Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Ben Shapiro REACTS to New NASA Facts! (#243)

Starting point is 00:00:03 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please help. Joining us on the line is Professor Brian Keating, Cosmologist, at the University of California, San Diego, which means he studies the stars. He's not a cosmetologist, which is like the person who does makeup. He's also the author of the best-selling memoir, losing the Nobel Prize.

Starting point is 00:00:28 His latest book is his newest book, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. Brian, thanks so much for joining the show. Great to talk to you. Yeah, it's good to see again, Ben. So let's talk about this amazing stuff that we are getting now from the web telescope. So first of all, what is the web telescope and why should we care other than it makes pretty pictures? Well, it does a lot more than that.

Starting point is 00:00:47 It's a $10 billion investment, probably the most complicated object human beings I've ever shot off into space. And it's located a million miles away from Earth. It's actually four times a distance to the moon. And its job is really to peer back almost to the beginning of time, not quite to the beginning of time. That's my domain. They're not allowed to go back all the way to the beginning, but they're allowed to look at,

Starting point is 00:01:09 and their goal is to look at the earliest structures that ever formed in the universe. That's one major topic, to look at galaxies, the first stars that formed, to see if the edifice on which all of modern science stands upon, which is based on our origin of the universe, if there is good, solid framework for it. And also, in so doing, these photons, these particles of light traverse the universe, and they encode the properties of the universe as it's evolved, since the origin of time, including relatively nearby objects, by our standards, things that are only a few thousand light years away.

Starting point is 00:01:43 And those are called exoplanets. Those are other planets, perhaps just like the Earth, that could potentially harbor forms of life. And that's a, you know, what if they have a, you know, competitor podcast to you, Ben? So we want to make sure that everyone out there is fully apprised of all the latest happenings. So this telescope is really a culmination of decades of. work. It's way over budget, way over time. But it really does what nothing else can do, which is, which is to peer back and give us a glimpse into our cosmic origins.

Starting point is 00:02:14 So, Brian, I watched a video where you're talking about this telescope. And obviously, you've spent your life making telescopes and monitoring telescopes. So what amount of complexity went into this? And also, I mean, how high was the risk here? Because this is out in the middle of nowhere. If something is broken on this thing, you're basically screwed and you just sent $10 billion with a hardware into just space for no reason. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this had so many what we call single point failure risks where anyone, an individual problem could compromise the whole $10 billion mission, whether that could be blowing up on the launch pad or not being able. This telescope is so big and so wide. It could not be launched in its final configuration and had to be unfolded and unpack like origami. And I have some animations on my YouTube channel of that process. And that is a technological hurdle, not just because you're building something. something in space with no astronauts nearby to service it, as you said, it's a, it's, you know, thousands of times farther away than the Hubble. The Hubble Space Telescope is actually

Starting point is 00:03:14 closer to us than, than you and I are right now. In other words, the Hubble space is only 250 miles above the Earth. This is, you know, this is a million miles away. So no chance of repair. No, no, no service stations out there in space. And so this had to work, they had to work at, the right time, the first time, and with no opportunity for repair. So, uh, no, no, no service stations out of space. And it also had to be unfolded and the mirrors aligned to a precision less than the diameter of a human hair. And so that is just astounding accomplishment. And there were many times when it could have been canceled and it could have been. And some astronomers, rightfully, I have to mention it, some astronomers didn't think they should continue with it because it did kind of swallow NASA's budget.

Starting point is 00:03:57 But now that it's out there, you know, you forgot about the birthing pains of the baby. And now it's doing this phenomenal science as of, as of, just this week. So what is the sort of program for the telescope? How long is it supposed to sit out there before it is out of range or degrades or does it sort of stay in? How does it stay out there? How do we communicate with it?

Starting point is 00:04:17 And what do we expect to get from it in terms of data? Yeah. So it's pretty amazing. It's not orbiting like the moon orbits around the Earth and the Earth orbits around the Sun. This object is orbiting around a blank piece of space. It's basically trailing behind the Sun, Earth, and Moon by distance of, as I said, a million million miles away from the earth. So it's kind of this amazing point in space called the Lagrange point for you, aficionados out there. I know your audience is the second smartest in the universe,

Starting point is 00:04:43 except for my audience. And this object has to maintain that precision called station keeping for hopefully two decades or more. There's really almost no limitation on its lifetime. It's shielded from the brutal conditions of space by this very thin, a miler balloon-like material, and that blocks enough light and heat that it can remain cold. These cameras are not seeing light, like you and I are looking at each other right now. They're seeing infrared radiation, which is slightly longer wavelength,

Starting point is 00:05:11 which is not visible to the human eyes. So it's revealing things that Hubble could not see, and it will do so for two decades. So you've obviously had a rich amount of time to study these photos. I mean, you've had all of like 24 hours to look at these photos. So explain the secrets of the universe.

Starting point is 00:05:26 So what exactly has been confirmed here? I mean, obviously, they've talked about the curvature of space time and the sort of confirmation of Einsteinian theories of relativity. But what are some of the earliest things that we've learned? Yeah, it's interesting. So, yeah, of course, the data just came out a few hours ago when the time we're talking.

Starting point is 00:05:46 But we kind of had a hint at what they would be looking at. And of course, Hubble's been up for a long for 30 years now. And so it was able to kind of provide a finder scope view of what these objects would look like. Again, different wavelengths, different signs. So what these five images that they released really do, portend for the future of this of this mission is quite astounding. We'll be able to look at the effects of gravity on distant objects. And gravity is the most pervasive force in the universe. It's the

Starting point is 00:06:14 one I use as an excuse why I don't go to the gym for the last 30 years. But gravity is the most dominant force and yet it's the weakest force. You don't think about that when you're at the gym pumping iron, but it's actually the weakest force. So therefore, it can have the longest range. It can reach out across the entirety of the universe and affect the properties. of massive clusters and stars. And what we're most interested in, I think, with Webb are really two or three different main topics. One is the effects on the early universe.

Starting point is 00:06:42 How do the early universe assemble the star? Which came first? The star or the galaxy? In other words, how do we know what the elemental building blocks are of astronomy? We actually don't have a great idea for that. What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? Dark matter and dark energy then make up 95% of the universe's mass and energy. and we have no clue whatsoever what they are.

Starting point is 00:07:04 And then the third thing that many people are really interested in, and I kind of aped you and did a Brian Keating React's video. There was less woke tears and there weren't so many lives of TikTok on it. But nevertheless, I did a reaction to what I'm most interested in is the search for life in the universe because I'm actually a life pessimist. I don't believe that there's life elsewhere in the universe, but no one would be more thrilled than I to discover. that there is life in the universe.

Starting point is 00:07:32 And what Webb can do and what it release just a tantalizing hint of an object that we know doesn't have life on it. It's an object, you know, something like half the size of Jupiter, the planet Jupiter, and it's cruising around a star every three days. So it's getting pretty toasty, a little toasterer than down there in Florida. But the object has so much so strong atmospheric lines that can actually demonstrate the properties of water. And many scientists think that water is a necessary ingredient, not sufficient, but necessary

Starting point is 00:08:00 ingredient for life to be supported. Again, I'm not so sanguine that there is life in the universe. There's zero evidence for life else we're in the universe, but that would make me the most surprised and excited to find out that it's true. And so Webb has this unique ability that even my powerful telescopes that my colleagues and I are building, we have no ability to do that. So Webb is unique in that sense. Brian Keating, he of course is the author of losing the Nobel Prize. And his latest book is Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. Brian, thanks so much for the insight on this stuff. It really is amazing and fascinating. And if you're a religious person, it confirms your

Starting point is 00:08:30 that there is a God in the universe. If you're not religious, then, you know, science is cool. Brian, really appreciate the time. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Ben Shapiro REACTS to New NASA Facts! (#243)

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