Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Schmidt:Nobel Prizewinner: Cosmic Acceleration and Collaboration ​(#201)

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Brian Schmidt, is an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, formerly known as Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories. He works in several areas of astronomy, most notably with exploding stars called supernovae. He also chases Gamma-Ray Bursts, and is heading a project to build a new Telescope that will map the Southern Sky called SkyMapper. Brian was awarded The Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae. Please join my mailing list; just click here: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Michael Saylor: https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/sh98cwRkzAA Sarah Rugheimer: https://youtu.be/w5DxU-lPYK4 Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everybody to a new episode of Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and another Brian, Brian Schmidt, winner, co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating universe, which, according to Brian, despite an enormous body of theoretical work that has been undertaken in response to their discovery, there is not yet a fundamentally altered knowledge or perspective or paradigm on how physicists should interpret the acceleration of the universe. And just last week, there was an announcement that not only is the universe's expansion that is accelerating, but its expansion itself parameterized by the so-called Hubble constant, is in grave tension. There is anxiety. Why do measurements using the cosmic microwave background radiation, the sort of science that I traffic in, and the type of science that Adam Reese, past guest and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize, along with Brian Schmidt, and Brian himself, traffic in, which is observations of distant compact objects, be they supernovae, be they sepheate variables and the like.

Why is there such a discrepancy? the chances of which happening by fluke chance are estimated at one in a million or less. So there's great tension, there's great interest in this. And it was just one of the many things that Brian and I talked about. He's an extremely busy human being. He basically runs a university in Australia and how he went from Montana to Alaska to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Seattle, to Australia is a subject of great interest. But one of the most fascinating things about Brian Schmidt is his obsession with wine. His Twitter handle is Cosmic Pino, and he tweets often about different varietals.

And I brought up one of my favorite quotes of the great master, the first observational astronomer in history, Galileo Galilei, who said, wine is sunlight held together by water. So we went through a great deal, including a little bit of, of a topic that I wasn't sure Brian would be willing to talk about, really required some genuine vulnerability on his side, talk about competition and even what he called toxic competition and the great lead-up to the announcement by two different teams, one led by Brian Schmidt, Bob Kirchner, and Adam Reese, and the other led by Saul Perlmutter at UC Berkeley,

and the really great links that they were all going to to get to the result first, almost at great cost to their psyches and to the cohesiveness of the team. And I thought it was great, it was greatly appreciated that Brian was able to speak so candidly about what he would have done differently, what he regretted about that. And it's all, you know, sort of in some sense driven by the Nobel Prize. And you know my feelings about that. They were just awarded last week by the time you're listening to this December 10th, the date not of Alfred Nobel's birth, but of his death. Now, why is that? There's an obsession with death in the Nobel Prize. Oh, you can be referred to my book for more details. But for now, I want you to sit back and relax

and enjoy this episode of Into the Impossible. And perhaps you'll do me a favor in the holiday season and leave a review because that is really the only thing I want for X-mas is a two-star. No, I want a five-star review, but I'll settle for whatever I can get. So please do me that one small favor takes two seconds. Wherever you're listening to this, if it has an option for review, please do me that huge favor. And this week's thank you note goes out to AK-47. That's a little scary, but he or she says, can't get enough of Brian's stuff. Love every episode, especially the Nobel Laureates that Brian always lands. Well, AK, you're in luck. This is one of your lucky days. So if you're enjoying this podcast, you may be interested in listening to all my Nobel Prize winning winners on the podcast.

And that's on a spinoff podcast called Into the Impossible. Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, the title of my second book. You can find that anywhere you get podcast. Just look up Think Like a Nobel Prize winner or my name. And that's my spinoff podcast. And if you're listening to that podcast, subscribe to my main podcast, Into the Impossible. And for now, I want to leave you with some work. words of wisdom from Arthur C. Clark himself and also from Hal 2000 in 2001, a space

odyssey, who is now going to let us open the Pod Bay doors, as in podcast Bay Doors. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the Pod Bay doors, Hal. So it is a great pleasure to be joined by a Brian who did not lose the Nobel Prize. but instead won the Nobel Prize. Brian Schmidt, co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize, the Vice Chancellor of the Australian National University. You may know them as the Owls, the Fighting Owls. I believe that is their wonderful mascot, a wise mascot indeed. And today, Brian is joining us from all the way down under in Canberra. Is that correct, sir? That is correct, although I don't think the owls are a mascot, although I like the sound of it. Well, that's what the so-called internet would tell us. So maybe it was retracted.

The owl was put out to pasture. But it is lovely to be chatting with you today. You are my 11th Nobel laureate to be joining us. And this is the 10th anniversary of your receipt, along with past guest, Adam Reese, and Saul Perlmutter, of the 2011 Nobel Prize. So I thought it was about time for me to extend a proper invitation. And one of the things that's always intrigued me about you is your fascination with wine extends all the way to the most important of all monikers your Twitter handle. And I thought we'd start with a quote from the very first observational astronomer to ever use a telescope in reality to explore the heavens. And that is, of course, my hero Galileo, who said, wine is sunlight held together by water.

And I had the honor to host a conference in 2015 on the relativity anniversary, centenary, at Galileo's final villa in Florence. And he had a vineyard there where he also said the sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. Now, you have a lot of things in the universe to do. But tell me, where do you find the time to be a vintner and to explore the properties of this fine, elixir of Dionysus. Well, you just have to make time.

You know, one of the things about this job, and, you know, when I applied, so the vice chancellor for Americans is the president of the university. Not a job I would necessarily recommend most people take, especially in the era of COVID. It's been quite a ride for the last couple years. But you just have to make time. And, you know, when I was interviewed for the job, I kind of went through and said, well okay there's you know this many hours in a week I'm gonna sleep for about 50 of them and you know how many hours a week do you want me to work and how many hours do I

get to do things like make wine and anyway I convinced them that I could still work an absurd number of hours and make wine and yeah you you make time it's good because you you need to decouple from you know anything and everything you do and I Obviously, of course, up at Arquetry at Galileo's Via, which was his prison, a pretty nice prison, though, from my standard. He drowned his sorrows and wine, which is something you probably don't want to do. But for me, it's just a way of getting out and thinking. And I often think about astronomy or the problems of the world while I'm out working in the vines. but it is a way, as I said, to de-stress and get some exercise and just do something that's a little different.

Now, your handle is Cosmic Pino on Twitter, and harkens back always to the famous movie from the early 2000 sideways, where they are really besotten with either people that are obsessed with Pino and people that hate Pino. But I looked up where does Pino grow and it grows pretty much. And you'll, of course, disabuse me if I'm wrong. But it grows predominantly in latitudes between positive and negative, you know, 30-ish latitude, negative south to negative 37 or something like that. And I know Canberra is that in the middle of that latitude band at exactly minus 35, I believe. Was that another part of your choice way back in the late 90s, I believe, when you took up residence in Australia? Yeah, so Pinot Noir, I mean, you can grow Pinot Noir in warm climates, but it produces a very innocuous wine. It just kind of produces red. And it's kind of a painful grape to grow because it's not well-behaved. It puts shoots everywhere. It has small bunches. It easily gets a disease. So if you're going to grow red, it's not the grape of choice. You're going to use something else. Shiraz is much easier to grow. But Shiraz needs a little.

little bit warmer to ripen properly. So here in Canberra, Canberra is up at elevation. So we're at my vineyards at 750 meters, give or take a little bit. So 2200 feet. So about Tucson, Arizona, if you're in the United States, of course, where I went to university. So we have the same latitude almost, a little further north of Tucson, but it's a very different climate. It's much more cool here. 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 GoogleFi Wireless.

My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. And you need to choose the grape that's appropriate for the temperature that you're at. And so Canber is such that Pino is the only one of the major grapes of red, especially 20 years ago when I planted that you could sensibly ripen every year.

I have a little bit of Shiraz planted now. It's hard to ripen, but I can get it ripe in at least the warm years. And it's my climate change hedge. But yeah, you choose based on the climate if you're smart. And if you're dumb, you plant grapes that don't get ripe, and that's not a lot of fun. Now, wine is used in my religion of Judaism for many purposes, but one of which is to celebrate the fact that wisdom improves, and people's wisdom improves with age. and also bread is used to signify that certain attributes decay over time. I wonder, as the, you know, kind of the appreciation with time, is that sort of storage, as, as Galileo said, sunlight in a bottle?

Is there sort of a stoic property of this wine that appeals to you, that you can grow it now, delay gratification? Admittedly, this is a little bit loaded question, but storing up and delaying gratification, which sometimes we have to do with scientists, Is that an appeal or is it just merely the pleasure and the earthly nature of your concoctions? I really do like the time. And wine is time and place, right? If you think about it, I get to take wine from Italy and bring it to my house. I get to take my product. But then there's this delay.

It changes over time. It takes years to actually create from grape to bottle and then years more to really evolve. And you can literally go in, you know, I go through and I do think back, oh, here's a bottle of wine that I bought in grad school. And that wine was made in France in 1982. And so I'm getting a chance to, you know, I guess connect back to, you know, a different time and place. and so I do find that as a nice part about fine wine. Of course, you don't have that type of wine every day of the week, or if you do, I think you get bored of it. I know people who do, but I think you use it to celebrate occasions sometimes. I just to say that long haul that wine represents, I think, is to me actually a really attractive character.

Yeah, absolutely. And last wine-related question before we either turn off our colleagues that are in 12-step programs or bore other people. What about pairings with food? How do you find – is that part of the pleasure as well? Or is it something to be savored separately as we have in California? You can't have a restaurant as part of a winery tasting room because they kind of want to separate those two functions for some reason. But what about pairing with food and so forth? Is that part of the challenge, the fun, the collectability nature of what you do?

So yes and no. I mean, some wines really go well with food and others, you know, pairings don't quite work well, but I'm not obsessed with it. You know, to my mind, I want to get something that's sensible. So I choose wine that's appropriate when I'm eating. If I'm going to have a, you know, a fish, a really light fish, I'm not going to go and get a monster chariot. because they just don't work very well together.

Lobster and Shiraz don't work well. Lobster and Chardonnay on the other end, that's a pretty good combination. But I'm not super fussy about it. It's, you know, I quite make Pina Noir, so Pena Noir kind of covers a broader range of food. You can have everything from steak to tuna and stuff. So, you know, that's why I kind of like it. It's a flexible one. But I try to pair to a reasonable amount, but I'm not obsessed with it.

It's kind of a utility infielder, as we would say here. I don't know if cricket has an equivalent down under. I want to now go back to your past and explore your low redshift activity, a slightly higher redshift than we are now. So you grew up in Montana, although I should point out, Brian, you know, when you go to the Nobel Prize.org site and you look up the facts about Brian P. Schmidt, it says Brian P. Schmidt has not submitted an autobiography.

Is there like some time limit on that that they're going to eventually come back? and rescind the prize or something if you don't submit your autobiography? Well, it's quite interesting because the actual piece I gave is quite autobiographical. Yeah. So it's easier instead to sit down and write your autobiographical, but I'm still living my life. So, you know, I figure I've got another 20 years in me. Well, as long as you get to it. That's all that matters.

I want to talk a little bit about going back further. You were early years in Montana and Alaska, undergrad at University of Arizona, and then at Harvard, and then basically from there to Australia. Talk about your dad. I recall from reading a little bit of background about you that he was a scientist. He was a biologist involved with fish and game, et cetera. A lot of the lorites, including Adam Reese, your co-recipient, one of your two, he credited a lot of the kind of curiosity and scientific inquisitiveness. that's so important in his kind of past worldline, he credited a lot to his dad.

And I wonder if that had any bearing on your career choices. Yeah, I'm very much a product of my mom and my dad. So my mom passed away in 2009. My dad still, fisheries biology, still doing some work up in Canada. Although he's 75 now, so he's trying to do a little less. So, yeah, so my parents had me when they were really young. My dad had just turned 20. My mom was 19.

I was what they called a sophomore surprise at 1967. And as my father started going and doing a master's degree and then a PhD, I, of course, was, you know, on his side a lot because there wasn't a lot of child care back then. My mother was working to help pay the bills because PhD stipends. As bad as we think they are now, they were worse in the past. I think. It was pretty tough. And having a small kid, so he did a lot of babysitting.

I remember going in the lab. And my father loved science. He was just passionate about it. And so I got to see that. And my mother, not a scientist, but someone who was a very dynamic person, I'm very good with people and, you know, doing, just getting things done.

It was an interesting combination between the two of them. So I'm a bit of both of them, actually. But at that time with my father was, I think, really instilled in me from a very young age that I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to be a scientist as early as I can remember since I was three. And the type of science you ended up practicing couldn't be more different, I suppose, from biology. You know, I always joke, I was such a bad biology student that when I would dissect a frog, the frog would live. I was just not cut out for biology. And then you were at Arizona and you got involved with an experiment,

a CCD camera that was used in a transit survey that would later, I believe, pay dividends for things like Sloan and other things. That seems like a pretty big leap from kind of fascination with fish and game growing up in Montana and Alaska to astronomy. Was that a product of remaining in the West in the United States? or was it something that had been kindled earlier? Because as I say, it does seem a little bit at odds with biology just to be. Well, I love science, and I still love science. I could have become a biologist.

I was really fascinated with becoming a meteorologist. And so the fact that it was science or whatever, the whole scientific process of trying to understand, experiment, learn, design experiments, be wrong. you know, modify, that type of thing. That was always what interested me in science. So I actually liked science of almost any flavor. The only science that I, I'll be honest, that I never really liked, much as a kid, which is quite of interesting, is I always struggled in chemistry.

Not so much the, because it was just very formulaic, and I just, you didn't get to mix things together and see what happened. Because if you did, you might do something. something bad, right? We always had to kind of follow recipes and things. So chemistry never quite worked the same for me. But from, you know, I can remember an eclipse when I was three in Oregon. I can remember comet Cahutec, the failed comet when I was 6, 73, Comet West, which was not a fail, I got a crappy, useful telescope that my parents could afford when I was probably eight or nine. I remember saying Jupiter for the first time.

Telescope when I was 13, I started that calculating eclipses and things, because I was an early computer nerd. And so, you know, one of the cool things I figured to do is how to calculate when solar or lunar eclipses. It wasn't good enough to do solar. I could tell when they were going to curve. I didn't know where they landed on the earth. But the lunar eclipses I could do. And so those are the things that I did. And so I was always interested in astronomy.

I just never thought it would be a job because only the smartest people in the world become astronomers. And I clearly wasn't the smartest people, one of the smartest people in the world. But I was a good student, but I wasn't, you know, one of the top 5,000 people in the world. I had this view that I should probably astronomy wasn't going to be on the cards. But then I decided after working at the National Weather Service that the forecast office and things that I was expecting was not as something. scientific as I had hoped. And I said, oh, crap, I don't know what I'm going to do. Okay, I'll do astronomy until I figure out what I'm really going to do. That's how I have to do an astronomy. Oh, okay. And then, of course, you had the good fortune to end up at Harvard with Bob Kirchner

and also sharing an office with past guest, Sean Carroll. And then we'll get into some of your commingling between his theoretical approach to dark energy and your obvious experimental approach. But one of the things that most tickles me about your advisor, bomb, which maybe you can comment on, after the announcement in 2011 that you and Adam had won the Nobel Prize, I should say Adam was also his student as well. He made a comment and he said, hey, what's the strongest force in the universe? It's not gravity. It's jealousy. What do you think he meant by that? I've never asked him actually what he meant by that. What do you think that was meant to imply? Yeah, I mean, I've heard him say that before the Nobel Prize. I mean, you know, it's when it's anything, a discovery. So I'm going to take it away from the Nobel Prize. I'm talking about the discovery back in 1998, you know. So Saul Pearl Mutters team, Supernova Cosmology Project with the high Z team,

were in a pretty brutal battle, which, you know, probably unnecessarily so. I mean, science should be competitive, but should be constructive. right and our battles were largely constructed but not entirely so and so there was a genuine worry by both teams that they were going to get scooped by the other team and not get the credit and that force of jealousy is really really intense about people and I'm a pretty mild-maned person and even I felt it and that goes through whether or not you know who gets prizes and all these things the world's not always very fair and it's not, it's something we need to remind ourselves is that there's a lot about luck being at the right place, the right time.

Normally it requires lots of people doing good work, but there's a huge amount of luck involved in being at the right place at the right time. And people really do feel jealous that they were just not quite at the right place at the right time or whatever, and I get it because it's not really fair. Yeah, I wonder to what extent, you know, things like prizes or accolades contribute to it, because, you know, speaking abstractly, does it matter that, you know, as long as we have this knowledge of the universe as well, for pure scientists, you know, we shouldn't care who gets there first. Of course, you know, for the benefit of the taxpayers who fund us, you know, we want to do it in a timely fashion. But, you know, ideally, I don't know if you would agree with that, but ideally it shouldn't really matter who gets there first. Of course, you can say the same thing about getting on the moon. And obviously that was a big. But, you know, You would like to think of scientists as kind of above those sort of petty, you know, human desires. But I think I think it's almost maybe a misconception that science is not competitive, right? That we don't have needs and desires for things that probably stem from just limited resources, right?

What would you attribute this need to be prior, you know, to achieve priority? Is it similar to, you know, nation, chest thumping, you know, getting on the moon? Or is there something different at work? Well, it depends a lot from person to person. We have a hyper-competitive field. There's a lot more people who want to become researchers in astronomy than there are positions available. We have a way of deciding who we think is worthy of those positions that is probably far from being the optimal. and so people do whatever they can.

They're really focused on that getting credit for who and what they are. And I think that physics and astronomy selects for pretty competitive people. They've had to be competitive to get into the university and the graduate programs and postdocs, and they remain. They don't suddenly just say, okay, I'm there. I'm going to chill out now and be really easygoing. So it's part of human nature. Competition is important because it does make things happen more quickly, but it can be destructive.

And so there's got to be a balance between a bit of competition, but to my mind, it should always be healthy and happy and you don't want to – it needs to be done openness. What it really bothers me is when you get competitive and then you hide your results and you hide your software and things then don't become irreproducible. We want, the goal is to get the science sent as fast as we can. Absolutely. So, a little competition good, a lot of competition bad. I've heard somewhat to me disturbing, you know, predictions about the future of science, including things like, you know, blockchain technology being used to produce effectively NFTs of, you know, the first microscope image of, you know, a certain whatever gene or virus

or what have you. Or you could imagine the first telescope images of a type 1A supernova at this red shit. Would you worry about that or do you see, as I do, also a place for maybe eliminating some of the pressure to beat the person to publication and all the shortcuts that can entail by maybe putting out a result in a blockchain format so that everyone could see it embedded in digital. So to speak, do you worry about any of the new technologies coming online or do you think that they could have a beneficial effect for science in terms of removing obfuscation and the deleterious aspects of competition? Well, like anything, there's two sides. So let's say you use blockchain technology so that I can instantly release my results out there and then people can build on that and I get credit for it through the ledger system. That would be a real positive. imagine I change it and said, I have this with blockchain and I keep it in a form where you can tell and prove that I did it, but you don't get to use it.

So my goal is to keep you so you know what I've done, but you don't actually get to do anything. I think that would be bad. And proprietary periods are necessary to a point, but ultimately you want to minimize them because they hold things. there's a balance of, you know, of openness versus giving people enough time so that they incentivized to do the best they can. That's a balance. We're just going to have to keep going on. And sticking with the theme of, you know, mentorship, et cetera, in your Nobel lecture

and your paper, what have you, you talked about how the teams kind of agreed, or your team agreed to really promote the kind of contributions of young. people, including postdocs, as you were at the time, and graduate students as Adam was at the time. And explain the thinking behind that, because, you know, as you said, there is a limited number of postdocs. There's limited number of graduate students. I call it the academic hunger games. You know, it's like every stage you go up, it's harder and harder to get a job. Except actually for postdocs to be, you know, it's actually not so challenging to get postdocs nowadays. It's sort of a seller's market where the postdocs are more in control.

But in the buyer's market, a faculty job is almost, you know, we have 400 to one applications for a single physics faculty slot here. I assume it's also incredibly challenging there. Is it fair to young people to kind of, you know, have the surplus of the second tier to being, if you consider it that, just speaking loosely, I don't mean it denigrated in any way. But at the postdoc level, have a surplus of slots only to find this brick wall that they can't go beyond. Is that fair to young people to kind of artificially inflate their hopes? Or is that just a natural outcome of a very competitive field of academia? Well, as long as we go through and people understand what's happening, and we do understand why it's happening,

there's a lot of research done at the postdoc level, there are a limited number of permanent faculty spots. There's a lot of postdoc spots, the member of postdoc spots relative to PhD stuff that's sort of found in equilibrium. But people need to understand that, you know, postdocs are a wonderful opportunity in some cases. And if that's where your career finishes up and then you go off and, you know, get a job outside of research, that's fine. And we need to prepare and give people the opportunity to do that transition well, right? So we need to be honest and open about it, and we need to make it so that it's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Right. And I'm here to tell you. I hate to tell everyone. But the pinnacle of my time as an astronomer, not winning the Nobel Prize, it was actually being a postdoc. Right. Once you get beyond that, then you have to do a lot of things that are less fun in life. Right. You have a lot of responsibility.

So enjoy the postdoc. Doc, and, you know, if you don't become a professor, that's okay. You have done the fun bit, and now you can go on and get a different job that isn't that, and life will be good. So I think we need to be honest, open, and transparent, and quit catastrophizing it. It's okay not to become a professor. You're not a failure, right, if you don't become a professor. Absolutely. Right. Yeah, some consider it the, you know, kind of a consolation prize of a kind, because it is very different than what you perceive it to be when you're a undergraduate or a graduate student. Speaking of postdocs, when you were a postdoc, your goal is to measure Q not.

I wonder if you could explain what was the mentality, what was the psychology going through your mind? You were using this tool and technology. And by the way, you had other opportunities to do other things and you are reported to have said, you know, you could think of no other place that you'd rather be than to be embedded in the expertise of Bob Kirshner's group. So I think that speaks very highly above, but also of your just tenaciousness to focus on a single goal. What is Q not? Why were you obsessed with measuring that? What did that imply if you were successful how you might have not led to the down the path that you ultimately achieve? What was Q not like in the 90s or the mid-90s when you were working on it?

Yeah, if you think about cosmology, I mean, and there's the off the sandedges quote, is that cosmology is a story of two numbers, H-0 and Q-not. So for my PhD, I was remembering H-NOT, and of course, being able to move to the other number, Q-Nod as your postdoc, seems relatively attractive, right? So it was the Holy Grail. That was the Holy Grail because we thought the universe was simple. And we thought that curvature, density, and acceleration or deceleration were a one-to-one correspondence, right? Because there was only one thing you had to worry about, which was, oh, man.

Mega matter. And that one-to-one correspondence meant, if you know Q-NOT, the thing that you could easily measure, then the game, you'd measure everything, right? So it was the Holy Grail. My God, the beginning and the end of the universe, the shape of space. That's why it was so exciting. And fortunately, for me, very fortunately, the world was complicated. But, you know, when we are doing it, it was literally being able to be part of measuring both numbers that describe the universe.

You know, large scale, you know, the large scale description of the universe. So Mark Twain reputedly said, you know, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Do you see any rhyming iambic pentameter in this Hubble tension? You know, people are expecting the two different measurements. The Hubble constant to agree the early times. MCMB, late-time supernova and Cephets and stuff that Wendy Friedman and Adam Reese and others work on. They're discordant. That's claimed to be a crisis, as your fellow laureate, the late great Stephen Weinberg said,

physics thrives on crises, but today, unfortunately, there's not so many. That was back in 1989, by the way. But nowadays, what do you make in the Hubble tension? Could that be the search for two numbers, except they're the same number? Or, you know, is there a much more prosaic thing that might be lurking as an explanation? I don't know. I mean, right now it's not a crisis. I've got the piano out and I played a note and it's out of tune.

It's like, ooh, it's all sounding great, but there's something wrong with that E down there. Because, you know, the discordance is there, but it's not huge, you know. It's not 22 Sigma. It's five or four, you know, depending on who and how you deal with it. But it's about the level of lambda detection that you guys made the first time. Indeed it is. And that's why the lambda, we didn't say discovery. We said observational evidence for, right?

Right. And, you know, I always tell the story that in 2000, when Boomerang and Maxima came along, and I think we always forget about Maximum, but Boomerang and Maximum, we're literally a day apart. Right? And those two came out, measured the peak of the cosmic microwave back. which told us that the universe was flat. And then the supernova measurements went from being kind of four and a half to being about eight sigma.

Right. And I remember seeing that on AstroPH and going to my wife and I said, I'll be damned. We're right. Because at that point, I knew it had to be right. We're not there yet in the discord of the Hubble stuff. Now, so I suspect there's a problem. but I'm not positive. And so I cannot yet tell you, is there something funny going on with, you know, the cosmic microwave background and how it measures the effectively the Hubble parameter and then extrapolates it back down to low redshift? Is there something funny going on there? I'm still mildly concerned about things not being exactly as you might expect between the different scales of the cosmic microwave background, but it's not a huge effect.

Or is it just that measuring the value of the Hubble constant in the nearby universe is really hard. And despite everyone trying hard, there's just something that didn't quite get it right. So I can go either way. And I just

don't know. Your thesis measurement, if I'm correct, involved physical properties of a type 2 supernova, right? Is anyone proceeding in those directions anymore? as a physical way that's not dependent on underlying cosmology, because that would seem to break some degeneracies.

Yeah, I mean, the challenge is that people are continuing to do that, but the physics is hard. And so we thought that the physics was probably good to a Hubble constant within about 10%. I reckon now you could probably do it to five or six, you know, but you need to be down at one. And I'm just, I think that in homogeneity's and the supernovae, the asphyricity of them,

those are all things that make it hard. And using type 2 supernovae is really intensive with respect to making measurements. So it's a harder thing than supernovae. It's direct. But I just worry that the physics knowledge, there's just not enough people, I think, running big codes

to be sure that we've got the actual underlying physics down well enough. There's dust, there's circumsteller material, there's all this crap. They're not perfect objects. So they're useful, but I think probably not good enough to do this question. One of the things that I think made the discovery of your teammates and yourself the so pure and maybe emblematic of great discoveries, in my humble opinion, is that it was basically serendipitous. In other words, you were actually setting out to measure the opposite of what you did measure. So confirmation bias is sort of filtered out to some degree. And I wonder, and I worry, with the Hubble tension being what it is, now everyone's looking for their theory

to confirm, you know, these measurements rather than the other way around. And so by its nature, it probably can't be resolved in such a pure way as, say, the dark energy question. But that's just an aside. I mean, I view the serendipity, serendipitous nature of that discovery is quite striking and reminiscent and a rhyming sense of the CMB's discovery, which was also serendipitous itself. In your lecture, in your Nobel lecture, you start off with a brief overview of 20th century cosmological models, and you talk about Einstein in what he called his wonderful thought, that inertial and gravitational acceleration were equivalent. And I remember knowing a little bit about that as a younger person.

And I believe the quote kind of was prompted by his realization that if you were in free fall, you would have, you would experience no gravitational forces. And even if you were near a gravitating body. And so he called that his wonderful thought. I want to talk about artificial intelligence because there's a lot being made about artificial intelligent physicist and that they'll be able to, there'll be an artificial AI Einstein, AI, E, A, E, there'll be all sorts of great things. But that quote that you quote and the preceding sentence about, you know, falling in a gravity, it doesn't strike me as something a computer could identify with. First of all, a happy thought, a wonderful thought, what does that even mean?

It seems uniquely human. And also the notion of falling, I mean, an experience or, you know, visceral sense, literally that prompted Einstein. Do you think artificial intelligent physicists can make an Einstein-like contribution? Can they create the laws of general relativity from just observational data? Or do you think it's being a little bit too much wishful thinking? Well, certainly AI as we are right now is nowhere near. I mean, I think people have to remember that AI right now is really just interpolation.

And it's a fancy interpolation. It does not extrapolate at all, right? So one of the reasons why self-driving cars are a problem. our edge cases where humans can extrapolate and say, I've never seen this before, but I'm pretty sure I know what's going to happen. And I'm afraid that your machine learning algorithm says, I've never seen this before. And here's your answer, but there's nothing to do with anything. So current versions of machine learning, not hopeless, right? It's about finding patterns in data that you have. So you might discover new and interesting things, but you're not going to, it's

not going to have that aesthetics that Einstein had of seeing some poor guy fall off a house and saying, hey, that guy doesn't feel gravity. What a wonderful thought, as opposed to, I should probably call the ambulance and help that guy out because he's probably hurt. So that aesthetics is certainly a long ways away. Now, you know, computer, artificial intelligence it may become much more human-like in the future, but it's not there anywhere there right now. So I could imagine it finding little patterns and data and what I think might happen is you'd go through

and you'd say, I suddenly can predict something in physics that I'm surprised I can predict. Why can I predict that? We'd go through the different layers of the neural net and say, ah, there's a pattern in there. Why is that pattern there? And then we would go through and use human creativity to try to understand it.

That's how I think it might happen in the first instance. But I think we're a long ways away from computers disintermediating physicists entirely. Yeah, I agree. I often say I think computers can beat humans at chess, but I don't know if they can invent the game of chess. I want to turn back to competition. You said in an interview with a fellow Brian astronomer Brian Green earlier this year, You said that the atmosphere between the Tysi and SCP teams was toxic at times. And you regretted that.

And you said you were not proud of it. Now, you were a post-star. You weren't, you know, there were many faculty members on each team. Why do you say that you personally weren't proud of it? And what were some of the benefits of that competition as ultimately proven out by the solidity of the discovery? Yeah, well, I was a postdoc, but I was the leader of the team, and I guess I was friends with a lot of people on Saul's team. And so we kind of joked and, you know, all going through our, do we have jobs? You know, these are the questions we used to talk about.

But the, I guess the toxic thing is just, to me, it's embarrassing, right? It's embarrassing because it did not need to be that way. and we're out there ultimately being role models for students and people watching what's going on and that's not what you want your life to be like in science. You don't want it to be toxic. You actually want it to be, I should say, in a competition, not bad, but you want it to be friendly, right?

And so that's why I guess I'm embarrassed by it. I don't think it ultimately interfered in any person's, you know, job prospects or things. We didn't get it into it where it became personally destructive, but it was unpleasant and unnecessary. Can you offer any ways to, you know, I have a large, large STEM professional audience that, you know, it was probably dealing with many of them are probably dealing with such things now. can you not specifically to that to that you know rival battle but you know kind of in general how can you de-escalate conflict how can you you know check these prejudices that you may have or biases that you may have as a scientist you know we're not known as I always joke you know how do you

know a scientist is outgoing because you know they look at your shoes when they talk to you but how do you know how could some of my listeners you know diffuse or detoxify if such a thing is possible and remove the tannins. Give me some techniques or tools that might be, have been beneficial, but as you say, it wasn't ultimately devastating, but could have been better, both for the younger students, witnessing all this. But again, I don't want you to speak specifically about that event. Just generally speaking, how can we, as scientists, detoxify a toxic situation? Well, the first thing to realize is that whenever you're feeling anger and emotion, you're not being a scientist, you're being human. And, That's fine, but it gets in the way of the science in us.

Trying to allow people easy outs when they've screwed up rather than humiliating them in public, either via Twitter, colloquiums, front page of the New York Times, whatever your flavor is. Don't humiliate people. It's a bad thing to do, even when they're wrong. Tell them nice and gently. not this isn't good. And see the world through other people's eyes. Be human about it and say,

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Exclusions apply for licenses, see Home Depot.com slash license numbers. The golden rule, do I, if I were, was this how I want to be treated? Right. And generally speaking, when you're really angry, you know, chill out. Don't send the email. Have a walk around. Send it tomorrow. Chill out and be analytical about it.

and take the emotion out of things as best you can. Because those things set us back and they, you know, they're, they take the joy out of, out of science if you get it wrong. And for those of us in power, like, you know, I'm, I have a lot of power now that I didn't have when I was younger. You have the power to, you know, one of the things is not to use power when you have it. But the other thing is to intervene, you know, at a colloquium, when, People are beating up on the speaker and piling on. Stop it.

Say, okay, I think we've got enough on that. Let's let the speaker move on. And, you know, you can intervene when things are not right, you know. And we need to, we have still a lot of bullying within our communities. And it's really hard to exercise power against others in this intellectual sense, but it's basically humiliate them. And that's, you want to avoid humiliating people. Yeah.

And talking about accountability and transparency and really ownership, last week you had a tweet thread, several tweets, about trying to understand your own decision-making and involvement in an archive article today. And you apologize for not thinking so much about it. And your mistake is that your participation would provide value to that question. Can you explain why that, what this article was, and why it's significant. It's an article about sort of job and research impact in astronomy.

How do you predict it? First, what is the conclusion that maybe you regret being a part of? Or can you clarify this, you know, as you did on Twitter to some extent, you know, that you took ownership of this decision and wanted to, you know, apologize in some sense. Can you talk a little bit about this situation, Brian? Yeah, I'm having to talk a little bit around it. Yeah. This was something proposed by John Cormandie where he wanted to calibrate citations with a group of people from different fields to just sort of, you know, say, what is an individual's scientific output relative to their citation output?

Now, I was at the time, I hadn't really thought through what exactly that meant when put on. on to paper. I was interested in just the whole notion of overuse of citations and boiling everyone down to citations in all sorts of ways. And I was worried about that. So in some sense, I was interested in seeing, are we going to find out that planetary science has a very different citation curve than cosmology and things like that? And I wasn't really thinking through the notion, the social construct of having, you know, 21 elite people very, very, a very homogeneous group of 21 people when you look at it, casting and putting ourselves in that position of power and saying,

we are God. And so the tone of the paper ended up being something I was pretty deeply uncomfortable with, and I just hadn't really thought through. And I will say, John gave me every opportunity to understand what he was doing. And I feel like I've let him down because I did not pay enough attention to understand what was going to come out. But I am very concerned about using only those types of measures that make us hyper-competitive. There's gatekeeping that I talk a little bit about in the tweet, where you're only really,

you've got to get the break to get into the university, to get to the PhD lab, to get the prize postdoc, to even be in this bit. And so there's a whole social thing there that I think that paper missed out on. and I know having talked to John, I think he's pretty upset. And he's caused, I don't think he wanted to cause that amount of upset. But in the end, I should have thought through what I did and realized what we were doing was probably very much out of touch and out of tone of the community we want to have, which is we want it to be inclusive. And we want to support excellence, but we don't want to gatekeep excellence. which I'm afraid a lot of what and how our field and academia in general works, unfortunately,

is it tends to only give opportunities to those who have had opportunities ahead of time. Matthew Effect on display. Thank you very much for that. And as I said, in my response to that tweet, your candor and ownership, because I think it's very rare. And I think that's a teachable moment, if you will, for young people to, you know, to see that you can, I don't want to say make mistakes, but that we're human beings, as you said earlier, when you have any kind of emotion, there's a disservice done by assuming that we're

just dispassionate observers of factual, rational reality. I think that's, that drives a lot of people away. As Jim Gates said, when he was on the podcast, he was like, I never thought I'd be Einstein, but that's okay. Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And I think we promote that myth of, you know, infallibility to our detriment, because I think it does exclude the broadest panorama possible. I want to wind up, because I know you only have a few minutes left, but I want to just kind of touch base with, as I said, this notion that you found it very important to have an intellectually diverse set of team members on your team, including theorists and physicists, gasp, physicist involved, including your former officemate, well, your former officemate was Sean Carroll. He wasn't a member of the team. But people like Chris Stubbs and other folks, physics and astronomy hybrids, et cetera. But theorists, talk about the importance of that and what role that plays and having a true panoramic synoptic view of a field. Does it require that or can we put our heads down, just talk to, you know, those of us who are like those of us and make a lot of progress?

Because we, you know, we have theorists and we have, you know, and a data scientist working on it. But it's not clear that, you know, all my students, I say, and this is probably my fault. But that they really have kind of the broad scope of history and all the different panoramic contributions that are necessary to make a huge caliber discovery. So maybe, yeah, a comment on kind of breadth versus depth, if you will, and the importance thereof. Yeah, it was a big project. And I really appreciated having a bunch of people with specific skills. and some people who, you know, could see things from the different part. And so I did really want to have that intellectual diversity and, you know, fessing up.

We had 20 people on the team, but no women. So we didn't get it all right. And if I could go back in time and fix that as a 27-year-old, I sure would. Because I think we, you know, that was part of our, you know, a missing part of our team when I look back at it. So if you're going to solve problems, if they're simple problems, okay, you just, you know, you have a hammer, you smash the nails. This was really hard because we were having to do a whole bunch of things.

We're going to have, you know, to schedule people and telescopes around the world. We're having to write software that had not been written before. We were having to process the data really, really fast. We were then having to set it across and then do a very detailed analysis. And, you know, we did a full Bayesian analysis in 1998. It's literally one of the first ones of those ever done. And I wasn't taught that. And, you know, Adam was kind of teaching me via Bill Press on the phone.

And we were only able to do that because of that diverse group of people came together. And so you don't really know you need diversity, but it's always useful. And as I said, I regret not having a more gender diverse team. It's one of my big regrets on all of that. And lastly, I want to know, what is your daily life like now? I mean, modulating out COVID, obviously, that's hopefully a time, limited, duration, limited thing. And Australia's, you know, reaction, notwithstanding in terms of, you know, uniqueness versus the U.S. But what is a vice chancellor, which, as you say, is tantamount to president here in the U.S.

Chancellor here. Talk about what is that life like? How do you go from astronomer to vice chancellor? Because it seems like you would have to do a lot of reading or maybe, you know, change gears radically so. So talk about that change from astronomical group leader to now, you know, academic, academician, as we would say. Yeah. Well, it was, it's a big jump. Ultimately, being a leader of a university in Australia, it's a little different. the U.S. president because you've got the outward bit, but a lot more of the inward bit, too. So it's sort of the president and the provost combined. So I had to learn a lot, you know, how do university budgets work really well, how do you improve the processes in a university

and all these business-like things? But ultimately, it comes down to people, right? Being ahead of a university is ultimately about empowering rather than just your group, all sorts of groups and all sorts of areas and getting to work constructively together and getting things done. So the work I did with people, I think, is the single most important part about being a university leader. But then you have to learn some of the mechanical bits around, you know, how do you run a billion-dollar organization? And, you know, listening and talking to people who do management and talking about it is important. But we also have to remember universities are not companies. And so most of the management theory you're going to learn is all about running a company.

And I'm telling you, that's not what a university is. I mean, a lot of universities have become like companies, but then I don't think they're very good universities. They're machines for producing undergraduate degrees or something. So it's been an interesting journey of learning for me. But in the end, the rules around a group of six actually apply to groups of 5,000. Treat people with respect, listen to them, understand things from their perspective, and try to get them to play nice in the sand yard, in the sandbox with each other. That's sort of the goal. And then, of course, get out and tell people around the world what you're doing and why it's exciting.

And, you know, that's sort of my job in fortunately many, many hours a week. Do you miss the telescope time? Do you miss the teaching or academic pursuits of? of a researcher more than you thought you might? Or are you comfortable kind of not being in the day-to-day grind of astronomical, professional astronomical life? So, I mean, I knew I was going to miss it. I knew what I was signing up for.

You know, I've been out now for almost six years. And, yeah, I'm really beginning to this. So I will be an astronomy professor once again. But I'm going to have to come into sort of this, you know, rebuild myself for several months. to get my skill set back up, and that will be interesting. And so, indeed. So, you know, it's here early in the morning, and my first meeting of the morning is starting in 90 seconds.

Then it's back to back for the entire day. Okay. I'll take that as an opportunity to ask you one question of my final three patented questions, if you'll be so kind. I want to ask you, Brian, if you can summarize kind of what you would put on a, called monolith. Arthur C. Clark had these monoliths in 2001. They're kind of time capsules, they're kind of devices meant to ward off disaster. Can you say what advice, what piece of information would you most want to put on a time capsule to last a billion years?

The future is more important than you think. It could also pass from my advice to my, advice to your former self. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. origin of my podcast named Brian Schmidt. Thank you for spending time with another Brian on sharing some of your valuable time with myself and my audience. I can't thank you enough. Great. Thank you very much. Take care.

Thanks, Brian. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Heating. That's DR, Brian Keating, and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com.

Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29.

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