Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating Discusses the Early Universe & Science Communication with Lawrence Krauss

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! In this personal conversation with a long-time friend of the show, Lawrence Krauss, I talk about my origins, my passion for physics, how I started researching the CMB, the BICEP experiments, my relationship with religion and Judaism, and much more. Tune in!  Lawrence M. Krauss is a highly acclaimed theoretical physicist, commentator, bestselling author, President of The Origins Project Foundation, and host of the Origins Podcast. Among his many significant scientific contributions was the 1995 proposal that most of the Universe's energy resides in empty space. Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:38 My origins 00:09:27 The importance of reading science and sci-fi  00:20:11 My passion for physics  00:30:49 On religion & my relationship with Judaism  00:49:35 Why I research the CMB 01:05:12 The BICEP experiments  01:17:39 The rush to publish  01:23:24 Inflation theory and the multiverse 01:35:52 Simons Array and Simons Observatory  01:51:37 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Check out Lawrence Krauss:  📚 The Edge of Knowledge by Lawrence Krauss: https://a.co/d/2Dtwy3x  💻 Website: https://lawrencemkrauss.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LKrauss1 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I don't think there's a way in all of science that you can replicate the visceral feeling of discovery that you can when you look through a telescope. You can't do it with a large Hadron Collider in your backyard. You can't do it looking at, you know, with an electron microscope. But if you look through a telescope, you immediately get transformed to the feeling that Galileo had when he looked up. I think that's remarkable. I think it's unparalleled in all of science. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. We have chatted before, and it's always fun.

And I want to have a chance to talk about some things we haven't had talked about, which is mostly your work and your background. And as you know, this is an origins podcast. So I like to talk about people's origins. And I want to begin with yours because I've known some things about it, but I want to be able to go into depth in a way that I hadn't before. Your father was a well-known mathematician. Right. It's a melanom mathematician. But, well, I wondered who, but I'm also, I also know that you

sort of were disconnected for a bunch of years when your parents got divorced and you later on reconnected. And if you don't mind talking a little bit about that, I would be happy to find out about that sort of influence because I guess, I would guess that his influence as a mathematician affected you later rather than earlier when you were very young. And I wonder what got you interested in science at the beginning. Like, what's your mother? Was your mother a scientist? So those are all a bunch of questions. No, no. She was, yeah, she was brilliant. She is brilliant. She thankfully is still alive. My father, of course, passed away, very young,

and 69 years old. But no, my mother didn't give me any scientific. I mean, it's kind of, I'm a scientist despite my father being a scientist and despite my mother being a non-scientist, it was kind of a way to teleport me away from the strife that the divorce, children go through, or children of divorced parents go through is very dear rigour in the 1970s, as people may know, is kind of the hip thing to do. And they were very much influential on me. My father more at a distance. And almost despite, you know, sometimes Lawrence, you can be just as get just as much value

from a weatherman who's always wrong than one who's always right. Although, you know, speaking here in San Diego, it's hard to be wrong very often. It's always, yeah, cloudy in the morning and Sunday the afternoon. But anyway. 72 and Sunday. So, you know, my father was kind of a counter example and I wanted to be as different as possible. You know, I felt like he had abandoned me and my elder brother at a young age and gone off and done stuff for himself and despite his brilliant. So, for example, he was the youngest full professor in Cornell University Math Department history.

He was 27. I think he was a full professor. Now mathematicians get tenure earlier anyway. way, but he was full professor age 27. And when I applied to Cornell as an undergraduate, I didn't even mention that my father had been a professor there, the young age. And so I wanted to succeed in my own merit. Of course, I didn't get in. Neither time did I apply that I applied to. But I went to the best Ivy League school eventually anyway, Brown University. Well, we can debate that. But if it, I was not accepted to Cornell, which was my safe school

for graduate school. Because I had two professors of mine as an undergraduate, and they both did their PhDs of Cornell. So I figured, oh, well, that's my safe school. I got into MIT instead, but it, but it, yeah, so it's all kind of random. Yeah, life works out in a way. But I ended up, you know, going to Case Western,

where you would later become my incoming department chair as I left, and that was a wonderful university for me. They were phenomenal professors. It was four to one, you know, teacher to student ratio. And I was back there a couple of years ago for it to speak at homecoming. And I really didn't take as much advantage of that university as I, as I probably should have. Always thinking about, oh, I should have gone to MIT or Cornell or whatever. But again, you know, it didn't seem to harm me very much.

So I think my father's influence, I really didn't discover. I didn't talk to him from age seven to age 21, 22, when I started to have inkling. that, you know, maybe there was a virtue to making peace with this, you know, by then, older man who, you know, I didn't even remember what he looked like. And so my brother and I got in touch with him through, you know, these are Jewish grandmothers. They weren't talking to each other, but they were, they had friends that talked to each other down in the Bermuda Triangle of Florida that I call the Yentenet. And these Jewish grandmothers, grandmothers, Bubbies got together and connected me to my

father and one day he called me up at brown and my dorm room and he said this is james ax and i said oh okay wow i recognize his voice instantly it was pretty funny and this is uh 19 yeah it was uh i didn't know i hadn't really heard his voice and you know the voice is so powerful yeah uh it's even more powerful than the visual in some ways and and i felt this connection we talked for hours on the phone and he had moved to los angeles and was living outside of l a and and invited me and my older brother to come visit him. And, you know, one of the first things we did is take a paternity test to prove that he really was our father.

Did he require that? And he required it. Yeah. And I was kind of, my mother was very insulted. She probably still is to this day. And, and, you know, I was so sure that it would come back, you know, positive, you know, with no uncertainty that I was willing to do it just to prove them wrong and, you know, get on with my life.

And then by the time we came out there, got the results, it was 99.9.7%, you know, as he used to say, genetic garbage. And so, yeah, so it was pretty, I said, no, nobody's perfect, you know. But for a long time, I couldn't or really bring myself to even call him dad. Like, I would just, I would say you or, you know, hey. It was very hard because I lived with another man for, you know, 15. brought you up, essentially your father, yeah, not your biological father, but your father, yeah. And, you know, that's Ray Keating, and that's whose name. He adopted me. And so my brother and I changed names. We changed religions. I was brought up Jewish. And then when they got divorced, my mother remarried an Irish Catholic man with nine brothers and sisters. And I converted at the time to being that most Jewish boys would have their bar mitzv. I was converted to being a Roman Catholic altar boy in the church of St. John and St. Mary's in the Catholic. New York.

You, that was a, that, oh, in Shepqua, New York. Okay. Well, you, you were lucky that you missed the bar mitzvistage. I think that's a, that was a gift, having gone through it myself. I'm going back, Lawrence, you'll be interested to know. So next year I'm going to be 52, and that's the fourth anniversary of my bar mitzv, and I'm going to go to Jerusalem and do my bar mitzvah at the wailing wall with my family, God willing, and that will be an event for the ages.

Because, you know, it's, it's kind of funny that I grew up, as I said, as an altar boy in the Catholic church for a few years. And then the person that converted me away from Catholicism was, was this guy, Galileo, Galilei. And I discovered him, even before I discovered you and cohorts that made me really question the Catholic Church. And I don't think it was that sophisticated, to be honest with you, Lawrence. I feel like a lot of people go through this phase. And you and I talk when you were on my podcast about, you know, at what level would I accept the refutation of, you know, right now there's all this brouhaha in the popular press

that the Big Bang never happened. I don't know if you're following this, but there's this guy who's been around since I was a kid, Eric Lerner. Yeah. He's not even a, you know, a scientist really by training. He has no formal education, but, you know, he puts a lot of videos. Anyway, he's saying all this.

And I was thinking, well, he's very convincing if you're, if you're not very sophisticated. a lot of the things he's saying makes some sense. And, but when you look deeper, you know, I was thinking, maybe he has like, uh, you know, an understanding of certain topics and people want me to debate him. And I always find it, you know, kind of, um, almost a waste of time because you're not going to change the ideas of somebody who already is so committed confirmation bias to want to believe something.

And you give it oxygen. And so I put out a video kind of debunking some of his claims about the JWST findings that supposedly are crisis in cosmology. And, but. I was thinking, you know, way back when, if I had heard this as a 13 year old, maybe I would have believed it, maybe not. And so I think that's the challenge of, of, you know, overcoming staunchly held ideas. And that wasn't really your question, but going back to the influence of people, I think I was always looking for a father figure. And I've been blessed to have people remote, dead, long dead people like Galileo and Einstein all the way up to people like, you know, the modern day, people like Barry Barish.

we were just speaking about. He's become a mentor. You could say, I don't want to ever take the chance that it goes to your head. Yeah, no, heaven forbid. Yeah, heaven for that. That would never happen. Barry is a wonderful guy, so it's great. Well, look, I think, did you, speaking of father figures, or at least going back, because I want to go back, did you read much? And for me, reading about science was really what turned me on when I was And in fact, I don't know if I've told you in our podcast, but it was actually a book about

Galileo that was the one that really turned me on to think you have science as romantic and daring activity. But did you read much science and popular science when you're? I did. I did. I actually read a lot more science than science fiction, which kind of puts me at strange odds. As you know, I'm the co-director, associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for your imagination here at UC San Diego where you've visited me a couple times. It's nice to, when you come to town. And, but I always read the science fact or science nonfiction of Isaac Asimov. He was really the biggest influence on me as a kid and so much so that, that I wanted to be like him, to write books, to be a professor, to teach, to educate at scale, which I think, you know,

you and I both do nowadays. And for me, that kind of blend of the creativity, the poetry, it was only much later that I read Galileo's work as a, from a nonfiction perspective and had the honor along with Frank Wilczek, your friend Frank and Carla Rovelli and many others, Fabiology and Nazi, to record the first ever audio book of Galileo's dialogue. And that changed my life. Yeah, I want to get to Galileo at the very end. But yeah, I mean, the dialogues are amazing. In fact, I've always, I think I told you, I always required my non-physics and non-science

students when I teach physics to read some Galileo, as we'll talk about. But we'll get there. But, you know, certainly. And by the way, as I'm always. was one of the ones who had a big effect on me, his non-fiction books. I never actually, I never read any of his science fiction. Yeah. You know, people, everyone thinks I'm like a science fiction, a fissionado because of

the physics of Star Trek. And I did read, I read a science fiction of a guy named John Wyndham more than the other people. But science fact always still continues to fascinate me more than science fiction. Yeah, I mean, Carl Sagan said, you know, and I know you're a huge fan of Carl's, and I heard your podcast with Jeff Marcy. yes absolutely these long dead books speak to you in your head and i think now with audio books read by authors and you've read your book um the greatest story ever told i listened to that again last year at a second time

and um you know having the actual voice now you know a lot of people say well what are you going to leave for your kids and yeah i'm like there's millions of hours literally that that are available people can watch and so forth and i feel like you know i i just can't imagine what it'd have been like to have Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov or, you know, even Jane Goodall in her prime to be, you know, on a podcast. I mean, it's just so incredible. And but I think, yeah, that search for father figures, you know, less, you know, unfortunately, just less so from other figures is just what was in the reality back then.

Now, thankfully, there's, you know, tremendous numbers of good authors on both sides of the gender spectrum. But I do feel like books are, are becoming sort of second tier. you know, I wrote my first book, one of the marketing people at Norton, you know, said, well, who is this for? And I started to say, well, for everybody. And they're like, that means nobody. And they asked me, well, what's your competition for your books? I said, Lawrence Krause is now. I said, you know, it's, it's a Brian Green or something. And they said, no, you're wrong. It's, it's every cat video ever made on YouTube. Like, that's your competition. Because people now,

it's so digestible, they can just get stuff without even selecting. You know, the benefit of TikTok now is that you don't have to have decision fatigue. You just get this thing fed into your brain. And I forbid my kids to watch it, or these stories and so forth, because it takes no effort, not even the effort of listening to an audio book. It's so detrimental to the developing mind. And I don't think I would be a scientist nowadays if I grew up with all the paradoxical choices that we have.

It's overwhelming. And I think it's ultimately, to the intellectual mind, the scholastic mind, I think it's very, very damaging. Well, yeah, I think that the fact that people don't read or don't read long things, they can digest short little tweets or whatever. And that's that is the problem because, you know, to do anything substantive, it requires thinking for more than a minute or two. And that's the training that's useful in many ways. And I mean, that's part of the training of physics. And speaking of that, I guess I wanted to, you know, okay, so you got interested, you were sort of interested in science by reading scientists as young. And your mother encouraged that as well.

She didn't want you to be a doctor or anything like that. She would, she, uh, no, not like your, I think your mom only would be a doctor right now. She became a Catholic. She's one of the rare Jewish mothers, you know, he wasn't like obsessed with me. But she ended up getting a doctor and my brother was a lawyer. So, you know, she got the Jewish mother's dream. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I think that the really, the transformative thing that she did is didn't stand in my way of what I was passionate about. And I was actually pretty motivated. I had a job as a kid. I was stocking shelves and a delicate contest in in Dobbs Ferry, New York. And I saved up my money because I really wanted to buy a telescope. And I realized that I, you know, I always say like I'm in no way comparing myself to Galileo, but the mere fact that you can buy a little telescope like this, and I'm going to go into, you know, someday I'm going to start making my own telescopes because so many people ask me,

what should I get from, I'm just get any sort of telescope. Do not point it at the sun. And anything that you can see is the exact same thing. Galileo saw 400 years ago, all the craters on the moon, all the phases of Venus, the ears of Saturn, as he called them, and most importantly, the moons of Jupiter. And Lawrence, I don't know, I mean, I don't know if I've ever said this to you, but, but I don't think there's a way as a science in all of science that you can replicate the visceral feeling of discovery that you can when you look through a telescope. You can't do it with a large Hadron Collider in your backyard.

You can't do it looking at, you know, with an electron microscope. But if you look through telescope immediately get transformed to the feeling that Galileo had when he looked up. I think that's remarkable. I think it's unparalleled in all of science. It could be. I mean, there's a difference, of course, that you know, the big difference is that Galileo didn't know what he was going to see. But no, you know, I have a telescope here, which actually I just bought, I had a telescope as a young kid, but I bought a fairly large telescope, which I never, I never bought one when I was living in Arizona because they live in the city or when I I lived in Oregon because you couldn't see the sky.

I couldn't see the sky, but you couldn't see the stars. But when I moved here, it's just so beautiful, so I knew I'd buy one. And I, a neighboring kid has now just gone to university, our next door neighbor, saw me there, and he didn't know, he'd never thought about it and brought a friend down, and I showed them, you know, moons of Jupiter and also Saturn. And it was just like an awakening experience for them. But you know, the interesting thing is, it's, It's interesting. I first realized this. I remember I was on and I did some movie about Voyager once and and and there was an, I went to Ireland, I think, and and where the director was from. And, and there was an audience question. And I, it was only then that I kind of realized something I should have realized before that every time a young person learned something, for them, it's the first time in the history of the world that's been understood. And we, you know, this said we, we should treat it always as discovery rather than regurgitation. And it.

in the sense that it is always brand new, but you're absolutely right that in the telescope, it's really visceral. And no matter how he pictures of Saturn you see, when you look at it through the telescope and you say it's there, it is, it still blows me away every time,

yeah, every time I look in a telescope. You know, for me, I started, I bought a little marble notebook and I taped the pencil inside of it and I would sketch out the Messier objects.

And I was doing research, you know, and I was doing research. and I wasn't on this track. You know, as I said, you know, growing up with parents divorced, you know, it's probably traumatic for me. I mean, I always like, you know, people are, you know, one of my sponsors on my podcast was this online therapy company. I won't say the name of it in case you're all the sponsors. And I was like, I never really had therapy.

You know, I'll give it a try, but I don't endorse things that I haven't used personally. So I started doing it. And I was like, well, what is he going to bring up? I mean, it's so obvious to talk about, you know, parents divorce, et cetera. But really, you know, I'm in my 50s now or just turned 50 last. year. And I started thinking, well, you know, like, is it going to be this goodwill hunting moment? You know, I have to like start sobbing over the phone on Zoom on this guy that I've never met, you know, and I feel like those are not really, you know, the cathartic moments that really,

you know, the impactful moments, at least in my life and my career, it was these serendipitous things that really came up. And that discovery and whatever it felt like looking back on it, makes sense. I was doing scientific research. I didn't know that's what it was. I had idea. There was no internet in 1986, 87. There was no Google. So you couldn't look these things. So you had a struggle.

You had to actually invest some effort. And from my case, I was like, the Sunday New York Times had this section, which they no longer do. And it was like the sky at night, basically, Cosmo section.

And you could see these. And I was like, holy crap. I saw Venus. Like, I thought you needed to have a spaceship. It was during the Voyager time. And that thrill, you know, it's not for everybody. But once you know that that is accessible,

you can get teleported away from, I think, a lot of earthly concerns. And then it's kind of a rabbit hole that you just want to go down. And now it's easier than ever. But I wonder, as I said, I wonder if that's a good thing. Like the fact that my kid, you know, one of my kids is obsessed with like perpetual motion machines. And he sees something on YouTube and he just gets totally drawn into it. It's great. And he talks about electron plasmas.

And he actually had a good suggestion, Lawrence. I want to get you as a particle physicist. He said that the electron. really should be called the negatron. I want to start a movement to call the electron the negatron and the positive. It's probably a little bit late, but it's not, but it's, you know, I think you know, if it were logical, of course, you know, if it were logical, it would be called the positron because it was Ben Franklin who got it wrong because really it's the carry of electric charger and that's the one you want to make, you want to call positive. They just got it wrong

and we're stuck with it now. So tell your son, tell your son, it really should be called the positron and see what he said. Okay, that'll be really enough people for my idea. Anyway, so your interest in science came through astronomy, which is a little bit different than me.

I had a telescope, but I was kind of interested in lots of things. And I think I mostly, well, I use the telescope part-time to look at the sky. Let me put it that way. But what, so in school, Did you gravitate to science subjects? Did you have good teachers?

I did. I went to public schools my whole life. I teach you to public school now. You know, that being said, I think public schools have changed a lot, at least here in the States. But back then, it was wonderful. They had in a library, they had Scientific American, a one's great magazine that featured many of your articles and expository statements. Now I can't really bring myself to read most of it. Yeah, me too.

But when I looked at when I would go to the library and really you had to subscribe to these magazines, Sky and Telescope, Astronomy. And I still subscribe to them to this day. For me, that was the entree. And then I had to learn about math. And because I think my lack of influence, my mother totally enumerate and my father just not being in the picture and my stepfather being really out to, you know, just a workaholic, alcoholic maybe, even as well. having to deal with that at home was a big challenge and feeling like, well, you know, I wanted to have a, an escape. And for me, that escape became taking, you know, taking this telescope out. Now, then I realized I need to learn about math. And I wasn't put on the track to learn about math at that age.

I was in a track to just to, you know, to graduate from high school without taking calculus. Wow. And so I had to kind of take on myself to learn trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus in the span of, you know, know, only two and a half years so I could take the AP exam, which I did and did well on and got out of my first, you know, kind of required classic case Western. So it was really self-motivation, I think, just to learn more what is parallax, how do we know these stars are that far away, what is redshift and what can you see through this? It was around Hallie's Comet, the last appearance of Hallie's Comet. I really wanted to see that. I didn't think I'd be around

for the next appearance and still another 50 years, 40 years away. So those things, to me were, and you're right, most people didn't really care. I mean, if you look at Andromeda through a telescope and you're expecting, you know, like this picture behind me if you're watching on YouTube, you know, you're going to be disappointed. And I think that's, you know, we never should have launched Hubble because it makes these, these pictures too accessible. JWSD should be canceled for many reasons. So, yeah, so I think, but but I became kind of like an apologist, Lawrence. I was like, well, you see there is a smudge there. And if you use averted vision, you can actually see the equatoral bands of Jupiter.

And people are the hell are you talking about? Like, it's just a peach colored schmunt. Yeah. But to me, I knew what I was the eye that has a brain as Homer Simpson would say. That was the thing that was so appealing to me. The connecting the hypothesis to an observation, writing in my logbook. And these are, you know, $50, $60 you could do that and make potentially an inroad to a career for a young person. Okay, well, you're a great advertiser for getting a telescope and thinking about these things, but I'm intrigued.

I want to know why were you drawn to, well, I guess it was astronomy. Why were you drawn to physics rather than by, were you, did you ever think of doing biology or anything else? Or was it always because of astronomy that you wanted to do physics? But you remember at Case there was a professor Peter Pesh. Yeah. And he was a very famous astronomer. He's still alive. I heard some some good news about him recently. He's still working, I think. Anyway, he was a friend of another astronomer who was a friend of one of my cousins. And this astronomer's name is Jay Passacoff, who's very famous. He wrote the Menzel guide after Menzel died at Harvard. They wrote the field guy, Peterson guide to the stars and planets. And that was like my Bible.

I read that every night, you know, before I do observations. And so I became friends with Jay Passacoff or, you know, at least he was friends with my cousin. And he said, Case has a great program. Go to Case. So I went to Case. And this was about the time where I had worked over the summer. I'd saved up some money working in restaurants in Westchester County. And my stepfather got fired.

He was unemployed. So we had just enough money to not qualify for financial aid my freshman year. And I was about to get kicked out of Case Western. But for the generosity of donors and even the president, Agnar Pitta, who you probably remember. Ag was one of the few good university presidents I've ever known. And one of the few honorable university presidents. I've ever known.

Yes. Yeah, with courage, which is a very rare trait for university. I mean, he recruited me, so I have a special attraction. Anyway. And he would meet with me. I was some freshman that, you know, had a decent GPA, but was going to kick. And he said, well, we had this program. And a physicist.

He was also, yeah. Sorry, gone. That's right. Yeah. So he ended up saying, well, you did so well in your SATs that if you had applied one year later, we would have given you a full ride. So they ended up, he ended up cobbling together a full ride for me one way or another with some loans and, and support from a,

an alumni. And so I ended up still remaining a case. But I figured, I need something practical. Astronomy is not practical. It's too much fun. Like, who's going to pay me to do this? Like being paid to be an ice cream taster. Or a wizard, you know, one of these roller coaster testers.

By the way, if you ever want to see like the definition of jaded, if you come to San Diego SeaWorld at 8.30 in the morning, there's a guy who gets paid to ride the, the Atlantis roller coaster, which is like one of the most terrifying rollercoasters in the world. This guy has to sit in the front of the first. front seat all by himself for liability reasons. I once brought my binox there with my kids and I zoomed in on his face and he was like this. Like going down a 45 degree angle at like 200 miles and I'll be like freak. This guy is so jaded. He does it every day. Anyway. Well, it's a first thing you do at work. It can't be exciting. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, exactly. It's right. So I ended up thinking,

well, I need something practical. Let me do engineering. So I switched to civil engineering. I hated it. It was terrible. And then that summer, like stepfather, A Keating, again, he gave me some great advice. He said, well, why don't you do something that's like a mixture between practicality and philosophical, you know, kind of intrigue that you're interested in. Physics is a good blend between the two. And so I switched my major to physics and I never look back. And yeah, so I went to, when I went to Brown, I was a physics, you know, pH, my department is now switching to half astronomy and half physics. But I've been a physicist my whole life. Well, you know, you indirectly got, I think, the right route. I was going to ask,

And intrigued me. Having been, I was a professor, obviously I was chair of the physics department, but I was also in the astronomy department there. And Case was one of the few universities that had an undergraduate major in astronomy. That's right. And I tell, and when students ask me who want to be astronomers, and I say, do an undergraduate degree in physics, because that's the right preparation. So I was really intrigued that you, here's what your interest in astronomy, but you went to physics, which is exactly the right thing to do, because that's the right background. to be, you see, when you, before you're born, maybe, but when you're younger than me, but it used to be that astronomy is quite different. It was kind of like botany in the sense that it

sort of was labeling things and now astronomy is essentially become astrophysics and, and merge with, and so the distinction between astronomy and physics is very different. But when I first started, it was, it was really a distinction and it was interesting to me because I, I became a professor in both departments from the time I taught at Yale onward, but I never had, I never, I never, took an astronomy course in my life, not once. Yeah. I didn't either. I didn't, you know, and I'm teaching, I teach astronomy, I teach cosmology.

I never took these classes. Yeah, physics is the right preparation. And I, by the way, I also used to, when I was chair of at Case, I used to tell the potential engineering students, because Case is primarily an engineering school, I used to tell them that, you know, we created a program in engineering physics because I used to say, that's the best of both worlds because, you know, you get a physics training and you can become an engineer. and if you really need the job. And by the way, I don't know if you know this,

a large fraction of people who are called engineers in industry are actually trained as physicists. Oh, yeah, I would say if you want something soldered right, you know, the last person you call is an electrical engineer. It's the most flexible. I have zero unemployment. I've graduated 18 students over the years, and four of them are faculty,

and not one of them is unemployed. And it's the most flexible job. Some of them work for Amazon. Sure, it's a great training. Yeah, no, I mean, I've students in all of those. Yeah, so I used to argue when I was recruiting that physics is a great training, but I won't do that recruiting spiel here. But anyway, you locked into the right department,

and the physics department at case was a great department. And when I was very pleased to become chair there, and a long tradition, especially of spending a lot of its energy and undergraduate education that one of the things that I was very proud of when I was there, but it was a tradition that had been created before I was there, is that we generally tried to put, you know, really good teachers, especially at the young, at the earlier levels, and not always have sort of lecturers teach the big internatory courses.

When I started, there were some, but we moved it away eventually to where we could get our really good faculty, because that's where they really should be is sort of motivating young people. Anyway, it was nice. You graduated the year of the year I arrived, and so just we sort of passed like ships in the night. but and then and then you as i say you went on to that that unknown ivy league university brown i think it's called yeah and and uh anyway but before before and then before we get to your physics career i do

you did touch on this interesting conversion you made two conversions religious conversions you went from being a catholic to be an atheist and then sort of from being an atheist to being jewish of course being jewish and being an atheist is not inconsistent um but i wanted to i wanted to i I couldn't, I don't want to dwell on this, but I'm intrigued what caused you as someone who would, you know, had been influenced by people and whoever they were and maybe it was one of them. But to, I think it's hard to be a scientist and not be an atheist. It's not impossible because there are a lot of good science. There are a number of good scientists who aren't.

But that, and it's never sort of a catharsis, usually a small, sort of a drift when you begin to realize you don't need that the fairy tales, that the real world is. is pretty interesting without them. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose Google Fi Wireless.

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adopt Judaism, do? Yeah, I mean, again, I think the revelation, if you like to call it, although it's not meant in this way, was that I had rejected something as a 12-year-old or 13-year-old. Actually, this is the way the syllogism worked for me. I thought I could reject Judaism after rejecting Christianity. In other words, I felt like Christians are very smart and they're going to know things. And so they must have known

what came before them, namely the Old Testament, the Torah, as we call it. And so they must have gone through and reconciled and rectified all the issues and the problems and the flaws and said, we're going to improve it. So Christianity in some sense is,

Judaism 2.0, this is my logic. And per force, if I can reject Christianity, then all the, you know, all the more so can I record you know a fortiori as they say I could reject judaism so I really didn't think about it from the time that I gave up um catholicism which was mainly due to this this absurd treatment of galileo which by the 1980 and in fact he's never been pardoned formally by the catholic church he was ruled by john paul who was a great and you know great man and he ruled that he was correct in 1989 I think it was an encyclical but he'd never forget i mean never pardoned

him. So I felt in the 1980s when I was like, well, how can I be adhering to somebody, something that would torture? I thought they tortured him. Little did I know it. You know, Bernie Madoff would easily gladly trade the prison cell that he had, you know, for for the prison cell that, you know, quote unquote, Galileo had, which I hosted a conference and his villa in our Chetri outside of Florence in 2015 for the hundred cent of 10th, an eel of relativity, which, of course, Galileo started, right? So anyway, it wasn't that bad a place to do your bid. His daughter had a much harder time, in fact, than Galileo. But anyway, yeah.

Both of them, yeah. And so, but how could I adhere to somebody that tortured this, this person? And of course, you go through all the things, well, like, you know, Judaism condones, you know, stoning children and doing this and doing that. But I realized, Lawrence, I really knew nothing about Judaism. I actually knew more about Islam because it was so prominent in the early, you know, 2000s. It was impossible to not be affected by it. And I knew a lot about Catholicism, Christianity, because I had converted and baptized, confirmed, and altered one. So, but I knew nothing about Judy.

I didn't know how to read Hebrew. I never studied for, but, you know, all I knew is that on Hanukkah, I used to remember getting a pair of husky trousers instead of getting, you know, an Atari, you know, or Commodore 64, you know, so like my, my Gentile friends. So I felt like it was almost a negative to be associated with Judaism, but I knew nothing about it. And in my 20s, I start to think, well, Judaism sure is playing this big role in an outsized impact on society. And, you know, at least behooves me to learn something about the religion of my birth, even if I will ultimately reject it. But to reject it without any confrontation as an adult, you know, Einstein used to say that he never asked questions like, what would it happen if I traveled at the speed of light and looked in a mirror to his father when he was five years old. And it was good that he didn't ask his father that question because his father would have told him the wrong answer

because it took Einstein and senior to actually come with the right answer. So he said it was blessing that I never asked my father these big questions. And I feel like for me, the richness of Judaism, you know, when you all you learn is, like you said, this miserable training for your bar mitzvah and getting embarrassed as your voice cracks on the stage in front of all your friends and your and your bubby. He's going to pinch your cheeks too hard. And yeah, you might get some money. Those are very superficial. And I felt like there was a depth to even reading, even as an atheist, I think as an atheist,

you can say there is wisdom in traditions that last for thousands of years. There are conflicts. There are challenges. But I think that the main thing, so Lawrence, like one thing, you know, that I think is a misconception about Judaism is how much is really present in Judaism in what you and I do, which is cosmology or particle physics. So I once looked at the Torah, the Old Testament. And I look, how many sentences are there that have anything to do with science in the Torah?

Not the Talmud, which is 2700 pages long in the Torah itself. So there's at most 32 verses that have to do with the first seven days. And by the way, of course there are things that make no sense scientifically. Like the sun was created on the fourth day. Like what is that? But they're not stupid, right? I know you've called them Bronze Age peasants and stuff. But let's just stipulate that they're-

Well, they weren't stupid. They were just ignorant. That's a big difference. Well, of course, but ignorant about science is one thing. If it's a science book, I always say, if I look to a brief history of time or the physics of Star Trek, if I look to it like, how am I going to raise my kids or how am I going to deal with, you know, peacefulness in my home or it's not, you didn't write it for that. I didn't write my books as a guide to how to raise my children or for wisdom that could last,

presumably for some time. And so I start to look, well, what are these things like stoning a kid? That's barbaric. That's, that's, that's disgusting. That's, that's preposterous. How could anybody adhere to this? And that's in the Old Testament. That's not, that's not some abstract thing that appears in the time. Yeah, it's right there. What was the context of that? So I started to look into it. Well, let me, let me look through the sources of it. So first of all, Jews are incredibly good at documenting and scholastic research and they had train of of custody for all these things going back. There's not one recorded instance where a child was ever killed by his parents in all of record. courted case law, which is what the Talmud is. And I said, well, that's interesting. Why would you have a law that has no purpose that you never did? And I realized even to this day, Lawrence, there are places in the Middle East in certain parts of Africa where kids are killed and they're killed by their parents. And so it wasn't the parents. The law actually says you will take your kid and you'll bring him to the Sanhedron, which is the court, and they will stone the kid. Okay. So what does that do?

well, took the ability to kill children out of parents' hands for the first time. I said, that's pretty interesting. Also, divorce. Divorce was not common. You're being quite charitable. You know, right? They were like chattel, right? They could be bought and sold as late.

Yeah. Right. So what did Judaism do? So I have a document hanging in my kitchen, which is my prenuptial agreement. And it tells all the obligations that I owe my wife. And if I don't give it, she has to be able to be permitted to marry another man. That was never done in the ancient world. In fact, in this very moment, there aren't people that are subject to basically chattel slavery and so forth.

And I start to ask, of course, you still realize that the fact that there's not a similar document that where you'd be permitted. I mean, the fact that she'd be permitted, many people would say those words are offensive today. But in any case. Well, whoa, but the alternative was I kill her, right? No, no, I know. I know you're absolutely right. It may, I mean, I think that's the important point. We live in the society nowadays.

We're fixated in the fact that people, gee, people behave. badly 50 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago. But you're absolutely right. Compared to the alternative, it was much better. And you can't hold, you know, you can't judge people by modern standards a century ago or a millennia ago. And that's something I wish young people understood now, but they don't. Right.

No, they want to say that the world started spinning, you know, the day that they were born and all these people that came before them if they had one fault. And I'd like to say, well, do you eat meat? you know, because in a hundred years, you could be subject to the exact, you know, Barack Obama eats meat, right? So there's a picture of eating five guys hamburgers, right? So like, is he going to be canceled someday? He could be.

And so I feel like that's very dangerous to say that. So when I was a kid and maybe even before, there was a, don't trust anyone over 30. Yeah. I trust a book that's 30 centuries old. Like, I remember reading, I read, I don't know if you've ever reread Stephen Hawking's books. Of course, you know everything in it. But he talks about inflation as being proven M. theory being proven and it's a vindication of all his ideas with hard all it. It's all nonsense. And I said,

I said to myself, he really would be happy with his books being relevant a hundred years from now. Yeah. And I would be terrified. The science that you and I do now, I talk about it in our works, is still like cutting edge and has never been overthrown. That would be very depressing to me. And so I look at, I didn't close the loop on the, on this like, just the accounting. So there's 30 verses in the, out of 30,000 verses in the entire Old Testament, plausibly it could say is related to science in some way or another, or cosmology even or Adam and Eve, whatever. So that's 0.1%, right?

So one in a thousand. So if you looked at the book and it said, you know, great NBA stars. And you started reading through that book. And 99 of the 1,000 pages were about like the Oliver North trial. And this book is not titled. Like, this is idiotic. Like, I was misled.

So I think, there is a natural, and people talk about science and religion and conflict. I think that's kind of stupid. I mean, honestly, there are too completely, there are useful things that you can glean. I don't think you can glean any wisdom necessarily from, you know, from the Feynman lectures. I think you can gain a tremendous knowledge. Oh, I think you can gain some wisdom. I think we disagree. In fact, I would argue get as much wisdom if you read it carefully and critically as you might from the Bible. but anyway. Well, look at you, Lawrence.

I was very touched when you wrote about your mother. Your mother was a tremendous influence on it. You don't write so much about your father. Certainly I wrote a lot more about my father. But I know that the fifth commitment in this, you know, schema of things is honor your parents. Honor your father. Actually says, it says fear your mother and honor your father.

Because it's kind of the natural inclination. Like kids kind of tease their father. There's no doubt. Yeah, exactly. And the word is, is cavode it means to make heavy it means to like be in fear and awe and turn now i don't know that the man who treated me the way that my father treated me if he necessarily deserved the the filial devotion that i showed to him in his waning moments of his life which was strenuous for me and for my

older brother i don't think i would have done that if if i didn't feel like there was an injunction in the commandment remember it says honor your mother and your father so that your days will be long on this earth. Now, what does that mean that you're going to live longer? I don't think so. I think it means your days will be filled with more life. And I think you honoring your mother, the way that you did and you do posthumously, I think your life is improved from that. I think it's inarguable. I think that you being in the sun. Now, you can say you didn't need the Bible. But I think, again, you came from a rich tradition of people in our religion. I don't think our religion. I don't think our religion is better. People argue, oh, the number of Nobel Prize winners. I think that's nonsense. I think

is racist. But there is a tradition related to argumentation. As I said, when you were on my podcast, the word Israel means fights against God. It's the exact opposite of Islam. So I feel like that's our tradition. And for me, at least, maybe I'm not as sophisticated as you or something, but I felt like having a code where you're saying from a very early age, putting things in the mouth of your children and teaching to them in a way that they can understand a value system that has a preponderance in my estimation of good deeds and goodness on earth, I think it's a good thing. So I use it mainly to answer a long-winded way of answering your question. I view it as practical.

It has made my life better to have a code at least to measure and calibrate against as we do as a scientist. You need some standard to compare against unless you're making it up yourself. I didn't feel I was sophisticated enough to make up my own moral code in my life and my children. So it does provide a useful calibration standpoint. Sure. Look, look, my point is that, you know, whatever,

floats your boat. You know, you take it as if, as, if religion helps someone and as long it doesn't get in the way and lead them to irrational and seemingly evil behavior, I have no problem with it. I also especially have no problem with it if people realize, hey, this is allegory and as you do. And, and, I mean, there is a real conflict between science and religion, the sense that when, when there are scientific statements, they're generally wrong in the Bible. but that's okay. You're, when you, your point, you weren't the first person to point out

the Bible is in a scientific document. St. Augustine certainly did. But, but, so, you know, if it works for you, my whole point, however, is, and I don't know, I'm sure it's my whole point, but one of the key ideas I like to get across for people is that, you know, just like Sam Harris seems to think you need to do psychedelics

to understand the world, which is nonsense, you don't if it works for you fine and if it's productive and leads to good behavior great but there are you don't need it you don't need it to be moral you don't need it to lead a good life you don't need it to come to moral conclusions and that's the biggest problem with religion is that is that it's kind of usurped or monopolized morality that it's viewed in a modern society if you're not religious yeah i just don't want to conflate, you know, like fatwas and a course of Islamist, you know, in Judaism, as you may know, it's forbidden to proselytize. I mean, that's one, and it was forbidden from the Romans by force, but nowadays it's not, like, we're not forbidden to, I can, you know, reconvert you back to Judaism. I could do that and then be perfectly legal in America. But, but we don't do it. In fact, you're supposed to turn away converts. A lot of converts, women convert to marry Jewish men and vice versa. Although it's a little more rare. you're actually supposed to be turned away. You're actually supposed to be turned away.

I think you're proselytosing right now, so we'll go to another area. Anyway, it was interesting to see what your rationale is. And I know, my brother happens to be a very religious Jew, so these conversations are not new to me. I just, you talked about the wisdom of ancient books, and there is some wisdom, but there's, but most ancient books,

I tend to think we've actually progressed, even in our wisdom compared to back then, and therefore I tend to, Although I'm an avid student of history, and I love ancient history, and I used to read it. And by the way, when I was younger, I read all the religious books because I just read everything. But I don't think we have to, I think it's, again, a worry when people say the wisdom of the ancients, because they seem to think that it's all there, but I think that we've discovered a lot of wisdom in the... Well, I look, here's just one last example, and you'll cut me off of from proselytizing.

In the Bible, there's no positive stories of family dynamics in the entire book of Genesis. There's not one story of a loving husband and a wife. Now, why is that? I mean, shouldn't most religious texts start off with the godly nature of their progenitors, right? Even in Christianity, right? Not in ancient Roman and Greek history. They have great gods because those gods were just behaved like humans and they were pretty vicious. They would have all these boyables.

So what happened to teach? Well, most families, as Tolstoy said, right, all unhappy families are miserable in their own ways. But I think it's part of the human community. condition that you didn't have to be, you could achieve greatness if your brothers tried to kill you, if your sons tried to deceive you. These are things that happen. And I look at the Tower of Babel story now, Lawrence, I see so many parallel. I mean, I'm not literal, but like with people rewriting language and using language as weapons, physical weapons, and what is the reason that they say? They wanted to make a name for themselves. They wanted to take down God. Okay, so that's a matter

Alligard, but they wanted to do it to make a name for, they want to build a tower out of, out of composite materials so that they can make a name. And then what does God do? He disperses them and confuses them and their language is dispersed. So now they're going to be talking in gobbledygook. I see so much of that as relevant today, at least from my perspective on a college campus. There's so much newspeak going on right now. I don't think even the Bible comes close to covering.

Well, there you go. You just point out to another reason why God was not, was, is no one to be, to be, to be worshipped because God wanted to get in the way of knowledge and make a name for humans to make a name for themselves, in my opinion. But in any case, so look, you can extract wisdom, and there I extract wisdom in Hans Christian, some of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales. Wherever you get it, it's fine, whatever literature or whatever you, look, and the Bible is literature, and it reflects a perception as its time, and I read it when I read it, I read it, I think, well, I was curious more than knowledgeable. But if I were going to read again, it's sort of a reflection of its time. And

therefore, I find it fascinating to see what humans were thinking about, just like, as I said, just like I happen to have Plutarch's lives down here. And I like, I love to read them every now and then because seeing both the continuity of thought and the difference in thought is fascinating for me. So anyway, I think it is. The last thing I would say, Lawrence, and I know you do, I want to move on too, but I think it would be fascinating because I do see you. I know you call yourself a militant atheist. No, I don't. Not anymore.

I call myself an apathist. Yeah, yeah, I used to. Yeah, I used to because my friends, yeah, but I think now I'm more because I'm an apathist because I don't think God's relevant to anything. But anyway, go on. But no, I think there is a virtue in, so there's something called the Haverusa, a partner method of studying where two people sit down and we just go back and forth. And these commentaries go back thousands of years.

Like you said, we're not going to be the first. ones, but we're going to approach it from a, from a specific point of view. And, and I have had, you know, kind of at least from a purely, you can take it purely literally, literarily, but going through stories, Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, these are obviously very rich and impactful on Western civilization. But I even think that they'd be interesting to you, not just from like, oh, I'm going to study like sociology of the world and world history, but actually going through it and saying, like, well, what does it mean when the serpent, like, says, did God really say you couldn't touch the tree oh no no no eve says oh no and then the woman that you gave me

like told me to eat the tree no she didn't do that like and and obviously they knew that there were these contradictions i mean they're not stupid as you have said they're not stupid they just knew what their time they're ignorant of scientific it okay fine i'm just saying i would love someday to do this havrusa talmudic description because i think it would enrich as it as it rich my life not trying to convert or proselytize but i do think it would be to see the modern residences, I think it would be fun. It would at least be fun.

That's all I can do. I think it would be fun, but my point is it would be fun with almost any ancient book or any modern book to do the same thing. So there you go. I mean, I would love to talk about Cash 22 with you,

which I still think is a much more motivating and a book that had much more impact on me than the Bible. But any case. Okay. But no, look, this was an interesting, and I appreciate your discussion in this regard. But let's go from the ridiculous of the sublime.

and talk about physics. And I want to, and so you, you went to do your PhD in physics, but you started, your PhDs in the cosmic, the cosmic microwave background, which has been the area of research for your whole career. What, was that just an accident of who happened to be a supervisor, a good supervisor, Peter Timby, I guess, at Brown? Or did you, did you think about, did that,

I mean, clearly it merged your interests in the sense that it was, physics, but it was applied to astronomy in a sense. So what caused you to get interested in the C&B? Cause my way background, I should say, for those. Yeah. Yeah. So I always wanted to like tinker and like build stuff. I had an old Volkswagen. You know, I used to take it apart and put it back together. So I always like working with my hands. I knew I probably didn't get started earlier enough in my math education to really go into theoretical physics. Although it has always interest me and I continue to try to maintain it at least a conversant nature with theory, although I don't do theories, new theories, novel theories, but I pride myself with that. I know a lot more about theory than many of my

experimental colleagues. And I wanted to do something, you know, impactful. And it was right after, and when I started graduate school, right after Kobe released their results in 1992, a year after that. And my, and I started at Brown with a young, there was a young professor there, had just come from Princeton where a lot of Kobe had been designed by David Wilkinson, who was my grand advisor, who was his PhD advisor. And we hit it off. He was very young and energetic. And he had made the first proposal to go after the polarization of the microarray background.

People hadn't thought about that. Yeah, it was early on. No one was talking about it at the time, at least few people were. That's right. Yeah. And so I got connected with him. And he also was somehow he got connected with a student of the great Yaakov Zeldovich. which is a Russian scientist who had emigrated to the UK named Alexander Polnarev.

And Polnerov had made some of the first predictions about what gravitational waves would do to the cosmic microbe backgrounds polarization. So this is way before we even discovered that the CNB was definitively polarized. And so I thought this was so exciting. And it was before we really had an inkling that inflation, the primordial epoch of hyper-accelerated expansion, could impact the cosmic microwave background with a particular class of polarization categorizes.

now called B mode polarization. So it was long before that, but I found it so fascinating that you could actually measure with a radio telescope that we could build on the roof of the Barrison-Holly building at Brown, and we could actually set some limits

or maybe even make a detection. And lo and behold, this became my thesis project, looking for the large angular scale polarization of the micro-rate background. I even spent a couple of months with Alexander Polnarev in Queen Mary, and we did the first modern treatment

of what the expectation would be for the polarization of the microarray background in 1995. And we made predictions what we'd see if there were gravitational waves, if there was reanization, which was still kind of unexpected at that time. And so it was fascinating to me that you could use a small radio telescope, a couple hundred thousand dollar project and make a deep impact, especially right after Kobe had done this really, really incredible work detecting for the very first time using the exact same technology that I was using, except mine was polarized, highly polarized, sensitive, we could maybe make a detection,

maybe as big as what Kobe had discovered. And of course, we're still waiting in some sense to make those detections. But the stakes have grown ever higher in this field, just kind of paying out like a stockholm slot machine with Nobel Prizes. And that became a big. I wondered how long would take you to get. I wondered how long would take the word Nobel Prize because you're fixing. Yeah, right. But we'll talk about that later. Actually, I keep trying to, I keep trying to get you over this fixation with that. But anyway, I want to parse this more carefully, because this, to me, this is obviously an important area. It's obviously personally important to me. And it's kind of fascinating to me when I think about that you having left Case right around that time. And when I

moved to Case, I had just, I'd been fascinated by Kobe. In fact, had been tried when I taught at Yale to get Yale to hire George Smoot, but I couldn't convince him to do it. But, and ran a big, actually, friend, the first workshop that brought together theorists and experimentalists on the Cosmicrow background when I was at Yale. They didn't used to talk to each other. And then that was the workshop where they decided to start doing things in multiple moments and developing a term. You know, the question is, what could you measure?

See, no measurements have been made. So what could you measure that you could interpret in terms of theory? And it was a fascinating meeting. And Dick Bond was there. And so for me, as a, you know, wasn't my main area, but I, the need to bring theorists and experimentalists together was so ripe because the minute you did get a measurement, it didn't mean anything unless you could, unless you could sort of say how you could compare things with theory. And it was fascinating to watch. And obviously, I was interested in inflation. So we, we just around then wrote papers, but never thinking of polarization, but how to distinguish inflation from other things.

and I worked with my student Martin White at the time, a bunch of things. But I want to take back because I want to, what I was working on is irrelevant. I want people to be able to understand what the significance of this is. So we have to take people back, and I want to parcel a little more carefully. Because polarization, the experiments you were doing

and are still involved in could be obviously incredibly important. As you know, I was actually on your bicycle experiment, as you know, I was asked to write the companion sort of paper talking about it's significant. So I want to get people to where Bicep was and what it did and what it didn't do and why it was interesting. So let's step back a little bit. So the cosmic microwave background is a, as I'm sure I've talked about in this before, but it's probably worth talking about again, is a signal of what the universe looked like when it was about 300,000 years old. It's the most direct bit of data that as again I've also said in other people a bit it turned cosmology from an art

into a science when I was back when I taught it when you were an undergraduate when I was a case and and and and at Yale before that was convinced you'd never be able to measure any fundamental cosmological quantities that astrophysics would get in the way and the cosmic way background changed that because it's a direct signal so why don't you talk a little bit about it you're the experimentalist. Yeah. So I think that is the important thing. You know, there are the people don't really realize that there you can do experiments in cosmology because we typically think of experiments as having a control and then modifying some variable and then you get the impact of the output. But of course, with even astronomical objects, any of you can't change a temperature of the sun

very easily or change the cross section of the neutrons inside of the sun. So, so how do you do an experiment? And especially when you only have one thing, or at least when I was a kid, we thought There was only one universe. That's what Uni means, right? So the conception of the CMB is, it was fascinating to me that you could build an instrument, effectively a radio telescope that sees the microwave wavelength radiation, which is the fossil relic heat, the oldest heat radiation in the universe. That's the leftover schmutz that comes from the fusion of the lightest elements in the periodic table

and lasted for at least of 371,000 years when the universe was basically a plasma of protons and electrons and none of my favorite croutons floating around. But it was very simple physics, which is very useful for physicists to make predictions. A plasma, fourth state of matter, sometimes it's called. And its properties are very, very simple and easy to predict in a certain sense,

acting under the force of gravity with a certain amount of dark matter. And people don't usually realize that dark matter's, you know, first evidence that was really quantitative, as Lawrence said, as a science, was coming from the fluctuations in the CMB and their magnitude, not only from rotation curves of galaxies. So there's very simple ingredients, dark matter, a couple, two different types of ordinary matter and photons.

That's all you need to make this leftover signal, which was detected by Penzius and Wilson, 1965, serendipitously. They weren't looking for it. found it by accident. And those discoveries I claim are the purest and most important in scientific history. And that was certainly one of them. Another one was dark energy, which you, of course, were intimately involved with, at least in the theoretical side of things. But anyway, so this plasma is very simple. So you want to mine scientists are simple-minded people. We want to mine as much as you can from as little input information as possible and make as many predictions about what you'd

see. So these fluctuations also can improve. When light interacts with matter, it can become polarized, which means that it'll have a preferential axis of orientation or oscillation. Waves of electromagnetic character have a polarization, which is the plane of oscillation. So if you're watching this on YouTube, I've got a polarizer here. It's reflecting my camera. I've got another one here, and I can rotate them at right angles to each other, and one will completely obscure what the other one is transmitting. and it will go through alternating cycles every 90 degrees. There's 90 degrees.

It becomes completely opaque. And then it goes another 90 degrees, 180. It goes back to being transparent. That is the sine qua non of polarization. And it's what allows us to build effectively polarizing sunglasses, but for microwaves. And they allow us to look into the CMB and see the subtle imprint of the interaction of light with matter. So the river behind you, has a glare because there's sunlight striking it and it's reflecting some of the polarization

and it's absorbing some of the polarization as well. That's why when you go out on the river, you bring polarized sunglasses. When I go fishing, I have polarized, yeah, so you can see under the water. Yeah. Yeah. So that removes the glare, which now your eye has more sensitive contrast and it can see into the water. That's exactly why we use polarized sunglasses. So what's the lesson? Polarization is a tracer of the scattering of unpolarized light, in this case from the sun hitting the river off of matter, in that case, the water, the dielectric material water behind you. The same thing can happen in a plasma in the early universe.

And instead of tracing the distribution of where the sun is and how bright the sun is, it's tracing the fundamental composition of the matter, the electrons, the protons, and the dark matter, and the properties of potentially other forms of radiation, in this case, gravitational waves, which could be suffusing the early universe at the same time that the CMB is produced. That's what we're looking for. Those telltile interaction. And for me, and to add, that was a beautiful description, and it's an incredibly important probe, and the fact that you can do it still amazes me. I'm always amazed by what experimentalists and observers can do, especially since I usually underestimate them. It just

seems so difficult. But for me, as a theorist, what was most interesting was not just the fact that, you know, if polar, astrophysics involves a lot of dirty stuff and yasha, the light can interact with matter and you learn about, you learn a great deal about astrophysical environments, but as a, as someone who was a particle physicist and was sort of interested in fundamental things, what amazed me early on was that it could not just end up being polarized, but it could start out being polarized because it could have been created in a way that, because of properties of what happened in the early universe with inflation. And in fact, I don't know if I ever talked about this, but, you know, the first paper, because my student Martin and I were, White and I were thinking about these things about how you could probe stuff.

When Kobe first came out, Kobe, as you know, measured actually what we call the quadrupole antisotropy. There's north, south, east, and west, and you can sort of compare the east-west and isotropy of the microwave background with the north-south, if you want to think of that way. And having already been thinking about gravitational waves, the paper we wrote showed at the time that you could explain the entire Kobe signal as a quadruple signal from gravitational waves. And we worked it out what the scale of inflation would be. And it was what the scale of inflation we thought, you know, was reasonable at the time. And it was, and it's funny because up to that point, no one I think had been thinking about whether the gravitational waves could give a signal on the microwave background. But, you know, it could get, but because gravitational waves are what are called basically quadrupole waves. They are, they, there's two things they can do.

They can imprint directly a quadripoenae and it ought to be or, and so that's what we looked at, or the other alternative is they can produce a polarization signal that reflects that quadipolaris 40. And it took a while later with people said, hey, maybe you could try and measure that directly and see gravitational waves from the beginning of time, which I think is what, the bicept experiment that you eventually became involved in was aimed to do. It was not so much to look at the scattering of light of matter, but to try and look for these primordial modes,

which would be the first really direct signature of something that happened almost at the beginning of time. And that's for me the most exciting thing. Because light or gravitational light, any form of radiation, as you know, but for your listeners and my listeners, they'll be tuning into this. As the universe expands, all weight links and all forms of radiation dilute as a very steep power of the expansion or scale factor, the fourth power. They expand their number density decreases as the universe doubles in size.

The volume goes up by eight. So their number density goes down by eight. So that's three powers of the expansion. But also their wavelength gets lengthened and therefore their energy goes down by another power of the scale factor. So it actually dilutes as the fourth power. That means if you're trying to measure these waves of gravity from the earliest epoch of the universe's history called inflation, if inflation exists, and there's a huge debate right now it's getting resuscitated and getting, maybe we'll get into that alternatives to inflation, that that expansion factor would be a trillion times a thousand to the fourth power harder to measure today. So I start to realize in early 2000, along with your late friend and my great mentor, Andrew Lang, another father figure in my life. So this is a story of, you know, father figures is maybe the right title for this episode.

So he came into my life at a very propitious time for me that he believed in me. He was at Caltech of Wonderkin. And you, he was a, yeah, Wonderkin, you were a postdoc there at that time. So he was a postdoc. Yeah. Yeah, I'd been fired for my first postdoc at Stanford University or I was working for Sarah Church. I was a professor there. I like to say Galileo and I both got fired by the church.

But she did me a huge solid. favor by getting me in touch with her former postdoc mentor as Andrew Lang, and I accepted the job offer before the words came out of his mouth. And I realized how privileged I was to get to work with him. And this is right after the boomerang experiment, which you wrote about many universe from nothing and another project you've worked on. And his, you know, he was basically short track for a Nobel Prize. In fact, his wife or his ex-wife, widow, won the Nobel Prize in 2018 in chemistry. But for the chance to work with this great mentor who had just come off the spectacular achievement along with Palo Di Bernardis and my colleague Paul Richards to measure the fluctuations, the antisotropy in the microrate background, definitively, you know, after my colleague Lyman Page and Amber Miller and Mark Devlin had measured it with the Tocco experiment, they had had hints and boomerang and Maxima came out.

There's a revolution in the spring of 2020, of 2000, right, 22 years ago. And then to get a job offer to work with him was just spectacular. And he and David Baltimore, who is the president at Caltech, another president with Vision, decided that they would back this idea that I had come up with on the tennis courts with my colleague, Jamie Bach. And that was to build a refracting telescope, not unlike this glass refracting telescope here, except one that had, instead of retinal cells attached to it, superconducting bilometers or semiconductor ballometers, depending on the incarnation. And we built this experiment called Bicep, which is just a 30 centimeter diameter primary aperture lens. And we took it down to the South Pole where we had had a base and we've had a base there for 65 years or so at the very bottom of the world, which happens to be the driest, highest continent on Earth.

And why is that important? Well, in the atmosphere, there are water molecules over every part of the earth. And water is a very efficient absorber of microwaves, as anyone who's ever heat. needed something up, knows. So you'd like to be in space, but space costs 100 or a thousand times more expensive than doing an equivalent experiment on the ground. And with polarization learns, you can do an experiment on the ground almost as well as you can from space. In some ways, better because you can't launch our current experiment called the Simon's Observatory, has a six meter diameter primary mirror, which is bigger than the JWST. And that had to be

origami unfolded in space. We couldn't do that for less than tens of billions of dollars. we can do it in Chile for a mere $100 million. So that's quite exciting. So there are things you can do on Earth that you can't do in space. And the penalty you pay is you get excess emission from our atmosphere that's unpolarized, thankfully. But it makes the experiment take longer. But my colleagues at Princeton and Penn and Berkeley are so exquisitely ingenious at making detectors that we can basically carpet a six meter diameter cryostat filled with detectors at 0.1 degree above absolute zero.

and we believe we can go after these signals with unprecedented accuracy in just the next two years. We get first light in April of 2024. The fact that you, you know, we're at the right place and that Andrew was interested in the idea of polarization, which, you know, again, you were at the right place. You've done that as a graduate student. Bicep, for people who weren't around, and one of the most exciting moments was when I heard the rumors and then I got contacted by one of the heads of bicep to read the paper before it came out so that I could write a companion paper for the American Physical Society, associated with

physical review. Was this amazing, for me, one of been, was an amazing, remarkable discovery and the greatest surprise that, that it claimed to measure these primordial waves from inflation, which would change everything. It would be the first direct observable of what happened at the beginning of time, and it was incredibly exciting and it was unveiled in an incredibly exciting way and it's gotten a lot of bad press as if they did something wrong but i still don't i think they were pretty careful they had no it was it was not that they that that they misquoted what what they did it was that they weren't

aware of a of a source of noise and nor did they expect there to be at least maybe you can correct me but as far as i can tell nor did anyone necessarily expect there to be noise that could mimic the signal that they saw. And it was only later that that that that would. So why do you take take us through that unfortunate episode? And I don't mean unfortunate. On my opinion, they did everything right, except they just didn't realize that there was another source of.

Yeah, we didn't make a blunderer. So, so, you know, I was involved. So what happened as I invented Bicep 1, which we later called Bicep 1. And it was an acronym that's different background imager of cosmic extra galactic polarization. And just like your iPhone, every couple. of years, you upgrade the number of megapixels and has and so forth. And so we upgraded it from 49 detectors to 256 detectors by making transition from the detectors that were made of little semiconductor chips up into superconducting chips. And these superconducting chips are not more sensitive,

but they're easier to fabricate. They're all what's called lithograph, like in an Intel or Apple semiconductor fabrication. They can all be made on a planer array. And so they're functionally as sensitive, but they can be mass produced. And because you win, not as the number of detectors, but as the square root of the number of detectors, if you quadruple the number of detectors, you only reduce the sensitivity or improve it by a factor of two. So we went from 49, call it, 50 to 250. So we had a factor of square root of five improvement by making what was called Bicep 2. Everything else was the same. Same telescope optics, same cryogenics, same location, same observing patch on the sky.

And we had known from a very long time, and this was Andrew's philosophy, Andrew Lang, that we would observe until we saw something. And then once we saw something, we'd go back and see what it was. And Bicep 2 had an Achilles heel, which is that it only observed at one frequency.

And that's fine if you only have one unknown, which is the Cmb itself. Or if you can convince yourself that the CMB is the only signal that you're seeing. As soon as you add in another signal, be it contamination from the atmosphere, or say, which we could roll out, or from the galaxy that we're inhabiting, we are peering out through a galaxy that's a bubbling.

And Lawrence Krause's words, a bubbling bitches brew, protons, electrons, synchotron radiation, dust particles and everything else. And by the way, Lawrence, I want to give a special offer to your podcast listeners. If they subscribe to my mailing list, which is Brian Keating.com, I will send them, if they're in the U.S., I'm sorry, I can't send it to dangerous locations like Canada. But if you'll subscribe, I will send you the villain of my book, which is this little piece of space schmutz, which is not focusing. It's a meteorite. This is an honest of goodness iron nickel meteorite, which I have acquired the old fashion way.

By buying it. But I will delivered by gravity and the U.S. Postal Service. I will send you the villain that covers the dust jacket of my book, losing a Nobel Prize. And this was the contaminant. This is the actual signal that we saw. So we saw the impact of trillions and trillions of tons of microscopic grains of mostly magnetized dust particles, which are the result of a failed star or exploded star in our galaxy. So it was an astrophysical signal.

It was not a cosmological signal. It does not represent the primordial gravitational wave signal that we were looking for because it emits at much higher temperature. These grains of dust are 10 times hotter than the CMB, which means that they're 10 to the fourth times hotter in terms of radiation emissivity than the CMB. So we were doomed unless we had a way of removing both the dust and measuring the cosmic signals,

and then we could subtract the dust-only signal from the dust-plus cosmic signal and we'd be left with the cosmic signal. Now, the failure that I think the team had is that we only went to esteemed readers like you. We didn't actually solicit the, and I wasn't involved with this. This is John Kovac. Yeah, I interacted with the people at Harvard, John Kovac. That's right. And so they were interviewed, and Mark Kamminski was at the press conference.

There wasn't a single member of an experimental team. And there were many that would have been happy to look at it. And there was huge rivalries. And I can understand. But I wasn't involved with that. By the time Andrew died, and he took his own life. He died by suicide, as they say, just a few months, Lawrence. I don't know if you remember it.

is a few months after Bicep 2 was fielded. So he never got to see, and maybe, maybe not, things could have been different. Some say it could have been. But his philosophy was we would keep studying until we could say for sure what it was, but he never thought we'd see anything,

let alone a signal representing as energetic an epoch of inflation that we claimed on March 17, 2014, to have witnessed. So again, we didn't make, and there were many of us who knew, in fact, we tried to get as much data from that was publicly available,

including a famous example where we scraped a PDF slide that the that the plank team had put on their website. I'm not intending it for any quantitative research. We quoted that in the first paper, which by the way was submitted to PRL, FISREV letters, almost prestigious journals, and it wasn't refereed by the time of the press conference. So there were a lot of things we could have done different. And why were we doing that? In my opinion, we were worried about getting scooped. We had been told by people like George of Staddeu,

and others on the Planck team, that this was well within their reach. If we could see it, a billion euro project like Plank could have seen it as well. So these leadership, which I wasn't a member of, decided we're going to go forward. We're going to have a press conference. We're going to put the paper on the archive and people can investigate it. And almost immediately there started to be questions of all different types, some legitimate, some not, that we had made a mistake, not a blunder, not leaving the lens cap on, or not plugging in the fiber optic cable and thinking we saw faster than the length.

neutrino. There are many, and in fact, the biggest proof of that, Lawrence, is that the experiment has gone through two more generations after Bicep 2, still going right now. And in fact, is currently the world leader in limits, not measurements, but limits on the microwave background's intensity of B-mod polarization. And it's going to be a while before myself and my teammates on Simon's Observatory come anywhere close to what the Bicep team, which I'm no longer involved with, by the way, I'm still friendly with the leaders, but I'm 100% dedicated to the Simon's Observatory right now. So we have long held to climb to get to where they are.

But effectively, what was measured so far, we can't say with any confidence that we have any evidence for inflationary gravitational waves, which makes some people in the theoretical community quite happy because they don't believe inflation actually occur. Well, you know, first of all, let's let me parse it as a theorist first. I mean, I watched it from a different perspective. Let me say there was another, there was another,

first of all, no one doubts, I mean, the signal that you claim to see was a signal. It just wasn't a signal of what you thought it was. I think it's fair to say as a theorist, but also it was an unlucky circumstance because there could have been other directions that your experiment could have looked at where the dust signal would have been much, much smaller. It was an unfortunate circumstance that you happen to look in a direction where the dust was larger and I'm not, I think it's a priori until your competition, the Plank satellite measured what they did. I think many people would have thought that maybe the dust hadn't been as significant.

So I think it was not an unreasonable expectation that dust wasn't going to be a problem. At least that's my perspective in retrospect. Yeah, one of my students picked this patch based on the existing evidence from WMAP back in the Bicep 1 era that this was the least contaminated patch we could look at. But fundamentally, the Achilles heel is that we only had one free Yeah, and you couldn't... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app

and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Currently, whereas Plank could do more. But the other thing, by the way, and this may be new to you because you're watching

for distance, but it's another, so yeah, you rush to announce because you're worried you're going to be scooped. It's part of the sociology of modern science. The interesting bit of sociology that I don't know if I ever talked about, but it's another bit of sociology, was the journal rushing.

Because I remember getting contacted by, I was actually not John Kovacs initially who contacted me. It was the physical. review letters who contacted me and said, hey, we've got this, you know, this discovery paper, we'd like you to write a companion paper to explain it. And they were so excited by, you know, it could have been submitted to nature, it could have been submitted to anywhere else. They wanted to push it very hard. And in fact, I think it was the first, I do believe,

it was probably the first FisR of Letters paper that violated the four-page limit. Yeah. They allowed it to be as long as possible. And I was just shocked. But it was. because they were so excited that they were going to have what they thought of as a Nobel Prize winning discovery in their journal as opposed to another journal. And therefore, they pushed it as very much as well as anyone else, which is another unfortunate characteristic, I guess, about the modern sociology of things is that journals are competing against each other, just like experimentalists are. And they wanted to promote it. And as I said, that's how I first

found out about it. And they were willing to make it arbitrarily long paper. It's called letters because it used to be required to have to do four pages. And as someone used to publish in that journal a lot since I was a graduate student, always the hard part was used after there were three requirements, timely, important, and also short. And the hard part was often short and getting things into four. And so it was very jealous to see that you guys could have as long as you wanted. But in any case, it was not an unrealistic expectation and it was unfortunate.

But indeed, it turned out to be a signal of something. something other than what you've seen. And then the question is, can you push the limits down and Bicep has done it? And I have to say that one of the, again, as a theorist, one of the smoking guns that made people worried is that the signal was about as large that you claim to see, was it about as large as you could possibly imagine a signal being, whereas you might have expected inflation, which produces these primordial modes. In fact, that's why it's such a good.

inflation is basically the only producer of these kind of modes. Inflation can produce, explain many other things about the observed universe, and it does, but, you know, it could have, there are other things that might. Well, yeah, I mean, even before the paper was put on the archive that, you know, Monday and Tuesday of 2014, there were, you know, 300 papers about, oh, this is evidence for string gas cosmology, but, you know, my former teacher, Robert Brandenberger, all the way KD. Freeze. This is evidence for, for, you know, power law inflation. And, uh, I mean, I think you're maybe overestimating the creativity of your fellow theories. Oh, no, no,

they can make, no, no, but what I'm saying, it's the only first principles. I mean, it's a generic feature of inflation that you'd look for this. And, and you can measure it. components. Yeah. And the thing that I like about this, this test, and I'm very good friends with the arch, you know, kind of rival theory to, uh, to this, which is goes by the name now cyclic or bouncing cosmologies. I wouldn't call it a rival. I think that's unfair to the word rival. But anyway, go on.

It's another theory, which is held by about four physicists as opposed to maybe the one is held by 20,000 or so. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, I don't appeal to authority, right? I mean, I want to appeal to it. The Bible Lawrence. No, no, but the difference is, and I've talked to Roger Penrose and Alighuth about this, is that one relies on known, on well-established physics,

and one relies on extrapolating what we know. And so one makes definitive predictions based on physics that you can trust. And the other one requires you to say, well, okay, maybe this happens and maybe this happens. But anyway, go on. Right, right. I think the virtue, there is a virtue, well, first of all, let me say two things. Sociologically, it's good when there are rivals. Sure.

And I think to say, yeah, I mean, I personally agree about Rogers' theory. I think the modern bouncing or cosmological models, there is a verse. virtue, of course, that these things avoid singularities. And I think the failure and the dream of what I'm doing, my job depends on it, as Upton Sinclair would say, and might make me prone to want to accept the inflation occurring in younger, more frivolous days. And now I think I've gotten a little more grizzled about it. But to say that you have a rival that predicts the opposite of what this theory predicts is extremely valuable. Because you kill so many different, uh, competitive competitors, if you make this one, that's the definition of a crisp measurement. Now, where I also

make, you know, fellow traveling with, with the alternatives is, is this multiverse, you know, issue. And that, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I mean, it's almost become like Holocaust denial or, and in fact, people have used this term multiverse deniers to talk about those that are skeptical or are fine difficulty in this notion, which we should probably explain for the listeners might be succumbent. Concomitant with inflation in Alan Gooth's mind, in Andre Linday's mind, and even in the competitors, is that the multiverse, this chaotic runaway kind of profligate universe is going to be a feature of inflationary universes. It's almost impossible not to have, you have to suppress multiverse phenomena. You create many different

Glenn, just let me parse it for people. I mean, people, we've talked about multiverse in this podcast before, but for people who haven't heard of that, the multiverse in this case is simply regions that are causally disconnected. They're so far apart that they can never communicate, and it's possible the laws of physics could be different each one. And inflation generically predicts, inflation is generically eternal, and it says most of space is actually very different than the universe we see. And within that very different space, other universes could be being born or dying. And if you wait long enough, there'll be ultimately an infinite number because it'll go on forever. So that's the idea of a multiverse. There are different versions of multiverses, but that's the most sensible kind of multiverse.

So just regions that we can never see and which it's possible in inflation where there are seeds of new universes, the laws of physics could be different in those different seeds. Sorry, go on. And my question to you, because I have you on the line, is why would it only be the laws of physics? In other words, why wouldn't modus tollens not hold in universe, you know, force 42 next door to ours? In other words, why is only restricted? It seems pretty arbitrary to say, well, only the speed of light would be different or only the Newton's constant would be different. Could the laws of logic or even math be different in another universe in the multiverse paradigm?

Well, of course, asking that, we only have math as a language. But the nice thing about inflation is because it isn't hand-waving. in that sense, is that it tells you specifically the kind of different possibilities that exist in different multiverses, in different universes. It tells you that each universe is describable by the same physical theory and how it relaxes in different ways will lead to different physical constants.

But once you give up, you might ask, well, is quantum mechanics generic to all of them? And then the answer is, well, if it isn't, then the whole used quantum mechanics to calculate it. So if it isn't, then the calculation doesn't make sense. So as a theorist, The theorists, it's like you work with what you have. If you're drunk, you won't get under the light.

And so this allows real calculations to be done and could be compared to experiment and it predicts a certain subset of possibilities. Not anything is possible, which unfortunately, I just read someone say that they were, quantum mechanics allows anything to be possible. It doesn't. And quite importantly, it doesn't. And so what's nice is, in fact, that's one of the virtues of inflation. It explains precisely the kind of differences.

that can happen, which might, if the multiverse is real, allow you to probe for those differences in one ways or another. So that's what I like about inflation. It's quite restrictive in the sense of what it allows. I mean, it still allows a lot of possibilities. And is there an easy way to understand why, say if the landscape, you know, which is an allied concomitant description that some say is relevant, pertinent to inflation? So when they talk about this 10 to the 500, different vacuum states, is it clear to you, or can you explain to me, how could it manifest as a change in the speed of light? Like, if I change the vacuum state here, it's immeasurable, right? And it's not something we have access to the absolute value of the vacuum or ground state. So how is it that

changing the ground state in universe 42? Again, how does that couple to the speed of light, the vacuum state? Well, it does because the ground state determines the relevant forces that are relevant at low energies. And the speed of light is determined by two fundamental constants in nature, the strength of magnetism, the strength of electricity. And it's because at low energies that electromagneticism manifests as a force because the photon is massless. But you could imagine a vacuum which electromagnetism might not be the sole low energy force.

And then the relationship between electricity and magnetism would be different. that would produce a different speed of light. So it's just precisely the fact that those fundamental constants are reflected in what forces are manifested, low energies, and that's a property of the vacuum. And different vacua would allow different forces to potentially be manifested. In fact, it would make the masses of particles different as well as, in fact, most importantly, you could imagine a vacuum where the light isn't massless, which of course would be a very different world.

But you could certainly imagine a vacuum where the photon is not massless. And that would be, of course, then the photon wouldn't have the speed of light. And it'd be very different laws of physics. So that's precisely the relationship between the vacuum and the speed of light. No, it's good. I was going to ask you to ask me questions. So this is a good. Yeah.

But I hope to listen. Since you're asking, you wrote a paper with Wilczek, which I think you won a gravity prize about quantum mechanics. and the B mode, the gravitational wave imprint that I study and we claim detection of. And the challenge I always have is when I think quantum, I mean, what's the, I'm an experiment. I'm just a simple, humble experimentalist, right, Lawrence? So I think of the double-slit experiment. Like, I would want that to be kind of, again, the sine qua non of quantum gravity. I often hear that if we, not only if we detect, you know, B modes, will we have detected the inflationary?

epoch and the multiverse, but it'll be the first evidence for quantum gravity. Well, that's what we demonstrated. But if I observe right now, I'm seeing these photons and let's say, you know, I have a Michaelson interferometer done at Case Western, right? And I measure the wavelength. And I have a classical wave. And that's all that these waves are when they imprint the CMB at 371,000 years post-Big so how is that evidence for quantum nature of gravitons?

That's why it was so surprising to us and I was so excited about it when I first kind to recognize it, but the simple argument is that it turns out that in order for inflation, everything we see, galaxies are classical objects, but you know that they come in inflation from originally quantum fluctuations. And it turns out that what we're able to show is that, you know, lumps of matter are very classical, but they originated as quantum fluctuations in inflation. And what we're able to show is that if and only if, there were quantum fluctuations in the gravitational field, would you produce a remnant classical distortion in space and time?

Just like, and we showed basically if quantum mechanics wasn't true, namely if electrons didn't interfere with other electrons, which would happen if Plank's constant went to zero, then if Plank's constant went to zero, there will be no gravitational wave spectrum from inflation. Basically, that's what we were able to show mathematically. And so we basically are able to show in a very, actually, in the best of all possible ways, I showed it quite in a complicated mathematical calculation,

but then one of the things that Frank did was to show, okay, using what we call dimensional analysis, you could arrive at the same result. But basically, on a very fundamental level, if you took this thing called Planck's constant, which went to zero, then the amplitude of those waves would go to zero as the square. of Planck's constant, it turns out. It's a square of Planck's constant. So it was almost analogous to the Planck's derivation, the black body formula. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's exactly. It's just as analogous and it would be nice and people thought of it that way now. What's so interesting to me about this field, so I kind of feel

as an experimentalist, I should have long shots and I should have, you know, base hits. I should have, you know, grand slam, swing for the fences, but also get some points on the board. So in this field, what's been so delightful to me is to know that you can measure these effects, but there are guaranteed signals. So inflation is not guaranteed at all. There's no matter from God or, you know, Guy. I have to say generally I would expect, and I, you know, that's why I always admire experimentalists. They can spend 20 years of life on something and I think is a long shot. Generically, I would say it's quite likely that while I think inflation is the best game in town, it's also quite likely you'll never see the signal you're looking for. Yeah, it could be,

Right. It could be inflation didn't take place. It could be inflation took place at too low in energy scale. Generically, it's, you know, in order for you to be able to see it, it's got to be up near the highest level, and it's quite possible in inflation. We all know that if inflation was an order magnitude lower, then you're not going to see it. I'm thinking this generation, probably while you're alive. And that's why, you know, I think what's been so exciting for me is that, you know, my colleagues in the field have, and some, you know, I have to take some credit myself for making this, you know, more prominent in the eyes of experimentalists. And I see a lot of residence between what's happening in the current state of the CMB and where I was back in 2001

when I first kicked around these ideas for Bicep. And that has to do with measuring what's called Lorentz invariance violation, which doesn't really get that much attention. There's Levi. Hello, Levi. It's actually Levi's little sister. This is, this is, oh, that's his baby sister. What's her name? What's her name? Cahahua. Tasha. And she's, no, no, it's not, that religious component is that. And Tasha's 15 years old. She was my mother's dog. tribe of Kraus.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. So what's interesting to me is that we are able to measure departures from fundamental symmetries using the exact same. Not like I have to build another detector. And what's so interesting to me is to look at my colleagues and they're almost apologetic like, oh, we're only searching for one number.

You know, it's kind of, we're searching for the tensor to scalar ratio. And if we detect it, that's great. I'm like, you guys, we're doing so much more than that. And any, you know, I was just talking to, I won't say which experimental But it's an experimentalist that can only do one number. Literally, it's like a massive particle or some, you know, transition or resident. And they have tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe I'm not crying poverty because the foundation, Heising Simons and the Simons Fund

have been very generous to us. But they are really looking for one number and it may not exist and it may be a, you know, kind of a fool's error. For us, we not only are capable of measuring, you know, these amplitude of primordial perturbations, but we're capable of. of measuring things like the mass of the neutrino, which people have not been able to measure on Earth. We have an upper limit and we have a lower limit, but we have no detection, right? So with the CMB type experiments in collaboration with optical surveys and so forth, we are going

to be able to measure for the first time detect the mass of neutrinos because we know the lower limit is sufficiently large that we have the sensitivity to make a multisigma, multi-sigma, multi-sigma confidence level detection of that measurement. So that's one of the number. So that's one something we can do in experimental cosmic microbe background science. We're also measuring the properties of dark energy via how these galaxies and clusters of galaxies, how do they evolve? What's their density on the sky as a function of redshift? Again, we can measure things like the Hubble parameter.

And as you know, there's a, there's a so-called tension or anxiety. As Stephen Weinberg used to say, physics thrives on controversy. Luckily, there's no crises in cosmology today. Of course, that was in 1987. So there's a crisis in cosmology from the Hubble tension, violently disagreeing at 5-Sigma between C&B and optical measurements. Then we have the opportunity to measure what I think is probably maybe even more interesting, see if you agree or not, which is, does the universe obey Lorentz invariance?

So not Lawrence and variance, but Lawrence invariance, which is the statement that physics doesn't give a crap about where you are, who you are, when you are, what you may have, the laws of physics shouldn't depend on any of those properties. And we only have really tight limits from solar system scales and so forth. And it turns out the polarization of light is a very, very, almost the optimal ideal tool to measure things like parity violation, preferred axes in space, and so forth. So I actually tease my colleagues, if God gave me the ability to measure only one thing, the tensor to scalar ratio or the violation of these fundamental symmetry, CP violation,

I would take the latter because that would really upend physics. We're always talking about, well, we want to see, we want to be surprised. That would be the ultimate surprise, wouldn't that, if the universe doesn't obey Lorenzo and variance symmetry? Well, you know, it's, of course it would be the ultimate surprise. It will, but for that reason, but it's fascinating to try and it's important to be able to detect it. And I've written papers on ways to try and probe those kind of violations of something called the equivalence principle. But what's wonderful is you actually took me through. I wanted to get away from Bicep, and I want to say, what's next?

What might you be able to do? And I wanted to ask you about the, and you've sort of a list, you've listed a whole bunch of the scientific goals of why this field remains relevant and interesting, even if you can't measure inflation. But one of the things I wanted to ask you, first, tell me about the Simon's Array. And, yeah, first tell me briefly about that. Yeah, so the Simon's array is a precursor to the Simon's Observatory. The Simon's Observatory is a $100 million class project. Both of these projects are funded by the Simon's Foundation. The first was proposed in 2012, so it's coming up on 10 years.

And it's three telescopes. Each one is three and a half meters in diameter at the Atacama Desert site where we operate. for the past 11 years now. And that is at 17,200 feet above sea level in what was known as the driest desert on Earth, the highest desert worth the highest construction project on Earth effectively. That's continually being an operation.

We have to build the roads. We have to build the diesel plants that provide electrical power generation capability. We have to have safety managers on site. We have cranes and we have all sorts of, it's a real honest of goodness, concrete pouring construction. site with, you come down there, you need a hard hat. And so that's a precursor that uses

20,000 detectors. The next generation is called the Simon's Observatory, which is going to be an array of four telescopes, three refracting telescopes, not unlike bicep, but much more capable, much bigger, and also crucially alleviating, putting the Achilles heel guard on, we are measuring doing three frequencies or two frequencies simultaneously in each of three different telescopes. So we can measure the CMB and the dust and eventually synchotron radiation, which is much lower frequency manifestation of galactic electron acceleration. And then we have a six meter diameter telescope, which can do the very fine scale, arc minute scale, 130th of the diameter, the full moon scale, mapping of about 50% of the sky.

The South Pole is great. and it was the ideal location in many ways to do what we were doing back in the early 2000s, but you could only at most see half of the sky because the sky is basically gyrating underneath the south polar cap, and so you only have access to one hemisphere in the sky. From the South Pole, from the Chilean site,

we can see almost 80% of the sky because of its location 20 degrees south of the equator. So it is in some ways a better site from what our perspective in some ways than bicep. Of course, my feeling is we need at least two flowers to bloom. We need no one's going to believe Bicep. And I used to say this again. If Bicep tomorrow comes out and asks you to write another op-ed, Lawrence,

I would think twice, I would think twice if Simon's Observatory asked you to write an op-ed, right? Because you need to have confirmation. That is the lesson not only of Bicep 2, but of almost every experiment to date. And I think, well, it's the fundamental lesson of science is that you need confirmation. Yeah, go on. And we had said that in the paper as well. So I'm not casting aspersions of my former colleagues. But the bottom line is this experiment will have the capability to do even far beyond what Bicep did. It has more detectors, more sensitive detectors. And the ultimate prize the community is looking at is a billion dollar experiment, which has the most winsome, delightful name in history called CMB Stage 4 experiment, which is a Department of Energy slash Department, National Science Foundation project.

that could be as much as a billion dollars. And you as a theorist might know this, but not. But anytime you hear a number from the experimentalist, always double it if you want to actually operate the experiment for a decade. It costs about 10% of construction cost to operate. So never believe this. Oh, it only costs $10 billion to build the web telescope. Yeah, that's to build it and throw it away.

If you actually want to use it, it's going to cost another $10 billion bucks. But that's okay. That used to be, $10 billion used to be a lot of money, but that was the old day. I know. We start throwing around billions and it starts to add up. So this project is, yeah, it's due for completion on Jim Simon's 86th birthday in April of 2024. And I was just talking to him this morning. And he is more excited than ever.

We just got the first accepted at the factory, these telescope, the large aperture telescope, the six meter diameter telescope. There's a link of my website to it scanning around. It's built in Germany. We have the three small aperture telescope platforms are in Chile. I'm going down in a couple months to start setting them up. and getting ready for first light, which we'll get first light next year, and then we'll get science quality data the year after

in time for his 86th birthday bash. Well, look, you know, I know you have to go in a few minutes, and because I have a lot of things I wanted to cover, so I'm going to be picking on, I wanted to ask you about the CNB for the supernova, but instead I wanted to hit another topic, which is because I have you here, which is kind of unique,

and I hope you don't mind talking about it. And it goes back to the beginning, which is your father, Jim Max, okay? Jim Simons, by the way, as you know, has been on my podcast, and I've known him for a long time and I have great respect for him. He became very wealthy as a mathematician.

One of the reasons he became wealthy, I think, is because he was also recruited really good people like Jim Axe. And so it's not an accident that you're involved in the Simon's Observatory because, of course, Jim Axe was worked with Jim Simons and to make a lot of money. And that's fine.

But I want to ask you, and so it's great if you can leverage that, that relationship, that's wonderful. It's good for science and good for you, but also good for science. So I don't want to explore that aspect of relationship, but I do want to talk about the fact that we're seeing how you feel about the modern sort of patrons of science, that we're, that we're, which is an example of this is called the Simons Observatory. It's not called the NSF Observatory or some name of some old NSF official like JWST or, you know, a NASA official. It's Simons because Simons is providing the money and Simons you know has a tremendous amount of money which is wonderful

and he's using it for good causes but we're seeing that more and more that scientists are turning to patrons because those patrons seem to have more disposable income than the U.S. government and I'm someone wondering do you think it's a good thing or that that we're being driven to that or bad so I you have a personal experience with it so I thought maybe we'd end up talking about that with the Simon's Foundation they've always had an interesting relationship with the federal government in that they have have the ability to act as a private organization without some of the fetters of the government kind of bureaucracy. That said, they work very closely with the government. So the current president of the Simon's Foundation is, you know, Jim retired. So he's playing golf all the time now. But he retired.

So David Spurgel is now the president of Simon's foundation. And David Spurgel is an eminent astrophysicist NAS member, incredible contributions throughout cosmology, WMAP, Dark Energy. He led the Flatiron Institute, CCA. He was a student and we wrote one of his first papers together with me. Anyway, go on. Oh, I didn't know. I was a post-talk. I was at Harvard when he was a student there. Yeah, go on. Oh, yeah, that's right. Right. So he's, and so he didn't choose, you know, somebody from any one of the other computational branches that he works in or he's interested. He didn't choose a mathematician. He didn't should. So, yes, this is a big project. Now, the Simon's Foundation gives away, I believe,

over $300 million per year. Yeah. So he's taken an incredible, and it's only in the basic sciences and autism. And those are areas, of course, that the government plays a huge role in. And I think they'd be more than happy to only do autism or only do math or what have you,

but they see a need and an ability to agilely take advantage of talent without so many different fetters. So for example, Ernst, two years ago, you may remember there was a Black Lives Matter protests throughout the world. And in particular, it hit us in science. So we were dealing with COVID. We had a cohort of young individuals who, you know, didn't have any outlet. We're protesting social justice, Black Lives Matter. And meanwhile, we were the scientists and we wanted to react. But what are we going to do? We're going to, we're going to like change the policing in Minneapolis. Like,

what the hell am I going to do? But what I can do is I'm a scientist and I can mentor people. I'm very good at that. I love to educate and I think I have some abilities to do so. My colleagues, David Spargel and Stefan Alexander, who was the president of the National Society of Black Physicist, we came to the Simon's Foundation. We said, we have some discretionary funds here in UC San Diego, where I'm the director of the project office. We're going to use some of those funds to do internships for kids from black colleges, historically black universities, to come to places like UC San Diego virtually or the Simon's Foundation. Back then, it was COVID, so they couldn't be in person. They did, we did mentorship. You know, we have not been able to do this through the NSF yet.

We've been trying for a couple of years now. I'm actually trying to work with the National Society of Hispanic physicists to replicate this thing. And it has been kind of, I don't want to say copied, but we've influenced places like the Event Horizon Telescope to also partner with the National Society of Black Physicist. Simon's Foundation, if they didn't do that, there were 30 or 40 kids who each wouldn't have received $5,000 for the summer, written papers, gotten to graduate school. got a graduate student who's coming this year. She's from this program. These are things that the government, as wonderful as the government is, are too sclerotic

to actually implement in an effective, agile, nimble fashion that the foundation has done. And so they've contributed a lot of things, high risk, high reward. I think what we're doing still qualifies in that way. And I think that they become a model for it. And I think they're tiny compared to the government. I mean, 300 million sounds like a lot, but compared to the, you know, 300 billion that was just forgiven for student loans in America. Well, but it's small compared to what the government spends on many things, but not that small

compared to what the government spends on fundamental science. It's comparable. And it's kind of interesting to me. No, look, and I think, you know, you've described how useful the Simons Foundation is in many ways. And I think you're absolutely right. I'm not opposed. You know, I was involved in another program breakthrough start one of the breakthrough programs funded by a Russian billionaire looking. And And specifically because I thought these are programs where I don't think the public should be paying for it. I think they're so speculative, why not waste someone's private money? Now, the programs you're in are not that way. They're the kind of things government can fund as well.

But I guess in the interest of, you know, I return to the James Axe axis. I want to return to the Galileo axis in some sense. Are we becoming? So Galileo was able to do what he did because he had rich patrons. And it was good for science. It was a good, it was good, you know, worked out pretty well. Yeah. And so do you think, you know, some people wonder or worry about the fact that these projects are going to be determined, what's being done is determined by the whim of certain ultra, ultra rich people. And so I was going to say, is it a bad thing or a good thing? And, you know, I can see arguments on both sides. But I, you know, it worked for Galileo. Maybe what's wrong with these people have a lot of money spending some of it on science? And if it's their own personal interest, well, that's their prerogative. Yeah, I joke in my book.

I say, you know, Galileo in his time, he named the discoveries after his patrons. You know, he called the moons, the Medecian moons. And nowadays, what do we call them the Galilean moon? So I think it's going to work out for scientists just the same. But in all honesty, I think there is, I think the public funding, I mean, the price that it's come to and thinking purely of scientists right now, I have an 8% chance applying for a National Science Foundation grant out the door of getting it. And that's with a lot of support and overhead at the university. Once I get that Monday, Lawrence, as you know, my university kindly takes 61% of that to support the philosophy. I'll use your favorite department, the philosophy department.

And some of my best friends are philosophers. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one. Anyway, go on. So there's a tremendous burden on scientists. And this is totally absent from my role as a teacher, as an administrator, as a committee. chairman, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So there's so much waste. Now, when the Simon's Foundation, yes, I had to write a 20-page proposal. I have daily meetings on stewardship, accountability. They do run it. And ultimately, the thing that tickles me is Jim doesn't care what we discover.

It's so interesting. He actually, Lawrence, prefers the cyclic models, as you may have gotten into on your podcast with him, but he actually prefers the non-inflation because he doesn't believe that time can start. So if he was truly interested, he'd say like Brian, make sure if there's any gravitational waves that you know, he actually is so curious about the world. He actually wrote a story called the last three minutes that I'm hoping to publish someday, maybe in my next book. He is so generally curious. So maybe in cases, and I don't even think of like, when I think about Uri Milner, I've had Avi Loeb on my podcast. And I said, look, Avi, you know Yuri Milner. Why don't just get him to send a spaceship to Amuamua rather than Proxima Centurie B.

And he said, no, he's not interested in doing that. We're going to wait and see what Rubin says. Look, I think ultimately, I would worry if there were, like, speculative people. Like people saying, I want to prove that global climate change isn't taking place. I want to prove that evolution isn't true. I'm sure there are. Well, they're called the Koch brothers. Well, they're called the Renaissance now.

Anyway, go on. But when you have actual scientists at the helm of these organizations, like I think Jim or David Spurtle now, I personally, don't have these concerns. And I don't, and I say that as a citizen scientist, right? David is now actually volunteering to lead a, this program to look for unidentified aerial phenomena at no benefit to himself for NASA. So I think that we all have a strong incentive. We also want to do things for underrepresented groups. As I said, I think these are great things to do. And I think they're beneficial for the scientific community, but also for scientists.

And I feel like if that is a priority for the, at least for the US, I think, that actually more of this type of phenomenon will be beneficial. I don't think Jim Simon is going to pay $10 billion to launch a JBST too, but I do feel like there's nucleation. And then, by the way, the government can save money when we build C&B stage four if we collaborate as we're in the negotiations with them to leverage our designs, our resources, our personnel, our data analysis pipeline, and combine it with them to maybe reduce it from a billion dollar project to, you know,

500 million and say. So hopefully it will end up saving tax payers, not cost. Yeah. Well, exactly. I think, you know, this is an important discussion to have, and I agree with you that it might be, the also the thing to worry about is that, or the thing to say is that these people, it's a, it's also a small drop in the bucket compared to their net wealth. But it seems to me if wealthy people are willing to spend some money on science, it can't hurt. And as long as the government, as long as the government doesn't give up supporting science at the same time.

And I don't think that they want to, right? No, no, they don't want to. And I think, look, I know you have to go. Tasha has to go to the bathroom, which is why I'm holding it right now because she's been bugging me. But I think what I've particularly enjoyed about her discussion, and I hope that the public will take from this is not just learning a little bit about the science. And I did want to spend some time on your public, you know, your popularization of science. Maybe we'll do that another time. But is the give and take between experimentalists and theorists and talking about these issues that they sort of hopefully can just,

sit as a fly in the wall and watch the kind of discussions that you and I might have had, even if we weren't doing this podcast. So I really enjoy, I really appreciated you taking the time to do this. And it's always fun to talk. You know, when I was a kid, I thought astronomers would spend all our time on telescopes, but I actually spent all my time on telecons, which I'm going to run to you now. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Lawrence.

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