but at that moment, they weren't as good, they weren't being made commercially and so forth. And we switched very early to a solid-state laser. It required a process that all the people that were already embedded that wanted to stay with a CO2 laser could buy off on afterwards, so we needed a process. But encouraging change and doing it responsibly is the opposite to having this big board that inhibits change and is great for making sure the bridge comes in that you build on costs and on schedule. So somehow you need to have the and the cost, monitoring costs, the important thing there is to make sure that it's not done by a separate group of cost people, but that it's inherent in the

people that the scientists again that are running. The guy that's responsible for making the laser has to be responsible for the budgets and it has to be translated to him in a way that he or she understands the budgets and it's not just something that's bureaucratic. Just to maybe push on this a little bit, I found it obvious that in contrasting distinction to building a bridge and experiment in research is something that you're trying to really figure out for the first time every time. In other words, there's no such thing as experimental bridge design, or at least I'm not going to be the first person to walk over your experimental bridge. But we often, a scientist, feel like we are somehow superior in a sense that we know better

than, say, a manager, you know, on a project, an engineering project, or even on a science project, that we know quantum field theory. And therefore, we don't need to learn how to manage people, how to run successfully manipulate the resources that we have in terms of finances and time and maybe equipment and marry those to this precious, extremely precious resource of human capital. How do we do that? There's no books, and yet there are, you know, perhaps resources that we could employ. So I don't think we can do away with all these aspects and just be totally freewheeling and fancy free with our experiment.

So I want to ask you, is there any sort of at least way that you were, if you were a manager of a project like the Simon's Observatory, what amount of... efforts should one put into, say, developing the best practices like change control? The charter of the change control board has built into it different than what it would have if we were building a bridge. That's what I was saying. And so, and we have equivalent of systems engineering, but it's done in a way that is optimized for our own problem. It's, we, I would call it integration, but it's basically making sure that it's not done. in the way that's done traditionally. So our organization might look superficially very much like,

and in fact, it's a great trick because our organization looks like a standard organization, and the reviewers at NSF or wherever don't get shocked by the fact that it looks like a skunk or something. It doesn't. It looks like a standard organization. It's just that we've basically changed the missions and who's in the boxes and what they're doing and so forth. So I really was maybe saying it wrong when I was, I wasn't, we're doing, we've taken what you call best practices, basically, and all are them in the way that is optimized for our problem, which is not the biggest problem in us. We have a problem of cost and schedule too.

We have to meet budgets, but it's not the overwhelming feature. And the one that you talked about, the fact that technology, that we're at the forefront, so we're limited by technology generally, and the fact that technology can improve or that we can make breakthroughs or that we find new problems. As we go along, we have to be able to change things, not change them because they cost too much or change them because something didn't reach a spec, which is the way happens on a bridge. but we change it because it's going to enable us to do our science problem better. Oh, yeah. I started, my background is that I was born in Omaha, Nebraska. My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was about 10, and neither then went to college, so I didn't have any real background.

They were encouraging for education and being a professional because it was a Jewish background that's kind of culturally built in. But I didn't have any of the advice, if you want, or encouragement. They didn't know anything. My father's worked on cars. My mother was a housewife. But I read a lot as a kid. I know you got interested in astronomy at a young age, but I didn't.

I read science fiction. I read mystery stories because my mother read. And then I got beyond that. And I grew up in Hollywood, kind of near Hollywood, East Hollywood. And so I was around a lot of what I would call storytelling, people that made movies and were into that kind of stuff. And I always liked storytelling. I liked writing.

And I was always reading something. So I liked reading, writing, and so forth. And at about the age of 13 or 12, I discovered good literature. And so I really got into storytelling and being or reading good books, you know, the Russian novels or whatever you want. And so by the time I entered high school, I certainly thought that my life was going to be writing novels, or at least writing or doing something like that and not science. I was always good at math and things as we all are kind of to get that far,

what we are. But it didn't mean anything much to me. And when I finally was cured of trying to be a writer, I decided I didn't know very much that I would go to do engineering. And so I applied to UCLA and Berkeley. in engineering, I happened to graduate in mid-year from high school at that time. They had mid-year graduating, and so I also had applied to Caltech. I had no vision to see beyond California.

It was just my horizon was too short. And so I applied to, and I was advised not to apply to Stanford because at that time, they were at least reputed by the advisor in my school to be biased against Jews. So I was told to not waste my time on that. but I did apply to Caltech. I thought I'd go to Caltech because I saw that, but I couldn't go in January when I graduated from high school. They took a class in September.

I wasn't admitted yet anyway. And so I went to Berkeley mostly because it meant leaving home and not going across town and started an engineering school. And Berkeley, I had to take another test to do it, be an engineering. And freshman engineering there consisted of, engineering drawing, which I love now because you can visualize something, but doing it, I had this terrible course and then as an excited freshman where I got criticized, as you said, for my arrowheads, and that turned me off. And then I had a second course in surveying where you had

this nice little transit and survey instrument and went around the campus, measured the heights of buildings and stuff. That was fun for about an hour while you learned about the instrument. And And then I was a shy 18-year-old or 17-year-old and running around, sitting on the campus looking through this little thing, well, kids walked by and kind of made fun of you, did, or I thought were making fun of me, didn't appeal very much. And at that time, I had to take freshman physics, and they were making discoveries up at the radiation laboratory. And so I switched to physics.

And then I got really lucky. I switched to physics. And then I got assigned an academic advisor, and it turned out to be Owen Chamberlain who got the Nobel Prize for the Antiproton. And he invited me to come up to the radiation lab because I was pretty good in classes. And I had extra time. So I used to go up there. Now the radiation lab, which is above campus, has a little shuttle bus. The anti-prochon was discovered in 1956.

and they won the Nobel Prize in 1959, and this is the period right in between. So, you know, he was busy as hell, I suppose. I now understand that, the time between when we saw gravitational waves, and the Nobel Prize was pretty busy in time, too. But he was too busy, and for me a lot of the time, but I had this overhead of going all the way up the hill.

So I used to wander up, and then they didn't have as much barriers for radiation problems and all that stuff, you could wander around. The Bevatron was too intimidating for me, and nobody would talk to me. I was a little 18-year-old kid. But I wandered up to the 184-inch cyclotron, which is the classic machine that existed there.

And it was much smaller, and it had a guy in the control room who ran it, who at the time, I didn't know who he was at all. Years later, I saw his picture, along with Lawrence and Alvarez, and all these people, he was always the guy with a white coat and stuff because he was their technical. His name was Jimmy Dale. But he was one person at the lab that would talk to me. So I wandered into the cyclotron.

And he would talk to me and he was running this machine and he knew the art of running it. And that is the period when I actually learned about control systems, not knowing that that's what I was learning. because he was, he was, he would, at that, they would have oscilloscopes and then a lot of knobs because everything was analog at that time, not now. And so somebody wants to change the energy of the machine. And so there's a big knob that had energy. And I'd be there chatting with him. And he changed that knob, but he'd also go tweak to something else, you know, a little tweak somewhere.

And I'd ask him why he would do that. And he'd say, because it works, you know, basically. And, you know, it's somebody that. grew up with this machine and it worked. And so basically I sat there and I used to chart what he did. So at first I thought I was charting it because so I could do what he did. But eventually I learned that I learned to be able that it basically, the control system wasn't diagonal.

And so you have a matrix is the control system. An ideal one is diagonal. And when you change the energy, you change the energy. but here there's some coupling between the energy and something else. And so the off-diagonal terms are a problem. And that's, I remember when I had all this big insight and I showed it the matrix and the off-diagonal terms because I had sat there and he didn't know what the hell I was talking about. And I didn't either, but I was there again, you know.

So, so I, so that was when I really got into experimental physics. It was really through sitting in a control room. And then that's how I got involved in doing accelerators. Actually, I did it. Yes. When we talked about that last year, that part of the motivation for having the 40-meter instrument at Caltech, he said that it was a training platform that gave your students and even one of my former students, Garcy Barron, who's now a professor, gave her hands-on

experience doing low risk but potentially high reward science, that she could learn a tremendous amount of physics, experimental physics, and then be an asset to the process. project. And I know you only have a little bit more time and I have a change control board meeting myself, but I want to ask you a couple of questions that come from your partner in prime, Ray Weiss. Ray will be on the show in the next few weeks. And he wants me to ask you about your thoughts for future upgrades with LIGO. And what kind of survey will you have coming up of that? And what's your vision? We, I think you should have an interesting conversation with Ray because he's really now. the way he gets like this about how we get from here to there on what we call the cosmic Explore, which is the next generation. There's not a clean set of ideas about how long we keep improving LIGO before we change to a new detector.

And then we have a second kind of issue, which is that in Europe, they were not constrained as we were to think about a next generation detector. And they did a design actually in 2011, supported by the European Union, I suppose, grants. And this is called the Einstein Telescope. And we had not discovered gravitational waves. The NSF wouldn't let us spend a penny or even breathe that we were thinking about, you know, next generation. We just had to accomplish. I mean, we did a little bit of thinking, but we couldn't really do any resources.

So we've been since we discovered gravitational waves and the older generation like Ray and I can afford to worry about the future more than the young guys who should exploit what's happened than they are. We've been working toward what we call the cosmic group's far. And the idea is complementary to the idea in Europe, although in the end you really need to make globally something that's either the same. or makes a set of detectors around the world that are practical, right? But the big difference is that they are, they designed the next generation gravitational wave detector this deep underground. It gets rid of a lot of the shaking of the Earth problem, but of course there's the big overhead in getting deep underground.

It's triangular in shape, which I won't go into why that's good, but that's the way they do it for the space experiment, Lisa. It's a triangle instead of L-shaped. It gives you a certain ability to go both directions to inside know something about what direction the gravitational wave came from and so forth. But it's, again, a big overhead in doing that. And lastly, and the thing that I think

is the biggest next step for technology for us is to cool it. I mean, the obvious thing is to go to low temperature. It's not trivial. The problem is going to low temperature. We have these test masses which aren't supposed to move, and yet we're supposed to suck all the heat out of them as the laser beam goes through without making a move.

And they're absolutely wonderful mirrors. The quality of the mirrors are the best super mirrors that exist, and the materials and everything matter. And the material that you'd use at low temperature is not the same as you use. And we're not material scientists. So now we're working with material scientists and what to do and what's the right temperature to go to and so forth. So that's it.

But the biggest overwhelming problem practically is that about a third of the cost of LIGO is the vacuum system. I like the vacuum system I see behind your head. A big vacuum system that is a third of the price of LIGO itself. And now we're talking about the way to get 10 times of sensitivity is to make everything better, but also make it bigger. So just stay on the Earth's surface, but make it 40 kilometers instead of 10 kilometers. We have to worry about the curvature of the Earth, but that's secondary.

The big problem is that if something costs a third of the cost, and now you make it 10 times longer, it's the dominant cost. So how to make the vacuum system, which has to be big, it can't be little for a bunch of reasons I won't go into, and be high vacuum, which it is, and make it much cheaper than it was before, is the practical overwhelming problem. And my colleague, Ray Wise, is wonderful at practical overwhelming challenges. And so he, you know, just pursue with him his ideas for how do you make a vacuum system and what tests have to be done. And how we get the support. It's a little bit like you were saying before. How do we get the support to do the R&D on something that isn't going project and so forth?

Because you just know it's going to be the big problem, but you want to work on it now before we're proposing it. We're talking about being ready to propose, you know, after CMBS4 is done or something off the table. So we're talking about, you know, the middle of this decade. We proposed it, started it, started 2030, start building it. You'd like to have the next generation one operational about the time of the space one. So they were complementary. But so that's 2035 or something. But for us, we can worry about that because we have tenure and have done our,

But Ray will sing all the ideas. That's an engineering problem. But what's wonderful is how much science goes into trying to solve an engineering problem like that. So how do you make a much cheaper vacuum system that's a super high vacuum system? We have the largest high vacuum system in the world. And how do you do that? So before we leave, I want to conclude with some questions that I ask all of my guests, Barry, if you indulge me, it will take very long. And the first one is based on a concept in Judaism called the ethical will, which in Hebrew is pronounced Zaba'am.

And it basically means something that you want to pass on to future generations, but not in the form of material wealth, but in ethical and wisdom-based wealth that you can bequeath to your intellectual, biological, and ideological errant. As you know, Alfred Nobel did this as well when he included a requirement that the winners of the Nobel Prize would have to make humankind better through their inventions and discoveries, even the ones that were winning it in the sciences such as yourself? So I want to ask you, what would you most like to lead in the terms of wisdom or ideology for future generations, not only for your children and grandchildren, but for humanity as a whole? Yeah, I, I'm not going to be as philosophical. I'm going to be very practical. The thing that I think is on the singular. really the biggest problem in that somehow maybe you and I evaded for lucky reasons, maybe

different reasons in growing up. So I grew up in a certain family. I didn't have. And so how did I get where I am? And who didn't get there that grew up and why? And so the problem I think that is so obvious to me is that young kids, you know, five years old, seven years old, are incredibly curious. They're asking you questions and pestering and want to know everything.

Okay? Then we get kids that are pretty good that come to Caltech. They don't ask questions anymore. They just want to do their homework. They ask you a question because I couldn't solve the problem. But somehow in the educational system, we kill curiosity. I may be overstating it, but we basically kill curiosity. And we even have a saying, which is detrimental.

It's curiosity killed the cat. And that's actually telling you that you don't want to, you know, you don't want to try anything because it's going to cause trouble. And I think if you find what happened with somebody like you or me or Carl Sagan made a statement about this that I can't remember exactly, that somehow by some piece of luck, we evaded of this problem. that it got killed. And for me, I've always been really curious. Why did I spend 10 years looking for a magnetic monopole? It's curiosity completely. So to get to where we are, and you don't have to be a physicist, but I think in life we have a real problem. So if I don't just go out in the street now,

we live in a society where everybody walks around with one of these cell phones, but do they know what it is, how it works at all? Most people don't have the foggiest idea how it communicates, how it makes little pictures on the screen, what it is. Then they go home and they turn on their television and they have no idea how there's what made the picture there. And they don't even ask why. And then they go in the kitchen and turn on the microwave to cook their dinner. And how many people really have any idea what it's doing to cook their dinner. So we've created a society where people don't even have, they've been killed. They don't have the curiosity that we all are born with is such a wonderful human factor.

And so we've got to do something about our education system to encourage, not kill curiosity. And to me, that's the message that I think anyone that's curious, it's wonderful, do it, you're not going to get killed. It's so interesting that you bring that up because there's something I learned, which I attribute to my friend James Altoucher, that he quoted when he gave his TED Talk. In San Diego, he and I both gave Ted Ex-Tox in San Diego, and he quote that a five-year-old kid smiles or laughs 300 times a day. But by the time they hit my age or your age, it's down to five times a day.

So laughter, like happiness, seems to be correlated with curiosity. And it also reminds me of another guest, in addition to James, who's been on the podcast, was a psychiatrist. His name is Dr. Judson Brewer at a Brown University. and he looks at ways to overcome addiction, such as smoking, drugs, food, whatever, wherever there's something that the human mind can crave, he feels that in this branch of psychology,

that you can overcome the addiction and manage it via becoming curious about the bodily sensations that one is craving. So he says that the first thing you do is become essentially curious. That's very interesting. Okay, 7442. Yes. The last question I want to ask you, it harkens to the name of this podcast, and it also involves curiosity and imagination. And that's one of Sir Arthur C. Clark's so-called three laws. His first law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. His second law, which you and I can make good use of, is that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And his third law is that the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. That's, of course, the name of this podcast, the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imaginations

into the Impossible podcast. So I want to ask you, what aspect of life was perhaps mysterious, maybe even intimidating and terrifying to you as a young person? But because of your courage or because of your hard work and discipline became possible. because you went a little bit beyond your comfort zone. Well, as I said, I think I didn't have a lot of mentoring as a young person. And I also was in over my head. Some sense, kids around me were more sophisticated or came from more sophisticated homes.

And so the big problem that I had, although it doesn't show so much now, is being overly shy, if you want. Not shy in the way that you think of shyness, but shy in every aspect of kind of being a person that I may in my head have been very adventurous, which I've always been and had curiosity, but I was very reticent until I got enough confidence through success, I suppose, to merge later in life.

Somehow I'm very lucky that that happened that I went down a path where I succeeded enough that I developed the inner confidence. But otherwise, I think I didn't have the confidence somehow in me to do what I was capable of doing. And that took a long time to develop. It's funny that you say that as well. I had on Lee Suskin this week. And he basically said this thing. He suffered from what people call the imposter syndrome until he was 50. And he was a, he's a member in the National Academy of you. I still have the imposter syndrome.

So the thing, I'll tell you an anecdote from the Nobel thing. Okay. So mostly it's intimidating. And of course, to have this king, give you this thing. But they walk you up at the very end when they give you your check and so forth. They don't give you your check. But when you walk up, you go to the foundation, Nobel Foundation. And they take the official pictures of you and all this stuff.

This is after the ceremony. I don't remember where this is the same day, but you go individually. And I went in, and then they hand you this little book, a book kind of like this, not much more than this thing that I'm holding in my hand, which you can't see very well. And it's leather bound and so forth. And they open it up to a page and ask you just to sign your name. Okay. I'm curious, right?

So I look back, and I look back, and you look back on the previous pages. and there's, you know, Einstein's signature or Richard Feynman. Yeah, and if at that moment, you don't have the imposter syndrome, which I certainly had, you know, how do I belong on this same page, same book with a finite number of pages and signatures, it's not like, you know, it's a telephone book or something that I think that I certainly have had it and I had it dramatically at that moment. Well, Barry, I so appreciate you and all the generosity and graciousness you've shown me personally. You don't have to do it and yet you do it.

There's so much here to talk about your life and I hope you'll come back in the future. I hope I can pick your brains and I don't drive you crazy with other crazy ideas that interest me but maybe not interest you. But I want to always thank you for the sage advice. Yeah. Well, I know this was about you interviewing me, but sometime we have to get together when this pandemic gets out of our way. So you can tell me all about CMB and what you're doing.

You can answer your side of the same group of questions, which I'm sure will be different, but very interesting. I've seen so much about to do that, Barry. You only that is paid back. That's right. I'm happy. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review.

Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating.

For more information on the Clark Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director.

Produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.