Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Exploring the Edge of the Universe: Brian Keating on Telescopes, CMB, and Scientific Discovery

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 In this captivating conversation, we dive deep into the cosmos with renowned cosmologist, podcaster, and UC San Diego professor Dr. Brian Keating. Joined by Mike Misha and Xinghui, Brian takes us on a journey from the childhood wonder inspired by the Moon to the high-altitude peaks of Chile and the frigid expanse of the South Pole, where he's helped pioneer the development of cutting-edge telescopes aimed at unlocking the secrets of the universe. This episode is from the 632nm Podcast - Takeaways: 00:00 Moon Fascination and Antarctic Astronomy 09:38 "Proof of Earth's Orbit via Parallax" 14:36 Uncharted Light Polarization Exploration 19:45 Challenges in Measuring Polarization 23:41 "Transistor Tech for Microwave Signals" 26:52 Optimal Telescope Size for Science 31:13 Collaborative Scientific Learning Journey 37:20 "Steady State vs. Big Bang" 46:43 Universe's Earliest Light Revealed 51:25 Rapid Advances in Observational Technology 58:01 Motel Suicide and Leadership Shift 58:50 Near-Miss: Nobel Prize Revelation 01:04:13 Missed Signals, Planck Pressure 01:13:54 Detecting Cosmic Phenomena with Telescopes 01:18:42 Balanced Research in Cosmology 01:23:27 Space Telescope Vision Expansion 01:26:51 AI's Limits in Predicting Relativity 01:31:28 Reevaluating the Nobel Prize Criteria 01:38:20 Musk's Mars Vision: Science Disruption 01:41:46 Balancing Science and Personal Life - Watch the episode on other platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z3THHIQorc&list=PL87anKnyrxSINa7feABRBcXA_fIQzqPH0 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-we-build-telescopes-to-explore-the-early-cosmos/id1751170269?i=1000719643327 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/60hbFQNpmBJvDsdHM5WgDW?si=e91b6fbc60a5411d Twitter: https://x.com/632nmPodcast/status/1950231216143126552 Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/632nmpodcast/p/listening-to-the-echoes-of-the-big?r=409hsq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true ------------------------------------------------------------------- Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In this episode, Mike, Misha, and Xingwei visit Dr. Brian Keating, cosmologist, podcaster, and professor at UC San Diego. They discussed the cutting-edge instruments he helped develop to measure the faint polarization of the cosmic microwave background. Brian waxes poetically about taking inspiration from Galileo and building telescopes in the high peaks of Chile. He also walks the team through some of the techniques and assumptions that allow astronomers to look up at the sky and deduce the makeup of our universe.

Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Brian Keating. Like to start off the conversation on the more celestial Nolan, what's your favorite object in the night sky? And what does it mean to you? Well, I would have to say the moon. The moon is probably my favorite object in the night sky. And it was really the first thing I ever saw as a kid and wondered about and got attracted to astronomy because of it. And when I got my first telescope, of course, the first thing to want to look after it. And it actually drew me to eventually end up at the south.

pole where during the summertime at the South Pole, there's only two objects you can see. They're astronomical. And so people wonder, why do we want to the South Pole to do science and astronomy when you can't even see more than two objects, but one of them is the moon. And even in the wintertime, you can see the moon. You can't see the sun. So the moon is the only celestial object always visible at all times of the year from the South Pole. So it has this unique distinction. And it's always been the most fascinating object to me. I want to go to the moon, visit the moon, mine the moon, and you know, get to the moon. And, you know, just a unique get some minerals there, maybe live on the moon someday.

So it's quite, it's quite always been quite, you know, mesmerized. I was saying, every way past war. Are there these special features of the moon, your particular, enjoy below it? Yes, there is a crater. I believe it's a Copernicus crater. And it was sketched by Galileo through the telescope. And his sketches of it are beautiful. They're very artistic, but they're completely scientifically inaccurate.

And Galileo is my hero, biggest hero. I remember having the science, completely follow his flaws and FOIAs, but he was an amazing scientist, and he knew how to do data science before we do. So he wasn't depicting the way that the craters actually looked or the mountains in the way that they actually lived. He was depicting how it felt when he saw them.

In other words, what was a visual sensation of looking at this giant crater that's on the meridian, the prime meridian of the moon as we see it? And he sketched it as he saw it, and, you know, today he'll look at it and realize that he made these sketches, you know, 400 plus years ago, and city areas no shoes.

And we're still using them, debating them, thinking about them, trying to learn more about what he saw, why he saw it, and how it changed the course of human history more than almost any other discovery, observation, or invention. When we look at the moon,

why many people originally figure out where it was and what it was? Like, what's the rigorous proof? You know, we're told in school that the moon is a satellite of the earth. What's the rigorous proof of that? Ah, yes. So I like to always, you know,

ask my students, they can prove that the I tell them the earth it is flat and you will fail unless you can disprove me and the cosmology class and i'd say well we can prove it but oh i don't know man uh almost none of them can prove that the sun is not the center of the sources or is the center i say it is the center i say prove me wrong i think prove the earth is not the center of the solution so all these things i would say 0.1% of the human population can prove that the earth is forbidden around the sun not the other way around so that's the way it looks right earth looks like it looks like it be orbited by the sun or the other way.

And certainly the moon orbits are on the sun, so why not go out the sun? The moon orbits around the Earth, so why not the Sun orbiting on the Earth too? So what is most surprisingly, or why do we know, how do we know of that? It comes out to geometry. So the link between geometry,

which is a study in math, but actually the geo and geometry means Earth. So the study of the Earth led to the study of mathematics that we now associated with geometry, and then of course, higher geometry, like our optimistic geometry, even higher dimensional gravity, objects like string theoretic things, membrane theory, those all come from geomitri,

which is measurement of Earth. So the measurement of the Earth led to the notion that the Earth is a sphere, very close to a sphere. It's not a perfect spirit, but it's very close to it. And then going at different distances on the Earth's surface allowed us to make measurements of the distance to the Moon. But not only that, Galileo actually estimated the height of the mountains on the Moon, which is very crucial through a telescope from the shadows that were cast at different times during the lunar year, which is the Earth, Earth month. One completely revolution around it's illuminating or the body that it orbits around and it's called this year or synodic period versus the moon's orbit up here. So he was able to measure

the high of the mountains to within a few kilometers of what their actual value is just with a crude telescope that's no bigger than the lens on a camera, a DSLR camera. So this is incredible that he was able to do that. And then once we go to different place on Earth, the parallax effect allows you to show that the distance that it is away and where it is on Earth. And that's actually how we mapped up all the different geometries of our solar system. So this is like the original assumption is that space is this three-dimensional Euclidean thing that happens here in front of us and also at the move. Yes, having never been to the moon, they have to make that assumption.

Right. So a lot of the early prehistoric notions of the geometry of space ton, as you might say, came from incorrect assumptions that had some kernel of truth. So Aristotle, for example, felt that heavy things fall faster than light things. So if I take this very nice swag mug with the logo, finding your way, I won't show you my swag. I think there's real, you know about Prize Vidalium and I got from Ray Weiss to you. Oh, really?

Yeah. So it's much lighter, even though this made a solid goal. And so if I dropped them, they would go at different rates. But Galileo said, you idiot, you know, Harris. Just put one on top of the other, and he could prove that they fall at the exact same rate. But he had a kernel of truth. They're all attracted at the Earth's center.

So once you had a radial direction, that started to map out that there are different positions in space in the third dimension, which we can't see. We don't see death. So we look at the Andromeda galaxy. It's six times bigger than the full moon's diameter. So things with the terms of their proximity to us, we'd say, oh, it's got to be six to 12 times closer than the moon is. But it's actually 2.3 million light years away from, you know, not 250,000 miles away from the Earth, like, seconds of one and a quarter light second. So Galileo kind of started to disabuse people of the notion of the notion of the world.

Earth being the center, but there was always a notion of three dimensions, that you can go places on land, you could go places in my seat, you could go at great distances, and if you had a tall enough, you know, a tower that you would see things farther and farther away. And that's another thing that Galileo did. He didn't invent the telescope. Actually, Dutch invented the telescope, and they had access to the finest crystal, and they were traders, so they used their merchant economy, you know, capitalism, you know, sorry, you guys, capitalism is one of the best inventions on Earth, and I'm just joking. Capitalism led them to be, not just joking. Capitalism led them to the, not not only a military power, but an economic power would lead them to be a scientific power.

So what they were able to do was collect the best glass on Earth and make the best ingredients for telescopes. They never thought, though, to take the telescope and pointed out who was going on, Galileo did that first. He made pictures of it, and then he started to discover. You could see things farther away with a telescope. You could see things on the moon that imply that the moon must be extremely far away. And then they measured it over the year. Actually, they knew that distance of the moon before Galileo, within a couple of thousand miles.

That was pretty good. So the sphineglasses were before that rain for like checkpoint purposes, and then it was the one who you're going out to look at it in the... Yeah, Pinoza was grinding glass. That's right. Yeah, Spinoza was a lensmaker by day, and then he was a heretic by night, and he was kicked out of the synagogue and kind of banished.

But then he lived to influence, or his life, influence Einstein, to have a notion of this kind of pantheistic god that Einstein, the later champion. So Spinoza's god. Yeah, exactly. Spinoza. the Dutch had that, and it was known for, you know, long time that the Earth was kind of either the center of the universe or it was in the universe, but it wasn't like there were just some dome affixed to which were stars, planets, and other objects that they didn't know much about, like comets, like comets, like comets that I gave you. And I'll give to you up there. Even Galileo, as brilliant as he was, he thought comets were in the various atmosphere. In other words, he thought they were atmospheric phenomena, like the meteorites that I gave you,

and I'll give to you out there. See, and you look at E.U email address, I give these a leg, Brian Keating.com slash UDU. And you'll get an actual meteorite, and those are a phenomenon that are in the atmosphere. They come from asteroids, fragments of them, bring up in the atmosphere. Galileo said, well, the comet's just like a really slow-moving meteorite. But of course, they're not. They're in the solar system much farther, right, than orbit of the moon. That was also discovered by trigonometry and what's called parallaxic.

Yeah, that's how we start to map. about where our position is in the universe. Do you have a favorite answer for why or proof for why the Earth isn't that? Has any one of your students ever written something that's actually original? Not about why the Earth is not flat. I think they're all comfortable with that. They can kind of figure that out on their own. And that was done really since that day, like 2,500 years ago,

I started out of time. But proving the Earth is in motion was not proven until the late 1700s early, early 18-opters when they know this was called parallax or stellar operation rather. So if you look at a very distant star as the Earth goes around the orbit with respect to a very very distant star you'll see the trace of the pattern of the star will map out a little ellipse or circle and that's negative effect we're orbiting around the sun there's a slight parallax between us and that star even though the stars are on huge distances runs even the Earth orbit the orbital distance between 93 million miles 186 million miles across that's enough to

get enough parallax to see the stars will make a little circle as we row as a road roads where this time is a more distant even more yes yeah so close the star approximates in terms four light years away look at something that's 10 light years away that'll be almost exact that'll have half the parallax or less so you'll be able to see its motion as kind of a cosmic wallpaper beyond what gnc things moving in relative motions so people knew that for a long time but but it took a lot of thought to think about that because it's actually it wouldn't be the effect is is made more prominent by the speed of the Earth's orbit being a fraction of the speed of life. If it was much, much slower, much faster, you'd have different results to be hard and

to prove that we're in motion. So most people get that problem. But I don't use it for a lot. So did you have a telescope as a teenager? Is that how you go fast? I did. Yeah. So one night I was asleep and I woke up and I saw the moon was out and it looked brighter than any light I'd ever seen and but next to it it looked like someone I'd broken a piece of the moon of because there was a chunk of light or bright spot of light that was the same intensity, you know, per given area, kind of air, intensity of light, but it was obviously like a star. I thought it was a star. And this is in 1985 or 1986. So it's like, oh, I'm going to chat GPT about that. No, I'm at least sometimes really did. For that was around the same time. So I was sad, like, was too lazy to wait for Google to be invented 16 years later. So I decided to do some research. So I decided to do some research. surgeon went to the library, got the New York Times back then. They used to have a section where they plot out it called the cosmos. What's out of the night sky?

It was on the moon's position. And then next to the moon that night, on the night before, it showed Jupiter. What the heck? You could see how planning it with your eye. I thought it was a round-in-time Voyager is making those rounds around the solar system. And I just was blown away. And I was like, if I could see that out of my naked eye, you imagine what you can see in the telescope.

So I had a job at the time working in the Venice, Delhi, which is kind of funny because Galileo would get money from the Venice Senate. I got money from the Venice Deli. And I was a three-letter agency known as the M-O-M foundation, my mom, kind of do hold my $2 an hour income. And I was able to buy a telescope after, you know, kind of three or four months of scrimping and saving. Got the telescope.

And, you know, for me, it was like using Holo. What the Hull telescope was launched? But it would have been like the biggest telescope on her. I could do whatever I wanted with it. And I just kept ever increasing the size of the technology. telescopes and now we have a six meter diameter telescope in Chile in the Simons of Zeritori so a million times more collecting area than my first one. When did you build your first telescope or when were you involved?

Actually I mean recently built it. Oh sorry so an optical telescope I mean recently built one and my kid can miss me to get my oldest got commitment to buy him a 3D printer and he's really printed and we got we bought you know a lens from Edmund Scientific and a focuser from China somewhere And three months later, he printed out this beautiful telescope. I'm actually going to bring it. It doesn't work that one. I don't tell him that.

He used, like, wood screws, instead of metal screws to put it together, but it's not working that great. But anyway, he'll find out when he sees this video. Where I put it. I think it'll have made it right here. So I was my first, like, optical telescope that I ever built, you know, a computer. But I've been building, you know, for my research, which is not using optical light at all.

It's using microwave light. I've been building telescopes for 2530 years. since graduate school. So our telescopes don't see visible light at all. We could put it in the middle of the Sahara Desert at high noon. It would work just fine, basically. But instead we do put in places like the South Pole or Chile, where not the light pollution, yes, the light pollution is well, but the heat pollution is well with care about. So we want to be some more coal because we're looking for this faint signal and we Big Bang's origin. So why did you decide to focus on Mike?

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Bottom the spectrum. Yeah, I kind of that led to it. When I went to graduate schools, I had a graduate student in Brown, and I wanted to be like a theorist and study condensed matter physics. And I never really

got back to, oh, I loved astronomy when I was like, yeah, why don't I do astronomy? It always seemed like being, you know, an ice cream taster. Like, no one's got a painting to use a telescope. But I realized that you could build your telescope, then you're the first and only person that knows how to use it. So I could use that as kind of an

unfair advantage to build, you know, to kind of build a brand around what I wanted to study. And that was building experiments that blended physics, low temperature physics, cryogenics, to cool sensors down to nearer absolute zero three calender and blow and build those detectors to do a study of what's called polarization, so the least familiar property in light. You got a spectra, and you mentioned that its intensity, how bright it is, its color, how it's a speckler, but its polarization is what orientation the electromagnetic, the field vectors are awesome. That was not studied as the CMB.

It was not detected in the CNB in my start graduate school in early 90s. So that was a kind of like Blue Ocean. I could do something I've done before. I work with a great advisor, still one of my closest friends, Peter Timby. And he was just a great mentor. And I would say to my students, you know, it's more important who your advisor is than what he or she studies

because you're going to have a relationship with them. I mean, he came to my, I've done a longer than I knew my wife. You know, I've been known him for 30 plus years now. me seeing me at you know my dumbest and now he's seeing me you know with my success and uh so it's more of the person that i want to work with rather than the topic that i wanted to work with but happily i fell into a great deal that has had nothing but high energy growth for the last three years which is which is quite excited was it was cosmology like a hot air like today a hot area is like AI right or something like that was cosmology AI for physicists at the time it got into it yeah

Osmology was kind of just going from being a laughing stock to now being respectable. So the Kobe satellite was the first major U.S. satellite that was launched in late 1980s. And in 1992, the year before I went to graduate school, he had returned the first, well, return the first hard evidence that the universe was a perfect blackbody. That the spectrum of heat from the Big Bang exactly matched the predictions that would be present in an expanding universe that start off in a big bit. That had been known to measure since Pesas Wilson, at least at spots along the spectrum, but it took actual satellite mission to measure it over the entirety of the electromagnetic spectrum and to get it down to the sub-milical, the model of precision over the first time. So it did that, but it also measured that there were deviations from perfect isotropy.

So the beach ball, that go all down there and beach ball, there's a lot of it. So it's over here, okay, so hopefully you can see it in the camera. So these fluctuations in the zone, yeah, so these fluctuations in the microred background, if you're watching, you guys do audio on me too, right? Yeah. We do. You should. You get the big mic. Exposture. These fluctuations are indicative of the early universe's first light, the properties of the very first photons that were able to propagate freely in the universe since the Big Bang itself. So this is a snapshot of what hydrogen and dark matter effect that we looked like in the early universe, 380,000 years after the big bag. What Kobe did in 1992, the year old before with the graduate school, is measure these large-scale fluctuation, not this tiny little ones, but these really big splotches where you have all blue, all red and green over there. So that was the first time that we discovered that the universe had an amount of what's called antisotry for you in homogenase.

that deviated from perfect isodrome. We knew that we exist, that there has to be some part of the universe that was broken into fragments and had a place where matter could accumulate. And we didn't know what those values were. No one could ever measure them until Kobe Nash had them. And Kobe was designed, it turned out and built, in part by Bob Dickie,

who was a very famous astronomer, Princeton, and I done work in World War II at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. working on radar. So along with the Manhattan project was an equal and some ways more important work out radar that was done mostly in the US and Britain. And almost nobody knows it on it. There should be an op-and-hauer, maybe it'll be a dicky or something, I don't know. But there's an all is an incredible project. And through that, we had developed very sensitive detectors for measuring microids radar waves, which is in the micro range and the radio

stacket. So what they had a bad did in my grand advisor, my Peter Timby's advisory, Wilkinson, they had invented these types of switching radiometers that could very exquisitely measured a difference, not the absolute temperature, but the difference between temperature over there and temperature over here. And by comparing those at every single pair of points that you could know in the sky, it was just phenomenal. So it was a very exciting time, like you're saying, kind of the way Aeon is now, but in the physical world, you could actually build so it wasn't coding, you know, maybe like robotics or something now is getting like that. But to actually do something with your hands, which I love to do, to do

observations and to build stuff that no one had never done before. They had measured the spectrum. They had measured the isotropy now, but no one had measured the polarization. And we thought we could try and do it. So why no one measured polarization before? What was the challenge? Yeah. So polarization is really faint. So if you're watching, you can see on top of the book cover, that lovely book cover, losing the Nobel Prize, there's this glare from the lights. Now, if you had polarized sunglasses, which, you know, we have to wear here in La Jolla and San Diego, you could actually remove the glare. The glare is coming from the fact that unpolarized light is bouncing off of matter,

and it becomes partially polarized. But the amount of fractional polarization that takes place is about half to 1%. So actually, that's actually quite bright. Compared to the CMB, it's orders of magnitude more highly polarized than the CMB is. So the answer is it's very technically challenging to measure polarization, but even more so when the signal itself is close to absolute zero, and you're measuring a fraction of a part in a billion or tens of parts per billion

of that signal that's partially polarized and won't be 100% percent, it'll be partially polarized. So it was just a technical challenge. Kobe tried to do it. They just couldn't measure it. They got an upper limit on it. And we decided we would use, we actually ended up using the same exact

feedhorn technology and so forth that they had just gotten as a gift from my grand advisor to my advisor. And that was part of my PhD thesis experiment. Maybe if you can explain a little bit more to the audience, to perform like polarimetry or measurement of the polarization, how's it done? Yeah, so polarimetry is the study of polarization.

It involves looking for the asymmetry between the plane of oscillation of the electromagnetic field. So electromagnetic waves propagate at the speed of light, and they have three properties, their wavelength or frequency, their intensity, the amplitude, and their oscillation direction because they're vectors. The vector in which the electric field oscillates is called polarization, perpendicular is a magnetic field. We don't usually see magnetic polarization, but it's there.

When you have an unpolarized light source, it's like two people holding a rope and causing it to oscillate in all different directions. So unpolarized light, like from the sun or from a black body, is 100% unpolarized, or 0% polarized. But when light interacts with matter, see, that's unpolarized light,

interact with matter scattering off the book, it suppresses one of the two directions of polarization, meaning that the part that's vertical, the perpendicular surface gets absorbed, and the part that's parallel to the surface gets reflected. So what you do with polarized sunglasses is you have an orthogonal direction, you suppress that direction,

and now you can see past that surface of reflection. That's mostly useful on water, or cameras use these things. They're called neutral density filters. The glare? The glare, yeah. So you can see through glare on the ocean surface with them. Or you cut down on the total intensity going into your eyes,

you know, fry your eyes, and you see more detail on more perspective. That's polarization of optical light. But all light sources have this. Is there any intuition? I mean, I could derive it from Maxwell's equation, but intuition for the glare, why it should be of specific?

Glare is just what we call the additional, the lack of suppression of one of the two polarizations. So it's like a mirror. It's just like a partial, a partial transmitting mirror, partially reflecting mirror. And it's reflecting one of the two polarization states more than the other one. At certain angles, you'll get complete internal reflection.

That's what Brewster's angle is, fiber optics, lasers will be completely suppressing that, the polarization direction internally, so it'll reflect completely internally. And so the glare is basically just the same color intensity and so forth as the unpolarized light itself, it's just you're seeing it, and now you want to suppress it because it's basically interfering. If you're looking into water surface, you don't want to see the sunlight, you want to see what's in the water.

So you want to suppress all the reflected light. but here suppress all the reflected light, you'll have nothing to see. So you're basically throwing away half the light in order to see with the other half the light with more clarity. And was there a specific technological trick or piece of equipment that you guys used that made you be able to measure polarization more clearly?

At that time, the technology that we used was called were types of transistors that could be cooled close to below the temperature of liquid nitrogen or around them below, and still operate and still conduct. when you cool transistors down, you freeze the electrons. They're not going to be very good conductors. So you won't be able to have much gain from a transistor amplifier. So what you do is you have like a horn that points at the sky.

You want that microwave energy to come in. You want to amplify it. You maybe want to get its spectrum as well. What are the wavelengths that are coming in? And then you want to have a do that when you have a lot of background noise. We're looking for a three degree Kelvin signal. And we're living on a 300. 100 Kelvin planet, and the amount of blackbody energy scales is the fourth power.

So you've got 100 to the fourth power more energy. Yeah, so it's Stefan's Long, exactly. So it's just astronomically larger amounts that would dwarf it. So you want to have a very narrow frequency range. So these transistors had recently been invented by teams at NIST primarily for communications and in the exact frequency range that would be useful for us to study the CMB. Nowadays, nobody uses those amplifiers. That's what's called coherent detection, like in a laser, whatever.

Coherent means you preserve the phase wavelength and all the other properties of the wave. We did that too. Nowadays, we use what are called ballometers, which are phase insensitive. They actually destroy the phase information. They're just total energy detectors. So how much total heat is coming from a given pixel, it will then heat up a tiny little superconductor, and I will change its resistance trying to get it to not superconduct anymore. And then we measure how much cooling power we need to supply to keep a little superconductor.

to keep it superconducting, and that gives us how much micro energy is trying to heat it up, which is a minuscule amount. We're talking picawatts of energy from the CMB. And you do that one, the last thing I'll say, you have to do that for each polarization state. There's just two polarization states, either horizontal and vertical or left circular and right circular. And you need an amplifier for each one of those or some combined splitter that takes those apart. So we use the splitter back for my PhD. And now we have a separate detector for each one of the polarization.

states, but you also have to do it for every frequency in which you could have an astronomical signal, whether it's cosmological or whether it's from the galaxy, which is what my first book is about. Yeah, it sounds like a completely different paradigm from optics, like what Galileo would use, like lenses,

the stack of lenses. Like here, you're molecular electronics side, like maybe this antenna arrays. Yeah, we do use antennas, but we do use lenses. Both of the telescopes, Bicep is a reflect, a refracting telescope. It's only about you know, 25 centimeters across the primary objective lens. And then the Simon's Observatory used a much bigger one that's about a half a meter across.

Is it last one of yours? Lens. So these are the ones that look for, so you only want to, I learn this. What's the best lens material for microwaves? Ah, so you guys are asking all the right questions, but you're asking them all at once. That's a multiplex my answers here. I'll do sign language to detail. So let me start with the first one.

So you asked how big our lenses, why are we using? So I said we have one six-meter telescope. That's a mirror telescope. That one's looking for, it's not looking for gravitational waves. For gravitational waves, you only want to build a telescope that's just big enough to do the science that you care about, right? So if you want to look at the full moon, and that's all you cared about, you don't need the James Webb space. You don't need a six-meter or the 30-meter telescope that, you know, Caltech and UCSD are building, right? you see his building. That's a total overkill. For gravitational waves, the signal on the sky

which determines the resolution. The angular diameter of the signal determines how big a resolution, how big an aperture you need, and the aperture determines how small a feature you can see. So you only want to build a telescope as big as possible just to detect what you want to see, but no bigger, because that's just adding extra expense. The cost of a telescope goes as the third power of the diameter of the telescope. So it's kind of like the volume goes up. The resolution only goes as a first power. So the angular diameter

that you can resolve is just the diameter of the telescope. So the smallest feature, the smallest crater you can see on the moon that Galileo could see was limited by how big as aperture was. But beyond a certain range, it means he's not looking for the footprints from the astronauts on the moon. Allegedly, no, no, they were there. That's one of my favorite things. People

claim the moon landing never happened. I have to argue with them online. So the telescope size is built. to just accommodate that size. So we use a refracting telescope rather than a reflecting telescope. The refractor diameter only has to be about 8 inches to 20 inches or so

in diameter. So for the Simon's Observatory, the Bicep was about 8 to 12 inches in diameter. For the Simon's Observatory, it's a half a meter in size, roughly. And the different materials that we use, to answer Mike's question, we use basically a plastic

that's very low loss in the microwave region, but it's completely opaque in the visible. So it's just called ultra-high-high-weight molecular, ultra-high-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. It's the same material that they used to make milk jug containers out of, but now, you know, environmentalists made it. Is it possible, like the 3-D-printed, maybe? People have done that.

The problem is you get structures on the scale of the wabling for a 3-D printer, but we've tried, we've thought about it. And you really, it's not that hard to get that kind of plastic. That plastic's a little more lossy, so now we use basically alumina, which is synthetic sapphire. It's very high purity. but you can't see through it with your eyes, but microwaves go right through it.

And you can make it really big. The problem is just like if you look at your iPhone there, see how you can see reflections off of it or if people wear glasses. There's reflections off of every dielectric surface interface. But we want the light to get in. We don't want it to reflect out. But we also have to keep the thing under vacuum,

unlike your iPhone, and we have to cool it down to 0.1 degree Kelvin. So 100 milliseconds Kelvin using what's called dilution refuelation. refrigerator, we can talk about that. And so effectively, you know, imagine trying to get your iPhone to work at, you know, even below zero is not guaranteed. But also to keep reflections out to allow radiation to get in, but not contamination to get in, to do it at all different frequencies, all different polarizations with 100,000 detectors total across the whole observatory,

and collect data and analyze the data and condition the data and treat and process it. it's a huge effort. So there's 350 people working on the project. Do you do like a frequency sweep, like, you know, adjust in the radio or you try to get all the... We don't have to do that. So, Belometer, unlike a coherent amplifier transistor, a bellometer takes in all the frequencies

and basically asks how much energy is in that. It's kind of like if you go outside with your hand on a sunny day here and you put your hand around, you could find roughly where the sun is from the infrared heat that warms up your skin. And the same thing could happen with these detectors. You couldn't do any frequency resolution with it, but you don't really care.

Let's say, you know, whatever, you're blind. You're trying to find the sun. You don't care. We don't care about the actual frequency coverage. We just care we get enough photons that we get a signal-to-noise ratio. That's much bigger than the background, which is coming from the Earth, the atmosphere, and the galaxy.

So there's a lot of different technologies that you need to use to build these telescopes. Did you just learn everything on the go as you did your PhD, or did you learn this already? Well, the first thing I realize is that nobody does about themselves. Like, everything I'm talking about is tens to hundreds of people throughout my whole career. And certainly now, the size of the telescope and the size of the collaboration just means more and more people that are much smarter than me are needed to make this thing actually work.

So that's the first thing. A lot of it is kind of just in time learning. You know, like if you just read all these books I have here, you know, for no reason, you know, who knows if you'll ever use any of it. But it's certainly not an efficient way to learn something. So when I was doing stuff with the coherent amplification, these transistors are very sensitive, I had to learn about them and how to build circuits like that. That knowledge was basically useless when I started working at Caltech as a postdoc and working on bolometric detectors, which are completely different.

They're basically just thermometers attached to absorbers, like I said, like your hand. And then those just get more and more complicated. They're very difficult to make. They're made photolithographically. They're not, they're microscopic, they're really small. They do everything. like frequency filter, polarization filter. They don't amplify.

They don't do anything to the signal itself. They have no frequency resolution, but they're incredibly sensitive. They can detect, you know, literally like a pretty bright light at the distance of the moon, these things in terms of their power, raw power sensitivity. They could detect. And we have literally 100,000 of them.

They're built and designed by my colleague Suzanne Staggs at Princeton and NIST in Colorado where they're fabricated. And these are just phenomenal objects in large part because they're superconductors. So you have to make these out of superconductors. And superconduers are really finicky, difficult to lithograph, to make them more sensitive. And then to get the signals out of a pure vacuum, you know, almost total vacuum, it's a millionth of the pressure we feel here. And then to deploy them and have them at the right optical properties, this is decades of people work, you know, that have gone into this.

So it's really complicated. And I just try and kind of stay, you know, a pace with what they're doing. And my main focus is literally, you know, trying to make sure everything comes together at the right time, that the people are in the right place, logistical, and that were funded and kind of the big picture, you know, coming up with the idea for building it with colleagues

and seeing it through to publications and getting the results out is the most exciting thing, but it also takes a really long time. So I guess obtaining the funding is a big part of the work now. What are the typical funding sources? So for Bicep, it was funded purely by the National Science Foundation, Marla. There were a couple of private grants. And the exact opposite for the Simons observed.

It's 100% funded by the Simons Foundation in New York City and member institutions like UCSD and our colleague partners and colleagues around the world. Like there's 45 or 50 different institutions, 300 plus people. Everybody contributes intellectually, and some also contribute intellectually and financially. But 80 million so far has come from the Simons Foundation alone. And by the time it's done, if we're getting an upgrade to it and talk about that some other time, but it will be close to $200 million project. And the large majority of that will come from the Simon's Foundation, but not all,

and hopefully we'll get 25, 30 percent from the next. National Science Foundation. 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 fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. So a lot of the idea of searching for, let's say, I mean, this is a big topic of your book about losing the Nobel Prize. A lot of the idea of searching for, let's say, evidence of inflation is predicated on

assuming the Big Bang, right? How sure are we about the Big Bang? Is there a cosmic dust equivalent of something that might be causing us to think there was a Big Bang when there really wasn't? So for every theory, there's always a counterpoint. There's always somebody who doesn't believe in the

theory who will make their career based on the quest to disprove the prevailing theory to show that they're all idiots and that only they know the truth. It's called Newton's Third War. I think it's Clark's law. Clark said for every expert, there's an

equal and opposite expert. And he's the namesake. He gave us the namesake of the podcast. So to answer your question, there are, you know, I like to joke, there are members of the Flat Earth Society all over the globe, right? So there are people

that believe it everywhere, right? There are people that don't believe the moon landing occurred. There are people that don't believe in evolution via natural selection and chromosomal heredity. All sorts of things. People have belief in their own theory, or they believe that the prevailing wisdom is a conspiracy. For what reason, you know, at least for the moon landing, you could kind of see there's a

conspiracy. I'm not justifying it, but, you know, NASA was embarrassed because they said they could do it, and JFK, you know, pushed the country to do it as a big source of national pride. We want to beat those nasty Soviets and Russians and whatever. And so they lied about it, but that's total nonsense. I mean, it could prove that it happened. colleagues of mine here have studied not only the moon, but measured the position to the moon to better than a millimeter using lasers shot at the moon from New Mexico.

And they're reflecting off of the very exact reflectors that were left by the astronauts that they have pictures of themselves putting there. And it's known not only by the U.S., but by every country that does this type of metrology to measure things in the solar system in the unit. So it's a total joke. But at least you could see how people are doing. The Big Bang opponents that deny, I call them Big Bang deniers, liar, liar, big bang denier.

I do videos about these people. They're really buffoons. They, in some cases, have ulterior motives that they are, in some cases, one guy is trying to build a very low energy neutron-mediated fusion reactor in Pennsylvania somewhere. And he's always getting people to give donations. And the way that he does, he makes a big case that the Big Bang never happened. and all of cosmology is a sham and a scam. It never happened.

But actually, in this very office, the previous occupant of his office was named Jeffrey Burbage. And he was an amazing astronomer, cosmologist, and he never believed in the Big Bang. And he was here for a very long time. The guy who came up with the name Big Bang, Fred Hoyle, didn't believe in the Big Bang. They believed in what's called the Steady State universe,

that the universe always existed and always would exist, and it was changing slowly. And the way that the behavior, where we saw galaxies moving away, is that there were pieces of helium and hydrogen that were created every year in the universe and only needed a tiny amount to cause the universe to expand. So they went to their graves thinking that the Big Bang never happened.

They didn't have the kind of violent antipathy that these other people do for some reason that are really obsessed and hate things like the James Webb Space Telescope and hate NASA and hate cosmologists like me. But they were pretty vehement. So the answer is because no theory is perfect. even the theory even the so if the flat earthers said the following if they said the earth is not a sphere I would agree with them the earth is not a sphere the earth is what's called an oblate spheroid

has a distortion because it was once molten and it's bulging at the equator like you know some of us do as we get older because it's rotating so it has deviations in the spherical harmonics that are along its the mid mid-plane of the earth and there are other deviations too plus mount everest and and here in california we've got the we've got Death Valley. So there are variations. So it's not a perfect sphere. So that would be right, but they don't say that. They say the Earth is flat. So they make a concrete claim with high precision. They say the curvature of the Earth is 0.000000, and we know we can roll that out at infinite sigma, an infinite number of standard deviation. We can say that the Earth is spherical to within so many standard deviations. And we can say what the deviations are, we can account for those very accurately. But at the end of the day, we can never prove a scientific fact. Karl Popper said you can never prove something in science, the way you can. canon and math. You can prove one plus one equals two, which is another thing people dispute online. I'm in a debate with this guy, Terrence Howard, about one times one equals two. He claims that. And, you know, he's a brilliant actor and everything else, but, you know, I said if they gave you

one paycheck for, you know, a million dollars and then they gave you another paycheck for a million, would they, would that not be two million or would you expect that? I would want to do business with him. Right, exactly, right. So at the end of the day, they'll always be detractors, doubters, and so forth, but the onus is on them, once you have enough preponderance of evidence to support scientific claim. So we have really three or four different pieces of evidence to point to what we call the Big Bang. If you say the Big Bang is the origin of time, that's where we can start debating if that's true. But the Big Bang theory is really referring to the formation of the earliest elements, the lightest elements on the periodic table of the elements. I've got a chart behind you over there.

and the formation of the cosmic microwave background, the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, first clusters of galaxies, and everything else that goes into them. And people always say, well, how can you guys talk about the Big Bang with such confidence if you don't know what 95% of the universe is made up of? We don't know what it's true.

We don't know what dark energy is, and we don't know what dark matter is. We've never detected a particle of dark matter. We've never detected a quantum of dark energy. And lately it's been as exciting as like, can remember in mind. It's the second major paradigm shift that may be occurring. The first in my career, at least, was the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe in 1997. And then now, in the last year, there's evidence that the expansion of the universe is not caused by a cosmological

constant. The acceleration is not caused by it, and may diminish and may eventually stop, perhaps. And so the cosmological constant has come under question. So that's a really exciting thing. None of that has to do with the other things that we test about the universe, namely the CMB. You can only have a CMB in a universe that once was hot, dense, and that's the context that we mean by the Big Bang. And you can go even further back that every hydrogen atom in your body and its isotopes were formed only during a very brief period, less than 20 minutes after the perhaps the origin of our universe. We can't say what the origin was, but perhaps after the inflationary epoch ended, or perhaps after a previous universe collapsed to form our universe. There are people that seriously study that. But there's no way that you can have consistency with that.

If you don't have a hot, dense phase of the universe, where you effectively had an extremely high energy density, extremely low entropy in the early universe, and then the expansion that comes out of it. You don't need dark energy for any of that. Dark energy only starts to play a role about four or five billion years after the Big Bang, four to seven billion years after the Big Bang. Dark matter, same hundreds of thousands of years or to millions of years after the Big Bang. You can get the CMB and the formation of the elements only in the model that has a hot-dense phase, and that's the model we call the Big Bang. So these alternative models are just total nonsense.

They don't predict the CMB. They don't predict the formation of the elements. They don't predict. They just pick at where there are uncertainties. disputes and conflict and tension, but that's part of a healthy field. When everyone believes the same thing, like the earth is flat, that's kind of the... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people

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And what's the strongest evidence for the Big Bang? Is it the expansion of the... I said there's three main pillars of the Big Bang. So there's the formation of the lightest elements of the Pyrrarch table. That's called primordial nucleus. If it wasn't, if there wasn't like a hot moment, then those things would not have formed in the quantities. that we see them.

Yeah, the universe was a fusion reactor. The universe was a fusion reactor. At every point in space and time in the extremely early the universe for the first 20 minutes. After the first 20 minutes, almost nothing happened. Nothing happens until the formation of the first atoms.

So the relics, I always like to think of cosmology as kind of like archaeology. They're fossils that we can study. When I look at you, I'm not seeing you instantaneously, right? Light travels one foot per nanosecond. You're two feet away. I see you two nanoseconds ago. Okay, not a big deal.

We see the sun. The sun could have done. disappeared right now, we wouldn't know about it for 8.2 minutes, right? Same with the near star. Near Star. Near Star could have exploded two years ago. We won't find out for another 2.3 years. However, if we look at the, if we look back to the very beginning, we have fewer and fewer kinds of artifacts, relics, fossils from that period. But in the case of the Big Bang, there are two extremely high precision measurements that we've done. One is the CMB. The CMB is the relic radiation, the oldest light in the universe,

the oldest fossils in the form of light. What did it come from? The fusion of a proton with an electron. We don't normally call it that, but that's what it is. Binding, or it's another way to say fusion. The equations that govern that tell us that process could not have occurred before the universe had cooled off

to below the ionization temperature of hydrogen, more or less. There's some corrections, but. So, too, the hydrogen and helium in this water, and it's isotopes, deuterium, and I've had, heavy water in my lab, I'll show it to you guys. Heavy water, the isotopes of hydrogen,

they cannot form. There, it's a fusion process too. Deuterium is the simplest of all nuclei. It's discovered by Harold Uri, who was a professor here. That's a fusion of a neutron with a proton. That cannot happen before the universe is cooled below about a billion Kelvin. That took

a few seconds after the Big Bang. And last until there are no more neutrons. Neutrons are unstable. They're radioactive decay, and beta decay unless they're combined with a proton. We don't know why that's true, but it is true. The decay after 880 seconds. And so if you don't make anything that needs neutrons,

namely every other element on the periodic table has a neutron in, except for hydrogen, the isotope that we call proteum, everything else has a neutron. So all the neutrons that were produced in the Big Bang are bound up into the periodic table or bound up into things that were made in the Big Bang itself. That's a fossil. So that means you go down to the ocean,

you scoop up some water, you say how much deuterium is in there, that will tell you exactly what the ratio was like, because you don't make deuterium anywhere else except for the Big Bang. So you often hear, oh, you're star stuff. Carl Sagan, we're star stuff, we're made of star stuff, we're made of hydrogen, and all the hydrogen was made during the Big Bang. So that's what we should think about. So it's that, it's the formation of the CMB, and it's the expansion of galaxies in the universe. Those three things point to a earlier, denser, hotter, a higher entropy state. at least in a higher energy state in the early universe.

How that started is an open question. That's what we're trying to study. And you were just talking about dark meta and dark energy. Is that something that you are actively interested in researching? Because I saw this year you had an archive paper on Alps, like axiom-like particles and biofringens. Is that something you can also detect? Or is a new direction? Yeah, no, it is a new direction.

So part of the interest in the CMB is because it is the oldest light in the universe. That means anything that we interact with or anything that's interaction, with light that you'd ever want to see or could see, you can't see that event before the formation of the CMB. The universe was a pure plasma. And in plasma, light doesn't propagate freely. It gets scattered. It's like looking, the sun is a plasma. You can't see into the sun. There's too much scattered. But if you, and if in the early universe, all we had was protons, neutrons that were bound with other protons and heat. Until the universe expanded enough and cooled it. enough that you could see from the last scattering event that ever occurred for those photons

to today. So that light came straight to—that's what this globe is. It's a picture as God would see it outside of our universe of what the different temperatures of photons would be as they were at the surface, when the surface was comprised of dark matter, ordinary matter, and photons. We see that light. It comes to us. It tells us about all the events that occurred before them.

So it's the longest leverage that you could ever have on, phenomena that involve light or propagate at the speed of light. Gravitational waves also propagate the speed of light, as you know. And they do imprint the CMB with a specific type of pattern that we are hoping to see. But not only that, any type of matter will interact. And just as that glare showed us before, when light interacts with matter, it develops polarization. It's called Thompson Scattering. Thompson Scattering can either tell you about the properties of the light or the properties of the matter. But if you know the property is the light, which we know very accurate is a black

body, then the polarization tells us about the quantity or composition of the matter. So we can kind of reveal how much of that matter could be dark matter versus ordinary matter. And there are other more sophisticated ways to do that and to see that there could be a coupling that are highly

speculative. We have no idea if this is true. We know for a fact that dark matter exists. We see it on every scale outside of the solar system. We see it in our galaxy, clusters of galaxies at the C&B, barian acoustic oscillations. We see every single example of a gravitationally bound structure has dark matter. But we don't know what it is.

So it's frustrating. So in your book, you mentioned a lot about the star dust. Or like in general, like maybe some other clusters are flying around or something which it's difficult to see from the earth. So could it be dark matter, something else that we're looking at? No, it can't be dark matter. So if you pick up that meteorite, that meteor right there in front of you is a giant chunk of dust. So the dust that

kind of obscured our view of the CMB was ordinary matter in our galaxy. Dark matter doesn't interact with light. This matter does interact with light. So what happened with this matter, these tiny grains of micrometeorites basically from a detonated supernova that blew up

four or five billion years ago in our galaxy, not in our solar solar system, in our galaxy, that made little particles basically of iron filings, like a compass needle. The galaxy has a magnetic field that then align those particles along a preferential direction, which made exactly the same type of pattern that the C&B would produce if gravitational waves are present. The only way to get rid of that is to go

beyond the galaxy into intergalactic space, which is very expensive and difficult to do in these funding climate time, though we live in. But it's ordinary matter. It's matter that interacts with light. So dark matter, its key characteristic, is that it does not, as you should really call it invisible matter. It's matter to which light is impervious to. kind of goes right through it. And there are examples of dark matter that are familiar to you. They're called neutrinos.

Neutrinos do not interact with light. They go through ordinary matter, light years of ordinary matter without any chance of scattering. And they have mass. Neutrinos are known to have mass. So they have all the characteristics. The problem is they don't have enough mass

and there aren't enough of them to make up the preponderance of dark matter that we see through all these cosmological surveys and that we know exists, but we don't know. exactly what it is. So people propose these other things, as you said, called axion-like particles,

ALPs, and these are particles that are kind of like heavy photons. And they reveal themselves in that they will cause the polarization state of the CMB to behave slightly differently than it would if they don't exist. And you can measure the product of their cross-section and their mass, the same way a dark matter

experiment would do them effectively. The more of the mass that they have, they'll affect the dark matter, the clumping of dark matter will be affected, the more massive they are on smaller scales. So you'll have more clumping at small scales, less clumping at large scales, if they're heavy, and then the converse is drifted are light. These are very light

particles. These are like tendemized 27 electron volts or something. I mean, incomprehensibly massless, but there's so many of them, like there's so many photons that they could comprise the dark matter that we do perceive indirectly. And can you re-evaluate data from older

observations to evaluate this, or do you need to build new more sensitive or different frequencies. It's kind of like, yeah, could you take a picture, you know, could you do, could you make an Applevision Pro, you know, with a camera, you know, from 1999? You could, you know, maybe. It wouldn't be that good.

And it certainly wouldn't have all the features and the resolution and quality of it. And so one or two, because the field moves so fast and people can build detectors and we kind of are outpacing Moore's law in terms of the number detectors, sensitivity of the detectors. It just doesn't make sense to do that. Like in one year of data with the Simon's Observatory, we can do everything that Bicep did in three to six years of observations and way more. I mean, we can do a lot more than that. And so it doesn't pay, although we are analyzing data from experiments that don't, that we've decommissioned at the same site in Chile, but different purposes. Also looking at polarization, but it wasn't originally designed to look for dark matter masses. Maybe talking of Bicep or like the earlier projects, could we go back to the time when you,

worked on that and what was the story behind it? Yeah, so I was a postdoc at Stanford right after I got my PhD and I went to work for a young assistant professor and her name was Sarah Church and she was, she had been a postdoc at Caltech where I would later end up after she fired me, which is not a career direction I recommend your listeners go off on, but that's what happened. I was working for her. She was working on like galaxy clusters, a little bit on polarization. I'd want to work only on polarization. And then I had this idea based on a paper by one of my future friends, Mark Kaminkowski and others,

that you could look for gravitational waves using a very small telescope that wouldn't cost as much money, or cost a fraction of the big telescopes that are being planned for my field. And so I was obsessed with that. I kept thinking about it. How could you build it? What would it look like? What would it do? And she just noticed that I wasn't working very much for her anymore.

And as she was paying me, not that much. You know, it was like $30, $30,000. And this is at the height of the first.com bubble. So imagine, like, the AI bubble that we're in now, but times like 1,000. And that was what the dot-com bubble was. Like, you know, these companies were, you know, so to get a house near Silicon Valley for a postdoc on $30,000 a year salary before taxes was almost, I was miserable. So I lived, like, on the train tracks, essentially, and I was almost homeless.

I hated it. It was awful. And she could tell. So she fired me one day. We'll get into the details of it. But she did me a great kindness. She sent me for a job appointment with her former postdoctoral advisor Caltech, who was the name Andrew Lang.

And he was a really famous sign. He had just finished measuring the very first observations of the fluctuations on the cosmic microbe background at small scales on this experiment called Boomerang. He was like this incredibly powerful charismatic guy. He'd come up to Stanford to give lectures on these new discoveries. Everyone thought he's going to win a Nobel Prize. and he invited me to give a talk to Caltech and job interview. Went down there.

He liked to talk, offered me a job. I said yes before he finished the sentences coming out of his mouth, moved down to Caltech, worked there for three years. And while I was there, I became friends with a postdoc or a scientist that worked with him named Jamie Bach, who's now a very famous professor and PI of this new satellite called Spherex. And I convinced Jamie of this idea that I had had at Stanford. for it to build a small telescope, put it at the South Pole, and observe for, you know,

three to four years and set of some limit, and we didn't think we'd detect anything. And over time, we hired more and more people, and then we upgraded the instrument like your iPhone every year. It gets more pixels, better sensor or whatever. So we improved it every year. The second generation was called Bicep 2. Same concept, refracting telescope, same location, same optic. Everything was the same, except it had six times more detectors.

and they were different type they were superconductors. It's like a biceps camera long. That's right, yeah. So we did that. Now they're on bicep, the fourth generation of bicep. So it's like a new iPhone model

and your bicep model. New bicep, that's right. Next season. One last thing. Except each copy is handmade and cost millions of dollars. And I came up with the acronym. So the acronym stands for background imager

of cosmic extra galactic polarization. It's kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization, not extra galactic polarization. But be it as it may, we got funding for it, we upgraded it, and then eventually we did detect it. We detected the signal that would be revealing indicative of gravitational waves. The only way the gravitational waves could get there is that the universe underwent a very brief period, but extremely energetic, incomprehensibly powerful expansion called inflation.

This was predicted by Alan Gooth, now at MIT, but at the time he was at Stanford also, almost getting fired himself, but then, you know, avoiding it and having a much better career than I had. But he ended up predicting this. And we realized that there would be signature of the relic gravitational waves from inflation. And that would imprint the CMB. And we discovered it. And the pattern that it would imprint would be a swirling.

So the polarization looks like little stiffer. Do you cover on the image to show? In my book, I do. Yeah, in the book. You can show the image of the book, where it shows not the intensity, like the color on that plush little animal toy over there. But it shows little sticks.

So the polarization is an orientation. Spon photons are spin one, so they have two different orientations. But you can't tell if the electric field is going vertically up or vertically down. You just know the plane of polarization. Like a rope, if you see two people's shaking a rope, you can't tell that it start going up or didn't start going down. If you look away for it, you can't tell.

So we only know the orientation. So at each point on the sky, in addition to the color, meaning the intensity and the frequency, we have an orientation of a stick. And the stick pattern, if they're gravitational waves, would form this swirling pattern called curl mode polarization. So at the gym, I realized you do curls at the gym, right? You know what I'm talking about.

So that's why I called it. Corals, like, for me, it's the derivatives. That's funny. That's not the bicep. That's right. That's pretty funny. So it's a muscle that does curls, right? So people like that name.

And then we upgrade it, but we always thought, oh, we detect it. We have to go back and see if it's really real. It has to be confirmed. Unfortunately, tragically, in 2010, the couple of months after weeks after we had deployed the second generation bicep, Andrew Lang, who is my hero, my mentor, like a father figure to me, he committed suicide. So he died in Pasadena. He took his own life at a motel that was the same motel that he had put me up when I stayed to do the job interview 10 years earlier. I mean, it was an incredible kind of coincidence and confluence of events. but one of the things that happened after his death is that there was like a leadership vacuum

and the team of people, some of whom I had hired as, you know, when I was advising Andrew before I left Caltech to come here to UCSD in 2004, they took over the leadership because they were there. I was still one of the, you know, co-investigators, co-leaders of it and the founder of the Bicep series of projects, but they had, you know, convinced themselves they didn't need me around anymore. And when they made the detection, I was part of the team and on the paper. and I helped, you know, with some of the results, and I had students working on it. But they did not include me in the big press conference and the big, you know, newspaper articles that are written about it.

And in hindsight, it was a great blessing for me because it turned out to, spoiler alert, not win the Nobel Prize. I realized I would not win the Nobel Prize, like the night that it came out, you know, right before we were going to publish it, either they would win it and they kick me out and only three people can win the Nobel Prize at most. Or we were wrong, which is kind of what I was leaning. towards, and I kind of wanted to distance it from that at that point. And that's what ended up happening. We saw these micrometeorites that made the same curling pattern of microrepolarization.

And we never, you know, really had, we had ways to validate it to make sure we didn't make a mistake, but we kind of let our excitement go ahead and we published it without peer review. We had a press conference, like I said, a very unorthodox way to approach it. But they were worried about being, you know, scooped out of the discovery by the plank satellite and others and then losing their Nobel Prize. Maybe if you can... Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals

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How many layers of data processing was before raw data to the final results? Yeah, so these detectors are superconductors. So what happens is there are 256 of them for each polarization state. So it's 512 total. Each one either measures vertical or horizontal polarization at one different pixel,

like a ccd camera. But it's a tiny fraction of a modern CCD camera. It's 512 by 512. It's a minuscule. But the pixels are big, and they have to be the size of the wavelength of photons, which is about 2 millimeters wavelength. So that's how you design the sensors.

If you made them the size of an iPhone, it wouldn't work. You wouldn't detect anything. And they have to operate at 0.2.3 Kelvin. And so we got to cool them down using these different isotopes of helium, called helium 3, to get down below, way below the temperature the CMB even, let alone the South Pole.

So we did all that. And what happens is they read out to get a voltage out. And then that voltage, superconductors have low resistance. It's very hard to read out a sensor that has very low impedance. So you have to transform the impedance and make it higher impedance, then you can put it into a normal

transistor amplifier. If you imagine you're trying to read out like zero oms, like with just sending in a current, it's almost impossible to do that. So what instead... Yeah, we use a squid. Exactly, yeah. So we use another type of super...

superconductor called superconducted quantum interference device that modulates the flux and that creates a higher impedance signal that can be amplified later by ordinary transistor amplifiers which are cheap compared to the squid amplifiers which are very expensive. And so you each one of those detectors can be read out or you can multiplex them. So you get many detectors are read out by a single squid, which is how we do things in the Simon's Observatory. And then they have to get out to room temperature somehow after amplification and then get, amplified again and again and then they have to the sampling is about 100 hertz not crazy but now with you know tens of thousands of detectors at 100 hertz we're getting close to a terabyte per day with the simons observatory and that's raw data and we we keep all the data as we can even if we can't use it we still keep it unlike cerns sirn might have 12 events you know the detection of the higgs i forgot how many events it was like that until the 15th well i mean total events but no the actual number of higgs bosons that that they created was under 20 or something like that. So that means they threw out 10 to the 15th,

you know, basically, you know, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is about a billion, right? So the difference between 12 and 10 to the 15th is 10 to the 15th. So looking at their, it's very different type of data analysis. They trigger, we don't trigger, we just take all the data. And so by the end of the season, you'll make a map, you'll make an image just like the beach ball.

How we do that, we have to filter, we have to, you know, do pointing reconstruction where it's looking, calibration, and it's very challenging to do polarization because there's no standard candle for polarization. There's no analog of a white dwarf that we know exactly what its mass is when it blows up in the case of the supernova measurements. Or, you know, we can't make a fake signal and put it in the sky that has the properties of the CMB. It's impossible. And in fact, there's a lot of contamination. Starlink, you know, SpaceX is exactly the frequency that we're going to look at. So all these reasons mean it's very hard to calibrate the data.

You look for all the ways you could have done wrong, systematic errors. You clean it as best as possible. Then you have to compare it to sources of astrophysical data, but not cosmological data, like the galaxy dust. That's an honest to goodness signal. It's not like they made a mistake and we didn't really measure something in space. No, it's really in space. It just wasn't from the Big Bang. It was from our galaxy.

Do you overlay it with a CMB data? Well, we take, well, it is. is the immediate. So we take this in addition to previously measured one. We will compare it to other instruments, but each new instrument is more sensitive than basically all the other instruments that came before it.

So there's only so much we can get from that. In the case of Bicep 2, yes, we did use the plank data, which is kind of contemporaneous. And they had a slide. What's that? Yeah, the slide. The digitized slide. Yeah, I'll talk about that in the book.

But mainly it was because we lack frequency coverage. Remember I said there's three properties of light, spectrum intensity and polarization. We measured the polarization and we measured the intensity, but we only had one frequency, so we couldn't measure two sources of potential signal. So we had to rely on other sources. So we either used a picture of an image of a slide

that someone had given from the plank team or made up models from other sources, but we couldn't do it internally. And that was a big gap, and that was partially why they thought that, oh, maybe Plank will scoop us and make the detection and win the Nobel Prize that we would have won if we had been a little quicker on the draw.

But a lot of it, I feel traces back, you know, personally to the fact that Andrew wasn't there anymore, and he wasn't really kind of the all-knowing, you know, kind of hero guru, whatever you want to call, that could give the gravitas to take a step back from the edge before we went forward. But in the end, thankfully, or, you know, depending on how you look at it, because of Bicep, we were able to build the Simon's Observatory,

which is now operating, and we'll be able to do everything, you know, that the Bicep team has done and continues to do. They're still working on it. But it will do so with more sensitivity, higher frequency coverage, better angular resolution from our companion six meter telescope. So the kind of death of bicep, you know,

for me personally, I'm no longer affiliated with it, led to me 100% committing to the Simon's Observatory, which has got the power to really be the, maybe the last of its kind, the biggest experiment ever funded to do this type of research. and there's an assumption that the quantum fluctuations during the inflation caused the polarization of the light, is that right? The model is that, and this is one of my great mentors, Alexander Polnarev, is now retired from Queen Mary, but when he was working for the Soviet, former Soviet Union, they were, you know, there's this whole team of group of astrophysicists who were working partially on astrophysics and partially on the Soviet atomic policy.

because they had a lot of things in common, including these high temperatures, high pressures, fusion, yeah, all these processes. So we were able to kind of leverage their expertise, and sometimes the, you know, kind of higher powers at the universities that they work would let them dabble in cosmology. And when they did, they came out with these great ideas.

One of the ideas was that if the universe began with this inflationary epoch, it would produce waves of gravity. The waves of gravity aren't unique, but they have a unique feature, in that a wave of gravity, if it goes through this room, would make us way less or more by a minuscule amount, less than 10th of our mass fractionally.

But the other thing it does is it actually shears space time. It can actually make space time on successive crest and troughs shear, and that's what causes the twisting curling pattern in the microwaves. So the logical syllogism that we are following here is, if you measure this pattern of curling, swirling, microwave polarization, the only way it could get there

cosmala over the entire sky would be if it occurred extremely early in the universe has passed, and if inflation took place to cause the universe to expand, and what we're effectively seeing, these gravitational waves are actually amplified quantum fluctuations

in a scalar field called the inflaton. Those quantum fluctuations, then, get magnified by the expansion to be very large-scale signals. Now they're degrees across. Remember I said, we only have to see a few degrees. We don't have to see arc-nano-arc seconds or anything like that. So the gravitational waves come from inflation in this idea.

But inflation is not, again, you can't prove inflation, but you can get a lot of circumstantial evidence for it. So imagine the gravitational waves from LIGO. Those were produced from a single pair of black holes 30 times the mass of the sun. But imagine every black hole, every galaxy, every supercloth, Everything exploding from a quantum field, but literally times a trillion. The caveat is that that occurred so long ago that the energy is diluted and expanded by the universe is expansion factor by a factor of the redshift to the fourth power.

That's how radiation dilutes. Why do you need to assume a quantum fluctuation versus just like thermal randomness? Like there's thermodynamics you're going to have some differences in density and so on. So when we look at the CMB, we're seeing the last scattering of, of photons from tightly coupled plasma. So the plasma is photons, electrons, and protons. The photons are scattering off the electrons. They only scatter off unbound electrons.

When the C&B and the temperature of the universe cools below the ionization binding energy of hydrogen, the electrons are no longer free to scatter. At that point, you get a snapshot of what life was like in the early universe. And at that time, it was a plasma. That's all there was. there was gravity in gravitational waves, but they are far subdominant to the ordinary fluctuations of matter,

temperature, pressure, and what are called acoustic oscillations. They're basically sound waves. Sound waves in a plasma travel at a speed of the speed of light, divided by square root of three, on this type of plasma, and the density fluctuations in them

come from the excess of basically dark matter. So the pattern there is really tracing the pattern of dark matter establishing a gravitational potential well, into which ordinary matter falls into that you can see. If it was just dark matter, we wouldn't exist. I couldn't see anything. The ordinary matter falls into these gravitational wells. It drags with it photons, and you see that imprint of the photon. The other thing, though, that's happening, are the waves of gravity are present. They are causing the space time to shear, as seen from a given electron before it scatters. So they see a little bit

hotter radiation coming in one direction, and then below them, they see hotter in this direction. If they get this shearing, twisting pattern, that causes a polarization of the photons to then have this pattern that comes out to be like a curl, a whirlpool, and that will be associated with a single set of perturbation. And then you have to superimpose all the different gravitational waves that could have been present from there. So the only way you can get the curling pattern, you're right, is from gravitational waves. But every other fluctuate, all that is fluctuations that have nothing to do with gravitational waves and everything to do with plasma sound waves in the early the universe.

Why is it always said that there's like a quantum, like the reason that the universe isn't uniform is there's the quantum fluctuations. Why aren't the classical fluctuations sufficient? So you have to ask, why did the dark matter form where it did? So the dark matter can only form if there's a place that breaks the symmetry of space time curvature. That's like the sun is formed where it did because there was a previous star that was here. Why that previous star form here? because there was other stars there,

while our galaxy form where it did, because there was actually an excess of dark matter here. And that dark matter established a gravitational potential well, into which gravity will pull in ordinary matter, and eventually they'll get hydrogen fusion into helium, and they get planets and people and podcasts, and everything else, right? Those types of fluctuations exist. Those are created, the perturbations in the spacetime curvature.

That's what's coming from inflation. If you don't have inflation, you have to explain why there are fluctuation. fluctuations at all. Why wasn't the universe perfectly homogeneous, smooth, and perfect? Why would there be any place to tell dark matter to form there and not here? And so what inflation does is it gives a seed mechanism for planting tiny seeds of pure curvature into which gravity will pull into, curvature is another way to say gravitational potential, so into which will fall ordinary matter. So the paradigm that we see now is consistent with those fluctuations in curvature, but it's not as

good a piece of evidence as it would be if we see the gravitational waves. Those can only be in other words, there are other models that produce the sound wave plasma fluctuations, but don't produce gravitational waves. So therefore, if you see gravitational lines, you don't prove inflation, but you disprove everything else, which is as good as you can do in science. Are there any byproducts on measuring the polarization? So I understand the first goal is to study the primordial gravitational waves, but do we get also information about other things? Yeah.

So not necessarily from the bicep-sized telescopes of the bicep or what we call small aperture telescopes of the Simon Observatory. Those are designed only to look for galactic contamination and the curl pattern from inflationary primordial perturbations. But the big telescope, six meters across, can see a whole bunch of other stuff. I can see all the fine-scale details, much higher resolution, better sensitivity than the Planck satellite even,

which is a billion-dollar project or more. And it can look in particular for a host of other astrophysical phenomena, formation of galaxies, of clusters of galaxies. It can also tell us about things that emit heat, anything that emits heat. So asteroids, planet nine,

we could potentially detect the ninth planet using a cosmology experiment because anything that exists that has mass that is made of matter is going to give off heat. So we can measure that. We also are very hopeful. We know neutrinos have mass, but we don't know what the mass is. So we're hopeful we can measure the mass of neutrinos by using the fluctuation pattern

of the cosmic microwave background and its polarization that will tell us about the size of the gravitational potential wells that are associated with the neutrinos. And that's another way of indirectly measuring their mass. We can't measure them in the lab directly with their mass is. It's very difficult because they're so light and they don't interact very much. But if you use the cosmos as a laboratory, it's much more probable that we can actually detect that. So there's many different aspects of cosmology, of astrophysics, of particle physics, that we are uniquely capable of measuring. And now we just have to collect enough data to do it.

We just got first light. We got first light last year on the first of the small aperture telescopes that are looking for these gravitational lanes. and we got the first light of the large telescope that can detect all these other things. Anything that's not gravitational waves can detect all those things. We just got first light with that in February, so three months ago. And now we're just going to turn loose

and hopefully have enough data in the next four years to really detect. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. To help him see if he can afford it.

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Yeah, there are even plans to do it. The problem is anything in space is 100 times more expensive, and this is already, you know, so that would be the cost of the James Webb Space Telescope just to do this. And the web telescope is the same size, the primary mirror is the same size of our telescope. Yes, it would be better.

Each detector would be 100 times more sensitive, but there are a lot of limitations. Like the web telescope, you remember, and that actually 3D printed by one of my students, actually folds apart. So there was a limit. You couldn't get into a rocket without that. For the measurement of the gravitational waves, you actually don't need to be in space.

It would be better, but it would be more reasonable to do it cost-wise. But you're kind of putting all your eggs in one basket. You don't need a giant telescope in space. You just need like a lot of smaller telescopes in space potentially. But, you know, given the budget environment right now, and the fact that you can do it from the ground is more promising than most other sources where you need to go into space. What are the main atmospheric contaminants? Just water vapor? Anything that has molecular

absorption or emission ban, water vapor is really bad. That's why we go to space, or we go to high mountain tops, or the South Pole. So right now in San Diego... Can you get better data if you induce rain to get rid of the water? Actually, you could...

You gave me a good idea. Our competitors... Can we shoot some clouds. Thank you, Mike. You can delay it. Oh, yeah, you could do it that way. You could delay it. No, so anyone who's heated up coffee in a microwave,

realize that water absorbs microwaves. Which is a crime, by the way. So if you have a photon that's been traveling for 13.8 billion years, the last thing you want is for it to get absorbed in the Earth's atmosphere. So going to space is very expensive. People have done it. So you want to go somewhere dry. You want to go to a desert.

Most people don't think of the South Pole is a desert, but it's one of the driest deserts on Earth. So right here in San Diego, which is also a desert, where it's called a coast. desert. If you were to take a glass, any width, it doesn't matter, and extend it to space and then cool it down to below the dew point of all the

water, all the vapor that's suspended above you in this jar, right now we would condense about two inches of water, inch and a half, two inches of water. Even in a desert, that's not how much water vapor is going to rain down on us, but it's called the, it's the column density of water, yeah, so it's there.

The South Pole, it's about a third of a millimeter. So it's 100 times better at least. And Chile is about a millimeter. Chile, you can get to tomorrow night if you wanted to. You could be there in 25 hours, if you wanted to. You can drive up to the mountain top, sea level

to 18,000 feet almost. You have to wear oxygen. You're above half the sea level pressure. You don't have enough oxygen to think clearly. So you have to wear canulence. Hard hats, ultraviolet radiation layering down on you. So the So when we look at the same B from there, we're above a lot of these water vapor contaminants.

The other type of thing that you can't get rid of on Earth is oxygen has emission and absorption features that we can see. That's basically it. Oxygen and water vapor, nothing else. And the atmosphere is kind of God or whoever you like in Mother Nature. They put bands, you know, where we get enough photons that we can get good statistics on. And where we get high absorption or high emission, we just don't put our frequency, we put our filters around this, we don't see into them.

So you know, you've obviously given a lot of thought to the Nobel Prize, right? Like we don't have to go into it here, but that's something you've opined on in the book, in other places. So if you had to do kind of like a venture, like a startup to win the Nobel Prize, right? And you could hire five teams to work on five problems

for five years. Which problem areas would you focus on? I mean, right now, I am focused on a project that, you know, if successful, you know, is in that level. And so what I like to do now, my research portfolio is, it has to be balanced. It can't be like Bitcoin, you know, nothing but Bitcoin, you know, you can have a little Bitcoin, if you like, but you should have something, you know, S&P 500 index fund. So that's why what I love about the Simon's Observatory and my colleagues like Mark Demblen and Suzanne Staggs and Dan Lyman Page and Adrian and all these other great scientists, Jeffrey McMahon, is that they are so good at doing all the things

that we can do Planet 9. We can look for galaxy clusters. We can look for neutrinos. So it's a balanced portfolio. We know all those exist, right? We know neutrinos exist. We know dark matter exist. We know the galaxies exist.

So there's guaranteed science. Like the S&P is going to go up 8% per year. And then you have your Bitcoin or your fart coin or whatever you want. You have your speculative. venture. For me, that's looking for this signal from inflation. We don't know if it took place. Inflation could have taken place, and we can never see it because the energy scale is too low. Or it couldn't have taken place, and we never see it anyway. The next kind of obsession that I have now

involves also high risk, but also balanced portfolio. It's called Churn Simons Cosmic Birofringens. It's a lot of words to it. But the Simons and Churn Simons suffices to say is the same Simons, is the Simon's Observatory, Jim Simons, my late great mentor. another father figure for me. And it's the following. When polarization propagates through materials, depending on that type of material, the polarization orientation

can rotate. You still have oscillation in a plane. You still have linear polarization or circular polarization. But the plane in which it oscillates in will change. If that's true, something completely bizarre would happen in our universe. We have not tested this on very, very, very distant scales.

It's very difficult to test this. You need very sensitive detectors, very high quality optics, and multiple frequency coverage. So we've only been able to really think about doing this accurately with the Simon's Observatory, because the way to calibrate these instruments is very difficult to do. So with the Simon's Observatory, we're using drones. So we're using a drone with a polarized source on it. That polarized source, technical reasons, can't fly into the distant far field of our big telescope. scope. It's too high up. Drones don't work very well unless you have like a global hawk or,

you know, the predator drones or whatever, which, you know, we've tried to get actually, but they won't want a lot of scenes. So one of the teams that you give me money to hire would be building a satellite. And that satellite would not look out, it would look down. And it would broadcast 100% known polarized signal at all frequencies, all times of the day when it's over us. Perfect point source, perfectly calibrated, standardized to NIST, you know, cesium claw, everything you could possibly want on. Probably $20, $30 million, but money is no object, so I shouldn't even think about the price, right? Another thing I would do is build, and that would be calibrating all these instruments.

Making an artificial, like a laser guide star, that would be also another thing, and that would shine. Again, these are calibration. Most people don't realize in science, we don't get paid to make these detections. We get paid to remove the unwanted stuff that we detected by accident. That's called systematic errors. Systematic errors cannot be removed by taking more data. If you have a ruler and it's three centimeters too short, it doesn't matter if you measure this table a thousand times.

You'll never get it right. You need something to calibrate against that known length, the wavelength of a cesium atom times the speed, or whatever. Then you could do it, but you can't do it unless you calibrate. So the hard part of being a scientist is not making the measurement, really, is calibrating the data and getting rid of systematic errors. So everything that I'd want to do at first would be calibrate and get precise measurements of these things.

Next thing would be a real long shot, but to get out of the plane of the solar system with a C&B satellite in space and moving at extremely high velocities, you know, get above the scale height of the galaxy. It might take a little while, but maybe we could do it. Uri Milner, you know, gives me a couple tens of billions of dollars. So that would be one thing. Get rid of a lot of the dust in their solar system and in our galaxy. And that's most of the background that we would care about to worry about. another project, I forget how many were up to, maybe three or four,

would be huge optical telescopes in space. And that would be polarization sensitive. There's never been a polarization-sensitive optical telescope. Have you heard of the idea of making the Earth into a telescope where you use the refraction of the atmosphere? Yeah, my friend David Kipping and others

have talked about that. Yeah, Earthscope or whatever. That wouldn't necessarily exactly do what I wanted to do, but yes, that's a very cool idea. What I'd want is like, you know, a bunch of, you know, Hubble and James Webb's and even bigger things, 30-meter telescopes in space. Because when you look at something in a type of way that no one's ever looked, Galileo optically looking at the sky, Herschel looking infrared eventually, and then gravitational waves opening up this whole new vista for astronomy. You get incredible, you know, doing discoveries. No one's ever looked with a telescope at all different wavelengths in space that's polarized.

It's dedicated to polarization. And then I'll show you when we're done with the interview. I'll show you some of the initial steps for building a prototype here to do that, but it's in San Diego. It's not in Spain. But until your check clears, that's the best of my fart coin cashes out. That's about as good as we can do. And then telescopes on the moon are always fun to think about. And then, you know, particle accelerators, you know, the size of the solar system and beyond are always fun to think about with your money.

anything's possible. This just made me appreciate our ability to inject calibration lines. Yes. Yeah. That's like just like a button. If you guys didn't do that, yeah, you wouldn't have been able to do what you did. It's absolutely true. Yeah, but we don't need like extra.

We don't need an extra set. I didn't say I need a team of theorist, right? I didn't say I need like all these brilliant theorists. I think that's something that gets overlooked. Even in what I do outside of work, which is, you know, my podcast, right? There are many more people that, you know, Sean Carroll, and Brian Green, Janelle Levin, people that have podcasts that do stuff, they're all theorists. Michi O'Cock, I don't know of another experimental physicist.

David Kipping is an observational astronomer, but doing, you know, really looking at what does it take to actually get the data that these brilliant theorists will then use to either, you know, claim they're correct or claim they're incorrect. These are just some of the most fascinating things, and it gets to tinker with your hands and not just sit in front of a pad and paper. all day long. So I think we have too much theory and I don't think we have enough experiment right now. Oh, I would totally agree. Yeah. It's just much harder. It's like same as maybe like hardware and then software. Exactly. Yeah. I would say that in my my friends and listeners and the audience that are software engineer. Why do you have to make fun about it? Without software engineering, you'd be screwed. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of really interesting. I'm fascinated with AI now and and using it all the time. And I hate it when my, I ask my students, like, do your professors let you use AI?

And they're like, no, it's like forbidden. I'm like, that's one of the dumbest. It's basically like child abuse. I even taught my daughter, you know, as like third grade, you know, how to use AI. She made a song about, you know, with her name in it. And like, you could exclude like, oh, I don't want to do a leap, but I do want, you know, whatever. She likes little girl stuff, right? And she learned how to prompt, like, age nine.

It's incredible. And to think that, like, imagine a teacher saying you can't. use it. It's like, oh, you can't use a spreadsheet when it came out, or, you know, you can't use Fortran or, you guys, probably didn't use Fortran, but IDL or imagine not using Python. I mean, it's

ridiculous. So I want them to embrace and I want them to be, you know, using it for, and we actually did a test with it. This is one of the things that I, the only kind of research I've done with AI, I asked the following question. Einstein, you know, imagine you gave Einstein AI

in 1914. before he came out with the theory of general relativity. And you said, here's the data, here's the orbit of the planet Mercury, which he knew about, put into AI, and then tell me what comes out of the AI. Does it predict the bending of space time

due to the presence of stress energy in the form of matter? Can it derive that? I know it can predict, I mean, I've debated with Max Tagmarker, I know it can solve the orbits perfectly, but can it predict that you need to go from you know, vectorized data into, you know, into Riemannian curvature. It's such a leap of human intuition.

And I almost know that it couldn't do it because we tried to do it. And what it did is said it had a discretize make on a grid. And it could reproduce the orbits, but it didn't come up with things like the Ritchie curvature, Ritchie Scaler, it didn't come up with Remontensor. It didn't do any of that. It's just here's a brute force method. So in other words, it wouldn't have come up with the idea. You know, it's like if you gave it, here's a list of all these people that have died recently.

You gave it to it in 1862. Is it going to come up with like the germ theory of disease? Like, oh, maybe there's some germ. No, it would never be able to do that because that's something that's observational. And that's, again, experimental, calibrational. You need to relate it to something that is uniquely the domain of humans. And the last thing I'll say about it is Einstein himself said, you know, the happiest thought of his life was that if he was on an elevator, it's kind of weird, and the elevator cable broke,

he'd experienced no gravitational field. And that's called the Einstein equivalent's principle. So how could a, you know, is Claude 24 going to be able to feel what it's like to have an elevator cable break or have a, oh, I'm really happy. Like, if my AI gets happy, something's going wrong. So I'm a problem. Yeah. But I think partnering with AI is very powerful.

other mathematicians are doing this, but things where there's proof, but where there's not proof, I think they get very uncomfortable. And as I said, many times throughout the conversation, can't prove something in experimental science. You can just observe it and exclude or disprove other things that could have been true but aren't. But what's your opinion on falsifiability? Is that like the basis for a scientific theory? I don't think it's the only criterion. It's kind of outdated in some ways.

I do think it's at least maybe necessary. It's too strong a word, but it's certainly not sufficient. I mean, I can tell you that, you know, I read my horoscope today as I do every day, and it predicted what would happen. And it didn't happen. You know, I got the parking space in the garage that you guys were trying to get. So it was false, right? So it's astrology science.

I mean, that would prove that it is, right? And of course, it's ironic because Popper used astrology as one of the many reasons to think that it's pseudoscience. But it's ironic because it's actually falsified. yeah i think uh what one question that you know kind of we can cut it out if you if you don't want to discuss it but i think uh it's just an interesting question is so you know the book had a lot of feedback you know our ideas how to potentially improve the Nobel Prize right because a Nobel Prize again it's just one of the prize and so on but it does have all these downstream effects like even in my world like i work in startups and you know people get like a Nobel

prize winner on their advisory board and you know does that person really get involved who knows, but it's like basically a quick way for someone to say, oh, you've got a Nobel Prize winner involved. So this must be at least sensible, right? It's an ultimate stamp of approval. So the question is then, okay, you know, having written this book, that's kind of, you know, it's been, I guess, seven years or so, have you actually had any kind of traction with, like, interacting with the people who run the Nobel Prize or even getting any feedback on your, on your ideas about, like, improving it?

I had, initially I did. I mean, you know, everything has an exponential decay curve to it, right? So first year, now you say seven years, it makes me feel really old because I remember writing it, you know, 10 years ago, before I had some kids that I now have. So it kind of dates a period of my life. And, you know, truth be told, it's not something, it's something I was obsessed with as a kid and a postdoc and a graduate student. And I almost never think about it now. I have been asked once, which is I was shocked. I got the letter to nominate a second time. So in the book, I talked about the first time I was asked to nominate and how I took it as a homework assignment.

you know, to kind of rehabilitate or redeem what Alfred Nobel really wanted. He said, you should go to one person who came up to invention last year that had the greatest benefit to mankind. And now it's three people can win it for stuff they did 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and who knows if it has a benefit to mankind, abstractly, you know, did the lighthouse have a huge benefit to mankind? At that time, it did, but it's certainly not like LIGO or something else. And interestingly enough, like, you know, I've talked to, you know, I've talked to, you

Barry Barish wrote the foreword to my second book. And he complains about a lot of the stuff that I complained about. But no one's ever refused the Nobel Prize. And no one's ever, you know, said, well, I think we should, I'm going to take my Nobel Prize in the Lago team, many of whom contacted me throughout the writing and post-writing the book, saying, you know, I should have done it. You know, they didn't take the prize and cut it into a thousand pieces.

They could have. I mean, the degree to which the scientific community worships the Nobel Prize and they cultivate that as a monopoly is the thing that most surprised me about it. Just how criticizing it, otherwise atheistic people like Sean Carroll, if I criticize it, oh, no, it has all these great features and it's wonderful.

And even though he wrote, you know, a blurb for the book, a lot of people just, you know, Sabina Hassanfeld or another person, they, you know, they think it's great. And they think, yes, it has some problems, but nobody thinks about changing it, reforming it, you know, what could be done to it. So I think a lot of it, every single person, you know, right sitting in this chair,

Adam Reese was here last year, and he said, yeah, you know, it should go to everybody on the team. And I'm like, well, did you give yours by? Like, you know, can you get a piece of it to your friend, you know, at the University of Texas who deserves it, you know? And they never do. Even Feynman. You know, Feynman claimed that, oh, you didn't care about it. He wasn't going to go at the ceremony and pick it up. Supposedly he drilled a hole in it to wear it as a big chain around his neck.

Nobody can prove that. I don't think that's true at all. But he would say things like, you know, I did it, you know, despite the Nobel Prize, I don't want to be a member of this club. And then, you know, but he kept his Nobel Prize and he would refer to it, right? Is it like actually a time maybe to create like a new system? Because it reminds me, it's like, you know, maybe people who work in like industry with like jirrits tickets like to move the progress. And then people start to abuse it in some sense.

So they're not really like working on the progress, but they're working to satisfy it. and move all this, like, the Jury tickets game. So would, like, the Nobel Prize turn into maybe originally, since maybe, like, the first Nobel Prizes, they were kind of satisfying, the kind of awarding the big breakthroughs in science, and then it turned out into something else. So do you have any, like, suggestions of use?

What would be, like, the new way of kind of stimulating the breakthroughs in science and technology? Well, I mean, I think, you know, the goal in writing it wasn't to tear it down, and destroy it, it was to reform it. I don't think there's anything irredeemable about it that couldn't be fixed without some attention to detail. The last time the rules were rewritten again

was in 1974, like 50 plus years ago. And that was to like allow or to forbid posthumous awarding of the Nobel Prize. That was one of the things. So like anything that doesn't change, it's changed once in its history. Officially, remember they changed it unofficially a couple years after Alfred Nobel died,

they gave it to three people, like Mary Curie and her husband, and I always forget the term, it wasn't Becker-R-L. But anyway, the point is, it could be reformed, and it should be. My whole point in the discussion of the Nobel Prize, there's only three chapters out of 11.

It's not really about that. It's more memoir being a scientist. But it was to like, let's save the Nobel Prize before it's too late. Because all these other prize, they're talking about the Pulitzer Prize. Nobody cares about the Pulitzer Prize anymore. I mean, if you're in writing,

maybe you do a newspaper. A minority really cares about it. You know, these things don't, but it used to be much more prestigious than the Nobel Prize for a long time. And now, you know, there are other prizes, the breakthrough prizes, you know, people don't really associate.

Templeton Prize was established explicitly to be worth more money than a Nobel Prize because it was about religion, spirituality, and the science is harmonization. And Templeton, Sir John Templeton, wanted to make the money equal or better than the Nobel Prize. So all these spin-off things have come

about it. Jim Simons was asked to invest their portfolio in the, I think it was in the 1990s. He was an investment unpaid financial advisor to the Nobel Prize Committee. So they obviously care about it, they want to keep it going. So some of this could be made for reform so that they don't get, you know,

me-toed or, you know, they don't have the problem. What's the one change? If you made one change, what would it be? I think the exclusion of teens is the biggest flaw and the biggest contradiction between how science is done now versus 1900. that, you know, teams of 1,000 people are needed, you know, more.

The Higgs-Boson, you know, went to three people, you know, Brown and Angler, and Higgs, and that rewrote, you know, people like my, like my graduate school group theory professor, Jerry Guralnick, collie out of history. But let's say if I have five minutes to decide who to have, like, control a bunch of funding, and I'm using the Nobel Prize to make that decision, and you give it to 2,000 people, am I supposed to do? Well, no. I'm just saying, doesn't that

reduce the utility, social utility of it? If the social utility is to like single out some people and kind of arbitrarily give them some, you know, sway in society as long as you're not afraid of a little work. Like scientific society. I mean, so let's say it went into his building right now.

They said, we're going to drop a Nobel Prize on everyone in this building. Do you think it would be really hard to figure out that like you probably want it because you're in the building, not because you did any of the work that was actually related to. what my colleague upstairs discovered life on an extra solar planet.

I mean, this is something that we could debate. But in science, I mean, there's always a hierarchy. So students work on it. They get to claim Nobel Prize, you know, that they have it, maybe they win $50 or whatever it comes out to be. I think that would encourage more scientifically to be able to say things like that. That's what happened with the climate, you know,

with the IPCC Nobel Peace Prize. There were physicists on that that are Nobel Prize winners because they won the Nobel Peace Prize because they're part of this intergovernmental panel. So I don't think it would diminish. They claim it. Al Gore claims it.

And I think, but more than that, I mean, I would be more worried about the irrelevancy of the Nobel Prize in the future. People aren't going to care. Or there'll be somebody who says, look, you can have a Nobel Prize, but if you do, you won't get the billion dollars. I mean, it could happen.

Like some super billionaire could say, I want only stuff, let's say Musk, you know, completely took over all of science in America and just uses his whole fortune and says, the only thing U.S. should do is build, is go to Mars. I don't think that's a smart thing to do, but he could do that.

And then there would be enough of a disruption to, you know, if he paid every single professor in this department, a billion dollars to work nothing but Mars, you don't think they would do it because they care so much about, you know, detecting some molecule on some other planet. Maybe those that hate them would do that. You know, they wouldn't take his money.

But I think, you know, if you pay a person enough money, even a scientist, they would say that. So I think, and then what would happen to the Nobel Prize? It would be for going to Mars. So I think the Nobel Prize doesn't cultivate the essence and the core of what it means to do science and what makes us uniquely capable of doing science as human beings, operating teams and building instrumentation and pushing the boundaries.

I think it may be at risk of being irrelevant. Again, it's kind of like my hope that it survives, not that it goes away and I want to kill it. Maybe the last few minutes, do you want to talk about the Lorentz invariance? I do, but I rather show you it. Yeah, maybe we just usually have a closing question. I don't know if you want to. Sure. Do you do have any advice for younger scientists, maybe studying PhD students?

Yeah, I definitely do. So I wrote my second and upcoming third book into The Impossible. That one's called, I want to pick that up. Show it again. So that one's subtitle is Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. And this was written, and the next one's called Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner that comes out in September. This is really like optimizing for Amazon sales. Selling the books.

When you got a winning brand. You know, it's like one of my friends said, asked me like, who are you competing against? I was like, science books. And he's like, yeah, you're competing against like every single Oprah and Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift and cat video that ever is winning. So this is a book written by after I did nine interviews with Nobel Prize winners, and the second one's written after the second batch of nine Nobel Prize winners. Someday I've interviewed 21 so far. Maybe I'll do a third one, but I'm kind of, you know, doubtful.

I'm writing another book about Lorenz and variance and other things. So who knows when that'll come out? But every time I interview nine people, I take all their wisdom, not just their knowledge. Anyone can look up what they won the Nobel Prize for. But what specific wisdom do they have literally for a young person in their 20-year-old self? And I asked them, what would you do, go back in time, and have, How would you handle the struggles that you had to give you the courage to go into the impossible and do this thing that almost no one in their right mind would say, yes. Only one of the people in that book said, yes, I knew I was going to win a Nobel Prize, and I deserved it, and I should have given it to me sooner. I won't say who that is because I don't want to embarrass him. And in the next edition, I have people like Donna Strickland. You know, you guys will probably love for lasers, aficionados that you guys are.

and, you know, she's just so humanizing of what a scientist is and what it takes to succeed. It's not just raw brain power. It's collaboration. Sometimes knowing who to collaborate with and the competition, remember I said it's more important who you work for and work with than it is what you work on. You could work on the hottest subject.

Today it's AI. Who knows? Who cares? If you don't get along with your advisor, if you're working with cutthroat people that are your competitors, and that happens a lot in science. And people don't realize. I think scientists is just like children.

asking question, no, it's very cutthroat. It's very demanding because there's only one Nobel Prize. It's the strongest monopoly ever created on Earth. So people that aspire to that rather than financial remuneration because they went into a field that doesn't pay as much, they went into because they love science, but they also like recognition. So I think partially it would be to recognize that you have a life outside of science and that most of what you do in life, your kind of identity

should not be tied up with who you are in the laboratory, but it should be made up of things that give you excitement and enjoyment and relationships with people, not with computers and AIs, outside the laboratory. And that's what's most enduring. And that's what leads to true happiness. And that's what the threat is between all these people is the connections they have with other people, not with like this, like, just complete obsession with the science and nothing else. It's a story of individuals and challenges.

And I wrote it to be applicable to a car salesman in Oklahoma as much as to an aspiring Nobel Prize winner. So I'll read that book. And then September 9th comes Focus like a Nobel Prize winner, which is about really literally, like how Donna Strickland would endure, you know, endure, you know, long winter nights in Canada, you know, working on laser chirpulse amplification and how she did it and what made it gave her the endurance to do it.

So that's coming out in the fall. And eight other people too. I think that's good. Hey, Brian. Thanks. No, too. Yes, thank you. Amazing conversation.

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