Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Bringing Astrophysics to Life Through Art with Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran (#397)

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 What do you get when you combine the minds of a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and an outstanding artist?  The Warped Side of Our Universe by Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran! A remarkable book that explores Thorne's astrophysical discoveries through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings.  Today, Kip and Lia will guide us through the process of creating their wonderful book. Tune in!  Kip Thorne is a theoretical physicist known for his contributions to gravitational physics and astrophysics. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.  Lia Halloran is an award-winning painter and photographer. She received her BFA at UCLA and her MFA in Painting in Printmaking at Yale. She serves as Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Painting and Drawing Department at Chapman University in Orange, CA.  Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Judging a book by its cover 00:04:46 What would Stephen Hawking make of the LIGO detector?  00:08:04 The color choices in the book  00:11:55 The origin story of their collaboration  00:21:33 The two cultures and the scientific revolution 00:33:16 Teaching arts and physics 00:44:42 Fermilab and the intersection of arts and science 00:51:10 Is the Big Bang too good to be true? 00:59:45 The criticisms of LIGO 01:08:16 What motivates Kip and Lia? 01:14:41 Kip’s bet with Stephen Hawking  01:15:54 Can human beings be replaced? 01:21:28 Kip’s book Gravitation  01:25:20 The most magical human invention  01:29:14 What were Kip and Lia wrong about? 01:34:05 Advice for their younger selves 01:37:26 Outro — Additional resources: 📚 The Warped Side of Our Universe by Kip and Lia: https://a.co/d/4JttLua  📝 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 😀 ! 📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ 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

And today's highly illustrated episode of The Into the Impossible featuring Kip Thorne, a renowned theoretical physicist and Leah Halloran, an award-winning artist. Kip, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is celebrated for his contributions to the theoretical understanding of black holes, wormholes, and especially to the LIGO experiment that resulted in his winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. And Leah's artistic endeavors have gracefully navigated the intersection of art and science. Kip, of course, has been known for his work with Christopher Nolan, an interstellar, making it into a scientifically accurate depiction of what a black hole would look like.

Together, Kip and Leah have authored the warp side of our universe, a remarkable book that explores Kipp's theoretical astrophysical discoveries and predictions through poetic verse and otherworldly paintings. There's even a depiction of my bicep to experiment in here, if you look closely. I want to know what a weird and wild, marvelous phenomena, inhabit the warp sign. We'll tune into this episode and you're about to find out. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors.

I never thought that Kip would write a book that would rival in mass or in gravity, the book that I have here. And as I told you guys, I put this one down. I always told my students when I'm teaching gravitation, Kip, I always tell them the book is part of the lab class for the class. You guys wrote this wonderful new book, The Warps Out of the Universe, as I told you, the favorite thing that I love to do with authors when they come on is do what you're not supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. So, Leah, take us through this wonderful book, the title, the cover. It's one of the most beautifully illustrated books I've ever read, but the cover is especially evocative.

So walk us through Leah, and then Kip, you can add your own take to it as well. Title, subtitle, and illustration. The warp side of our universe is a term that Kip has been using in his own science for many years. So even when this book started as an article, it was always the working title. Then our publisher encouraged the subline on that. And what we really wanted to do with the cover was to make something that would tell the viewer exactly what you're going to get in the book in an instant. So in this picture, you have a black hole.

You sort of recognize it as this funnel shape, but it's painted in this way that's inviting an experience. And there in the center of it, you see a figure being twisted and turned down this funnel. And that figure is my wife, Felicia. So it's a little bit of a clue that the book is going to be very evocative and sensual. And then as you turn the book around, we've used. And as you see through the entire book, each of the pages has its own painting for where the text floats over it. And so these blue sort of ink spills both work to invite the viewer into like a shift of scale. At some parts, they seem like you're looking at something very small. At others,

they seem very large. And we decided to keep it very minimal. And we invited two of our favorite authors Diane Ackerman and Davis Sobel to comment on the back who have been really influential for this book and for Kip and I. Kip, the title, obviously you've had a couple of books with the title, Black Hulls, Worm Holes, Fascinated with Holes of All Kinds. And the best advice I ever got, I think I learned from you when you're in a hole, stop digging. I think you said that, right, Kip? I'm so old, I can't remember what I said decades ago. Well, I've learned so much from you. We'll talk about your pedagogical pursuits later on perhaps. But of these different topics, of black holes, wormholes, time travel,

gravitational waves, can you rank one? Do you have a favorite? Is there more one that's more kind of mysterious, magical, and intriguing to you? Well, I think gravitational waves is my favorite because it's the powerful tool by which we explore all the rest, or try to explore all the rest. It's the tool gravitational waves are made from warped space and time, just like the other objects on the warps side of the universe, black holes, wormholes, cosmic strings, the Big Bang. And so they're the ideal tool, gravitational waves, the ideal tool for exploring the warp side of the universe. And when you first encountered these, as I did, you know, probably in graduate school or, you know,

it was not long after, you know, the prediction in 1916 of Einstein. And so one of these things that he never thought would be detectable, right? Kip, I mean, the idea that. that you could detect these infinitesimal ripples. And I love these very short papers that only Einstein could write. Like he wrote a paper, which basically a letter to the editor of nature that predicted gravitational lensing, as I recall. What about these gravitational waves was so astonishing that it really took, you know, almost 100 years, 100 years almost to the day for their detection? What makes them so ephemeral? The extreme weakness of the force that they

exert on matter by the time they reached the earth. It was already clear to me when we just began thinking about trying to detect gravitational waves. I had a pretty good understanding of how strong the waves would be, and that was so weak that if you had, what the gravitational wave does is it stretches and squeezes space and therefore moves things back and forth relative to each other when the space between drinks or expands. And he, so the magnitude of that is so exquisitely small. It is about 10 million times smaller than the atoms inside the mirrors off which we bounce light

in the process of trying to see the stretching and squeezing, 10 million times smaller than an atom. When the two objects that are being pushed back and forth relative to each other are four kilometers apart, two and a half miles apart. It's incredible that one can actually measure those tiny, tiny motions. Einstein thought it would never be possible. And I thought it would not be possible. When I first started looking at this, it took me several years to become convinced that we really had a shot at it. And I tell this story. When we, I remember walking through the halls of Westbridge and when I was a postdoc with Andrew Lang, 25 years ago or so, and seeing

various bets and so forth with Stephen Hawking. What do you think Hawking would make of this besides, you know, being featured here? What would he sort of, you know, make of this? I mean, he lived to see the detection of gravitational waves, but maybe not the kind of astronomical tool that LIGO has become with the aurory of literally hundreds of candidate objects. So what do you think Hawking would make? And what was he like to work with? Stephen was a close personal friend of mine. Leah has a wonderful painting of Stephen in his wheelchair. We did never collaborate on research, but he, like me, expected that gravitational waves

would become a very powerful tool for astronomy. And that was the whole motivation of going after them. And, as I say, I never collaborated with him on research. We were friends at the level of talking about things like life, love, and death. And Leah, when I look at the book, I mean, it's impossible to think that the color blue, this bluish, green, lovely, and just beautiful theme, that there's not some sort of message, perhaps, encrypted within this color choice. I mean, of all the colors and all the places and the palettes of the artists around the world, is there something, is it a reference to my friend and Kip's friend, Jana Levin's book, Black Hole Blues?

What's the second book? You know, usually cosmology books have these, or, you know, astronomy books have these black covers. What is the reason behind the color choice that you employ here throughout the book? It was very intuitive. It wasn't that I was thinking very theoretically about it, but I've always felt that blue does something that other colors can't, which is that it represents something that could be interpreted as like a deep darkness and a deep space, but it's also very luminous. So if you look in the book, I've really utilized the range of intensity of the blues to do that.

At some parts, it feels like it's illuminating and other parts it's used to develop this kind of richness and subtlety. And I wanted to keep the book very, paintings aligned with what Kip was doing with his verse, which was that there was like an elegance, an efficiency, a quickness, that they weren't overly done, that they sort of, I like to think that they like arrived on their own. There's many iterations to get to a final painting. So you might see, you know, one painting in the in the pages, but it would take, you know, somewhere between

seven to 14 tries or iterations to get there. So you, you know, you know, Using the ink was a way to make the paintings very quickly. It represented the efficiency and conversations and back and forth that Kip and I had. And I think the color sort of is evocative enough. It tells the viewer a little bit of a little bit about the material itself. And then you'll also find that there's one other color

in different parts where Kip is describing this new discoveries of tendencies and bordices. And what we wanted to do was to visually signal to the viewer, attention, a pull and a push, a twist one way of clockwise turning and a twist of counterclockwise turning. And so I love that you've noticed that the blue is actually a kind of greenish blue. And I've used the exact complement of that, which is like an orangish red. So that when you're looking at it, you don't need the text to be didactic. You can just look at it and understand there's opposition and different forces at play.

Yeah, it's truly mesmerizing. And, yeah, I mean, to me, obviously, art evokes different emotions and different people, but the kind of, you know, marine-like quality of it, you know, coupled with the phenomenon on the cover, by the way, my wife also likes to envision me being thrown into a black hole. How did your wife react to her being depicted there? Was that during an argument or something? You don't have to get too personal, but. It's quite the opposite. I think it's like an act of love. Both Kip and I at a certain point,

we both have different memories of whose idea it was. Kip says it was my idea. I remember that it was Kip's idea, that we would have one space traveler and it would be Felicia. And I think that's, both of us felt like that was a way to really invite the viewer in to like this intimate surrogate. And if you do read carefully, though, Kip has given her a way out through three, singularities. So doom is not necessarily, you know, imminent in these things. So I think it's more that we don't promise she'll survive, but we offer that possibility. How did you guys meet? Kip, can you explain the origin story of this collaboration? I understand you guys have worked together for decades almost, right? So how did you guys come to meet? And what does it like

working with an artist, you know, more or less full time? I would have to let Leah tell the story of our meeting, I think, because she met me before I met her. Yeah, like many people, I've met Kip through his book and started collaborating with him, whether he liked it or not. I had been given his amazing book, Black Hole's and Time Travels, Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. Blackholes and Time Warp. Time Warps, pardon me.

Not gravitation? You didn't meet him after reading Gravitation? I mean, I have that, but just as a doorstop. I never open it. But if I need to, you know, hold anything massively heavy open, I use that. That is why we've sold so many copies of gravitation. What's funny about gravitation is that my father is a physicist. So that book was in my house growing up.

So I actually am very familiar with it. But when I was in graduate school, my mom gifted me this book. And I had in my undergraduate years at UCLA, started taking astrophysics classes. I had toyed with the idea of double majoring in astrophysics. And then I applied to two grad schools, my dream grad schools, Columbia and Yale. And I thought, if I get into one of those, I'm going to go straight through for art. If I don't, I'll stay and finish the secondary degree. I got into Yale.

And it was at that point that Yale was really cool in their grad program where they actually made you take classes outside of your master's courses. or degree, which is very unique because you're so immersed in what you're doing. And so I took a couple of great literature classes, but what I mainly took was astronomy classes. And under, I really, really had an affinity with Charles Baylon, who was the chair of the astrophysics program at that point, and he was studying black holes. And it had nothing to do with what I was making paintings of. But at a certain point, my studies sort of kind of pushed against what I was conceptualizing in my art practice. And it was only until I got Kipp's book that I really felt a transformation into experience.

What was not coming through in my studies, which was, of course, it's an astrophysics class at Yale. It's mathematics and its theory. I did have keys to the telescope there, which was very cool. And I felt like, you know, that's, that was really fun to do observational astronomy. But there was something about Kipp's book. I think it was the idea. There was one particular passage about imagining one traveling towards the speed of light and what that would be like. And it just felt like this wonderful invitation.

And it was from that book that one of my main paintings in my MFA thesis show, I used the theories of his book to inspire, you know, the foundations. and the painting itself. So it's a five foot by 16 foot painting of a wormhole. And after that, it just sort of cracked open this idea that I could use science as a subject matter. And it has been that way ever since. The project with KIP, it takes on a very different approach.

So my work explores different ideas of time and perception. And I've used airplanes and skateboarding and crystals and all sorts of very, an expansive sort of collection of subject matter, but it all roots from a curiosity about science and nature. That's a long roundabout to say how I got kind of introduced to Kip. And so long story short, I was at a cocktail party. We were both at a cocktail party for the physicist Lisa Randall, who's a joint friend of ours. And she had been doing a sabbatical at Caltech, and she had thrown herself a going away party and I was at this party and I overheard someone say Kip's name so unabashedly and I ran up

to Kip and interrupted his conversation and you know was just gushing oh my gosh your your book was so influential and I invited him over for a studio visit to just show him some of my artwork and I was blown away by her studio by the paintings on the walls by the paintings she showed me that were in storage, the photographs from her dark skate series. Most interestingly, I asked her, I told her I'm beginning to work on a movie, and I would like some way to describe for the director of this movie, Black Hole's and Wormholes, and Would You Make Me a Sketch of Black Holes and Wormholes? So she did a sketch there for me on a pencil sketch on Vellum, I think,

and which has become one of my prize possessions. And I took that, it's a sketch, it's almost like a Dr. Seuss picture from one of Dr. Seuss's books for children, but it is very powerful and evocative. And so I took that with me to show to this filmmaker at our first meeting and explain what this was all about. And so that was our very first step in collaboration.

And let me tell you, Kip had said, there's a young filmmaker interested in making a movie about my science. You know, would you be interested in helping me, you know, visualize these warped sides of the universe? And I said, absolutely. And that young filmmaker was Steven Spielberg. And the movie was interstellar. But Stephen Spielberg did not end up in the end directing the movie. But that was like our, that was our first kind of visual conversation back and forth, is Kip telling me something, sort of blowing my mind and me then trying to make sense of it by visualizing it. Just a bit later than that, I was asked to write a article for Playboy magazine by Amy Grace Lloyd,

who had been my editor for Blackholes and Time Warps. And she was now, had been commissioned by Playboy magazine to bring in interviews and articles by people, eminent people in the sciences or in the arts or in literature. to try to distinguish Playboy from other gentlemen's magazines. And so I said, sure, I'd be happy to do something. But I'd like to bring on Leah as a painter to make the pictures. The art editor, and she looked at Leah's painting. They were enthusiastic.

So we produced an article about the warped side of the universe that was just about 3,000 pages and five paintings. 3,000 words. Three thousand words. Yeah. Not even gravitation is that long. That's right. And Hugh Hefner personally rejected it.

He said that the women in the paintings, Leah's wife, Felicia, being the primary one, were not up to the Femlin standards of Playboy. Now Femlin was the cartoonist who made these women with very large breasts and buttocks. and he was not satisfied with the way that Leah's women appeared. Which I hold as a badge of honor, Brian. Hey there, I'm sorry to interrupt this beautiful, amazing and illustrative episode of Into the Impossible, but I have a small favor to ask you to help me help you get more subscribers and attention for The Into the Impossible podcast, and that's to make sure you're following the podcast

or subscribe to it on YouTube. You can follow it on any audio platform you're listening to it. And leave a rating in a review. All these things help the algorithm. And the algorithm is what is going to propel us from the 300,000 raniacs that are currently on this voyage to well over a million. And I know that your support is key to our success on this endeavor together. So thanks a lot. Make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell and leave a review for extra credit homework.

Now back to the episode. That is something very few artists or scientists can claim that their article was rejected because of not enough buttocks or curbs. baritare, Botticelli rejection. Yeah. That's one of the best things ever happened to us because we then took our kill fee on the article and decided we'd turn it into a book. And so that's how this book started to come to be.

It was originally prose and paintings, but when one of Leah's friends did a layout at the very beginning, it's juxtaposed brief snippets of my prose alongside Leah's paintings, I looked at that and said, my gosh, this could be poetry. It could be verse. And never before had I ever contemplated writing verse. But that was an epiphany, one of the sort of big epiphanies in my life, the epiphany that this could be verse. And we could try to get across to the reader. The ethos, the essence of these scientific ideas through tightly integrated verse and paintings. And that became the goal of our collaboration.

And some 13 years later, here we are. I keep, you know, kind of having this feeling as I read the book, you know, again and again. And it's a book that you can really just digest multiple times and come to different conclusions as you read it. But the, I would say sort of the courage that it took for both of you. guys to work in a medium that's very different. And I wonder if you both could react first, Leah. This quote, it's kind of long, so bear with me. It's from C.P. Snow. It has to do, it's called the two cultures and the scientific revolution. So C.P. Snow basically was claiming that science and arts or the humanities had represented the two different halves of the life of all of Western

society, but it had been split into two different cultures and that the division was a handicap to solving the world's problems. And so he describes C.P. Snow does this interaction, probably at a cocktail party. And he said, once or twice, I've been provoked and asked the crowd at the cocktail party, how many of you could describe the second law of thermodynamics? The reaction was cold. It was also negative. Yet, I was asking something, which is the equivalent of, have you ever read a work of Shakespeare? And I wonder how you react to that, both of you, Leah, Are arts and sciences, are they as disparate, as disconnected, as unrelated as CP was, good old CP was lamenting? Or is there a consilience that you find that we're missing out maybe by not

teaching our science students more about the arts? And conversely, the arts students, you know, more about the hard sciences. What do you think about this two cultures? Is it a problem? I mean, I think that's a, it's a divisive question. And I like to think, of it in terms of when in your life you were asked that. If you ask, let's say, five-year-olds about the difference of art and science, I think you'd find that there's not very much of a difference, right? You're curious about the natural world. Usually young kids are trying to maybe depict or understand something, but they do it in a way that shows a little bit more about their own meaning. And I think, you know, in terms of a five-year-old being curious

about how stuff works, it's the same thing. You'd be curious. to figure something out because it's crossing your path and it adds meaning to your life. So I like to think of the, you know, the trajectory of actually when these two sort of parted ways. And we've then, in our culture, sort of told people, I think that the example of, you know, the laws of thermodynamics is a great one because what that actually is saying and why people are being cold is that at a certain point, they were told that science is not for them. Science is you're not smart enough, you haven't studied enough, you haven't gone far enough. And I think the art world similarly has this sort of kind of exclusionary version, right? Like, right when someone draws something,

they'll say, oh, oh, I'm not an artist. I'm, you know, as an adult, right? But when you, again, go back, let's transport back to five-year-olds. Like, if you, I always like, my daughter is five years old and I, you know, I sometimes get invited as a artist into her Montessori. And I say, who hears an artist? And you can imagine, everybody raises their hands and the same thing, like, who's curious about figuring things out? They would all raise their hands. So I think it's more about our limitations, about where we are including the general public. And I think that, like, Kipp's interest in making the movie Interstellar and making this book shows a great passion and also interest from the general public to be pulled over that line. And I find the same thing as an artist.

I'm really, really interested in creating an experience of science for the viewer and not in a way that's didactic. You know, I was not going, my intention was not to illustrate Kip's ideas, but instead to have a conversation with Kip. The way that it was made was very untraditional. Kip did not, like, present me with text. We just had conversations and I would make a painting and then say, okay, here's the painting right around it. Sometimes he'd come up with text and I'd then say, well, this needs to be three or five paintings. or it needs to be one, or, you know, the text and paintings really nudged each other back and forth. So what we're trying to do is to find the Venn diagram of that cocktail party of asking about

thermodynamics, right, and to invite people to say, what do you know and how are you curious and how do those things add meaning to your life? Returning to the question of C.P. Snow, is this sort of a false dichotomy that people have been lamenting including snow and others, or is there really a good reason, you know, that science and the arts are separate? You know, science and the arts were not all that far separate in the era of Leonardo da Vinci, in which you had people like Leonardo who were both scientists and artists. From my own personal point of view, and my dear friend Stephen Hawking was quite similar, I think quite visually. And so when I'm doing scientific research, although

So I'm a theorist and one of my two principal tools is mathematics because mathematics is the language in which the laws of physics are written. But the other principle tool is artistic visualizations in the sense that if I'm going to make any progress at any kind of a speed, I don't make it through the mathematics. That's very, very cumbersome and very, very slow. I need intuition, visual-based intuition, in order to make intuitive leaps, in order to figure out what calculations are worth doing and what they're likely to yield and then pursue them.

But those intuitive leaps in the way in which I mentally summarize the laws of physics and work with them mentally are visual. And they're not all that far from Leah's paintings, in fact, in dealing with these concepts that are in this book, black holes and wormholes, gravitational waves, I would give Leah verbally, usually, sometimes in terms of pencil sketches, some sense of what was going on physically

with regard to a black hole, say, or black holes colliding or black holes tearing something apart, then I would say make a painting. But it would be a verbal conversation, sometimes just a bit of a pencil sketch. But she then would translate my mental pictures into an artistic piece that was much more compelling than my metal pictures were. So her paintings are elaborations of one of the two main tools that I use in my

scientific research. Was it intimidating Leah to talk, and by the way, it would be so cool, and please tell me this is true, if your middle name is Nardo. That would be awesome, right? Was it intimidating working with Kip? Not just because of his brilliance, Nobel caliber and storied career, but because, you know, I'm thinking just practically, he worked with Gary Nolan, right? And it wasn't just like, here's some pencil sketches that Kip did. I mean, as I understand it, Kip, correct me if I'm wrong, there were pretty hardcore numerical relativity simulations that went into the Black Hall Gargantua in Interstellar.

and that there was actually allegedly some, you know, maybe new insights into the physics of curved space time and highly dense objects. So I guess what I'm asking, Lee, is like the difference between a pencil sketch and then you're competing with like Nolan and like a, what, $25 million budget for simulating, took weeks to make a single second. How did you handle that? Was that, was that intimidating at all? Or am I just projecting my own fears?

Well, when you say it that way, that all sounds very intimidating. that I would say, no, I never felt intimidated by Kip. Maybe I should have been. I think that when Kip and I met, we just felt very kindred and welcoming to each other. I think we set up an immediate friendship and trust. And I wanted to stay true to what Kip's intentions were in his writing. And that's all that I was being guided by. I think that we both have. a kind of way of working almost in, that goes beyond language. That was that intersection that's Kip talking about with the visualizations. So Kip would say something to me and I would make something sometimes in front of him. And he would then say it's got to be a little bit more like this and a little bit more like that. So I really trusted our process. We had just an absolute amazing time working together.

Every time that we've seen each other over this period of 13 years, I feel like I learned something more. It's just been an absolute joy. But no, it never felt like work and never felt intimidating. It always felt like this wonderful adventure and an opportunity to go outside of my own studio practice and work with someone that I, you know, love and admire very much. Kip, how was it working, you know, when you were advising students or, you know, when we're, you know, dealing with computer simulations and so forth, we're used to it being, you know, a very

linear process, at least not the physics. The physics is highly nonlinear, obviously, but when you, what you get in, what you put in is, you know, going to determine exactly what you get out. Whereas in artistry of the kind that Leah exemplifies, it's very highly nonlinear and it's emotional and so forth. How did, how did you react? Were you intimidated working with her that, you know, to have, well, such a great artist to have this, to have this, you know, kind of notion of how you could communicate things that's easy to communicate to fellow geeks, dweeps, and nerds like me or our students in a computer simulation, but now you're dealing with a with a supercomputer on her shoulders. So how did you react to working with her?

It was just a very joyous experience as it was working with Christopher Nolan as well. And there was a real similarity in the sense that with Christopher Nolan, we would brainstorm together in order to figure out ways to deal with and to depict certain ideas. There was a lot of joint brainstorming going together, going into Interstellar. And similarly with Leah, it was huge amounts of brainstorming together that led to this tightly integrated verse and paintings. And so I guess I never felt intimidated by any of my collaborators. The key to success in a collaboration is openness. The key to lubricating the success is that you really like the person,

you love the person that you're working with. And intimidation is, I think, would be a huge obstacle. I try hard to, throughout my career, I tried very hard to not intimidate myself. students. One of my strategies was you always call me KIP, you never call me Dr. Thorne or Professor Thorne. If you call me by my first name, maybe you'll let your guard down just a little bit and open up and maybe we can have a real relationship in terms of intellectual interaction. And friendship is really a key to progress and a collaboration. 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 started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So, yeah, I got to stop forcing my grad students to call me Herr Professor Dr. Keating. I want to talk about pedagogy now and ask both of you, the way that you become a physicist, it's also highly contorted warp passages.

And I imagine for an artist it's the same way. I want to get your reaction to a strategy I do use in all seriousness with my students. I'm an experimental physicist. I build telescopes. I build detectors, instrument systems, and so forth. But what I like to have them do is what's called, at least in literature. as I've read it, it's called copywork. And it's a part in the incredibly sexist language, but it dates back to Socrates, who said the following, employ your time in improving yourself

by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. And in so doing, I try to say to my students, if you were an artist, if I was teaching art, as I'm going to ask Leah in a second, I would have you first copy all the masters, go back. you know, all the way back to the Middle Ages and the Byzantine era and just, just feel what it's like as, as I think, I think F. Scott Fitzgerald, hand wrote the old man in the sea. And he said, he was asked, why did that? And he said, because I wanted to feel what it feels like to write an incredible novel. Leah, how do you teach someone or can't, first let me ask, can you teach someone to be a good artist? I mean, my, you know, my stick, you know, figures, I would not even ever dare to show you. But, so I think, I think. it's too late for me. But can you teach someone to be an artist or is it something that's really nature and nurture and you need a little bit of nature before it can be nurtured? So first you, what is your strategy of teaching people as a professor? I mean, I think that my strategy as a professor in teaching art is first to invite my students to be passionate and find meaning in art in this,

you know, wild world that has so much pressure and so many things going on is like it's, you could almost look at the same, you could ask the same question. What does LIGO have to do with my life? What does a museum show have to do with my life? And first, to instill that art has a profound, can give you a profound meaning and direction in your life. I think that it's very easy to teach people technical skills, actually. Your example of stick figures, I actually feel like I absolutely could change that. If you took a drawing class with me, because just like anything, of learning the steps of understanding physics, there's certain rules to follow. I could, you know, even Kip has been inspired by an engineering class that he took early on at

Caltech, which is such a cool thing that they don't do anymore, but that he learned the rules of perspective. I mean, it's a geometric system. But those are tricks of the eye. What I think is harder to teach, but can be encouraged and fostered and, you know, developed is someone to think critically, right? And I think that that distinguishes probably the two of you in the same way in science is you have someone who can be very technically good at something and they will be an incredibly important part of a team, but they're not going to excel and think critically for themselves. And so I think as a teacher, I'm always looking for that person that conceptually is on to something really different. And I actually tried to restrict them from getting too technically

involved. I think it's a trap for artists who can paint really well, that they get a lot of accolades for it and they can lean on that. But that is not the goal of art. That's the difference of art and design. I think for me, the most exciting thing that I find in my practice is to surprise myself where there's a form or a, you know, there's something going on visually that matches with the concept, right? There's like even you pointing out the blue or the way that it's painted. Those are not accidental. They could have been painted in a lot of different ways, a lot of different colors, but that it tells you something about the content. And, you know, in mentoring my students, I think having someone developed their independent voice is really the most essential thing

that you can do with a young artist. Technique is actually easy. And Kip, what was your strategy when you were actively advising your many students? What was your technique to kind of teach them as an apprentice, you know, is taught by a master, say, in art. How did you communicate the craft of physics to them? Oh, boy. There are many small techniques, and I even wrote them all down in a document that some of my students have resurrected and put on the web. But I think the bigger issues were to...

to the following. One, they need to, if they're going to really work in physics, and if they want to pursue a career in physics, they need to love it. Because it's going to be very hard work. And if you don't love it, you won't put enough work into it to really do it successfully and really become fulfilled. So if you don't really love it, you use it as a stepping stone,

a launching pad for moving in some other direction. And there are many directions you can move from physics. That was one fundamental principle. Love for what you're doing. Then there is the issue of that different people's minds work differently. And you need to get some sense of how your mind works. Different people learn in different ways. And recognize the difference between yourself and other people.

And focus in on developing things such as visual-based intuition in my case. that are going to be powerful tools for you and that really, really work for you. Whereas I have had other students who are more like Chandra Sikhar, whom you may have known. And Chandra Sikhar, his mind worked entirely in terms of the mathematics and not in terms of anything visual at all. These big differences in how people's minds work is something students should become aware of very early on. Another aspect of this is, you've got to not be able to not only do creative work to really understand things. You have to be able to explain yourself to colleagues.

Otherwise, scientific research is truly a joint process. And you need to be able to influence other people in the same way as they influence you. And that has to come through communication. And so you've got to learn how to communicate verbally and in writing. And so I worked with my students very hard on the difference between technical and non-technical writing and writing techniques and writing tools, how to organize a paper, how to use barrel structure to more lucidly explain complicated things and so forth. So there are a number of things of this sort that are part of it. So I'm not, I've not given you a very clear picture. I've just given you, I guess, a scatter gun set of some of the more important principles

for me as a mentor of students. I just want to, you know, respectfully push back with love on just one of the statements you said that you have to collaborate with people. I mean, the person that, you know, is kind of lurking throughout this book is this guy, Einstein. One of his most famous papers is the EPR, you know, kind of paper. But besides that, he's basically, known as the paradigmatic lone genius, you know, working in isolation. Leah, I don't detect any collaborators on any of these glorious paintings and illustrations. So is that really true? Do you

have to work with people? Or if you're so good, you can just go on and people can't ignore you, right? I was not intending to say that you need to collaborate, but you'd need to be able to communicate the results of your work, even if you're somebody who works almost entirely alone like Einstein did. And so this difference between people in terms of whether or not they collaborate with ease, whether or not they enjoy collaboration is also something that I would discuss with students. I myself enjoy much more working alone or with just one or two other people and not in a large collaboration with the LIGO project for gravitational wave detection that I devoted much of my career to, had to be a big collaboration. I just had to grit my teeth and do it.

I think it's important for people to understand what types of interaction with people are most fruitful for them for productive work. And then also, however, pay attention to whether or not the things that they really want to do can be pursued in the manner they bet most like. And I'm an example that I know I'm much happier working alone or in a very small collaboration, but forced into a different mode because what I did could not be done in any other manner than in a huge collaboration. And I found like great expanse in my studio practice when I'm collaborating. KIP is just one example of ways in which like my studio practice has changed and grown. Some of the works that I make, I can make by myself.

Like if I'm making an oil painting, or you're right, I don't need another person to physically make the drawing, but KIP is really guiding through our conversations, the way that the paintings are made for the book. One of my recent pieces is called Double Horizon, and it's an installation video where I attached cameras to the external parts of a Cessna plane when I was learning how to fly.

And that was something where I really didn't know what I was going to make. I've never made an installation video. But what I did know is that I was interested in making a piece that explored the notion of time. And so I thought, oh, well, it can't be a painting. It has to be a time-based medium. And that gave me the opportunity to collaborate with a composer, collaborate with a color separationist, collaborate with an editor,

figure out the technical way of doing five-point sound. And I don't think that I would value them as like better or better. less than, but I just find that having these opportunities that expand my practice, and Kipp has said this as well, to look for opportunities, unexpected opportunities in his career. And I think that that's very similar to the way that I work, where I do love painting by myself, I like, you know, the solitude, but I also love taking what I'm thinking about and actually developing curriculum around it or inviting other teams of collaborators. in a way it just expands and makes the concepts much more rich for me.

Getting back to this kind of two cultures, but, you know, one goal, I want to take us back to another experiment that was quite costly and contested, as was LIGO, as you guys both know. And that's 1969 when Robert Wilson was on Capitol Hill talking to a bunch of senators trying to give the money to build what would become Fermilab. And it's reputed the senator, you know, leading the committee, Senator Pestori said, is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?

And Wilson says, no, sir, I don't believe so. And the senator says, nothing at all. Wilson says, nothing at all. And Pestori says, it has no value in that respect. And then Wilson says, it has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with, are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean, all the things that we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about, it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth

defending. Leah, how do you react to that statement? Is the culture, is the science, are they intertwined in a way that it actually gives sort of a teleological, you know, raison d'etra for our country because it seems like very few countries can attest to making a LIGO or a Fermi lab. So how do you react to that? I think it's like the underlying question of, is it practical to be an explorer? Or do we explore because it makes our heart sings and expands what we know about what the human existence can mean? One of my favorite things to think about, especially when I'm teaching young painters, is to actually wrap your head around how do we know what we know about the history? of humanity. It's through art. It's through architecture. And other than that, it's not through

anything else. We can look at the Egyptian tombs and the paintings and through the history of painting, even back to cave paintings. We know it through art. Now, was that cave paintings, you know, one scholar could say, yes, it was very practical. They were tracking buffalo migration. I don't know. I'm just speaking out loud. But it actually is like there, is such an urge, at least within me and when I see around others, to be creative and express what it means to have humanity. And so I mean, I love what you just read because there's more to being alive than being practical. And can we invite ourselves and remind ourselves to remain constant explorers? And even just going back to like our five-year-old selves, right? Like every,

all that makes sense if you're asking a five-year-old. But it like, it doesn't, make sense because we're older. Well, could we actually envision a culture and a humanity where art and science are held at the same level of importance because it tells us who we are? Normally when I talk to an author about a book, I'm always torn because the audience hasn't read it. You know, most of them haven't read it, even though it's your book's been out for a while. But sometimes I talk to authors, you know, on publication days and nobody's read it except for, you know, kind of nerds that run podcasts like me. But, but I'm reluctant to always, you know, summarize the book because, you know, I feel like I'm not, you know, audible, you know,

narrator or something like that. So I want them to buy the book. But in this case, I'm not so worried because you have to, there's no way to really, you know, I mean, yes, you can have an audio version of it. I doubt that would be as pleasant as the current version. My saying this is because I don't like to like actually show or read direct passages from the book, except in this case, because in this case, this one image, you know, which I have to talk to Lee. I don't know if it's possible to procure such an image from the original. But this image here is very near and dear to my heart. It's the only thing that we have in common, guys,

because it appears on the cover of my book as well. It's a photograph, and that is the dark sector laboratory at the South Pole Emerson Scott Station, where I've spent a month of my life or so on separate visits and over a period of a few years. I want to read the article and also kind of ask some questions because how often do I get the chance to talk to the actual artist? So the poem says, a fleet of astrophysicist, allies of Ligo's fleet, have toiled for three full decades on a radical new and elegant type of gravity wave detector. Now I should stop and say thank you, Kip, for recognizing.

So Andrew Lang, myself and Jamie Bach, who's currently a professor. Andrew unfortunately took his own life shortly after Bicep 2 is deployed here. that's the story that I talk about in my book. But it is true. We would not have built Bicep or Bicep 2 or Bice at any of these experiments. And my current experiment called the Simon's Observatory had it not been for Caltech and President Baltimore back 30 years ago now, or almost 30 years ago, having the courage to back us with a million dollars in presidential discretionary funds. So I'll always be indebted to Caltech for doing that. And it's launched literally billions of dollars worth of research and education and training.

So it's a detector aimed at primordial waves. These are gravitational waves with wavelengths truly humongous, hundreds of millions of light years long, just 10 to 100 times smaller than all the universe we see. Long ago when the universe was 300,000 years old, that's far before the very first stars and galaxies were born. These gravity waves placed imprints onto the polarization of cosmic microwaves. So I just want to thank you guys for this description,

but I want to ask a question. Leah, what is this thing up here? Is that, what is that thing in the sky? Is that a meteor? What is going on with that? I didn't see that when I was there the last couple of times. Well, it was a way to actually impose two instruments in one painting. So that was an example where I had a separate painting of the spacebound observer and the groundbound one.

But I loved making that painting, I'll have to say, it was really nice to try to create something that had like a, desolate kind of heroic feel to it with this like sparse of Antarctica. So I'm glad that you find that it's that you like it. I love it. Yeah. So when we think about like the futuristic upcoming discoveries and so forth in along the lines of, you know, the depiction in words at least of of of that poem, I guess it strikes to the heart of what I do, which is, you know, to understand whether or not the universe really had a beginning. And maybe this will also, you know, segue into Leah, but but depictions of the creation event and so forth are ubiquitous. And yet if you, if you, if you, if you, I always point out Kipp and you can confirm if this is true or not, if you have like 10,000 ping pong balls

representing 10,000 years of human civilization. And you write the year on each one, you know, going back 8,000 BC, uh, E to today, 10,000 years total. And you write the year on it. And then you you write, what was the prevailing cosmogenic story? What was the prevailing thought of the origin of the universe at that time? I mean, 90% of them will have, you know, eternal static universe written on them, right? So what is it about the, the big bang and the power of the narrative of the big bang, that it's really displaced all other possible contenders? You, you, career spans, you know, the end of the steady, quasi-steady state theory by my late great colleague, Jeff Burbage and Fred Hoyle, the way up until obviously today. So what do you make of the Big Bang? Is it just a story that's

too good to be true, too good to be false? Where do you rank the Big Bang in terms of cosmic creation events and whether or not that speaks to something intrinsic to humanity on a deep visceral level? Well, I think the Big Bang was something that scientists were forced into by the observations. Certainly when I was a graduate student, the steady state theory, was still pretty respectable. It was only near the end of my graduate studies around the time that the cosmic microwave background was discovered, which played some significant role

in putting a nail in the coffin of a steady state model of the universe. I've seen the transition from an era in which large numbers of cosmologists who my highly respected such as Jeffrey Burbage, quite proudly supported a steady state universe to an era where nobody does anymore. It's observations. Observations combined with then,

with the work of theorists who find that they can embody those observations in theoretical structures, they're extremely powerful in terms both of explaining what was seen and predicting new things. Kaking and screaming in some sense that humanity has been dragged into the Big Bang. As a non-astronomer, I would say, like, it's almost implied, right?

Like, everybody loves a good origin story. How can you not be in awe of the universe on a dark night where you're looking at the Milky Way and say to yourself, like, how did this get here? You know, and I think, like, to know where we're at, we try to look back and follow the path of where we came from. So whether you were dragged kicking or screaming, I feel to me as the, you know,

is the, you know, just always chasing, you know, the idea of experience in the sense of awe or the sublime. I'm like, the question is right there as you're having that, like that moment, right? Like, where did this all come from? How are we here? Yeah, but I, you know, I did grow up in the Rocky Mountains at about 5,000 foot altitude in a rather dark valley. The sky was spectacular. And when I looked at that sky, boy, it was hard to. contemplate that it wouldn't have been like that forever.

I mean, I always ask people, I'll ask you guys, yeah, what's your favorite day on the calendar every year? Leah, what's your favorite day? My favorite day is probably Friendsgiving. My wife and I throw this epic party, and it's like a sit-down dinner for like 40 people. And we just like drink and eat for about 14 hours. Kip, what's your favorite day on the calendar?

I don't think I have one. Okay. I have a number of point like. Normally, so you guys are, you guys are aberrations, though, because normally I ask and people say it's my anniversary or my birthday or my kid's birthday, or if they're smart, they'll say their wife's birthday, you know, because. Can I change my answer, Brian?

Yeah, yeah, you could do it. My wife's birthday. I think my wife would actually say Friendsgiving as well, so I think I'm safe. And I always point out because it's like you don't know what, you know, it's an origin. It's when something happened before your comprehension and your personal experience. And so people are drawn to that because it's a great mystery. that you can't have direct evidence for, at least in the case of your own birthday.

I want to talk about something in common that I'm sure you both have faced. And I'll start with Leah. Criticism. You must have had bad reviews. I mean, no good artist, professor, science, gets to where they at, at the highest levels that you're at now,

or KIP has achieved now, without significant criticism, maybe in public. How do you handle critics? How do you keep the swagger that you need to be a great artist, along with the humility to know that, Yeah, sometimes it may be, the critics may have a point. How do you handle criticism? I think that's a great question. To me, I just wonder, I ask myself, like, who my audience is,

like who it matters, that the work is good enough, strong enough, conceptually rigor. I'll tell you a story in my first solo show in Los Angeles. I got a review in the LA Times, and the work sold out. So it was like this double thing, my first solo show, a lot of attention. I also got offered a solo show in New York. Everything was going great. But in this LA Times review, I could tell that the viewer kind of didn't totally understand what I was doing. And those paintings were of female astronauts in these, like, very ambiguous situation.

So it wasn't necessarily that they were astronauts or space suits, but you couldn't help but feel that there was something about them. And the line that. that the reviewer used was Space Babes. And I was like, now that is a twist of the knife. You know, it's like, it's almost like he was in the, the people that I depicted very often I use the people around me as in this book.

My goal and my work is always that I like, I connect in a universal, like a universal concept, but that it comes from somewhere very personal. So I put myself in a lot of my work, sometimes in invisible ways, like flying the plane of the video piece I'm talking about, or being the skateboarder in the series called Dark Skate. But the nature of inserting my body in a personal way is a thorough line through all of my work.

And in this piece, what he was saying was that, like, in one hand, and the larger review, I would say, was like average positive. And the fact that he, you know, reviewed it in the LA Times, you could, you know, my dealers said, oh, that's a success. But what he was basically saying was like, how dare you have attractive friends and how dare you make work about science? And I would say that that kind of criticism has been subtly repeated, where people don't understand necessarily why I'm making work about science. It seems very at times that it enters a dialogue, like I'm trying to put science on a pedestal.

But most of my work really just invites the viewer to kind of consider their own physical environment and I'm using scientific concept to drive it. And, you know, it comes down to the same thing that led that was driving Kipp and I to make this book. We didn't know if the book would be good. We didn't know if the book would be interesting to a lot of people. But what we did know, it was the book that we wanted to read. You know, we just kept saying, you know, if I want to read a book about black holes, it's going to be intimate. It's going to be poetic. It's going to be sensual.

It's going to contain the people that I love. It's going to have the story, the origin story of LIGO, the cutting edge science. it's going to have all the things that we want. And so we made the book for us and invite the viewer at large. And I think whenever I'm faced with rejection in grants or bad reviews, I just come down to feeling really confident that I have a drive and a goal that I feel that is very thoughtful in my career. And Kip, I want to pivot not to the book, but actually to LIGO.

And I want to get your take on a subject I've talked a lot about with Ray Y. and with Barry Barish. And that's about the critics of Ligo. And there were many, not only from its inception. There were even, you know, previous claims of direct detection of gravitational waves by a really wonderful physicist who doesn't get, you know, too much, too much attention, Joe Weber. I want you to comment on, you know, criticism. Compare the criticism of Weber, who claimed detection decades before LIGO with a completely different technique, resonant bar technique, with the critics of LIGO. In other words, the Voight, the, the, Bacall, I remember, also at Tyson, et cetera,

a Drever. So talk about this, the critics of LIGO, and how did you handle scientific criticism of an equal and opposite maybe variety that Leah described, but how did you handle those criticisms and how did you prevail? A key aspect of how we handled that was that we had a superb program director at the National Science Foundation, who was dedicated to making sure that this thing went forward, if and only if, it was really soundly based.

And so he arranged review after review by very tough people, some of whom were actually critics before they went into the review, and people who were experts on the technology, and the issue was whether or not we were going to get there in terms of the technology. And we passed those reviews, usually with flying colors. We passed all those reviews. And our critics were people who were very eminent, astronomers primarily, very eminent

astronomers, who are not close enough to the technology that we were working with to really have anything like the wisdom of the reviewers we dealt with. And so then the crucial issue was to make sure that in Washington, it was the technically competent reviewers to whom attention was paid. And that was assured one within the National Science Foundation just by the structure of the National Science Foundation and how it operates. It really does operate in a very effective manner in terms of reviewing things and making decisions based on reviews. In Congress, it required lobbying. Lobbying is a nasty word in many people's minds,

but if you think of a lobbyist as somebody who is dedicated to educating the congressional staff and the Congress people about the issues on which they have to make funding decisions, then you need really good lobbyist who is very effective at knowing who should be talked to. and what the level of understanding is and how you talk with them. And you need a very good director who is excellent at talking to such people. And in the crucial period where we were trying to get this funded, it was Robbie Vogt, who was our director,

and he was extremely good at communicating with congressional staff and with Congresspeople. And so it was that combination that got us through it. And then when Barry Beres took over, Barry is also superb at that, but we were over the worst hump in Robbie's hands. Barry, however, played the crucial role, a very different crucial role of transforming the project into a very successful, large-scale collaboration that was absolutely essential to success. But dealing with critics, those were the tools that got us through. With regard to LIGO, I understood the critics well because when I first heard this idea for gravitational wave detection, as we described in our book, Leah and I, from Ray Weiss,

I didn't believe for a minute that it was possible. And it took me several years to become convinced that we had a real shot at pulling it off. And only after that did I buy in and do what I could as a theorist to help the experimenter succeed. But I really understood the critics from that point of view that I'd been there and done that. And if you could comment on Weber, when you heard the Weber results back in the 60s, 70s, a claim detection of gravitational waves using an aluminum resonant bar. basically he was uh i mean he he it's so much cool and interesting stuff uh i hope to have his you know widow uh virginia on at some point but talk about how you reacted because there's some

historical parallels in what i do and and my you know uh version of of cosmology this book is obviously tied to losing the Nobel Prize so uh you're the uh you're the diametric opposite of me but um but it's because we made a claim that was premature much as Weber did and yet the you know sometimes they say in real estate or business, the second mouse gets the cheese. Is that a case of what happened with LIGO or talk about how did you react? And what kind of criticisms and warnings maybe did Weber ignore? Well, so I know the Weber history extremely well. I was fairly close to Joe Weber personally.

Was very fond of him. And I highly respected his creativity. and his courage in tackling what was regarded by everybody else as an impossible task. And he got the field started, and the techniques that he developed for this hung on in other people's hands for decades. And they were only dropped when LIGO sensitivity surpassed the sensitivity of his types of gravity-dectors. and that was not until the 2000s. And so he did his work beginning in the 1960s, late 1950s. And so there were basically 40 years of work by his technique that he invented.

But in the end, the technique that we pursued had the ultimate success. But what happened with Joe Weber is that other people built similar detectors, not identically the same, see the gravitational signals or did not see the signals that Weber was seeing. And so there was a considerable controversy over that. But the critics were critics who were critics based on other experiments attempting to replicate what he had done and not succeeding in seeing the same signals. It's a very different kind of a criticism than what we dealt with in LIGO, where people were just skeptical of whether or not we could achieve the sensitivity that we and they basically agreed one needed to achieve.

There is, let me just say, there's a forthcoming documentary film about Joe Weber, which then segues into Lago that is superb, called Far Away, comma, nearby, that tells the history of Joe Weber's effort, then followed by the, the LIGO effort, but it is also very interesting in that it is a film that it focuses on the role of emotion in science. And Weber was very emotional. I can be very emotional too, but how you use emotion in science and how it can sometimes get in the way of doing science successfully and how it is often very important in terms of doing science successfully. This will be premiered in Belgium in March. It's by Paula Froly and with assisted by Alan Lightman. Wonderful.

I can't wait to hear it. Yeah, I mean, there's a, you know, kind of a trope that, you know, scientists are these dispassionate, you know, unemotional automatones and so forth. But you know there's a trick, Leah, I don't know if you knew this. but it doesn't apply to Kip, but you know how you can tell if a scientist is outgoing or an extroverted? They look at your shoes when they talk to you. So speaking of emotion, I want to talk about remuneration and so forth and kind of the currency of both of your professions. Obviously, the highest accolade I think there is in science is a Nobel Prize.

So obviously Kip has achieved that. But I want to bring a quote down from the famous philosopher, Bob Marley. And he said, money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end. What motivates you guys? Start with Leah. Leah, money, attention, critical reviews, fame, professorships. You've had a lot of these. What keeps you going? What inspires you? What gives you energy and what takes away your energy? Well, I like what Kip, what you were saying to your students. Like if you have to love what you do, because I feel like if you could, I always tell my students, if you can do anything except be an artist,

then do that because it's a really hard road. And I feel like I just could not ever do anything else. And weirdly, I was like that kid, if you had asked me when I was 12, what I wanted to be, I would say, I want to teach art and I want to be a, you know, I want to be an artist. And it just comes down to I love discovering things and making things with my hands and doing it in a way that invokes a, a response in an audience. I don't think it's as literal as like a wide audience or for a certain you know, type of response or fame or whatever. But I definitely love to think deeply about concepts or our human experience in the world and then try to make pieces and make installations that invite the viewer along for that ride and give them like nudge them out of their comfort zone.

And one of the things that I lead with in my own studio is that I want to walk into my studio and feel surprised at the things that I'm looking at. I don't want to just be executing things. So that keeps me on my toes. You know, I'm working all these different mediums. And, you know, I feel like my studio practice and the rigor that I bring to it, it just keeps me going and keeps me curious and keeps me challenged. Wonderful. And Kip, what motivates you? What keeps you going?

now that you've achieved it and what T.S. Eliot said, the Nobel Prize is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has done anything of value since they won it. So how do you react to good old TS? Well, let me first say that I never aspired to win the Nobel Prize. And I, when I got the telephone call in the middle of the night to tell me that I was being awarded the Nobel Prize together with Ray Weiss and Barry Beresh. And my response, was I'm not surprised at all. It was obvious that this project deserved it, but I'm very disappointed because the prize should have gone

to the team of a thousand people who really made it happen and should not be going to just the three of us. I felt that very strongly. And so for me, the issue of the Nobel Prize has been a struggle that took probably a year for me to come to terms of the fact that I'm an icon for this project. and I just have to accept that I'm an icon for the project carrying around this prize that really belongs to a thousand people.

So that's the response with regard to the Nobel Prize. But in general, what drives me is just the pleasure of doing science, great joy of just suddenly understanding something that I didn't understand before. Yeah, it's a little better if nobody ever understood it before, and I'm the first. But even if lots of other people understood it before, and I'm just suddenly understand it.

That also gives great joy. The joy of working with students, with really great students, with whom you could build a bond and you could watch them grow and develop into mature scientists through their enormous skill and their talents. And I can provide an environment in which they blossom. Those are the things that really drove me. I was certainly also driven by the quest to understand the universe, yes,

but the process itself is so much fun that I would often lose the side of the quest and just simply enjoy the process. And I'd like to ask you a quick question, first of all, is about the famous Thorne Hawking bet, which is described in a brief history of time by Stephen Hawking as a form of insurance policy for him. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would be all wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would win me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kipp would get one year of penthouse.

Ah, now I understand why Hefner didn't want to commission that article. He was jealous. So you guys made the bet in 1975. You're 80% certain that Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. By now, I'd say we're about 95%. This is in 1988. but the bet has yet to be settled. Roger Penrose came on this podcast

and told me it was always a pleasure to make a bet with Stephen Hawking because no matter what he chose, he would always end up being wrong because he would flip sides of the bet. Was that bet ever resolved? I think it was 1990. While I was in Moscow, Russia,

working with Vladimir Brighensky, Stephen Hawking went to USC. Usually when he'd come to Southern California, he'd be coming to Caltech. We went to USC. to give a public lecture. And he got a hold of some of my graduate students and broke into my office and thumbprinted off on the bet.

And by 1990, he was convinced. And so I came back from Moscow and there was the bet thumb printed off on Stephen. Stephen had conceded. What would you bet on now if you had to make a consolation bet, Kip, about some potential upcoming discovery, maybe not in physics, maybe in, you know, artificial intelligence or something like that. Can you tell me anything that you would like a consolation about such that if it weren't true, you would still receive the remuneration of a lifetime subscription to Scientific American? I'll make it a little bit more PG. The thing I would bet on that I, that I regard as the

holy rail of cosmology, is definitively seeing the gravitation. ways from the birth of the universe, and using them to the information therein, to help delineate, to help clarify the laws of quantum gravity that presumably controlled the birth of the universe. So it's not just seeing those waves. It's really the information that you pull out of those waves. This was the direction you chose for your career, and it was certainly, I think, it's the, holy rail of physics in our generation and your generation in this era. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the state.

you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. That's great to hear and I'll put that on, you know, that endorsement and comium. If ever, I do, you know, end up in Stockholm, Sweden. I'll invite you along. I want to ask you both about artificial intelligence. We hear so much about this. I use it. I used it to help prepare, you know, some deep dives for this interview. Even I use it in my research, but, you know, not to do original research. But that's the topic of my question. And that involves can human beings be replaced? And I want to evoke this by asking Kip, if he remembers what Einstein here said was his happiest thought, the one that gave him palpitations. Can you say what Einstein's happiest thought was? As I recall, it had to do with if he jumps off a roof and he's freely falling,

he doesn't no longer experience his gravity. So that's Einstein in free fall. And he said, Leah, you may know those, you may not, that that was his happiest thought because he basically was able to viscerally concoct this notion of the equivalence principle, Einstein equivalence principle, from the notion that a free falling observer would feel no gravitational force. And from that leads geodesics and notions of curve space time, et cetera. But I bring this up for two reasons. One, I don't personally understand how a computer could experience happiness. In other words, replicate the sensation of a happy. thought, nor do I understand how a computer being able to sense the visceral sensation of free fall and be experiencing happiness seems patently absurd. How have you reacted, Leah, first, to the notion of generative AI? Is it something to be feared? Will it put artists out of business? Will it be replacing you? So talk about the prospects, promises, pitfalls, and perils of generative artificial intelligence, please.

I mean, I think this circles back to maybe I shouldn't have, should have been intimidated by KIP. Maybe I should be fearful of AI, but I just am not. I feel like it's an exciting tool that will open a lot of doors of things. But what I'm, let me tell you what I'm observing in my students, right? Like, I can kind of understand where we're going by seeing what's exciting to them. And a long time ago, there was a big. push to destroy all of the photo labs in universities. They got rid of enlargers, dark rooms, because everything was going to be digital. Why would we create photos? We run at Chapman University,

where I'm the department chair, we run something like six photo classes a semester, and we have wait lists that are double or triple of what we can accommodate. Because the students want to make something physical. And when they're talking about photos, they talk about it as an object now. They don't talk about it as an image on their phone. There's also a huge surge of people who are taking photos with film. I don't know if you've realized, but now you, there are, now you can go back to CBS and get your photos developed. There's different, you know, there's all this desire to have, quote, the real thing. I think the more images we have, it desaturates meaning. So the more images on your laptop, the more than an actual photograph that was taken with a film

camera that was developed in a dark room, it actually makes it something distinguished. And so I think with AI, it's very similar to what happened with Photoshop. I was told when Photoshop came out that I shouldn't major in painting because it was over and Photoshop would, you know, but when you look at Sotheby's auctions, nobody's auctioning photograph, nobody's auctioning Photoshop documents, right? There's something that we still attach a great amount of value to the manned made. to the touch to the personal. When AI is working at its best, it just accentuates that. It accentuates the concept or accentuates what the artist is trying to do. But I don't ever think that it would replace this desire for the human connection. Hey there, it's me again, your fearful host,

Brian Keating. I want to make a special request that you subscribe to my newsletter at at briankeating.com slash list. And if you do, you'll be entered to win a real piece of a meteorite, a chunk of space dust, a four billion-year-old slice of space dust, a meteorite that fell to Earth thousands and thousands of years ago. You'll get information about the meteorite and you'll get information about how you too can watch meteor showers throughout the year. It's my small way of giving back to you. If you have a .edu email address, you're guaranteed to win. So make sure to enter at brianckitam.com slash list. Now back to the episode. Can you speculate on whether or not there'll be, you know, AI Thorn, will there be A.A.A.E.

Einstein. What extent can a physicist be replaced by in silico versions of such? And I don't feel that I have dug into it deeply enough to have an informed view, impressed by the pronouncements that people I respect make about this. And I worry about because some people I respect worry. But I just, this is, an area that I have not dug into far enough to have an informed view, even at the level, to have what I would regard myself an opinion, much less to make an opinion public. Okay, well, we started the conversation with the description of this book's cover. I want to turn to this book, as I promised you I would, gravitation.

And really just what it's meant. It's over 50 years old. It's one of the best-selling books in all of physics history. It's as glorious illustrations that I'm sure Leah would add her in Comia, too, if she was even alive at the time when it came out. But having a physicist dad is, you know, it was probably around the table, dinnertime conversation. Talk about this book.

What did it mean to you to write it? And especially Wheeler, working with him, what was that like? John Wheeler was a very inspirational man. He was my PhD mentor. He was Richard Feynman's PhD mentor, some 20 years apart, 20 or 30 years apart. We both revered him as a mentor, but I wound up collaborating with him very tightly on this particular book. It was an era when relativity, Einstein's laws of warp space time, had been relegated to the province of mathematicians, and very few physicists were paying any attention to that. That was true from, say, the early 1930s, through the 40s, the 50s, into the 1960s when we began working on this book in the late 60s.

And it was only beginning to be embraced again by physicists as we worked on this book, as a result of a series of astronomical discoveries that caused me microwave background, pulsars, quasars, and so forth. So it was a period then when physicists were being pulled into relativity, relativity was pulled into the province of physicists, and we wanted to write a book that would transform the way physicists thought about relativity. a book that would be teach physicists how to think about relativity intuitively. That meant that the ratio of words to equations would be much larger.

The ratio of pictures to equations would be enormously larger than in other textbooks because the pictures and the words were the essence of building intuition. The equations were, as I said earlier, the language of nature. For physicists to really embrace this and use it as a powerful tool, they had to build intuition. And the book then was designed for that purpose. As a result, we also then used rather innovative techniques in the book, various kinds of marginal notes of boxes and so forth, boxes that run on for page after page that basically embrace the nonlinear structure of learning. Yeah, and the choose your own adventure, the upper corners have these different tracks, one and two, depending on the sophistication.

Yeah, and the illustrations, of course, as well. When it came out, it was somewhat controversial in the sense that the people who were working in the field at the time were largely mathematical, and they were left cold by the amount of pictures. and verbal descriptions. But in fact, the students embraced it, as did street people in Berkeley in the era of the Vietnam War. And so we probably sold more copies

to street people in Berkeley than we did to real physics students. Okay, well, we've reached the end of the normally scheduled part of the conversation where we discussed these just incredible topics, and we come to the conclusion where we ask existential questions. And originally I was planning to only ask Kip, but I can't resist to ask these exact same questions of Leah.

So I will beg your indulgence and forbearance in answering these final four thrilling questions if you do not mind. So they start like this. They're related in some way or another to Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is also a great exemplar of the blending of art and science. in his case literature and a hard, you know, tech, high-tech science. So the first question relates to a very famous statement by Sir Arthur, which is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I like to turn this into a question very similar to your late great colleague, Richard Feynman, who Kip just mentioned.

And that is sort of a cataclysm question. And he was asked, what piece of wisdom? or knowledge that humans have come up with or technology, you know, expresses the most amount of information in the smallest amount, fewest amount of words, such that if Earth were destroyed in a cataclysm, you know, we could put this on a time capsule and send it out into the universe as a token of our existence. So I want to ask you first, Kip, what is the most amazing and therefore magical technology, theory or art that humans have ever come up with? I would say that there are two things that I think of scientific discoveries, but many other people would say that these are human constructs to try to explain how the universe works.

But one is general relativity, warp space time, the other is quantum physics. And the fundamental principles of quantum physics, the fundamental principles of general relativity have enormous power. And they, the two of them together basically have enough power to explain. and deal with almost everything that we see in the universe. And at least in their present forms, they are human constructs, y'all agree, but I think that they actually must mirror in some very deep way what was really going on in nature. So there are discoveries in that sense. And Leah, what magical creation of the human species is most impressive to you?

If we are talking about science, I would actually kind of go back to what your question was to Kip about what the most kind of profound discovery would be. And something that has always perplexed me really severely is dark matter and dark energy. And so to me, I think that the most exciting technology are the things that are helping us to visualize the unseen, which in a lot of ways is what I'm trying to do in the book, is Kip gives me a concept or an idea that we haven't seen. And so to me, I mean, the future observers of Lisa or the image of the black hole, I mean, to me, those are just like the most, like the moments where I feel or even the discovery of LIGO, I just thought like, what a crazy time to be alive to witness these things, you know, just as an observer on Earth. So to me, I think the most exciting parts are the things that we mathematically know that are there.

But like, who do we think we are observing black holes? You know, like what an exciting adventure to think beyond our earth and to these like really massive scales of the universe. So I would like encompass them all, even, you know, even James Webb, you know, I mean, these things that are just pushing the boundaries of what our understanding is in ways that, you know, just weren't clear would be possible when we, you know, when we were young. Okay. The next question that I love to ask my treasured yes has to do with the following. following quote by Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said, when a distinguished but elderly scientists, I'm not calling you elderly, Kip, calling Lee, no, I'm not calling Leah elderly either. But when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are very certainly

right. But when they say something is impossible, they are very probably wrong. Arthur called these types of, you know, fallacies. He called these failures of imagination in his book, profiles of the future. Nowadays, we call these limiting beliefs. So I want to ask you in the phrase of maybe something that you've changed your mind on, starting with KIP, what have you changed your mind on? Or what beliefs that may cause my audience or you to limit our achievement, have you indulged in the past and you'd like to sort of correct yourself or correct as a warning for my audience in the future? So what have you been wrong about, I would essentially say, if anything. So let me begin with a quotation from John Wheeler, he said that the greatest

physicists are the ones who make the most mistakes, the most rapidly, on the way toward the truth. And I think there is a lot of truth to that. We find that we are wrong daily in little ways as physicists. You make a mistake in a calculation, or you think a calculation is going and come out one way and it comes out another way. And so you very quickly become humble in a way that politicians almost never are because they never get their noses rubbed in it the way we do. So that's one statement. But then let's talk about the bigger places where we're wrong.

The biggest or one of the biggest for me was the issue of whether or not the universe is accelerating. The evidence that came in from supernova observations, I thought, well, I know so well that astrophysicists have systematic errors in their observations that they often don't understand. And so this is almost certainly wrong, because it's obviously wrong. The universe can't be accelerating. As a theorist, I know that it has to be wrong. And then when data came in from a cosmic microwave background, I was still very skeptical. It required a number of different kinds of observations of different sorts to finally force me, kicking and screaming, into accepting that the universe is accelerating, that there must be some force the causes it to accelerate, which we now call dark energy. But I just was totally resistant.

But it is, again, along the same lines that as a scientist, I have learned. to be humble. So I'm accustomed to being proved wrong, but not accustomed to being proved wrong on things that are so obviously. I was so obviously right in resisting this. I'm not accustomed to being proved wrong on something of that magnitude. And Leo, you're not nearly as old as me or as Kip, but tell me, please. What have you been wrong about, if anything? What have you changed your mind about or what limiting beliefs should my audience be on guard against to avoid these so-called failures of imagination. In my early career, and I may be older than you think, I've been showing in galleries for 18, nearly 20 years now. I think that in my early career, I thought that you could

foster creativity through kind of having a goal, working really hard, and just being very fixated on that, you know, that point. And over my career, I found that the key to really being creative is to sit in the risks and the unknown and really the part of being very uncomfortable. It's going to sound very weird, but I find that being embarrassed is actually one of my best balances in my studio practice. And I've learned to just kind of welcome that. If I'm making a painting and I feel that there's nothing embarrassing about it, then I feel like I'm trying to be too right. And I know that it's probably not that great. I think if I'm ever going to grow as an artist that, Those kind of cliche things about saying take risks, to get to know what that means personally,

I have really changed what I know to be success within my own art practice. And it's just wielded the kind of more risk I take, the more uncomfortable I feel, it allows me to step outside of me sort of being right into the realm of actually being a creator. Well, that segues beautifully into my final question. again, inspired by Sir Arthur C. Clark. I didn't explain why, but the reason is I am the associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, which was established by the Arthur C. Clark Foundation in Washington, and we've been doing this for 12 years now. And I started the podcast only about three years ago in earnest. My first guest was someone that I know Kip knows very well, the late great

Freeman Dyson. And I've been doing this for years. And I always asked these kind of big picture questions, as I said, to humanized scientists. And the last one is really going to harken back to, you know, advice to your, to your former self. And I like to phrase it in this way. Again, another quote from Sir Arthur C. Clark, going backwards in time, his so-called third law states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of this podcast. I want to ask it as in a in the form of advice to your former self. So Kip, starting with you, what aspect of life of anything, not just science,

perplexed you as a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old, the average age in my audience? What were those great moments of clarity or breakthroughs that gave you the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? So sort of advice to your former self? So I think it's something that we mentioned earlier in this podcast, I learned probably when I was in my 30s, I really began to appreciate the power of watching for totally unexpected opportunities. Then looking at them seriously and evaluating them with care, decide whether or not you want to take them. And the example of par excellence for me was this issue of winding up, devoting a very large portion of my career and that of my students to the search for gravitational waves.

It seemed to be totally impossible technologically when I first saw the ideas that Ray Weiss was putting forth. Just totally impossible. It took me three years to be convinced that it was possible. That for me, and I did not at all intend to pursue things in that direction until I saw that we had a real shot at success. And that was the point at which then what had seemed to me to be totally impossible became conceivable. And with such a huge payoff in the end that, yes, I turned my whole career around and headed in that direction. And lastly, concluding with you, Leah, you got 30 seconds with your 20-year-old self. What do you tell her? I would say to just stay curious, make sure that all your decisions are made with joy

because you will work harder than you will work at anything if you just have a true, honest passion for it. And to just walk into those unknowns with confidence that you will break through to something even better than if you stay in the safe zones. Amazing. Well, Kip and Leah, my two favorite, three-letter author presenters on the podcast. Congratulations. This is such a wonderful gift to the world. I hope we can meet in person. I'll come up again, I'm sure, to the Los Angeles area. And I'd love to involve you in a project I have, Leah, which is to turn these meteorites, which are, really the villain of my book,

losing the Nobel Prize, it's Cosmic Dust. So these are fragments that I actually give away on my website to anyone with a dot edu email address because I love, and you should tell your students about that at Chapman, because I want to encourage the next generation of minds. But I'm really transfixed by these wonderful fragments of Star Stuff,

as also called by Kipp's late gray friend, Kip, you remember this gentleman, this is Carl Sagan. He said we're all made of Star Stuff. I had on his widow, And Drurian and his daughter, Sasha Sagan, my first and only to date, mother-daughter combination. I've had father-son, but not mother-daughter. But anyway, I'd love to meet up in person and tour your studio and see what you do in person.

And Kip, I always love chatting with you. It's such a pleasure. You've been a mentor of mine, whether you knew it or not, whether you like it or not, for 30 years since I met you first at Caltech in 1997, I think. Well, then that gives me some pride. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's a great flattery to hear. Thank you guys so much. Have a wonderful holiday season. And as I said, this is such a special treat for me. Thank you. Thanks so much, Brian. Thank you so much. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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