Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Galileo: The Elon Musk of the Renaissance? | Dr. Brian Keating on Young Heretics with Spencer Klavan

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Dr. Brian Keating joins Spencer Klavan to discuss one of the most brilliant, complicated, and misunderstood men in all of Western history. No, not Elon Musk. Galileo Galilei! They cover Galileo's daring philosophy of science, his contributions to human knowledge, his devout Catholic faith, and his many, many mistresses and children. Plus: what can believers learn from scientists, and vice versa? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Hey guys, welcome back to Young Heretics Conversations. I've been on the road a little bit lately, and while I'm traveling, I like to drop these conversations interviews that I've been having with interesting people, authors, thinkers at the forefront of their fields in the present day, because we're doing this long series on the Indianid, which I am loving. Thank you for coming with me on this journey through the great epic poem of Augustin Rome. But every now and then, it is a very now and then.

good also to check in with what's going on in the here and now and think about how these principles relate to one another. I am delighted to introduce you guys if you don't already know Dr. Brian Keating. He is a friend of mine, but more importantly, he's somebody working at the cutting edge of cosmology, which is the study, the scientific study of the origin of the universe. And his particular area of study is one of my favorite areas in all of modern physics. If I'm allowed as a non-physicist to have a favorite area, and that is he works on the CMBR, the cosmic microwave background radiation that supposedly endures from the very, very first instance of the universe. This is something I wrote about in my book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which you should all order

on Amazon if you haven't already and give five stars if you have. But this is one of the most poetic, suggestive, inspiring ideas to have emerged, I would say, in the last 100 years or so from physics, that in fact the universe does have an origin. And in fact, there are traces of it still lingering in the air. Even in your TV static, if you have an old-fashioned TV, there are traces of this ancient light. And Brian is working on detecting, studying this light, looking for evidence of and about the, origins of the universe. I met him at a conference we were both at, and I could just tell from the start, like, this guy gets it. He's super smart, obviously an advanced physicist, but he's also just a good guy. He's got a sense of humor. He's got a research lab at UC San Diego,

but he's also a great popular explainer of things. He's got a podcast called Into the Impossible, where he talks to just incredible guests. I mean, Andrew Humberman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, like top talent, yours truly, myself. He's got a great book called Losing the Nobel Prize, and he understands that we are not the first people ever to have had thoughts. In fact, he has a deep understanding also of the history of science. And so when I finished my book in manuscript, I have to admit, I never quite told him this, I was like really nervous to send it to him because I was like, okay, there's like a real scientist, and I'm writing this book about the history of science. I think there are like cool arguments in it, but we just really

hit it off and we had a great interview on his show about my book and about the question of God and science and how they relate to one another. And we definitely knew we wanted to have a conversation on young heretics. And since this is a show that looks back at kind of the longer history of the West, what we thought we would talk about is Dr. Keating's hero, namely Galileo Galilei, somebody who has been obviously celebrated but also denounced variously. his story has been told and retold, and he's kind of a major player in what I think of as like the morality tale of the post-enlightenment story of science, that this was this crusader for reason against the church. And of course, the reality is much, much more complicated, much more interesting than that.

I go into it in the book. But Brian's been studying Galileo knows Galileo's works back to front. And we've just had a really, really interesting conversation about him, Galileo, his place in the history of science. and the future of science in its contemporary mode. What exactly does science have to offer the layman? Why has it been so misused in the era of COVID? And how can we recover a robust scientific project amid what might also be a religious and cultural revival? So I'm excited to share this conversation with you guys.

But first, five alarm fire, urgent matter, do not pass go, do not collect $200, just go. just go straight to ancient language.com slash heretics, H-E-R-E-T-I-C-S, and sign up for the summer term at the Ancient Language Institute. The deadline is closing down on us really fast. April 19th, registration will close. I know there are, I think, a few spots left last time I checked, and you can get a discount by using my name, Spencer, S-P-E-N-C-E-R at checkout, which is a secret.

Don't tell anybody only for listeners of this show. You get a special Spencer Claven, Young Heretics, Discount, Ancientlanguage.com slash heretics, where you can study Greek, Latin, biblical Hebrew, and or Old English, Anglo-Saxon. What could be better? There is, I can think of no better uses for your free time, for your furthering education, wherever you are in life. If you have already done all your formal education, but you want to dig deeper into the classics. You want to get that face-to-face encounter with the ancient world. You want to have ownership over your cultural heritage as a citizen of the West. Maybe you're a student, you're just

coming up and you want to incorporate this into your education. There's nowhere better to do it than the Ancient Language Institute. They take an extremely intuitive approach that gets you reading really quickly. So if you're going in for a particular book that you want to read, you'll be able to start working with real life sentences in the wild really quickly. They have a whole bunch of special programs to meet you at whatever level you might be at. There's a Plato camp in June and July. There's a Latin teacher boot camp. There's all sorts of offerings.

Gotta go before April 19th to ancient language.com slash heretics using the offer code Spencer, S-P-E-N-C-E-R to let them know I sent you and to get the special discount. All right. And with that, let's talk to Dr. Brian Keating. All right. Well, I am here with my friend Brian Keating. I often say that Young Heretics is the classical education you didn't know you were missing. Brian Keating is the one man, science education. You didn't know you were missing. You can find him at Brian Keating.com. His accomplishments are far too many for me to enumerate. He's the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego. expert on cosmic microwave, the cosmic microwave background, not just any cosmic microwave background, but the cosmic microwave background. One of my favorite subjects as an amateur to read the kind of trade papers about, or rather the kind of public facing stuff about that. And he's a wonderful, among other things, explainer of complex and difficult scientific

questions, which you can hear him doing on his podcast, into the impossible. Go check out episode we did together when my book, The Mind of the World came out. That was a real blast. One of the highlights of the press store for that book. Brian, welcome to Young Heretics. Maggie Spencer, thank you for reading that introduction as my Jewish mother wrote it. And thank you for not, you know, presenting my Jewish mother-in-law's version, which would be her rebuttal. Thank you. That comes later in the show, actually. We roast you at a 30-minute mark or so. But we're here to talk not actually about you, fascinating as you are, but about Galileo. This is a show about the Western culture broadly conceived. Galileo, obviously, a major player. And for those following

along at home, this is not the AI program that's unlocking evaluation intelligence for AI teams. Although there is a program called Galileo that does that. This is the 17th century pioneer of science who figures, and I think this is important, figures very prominently in what I've called the morality tale of science versus religion. I think he's almost conceived of as kind of ground zero for this like enlightenment narrative of the big bad church that was very mad at nice Galileo who discovered for the first time something something. Nobody seems to quite, this is the point where the story breaks down,

although every point of the story needs modification. Some people seem to be under the impression that Galileo discovered the earth was round. Not the case. People have done that for a long time. Some people seem to be under the impression that he discovered or proved that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. Neither of those is quite the case either. And yet, and yet, when you clear away all of these sort of popular misconceptions and you take a look at the actual legacy of this man.

It's almost as if the truth is more exciting, more fascinating, more complicated than the fiction. And even after all of that, you, Brian, I think I've heard you say that Galileo is your intellectual hero. Is that correct? Did I have that right? Yeah. And he did a remarkable job of relating some of the misconceptions. But you left out the most important one that he was tortured in jail.

and killed because of his heretical beliefs. And who better to represent this show than Galileo? So I had this finger puppet made of him. It's the only way that you want to be fingered, trust me, Spencer, from experience. Here he is with a telescope. For those of you listening at home, you can get one of these. Send me an email. I'll send you one of those.

But the point is he's just a larger-than-life figure. I mean, he's the person I'd most like to, you know, share some time with, have a grapa with, And really, the one regret, if I have one from our all too brief time this past summer, would be to have not the opportunity of taking you to his villa, which was his prison. It was his home imprisonment, but it was outside of Florence where we were, you know, supping and dining and not, but the most lavish and expensive and delicious foods and drinks. But in our Chetri, in the hills above the Arno, was his final resting place. And it's one of the most incredible, you know, scientific, culturally important places in the world for many reasons. But the fact of his story, it almost doesn't need embellishment, even though, you know, people, that doesn't stop people from trying. That's right.

We met in Florence, and we do have a standing now obligation. You've got to take me on the tour of the villa where Galileo was placed under house arrest. And you're right. that is kind of the pinnacle of his legend, of his mythology, as well as of the truth of his story. So I want to get into that and what exactly happened in 1633 that kind of left him under under house arrest. But first, you know, all of this is intensely relevant to the modern day. Not only that story of him and this idea that Galileo is sort of the, poster boy for the fight between science and religion. But, you know, you yourself are,

I won't blow in quite so much, Mokos say you are the inheritor, the heir of Galileo's legacy. But you are certainly working in the tradition that he in many ways inaugurated. Could you explain in a nutshell what exactly did Galileo do? What is it about his work that was so transformative and revolutionary? He was really the first, in some sense, of the Renaissance man, the man of letters, the man of science, the man of humanities, arts, music. His father was a gifted musician. He was a mathematician. He was a courtier to the Venetian, you know, Senate and Doge, the original doge, I should say, just to make it clear for our younger listeners. Yeah, and how old was he at the time? That's the real question. Was he one of these teenagers

I didn't know anything? No, he wasn't big balls. He was significantly older when he made a chance discovery. So it's really interesting. I was fuzzling around with the camera before we started recording. And you remarked it's quite apropos for this episode. I have a lens here. And for those of you listening on audio-only platforms,

but I have a lens here from camera, which is basically what a telescope is. It's not any different than the two refracting telescopes that occupy your ocular, you know, vault in your head, connected to a detector system, not a CCD, but are connected to your retina and to your massive brain. And a camera is basically a telescope, and your eyes are telescopes too.

And what was so fascinating about Galileo, another myth is that he invented the telescope. He did not. He was invented in the Netherlands, as was the microscope, it turns out. And why was it invented there? Why were both a telescope and the microbe? I mean it has to do with capitalism.

Both of those trades relied on getting the finest glass, for example, to make microscopes, to make telescopes. And that required getting trade and the Netherlands and Holland was one of the greatest trading centers of the world in the late 1600s, or late 1500s, early 1600s. But by the time Galileo comes upon this little instrument, which he says, I heard about this interesting device from a, from a from a from a from a from a from a from a from a from a from a from a Dutchman that makes distant objects appear bigger. And he called it the perspiculum, the perspective tube. And now we call it the telescope, the distance scope, distance viewer. And this object, he doesn't give credit to Hans Lipper Shea. I have to give credit to good old Hans.

But to give Galileo his due, Hans never thought that he would take this little object up at night and go like this, go from looking horizontally, you know, for ships at sea, which Galileo also did. He had many motivations. But one of the most important ones that he had was this notion that what a scientist should do is to measure. 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.

As he said, what is measurable, but make measurable what is not yet so, meaning that, you know, his quest was always to do the impossible. and he was intensely curious. He was driven by many forces. He was incredibly interesting. He had multiple mistresses and illegitimate children and really a patronage that he was trying to cultivate, not unlike many shrewd actors of their time, but he was a Machiavellian figure,

so much so that he's in Robert Green's book, The 48 Laws of Power. He appears in that book, and he's the only scientist that I know of that appears in it. And it's because he had this incredible, aptitude on one hand to be perceptive and to ingratiate himself with everything from the Doge, the Senate of Venice, in other words, from the Medici family, who were his National Science Foundation support network, all the way up to the Catholic Church, which he was a deeply believing

and abiding Christian Catholic, and in fact his oldest daughter was a nun, and his youngest daughter was a nun too, and they were nuns because they were illegitimate, born out of wedlock. So he was a very complicated figure, but he could be incredibly perceptive, but like many great men, like Einstein, like you, Spencer, great men are not immune from having great flaws. And he had many of them, one of which was to be completely oblivious to impolitic things that he would later step his foot into, despite multiple warnings. And a lot of latitude from the church. Now, the church deserves a lot of ire in some ways, and we can get into that. But it wasn't the all-pervasive, you know, kind of, uh, inquisition, torturing this poor man of science, um, as they did do to Bruno, uh, some 10 years earlier, but Gallo didn't really learn very many lessons. And I always say it's too bad because he could have had a great career. They burned him, right, Bruno at the stake? Is that what happened? They burned him in 1600. But he was kind of a prick. I mean, he was, he was intentionally, that case. I knew there was something I didn't like about, fine, burn,

you at the stake then, in that case. Oh, yeah. So, Bruno famously, Clayton, uh, so Bruno famously, that every star was a planet, was a world, and those worlds were innumerable, and they all had people on it and places. And then the church said, well, wait a second, now could Jesus be there? We know there's a lot of planets out there. Every single point of light is a planet, which it's not, by the way. So he was wrong, as Galileo as often, as Einstein is, as Newton is. The science is provisional, right, Spencer? It's not fixed in stone. The whole point of, when I write a book, is that I hope and pray, unlike, you know, people like Stephen Hawking or whatever, that

that my books are irrelevant in 50, 100 years, whereas the light of the world is different. And it's an eternal light versus the more ephemeral light that science is meant to be overthrown continuously everywhere and at every place science should be provisional. And the biggest doubters of the scientific method trademarked, you know, long ago, are scientists themselves or should be. So Bruno was a multiverse theorist. That was his true sin. Right, exactly.

Now I feel great about it. In that case. A field day way. You would have had a field day with all. Absolutely. Yeah. I have a small side question, which you, yeah. Fine if you don't know the answer to this.

I heard, I vaguely remember reading one time somewhere that at some point, a number of clerics thought that the rings of Saturn were the foreskin of Christ that had been like cast up into the heavens. Did you, do you know anything about this? Is that real? I've never heard that. I've never heard that. Galileo. actually, because he was so protective, he had an industry.

Like I said, he wasn't a rich man. In fact, when he showed the telescope to the Doge of Venice, they said, great, now you've got tenure. And he's like, F that, you know, I need more money. Give me those ducats, baby. And, you know, they give him a little extra startup money and it became a, you know, renowned professor. But, you know, he had basically given him the keys to turn off the stealth of the stealth bomber. I mean, he literally was able to remove the distance, you know, provided stealth that otherwise would have been immune to. So you could see, he took him up to the tower of San Machelli and Sanmichelli Piazza, and he showed them, look, you go up to this tower with the telescope.

You can see a boat that will take you otherwise three more days until the boat comes into the harbor. You can see it now. So that was a huge military advantage. And he worked on projectiles and armories. And he made a military compass, which was basically a slide rule. if you know are old enough. I don't think you are to remember what those are. But basically, yeah, yeah, exactly. I keep one of my pocket protector. But he, he was an incredible mind. And he was always hustling. He was a hustler. He was trying to make money to support those babies,

support those kids, support those women, and support is illegitimate, you know, and legitimate, you know, and legitimate, you know, kind of concubines. But he was, he was human. And I just love that about him. Wow, the parallels with Elon just keep multiplying, one of which is the involvement in public affairs. And he was also a polemicist, right? Is that fair to say? A very skilled rhetorical. Oh, he was beautiful. But he did it in a way that at the time sounded humble, but reading it in retrospect, my favorite, the quote of his from the dialogue. So I had the honor. So I was going to be on Prager University's book club with our friend, mutual friend Michael Moles. And in fact, I was on it. the year 2021, 2021, I forget when it was. I've been on there three or four times by now. I love that, you know, wishing Dennis to speedy refuish a lame, recovery completely. But what happened was

they asked me to do their first science offering. And I said, great, you know, and they were like, you want to do a brief history of time. I'm like, I met Stephen Hawking. Even he didn't understand the full, you know, it's really impenetrable and not very well-written book. But I was like, well, maybe do my scientific hero, I'll just do Galileo. And I thought, what's his most famous book? Well, it's the dialogue. And I'll just go to Audible, where we can find both of our books. And I actually, before your book was available on Audible, you'll remember, I made it into my own audiobook, narrated by that famous polemicist. Snoop Dog. And I still think that's the better version, but it's the contraband version. You can't get it in Audible. They can't get it anywhere else. But for me,

But anyway, so I went to Audible, and to my chagrin, I found it was not available, nor were any of his books, nor were Einstein's books or Newton's books. So I was like, oh, my God, this is awful, and it's an injustice. And so after I did the episode with Michael, I did sit down and record a 21-hour trialogue. It's a book with three voices, Galileo, an intelligent, you know, kind of layperson who I played. And then I had two Italians read the voice of Galileo and the voice. voice of the Pope, basically, who Galileo in, you know, imperfectly called the simpleton, Simplicio. So that was led partially to his downfall in 1633 when it's published. But the reason I bring all this up is because he had this beautiful way of writing that would

kind of give him cover if he was about to get canceled. And cancellation back then was pretty serious, as Bruno found out, at the wrong end of a torch. and the statement that he ends the book with is meant to like deflect criticism from the church, which he had gotten permission to publish the book from. Obviously they later banned it and put it on the index and did home imprison him. They didn't torture him. But at the end of the book, he goes, I have provided these words, not as a final say in the matter, but merely as a portal such that mine's more perspicacious than mine will be able to see farther

than I was able to do with my meager tools available. But literally, this prose that he writes with, it's beautiful, it's guberious, it's luscious, and I don't know any scientists that can really write like that. And the forward to that book is written by Albert Einstein, who called him, and Albert was a big egomaniac, as you know, too. And Albert says, you know, he was one of the greatest minds that ever lived, including me in the foreword. So that means they both had great flaws, as you earlier indicated. By the way, I'm awaiting perhaps after we turn off the mic, the catalog of my great flaws that you...

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm very curious to hear it from you. I'm editing your Wikipedia page right now, so... At least I'll then have a Wikipedia page. I'm very jealous that you have one. I don't have one yet. In any case, this starts to touch on kind of the counter myth. I've noticed recently that because a lot of us grew up with the, like, Mary Sue version of Galileo,

who could do no wrong against the villainous church, you're now getting a sort of revisionist version in which Galileo was just a, you called him a prick, right? Galileo was just a total pill and did everything wrong. I didn't call Galileo a prick. I called Bruno a prick. Just Bruno, I'm sorry. Bruno was a prick.

That's right. Okay. So, but some people will, we'll sell you Galileo was also a prick. You mentioned one major count against him. He puts the arguments of the church into the mouth of a guy called, dummy. He's got, you know, a certain one thing that people often mention is that he writes in Italian as compared to Copernicus Latin, which is somewhat more covert and clandestine, but just generally known for getting out over his skis, being unable to control the passion of his

arguments. How true is any of this? Was Galileo asking for it in any way? Oh, I think this is very True. And in fact, he literally was allowed by the church in 1610 when the Cedarius Nuncius came out, the Starry Messenger, which is really the first book that applied the scientific method to astronomy, to cosmology, and actually to codify the scientific method, namely that you can use instruments to gather evidence to bolster hypotheses. Now, in that book, there are hypotheses that are correct. There are hypotheses that are incorrect. and it wasn't written in a way to to bolster, you know, make arguments about the Copernican model versus the Aristotelian model, which is your favorite. But nevertheless, it was, it was, it was done on the point of heliocentrism versus

geotry. It would be totally clear, much as I love my boy, I yourself. But, you know, although you can read Latin, you know, and maybe chat GPT can, the average person couldn't. And he was permitted to study what they call the Copernican theory or the non-suncernic-theon-centered, the anti-tolemaic or Aristotelian model. He was permitted. He had a license to study it, but not to teach it. What did teaching mean?

It meant to convey it in the parlance of the common man or woman that could understand the dialect of the time. That to the extent that they could understand anything, most of them were illiterate. It was Italian. That was the lingua franca or the lingua, you know, Italiano. Italian, right? Yeah, exactly. I don't want to mix too many metaphors. So at the end of the day, he was permitted to study it, and he did, and he published it

under Latin, and he got permission to do it, and it became, he became, you know, overnight, you know, sensation all around Europe. But he had been, you know, he wouldn't have published that, and if he knew if he published that one in Italian, he would have, you know, suffered, you know, a pretty egregious fate. but at the same time he he kind of let it go to his head that success

and the many books that he wrote after he wrote like 12 other books and those were you know slowly translated into and into Italian he stopped writing in Latin and the Dialago that's Italian that's not

what would it be in Latin dialectica or something like that so that was written in Italian and in that book he he really postulates hard he's you know he's he's you know he's risen on I don't know what do the kids say

He's really going after the Copernican model with all his might, so much so that he actually uses incorrect evidence to bolster a correct scientific theory. We know that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, but it wasn't due to the proofs that he constructed in that book. So it's a fascinating example. We have many examples throughout time about this, but that's probably the most stark of a paradigm shift that's actually correct, but was not substantiated by the very people that were making. the argument. Copernicus never said he had evidence for it, but Galileo did provide some evidence, but it wasn't conclusive. And in fact, it's not, it's disputed and known to be wrong, the evidence that he puts forth in the book. The actual book's title was, you know, as a dialogue on the two chief world systems, Aristotelian and Copernican, but the title that he was permitted to really

publish was on the ebb and flow of tides on the earth seas and in lakes and ferns. You know that fern is a body of water? I didn't know that. I did not. No, it's new to me. Yeah. So that has a much less, you know, catchy title. You know, it doesn't really roll up to tongue, like a brief history of time or the dial. So in the book, he basically suggests that the Earth's oceans and tides are caused by the motion of the Earth on its axis, rotating around like this shot of, you know, vodka and orange juice that I have here. And as it orbits, it's sloshing back and forth. But that's not how the Earth's tides are caused.

caused by the effect of the tidal gravitational differential force of the moon, not the Earth's orbit around the Sun. So you see what he was trying to do is here. Here's evidence. The tides happen four times a day. It's because the Earth is turning, but actually that's wrong. The Earth's tides are not caused by this rotation and revolution. They're caused by the gravitational force of the moon, sucking the Earth towards it and sinking it in, the oceans in slightly at the apopal point. So he was right for the wrong reasons. And he did. did suffer, you know, greatly, but not for a scientific sense. Right.

Well, is it true that technically speaking, geocentrism or rather heliocentrism isn't proven until you can observe stellar parallax, which is in the 19th century? I mean, yeah, stellar aberration. That's right. Parallax is a different effect, but it's part of the effect. But aberration is the effect that's most convincing that demonstrates. And aberration just means, as you're doing,

driving in your car and it's raining, which it never does here, but it does there, or snowing. I don't know. It's the snowing there yet. You do have weather here. It's kind of amazing. I know. I can't wait to visit you someday, get some barbecue that you promise me barbecue. I'm going to give you a meteor and you're going to give me some barbecue. Some meteor barbecue. You're going to get some hot chicken in exchange. Yeah, absolutely. Meteoric hot chicken, in fact, out of this world, interstellar. Yeah. Oh, but you were explaining this is a, this is very interesting. So, okay, I, what's the So you're driving in your car.

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Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com. Only at Yamava Resort and Casino celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to 8. It's coming at a slight angle, right? The faster you move, the more the rain appears to be coming at a very steep angle, right?

Compared to if you're stationary, it's falling at a 90-degree angle. And as you're driving, it's almost coming horizontal. So the same thing happens with light. If you're moving at a velocity that's not comparable to the speed of light, but the Earth moves roughly a percent of the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, you know, 3% of that. It's a few hundred, you know, almost 1,000 miles every second in our orbit around the sun takes a year, and that causes a slight angular change in the perceived direction that the rain

of photons coming from distant stars makes. And if you map that over the year, you get a little ellipse that is roughly almost circular. If you plot each star's motion, you get this aberration effect. And it's exactly like that effect of rain falling on your car's windshield. And that was what proved it. That's what actually proved it. That wasn't until Bradley in the late 1700. So it's almost, you know, 40, 30 years after Galileo's death or 80 years after his death. Right. So this is, I mean, but as you say, there's, he, he's sort of piling up the simplicity, some of which is, are, he's kind of grabbing at, some of which aren't, aren't totally correct. That's right. But I, I'm, I'm keen to stress this point that you've

raised a couple times now about, um, the provisional nature of Galileo's own presentation, which is something that gets missed, I think, a fair bit because he was also this enormous ego, because he was also sort of making these grand pronouncements on behalf of the canokiale or whatever, the lens tube. And, you know, what you're saying is that also there is this strain, which persists to this day among sound practitioners of science, that hypotheses are meant to be tested and eventually, as we discover more and more discarded. I raise all of this because this seems like one of the major objects of present dispute among scientists. At a political level, the way that science has become this football in COVID years and thereafter,

one of the big questions is, like, is it possible for science to be settled? And what does it mean? And why is it now, do you think that this Galilean principle is kind of under dispute or suddenly so in question. Well, I think it's incredibly important to first stress that, as you've written about, Galileo was intensely religious. He was not an atheist by any means. It's not even clear that there's any evidence of support that he had anything less than

a very devout belief in God. And not only that, but an adherence, strict adherence to the work of the Catholic Church. And in fact, he would do things like, I want to release this, my next book on the on the trajectory of comets or the projectile motion on you know some minor you know forgive me i was you know i was an altar boy at one point in my life but i was born jewish and i'm jewish now and so i've forgotten the actual you know minor margarita you know santa margaritas day whatever it is when we drink you know tequila and no when when they would actually observe it he was i want the scientific book released on this holiday because it will bring good fortune

thanks to the divine providence of, you know, Holy Mary mother or, you know, Sister Mary, Marguerita or whatever, he would do these things in, you know, kind of abeyance or, you know, in hope of propitiating. Because of his Catholic faith, I mean, he was deeply religious. Like I said, his two daughters were nuns, and, you know, they would have had a terrible, they probably would have died without the Catholic Church intervention. He was not tortured. He was eventually by the Pope that he had, by Urban, who he had tutored earlier.

in his life and Cardinal Barbarini and just a fascinating thing, he would, you know, the actual crime that he was convicted of was suspicion of heresy. So this goes to the podcast that, you know, you would be the suspected young heretic. So there's difference in being, it's like murder and attempted murder. It's like he was about to be heretical and we think he could have been heretical, but he wasn't. If he was actually guilty. It's a minority report for heresy. That's right. So he was deeply religious, he would quote God, he would quote scripture all the time, he would say, you know, echoing Proverbs 252, it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honor of kings or scientists is to search out a matter. He said, I do not, I believe that the intention of

holy writ was to persuade when of the truths necessary to salvation, but I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses would have us put them aside to instead teach us such things as with their help, we could not find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences, of which there is not the smallest mention in scripture. And that's kind of the, you know, the non-overlapping magisteria of the 1600s, that he's aping or gould is aping him, that these are separate and distinct things. But he was deeply religious, and he was, you know, he received salvation and much, much, you know, needed, you know, patronage and, and support. thanks to his devout, you know, practice of Catholicism.

That's a really key point because, as you say, the quote about science not being in scripture and God having given us our senses, this is now regarded as a kind of atheist talking point, but it's anything but, in fact, it's a claim motivated by religion about religion, aimed to appeal to a religious sensibility. So as you indicate, really a lot of these disputes that we now think of as faith versus irreligion are actually intra-religious disputes. They're about like the implications of the religious perspective and worldview. Galileo, classic example of this. I return to the kind of contemporary valence of some of this stuff, right?

So we now, it's funny that we live under the specter of some sort of, hidebound religious superstition crushing science since if there ever was such a power it's been thoroughly vanquished i mean there's really no as far as i can tell there's no there's no universe in which like what pope francis is going to ride in and tell you not to you know if you discover something that the that suggests the earth is eternal or something nobody's going to tell you no from cosmologists yeah beware right right right exactly i mean i'm i'm curious actually like from your perspective as a working, you're at the cutting edge of your field, you're a working physicist. Does it trouble you at all? Some of the kind of epistemic closure that science has been

threatened with? And how do you see that playing out in the next couple of years? It does and it doesn't. I'm, you know, kind of an equal opportunity offender. You know, I call myself a devout practicing agnostic and that, you know, we keep kosher, we go to temple on Saturday. I don't work on Saturdays, as you know, or holidays. And we've, you know, for a long time, this is the way I wanted to raise my kids and my wife and has the same feelings about our children. And I think that's really quite important. So I'm a pragmatist. I like to look at how people behave as a behaviorist. How do we actually behave? Are we behaving in concert with the notion that it's possible for God to exist? And I always say, I don't believe in God. You know, like,

does he mean me to believe in him? But I do say, I also. don't believe in gravity. I have evidence for gravity. If we had evidence for, I know you believe there's evidence and that you don't need necessary for Christ, and we've talked about that, and we'll have many, many more conversations about that. And that's okay. But there's a difference between faith and science in the position of evidence. So for me, what I try to do is collect as much evidence as possible, knowing that there's no amount of evidence that can account for proof, right? There's no such thing as proving a physical law. E equals MC squared could be found to be violated tomorrow.

In fact, one of my projects is to investigate whether all colors of light travel at the same speed across the cosmos. If we find, or polarization sites to be a little bit more accurate for the cognizante out there, this is not known to be the case. But if it were proven that light based on its color travels at different speeds, and we've only tested that and very limited, you know, the farthest object from Earth is a Voyager spacecraft, which is about one light day away from Earth. It was launched probably long before you were born in the 70s.

And it's gotten, in those 55 years or so, has only gotten one light day away from Earth. Now, it's pretty far, and it's a great accomplishment. But we've only been able to test the property of the speed of light out to one light day. We study the universe on scales that could be tantamount to some 90 billion light years from edge to edge, if you will, of the observable universe. So there's no extrapolation that allows you to go from one light day to even one light year, let alone billions of light years. So you have to test these things. So in my career is dedicated to testing things that people assume to be true.

But we have to be open to the fact that could be falsified tomorrow. And that's part of what doing good science is about. So in those ways, I do give equal. I said I'm an equal opportunity offender. There's plenty of things we can castigate my scientific colleagues about. and many of them I've written about and made presentation, like I said, and Prager You in a couple videos about the multiverse and the nonsensical things that some of my colleagues have built entire careers upon,

let alone, you know, like their atheism, and that 90% of the National Academy of Sciences does not affirmatively believe, you know, or denies the existence of a God. But on the same token, Spencer, I want to not let my theistic friends in your audience off the hook so easily. I do believe that this is a bit. please yeah here we go i'm curious what our big blinds genuinely what what are the blinds this is well this is section two of the of your wikipedia page now um so yeah i'm gonna take the

i'm gonna take the ruler out i'm gonna get the my catholic school training in it this is the mother-in-law part all right so if you um want to approach god the clearest thing to me would be to um to access the highest thing that a human being can contemplate but the most which is science and math. Math holds everywhere. Physics may not hold everywhere. A proof of E equals MC squared could be invalidated tomorrow. A proof of the Pythagorean theorem will never be invalidated because you can prove things mathematically that are rigorous and closed, yet there are things outside the corpus of mathematics that can neither be proved nor falsified. That's a separate matter. That has to do with girdle and completeness theorem, that any mathematical algorithm of the system is

inherently incomplete, and that's a separate item. But at least they have that. In other words, in science, we don't have a proof of what is or is not science. Mathematicians have a proof of what is or is not possible to be proven by girdle. There's no analogous thing. People like to use Popper and falsification. We can get into that. Most modern scientists like me don't believe that Popper was the final word on this. I just talked to our mutual friend Steve Fuller about this very on topic. And even things like scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts, and those are not like in the lexicon of modern science. And so that's what's good. I hope that they're overturned. I hope that my books are overturned. I hope that my findings go away and people don't even remember

them. I hope my family and I have a legacy, but it's very different. No, Galileo was wrong about every single thing he did if you look at it, but he was right and more right than the people that came before him. And that's the whole purpose of science. So I say to religious listeners and viewer, if you want to have more evidence for God's possibility of existence, then you should learn as much science and math as possible. And not only do I not see that, I even had this debate with Steve Fuller about our mutual friends at the Discovery Institute and what they do and what their plans are in terms of casting down on science by using the scientific method, you know, evolutionary arguments that have to accept certain principles of evolution. But the average citizen

doesn't hear that. They hear, oh, evolution's not true. The scientists don't know what they're talking about. But nothing could give you more faith, more Amuna in Hebrew, than to look at the word of God that we, if he exists, would know is inviolable. And that's mathematics, and that's physics, and that's science, the base layer of reality that we humans have access to. So my imprecation is that your listeners and you even, and I hope to be involved in this part of your, you know, massive brain expansion. But it is to learn more science, Spencer. Yeah. Because that is the only vector that I know to get me closer and get you closer to God. It's if you have faith, that's fine. But I don't have faith in gravity. I have proof of it. Hmm. Well, I actually think that

you and I are on a very similar page here. I mean, I know you, you wrote my book at the end of which I sort of say something kind of similar to both to both camps. And I think that actually the fact that what you just said about math holding good everywhere might be one of the best possible illustrations of what you would call the Imago Day, the idea of the image of God. The idea that the human mind could contain principles that do hold good everywhere across the universe is something that if you think of it as like a scientific hypothesis, the only hypothesis that would predict that is the hypothesis that the human mind is made in the image of the mind that created the universe.

But this is perhaps a longer conversation for another time, which I hope we will have. And I will sign up to be taught more science by you any day of the week, Brian Keating. And I hope other people will do so too by listening to the End of the Impossible podcast and going to Brian Keating.com. Ryan, thank you so much. Is there anywhere else that people should find you? How can they get in touch? I'm pretty much everywhere. Now that I take this off my list, Spencer, yeah, I'm easy to find. You are all everywhere. Well, my expanding universe waistline tends to agree with you. Spencer, it's been a pleasure, and I hope that we will do it over, you know, a glass of Grappa and a cigar in the very near future.

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