Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating Discusses the Meaning of Life and Science With Eric Metaxas

Episode Date: May 16, 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! Join Eric Metaxas and me for a thought-provoking discussion on the origins of the Universe, the Big Bang theory, and the multiverse. I also share my personal experience of almost winning the Nobel Prize and how it changed my perspective on the pursuit of scientific knowledge.  Eric Metaxas is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Bonhoeffer and many other books, including Is Atheism Dead?, Martin Luther, Amazing Grace, and Letter to the American Church, which was made into a full-length documentary by the same name. Metaxas’s latest book is Religionless Christianity: God’s Answer to Evil. He has written over thirty children’s books, including the bestsellers Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving and It’s Time to Sleep, My Love, illustrated by Nancy Tillman. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He hosts Socrates in the City and the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Radio Show — “The Show about Everything!” — which also airs as a weekly TV program on TBN. Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:17 Losing the Nobel Prize  00:03:56 Looking into the past with telescopes  00:14:39 The origin of the universe 00:21:04 What happened before the Big Bang? 00:27:32 Does the standard model imply multiverses?  00:38:29 Faith, science, and the multiverse  00:48:34 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 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Eric Metaxas: 💻 Website: https://ericmetaxas.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericmetaxas/ ➡️ 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

Joe. As the announcer of this show, I sometimes ask myself, to what shall I compare Eric? Shall I compare him to a summer's day? Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. But not Aaron. I'll tell you nothing shakes this guy. And now here he is. Wearing green leotards and a jesters coxcomb, Eric Mataxis. Take-todont. Stage left. How does he know that? How does he know that? He's in California. Fascinating. Folks, speaking of fascinating, as you know, this is the show about The Eric Mottackettackus show is officially known as the show about everything.

And when you're talking about everything, that includes science. It includes the Nobel Prize. It includes a lot of things that I'm going to talk about today. I have for the full hour, Brian Keating, who has written a spectacular new book called Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science's highest. honor he's with me now brian keating welcome to the program thanks harrick it's a great pleasure to be with you i have to say this is a spectacular story i had no idea and i'm sure most people uh unless they've read a review of this book have have no idea of the story that you tell in it it's a little

bit chilling in a way uh without my trying to uh to give it in a nutshell why don't i ask you to do that Yeah, I always like it when interviewers ask, you know, what's the entire purpose of your book? And every point you make, so the readers don't even have to buy it. Right. Yes, exactly. Well, it sort of started out as a description of a remarkable event in my life and a personal one at that of how I came to come extremely close to winning the Nobel Prize and then find it slipping and eluding my grasp. And along the way, I became not only a nominee for the Nobel Prize, but later I became a nominator the very next year that I lost out on science's highest honor, which is the Nobel Prize. I actually think it's humanity's highest honor.

You'll hear about it, bandied about, as the most superlative award that any human being can win. And so when I was not able to win the prize myself for my scientific discovery in cosmology, which is the study of the origin and evolution, of the entire universe, which I'm sure we'll get into. And then when I lost that opportunity, I found a remarkable thing happened to me that I found that the pursuit of this prize became somewhat revealed to me as nothing more than vanity and why I had wanted to win it, the ambition to win it and sort of dissipated. And then ironically, after I lost it, right after I lost it, I was asked by the same committee in Sweden, the Swedish Royal Academy of Science.

to nominate the next year's winners of the Nobel Prize in physics. And when I did so, I encountered a remarkable series of requests dating back to the beginning of the Nobel Prize with Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and became one of the richest human beings on the planet in 1800s. I realized that what he had wanted to come of the prize was nothing at all like the way it resembled when I was asked to nominate the winners of the prize two years ago. And so the book tells a kind of a memoir. It's a scientific mystery drama of what happened in the early universe and the possibility for there to be other universes that exist and how this debate is roiling cosmology as we speak, this notion of the multiverse, which I hope to get into with you today. Well, I would love to. Yes.

Yeah. Well, no, I know. So it's a, it's a, yeah, go ahead. No, I just, there's so much here. First of all, I neglected to say that you are yourself, of course, a. someone nominated for the Nobel Prize. You're a professor of physics in California at UC San Diego. And you really are in the middle of all of this.

So you have a particular, you know, front row seat, as it were, at the inner workings of the Nobel Prize and how it happens and what it is to be so close. to lose it. And as a physicist, you have a front row seat at the inner workings of the beginning of the universe, which is really what led us to this point, to you're being nominated for the Nobel Prize. So take us down that road, the idea that you in 2014, with the most powerful cosmology telescope made in the history of the world, some people revealed they'd glimpsed the spark that had ignited the big bang. I remember this news. Explain to us who are not a cosmologists or physicists how that's even possible with a telescope to see something that took place nearly 14 billion years ago. Yeah. What's remarkable to realize is that astronomy is really tough,

right, because we can't really do an experiment like my colleagues in the biology department here at UC San Diego do experiments. They'll take a frog, you know, as I remember, everything they do involves frogs in some way. And then they'll, you know, they'll subject it to some, you know, some chemicals or something. And they'll see what happens to that frog. And there'll be another frog that they don't do that too. So they'll have what's called a control. And that will allow them to test the effects of their hypothesis and what this drug or chemical or exposure to sunlight or, you know, sudden fame or something like that for the frog. We can't do that. We can't do that. Not only can we not do that in our solar system, we can't go out and change the distance of the

planet Neptune from the planet Saturn and ask how that affects life on Earth. We can't do that in the entire cosmos for sure because albeit there's many planets in our solar system and there's thousands of planets known around other stars in the rest of our galaxy and potentially in other galaxies. But there's only one universe or so we thought. And so back in the early 80s, there was a conjecture from a theoretical physicist, a cosmologist named Alan Gooth. And Dr. Goose suggested that if the universe began with just the right conditions, under just the right circumstances at a particular point in time, the universe could evolve and become so resplendent in the structure that we see in the universe, that there would be this opportunity to explain all these puzzles,

which theretofore had been unexplained. And to do that really was thought to be impossible back in the 80s. But in the early part of the 2000s, I realized that we could build a relatively small telescope that would act in the way that all telescopes do, which is that they act as time machines. So you know that when we look, when I'm talking to you, we're communicating across the country at the speed of radio waves, and those radio waves travel at the speed of light. And it takes, you know, less than a millisecond or, you know, a millisecond or so to get across the country. But when we communicate or we were, if we were looking at the sun and, you know, God forbid the sun were to disappear, we wouldn't know about that for eight minutes.

I remember that from high school. The idea that it takes eight minutes, very hard to believe, that to go 93 million miles, the light takes eight full minutes to reach my sun-tanned body. That is really, I mean, I love the fact that it's eight minutes. It's not some bizarre number that you can't fathom. It's very fathomable. Exactly. It's very human time scale.

And just like, well, you're too young and I'm too young to remember when, you know, humans first landed on the moon. But when they would communicate, there'd be a sound from Houston transmitted at the speed of light. You know, are you there? And they would say, yeah, you know, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. And the communication took a second and a half each direction. Right. Because the moon is exactly one and a half light seconds away from us, or radio seconds, if you will. So this transmission, go ahead. And I'm just going to say, I'm glad you think I'm too young. I am not too young. I was six years old in 1969 when that happened. And I do remember watching it on a very snowy TV. But, but you're

quite right that these are the kinds of things which some of us have observed. Yes. So you look at these fact that light travels at a finite speed. That means when you look back into space, you're looking back in time. So if I were looking at you now, you know, if I could somehow see across the country, I could see you, that would, I would see you as you are a millisecond to go, not as you are instantaneously now. But what gets in the way? Of course, there's the Rocky Mountains and other things that would get in the way so I can't see you. So if you could look in a way that your view is not impeded by anything else, any star. planet, galaxy, or whatever. Then you're looking back to when time itself existed. And that is what

we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang solved many of the problems that had vexed astronomers and physicists for thousands of years, namely, you know, how did the universe get to be so large? And how did everything get to be rushing away from us at tremendous velocities? But nevertheless, we had no evidence for how or what sparked that process scientifically. Of course, you know, those that are theologically inclined, they believe they knew the answer all along. But we wanted hard scientific evidence. And so that scientific evidence was thought to come from a telescope that we built at the very bottom of the world, namely Antarctica, and in fact, the South Pole Antarctica. Okay. When we come back, we're going to continue talking to Brian Keating, who has written a new

book called Losing the Nobel Prize. Losing the Nobel Prize, fantastic story, true story. We'll be right back It's the York Metaxas show. The way you get your medicine prescriptions is now changing across America. Go-GoMeds.com can deliver your medicine right to your door. Here's all you need to do. Your doctor gives you the prescription. You go online to go-go-meds.com, put in your information, and make sure to include the promo code, Mike 2018,

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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. Folks, it's here from Texas show. We're talking about cosmology, physics, the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, the Nobel Prize. We're talking to Brian Keating, who has written a brand new book called Losing the Nobel Prize.

Brian, welcome back to the program. Thanks, Eric. There's so much here. First of all, I'm fascinated with the idea that science only fairly recently told us that the steady state universe, the idea of a universe that existed forever and ever and ever was a myth, and that in fact it has only existed, you know, 13.8 billion years, give or take a fortnight. I mean, that's big news in the world of science because the ramifications of a finite universe beginning that time and space would have begun at a specific moment in the past. Again, the ramifications are gigantic for that.

Absolutely. And nonetheless than, you know, intellects such as Aristotle and, you know, from your ancestral homeland of, ancient Greece to Einstein and in the early part of the 1900s, believed that the universe was eternal and static and unchanging. And yet they were dissuaded from believing that by their own equations. It was almost as if their equations were smarter than them. And someone was trying to tell them that the universe could not be static and eternal. And yet the theory could have been named instead of the steady state theory. You know, we'd have a television show called, you know, the steady state theory instead of the Big Bang theory. But in actuality, it

turned out to be the case that that theory was, you know, would better name die hard because people didn't want to give up the steady state because of, in part, the theological ramifications of the Big Bang, singular unified origin of the universe. Well, yeah, and it is interesting because when you realize that if the universe began at a specific moment, and we can look back to that moment, but not past that moment, you know, we get into trouble as scientists. I'm not a scientist, but we get into trouble because we realize, well, we don't want science to be limited, but we're limited. We can't look beyond time and space. That's the very definition of what it is to be a scientist, is to examine what's in the known universe, and we're sort of stuck. There are all kinds of

implications. But what you were doing, you just mentioned that you came up with the idea to build this telescope not so long ago. Is that right? Yeah, I was in the early part of the 2000s. I was what's called a postdoc, which is. kind of a no man's, no woman's land between being a graduate student, getting my PhD, and then hopefully becoming a professor, as I later did become. Okay. And so what was this idea? How is this telescope that you were thinking about different from previous telescopes?

It was that it was sensitive only, and it was optimized only to detect what would be essentially the smoke from the gun, you know, the smoking gun that ignited the Big Bang. So, you know, what caused the universe to propel outward at such a fan? fantastic velocities that all the universe seems to be expanding away from us, that question is what impelled me to want to build this telescope. And the telescope itself was very simple, but it was very, it was very clean and and pristine and designed in a way that was optimal for detecting waves of gravity from these explosive expansion at early times called inflation. But you can really think of it as what ignited the explosion. We don't know what

really propels the universe. And it was thought that if we could do that, the most, you know, the most significant thing, accomplishment in all of cosmology and some said in all of science when we did make the announcement in 2014 that we had indeed detected the imprimatur of the Big Bang and how it unfolded and how the universe unfurled, that this would not only lead to, you know, the greatest understanding, as some said, famous, famously said by Lawrence Krauss, a very, very well-known, militant, self-declared militant, atheist and cosmologist. he said that this expanded human knowledge more than anything prior to it.

So it was quite amazing. And then, of course, the most tangible piece of reward for it would have been the Nobel Prizes, which would have hung around our necks had the discovery held up. You know, I don't think as much of the Nobel Prize now that Obama got one for effectively having done nothing. It was kind of like giving the Big Bang a prize for being the Big Bang before the Big Bang, which you can't really do on any level, scientifically. or otherwise. But it's a very strange thing. Prizes are a strange, strange thing. And your book tells the

story of that. So tell us the story of what happened. First of all, it must have been just monumentally heady to have believed that you were going to win the Nobel Prize and to have believed that you had glimpsed, you know, the spark that ignited the big bang. And let me ask you question also. When we talk about glimpsing the spark that ignited the big bang, that sounds like you're seeing something before the big bang. If the spark ignited the big bang, it, by definition, happened before the actual big bang. How is that possible? So that's a very good question. So what ends up happening in cosmology is that we can extrapolate back in time as we use our telescopes and use our data. We can go back in time to a certain point. As you said, some of that

appears to be hidden from our view. And indeed it is, you can't go back earlier in time than about 400,000 years after the Big Bang if you're using light. But if you're using waves of gravity, you can go back much, much farther in time, back to possibly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, just an incomprehensible fraction of a second. And what we call the Big Bang is this expansion of the universe. And so what we were explaining is how that became energetically after the beginning of time, you can call the Big Bang the expansion of the universe that allows the universe to unfurl possibly the speed of light. But the question is what gave it that energetic kick? And that is this period of time called inflation that I call the spark that ignited this expansion. There are theories that I describe in the book that describe a period of time that happened before the Big Bang, before time equals zero.

And those models stand in direct contradiction to the models that we were trying to probe with this inflation, you know, looking for inflation with this telescope I invented called Bicep. But again, even the idea, we can make, we can take guesses at what happened before the Big Bang. But by definition, that's outside the realm of science. Is it not? Well, not exactly. No. So there are conjectures that postures. that postulate that there was a very well-defined question to, you know, what happened 15 minutes before the Big Bang?

So those are models that are basically the hereditary, you know, inheritors of the steady state model. And it's interesting that these models come and go in and out of fashion, you know, kind of like ties on Wall Street being wide or narrow. the theory of this of this model is called the bouncing or cyclic cosmology and none less than you know sir roger penrose and paul steinhardt at princeton and many others have conjectured that there were an epochs perhaps an infinite number perhaps just one that preceded our universe and what's known as a big crunch so those models are very much able to answer the question as to what happened before what we called the big bang the big bang was essentially in those models the rebound from a collapse so in that question i mean you you can understand how the answer to what happened before what we call the Big Bang makes sense. But they may require an infinite past history to be accounted for. So they come with their own challenges as well. But you're right. In the standard cosmology where inflation took place, there would be a singular event.

And the question of what happened before the Big Bang, as Stephen Hawking once said, makes as much sense as asking what's north of the North Pole. But as I always say to when my kids ask me that, I say it's Santa Claus, you know, is right above the North Pole. Right. As long as we understand, we're talking about the mythic at that point. And I think we have to be honest, when everybody's talking about what happened before the Big Bang, it's conjecture. It's not observable, period, case closed. So it doesn't mean we can't talk about it, but we have to be honest about what we're doing. Well, in some models, so that was what was so exciting about our discovery, because our discovery basically killed the question for once and for all of whether or not there was a cyclic model of the universe. Our data seemed to support the evidence for a singular creation. So you're right, if our data held up to be correct. But what's so deliciously mysterious is that today we don't know the answer. And as the title of the book suggests, we didn't win the Nobel Prize.

I didn't win the Nobel Prize. And that's because our data were not, were disconfirmed, that we had to retract, embarrassingly, what we discovered. And so that means the door is wide open. And many people believe that not only is the notion of a universe preexisting our Big Bang, what we call the Big Bang, not only is that palatable. In some sense, it's more natural. because inflation has an awful lot of problems with it, and those problems to some people are make it seem basically completely fanciful. And one of those problems that I hope to get into with you today is this notion of the

multiverse. So when you hear about inflation, it's almost inextricably linked to the notion of the multiverse. So if you accept the multiverse, or if you accept inflation, you must also perforce accept the multiverse. With the cyclic cosmology that has the answer, you know, which may be equally unpalatable to you and to your listeners. But nevertheless, if you accept that there could have been a universe before ours, you have other questions to answer and reconcile with as well. I'm so glad that I'm listening carefully because this is heavy stuff, man. This is awesome stuff.

Folks, when we come back, we will continue this important conversation about the Nobel Prize and about the origins of the universe. I'm talking to Brian Keating. His book is losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils. of science's highest honor published by Norton. We'll be right back. Have you ever thought about trading? Do you think you might do a better job than your financial advisor? Well, at Apiary Fund, we train people just like you to create an income stream by trading online. With Apiary Fund, you'll be taught by a highly experienced trading team, including legendary trader Sean Lucas, who's formerly managed $2.5 trillion worth of investor funds.

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Swing low, sweet chariot. Coming forward to carry me. Hey there, folks. It's the Airquintaxis show. We are asking the big questions, folks. I'm talking to Brian Keating. He's a physicist. His book is losing the Nobel Prize.

We're asking questions like, what's north of the North Pole? What happened 15 minutes before the beginning of time? And then the big question, if a man and a woman are having an argument, husband and wife having an argument and the husband can't hear, is he still wrong? That's dumb. That's really dumb, but that's okay. Now listen, this book, losing the Nobel Prize, you talk about your experience.

But before we get into all that, because there's so much here, we were just talking about you said that the inflation model, the Big Bang model, the standard Big Bang model, implies multiverse. That is not something with which I'm familiar. Can you explain that? Yeah. So the, and I know this is very complex stuff, and I do, hopefully do a job, a good job explaining it and what these different terms mean in the book. But in short, the multiverse is a conjecture used to explain the unusual features of our universe, namely the fact that we exist. So the fact that we exist leads to a very banal sounding conjecture. that the laws of physics in our universe must be compatible with the existence of conscious observers like us.

And in that sense, it's not super controversial. But when you say that the universe could be an infinitely arranged and an infinite number of other arrangements, most of which, perhaps all but one of which, could lead to a universe that's completely incompatible with our existing, then it makes us seem somewhat very special, doesn't it? So the multiverse attempts to explain the low probability of our existence by multiplying that small probability by a large number of potential other universes. So if you multiply 100 by 1% you get 1. If you multiply 1,000 by 1 over 1,000, you get 1. So you can make any number that's no matter how small, you can make that actually finite and in fact 100% odds by multiplying it by an infinite number.

if it's infinitesimal, at least within, you know, certain approximations. So this is the way that many scientists believe we can explain how our existence came to be, as improbable as all the parameters that are required, the fine-tuning arguments that are needed to explain our universe. Not only is this problem, is our existence probable according to the multiverse? It's mandatory, except that in many of these other universes, I'm interviewing you, and I have the Brian Keating Show and you're a professor Eric Metaxis at the University of California. and an infinite number of other arrangements. And that's what's so baffling, puzzling, and some people completely unpalatable that such an argument can even enter the realm of science.

Because it's inherently a biased argument. It's an argument that relies on a certain form of chauvinism in a way that our importance becomes essentially minimal and completely unimportant. And the improbability of our existence just gets magnified. So by finding inflation, we thought we would find direct evidence, if you will, for the multiverse. And that's what excited so many of these militant atheists from, you know, Stephen Hawking, who the day of our discovery, you know, was basically celebrating the finding four years ago to, as I said, Lawrence Krauss and Max Tegmark and many other who are in this sort of devout, secular camp, as I call it. Well, it's interesting because I do know a little bit about what you're talking about now because I still there. I stumbled into writing an article about, I'm sorry, can you hear me? Yes, I hear you now.

No, I was going to say that I know something about this. Obviously, I'm not a scientist, but I read a number of books about the fine-tuned universe, and I was so fascinated because I'd never heard anything about this. And the more I looked into it, the more I was compelled, because obviously 50 years ago or 100 years ago, we didn't have a clue of what the parameters were that were necessary for the world in which we live. but the more time has passed, the more we're able to measure this and measure that and measure this and measure this and begin to see like, wow, this is pretty fabulous contraption here called the universe. And that if, you know, this value is off by a millimeter, the whole thing goes to Kibblui.

We become, you know, a black hole or we become just, you know, random atoms floating, never forming planets and that kind of stuff. And so it's so fascinating. And I was most fascinated because I put it in in my book Miracles and then I wrote an op-ed. that was in the Wall Street Journal that was very popular. Just on this issue, that it's kind of science is leading us. It seems to me to speculate that, in fact, the universe is to use, to quote Fred Hoyle, a put-up job, right? And so I wrote about it, not realizing the backlash. And in fact, Lawrence Krause wrote a long piece in The New Yorker.

But what I found funny, what I found funny was that, you know, he was saying things like all this has been debunked and this is nonsense, whatever. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, it's one thing to disagree with it or not to like it, but to say it's been debunked, it's not been debunked. In fact, Christopher Hitchens himself was asked, what is the most compelling argument on the other side? And he said, oh, you know, without any doubt,

you know, the fine-tuned universe, and I suppose most of my colleagues would agree about it. But, you know, in other words, it's very, very compelling. And so for folks who don't like the idea that there is a universe that was created by some intelligence, if that's fundamentally unpalatable, you kind of, you know, throw a Hail Mary, and you say, well, hey, wait a minute, what if there's an infinite number of universes?

One of them just happens to be perfect. And by the way, we just happen to be living in that universe and it solves the problem. But, I mean, that's how it strikes me. It sounds like a wild, frankly, unscientific speculation. Well, that's absolutely right. You know, they wouldn't call it a Hail Mary. They'd call it a Hail Dawkins. But another, I hear the music, but I'd like to talk about that.

And the kind of affliction that most of my colleagues suffer from when it comes to accepting things. on faith alone. Yeah, it's so strange. We're going to be right back, folks. We're talking to Brian Keating. He's written a book called Losing the Nobel Prize. Absolutely fascinating. Stick around.

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I would purport. Yeah. So one thing I was able to do recently is give a Prager University course, which was entitled, which is a bigger leap of faith, God or the multiverse. And, you know, and it was kind of a, I viewed it as sort of a part two of your wonderful video for Prager University, which is that, you know, where not only are, you laid out the facts and the evidence for it, which is, which is that the improbability of our existence is so troubling to scientists and rightfully so that they want to rectify that. And they've gone to great lengths to rectify it. What's different about this current debate in cosmology as to the multiverse's reality is whether or not scientists will accept. things based on faith. In other words, scientists usually think of people that are faithful like you or me. They'll think of us as kind of, you know, victims either of a great con job or they'll just say that we're just rubs and we're willing to believe anything that, you know, that that we hear if it comports

with our notion of the existence of the universe or of God or whatever. And what I think is so troubling to me and many others, thankfully, that the, you know, there are scientists who will be intellectually honest enough to admit that they accept the multiverse basically on the same amount of faith. I know that you've had a personal revelation experience with Jesus Christ. I'm Jewish. I haven't had that revelation, although I was an altar boy, as I described in my book. I've had nothing but wonderful encounters. But I am actually, you know, practicing observant Jew. And for me, you know, I take it on a basis of faith, you know, the very notion that that God exist can't is is you know if if you don't have a direct physical encounter with within a religious

experience or awakening that that you have to accept things on faith and that's part of the you know the attributes of faith in my religion and and I'm sure the the you know equivalent things in your religion as well but you're not you're not going against the evidence in other words when you say faith it doesn't mean that it's irrational it simply means that it's beyond rational right but you're still looking at evidence. You're not saying, like, I don't care what the evidence shows. I accept it on faith. You care what the evidence shows.

You're a scientist. I do. I definitely do. And I look back, but there are things, you know, that God said to Moses. Okay, I wasn't in that conversation. So I have to accept on faith for veracity for other reasons. And I do that. And I do accept that.

So but scientists are exactly as you just said a second ago. Scientists are supposed to act on data, not on faith. And I think it's important. You can wear two different hats. You can be a scientist looking at data, looking through the microscope, looking through the telescope. And if that brings you closer to God, then that's wonderful. But on the other hand, you shouldn't say that you're simultaneously evidence-driven,

that you only care about evidence, and then accept things on faith, which is that the multiverse is real because it comports with my preconceived notion that there is no God. In other words, that they have to explain the fine-tuning argument, and the only way they do that, as I said in the previous segment, is that they multiply the improbability, these tiny odds of our existence with this vast array of population. Possibilities, namely the multiverse. And no less of the authorities than, as I said, you know, people like Dawkins and Krauss and many others, you know, will wholeheartedly admit that, look, I told you in the very beginning of the show that we see things in the sun's sunlight coming to us from eight light minutes ago, right? But another universe is located potentially an infinite number of light minutes away from us that will never be able to encounter. So not only can we not prove the truth of it that it does exist. We may not even be able to fall. It's existence. And this is a very important detail, which is that scientific theories are judged on their ability to be not proven because we can't prove, you know, vast arrays of scientific knowledge.

We can't prove it because there could be one counter example that we don't know about. But if you say that my theory is at the South Pole, there's a purple unicorn waiting to be discovered. I can go to the South Pole and see if there's a purple unicorn in the last couple times I've been there. I didn't see one. So you can falsify that. And then before you can reject that hypothesis and say it is not sound scientific reasoning. With the multiverse, you can't even do that. You can't prove it wrong.

So why are proponents of the multiverse theory not candid that they have moved beyond the precincts of science? Why can't they be candid about that? I would love to have you, you know, as a member of my congregation, you know, are you willing to join up our congregation? Our dues are very reasonable. Would you like to convert? Eric, could you convert a circumcision? I can offer you discount circumcision. I'm arrogant enough to think that I've already been grafted in by faith because I believe in the Mosheya, you know, which came out of the...

Exactly. So, but seriously, this is like... But no, my point is real. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm being tongue in cheek, but I'm really, I'm really being serious because it's as much a religious dogma to sway somebody from believing, from being a militant atheist as it is to ask you. to convert to another religion. And people are very comfortable

with their choices of religion. And I go through a very great number of them in this book. And a lot of times it comes down to things like authority bias and confirmation bias and prejudices, some of which led me astray in my early encounters, both of the religion and with science. And these things that everybody,

even if you are a militant atheist, you still have a religion. Richard Dawkins is as devout as you are in Christianity or as I am in Judaism. It's just that his religion is focused around the complete proselyization that there is no God. There is no reason to believe that people of faith are foolish. And I think that that is as dogmatic as, you know, someone who's completely devout and maybe less so because they purport to be rational and evidence driven. When in a lot of cases, it's a lot of wishful thinking.

Well, that's where I find it embarrassing. In other words, I think to myself, if you have the guts to say that the universe has no means. that there's no such thing as truth or good or evil. Nietzsche had the guts to say that and to preach that. That's the logical extension of the idea that life evolved without any guiding hand that we are here as accidents. If you really, really believe that, then you have also to believe that there is no meaning and that there's no good or evil.

And then if you believe that, I say, why don't you commit suicide or why don't you do all kinds of wicked things because there's no such thing as wickedness. We're out of time. We're going to be right back, folks, talking to Brian Keating about everything. His book is losing the Nobel Prize. Check it out. Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Posting your job in one place isn't enough to find quality candidates.

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Is this the only place you thought to go? Am I the only man you ever had? Or am I just the last surviving a friend? This is the Eric Mataxas show. I'm talking to the author of Losing the Nobel Prize. He's a cosmologist, and he's the inventor of the famous Bicep Experiment, background imaging of cosmic extra-galactic polarization, Gizundheit, which tells the story of that telescopes mesmerizing discreet.

and the scientific drama that ensued. By the way, folks, I should have said this earlier. It's an adventure story. It pretty much spans the globe, goes to the South Pole, Chile, California. And it is absolutely fascinating. And I have to say, Brian, that we're going to run out of time in this hour. Do you have time to continue the conversation after this? Absolutely.

Okay, because there is so much here. There's so much here. First of all, we were just talking about how scientists are. taking this thing on faith. And I actually would argue that the multiverse theory takes more faith and is less plausible than believing in the flying spaghetti monster. The so-called flying, but I actually mean that. Like, it's just, it's the wildest thing.

It makes any kind of irrational faith claim look rational in comparison, because we're talking about an infinity lacking any proof. Yeah. Well, you know, to paraphrase, you know, the great Jewish sage, Woody Allen, he said eternity is pretty long, especially towards the end. And, you know, when you think about infinity, you can't think about infinity. I shouldn't even say that. But infinity, I sometimes say, is pretty big, especially towards the top. You know, in other words, there's you can't, the human brain is a finite entity.

It's composed, maybe created by an infinite entity. But we have, we have, you know, powers to visualize things, but only by analogy. And really, there is no good analogy for infinity. And because we don't have to encounter infinity in a daily basis, and so our brains are not really wired in such a way as to do so. But in this controversy, which is really gripped cosmology, I mean, you know, cosmology is a pretty, you know, reserved field. It's not like talk show or radio, but where we have, you know, combative things on Twitter back and forth. But nevertheless, cosmologists are really up in arms with one very huge camp populated by the pro multiverse crowd, where we have people. then are assailing those that have an alternative explanation that doesn't involve the multiverse,

and they can't even agree on the terminology of what is scientific. So I gave it a brief example of something that's not scientific, you know, a purple unicorn theory, but on the other hand, you can falsify that. You can prove it wrong. So the question is whether or not this constitutes science should be of interest to my fellow cosmologists. And to some, it's as heated and I believe as any religious debate because it is, in fact, their form of religion. There's no question that that's what we're talking about. I'm glad we're going to get more time with you. We're basically out of time in this hour.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am talking to Brian Keating. He almost won the Nobel Prize. He's written a book about it called Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of science's highest honor. In hour two, we're going to talk about what it's like to be at the South Pole, what it's like almost to win the Nobel Prize and much, much more. Brian, just a joy to speak with you. Thanks for being my guest. It's such a pleasure, Eric. Thank you.

Folks, we'll be ending this hour, but we will have hour two with Brian Keating losing the Nobel Prize. The book, this is the Eric Mataxis show. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th. the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino,

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