Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - David Spergel: Way of the Peaceful Cosmologist (#130)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome, everybody, to the latest edition of the Into the Impossible podcast. Today is a special episode for me because I get to interview one of my heroes in astronomy on the eve of his birthday. It's not actually his birthday. But I dressed up nonetheless. I was going to have a party hat, but I decided against that because I'm already having a bad enough hair day as it is. today's guest is none other than Dr. David Spurgel, who I've known for many, many years, his legends are numerous, plentiful, and well-deserved.

Starting point is 00:00:45 I describe him whenever I'm given the honor of introducing him at a talk or a speech of any kind. I always say he's Astronomies Chuck Yeager. Because, as you guys know, I'm a pilot, and whenever I'm putting around in my little tiny Cessna, I will get the chance to talk to air traffic control. and every pilot, no matter the tiniest plane whatsoever, will channel Chuck Yeager. We're going to go take off and run away 6-3 and take them and go to Southbound and take the airway. And then you just channel it with that drawl. And then air traffic control, you may not know this.

Starting point is 00:01:20 They have to treat you like you're Chuck Yeager, even if you're doing, you know, a whopping 75 knots. So, it's good to see you today. You know, you're clear through class brawl airspace. And I just feel when I'm doing that, I'm Chuck. Yeager. And I feel that like Chuck Yeager, every astronomer wants to be you in one way or another. You are such a legend in this field. I want to thank you. I want to wish you a happy early 60th birthday. I cannot believe it. Thank you. You have done, you and I have managed to conserve weight during COVID. You have gotten more fit. I have dropped five pounds also, but from my double chin

Starting point is 00:01:56 to my stomach. I want to congratulate you on that. And first, maybe that will take us into our first topic. Do you have any daily rituals, any habits, any practices that you engage in with regularity, or is every day kind of a new cause? No, I have some regular habits. I exercise every morning. When it's winter, I go to the gym and lift weights and then work out on the treadmill. And when the weather gets warmer here, I bicycle along the river. I'm usually up to the tip of Manhattan and back.

Starting point is 00:02:35 And where is here from my audience that might not be familiar? Where are you calling us from? I'm in Manhattan, which enables me to bike to the tip of Manhattan and back. Otherwise, it'd be a long trip. Right. If you were at Princeton still, it would be a little bit longer. But I'm sure you could do it, nevertheless. And what about academic habits or intellectual habits?

Starting point is 00:02:53 Do you have any daily practices, anything you read on a daily basis, writing, journal, anything like that? I try to keep my days clear in the morning. I'm a morning person. So, you know, I'm up at six. I exercise. I have a light breakfast. I come in and then try to prepare for my day in various ways.

Starting point is 00:03:18 So a lot of times my day is meeting with graduate students and postdocs later in the day. A habit I've tried to get into is have them send. me papers in advance. You know, they're working on something like the current draft, the current slides. So I try to spend time typically from 8 to 10 reading, reading what they've sent me, reading sometimes the scientific literature. I'll look at the archive if I have time and see what's there. and then the rest of my day then starts to fill up.

Starting point is 00:03:58 I try to avoid dealing with emails that are just things you have to answer. The first thing, I'd like to use that time for thinking. And then I'd say what I try to do with my day is if I have 15 minutes between me, meetings, that's when I check my email and try to answer it. Right? I mean, I think it's, you know, we're in this interrupt world of email and Slack. And if you want to think deeply about things, you need to set aside blocks of time to think. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:42 Just to think superficially about things you need to set about lots of times. Yeah, I've lately discovered the value of having blank spots on my calendar, but they tend fill up when you, especially when I have young kids, but even more especially when you have responsibilities for hundreds of people, as you do. I should say that currently you're at the Flatiron Institute, the Center for Computational Astrophysics, which, as David mentioned, is in Manhattan. Before that, you were a Princeton University professor for many years. You did step down. You're now a Merida's professor. You've won many awards, including the 2018 Breakthrough Prize. You won the Honument Prize and you honored me by providing an encomium for my book,

Starting point is 00:05:27 losing the Nobel Prize, which may indeed hurt your chances at one point. But you called this book, the work of my life. You said, it's not often that you get to actually touch space junk. It's far removed from your experience. But Keating's book provides an ample opportunity for tangible. No, you didn't say that. You said very glowing things. I'm very honored that you did it. You should know. I was a little nervous to provide you with the advanced copy because as I say I look up to you so much and I was nervous that you know you would think it was a bad idea to write this book you didn't exactly say it was the best idea for this book but you did tell me some things about prizes and and I thought maybe we'd start there you don't strike me as someone who's ever been motivated to win prizes and I've

Starting point is 00:06:10 had nine Nobel Prize winners on the podcast and not one of them has ever said something like oh I was really driven to win the Nobel Prize so you know most of them are not like me as venal and inconsequential as I am. But can you talk a little bit about prizes that you win them? They don't drive you. How do you strike a balance between the motivational aspects of fame or attention versus just like putting your head down and doing the work? Yeah, I mean, I was motivated to get a job, and I was certainly motivated to get tenure

Starting point is 00:06:40 and paid attention to that. I wouldn't claim to be not, you know, purely motivated by the, uh, the, uh, the drive to understand the universe. You know, you want to get a job and be able to eat and feed your family. But my primary motivation is it's fun to learn stuff. And I enjoy that. I think that's one of my motivations as a mentor. It's fun to watch people grow and develop. You know, so I think that's always been something driving me. You know, I was right before this call, I was talking with some students and postdocs applying machine learning to understand turbulence.

Starting point is 00:07:30 And it is exciting to see new results and to be able to contribute in some way to it. Now I find myself on prize committees. And then you have to ask yourself, what role does a prize play? And like, do you want to reward the person? Do you want to hold the person up as an example for younger people? This is a model you want to follow? You know, I think, for example, I'm a proponent of giving prizes to experimentalists who put really good limits. on important numbers.

Starting point is 00:08:12 We tend not to do that. But I think that's a, we have to send a message to people that careful precision measurement is important. Right. I think, you know, there are people who get very upset about the idea of giving a prize to someone

Starting point is 00:08:29 working on string theory because it's not yet a proven theory. But regardless of whether string theory turns out to be an important step, in the fundamental theory of gravity, it's already taught us a lot about the underlying structure of gravitational physics. And so I think we need to recognize parts of physics or any other field that contribute to advance.

Starting point is 00:08:58 So that to me is valuable. I think in some ways of the prizes that I've gotten, the one that was the most valuable to me was the MacArthur, because I got that early. And it gave me the resources to not worry about a bunch of things. I mean, the story I like to tell is when I got my MacArthur, there was an article about it in the Trenton Times. And I said in the interview, they asked me, how will this change my life? And I said, I was going to spend the weekend cleaning the gutters of the house. But now that I have this money, I'm going to hire someone to clean the gutters.

Starting point is 00:09:40 or physics. And I then got an email from someone who said, I clean gutters. Give me a call if you want someone to clean your gutters. So I did. And it brought for me time, which is the most valuable thing. And also, I took most of that money and set it aside for my kids' college tuitions and remove that source of stress. And so, you know, I think money early that can enable you to do things you wouldn't otherwise do is valuable. You know, I'm now moving to my new job across the street soon where I'm going to become president of Simon's Foundation. And the foundation doesn't give out prizes. There's no Simon's prize.

Starting point is 00:10:36 Right. We made a decision to do that. decision to do that because we thought it was more valuable to take the money to fund people's research. And one of the many things I've been thinking about with this transition is what are the things we can do that will be most effective at enabling transformational work. How do we fund people? When in their careers do we fund them and so on? Right. Typically, prizes I talk about in my book, you know, the Nobel Prize average age has gone up every decade by, you know, faster than the rate of inflation. And now it's, you know, recently last year we had an 89-year-old, so Roger Penrose, your friend and mine, was one of the winners. Before that, we had people in their 80s, et cetera. And so it has gone up steadily. And it's almost like by the time they receive it, they almost don't need it. And sometimes they don't make it out alive, as has happened. So people don't end up. winning it. But yeah, I agree, kind of the unsung way that people can work without necessarily being motivated for it. And I see a contradistinction between that. I don't know if you want to

Starting point is 00:11:49 talk about this necessarily. If you don't, we can always edit it out. But oftentimes on Twitter, I see things people like, for example, you mentioned string theory, one of the self-declared, you know, parents of string theory, Mitch Okaku, who I'm hoping to have on the show in a couple weeks. his new book is coming out. It's called the God equation. And the God equation, he keeps saying will do what Einstein didn't do. So there's an authority. And we'll win you a Nobel Prize. And it will provide you a theory of everything that you can write in an equation one inch long. Now, I know you're a master of latex. You could write in zero point font better than anybody. So the length of the equation is irrelevant. But the conflation of Einstein and God and the Nobel Prize,

Starting point is 00:12:32 I kind of find that they are held up as sort of synonymous to one another. And I always wondered, what is your perspective on the science as the prize? Of course, you do it, as you say, without expectation of reward thereof. But the science as the prize, or maybe perhaps the authority that comes with setting the taste or the preferences of a field, as string theory has, as someone like Kaku is talking about doing. Can you say something about that, the conflation of, of, of, of, God of these figures of authority of the Nobel Prize along with physics. I mean, at first glance, they might not have so much to do with each other.

Starting point is 00:13:11 Well, you know, one of the things about getting credit or not things, it depends what you want to accomplish. You can often been said, right, you can accomplish a lot if you don't care so much about getting credit for it. Yeah, Lombardi said that, right? Right. I think it's, I've heard that quote, contribute. associated with many different people.

Starting point is 00:13:37 I think Ben Franklin said it. Oh, right. At least I've heard that credited it to Franklin. And I think that's also true in science, right? There are things that, you know, you want to accomplish that you can do without getting credit. And then, on the other hand,

Starting point is 00:13:57 if you do get the opportunity to do other things, And if you have done made a significant contribution and it gets recognized, it gives you opportunities to do new things in the future. To me, that's the biggest benefit. You know, the Nobel Prize. So the best use of the Nobel Prize to me is someone like Steve Chu, who won the prize for really, you know, superb work he did. then used the authority of the prize to speak on areas like global warming and to speak with with, but while speaking with authority also recognize the weight of what he had to do. So there are people who use the prize to treat themselves like authority and talk about areas

Starting point is 00:14:59 where they don't know much. The halo bias, right, the halo effect. And, you know, but Chu became expert on energy policy and used that to do good. You know, Brian Schmidt, one of our colleagues who won the Nobel Prize for his work on Supernova, has become an important advocate for science in Australia. people like Brian Schmidt, who've used the prize effectively, with one of my concerns with Roger Penrose. Roger has certainly done great work in the 70s and 80s, but he's written some really poor quality papers in the last 20 years. And he's used his authority to have press conferences to make claims that were poorly vetted and incorrect.

Starting point is 00:15:53 And the danger about, you know, and this gets to, do you want to, when you think about a prize, think about someone's one singular contribution, or think about recognizing your career and realizing that in giving particularly a high-profile prize like the Nobel Prize, you're elevating someone to be a spokesperson for physics. Right. And you've certainly been on a lot of teams, and you've led teams. You've also been, you know, kind of member at large of teams. Now you're going to be leading the Simon's Foundation as a president in kind of, you've

Starting point is 00:16:29 coming in, is it July, I think July 1st. So, you know, congratulations on that. Well, richly deserved. I'm talking about leadership and teams. I often find, and, you know, I haven't been on as many teams and projects as you, but nevertheless, I always find that we kind of stumble into leadership roles. And I've had conversations with folks like Barry Barish on the podcast about leadership. And people will say, oh, it's too hard. You know, like, I'm not going to learn leadership. I'm not going to learn communication or public speaking. That's hard. And I always say, well, you know, quantum field theory is pretty darn hard too.

Starting point is 00:17:04 And I don't think you were born knowing that. Although Shelley Glashow basically hinted that he almost was born knowing that. He's the only one that's been on the show. And I'll ask you this question later, too, about the imposter syndrome. He's the only person who answered in the negative that he never experienced the impostors. Actually, Frank Wilczek also. But nevertheless, I'll ask you that towards the end. But talk about leadership and how.

Starting point is 00:17:27 Now, we don't prioritize learning about it, and yet it's one of our most important duties as a scientist, as a mentor, and even on teams, those of us who are on teams. So what would you say to those that say it's too hard to learn the rules of leadership or how to lead? I think it's a skill that can be learned. Like everything else, there's some people who have innate ability to communicate well, who are naturally born leaders. but like naturally born athletes, you do a lot better if you train. And I think I would view leadership like playing a sport. You get better by practice, you get better by reading about it, you get better by working with a coach.

Starting point is 00:18:15 So right now, you know, I'm making this transition to becoming president to the foundation. I'm working with an executive coach. When I became department chair, when I started to play leadership roles and projects, I read books on leadership. I found particularly useful books written by people in the technology industry. Because I think that's closest to what we do when we're leading teams. We're not managing factories. We're managing groups of people who are making intellectual contributions to the project.

Starting point is 00:18:50 So learning, well, there's a lot of things I think you need to learn as a leader. You need to learn to communicate clearly, have a clear message about what you expect of people. You want to build a team of people where you bring in the brightest people. You have to recognize that the brighter the people you are, what are are people brighter than you on your team? That's easy for some of us. And you then want to make sure that they feel comfortable speaking their mind. And you want to make sure that people, you know, you want to develop the right culture. I mean, this is something I was very conscious of when we built the Center of Computational Astrophysics,

Starting point is 00:19:36 was thinking about what is the intellectual culture you want to maintain. You want to establish. You want people to treat each other with respect. you know, but you also feel they can't speak out, right? So you don't balance that. And yeah, so I think leadership and mentorship are things where we need to be trained. I think one of the failings of the academic system is we make a transition from postdoc to junior faculty. And the universities don't set time aside to say to you, all right, you now need to learn pedagogic.

Starting point is 00:20:22 You need to learn mentorship. And there are some basic lessons. I mean, everyone develops their own style. But we can certainly learn a lot from others, and we don't train junior faculty on making that transition. You know, later in my career, what I went from, a faculty member to department chair, we had, one three-hour meeting with all the new incoming chairs where we learned, got some basic training. Three hours was good. You know, I was discussing this with one of my colleagues who is thinking about becoming a dean. And we discussed that, you know, if I was a dean at a university,

Starting point is 00:21:06 I would want to make sure that all of my incoming chairs worked with a coach, had some training on how do you run a department? How do you work with your faculty? How do you work with your staff? How do you work with your students? How do you run a large organization? I think we've all seen departments that have suffered when people who are very good scientists

Starting point is 00:21:35 and are smart people. So we can't all be great athletes, But, you know, pretty much all of us, if we're not disabled in some way, can run a mile. Right. You know. Speak for yourself. Well, I think, you know, you want to lose that COVID-20. I wish it was 20.

Starting point is 00:22:01 God, you're giving me a head start. I don't deserve. But you're absolutely right. I talked to a Navy submarine commander. This guy had a $1.5 billion nuclear submarine called the USS Santa Fe. his name is David Marque. He's been on the show, and he wrote, his first book was called Turn the Ship Around, where he took the sub from worst to first in the Navy and different metrics.

Starting point is 00:22:22 And I think that was the key in that book, having metrics, because if you go into it as a scientist, you think, oh, scientists are naturally driven by metrics, but then it's really like sociology, as you're saying. No one says there's no one set of skills, scientists or professor, and as there is for a baseball player. I mean, there might be some subtlety and some might be more students of the game. But basically, you're either pitching, you're hitting, you're fielding. There's a more limited set of skills. But we have to deal with knowledge and wisdom.

Starting point is 00:22:52 And in his second book, he told me the most, his second book is called Leadership is Language. And in that book, he said, the worst word that you can say as a leader is right. Like, we're going to launch a space shuttle today, even though the weather's cold, right? or like do you have any problems with making that landing, you know, Chuck Yeager to write? And so I think it goes both ways. It can also be that the person in the right seat in the plane or the student goes along with things that they don't really have the, they don't really have enough knowledge to know that they should or should not trust or leadership. And going back to my experience to say Bicep, there were many times along the way when, you know, I could have stepped in. I could have said, no, halt the presses.

Starting point is 00:23:34 you know, and I had concerns, as you know, and then we talked about that, and they were driven by papers that you wrote with Ichiro and other people, long before the event itself. But I never stopped it. And I never said, we shouldn't land there, Captain, you know, or we should turn the ship around, you know. And so I think it's hard because as a student scientist, you don't really feel like you have the ability to speak up to this professor. I mean, after all, you know, he or she is the chair. Princeton or UC San Diego, wherever. So how do you balance that? How do you balance the need for a student to have to be a little bit of their own shepherds of their career, but also they have to trust their advisor, their mentor? It's a very perilous dynamic, also one that's never taught.

Starting point is 00:24:22 Nobody teaches you how to be a grad student, a postdoc, just like they don't really teach us how to be a professor. So what would you say to a student who feels like something's a little bit off, but they don't have enough kind of historical legacy of knowledge to know this isn't right. Well, I think the first thing to do is ask questions. If you don't understand why we're doing, why the experiments doing it this way, you're doing a theoretical paper, you don't understand why we're, I think one of the most important phrases for all of us to learn is I don't understand. we should never be embarrassed to say I don't understand you know or I'm a bit confused here

Starting point is 00:25:07 can you explain why we're doing this and you know it probably is true nine times out of ten when someone explains why they're doing it they're doing it for a good reason and if you're part of a paper and you want to understand and you're reading as a co-author and you don't understand why we're doing this if you don't know you know I I like to tell people if you don't understand it, a lot of other people don't understand. The reader's not going to, right. You should make it as easy as possible.

Starting point is 00:25:37 So I think for a student, you want to be asking questions, right? You know, why are we making this assumption and so on? And every now and then, you ask that question and it's like, I don't know why we're doing this. Why don't we make this assumption? You know, and this tends to be, I feel that this point, you know, how I contribute to science in my discussions.

Starting point is 00:26:06 Right? It's like, you know, someone, this is why I mentioned early on when you talked about my daily habits. I like to have students sometimes send me in advance a write-up of what they've done. And I like to, as I look at it, I ask like, why are you making these assumptions? And for me, that's, I think, often the way I can contribute most of the project is asking questions and trying to understand what, you know, understanding for myself forces me to ask questions. And then, you know, people like to say there's, you know, no such thing is a dumb question. And that really is mostly true. I mean, there's questions you ask because you're simply not paying attention or you haven't done the, you know, you haven't done the homework, right? You missed the previous four lectures that explain what that is, right?

Starting point is 00:27:03 Those questions, you might want to at least look over the notes. But most of the time, if you don't understand something, you want to ask those questions. And I think a piece of leadership is encouraging that, encouraging people. to ask questions and creating environments where they can do that. There's some tricks I've learned to get people to ask questions and speak more, right? Just go around the room. You know, you make sure that rather than just having the loudest voice heard, you try to hear from all voices. Especially underrepresented voices. I find that a lot with my students who come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds in physics, African-American.

Starting point is 00:27:50 students or female in science. And even in leadership positions, David, there are people that you and I know very well. And sometimes I'll be in a meeting. I'm like, you're so much wiser and smarter than me, but you're not speaking up. Let me just be a boorish, you know, stupid mansplanner and just ask you what do you think, you know, to one of these, one of our colleagues. And I'll be surprised I'm just like, God, if you didn't answer, like, I'll hurt myself, patting myself on the back, but only for asking them, please tell me what you think. Because I think it can really be dangerous, not to do what you just said, go around the room. Yeah, no, you want to hear everyone's voice.

Starting point is 00:28:26 And I think when you're the only woman in the room, you're the only African-American, you know, and even if you're just, you know, we all have had moments, maybe not Frank Wilczek, I guess you mentioned where we feel inadequate. We feel we don't know enough. and we feel awkward asking questions. You know, I'm finding myself again in this situation,

Starting point is 00:29:01 which is, I think, refreshing and growing, right? Because none of them becoming president of a foundation that works on things like autism. What do I know about autism? What do I know about neuroscience? Everyone else in the room knows more than me. And, you know, I know I'm inadequate in this, but on the other hand, I need to learn.

Starting point is 00:29:23 And I'll only learn by asking questions. And I would say nine out of my ten questions are questions, you know, of someone who's ignorant and learning. They're not dumb, they're ignorant questions. And I studied the field. But every now and then you come into an area and you ask a question. And it turns out to actually be an interesting question. because you think about things differently from other people.

Starting point is 00:29:54 Right. And I think that, you know, having that taste, developing that taste, it takes some confidence and confidence is built on, you know, some level of past success. Absolutely. But certainly, you know, failure, you know, I did a Google Ngram search once and it was like, what, if you hear the following words, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. And you ask Google, what two words are the most commonly used before those words, it was the best thing that ever happened to me?

Starting point is 00:30:19 It turns out it's I failed or I got fired. In my case, I had both experiences in my life. And it was the best experience. I wouldn't be talking to you. I don't know what I'd be doing without failure. So ironically, we think of our successes as building this great capability and capacity. It's more often than not our failures. And it's just amazing that someone who presumably hasn't failed all that much has done so much and succeeded so much.

Starting point is 00:30:45 So maybe, you know, as pilots say, you have to learn from the failure. because you won't live long enough to make them all yourself. I do think actually some of my most important work came out of, in a sense, failures. So I spent about four years working on the idea that topological defects, cosmic strings, textures, sort of defects produced at phase transitions, could be the source of large-scale structure. And we wrote a bunch of papers on this. this and I understood it well enough to understand the predictions of the model. I would argue in retrospect that's actually a success.

Starting point is 00:31:28 Exploring a model and realizing its predictions is a good thing. But when the new data came in from Kobe, which the first measurements, the microwave background, as you know well, our model was dead. I knew it was ruled out. And you know, I did not respond to that result. with joy, you know, when you've worked on something for four years and the data rules it out, that's not a happy moment. No. On the other hand, it made me rethink where things were going.

Starting point is 00:32:03 It actually made me appreciate how quickly the microwave background was going to get interesting. So I then decided to start thinking about what the microwave background can tell us about the basic properties of the universe, it's geometry, its composition, and so on. And that eventually led to a series of papers that provided the science case for Dublin. Right. So I would say the failures of those four years going in the wrong direction, in a sense, led to the successes that followed in the subsequent years. Right. Yeah. And in fact, I had on John Mather last month on the podcast and he was talking, you know, he's much more a matter of fact, I think, but the experience of the Challenger disaster, setting back Kobe and just like introducing

Starting point is 00:32:55 complete uncertainty, as we scientists like to say, you know, if you don't write down the uncertainty associated with some answer that you get, you can't really say you understand it in full breath completely. I want to talk about a quote that I often think about with regard to you in regards to pedagogy, et cetera, which is attributed to somebody, I believe it was the Labavitur rabbi, the rabbi of the Habbat movement back in the early part of the mid part of the 1900s. And he said, a good leader creates many followers, but a great leader creates many leaders. And I wonder if we can talk about the leadership philosophy. You're very famous and well-known for saying the main thing students need is love.

Starting point is 00:33:44 What do you mean by that? They need a sense of self-confidence. They need a sense of support. I think as a parent, your goal is to first teach your kids the basic skills, but then give them the confidence to go out in their own and find their own path. And I think that's the same thing we want to do as mentors. You know, we do need to teach our students some basic skills, but more important than the basic skills is the self-confidence to succeed. And, you know, when I've said that about students, Neelah, that's actually a quote from Dennis Shama.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Oh, right. That's true. So Dennis Shama was the mentor of Stephen Hawking. Roger Penrose. Martin Reese. Martin Reese, the Baron of Ludlow. That's right. Astronomer Royal who tells the Queen her horoscope every morning.

Starting point is 00:34:56 Exactly. James Binney, one of my mentors, a lot of people studied with Denishama. Interestingly, Denishama never got a professorship at Cambridge. Because at the time, there was a feeling there were too many Jews who had professorships already. So, but he had a tremendous effect on the field. Some through his work, but primarily through his students.

Starting point is 00:35:24 And one of my collaborators, Graciella Galmini, Graciella and I worked together when we were both at Harvard, had gone to Sisa in Trieste, where Shama was now a professor. and she asked him as a starting assistant professor, what do students need? And it was Dennis who said this to Graciela, and Graciela told me this. And what Dennis said was if you give students a sense of love,

Starting point is 00:35:56 a sense of self-confidence, they'll find an interesting project. They'll have the confidence to find an interesting project. They'll have a confidence to do interesting work. And, you know, you don't want to give people, false feedback. They come in with poor quality work and you say that's wonderful because they know that. People know it. On the other hand, you do want to encourage people to take those next steps and you know, encourage people to realize like, you know, if you don't

Starting point is 00:36:39 succeed, try, try again. And then if that fails, take a different approach. That's so funny. You mentioned that's exactly what John Mather said. He said, you know, it's okay to have heterodox views, maybe even crank views, alternative views, but only so far. You know, at some point you have to be able to falsify your hypothesis or whatever, even if it is heterodox and we're all for diversity of viewpoint, right? But that leads me into my next set of questions and that's related to the baron that you just mentioned, Lord Martin Rees, who on my show, we talked about the value of debate in science. And he said, and I quote to me, most of debate is pointless because people don't really change their minds. And it can actually

Starting point is 00:37:29 create an illusion of uncertainty or perhaps give equal weight to a very, very much minority viewpoint, not, you know, obviously in a basket. But, and you participated very graciously on the great debate, you know, redux that we did on the 100th anniversary of the great debate, Shappley Curtis debate, and we had a great conversation. But, you know, as fun as that was with Adam Reese and Sarah Seeger, Wendy Friedman, Jan 11, and you and me, you know, we didn't get that much out of it. And actually, I'll have a link because I made an e-book, which I'll send to you, an illustrated e-book from that event, which is available for all my subscribers. So please subscribe to my mailing list, Brian Keating.com. You've got a copy of that.

Starting point is 00:38:13 David's words were very fascinating. But anyway, what about debate? Are there people you won't debate, so to speak? I mean, obviously someone who has, you know, bad intentions, but are there viewpoints? I mean, would you debate somebody? I recently had someone on who is a very well-known Cambridge University-trained doctor of philosophy, who's an intelligent design proponent. He's not a young earth creationist.

Starting point is 00:38:36 Would you talk to anybody as long as they have pure motives, or do you feel like Martin does? it's not worth it. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main

Starting point is 00:38:58 event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry and the best have you wait in the world, Frances Angano versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time.

Starting point is 00:39:16 depends on the person. I think you're very rarely going to convince the other person in a debate, right? I mean, I, you know, you can get, I think about this with Facebook. Can you point out someone who has been convinced of another political view by reading something on Facebook? I'm not familiar with this phenomenon. Politics, right? I mean, how many people say? No, that's what I mean, politics. Politics, that's right. On the other hand, there are people who listen to these debates who come in with open mind. So it depends on the forum. There's a balance where if it's a discussion of something like intelligent design is by engaging in this discussion, is this an opportunity to convey to an interested but not scientifically literally at audience, why we actually have a very good scientific, why evolution really represents by far the best model we have. So, you know, and, you know, sometimes, you know, I engaged in a debate once with this guy who wrote a book that the Big Bang never happened. And, um, is that Jeff Burbage here

Starting point is 00:40:54 at UC, San Diego? No, no, it was this. You know, in fact, I remember when Jeff Burbage came to Princeton to give a colloquium. And I was an undergraduate. And Martin Schwarschild, one of my heroes, was sitting in the front row, as Martin often did, and asked a series of pointed questions. And Martin turned to me afterwards and said, the reasons I ask this questions is for you. that as a student you should realize the weaknesses in these arguments. So for me, the reason to engage the debate is if there's going to be students listening

Starting point is 00:41:40 who will not understand the weaknesses of those arguments. Yeah. And I often feel I say this, and I did a video about this around the presidential debates, you know, I feel like it's almost, you know, we should look to the scientific way, of debating. Again, the way that Shappley and Curtis debated, eventually, you know, Shappley came around. It took some evidence to convince him, which is fine. But he was convincible from the outset. In other words, if the evidence had existed, if the data were good enough, as Einstein did, Einstein debate, as you know, better than me, the validity of the Big Bang model. And then he saw

Starting point is 00:42:18 data, the evidence convinced him. But if you're not in principle, possibly falsifiable in your tenets of what you believe, whether it's political or whatever. I do agree that a lot of it is pointless, but you're right. I hadn't considered that notion of, you know, the benefit to the student. Let me give you two examples of people who have been on your show. Okay. So Adam Reese, Adam is trying to convince people that there really is strong evidence that local measurements, the Hubble constant, give a large value. Wendy Frieden, you've been using. Wendy Friedman, This is another method and argues for a different value. They both fundamentally are most interested in getting at the answer.

Starting point is 00:43:07 And when later this year the James Webb Space Telescope launches, hopefully a launch goes well, deploy successful, we will have a telescope far more powerful than Hubble. it will measure distances to the nearby galaxies, and it will get those distances more accurately than Hubble. And I think that data could easily convince Wendy or me that Adam is completely right, the data improves, and that just gets more and more solid. On the other hand, it could show that blending for Cepheid

Starting point is 00:43:49 is more of a problem and more complicated in ways we thought and some subtle things were going on, and Adam will be convinced. So that's a scientific debate where people will respond to evidence. I am not convinced that your recent guest, Avi Lowe, is actually interested in what a mehamea is, rather than wants to promote the idea that he's seen aliens.

Starting point is 00:44:16 I think that the response to claims like this could be easily explained by a solid nitrogen, much like what we see on the surface of Pluto, is a much simpler and more plausible explanation. And, you know, we're seeing discussions that are about selling books, not about trying to understand the way the universe works. Well, I have to defend him a little bit, just to make it interesting for that. I thought you were going to bring up Roger Penrose or Giant Narla Carr, who was a guest about a month ago, who is still not convinced of the validity of the Big Bang model, but he's impossible to not love him. He's such a gentleman. And anyone, you know, who is, you know, so close to Fred Hoyle, there's got to be some good, good,

Starting point is 00:45:09 natured fun to be bad with that person. But let's talk about Avi. So I agree with you that I don't believe that Avi believes what he's claiming, but for a completely different reason. And that is, I said to him, Avi, you know, if only you knew a billionaire, you know, that could fund a research voyage to Omuamua. Let's not talk about these objects coming in the future that you think will be discovered with the Beir Rubin Observatory or maybe with J.BST or what have you. By the way, that's going to be based on just sheer number of N-gram searches on the Into the Impossible Podcast, that telescope is not going to have one second of downtime. Sarah Seeger was telling me how much she's looking forward to using it.

Starting point is 00:45:50 Now, you know, we're hearing all these different things. Avi wants to, but getting back to Avi, I said, instead of sending a bunch of iPhone four cameras to Proxima Centurib, why don't you just get Yuri, your buddy Milner, to sponsor. By the way, he sponsored your breakthrough prize, if I'm not mistaken. And he's a very, very important figure, I think, in modern science. But anyway, get him to send him. a CubeSat to Omuamua before it goes, you know, it's still, it's not traveling nearly the speed of light that your cameras are going to have to get close to. And he said, no, no, no, Brian, don't worry. If I'm right, there'll be plenty of Omuamua like objects coming and Vera Rubin will observe them and all will be well. And I said, you know, look, if I had, if I believe that that this was true, I wouldn't stop at any, there's nothing I would stop at to validate my theory. And I said to him, you're, you're being accused of, you know, trying to get popular attention going.

Starting point is 00:46:43 on the Joe Rogan show and whatnot. I don't have anything against it, by the way, because I do think science should be popularized, and I think it's natural that somebody who talks about aliens and alien technology is going to be lumped together with the cooks, right? But I think you're saying something. I think there's a standard of proof for important claims.

Starting point is 00:47:06 And, you know, before you resort to and make large public announcements, about important revolutionary claims. The claim ought to be widely vetted, and you ought, you know, and that doesn't mean, I think it's very appropriate to think about these things. Right. And he's written like 80 papers about it.

Starting point is 00:47:31 It's not, you know, that, oh, here's a book. Obviously, the book got him a lot of attention, but, you know, and I also, I think that, you know, the, you know, there's a, I'm not sure that the ideas, of other people are been treated with the respect they deserve by. Yeah, and that's certainly true. There's a well-known incident where he was very, very, you know, he was acting very uncollegally. Disnissive of someone who has devoted her career to doing patient.

Starting point is 00:48:08 Who is a guest? Jill. Who is a guest? To go back to something we talked about earlier, I have a lot of admiration for people. people like Jill who devote a lot of energy for doing really hard things. Yeah. One of the greatest compliments I ever got was in addition to your encomium on my book. But Jill read it.

Starting point is 00:48:28 And not only did she read it, the day before it was due, she was going to give a talk or press conference. And one of my friends at the SETI Institute had to pick her up to go give the talk. And he arrived at her house in Berkeley, and she was all disheveled. And she didn't have her makeup on her hair, whatever, looks, you know, looks whatever. like I do every day, but, you know, she cleans up very beautifully. And he said, she said, I was up all night reading this darn book. And it was my book.

Starting point is 00:48:55 And she gave it, she gave it, she gave an incumbent. She's been a guest on the show as well. And she's the, you know, like she's, she's the Chuck Yeager on the West Coast, shall we say, of astrophysics. The person you want to emulate, cool under fire, just a scientist, scientist at every level. But, but yeah, so these controversies come up. And Avi and his book is very dismissive of. things like the multiverse. And this is why I pressed them on it. I said, we might not be able to falsify the multiverse, right? Because it could be that there are multiverse, there are other

Starting point is 00:49:24 universes. We don't have access to them. And we have a mutual, you know, disdain for, for kind of physics that can't be necessarily tested. But I said, Avi, you could test Omuamua's alien origin by visiting, literally visiting it, unlike another universe, which we can't probably even in practice visits. So I want to ask you, though, about these kind of unfalsifiable things. I talked to John Preskill. Sorry to drop so many names. He's the Richard Feynman professor at Caltech, a little technical college up the road. You don't spend any time in California anymore. I really miss you coming out here. But next time you're here. You know, I was hoping to get there. This thing called COVID happened. What? COVID.

Starting point is 00:50:04 I haven't heard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that intelligent design? Is that co-variant intelligent design? Well, that's actually a very interesting question is what is the origin of COVID, not something I'm expert on it all. But I think there is an interesting debate on its origin. Yes. So, but getting back to John Preskell. So I said, because he was friends with Stephen Hawking famously, and they had many bets. And one of the things that he was most interested in is inflation and also how the early university evolving, indigent quantum computing, which was a subject of our conversation. But at one point, I said, you know, because he's talking about string theory and your friend and mine, Kammer and

Starting point is 00:50:44 Alpha, another guest, when I ask you at the end of the show, I'm going to ask you what information would you put on a billion-year-long lasting time capsule. And Qumran said the equations of string theory. And I said to John, I said, what would Feynman say about that? Feynman is famous for saying, I don't care how beautiful your theory is. I don't care what kind of equations they predict. Unlike Dirac, if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. But David, what about things you can't experiment on? Do they count as wrong or right?

Starting point is 00:51:15 John just said try harder, which I found a little unsatisfying. What do you think about things you can't even in principle test via experiment? Are they not even wrong as Palli? I think Palli would say. Well, I think, so string theory is an interesting example. So if we, in principle, you could imagine we understood, which we do not. yet how string vacu were selected and we knew a way of predicting fundamental constants. We could predict the constants of the standard model from string theory.

Starting point is 00:52:00 That would be a tremendous success. As it's nowhere near my colleagues or colleagues working this are no one near this yet. Not only that, they could predict not just those constants but the properties of the of something like dark matter would drop out of the theory and then be confirmed by experiment. I think we'd all look at that and say, wow, that was a success. If that were to happen,

Starting point is 00:52:28 and we then understood string theory at a level where we said it predicted the multiverse, which I don't, you know, then I think we would be forced to take the idea of multiverses, more seriously as an interesting and untestable outcome of this theory that seems to be a good description of nature that we've tested in other ways. So, you know, I could see a path where I would take multiverses seriously. At this point, until we have, you know, our ability to

Starting point is 00:53:08 understand them are limited by things we have no access to. What's the right? prior for initial conditions for the universe. I don't think it's an interesting discussion. I think this got, you know, when I look at areas of physics, a question I asked myself is, is my investing my time, or now that I'm president of a foundation that supports basic research, are our investing resources in this likely to advance the field in the next 20, 30 years? or not even likely, have a chance of advancing the field. And, you know, the, I think string theory is, to me, is an interesting bet. I've been very impressed by the recent work that came out of techniques people learn by string theory,

Starting point is 00:54:07 but doesn't actually rest itself on string theory, on understanding the information paradox with black holes. I think there's been a lot of progress on that in the last couple of years, and that's a profound question. That really has been, the ideas that have come out of people thinking about string theory has really helped advance that. We wouldn't have done that without that. So I think there are some real advances coming from string theory. On the other hand, I see most of the work I've seen on multiverses, is to me not that interesting and not that likely to lead to insight.

Starting point is 00:54:54 Of course, I could be wrong. Yeah. Right? That's, you know, we place our bets. We bet, you know, and we place our bets most fundamentally with our time. That's right. Although, yeah, lately I've been thinking about, in the context of kids, you know, they say, as you said, you know, the most important resource is time. It's true. I mean, although we watch enough cat videos, at least around here, to put that to the test.

Starting point is 00:55:20 But my feeling is actually innocence is the most irredeemable, a non-fungible form of resource. Because really, once you lose your innocent, whatever that means, it could be, I've talked to soldiers after they came back from going to war and actually ending the lives of other people. And they would have been, their lives would have been ended. And, you know, you look at what can you get back? I think with research, yeah, there are so many dollars. And when you think about your portfolio, how are you going to risk balance it? How are you going to hedge it? I love talking to Jim about the Simon's Observatory, getting back to who you're going to be replacing. And it's good he's finally retiring. I hope he'll have enough to live off of in retirement. But Jim always said,

Starting point is 00:56:06 you know, if we detect inflationary generated B modes with primordial perturbations using the Simon's Observatory, we'll be dancing in the streets and we win an Nobel Prize. However, if we don't, that might even be more interesting. It might, you know, cast, have theological or philosophical implications. The last kind of personal question or sort of scientific question, semi-personal question before we close out with the three questions I ask everybody, how much does what you do matter to you in that? You obviously are very accomplished. You can do anything. And I think a lot of our colleagues and the students that you've turned into faculty all around the world, they could do anything, they could be CEOs, they could be, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:47 hedge fund traders, as Jim might have them. But how much what you do, do you feel matters? And the ultimate questions, I know you're a very philosophical person. I know that you, that you're very knowledgeable about religion, theology, et cetera. What do you think is the value of a life in science like this? And does it give you mean? And can knowledge, in other words, science means knowledge, not wisdom. But has it brought a sense of wisdom to you or a sense of wonder? What metaphysical satisfaction do you get? If any, I'm not sure if you do from what you do as a scientist.

Starting point is 00:57:27 I believe in the scientific enterprise. I think one of humanity's great accomplishments, and certainly one of the great accomplishments, of the last few hundred years has been our deepening understanding of the universe. And by that I don't just mean of cosmology. I mean everything from, you know, the biology and anthropology, the whole broad sweep of science. We understand more now than we did in the past. And we have done something that, well, some of the other.

Starting point is 00:58:11 outcomes of science and increased knowledge has led to technologies that have made life worse, in many ways life for humanity is better. A smaller fraction of the human population goes to bed hungry now than ever in our history. Right? I think there are more people are free in various ways. There's a hell of a lot of it of quality, but there's a lot more equality than there was in the Middle Ages. The world is a better place, and I think some of that is the advance of science. And I feel fortunate to be able to contribute in a number of different ways to advancing science. Some through my own work, perhaps in the long run I think my greatest contributions will be through training students, right?

Starting point is 00:59:06 That there's a, I've had the good fortune to train, you know, probably above what are 100 people who have been my graduate students or postdoc or undergrad, many of whom I've done really exciting work. And the fact that I've helped train them and contribute to them to me means I'm helping to contribute to science. So for me,

Starting point is 00:59:31 contributing to our understanding is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Very good, David. Thank you very much for that. And now we're going to enter the Into the Impossible Thrilling Three. If you have a few more minutes, David, will you bear with us? Sure, I do. Okay, great. So, but to get David's answers, you're going to have to subscribe to this channel, Dr. Ryan Keating on YouTube. And then you can also subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Spotify, wherever you get podcast bought and sold. Podcasts are free, but your time is valuable, and I appreciate every listener. And now we're going to ask David the questions that I ask all my guests.

Starting point is 01:00:10 Today will be especially poignant because it is the eve of his birthday. And he is turning 60, and that is a milestone. He's reaching midlife. So to get David's answers, you're going to need to subscribe to my mailing list, which you can do at bryankeating.com and sign up. And you'll get actually some tips and tricks on life. from Jim Simons, who is, for now, the holder of the office that David will then subsume in July richly deserved. So signing off, if you do not subscribe, you'll miss out on these final three answers

Starting point is 01:00:42 to the questions I'm about to ask David. I hope you will join us over there, and you can do so in your inbox, in your email, wherever you get your email. Well, David Spurgel, may you reach the biblical age, maybe exceed it with the developments and breakthroughs that the Simons Foundation will undoubtedly come to under your stewardship. I wish you blessings of... We are... One of the things we're funding is a program called the plasticity of the aging brain.

Starting point is 01:01:10 Wow. Oh, that's phenomenal. So, and one of the things to get back to something you asked at the very beginning that I think we're learning is that just having good blood flow to the brain helps. So get out and start running in the morning.

Starting point is 01:01:36 Or get on that peloton. That's right. I got to get the laundry off of it first. That's always the biggest obstacle. David, we love you. We're richer for knowing you. You're a blessing in our lives as cosmologists, as scientists, and just as students of the universe.

Starting point is 01:01:57 I wish you great luck. A happy birthday. And I hope that you'll come back again on the Into the Impossible podcast. I look forward to it and I look forward to when the world is traveling comfortably and come out and visit San Diego. See you out there. I hope so.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And I hope to see you in New York City and I miss my ancestral homeland. David B. Always welcome. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hello. I'm Stuart Volko, producer of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Keating, Please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, rating and leaving

Starting point is 01:02:38 reviews. It really helps keep our universe expanding. We appreciate hearing from you, and read every review and comment. We're always open to your suggestions for future episodes. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, and join our premieres every Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time for live chats. Follow Brian on Twitter, Medium, and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating.

Starting point is 01:03:07 For free access to exclusive content, please visit Professor Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Eric Vary, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating. For more information on the Arthur C. Clarke Center, go to imagination.ucsd.edu.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - David Spergel: Way of the Peaceful Cosmologist (#130)

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