Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Barry Barish Interviews Brian Keating: Part 1 ​(#193)

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

In February 2021 Dr. Barry Barish, co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the LIGO experiment, interviewed me at his home in Los Angeles. The topic was his thoughts and reactions to my book, Losing the Nobel Prize (http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA). We discussed scientific leadership, academic stress, burnout, the role of mentors and managers in science and a lot about my book too. Losing The Nobel Prize By Brian Keating The inside story of a quest to unlock one of cosmology’s biggest mysteries, derailed by the lure of the Nobel Prize. What would it have been like to be an eyewitness to the Big Bang? In 2014, astronomers wielding BICEP2, the most powerful cosmology telescope ever made, revealed that they’d glimpsed the spark that ignited the Big Bang. Millions around the world tuned in to the announcement broadcast live from Harvard University, immediately igniting rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. But had these cosmologists truly read the cosmic prologue or, swept up in Nobel dreams, had they been deceived by a galactic mirage? In Losing the Nobel Prize, cosmologist and inventor of the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment Brian Keating tells the inside story of BICEP2’s mesmerizing discovery and the scientific drama that ensued. In an adventure story that spans the globe from Rhode Island to the South Pole, from California to Chile, Keating takes us on a personal journey of revelation and discovery, bringing to vivid life the highly competitive, take-no-prisoners, publish-or-perish world of modern science. Along the way, he provocatively argues that the Nobel Prize, instead of advancing scientific progress, may actually hamper it, encouraging speed and greed while punishing collaboration and bold innovation. In a thoughtful reappraisal of the wishes of Alfred Nobel, Keating offers practical solutions for reforming the prize, providing a vision of a scientific future in which cosmologists may, finally, be able to see all the way back to the very beginning. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/impossible to post a job for free.  Audible is hands-down my favorite platform for consuming podcasts, fiction and nonfiction books! With an Audible membership, you can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. The Audible app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. Audible members don’t have to worry about using their credits right away. You can keep your credits for up to a year—and use them to binge on a whole series if you’d like! And if you’re not loving your selection, you can simply swap it for another. Start your free 30-day trial today:  Audible.com/impossible or text “impossible” to 500-500 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to part one of this special two-part episode of Think Like a Nobel Prize winner featuring Dr. Barry Barish, co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the LIGO experiment. This lively discussion between Dr. Barish and Professor Keating touches on scientific leadership, academic stress, the role of mentors and managers in science and many other topics. Don't forget to come back for part two. Welcome to Into the Impossible, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. discover how the world's most accomplished scientists supercharged their creativity and strengthen their most precious collaborations and how you can too no matter what you do well we are here live in los angeles for a very special interview with as you long-time listeners of the into the impossible

podcast know is one of my heroes not only of experimental physics not only of the pursuit of perfection as an educator, but our true mention, somebody that I look up to because he has not only scientific knowledge, which is what science means, but he also has a lot of wisdom, and we figured I'm in L.A. today. Maybe we do a

special live version, or not live version, but we record in person since we missed out on that pleasure last time. So how have you been since last year? Well, considering this silly situation we're in, I'm fine. I know. I got my first vaccination.

Dodger Stadium. Oh, you did? Yeah. Oh, wow. Two weeks ago, so you have to wait two more weeks to get a second one. Right, yeah. But that was quite a scene. There's 10,000 people going through in cars.

Well, you always were a good athlete growing up, so, you know, you made it to Dodger Stadium one way or another. Right. So I wanted to talk, last time we talked a lot about, you know, kind of the process of science, how LIGO came about, SSC. I thought maybe we talked about, maybe a little bit about the first. future and what interests you. If you had to take another attack in career starting off right now, what aspects of astrophysics, astronomy, physics are appealing to you or interesting to you, or just somewhat fascinating, even if it wouldn't be your career? I'm curious about that. Yeah. Okay. The future is always hard because it changed your mind all the time.

I you know my background was particle physics but then I kind of moved into we just talked about this thing I spent 10 years in my life looking for identical monopoles I don't know if I told you that yeah and then I have done my go sorry about the planes that's okay I'm a pilot I'm just an airplane on you And, you know, I wonder for myself, I always think that I'm pretty forward-looking and I'm not restricted by whatever I've done. But I must say I miss the boat on what you do, CMB. I never really, even though it was going on at Caltech and Andy Lang was hired during my time, it never really caught me. And it was just something that I asked myself why. I don't know why.

But so when you think of whether you have any vision of where experimental physics you'd go, I missed it on that. I mean, it isn't that I didn't know the physics potential because it's been around Keltag. So that's not the only thing I've missed. But since it was happening around me, I always ask myself why. Personally, I don't think the, even though my background is in particle physics, I doubt if the, that there's a big frontier there in the future. Even if we solve the problem of how to make accelerators have a higher gradient and they're cheaper, I think the problem is background. What I mean by that is in particle physics, there's a lot that. happens when you collide particles together.

And if you want to see something new, if you just look at the discovery of the Higgs boson, this is a long-winded answer, because I don't have a real answer. It's your show. Okay, I don't have a real answer. But if you look at the discovery of the Higgs boson, you'll...

Hi, Simone. Nice to be. That's my daughter's middle name. Yeah. Very nice to be. Water. He wants water. The own water?

Yeah, that would be wonderful. Thank you so much. So if you look at the discovery of the Higgs boson, you'll notice it's a little teeny peak over a big background. And if you really look carefully, you'll notice that the zero has been suppressed. So it's worse that it looks like. And other than how much of a frontier it is after that, you'll notice how slowly progress is. And the reason is that there's so much physics background. that whatever you see, even something like the Higgs boson, is a very tiny effect on top of a physics background.

So you have to understand that background very well and then pile up huge statistics to see something. And that's as you go higher in energy, that almost any effects you can think of, they don't stand out. So I think it's not easy to make progress just for a reason of what kind of data you get. There's a lot of science in the data that you already know, and then you're trying to see something on top of that. And the topologies can be the same. The only difference is that a cluster of the particles and the final state add up to the mass of whatever the expozons. Ligo is different than that. And that we, so we made our decision.

discovery three, four years after the Higgs, but we've progressed even since then a lot faster. And that's not that we're better, it's that the situation is much more favorable because what limits LIGO is technical issues, not physics. And so the technical issues are the shaking of the earth or electronic noise or things that we can cope with. And so we know how to make the background lower, which lets you see smaller effects. And we've done that already, and we'll keep doing it. And so it's the advantage of having kind of a background that isn't physics. It's really just something that gets into your equipment.

So I think that just taking the two things that I know the best, that there's a much better future in gravitational waves than in particle physics. And in fact, I think the future is so bright. I'll tell you why I think so, that I would have to be awfully tempted if I were to go somewhere else. I mean, the first round was to see gravitational waves. Now there's so many things that we can do as we get more sensitive that I think it's just really bright. even though it seems like you're measuring something that's so small, the things that limited are even much, much smaller.

So you'll continue to see us do better and better over the next five or ten years. And then we know what it would take to build a next generation detector, whether it'll happen, whether it's funded, I don't know. But my first answer is the simple one. This is too rich to go anywhere else. Right. And we haven't really done anywhere near the testing of Einstein's equations that we're going to be able to do. We haven't good enough sky coverage to do the kind of multi-messager astronomy that we can do.

But I think primarily, and you'll relate to this, everything we've done so far is just simple astrophysics. It's a discovery. It's, you know, stopping now, it would be like Galileo stopping after discovering the moment. moons of Jupiter. Thank you. You warm enough? I love, I am more than more. If not we've got a lot of kids or anything else you need you're having to go. Thank you so much. You want some coffee?

No, I think water's just fine. Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a good meeting. So I think, you know, what I meant was everything we're doing, of course, so we're doing things that keep going. But in particular, I think there's a rich future in gravitational waves in starting to do

cosmology. I say I didn't understand what you do, but everything we do now is a very small Z, no redshift. And as we can increase the sensitivity, we get a lot more events, we get more sensitivity. But I think the primary, personally, I think the primary real change will be to get a large Z and be able to do cosmology with gravitation waves. And that's a very generalized statement, but I think that's what opens up other than being much much more sense. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. The other thing that you brought up is in particle physics, because particle physicists are sort of victims of their own success

in that they discovered so much, so fast, it was really exponential. And I feel right now... I know, I know. Well, I'm a pilot. I've flown out of Santa Monica on many occasions, but we always see it from the other side. All these residents, they're always complaining about our noise. You know, it's like, I think it's a misdemeanor if you start your engine after 11 p.m.

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to Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. It's destined to be close, but not this room. Yeah, exactly. Hopefully, Matthew. It is an amazing. It has a historical background. The pilots love it. It's a real pilots airport. Important for the community. But anyway, getting back to the particle physics. So I hear a lot from my particle physics friends in experiment that the future is sort of equally bright. if only we can build things like the future circular collider

or the international linear collider, these $100 million dollars. And if I've learned one thing from you, and I'm not the best student, but when somebody tells you that an experiment is going to cost X dollars, you have to at least double that if you ever want to operate the experiment, and you probably have to triple, quadruple, quintuple it

if you're being realistic. So those numbers could be as high as $100 billion for the future circular collider. And I always say, you know, what is the point of doing that? Not that if you canceled it, as you know, very painfully. So when the collider was super-coiting super-Cola, it wasn't like, oh, physics gets all this money because we canceled the SSC. No, it was almost the opposite. It was true, unfortunately. So canceling the future circular collater, I'm not saying we should do that to fund C&B or future gravitational lines,

but I'm just making the point that they don't do ourselves, we don't do ourselves a favor if we undercost or underestimate. Oh, I agree with that. We do know pretty much about how to cost accelerators because we've done so much. So they're not likely to be as they're under costed because of what you leave out, not because you don't know what you're doing. What do you say to those people that's... But anyway, let me answer your question. I think that it depends which thing you're talking about.

I think I told you that I worked for several years designing the linear collider. I personally think it's worth every penny. and should be built. Maybe as a more specialized machine than we proposed. Because when we proposed it, and I did the design, the Higgs hadn't yet been found. But now you can actually make it a little more specialized, a little bit cheaper.

That's kind of what the Japanese are likely to do if they build it. And concentrate on the Higgs. So why the Higgs? it is different than everything that we have in particle physics. It's the thing that's responsible for mass. And we don't know, except for seeing it, and seeing it in a way that you are sure because of its quantum numbers,

it's the modes that it's made in and not made in that you know it fits the model of B to Higgs, but we don't really know anything about it. Yet, it is what's responsible for mass. particle physics is fine if all the masses are zero. We used to put it in by hand. Now we put it in because we know the Higgs mechanism. So if we want to understand how nature makes mass,

we have to understand, we have to study the Higgs bosom. So it's a very specialized probe. I think a linear collider built as a Higgs factor is well worth, well worth it. I think it's a very targeted place where we just have a hint of something and we haven't done anything beyond that. And it's nothing almost as more important than where does mass come from. We do, we know since Einstein that E equals MC squared, right? Every kid writes it down. Energy makes mass. Einstein told us that. We now know it makes mass by a mechanism called the Higgs mechanism. So we know why it does that, but we don't know much about the Higgs mechanism, what it really

is like experimental. So that kind of preempted my subsequent question, which was really about the future circular collider and that I've heard from preeminent experimentalist involved in the project. And I asked them, well, why should we build it? And they say, well, because serendipity can strike or they don't really have a natural target.

And for that reason, I suspect that is not as well motivated as the linear collider. For me, it's not. except the, you know, statement that every time you've gone to higher energy, you've opened up new frontiers. But that's a vague kind of poetic statement. I like a better target than that. So I think the motivation right now, maybe something will be seen at the LHC that are motivated better. It takes so long to develop the technologies and designs that it's good that they're doing that.

You also have a ready-made laboratory that can do it, which is CERN. But I don't know that it's, I haven't seen the same kind of target that you can kind of aim at. Like I talk about the Higgs itself, which I think is. And you bring up the Higgs and it's interesting to me because it seems like the Higgs, because of its uniqueness, as you point out, it's a scalar field. It's a first known scalar field of its kind. And my job, my day job, when I'm not interviewing folks for fun and enjoyment, is to look for something that could be the result of what's called the Inflaton, which is also a scalar field, which until the Higgs boson, we point out, you know, had no analog, no discovery, had never been noticed in nature. and now since the Higgs, not only are there papers that come out every day on the archive

about Higgs inflation, but there's all sorts of hoax, perhaps, maybe misguided, I want to get your opinion, that, you know, the Higgs kind of mechanism can do it all. We can have axions, we can have the infloton, as I mentioned, maybe the dark energy is caused by, you know, something that has similarities to the Higgs mechanism. So I wonder, you know, if it too might be kind of a victim of its own success in that we're trying to unify it with so many different disparate phenomena that maybe it's asking too much.

Maybe we should just study it for its own good. I actually don't think it can do everything. And I can tell you the main example where there's equal contort to try to make something happen, which you can always do, but it's certainly not build in. And that's the fact that neutrinos have missed. That's not described by the Higgs mechanism

in any natural way. So where do that come? come from. That's another thing we're hoping to do with the cosmic microwave background. Unfortunately, we can't actually detect the individual masses, but we can detect the sum of the masses. But that's also interesting, right? I always view it as a personal affront to my dignity as a physicist that of all the 17 fundamental elementary particles, we don't know what the masses are. We have bounds on the neutrino mass, but we don't know what the masses are. And by the way, they're the only form of dark matter that we know exists. They're not the dominant form of dark matter,

by any means, and we know that. But, you know, I always make the joke. There's this old joke of this policeman. He comes up and he sees this drunk guy on his hands and knees underneath a streetlight, and he's looking around, and a cop says, what are you doing on your hands and knees? And the guy said, the drunk guy says, I lost my keys. And the cop says, here, let me help you look for him. Did you lose him over here?

He goes, no, the street light's where the light is. And I feel like, yeah, that's maybe not the greatest way to look for keys. But sometimes if nature only gives us one opportunity or one glimpse, we may not be so lucky again, which is why I wanted to get into this, but I do want to get your take on neutrinos first, and then I want to ask you about serendipity in science, because I want to get your impression about some things that have happened lately,

serendipity was among your other fellow Nobelists and others that I talked to. Well, Sarah, you're going to stay on neutrinos first. Let's go neutrinos, and then we'll go to serendipity. All right, so what I said, neutrinos are really mysterious particles and how they interact and the fact that one type of experiment could find two rather different phenomenon, that is how the sun burns, prove that it's fusion and at the same time not get enough neutrinos and then discover that that's because neutrinos change their identity is pretty phenomenal.

And not serendipity, I don't think. The fact that neutrinos can affect the cosmic microwave background, the fact that the masses that we have are not described by the Higgs mechanism means to me that the neutrinos are still a real place where we have a lot to learn. And they're very, very mysterious. But they're hard to do because they don't interact. So we now talk about doing, or we're doing very very mysterious. multi-messinger astronomy where we don't just do photons, but gravitational waves and neutrinos.

But even though people have been detecting neutrinos a lot longer than gravitational waves, it's just too hard. And if you try to see neutrinos from the early universe, they're too low in energy because they've thermalized. So they're fantastic particles, but it's hard to get at them. Serendipity My friend Chili Glashel loves such

serendipity likes to give a whole lecture on it actually It's been very important obviously in science and probably the most important I don't know what he said

but the discovery of penicillin which was done by serendipity is probably one that we've all benefited from in terms of our lifespan. Lifespan changed between 100 years ago and now is about 30 years. It's amazing. And some of it's due to hygiene. But the biggest single thing is antibiotics.

And that was discovered by an accident. But coupled with what I believe is the key to science. So I'll tell you my view, which is not. Shelly's a theorist. And that is that, what's the guy's name, Fitzgerra? What's his name?

Scott for Penicillian. Yeah, Fitzgerald. He went on vacation. He was going on vacation, as I recall. And when he went on vacation, he came back and on his plates were some mold. And then he noticed that his penicillin

was eating away at the mold. Right. And I think if you were a book scientist that just did what's in the book, you would clean your plates and go on with what you're doing. I wouldn't do that. I'm notoriously messy as my wife all the test. And instead of doing that, he was curious what was causing that.

And, of course, following that up is what developed penicillin. So that's a serendipitous discovery, but wouldn't have been made without curiosity. So I'm going to go to the last page or next to last page in your book and ask you a question. Because curiosity for me is what I think is the whole key to being a scientist. And it's the flaw in our educational system that we basically kill it. Curiosity killed the cat. And those of us that have survived that are the ones that kind of continue.

you to do science. So you say that the end, it's the only thing I remember from your book, by the way. Not really. I'm joking. They say you only remember 1% of every book you've ever. I'm just joking. But somewhere near the end, you'll remember this. You said as you got something like more powerful instruments, your curiosity has grown and grown. I think it's maybe nearly the last paragraph of the book. That's true. I always key in on the word curiosity. So I remember that. Can you tell me what you meant by that? I think when I look at now benefiting from having kids and having been a kid, I always used to say, you know, scientists are like children. We have curiosity, we have imagination, we don't play well with others, we are jealous, we like to have our toys.

And when I see my kids discover something, I think Michelson said this. He said that, you know, a scientist is someone who's like a kid who solves a puzzle. And when a kid solves a puzzle, they don't just put it away. They'll come back to it because you get a rush, which I now know is dopamine, this satisfaction kind of hormone that gets secreted. And it's addictive. And I have, I recognize I have an addictive personality. And it's something I have to control.

Thank God it's not involving anything illegal or what have you. But it's something that I want to encourage but strike this balance between. Because every, you know, every blessing can come with a curse. You can have sort of, you know, a sense that science, for example, pursuing it is the, you know, materialism. It is the only acceptable explanation. And you must live by this particular way. In my case, curiosity is almost as fundamental, as, you know, fundamentally distinctive of what a homo sapient is. So Homo sapiens sapien-sapien means someone who thinks and is conscious and knows he's conscious.

And that's actually the word sapien in Latin means wisdom. And it's always interesting because science means knowledge in Latin. It doesn't mean wisdom. And there's a huge difference. You know, they say knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. And for me, the curiosity of wanting to take things apart, understand what their kind of building blocks were about,

and then do it again. After I did the experiment, as a kid, made some pesticide to kill off, hopefully not my neighbor's cat, but kill some bugs or whatever. And I saw, as I learned more about, I wasn't a good student as a high school student. I was actually held back in mathematics beyond what below the grade that would have allowed me to take calculus in high school. So they didn't think I was very good at math. But because I got into astronomy and I wanted to measure the speed of light using the eclipses of Jupiter, which I didn't know that Galileo, had done 400 years earlier, I was like, well, how can I prove this and measure parallax? And I realized that curiosity was a gateway drug in this addiction to learning calculus. And I actually had to teach

myself trigonometry, pre-calculus, and then I did get into calculus and got the highest score in my class in the AP exam. I was very proud of that. But if I hadn't been curious, I would have found something else to occupy my time with. And so it sort of saved me in a way. And I'm equally curious now with the more kind of knowledge you have. They say my father is a mathematician, and they say that mathematicians do their best work by age 30. I don't know if that's true in mathematics or not. I suspect that it's not,

but I know for certain that it's not true in physics, especially experimental physics. You know so much more at your age than I do, and that, you know, hopefully I'll get to some fraction of it someday, but you know more than you did a year ago. And your toolkit has magnified, and that allows you to, to investigate more and more things that you're curious about.

So that's sort of what I meant. And then, but I've been thinking a lot about, you know, again, I'm not comparing myself to Einstein and whatever, but I had a scene, the way that Einstein had Besso and Grossman, when I was at Caltech, those are really magical years for me because I had this opportunity to work with Andrew Lang, who was a great devotee of yours, he would always speak about you, magnificent human being, tragically no longer with us.

But being in his lab, Jamie Bach, and that group of young hungry postdocs that had this huge amount of intellectual horsepower combined with Andrew's ability to facilitate and we could magnify his curiosity as well. And that to me was the kind of, that's the hallmark, I think, of a good scientist. I mean, that's my opinion. But not restricting it only for the laboratory and wanting to learn about, well, what are the reasons why I want to do certain things? that motivates me. And that, you know, obviously it was part of my book, motivation as well. Well, it's been, I think for me it's always been the central reason I'm as scientists. Curious. It can be curious, curiosity about, you know, why neutrinos have mass or something

profound or presumably profound or just why this circuit isn't working. But curiosity is what's always attracted. It's what attracted me into what I do. And it's what drives me kind of, and fun. Yeah. So there's two elements. I like to have fun in life. And what I do, if what I'm doing is in fun, I wouldn't do it. But having fun, and that's one reason I worked well with Ray Weiss because he enjoys being in the lab.

I enjoy it. And it's fun. Yeah. He said on my podcast, he came on after you did. And I said, you know, what's your advice to your former self, which I gave, I asked you that question. you never give up curiosity. And I've taken that, you know, really to heart. And I remember telling you at the time,

I had interviewed a very famous neuroscientist at Brown University who does work on addiction. And his work in addiction is geared towards the overcoming of cravings to eat this delicious cheese, you know, while I'm on a diet, by doing so by saying, am I really hungry? Let me investigate. What are these, I struggle with weight my whole life.

But let me, am I really hungry? Maybe I am, but maybe I'm not. And maybe I'm filling this void or I'm doing it socially because I don't want to embarrass me, whatever, my lovely host, or I want to partake in something that's mindless. So when you said that, I started to think, well, let's just say it's an addiction. I'm not asking you to agree with it. I don't know if I agree 100% with him. But his point is that curiosity is rewarding when you find an answer.

You get that dopamine hit. So you can overcome the addiction for food by replacing it with a little less dopamine, but still dopamine by doing this. Oh, that's why I'm hungry. because I'm with this, my friend, and I want to talk. But taking that one step further, I don't know how to put this delicately. Let's say someone that is an alcoholic or whatever. You know, there's nothing that you need to drink every day.

Like, you need to eat every day. You'll die, right? But why do people, why are there so many different types of drinks? Like, I'm not big into alcohol. It's not like a huge part of my life. But there's vodka, tequila, and whatever, whiskey, blah, blah. There are all these different types. But, you know, if it's just to get a little bit of a buzz and feel good,

you don't need one. But the reason is because humans like variety. And I sensed in Ray, not, I'm not, you know, the horrible segue from like alcoholism to Ray Weiss. But I'll say he said that he switched fields every, you know, like almost like clockwork. And that he went from radar. He went to, you know, obviously gravitational wave.

He was CMB. And Matt gave him this little, I interpret as a kind of dopamine hit, that he was doing something novel and that he had variety, which the human mind craves. So, you know what? But he also knows how to have fun. Yes. He said if it's not fun, you shouldn't do it.

Yeah. And I have a very much similar kind of reward having fun. So curiosity and fun are the two elements for me personally. But is it for you? You wrote this whole book. We talked about the last page. But a lot of the rest of it has to do with, getting credited and being appreciated, all the things that,

how much is forgetting about you? How much is that what it really takes to be a scientist? I'm not sure that I understand others or human nature well enough to know, okay, it's kind of idealistic to say, I'm curious, and I like to have fun when I do science, blah, blah, blah. But how much do you also need, I don't, appreciation, accolades, what all that can do. Well, I definitely feel that for me it was very important.

I think less so now. I mean, my joke now is, you know, if you claim that I'm a hypocrite. But it wasn't some of that, sorry, but it wasn't some of that because you were expected to be successful by a successful father and so forth. A lot of it was, was that. And actually, you know, Dimitri Bassov was the chairman of my physics department when I, and he's the, as you know, the son of Nikolai Bassov, and the spitting image of Nikolai, by the way.

He's a good friend of mine. He's a mentor to me. He does Condense Matter Physics. Dimitri does now. He's at Columbia, no longer at UCSD. When I was there, he would say things like, we hired you in part because we thought you're going to win a Nobel Prize, and, you know, and kind of joke like,

and we'll be pretty disappointed if you don't. Then when it came to get matching funds for other experiments, like sometimes an organization will say, will give you funding, but it's contingent on X percent matching from your home institution or whatever. He then told me, like, I'm going to make the case for you to get these funds, you know, predicated on the fact that you are still, and this was after Bicep, too, that you are one of our best chances at winning a Nobel Prize. I heard, yeah, to get tenure. So it happens in academia, and I always, oh, that's kind of funny, but, you know, it's like they say, you know, the plural of anecdotes isn't data. But, you know, having had a lot of those experiences and just even during the writing of my book, as I mentioned, Duncan Hallnden came to UCSD and he brought either the Nobel Prize or replica of the Nobel Prize with him, which I want to see if you've got one lying around here. I'd love to see it.

but everybody didn't really care so much about him. And they really did covet and wanted to take pictures and kiss the Nobel Prize. And I took a picture of it. And here I just finished the first draft of the book about it. And I am a biblical-centered person in terms of values, not like literal biblical intelligence. But there's a very famous part of the Old Testament where the Jews just witnessed these famous 10 plagues that devastate Egypt. And then literally, three days later, they're in the wilderness. These are former slaves. They're complaining to Moses. Moses, take us back to Egypt because there we were

fed pots of meat and garlic. And if you read it, it's just like, I thought Jews are supposed to be smart. Like, you know, we come off so badly. And then 40 days after that, they build a calf out of gold and they worship it. After seeing God give them the 10 commandments, it's the second commandant. So I think that human nature doesn't change too much. I think we all do have idols and, you know, and people may not want to admit that scientists, you know, do things that are not scientific, that are not materialistic, that are, but I think sometimes, and you said it to me,

actually it rubbed off a little bit on me when you said that you kind of felt the imposter syndrome when you saw Einstein's name in this ledger. And it gave me goosebumps, then it gives me goosebumps now to talk to you in person. It's such a treat. but the fact is Einstein you know Einstein deserve seven Nobel prizes and many people's opinions for all the things but he also had

seven major blunders and you know and Jim Gates who you knew and know very well as our mutual friend string theory a string theory super symmetry pioneer he has a book about Einstein proving Einstein right in which he says like Einstein wasn't always Einstein and I think there is this

veneration and because there are no other kind of objective talisman or icons of accomplishment, the Nobel Prize has kind of taken on that for many scientists. Now, I know it didn't motivate you specifically. It's funny because I've never met a Nobel Prize winning. Actually, Frank Wilczek, I did talk to about it. Well, it's an unattainable thing for most people in our profession. Anyone else? I just happen to hit all the right notes. But, I think if that's what you strive for, you're almost bound for disappointment.

No. And so I wasn't really keen on the Nobel Prize as much as... Does curiosity motivate me? No, no. Does being applauded, appreciated, whatever rewards are there? How important is that? Not just for you, but for people that... So we said people that do science.

Well, I've driven by curiosity. and maybe fun. Are they also driven by the need to be appreciated? I mean, doing science, people look at you. So how much is that really a factor? For me, it wasn't much because I came from so little. I came from a family where my parents didn't go to college. Nothing was expected of me, blah, blah, blah.

So I didn't have to have such lofty goals. It's not that I'm a better person. It's just everything I did. It was beyond what I should have done, kind of, so I didn't have to worry about that. But if you think in general, what drives scientists kind of generally, we differ, obviously. But how important is being appreciated, being respected? Yeah, for me, as individuals, not for the science. No, no, no.

Well, I do want to answer specifically for me, as you might know, I mean, I had a very difficult relationship with my father. and for that reason, because he was missing for most of my formative education, and I was really self-taught, you know, it's funny, my father was the youngest full professor. He was a full professor at Cornell when he was like 27, which is basically unheard. And because he was an academic and because I was going into science and college and then graduate school, people would always, oh, you got that from your dad. I'm like, my dad wasn't around for 15 of the most important years of my life and only came back much later in my life. That said, I was always, want to prove something to him. And I think in part, I look to, you know, to mentors as kind of like

father figures, but wanting to kind of impress them, maybe, you know, compete with them in some sense. And I know it's not, I know it's unique to me. So this is not generic to scientists, although I do have some, some thoughts about that. Because, you know, science, you know, the way that that I see is, of course, to be dispassion as to be an accountant. You shouldn't, you shouldn't look for like, I should be, you know, the best, most creative accountant in the in history. You know, if your, if your doctor tells you, I'm going to be very curious to do this certain, like, I'll run away from that doctor. But on the same token, science, scientists are held in such high esteem now. I mean, you hear things like, you know, the party of science,

you know, we trust science, and it's impossible to escape that there still are some paternalistic aspects of science. So there is this encoded within science. And, you know, for a bit, you know, all the people that I mentioned, you know, like, Andrew Lyme, he was like a father figure to me at that formative age. And he wasn't that much. And he used to say, like, I'm going to give you some fatherly advice, you know, don't get married before you have tenure, you know, things I didn't take into consideration, thankfully, because I would have gotten started even later than I did.

But now I try to, I think I see things personally. I know you're talking generally about scientists. I feel that once you get to graduate school, you're no longer. or graded, but you're still kind of competing. It's almost as if you were mentioning you went to Dodgers Stadium, not too long. I got the San Diego Padres mask here. So imagine baseball. It's almost impossible.

It's almost as hard to win to get to the major leagues and play for the Dodgers or the Padres as it is to win a Nobel Prize. It's extremely few. In fact, there are more people in the major league baseball than are doing physics like you and I do at an R1 university, right? But to be a postdoc, I can't hire any of postdocs. You guys sweep them up or like probably the same for you guys, right? It's very hard to hire postdocs.

It would be as if the AAA league of baseball is easy to get into. Anybody can get in. Yeah, I can get in with my gimp arm. But then it's impossible to get to the major needs. So we have this kind of set of hurdles, which in academia, they stop because you don't get grades in graduate school really anymore. But I think there is this notion of hierarchy. Look, we have the H index. We are judged on promotions based.

on a series of different metrics, the most predominant amongst them, prominent amongst them, is their citation count, H index, impact factor of journal. So we're quantitative by nature as scientists. And yet there's nothing really objective to mark scientific excellence. Like, how do I know that Shelley Glashow is, you know, in the same category class as, you know, let's say, Freeman Dyson or something, who didn't want to know about friends? It's like, I meant the both, you know, like they're both incredible human beings and incredible intellect. You know, so I think it's just natural because human beings love hacks.

We love shortcuts. We want to say this person, and that's part of the reason we have prejudices and biases in society, I think, because we want to shortcut, say, oh, Jews aren't as good as non-Jew or whatever. And so those are pernicious ones, obviously. I think it can carry through into science. I mean, promotions, named chairs, and sciences, academia is replete with these kinds of distinctions. It goes back, you know, thousand years. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed.

That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees, Google FiWireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network use. And do you think it's important to be that way? I mean, are we victims of that system or do we create that? I mean, which way does it go? Is that something that we need is to have a hierarchy that we create? Yeah, I guess let's examine the alternatives. So if you didn't like count or you had differential weightings for different things that are not scientific, you know, then would science be better off for it? I think, you know, it's hard.

to run the counterfactual experiment. And so I think what I worry about more is that because when we had a big discovery, one of the first things that happens is this flywheel starts to ramp up, where you want to notify your chair, and then your chair tells your dean, and your dean tells the press office, the press office tells the local newspaper, local, you know, and this really ramps up out of control. And that's what I wanted to get into talking about colleagues of ours in astronomy, in physics,

We've had these huge announcements, made the flywheel kind of go around really successfully. And then, you know, later on, things get called into question or whatever. And I'm wondering if at the core of it is because science is at some sense be held, beholden to the government. You know, one of my colleagues who's a particle physicist, I don't know if you ever knew Hans Parr. It was Leon Letterman. So, yeah. So Hans and I, who's like a mentor to me too, he passed away two years ago, unfortunately. me. Yeah, he had director of cancer. And he was a wonderful person. And, you know, so he used to say, we physicists are the biggest beneficiaries of world peace. You know, because if there's a war,

you're going to call the scientists and we're going to make bombs or we're going to do whatever. And so we serve at the pleasure of the people and the people in charge of the politicians. Sometimes I wonder if we take that too far. In other words, because we don't have, we have tenure, but we don't have stipend. Like, I don't get like the Duke of Tuscan and he gets. giving me a stipend to do research. So we have to apply for large grants, billions of dollars. It might take years and years. So there is an incentive, as Feynman used to say, to kind of exaggerate.

And he warned in his famous speech at Caltech in 1964, the famous, you're the easiest person to fool. He said, you should never, you know, you should never really be too self-promotional in the thought that no one will support you unless you are. In other words, you should never distort what you're doing. And he said, you know, he heard a scientist, an astronomer say, my research is good for nothing. Well, he thought that was actually, that was wrong for the person to do that.

So anyway, I think there is this kind of incentive system. I don't know. I mean, it's not universal. No. By the way, I give you the counter examples of Max Planck Society, where they don't write any, once you're made a Max Bank professor instead of a UCSD professor. and we have several in LIGO. They basically are supported for life by the Max Planck Society.

Right. They couldn't build LIGO, but their salaries are supported, right? Not just their salaries. Their laboratories? Okay. So Reinhardt Gensel. Yeah. He was in Berkeley before, but then he went to the Max Planck Society,

and basically all that research was supported through without writing proposals. Right. No, it's not the most, not as expensive as mine, but it's still world-class important research. And, well, obviously important. But it works in a different system, not. So would you say that's because the German society has prioritized science over some other cause that might be held up as equally valid? I don't know. I think it's, to me, I, I, I've been on the oversight, but maybe the system you described is the most successful because science in the U.S. has been preaminent. But the one that came to mind is the Max Flanks Society, which has created fantastic science, has fantastic scientists, but is a very old-fashioned model.

It's the model of basically they don't call it this, but where the assistant professor means the assistant to the professor. So you have a professor, he has an institute and a lot of people that work for it, which is different than our system, where junior people grow up and take over. I don't know that that's, I'm on the oversight committee that meets once every three years, so it's not very often for the gravitational. groups, gravitational waves and gravitation, which is in Hanover and in Berlin. But I don't

feel I know it well enough to judge why it is certainly successful. I think it has this problem that it doesn't develop a pipeline very well, but it doesn't seem to be a problem for producing science for the eminent

people who who run it. But in addition to all this, that we're not going to, you know, this hierarchy and this and that, there's another aspect that you mention all the time. And I don't know that I understand it very well. But you use the word quite a few times.

You're not afraid of it. For me, I've always told myself that it's not a strong element for me. I'm not sure, though. Because, and that's competition. Being competitive. You just told me an anecdote that had to do with competition between people. As a kid, I played serious tennis.

I told you, and I was as competitive as you come. But I've never felt or maybe admitted, I don't know, that that's been a big driver in doing science. I never felt it in my guts in the same way I had to on a tennis court, say. But you seem to have experienced it a lot and feel. it's a big part of where the whole system's coming from. And maybe I'm oblivious to it a little bit or are denying, I don't know. So where does competition come in to be doing successful science, not just individually? Where is that?

I see it a lot in groups. We perceived it directly firsthand with plank versus Bicep 2, you know, in terms of groups of scientists. you know, we always have to be cognizant. Obviously, science is done by scientists, and scientists are human beings, and human beings have all the peccadillos of mortal men and women. And so I've seen it in my career. I've seen it in groups that I've been involved. I've seen it individually. I'm seeing it right now in the public sphere where very eminent colleagues of mine, thinking a professor at MIT, Sarah Seeger, who is a guest in my podcast, a very eminent astrophysicist and an educator, also wrote a wonderful book, and Avi Loeb at Harvard, across town rival of them.

These are two people who have had very, let's say, sensational, but in a good way. I don't mean they're like, you know, tabloids like you have here in Los Angeles, but they've made, you know, really extravagant claims about, in both cases, some form of life. whether it be life in our own solar system in the atmospheric clouds of Venus, as evidenced by the presence of detected a molecule called phosphine, which is like ammonia, but with phosphorus instead of nitrogen, and in Avi Loeb's case with an extremely high degree of confidence that he claims that this object that passed by the Earth,

Amoamu, right? So now, I'm getting, I'm talking to both of them, and they both don't know that I'm talking to both of them, and they're both identically telling me the same things at how disappointed they are, not only in competing teams using different telescopes, different apparatus, or whatever, that are basically taking the opposite point of view in some sense. But they're individual scientists, some cases in their home departments that are attacking. And kind of, it's not entirely scientific.

And I've seen this, I won't mention his name, but it was a guest at Michelle, a very prominent individual who came in my show, very good friends with him. And criticizing one of these two, I'll just say one of these two, so I don't have to reveal who it is. And in public. And it's, I would find it unseemly if it was like political. And you ask, why is that? What is, what is it about science? I believe you, Barry, that science is what's called an infinite game. In other words, there's no winner or a loser. Like, have you ever, you know, someone says, I won science. It's not the same as chess. Chess is a finite game, a zero-sum game. Science is not, but sometimes I feel like we do treat. as if it is, like if you win, if Plank got to the B-Modds before Bicep 2, there'd be a perception,

there'd be this, you know, concernment. You saw this with the Supernova teams the same way. They were as fiercely competitive as you can possibly imagine. Saul Pomerner speaks about this. Adam Rees spoke about this on my podcast. And so I don't know, I'm not going to say that you're, you know, not aware of it, but I do feel like you have a couple of what's called survivorship, know, biases in that you were the only game in town. I mean, Lago is the only a silly generous, right? There's no one else that was competing. We had competition for 15 years for that from the Italian French.

Right. Yeah. And there was a question of who was going to get there first. Yet we also agreed along the way to use the same data formats so we could exchange data and things like that and that we would eventually be collaborators. So we competed. I've heard people say competition isn't a bad thing. It's not a bad thing.

I'm trying to understand how important it is. I know how important it is to play tennis. I don't know how important it is in science because my mind hasn't really focused on it, maybe just the circumstances I've been in. Thanks for listening to Part 1 of this special two-part episode of Think Like a Nobel Prize winner with Barry Berrish and Brian Key. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe.

And also subscribe to our original podcast and to The Impossible, available here too. Please support this inspirational podcast by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. Purchase a copy of the book, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, on Amazon to read, or listen to you via Audible. Follow Professor Keating on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. DR Brian Keating. For exclusive content and his informative newsletter, sign up for Brian's email list

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