Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Genesis & The Big Bang: Are They Compatible? (#264)

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Be sure to watch the video version of this episode with slides here: https://youtu.be/F3P1ZtLZd9s Genesis & The Big Bang “If You Can Count the Stars, A Jewish Astronomer’s Journey! Think back to the late-night dorm room discussions from your college days. We are going to talk about cosmology, the Big Bang, and more from two perspectives, from the perspective of an astrophysicist and the perspective of a Torah observant Jew and ask what they may have in common, and how they differ. How can you reconcile when one seems to be in conflict with the other? I think it's very, very crucial for modern people, secular or religious, to confront. It is said the signature of God is truth. So if something isn't true, then it can't be found to be resonant with notions of eternal truth and perhaps ultimate truth. I'll take you on my Jewish journey which will take us around the planet, and, and maybe beyond. And then I'm going to have some interesting confluences between the study of what we do in cosmology and also something that the Torah speaks about a great length, which is the most humble substance in the world -- dust, and hopefully we'll see a delightful connection between those. And then a simple question, if we have time, can science to prove God? That's the question I get second most after "how can you be a scientist and believe in God and the Torah?" And then the third most frequent question I get is, can science prove God's existence? Join me for an exploration of religion and science, including My Jewish journey, How much cosmology is in the Bible? And can science prove God exists? Plus problems with Gerald Scroeder's God and the Big Bang and more! Connect with me: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.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.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here   🎧 On Audible it’s here Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast  Support the podcast on Patreon or become a Member on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot-bay doors, please help. So tonight we're going to go on a journey through space and time, all the way from the land of Canaan to the South Pole, to Chile, and beyond. I will give an overview of what the Torah says about cosmology, if we can endeavor to ask us. such a question and how the Torah relates to science in general. I'll have a little explication of something that really resonates with me, passages in the Torah that I find particularly brilliant and full of wisdom. And then I'll conclude with some homework. I'll actually start with some homework too.

So let me share my screen and there'll be questions at the end and you're welcome to ask them in the chat room as well as holding to the end. I'll do the Q&A itself. And I want to welcome my friends on the East Coast. I see a bunch of you out there on the East Coast. Thank you for staying up late. Hopefully it'll be worth it. But as you know, we astronomers, we do it in the dark. We're used to staying up all night and and then sleeping during the day. So hopefully you'll get a little taste of what life is like for a professional astronomer. So I call this if you can count the stars. And the reason why that'll become apparent, hopefully, in just a little bit. And that'll be kind of the theme. And it will relate

to this project that I've been involved with for the last couple of years, which I call into the impossible, which is to try to test as Sir Arthur C. Clark, the namesake of the center at UCSD that I am associate director of. We aim to push the boundaries of the possible by seeing the limits of going into the impossible. And we're going to see that that is a mission as old as our people as our history. And hopefully that will become clear as we go on. We're going to talk very quickly about cosmology from two different perspectives, the perspectives of an astrophysicist and the perspective of a Torah, observant Torah, so a different kind of observer.

And what they reveal, what they have in common, more they differ. And how do you reconcile when one seems to be in conflict with another? I think that's very, very crucial for modern people to confront. Because as it is said, the signature of God is truth. So if something isn't true, then it can't really be found to be resonant with these notions of eternal truth and perhaps ultimate truth. I'm going to talk a little bit about my Jewish journey, which will take us around the planet and maybe beyond. And then I'm going to have some interesting confluences between the study of what we do in cosmology. And also something that the Torah speaks about at great length, which is the most humble substance in the world, dust.

And hopefully we'll see a delightful connection between those. And then a simple question, if we have time, you know, I'll ask if science can prove God. That's the question I get second most. The first most question is, you know, how can you be a scientist and believe in God in the Torah? and then the second most frequent question I get is can science prove God's existence. I believe my mission as a publicly funded scientist and all scientists are publicly funded. There's no such thing as someone who wasn't supported by the government and therefore by the taxpayers. I believe we have a moral obligation.

That's right, a moral obligation to give back, to teach, to share what we learned based on your tax dollars. So if you are a taxpayer and I assume all of it, us are, we should pay back the debt that we owe to you as scientists. So part, I do that through my email list. And the other way I do it is through my weekly videos that I post with conversations ranging from Nobel Prize winners to astronauts on the space station traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. I've had the honor to interview both. And it's really a lot of fun. And I do kind of explainer videos. And my mission is to maintain curiosity. Because curiosity is more important in my mind than passion.

Passion kind of comes and goes. Don't follow your passion. Follow your curiosity. It will always be there for you. So now, we come to the beginning. And in the beginning of this webinar, there was a book. That book is called Genesis. And today we're going to be talking about the description that you see in front of you.

This is from, I believe, the King James version, perhaps. Some people call it the Bible. Some people call it the Torah. Some people call it the Old Testament. I don't care what you call it. But we're going to talk about the statements that are made here, where it says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And then it goes into a much more description over the course of the remaining six days of the week, the first week of creation, which in some characterizations and the bishop usher, so forth,

characterized this as occurring in the year 4,000 approximately in what we would now call BCE before the common error, before Christ, if it's using BC. And so we're now 6,000 years approximately later. And the question is, how do you reconcile this kind of disruption, this kind of depiction of a finite and really not that long period of time compared to the scientific explanation, which we all learned about when we study the Big Bang Theory. So we're all experts in the Big Bang Theory, most popular television show of all time, according to some. And it features a character named Sheldon, by the way.

He's based on a real guy who I had the honor of interviewing Sheldon Glashow, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize, shared it with somebody I'm going to talk about Stephen Weinberg, renowned another Jewish famous Jewish atheist. I didn't have Stephen Weinberg on my podcast. Unfortunately, he's now passed away. But Sheldon is based on this real, you know, really incredible intellect named Sheldon Glashow. And so these Nobel Prize winners carry great resonance throughout our culture.

And, of course, there's no more funny and relevant show than this one for most cosmologists. So I want to take us on a depiction of three verses, which will come back to frequently throughout this. discussion and it involves these three quotes involve the following three substances dust sand and stars and the title of the talk or subtitle of the talk no it was a title of the talk said um quoting from genesis uh chapter 15 it said god took abraham him as abraham or abram He was known as Abram. And he said, look up into the sky and count the stars. Count them.

If you can. That's how many descendants you will have. And this was talking to, I believe, a 90-year-old person. Rabbi Eratel will hit me later on, if I'm wrong. But about approximately 90 years old was Abram at this time. He had no kids. And let alone did he have this huge number of kids. And there was no prospect of this.

with his wife Sarah, who is, I believe 80-something at the time, of them ever having kids, let alone such numerous profligate expansion of their own personal universes. So we'll come back to that particular quote. There's another quote that involves dust, and we'll talk about that one as well. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth so that if one could count the dust of the earth, then your offspring could be counted. And then lastly, it says, I shall surely bless you and I'll multiply you, like the stars in the sky, he already said that, Hashem, you're being kind of repetitive here,

but then it says like the sand on the seashore. So we have three different metaphors, comparisons that God is saying and promising to Abram, Abraham, who will later become Abraham, the father of all the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And here he is, saying these three different comparisons. What do they have to do with each other? Why use such metaphors? And what do they have to do with modern cosmology. So let's turn to the biblical description of Genesis first. So it's interesting to note there are six days of creation depicted where God makes different things. And most of the time he's making stuff, he's not only, he's not making something in a void. He's making something and a comparison, something and its opposite, something and something

to complement it. For example, he makes Adam, but he also makes Eve from Adam. And that involves dust, as you know, as well. We'll get to that later on. He makes water. He makes light, and there's difference between darkness and light. There's all these comparisons, day and night. So everything is done in comparison to something else. So this is a nice woodcut or depiction, colorized by Photoshop, and 1493.

And it depicts the six days of creation in some fashion, sort of from an outside observer. maybe it's God's perspective. God starts off with creating the waters, the upper waters, the lower waters. We'll go through that in just a second. What was actually created. But note that it's counting from the top. So it goes one, two, three, four, and the fourth day is on the lower left. And that becomes yellow in the background. And that's because the fourth day is the day in which the sun is created. So wait, you may think, well, that's kind of weird. How do you have a day, which we define as a 24-hour period? How do you find a day or an hour when the sun hasn't been created until the fourth day? What is that meant to teach us?

It must be telling us something. Obviously, people knew that day was caused by sun, night was caused by the absence of sun, that there were other luminaries in the sky, the moon, the stars. They knew that even if you want to say they didn't know cosmology, they didn't have the benefit of the Hubble Space Telescope. they still knew that day followed night because of the repetition of the daily cyclical pattern of the sun rising from our perspective and setting each day. So how could you have a day without the sun? It must be coming to tell us something, something very interesting. And I'll skip to the punchline

in that context, for me, not as a cosmologist, but as just a person who is comfortable with basic logic, that it came to teach us something that even the sun and moon, which were throughout history, have been worshipped as deities, that they were created. So it was unambiguous that the earth and the sun and the moon were not gods. Say what you will if you believe it or not, if it was literal or not. Nevertheless, you have to agree that the time, that the perspective that's being depicted is obviously one that's showing a creation of things previously considered to be gods, the sun and the moon.

and the stars. So this is, this was rampant throughout the Middle East and throughout history that those were worship. And then later on, things like trees and herbs and so forth were created. But even it says that you weren't able to see the light from the sun until that, that very special fifth day in the middle of lower panel. And then later the culmination of all of creation according to the biblical sources was the creation of man or humans. Man and woman were created, as it says. So what I think is so interesting is that people come up to me and they say, oh, Professor Keating, how can you believe in this? You know, it's like the Torah and Judaism and so for, they're incompatible with science. And I say to them, imagine you picked up a book.

And in that book, it was a thousand page book. And in that book, there were 999 pages. and they were dedicated to the history and the background behind the National Basketball Association. Okay. So there's a book and 99.9% of it is about the NBA. And then there's one page and there's one page and it's about the American Revolutionary War. And then you say, okay, well, that's kind of weird. I don't know what they really have to do with each other. Maybe NBA started America.

It was American. Who knows? But okay, so it's in there. Maybe it's relevant in some way. Then you turn the cover over and you look at the cover and says, The history of the American Revolution, you'd say, this is very weird. Like, this book is, it has a little bit of that in it, but most 99.9% of it is not about that. Well, guess what?

That's the exact ratio of verses that cover these six days. There's 35 verses in the Torah, in Genesis, about these events. And there's 35,000 total verses in the five books of Moses, the Old Testament, the Bible, whatever you want to call it. So it's the same. It's the same 0.1%. So to me, again, just from basic logic, you have to agree that the Torah is not coming to teach us about science. And in fact, Torah translates to wisdom and teaching. But the word science comes from Latin, sciencia, and that means knowledge. And there's a very big difference between knowledge and wisdom, as the saying goes, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

And I think when we look at this chronology, it's not meant to teach us about genetics, evolution, cosmology, and so forth. So many of you may be feeling like maybe you should tune out now. I hope you won't. But the point is we have a depiction that's coming to teach us something, perhaps about wisdom, not necessarily about the knowledge of the physical universe. And nor should we go there to glean information about physics. You know, if I'm teaching, I am teaching cosmology this quarter. And one of my students, you know, tells me that they're, you know, they don't believe that the universe is expanding because it's not in the Torah. I'd say, well, you know, you're free, it's a free country, but, but that's not accurate to describe it as part of modern cosmology. In fact, we're going to go through some of the

competing cosmologies that the Torah supplanted, uniquely so, for thousands of years. Again, I'm not going to use that as proof that the Torah is correct, that God definitely exists, or that science somehow backs up the Torah description, as some people have claimed it does. I don't believe that's possible because I don't believe that's a mission of the Torah. And yet, I believe the Torah is the most important book ever read. I've written three books. Well, I've written two books, and I've recorded a third book, an audio-only book. And when they all start off, they're kind of, it's nice to see a book, you know, goes to, you know, high ranking on Amazon, and you can get your author ranking on Amazon.

And then within a couple of days, it falls off and it goes down to almost zero. I mean, it goes down to like one million or something like that out of the 10 million books on Amazon. So you feel a little dejected. But it's natural. That's what happens. Except if your name is, you know, Hashem or God, and you wrote a book called the Bible, and that just kind of like stays at number one for all time.

And so what did the Torah have to do? It had to do something that neither one of my written books or nor my audio book can do, which is to speak to people thousands of years ago and continue to speak to people for thousands of years to come. That's something that only wisdom can do. I hope that my books are superseded and rendered obsolete by discoveries that I make or my colleagues or my students make. I hope the works of Stephen Hawking are completely obsolete.

And any good scientists should say that. They hope that their work is superseded because that's the way that science makes progress. And we'll explain why in just a bit. So there's a depiction. I'm not going to talk too much about it, how it's depicted. It's certainly not how we understand how the universe, how the earth is shaped or so forth. Again, we have to ask go deeper and talk about, well, what is it trying to teach us?

What is it trying to do? Is it trying to really understand the scientific method that wouldn't be invented until the middle 1600s by Galileo? or is it doing something different? And if so, what? And where does it establish its expertise? Obviously, modern cosmologists like myself and others have expertise in our domain. The question is, when you get into trouble, it is when you try to shoehorn or force one

into the other domain. And I can hear arguments on both sides that say the Torah should contain all this wisdom and truth and some that would say it has nothing to teach us. So it's a careful line to walk, but I think that's the most fun, challenge. and interesting way to approach this immense book of wisdom that we call the Old Testament or the Bible. So how does that depiction of the first six days, how does it relate or what is it to be compared to? It really is compared to a theory that we call the Big Bang Theory, which posits that the universe came into existence ex nilio from nothing, which actually sounds very similar to the Bible's description.

The Bible doesn't talk about anything before the Genesis 1-1. It talks about the beginning, establishing a singular event before which there were no days or times, perhaps. And after which there was history that could be recorded and characterized both in the physical world to a minor extent, 0.1% extent, and later to understand the evolution of specific peoples in the Near East and Middle East. Now, the Big Bang theory was brought about through a series of scientific observations, hypotheses, and the application of the scientific method. And yet, it wasn't really verified for many decades. And in fact, it was never proven. And it still isn't proven.

And before you start to object, you know, if you're coming to this as a scientist and saying, like, even this cosmologist doesn't believe in the Big Bang, well, that's the whole thing. When you believe in something, it means you don't have evidence for it. It means that you are necessarily, if you have faith in something, rather, it means you don't have proof of it or data or evidence. And in science, we can't really prove things. We can't do a good job of proving something that took place once in the history of the entire universe, namely the birth of the universe itself. Unless that's not what happened. And I'll explain what I mean in just a bit.

So if you look on the right side of this plot here, you see these galaxies and whatnot. And the galaxies that you see will later look like the Milky Way galaxy and will harbor planets. And those planets will have people upon it in the modern cosmological interpretation. We know of hundreds of billions of galaxies. We know of billions of stars that are in each galaxy. And we know that around each star, there are perhaps tens or thousands of planets. and asteroids and comets just like our solar system harbors.

And in fact, there's so many stars that are just like the sun, that have planets just like the Earth within them, that we've almost stopped counting them, and now are trying to learn more and more about their properties in the hope. Some say vain hope. I'm not going to talk about that now, although I've expressed it on other people's podcasts, that they will find life and perhaps even intelligent life

on other planets around other stars. in our galaxy and perhaps in other galaxies in the universe. So again, what is Abraham commanded to do? It says, go out and count the stars. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove

seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot While supplies last price invalid May 14th or May 27th US only exclusions apply see homedepot.com slash price match for details Again, Rabbi Ertell, correct me It's in a command form it's saying go and count the stars and then says if you can and if you can And if you can do that then that is what your offspring will be numbered So here's an image of a host of pixels of light. And every single smudge from this picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope about 25 years

ago, every single smudge of light, every speck of light, with one exception, is a galaxy. So there's only one star in this whole picture. That stars in the, just below the word the, and it has this kind of cross-like pattern, double cross pattern. That's the only star. That stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and every other speck of light is a galaxy outside of the Milky Way galaxy, potentially just like the Milky Way galaxy, harboring perhaps 100 billion or a trillion stars in each galaxy. So how could you count the stars? Well, we'll come back to that in just a bit. So I said scientists don't go about talking about things they have faith in or they believe in, and the Hebrew term is amuna, from which we get the word in English, Amen, meaning truth.

But that's a statement of faith. I don't have faith that gravity is going to cause this object to fall. I have evidence for that. And we have a superseding theory that explains, based on observational data, through the rigorous process of refinement that we call the scientific method, that that behavior will be replicated. But it is possible in some circumstances for something that has been observed in the past to no longer behave that way in the future, that effectively there are forces in the universe that behave like anti-gravity.

And in fact, one of them was established by Albert Einstein himself, about 100 years ago, a type of anti-gravitation, a type of anti-repulsive gravitation, which was totally in contradistinction to anything ever conceived of before. And the reason he conjectured that was to adhere to his worldview of how the cosmos must behave, that he believed we live not in a universe with a singular Big Bang origin, but in a static universe. And we're going to talk about that. But the statement of what scientists do or do not do, we don't really prove things. We typically will prove things wrong. We won't prove things right. I can't necessarily. prove to you that there is right now a purple unicorn on the north pole of Neptune.

We cannot physically do that. You could disprove it if you could go there and so forth and see it, but you can't prove and have any physical evidence instantaneously that that's there right now. So you can't prove or you can't prove something happened if it only happened once in the course of history. So what this philosopher Carl Popper said is that you, shouldn't look to prove things you should look to disprove everything else and what will be left is the closest approximation to the truth for example many of us know for certain the earth is not flat but very few of us know that the earth is not a perfect sphere either so both of those statements

are wrong if i say the earth is flat i'm wrong but i'm somehow more wrong than when i say the earth is a perfect sphere even though i'm wrong when i say the earth is a perfect sphere it's not because the rotation of the earth, it bulges at the equators and becomes a little bit like pear-shaped and squashed as it rotates. So it's not a perfect sphere either, and yet it's more close to the approximation. That's what scientists should be doing. We should look for experiments that come closer and closer to truth to the accurate description and then parameterize what we do not know. So what are some of the alternatives to the singular origin of the universe? Turns out there's a lot of them. I'm not going to read them all here. But one of the most important ones is called a cyclic model.

And this is artwork from about 1,000 BC talking about the universe as cycling through time from an Egyptian book of the dead. And this, again, the Jews had no lack of familiarity with Egyptian texts and Egyptian knowledge. The Torah is a tree of life. Their book was a book of death. Their God was the sun god to the Jews. The Jews had that Hashem, that God created the sun. So how could it be a God? There's a lot of counterpose and not of counterpoint between Egyptian culture and the Hebraic culture. But nowadays, we still have colleagues and friends and working on my project called the Simon's

Observatory that are working on a type of cyclic cosmology, where the universe cycles through endless periods of expansion and contraction over uncountable eons of time. and this occurs with the same dynamics that we would observe, and this stands in contradistinction to a single universe. A universe that's infinite in time is not created at a point at which an author, be it God, Moses, whoever, could say was the beginning. It loses meaning if it's a periodic, cyclic universe. Therefore, if you could prove this model is wrong, you would come some way to establishing

some more credulity in the Big Bang Torah description, if you will, of a single event that had a single beginning. There were no shortage of other cosmologies that weren't dynamic like that previous one. There was one by Aristotle. The universe was static, fixed in size, unchanging for all time. Newton came along 2,000 years later with a steady state static universe in which he had to composite an unstable universe that was somehow magically kept at bay from gravitational instability and collapse. This mode was then built upon by Albert Einstein, worked on Yitzhak Newton's laws, improved them, came up with a new theory of gravity that incorporated an anti-gravitational force to keep the universe opposed to the contraction that would surely result from the Newtonian description.

Turned out he was wrong about the philosophical underpinning of this term, which he called the cosmological constant. But later, about 80 years later, we did measure that the universe not only has a cosmological constant, but it's causing the universe to get bigger in its size and its rate of expansion with every passing second for all time. And that's called cosmic acceleration. Now, some of these models were appealing, especially to atheists, like the late great Stephen Weinberg, who, as I mentioned, passed away, shared the Nobel Prize with Old Sheldon, Sheldon Cooper, the character which he's based on Sheldon Glashow. He said, the steady state theory is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis. In other words, this atheist happens to be born Jewish, but atheist scientist is saying that what makes the steady state model, which is an antithetical concept of the Big Bang theory, it posits the universe has been around forever. He's saying that's attractive because it doesn't involve anything to do that could be correlated with religion, as does the Big Bang model.

So it's pretty amazing. And so even though Hubble had evidence that the universe was expanding and was dynamic, it really took until the 1960s until there were theoretical predictions, as well as experimental observations, including the subject that I studied called the cosmic microwave background or CMB, that supported the fact that the universe began or was at one point incredibly hot and dense, sufficiently so to cause nuclear reactions to fuse. lighter elements into heavier elements producing the periodic table left upper hand

entries and that was a decisive blow against the steady state model it doesn't prove the big bang but again that's not what scientists do we're not in the job of trying to prove something happened we're trying to essentially disprove any other alternative and then the preponderance of evidence Occam's Razor, if you will, will suggest that the most likely result lies outside of those disproven alternatives and will be corroborated by evidence, sometimes circumstantial, of things like the Big Bang. Now, many people throughout history have picked up on the corollary between the Genesis 1-1 description and the observations, both of Hubble and of the cosmic microwave background in the 1960s. in particular one who was an agnostic robert jastrow he wrote in a book called god and the astronomers he wrote

the scientist who's lived by faith meaning that like the Weinberg type scientist who had been hoping that the big bang was wrong because it was too theistic in its application he said that story ends like a bad dream he scaled the mountains of ignorance it's about to conquer the highest peak pulls himself over the final rock he's greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries, meaning that the evidence for the cosmic microwave background, just like Hubble's evidence seemed to be suggestive of and was used by theistic proponents. Namely, the Pope Pius in the 1930s and 40s took upon the work of Hubble to say that this proved there was an origin of the universe, just like in Genesis.

And this guy, Jastrow, saying a similar thing 30 to 40 years later, based on completely different evidence and that's what you want as a scientist you want multiple types of evidence pointing to a singular explanation that all agree and build consensus that's what we and scientists do we can't say 100% that anything that evolution is occurring that um that global warming is occurring but you can have a preponderance of evidence for multiple disparate fields that will allow scientists to build powerful consensus though admitting we can never prove unequivocally something is true or correct or definitive. So again, modern cosmology history starts with a big bang on the left and then produces a cosmic microwave background. That's what I study. And what I did, along with some

colleagues, is create an experiment that effectively was trying to refute, if you will, alternatives to the Big Bang hypothesis, which would be if we were to be successful with this experiment called Bicep 2, we would measure the aftershocks of the Big Bang. It's as close as you could get to taking an infant baby picture of the newborn embryonic universe. So I've said most of this, the Torah description versus the scientific description. People like Karen mentioned this at Gerald Schroeder. I happen to have violent disagreements with him about a lot of stuff. And nevertheless, there are people that try to shoehorn in to,

the six days of creation, a literal phenomenon of passage of time corresponding to each situational event that's taken place, only a tiny bit of which is actually indicated on the plots on the left. So the plots on the left is showing time after the Big Bang in seconds and then years and then leading up to the 1990s when some of us were born or alive. And then trying to then shoehorn in the elapsed time according to the cosmology of these different events. I'm not going to get into that. I've spoken about that elsewhere, but this is a very, very fraught process to try to do. Because as some of these processes depend very sensitively on the conditions of preceding epochs,

and it's essentially impossible to make definitive predictions as the universe becomes more and more well understood, the tension between the six days of creation in this. translation by Schroeder and others becomes more and more excluded. So I'm going to get into that. That's not something I'm particularly interested in discussing here, other than the fact, again, I'm trying to say that the Torah is not a science book. And so I take issue, even with my fellow scientists, who happened to be Jewish, I have take great issue when that is trying to make this Torah into a science book.

Because then you could get into a situation where if the Torah says something, there's a there's an elementary particle called the crouton, then, and we never discover it, and somehow it's listed in the Torah as being evidence on which the Big Bang theory of the Torah rests, then the disproof of that would therefore bring up questions of the ultimate veracity of the Torah itself. So these are very fraught things to do.

I personally don't like it. You're free to go and explore it and read it, be my guest, but I personally don't think it's a fruitful way to proceed. But let's get back to this, Can we reconcile these two things? My claim is that is a very, very tenuous process indeed. And I don't think it's a necessary process. I don't think it's necessary to shoehorn in the 13.8 billion years

and notice that change is pretty radical. It's two billion years difference from the Schroeder calculations. That's a 25% error in your logic as a scientist or accuracy as a scientist. So I see there's something in the change. there's something in the chat. I cannot read the chat unless I stop the presentation, which I don't want to do.

But if something's super urgent, maybe Andy, you could let me know. If I'm like, you guys have not heard anything I've said for the last 20 minutes. Let me know. Andy. You're still all good.

Everything's good. Okay. Great. So we can't prove things. We can falsify things. Can we falsify what the Torah says? So that's a scientific question. It's not a theistic question or theological question.

So the Torah says there was a beginning. Science says there may have been a beginning. This is from someone else's slide. Afriam Vala. No, I don't know how to pronounce his name. But again, these are trying to make a correspondence between biblical description and Hebrew words and then trying to convert those into modern scientific language. And at any point in history, this could have been done, and there would have been zero evidence

for a singular beginning in Isaac Newton's time, or early part of Einstein's career. There would have been no evidence for it. So the Torah, in some sense, is going out on a limb by saying that there was a singular event. So we can ask the question, can you prove that there are multiple events? Can you disprove that there are multiple creation-type events? If you could somehow prove that there were multiple e-creation events, that would call into question some aspects of the Torah's veracity as a scientific book, not as a book of wisdom, which I claim is its primary contribution. I think anybody who goes and studies science and uses the Torah as their reference material is going to experience a great deal of challenges. So you see here in both of these, it says that science believes there was a period of rapid inflation.

in this as the Torah says there's rapid inflation. I'd never seen the word inflation before. Inflation has a very, very specific meaning. That means acceleration faster than light in the early universe. There's no mention of that, to my knowledge, by even claimed by someone like Gerald Schroeder, who I disagree with in many cases. Nevertheless, it behooves us to ask the question, was there a singular point, a singularity, an origin? And again, this is something that's also untrue on the left column. There was no consensus.

There's no proof that science says there was a singularity. A singularity is not just an event that occurred once. It has a very specific meaning in that you have infinite density, curvature, temperature, of space in time at a finite point in time. And we have no proof of that, no evidence of that. And yet, we can observe the after effects. If it did occur, we can ask, is the evidence that we see consistent with a singular origin or a very high temperature origin?

So now we're going to do a little travel log, not going back billions of years, just going back about 50 years, my wanderings through the desert of this world and the places that I've been. So I grew up on Long Island. I was a Jew. So at that point, I was a Jew. It's going to be a little complicated because you're going to see I go through more cycles than a cyclic universe.

I started off parents both Jewish, born to biological Jewish parents. I grew up on Long Island for the first seven years. Parents got divorced. I used to love looking at the moon. And I moved in and lived with my stepfather, who was a devout Irish Catholic with nine brothers and sisters and was actually converted to Catholicism. I had a communion. I had a confirmation. I had my baptism all at age 12 to 13 when I would have been preparing for my bar mitzvah. As a typical Jewish boy, had my parents not gotten divorced and had I remained in the faith. And it's funny because one of my kids, my oldest son, he's a couple years away from his barmezzan.

Mibisv and he will say things to me like, you know, I say you have to fast on Yom Kippur soon. And he's like, but it's not my bar mitzvah. And I'm not obligated to fast until my bar mitzvah in a couple of years. And then I say, well, I haven't had my bar mitzvah either. So maybe I don't have to fast on Yom Kippur. So I never had a bar mitzvah. Don't weep any tears for me. I've received tremendous blessings even despite that lack in my life.

And my goal is to actually have my bar mitzvah someday. perhaps even in Israel on my fourth bar mitzvah anniversary when I'm 52 so stay tuned for news about that on my mailing list so I was an altar boy so I wanted to do everything you could possibly do I'm a very kind of purist I always want to do things the most authentic way possible so I want to be a priest and and again I was 12 at this time and the closest thing you could do it as a 12 year old was become an altar boy and so at that church called the church of st. John and St. Mary with The man on the left with the bishop hat was actually Monsignor, Father Skelly, Robert Skelly, and he was a wonderful man.

And he was a great religious thinker, a great, humorous soul, incredible gift for being with people. And I just had a delightful time. This is in Chappaquin, New York. And I wanted to be a priest for maybe a year or two. And so I kept it up the altar boy. And then I got a telescope on my 13th birthday and between age and 12 and 13, I met my first rabbi, which I call my rabbi, and that's Galileo Galilei, who was really the first person that I felt could communicate with me from beyond the grave, and that he had been departed for so long. And yet his writing, his thinking, his artistry, he was a wonderful artist, poet, musician.

All these things wrapped into one. It just made me want to be him. And so when I got my first telescope, I tried to repeat the observations that he had made, which in some part contributed in a very strange way. I've realized that the telescope has kind of been an integral part of not only the revelation of beautiful works and objects and things in the universe, but also of the maybe the decline of religion. And the way it came about, I kind of have this cartoon from a tweet I put out once,

about what happened in the history of science is that Galileo didn't invent a telescope, but he perfected it. He made it into the device that he could use to do actual science. And the telescope came from the fact that people at just in the late 1400s, early 1500s, been able to use. reading glasses, so having pieces of glass that they could combine together in front of their eyes,

and that would improve their vision. And how do they know they needed glasses, they would look at standard print font of a certain size, printed in movable typeset printing that was only invented by the Gutenberg Bible by Gutenberg himself in the 1400s. So the fact that the first thing ever printed then became the eyeglass or eyesight standard. It's kind of ironic because then later the telescope came to overthrow the church belief that the earth was the center of the universe. And that led to all sorts of things like secularism and humanism and ultimately the decline of religion itself. This is kind of ironic that the Bible was kind of responsible for its own decline. But that's not really the subject of this discussion.

It's more Galileo and what he saw through this telescope and what he wrote in his book, the Cedirius Nuncius, and later in the dialogue, which I've just published as an audiobook with about six of my physicist friends, the first ever audiobook by Galileo Galilei. So I have two written books and one audio only book. And what Galileo did is he went on a book tour and he tried to sell copies. You see in his right hand, he's holding pictures of sketches and stuff. And he's showing it to these senators in Venice and they want to buy the telescope and so forth. And he became incredibly famous like this person here.

He had 100 million Twitter followers. Now, he had the equivalent of it. He never left Italy and people as far away as Asia knew about him in his own lifetime. It's really quite incredible. And of course, what he did is usher in this notion that the universe is not centered on the earth. It's centered on the sun. And that got him into great trouble with the inquisition. Because the Inquisition forbade the teaching of Copernicanism, of heliocentrism.

And saying, in my opinion, in a wrong interpretation of the Hebrew, apparently, allegedly from the book of Joshua, that Joshua caused the sun to stand still or Hashem, God, caused that to stop rotating around the earth. and for that apparently that was one of the main sources of the sun being an orbit around the earth as shown on the left and of course we know that's wrong today and in between when galileo was about to be persecuted he thought he could get away with it because in his book the dialogue is my friends and i read it as a dramatic work of literature he says in it basically it's like a proof of god's existence, that God can make whatever he wants. And so he said here, I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use. And he also said, the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the

heavens go. So he was, he tested the waters back then. And don't forget, only 11 years before he wrote his book Giodonna Bruno was burned at the stake. So Galeo got off kind of easily. He was house imprisoned, courtesy of the Inquisition, the Holy Office, as it was called. There he is, about to get hit with this conquistador sword. But he was sentenced to prison. His prison is this villa outside of Florence where I was pleased to host a conference in his honor about seven years ago. He still has olive trees and grape vines. It's a pretty nice prison. I think Bernie made off would have been happy there. But nevertheless, he was imprisoned and threatened with possible torture.

He was actually never tortured, but there were threats about it. So after that period of time, after learning that Galileo had never been pardoned for the sin of suspicion of heresy that the earth was no longer the center of the universe, I became disenchanted with religion. I thought any religion that would persecute my hero wasn't worthy of me being a part of. So I actually left the Catholic Church and completely lost my religion and was an atheist for many, many years, from the time of, you know, early high school till graduate school and beyond. And I kind of used this deduction, which was that, you know, Galileo was never pardoned. He was never forgiven for what he did, even up until the time of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background.

He's actually never formally been pardoned. He was ruled correct by Pope John Paul, the great Pope John Paul in the 1980s. But that was long after I was kind of disenchanted with the Catholic Church. So I kind of abandoned my faith. And I said, well, to myself, well, Judaism, you know, was around before Christianity. and if I have problems of Christianity and it came along after Judaism, well, Christianity must have fixed all the flaws in Judaism and updated those. And there's a lot of similarities between Judaism and Christianity,

but there's a lot that Christianity overthrew in Judaism. So it's very different. And so that logical syllogism, as is called, deductive argument, is not really a kosher form of inference. And yet, that's kind of the way my mind was working back. them. And eventually after graduation from Brown, I went to Stanford as what's called a postdoc, and I had ideas to test whether or not the Big Bang actually occurred. Ideas for a telescope. There's just one problem. I wasn't being paid to do that. It was being paid to work on a completely different

project. And so my advisor, by the way, if anyone knows this German, they know that the motto of Stanford is de Luft der Freirette, which means the wind of freedom blows, And I was blown free of a paycheck very shortly after being at Stanford. And I was actually fired by a professor whose name is church. So I got in trouble with the church too, very different than Galileo, of course. But it did involve a refracting telescope, just like what Galileo built. And I'm not comparing myself to Galileo or to the fate of suffering at the hands of the church. from there I went to Caltech, a small technical college in Los Angeles, and about a year after I got there, 9-11 occurred.

And again, at this point, I had not been Jewish for, you know, practicing, observant, doing anything for 20, 30 years. And yet when 9-11 occurred, it became increasingly clear to me that there was something about Judaism that I didn't know. It was kind of gnawing at me that I knew so much about Islam and it was it was kind of, you know, perhaps unfairly being tarnished in some ways in the media. But everybody knew about Islam and what did it stand for and what is it a religion about? I knew a lot about Christianity and Catholicism because of my peripatetic upbringing. But I knew nothing about the religion I was born into. So that was kind of when I resolved to start learning about Judaism.

And I actually started teaching myself to read Hebrew. and I studied with a rabbi and I went to Israel and I studied an isheva for a month and I vowed to try to establish descendants to have children, to have a Jewish family and to bring up kids according to the religion of my birth that had increasingly appealed to me. And I saw it as sort of not in an ethnic sense, but actually in an almost a moral philosophical sense that I had been given a history, a legacy that was very precious. And I want to know more about it. And if it was valuable to me, I felt that I could use its wisdom of generations of

millennia, after all, to better my life and to break out of the cycle of divorce, you know, despondency, depression, anger, et cetera, that had driven my family apart. Of course, nothing is a cure-all for those things. But nevertheless, it offered some hope. And in that sense, especially the ability of the Torah to speak to the dynamics of families. Don't forget. Abraham, you know, it doesn't get pregnant. Sarah doesn't get pregnant until she's 90 or so.

They all, they have children that fight with each other. Of course, Jacob and Asa fight and want to kill each other. Joseph and his brother. So the Torah is very true to what life is like. I mean, nobody has a hopefully, you know, families where your brother's trying to kill you, Kane and Abel. But nevertheless, it speaks in very realistic terms about the limitations of the human condition. And that appealed to me.

It wasn't aspirational that I couldn't ever achieve. It wasn't far from me. It was something I could become. And I felt a great appeal to it. And so I started out a mission to see if there was. these blessings. And I actually got a blessed to come to UCSD in 2004, where I've been ever since, 18 years. I've been here on the seashore there that Abraham was promised to have sand-like numbers of offspring. So I don't know about that. My wife's not down for that. But nevertheless,

it was something that I knew I had to continue this mission to try to understand if I could reconcile some of the aspects of science with the Torah. And so we built this telescope. It was called Bicep. We took it from San Diego and Caltech. We took it down to the South Pole Antarctica. So now I'm traveling with you to Antarctica. We shipped it there.

It's a refracting telescope at the bottom of the world. I've been there twice. And it's an otherworldly ice planet like in Star Wars, the planet Hoth. And it's been a challenge to get to you for 100 years more. It was only discovered in the early 1900s, the size. pole. And the people in the bottom all died trying to get back from the South Pole and lost their battle, froze to death in a March of 1912, 110 years ago this year. And they did it for kind of the same nationalistic pride that we went to the moon or people do stuff as nations. And they were

also interested in science. And I thought it's an amazing place to be. Still very dangerous. If you go there now, you're as likely perhaps lose your life not to the cold conditions because you wear very warm comfortable clothing but to the fauna that are so violent and so destructive those are brothers the one on the on the right is his name is cane uh but um but maybe they're just mad at other penguins maybe they get along with people so i try to get close to one the second time i went down there is also extremely dangerous So maybe not quite as dangerous as when Scott and company froze to death. But we actually made this discovery that we were trying to make. In other words, we saw the imprint that would have proven as close as you could beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe began with a big bang.

And that was called a detection of this inflationary signal. And you see at Stanford, back where I used to be, there was a video put out. It got three million views in a day or two. There was a press conference at Harvard. And I described this in my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize. And I kind of have some links to folks on my YouTube channel that show this. We were on CNN.

We were in the most important newspaper in all of the planet, the San Diego Union Tribune. You see that on the left. And also on this paper called The New York Times. And I wanted to really draw your attention to what it shows in the middle of that column of the New York Times. It says space ripples seen as the Big Bang smoking gun. So we had done it. This is on March 17, 2014.

On the left, you see this very, very wrinkle. We detect evidence of such an event after the Big Bang. I was a little bit more cautious in that article. And you see something in the top. You see, you know, history, history keeps rhyming. It doesn't repeat. There's Putin invading Crimea. Okay, so eight years later, he's invading Ukraine, right?

On the bottom, you see the economist. It sounds like some guy just saw the beginning of the universe. That's kind of cool. And then we were whispered about winning a Nobel Prize. Now, spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize. So at least, you know I didn't win it. But perhaps other people could win it. And the question is, why?

Why didn't I win the Nobel Prize? Why didn't anybody win the Nobel Prize? You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not so. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. So you know you made it when you are printed up in the onion, and you can see this about this quote from below.

So these are talking about the meaning of forever. They're talking about the Bicep 2 experiment. This is a month after the announcement was made. So that was kind of ticklish to see that. But everything was had to be kind of evaluated and taken with a grain of dust. as it turns out. So there are these, this cartoon shows these two housekeepers, whatever, in a hotel maybe looking out and saying it's so beautiful, but I can't stop thinking about all that interstellar dust out there. Now, why would they be thinking about such things? Well, it turns out the universe is a pretty filthy place. It's full of failed comets, failed asteroids, meteorites, galactic schmutz, as we professionals call it. And this dust can actually mimic the imprimatur of the Big Bank City. that we were seeking. And in fact, it did. It replicated and fooled us into believing that the signal that we saw was actually the harbinger of the early universe's birth pangs, but it wasn't. It was actually

the mere presence of microscopic grains of dust, permeating our galaxy, not even the cosmos, just our galaxy. And it tricked us into believing that we had detected once and for all the Big Bang smoking gun. So now we know the universe isn't so pristine. We can't just look here from Earth all the way back to the beginning of time, that instead it's kind of smoggy, it's kind of smoky, kind of reminds me of Los Angeles on a bad day. The universe has tons and tons and tons of this type of substance, the very humble substance, but one that we didn't account for in its completeness, and that's called dust. And so we have to pivot. We have to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, even when our Nobel aspirations are blown away.

into the dust of the wind, we still have to do more. And so we have created a new experiment. And it's called the Simon's Observatory. And this observatory has a goal to not only detect these aftershocks of the Big Bang if the Big Bang occurred, but also to detect the presence of dust in the universe and get rid of it and account for it accurately and precisely using an array of instruments that I won't talk about in great detail. can follow us online. It's at 17,200 feet above sea level in the Outta Comet Desert of Northern Chile, which is considered the driest desert on earth. It's called the Desert of Deserts. I actually thought it was the dessert of desserts. When I went there the first time, I was sorely

mistaken. But it's on this plateau high above sea level, where you can basically look straight up and feel like you're looking into the inky blackness of outer space. From there, we're attempting to build courtesy of very, very generous funding from both the Simons Foundation and the Heising Simons Foundation and our member and partner institutions that have been so generous, including UC San Diego, Princeton, Penn, and Berkeley that founded the Observatory in 2016. We aim to be taking data with it in 2024, which is just about two years from now. Less than two years. We aim to have data from both the universe's inflationary origin if that indeed took place and from dust and potentially rule out or constrain these other models of cosmic genesis cyclic universes

bouncing universes static universes we can rule all those out perhaps there would be enough credulity in the existence of inflation and therefore the single big bank so again coming back to one of the three quotes I started with. God said to you, Abram, I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring could be counted. So again, we heard about stars will be like the children, the offspring. Now we hear dust. So can we count the dust? Well, to count dust in cosmology, we need to have very smart people working with us. They're some of the most brilliant people that I would work with for free, and I can't believe that I get paid to work with these geniuses. We're building refracting telescopes, not unlike

one that Galileo himself would recognize, to look back and to get the earliest evidence, not only for the existence of gravitational waves and the Big Bang, but perhaps for also at the same time ruling out competing models for how the universe could have been formed but didn't. To do that, we have to measure dust and measure the CMB. So we have three different telescopes. And that way we can count dust as well as count the signals that we're looking for. And we have these three telescopes here, one of which is in my laboratory, being completely built by my colleague, Professor Cam Arnold, and our students and postdocs here. And another one at Princeton University led by Lyman Page, and we have one of my colleagues on the phone.

Fred Carl, who's invaluable member of the team. And we also have a third telescope, which is being built by my colleague Adrian Lee in his group at UC Berkeley. These three telescopes will sit on this very strange-looking platform, which has this thing called a co-moving shield. This remind you is at 17,000 feet above sea level. The atmospheric air pressure is half that which we feel here at sea level. We have to be continuously on oxygen. There's tremendous danger from ultraviolet rays. They're incredibly dry, obviously.

You almost see no clouds at any time. The sky is completely black when you look overhead. And it's a tremendously alien environment. And oh, by the way, those little pointy mountains are volcanoes that we think are dormant, but not extinct. And every so often they erupt. So you see those big boxes underneath that crane. So we have to provide everything. Cam and others have built out the site with infrastructure.

structure with concrete, with diesel power generators, with laboratories in the foreground, getting cranes up to 17,000 feet. It's an incredible challenge, but we have an incredible team. And I'm so pleased to be a part of it, all in an effort to measure simultaneously the cosmic signals that we care about, as well as measuring the dust signals. So I want to conclude by saying this famous quote, which we let off with. The Lord took Abram outside, said, look up and count the. the stars. He was commanding him to do it. He says, if you can, that's how many descendants you

will have. Now, it says that they will be, previously it said they will be a certain, you'll have as many offspring also as the dust and of the sand on the seashore. So I'm an astronomer, and I want to do a calculation. Are there more grains of sand in the Earth's beaches? Or are there more stars in the universe? Or are they the same number? So it turns out you can go through the calculation. In the Milky Way galaxy, we know there's about 100 billion to at most half a trillion stars. We can count them up. And we can do it a simple estimation of how many grains of sand there are. And it comes out to be about 3 billion billion grains of sand. So there's more than a billion times more, about a billion times more, 33 million or so times more grains of sand on the seashore than there

are stars in the sky. And yet, what did Abraham do? He went out and he tried to do it. So this is a tour of our galaxy. Now imagine trying to count every single star in this galaxy. Obviously, that's impossible. This is kind of a simulation of what it would look like. We can't get far enough away to actually do this type of a journey through the galaxy. But every single point of light is a star, and then there's a lot of dust in there, too, of course. So each star is unique and as it said, when we try to do the impossible, amazing things often happen. It is through persistence that we discover our true abilities. So we can't count the number of stars in the sky.

We couldn't count the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to go into the impossible. So what are the takeaways? Again, Torah means wisdom, science means knowledge. They're not the same thing. Can we prove God exists? No, that's not what scientists do. We disprove things that don't exist. And the last lesson is to take away the fact that Abraham tried to do the impossible.

He knew it was impossible. But when you have something like an entity like God telling you to do something, you don't say no. I think it's a valuable lesson that we can all take away. And it's not a coincidence that my podcast is also called Into the Impossible, which you can find when you do your homework and visit both my email list to get updates from around the universe. That is cosmology, astronomy, theology, religion, all sorts of events. When I start speaking around the country again, you'll be able to get in touch with me. I might come to a city near you. And lastly, where I keep my podcast into the Impostradict.

where Abraham would surely go. It is accessible on YouTube and anywhere you get your audio podcast as well. And with that, I want to thank everybody and hope that you will all stay in touch. And I'm happy to take some questions, Andy. All right. Yeah, thank you so much. Dr. Keating, that was unbelievable. Thank you for doing your story and everything that you did with us tonight.

As I said in the chat, Redass after he ended, before it's open to any questions anyone may have on anything that we're interested about learning more about conduct repeating. So yeah, I'll just give it maybe a minute here. But actually, I didn't get any questions in the Q&A and none in the chat yet, so I'll give people some time. I'll kick it off with the question I have.

have is during your academic journey, have you experienced any difficulties in developing these refractions telescopes? And what did you learn from those challenges that you've come across? Oh, did I ever experience any challenges? Yeah. So we've experienced basically nonstop challenges

in any of these projects, whether it was getting funding to do it, getting someone to believe in you. I had a mentor, Andrew Lang, at Caltech, who believed in a way that no scientist had ever believed in me that you could actually measure the early parts of the universe's evolution. And Andrew was a towering figure in my life, about 10 years older than me, kind of like an uncle, he would give me all sorts of advice. And in January of 2010, when we should have been celebrating the greatest heights imaginable if we had just deployed this telescope to the South Pole, which was my vision and his vision, he took his own life and nobody knows why.

And I write about him as kind of this just monumental loss for not just me and cosmology, but obviously for his children, his family. And it's something I could never really wrap my mind around, not that I was the most important consideration in his life, but just being so close to somebody who believed in you, really the first true person I felt that way about and to lose them. So that was, yeah, devastating to me. And then moving, losing out on certain opportunities to measure and to be a part of different things.

But you get, like if I point out in my book, if I hadn't been fired from Stanford, which I thought was the most challenging thing that ever happened to me, the worst thing that ever happened to me, you know, one of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the planet. I get fired, the only time I've ever been fired. And yet, if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have eventually moved to San Diego where I met my wife and had children and been able to do everything else I've been able to do in life. So since then, so a lot of times you think something's really bad, but only through the clarity of looking back through the power of the telescope, the power perspective.

That's what the telescope means. And according to Galileo, it was called a perspective tube. I got that perspective, but only through distance. Do you know that what you thought was a challenge? It was actually a great gift. Yeah, in question. Yeah, so we actually did get a few questions coming in. The first one I saw was from Vena.

And the question is, what are your next steps to prove the Big Bang? Oh, that's my friend, Rina. So Rina is also a great podcaster. and she's married to a great scientist named Zev. So shout out to them. So the Simon's Observatory will take us to measure not only the signals that get in the way, the contamination, the systematic errors that contaminate our measurement, but will also measure with deeper precision and greater accuracy, the potential existence of these waves of gravity,

which would then be evidence for inflation, which would then be evidence for the Big Bang starting off in a quantum fluctuation singularity, and also tie into something that I didn't have time to speak about called the multiverse. That would be maybe we'll talk about that at a different event, perhaps. Maybe. And then the next question we had coming in is, what is the best advice that you have for students who struggle with their identities of being in STEM and Jewish? Ah, well, I think that the most important thing to to work on in in as a stem aspiring STEM professional. I've never seen it get in the way. In fact, in STEM is much, much less likely to face some of the challenges that you face. And if you take Judaic studies or international relations. So I'm not sure why this question would be really pertinent to to STEM in that.

you know, STEM is traditionally science, technology, engineering, and math. It's really focused on practical matters that don't involve necessarily a confrontation of your Jewish ethnic identity, cultural identity, or even religious identity. So I've never found those in conflict at all. I would be much, much less, you know, optimistic if I were studying, you know, something in the humanity where it's often, you know, there are a lot of challenges to, that come from things like the BDS movement. We don't have that.

There have been some attempts to do that in the hard sciences. Luckily, they've been refuted in most ways. Yeah. Yeah, I can definitely speak to that as a student as well, what you were you saying. Yeah, and the next question we got is, from Muba, which is actually my mom. Can you provide an example of two of your disagreements with Dr. Schroeder?

Okay, so hi, mom, happy Mother's Day. Thank you for making Andy. So disagreements with Schroeder. So, again, there is, there are two different philosophies. One is to say the Torah and science are what, what Stephen J. Gould, the late great atheist but Jewish, a historian of science at Harvard said, were non-overlapping magisteria. In other words, they are domains that are self-contained and are completely intact and wholly disparate from one another, that religion and science have

nothing to do with each other. That is in direct opposition to Schroeder and others who attempt to reconcile a one-to-one correspondence between statements in genesis and statements in in science i do not believe for myself that that is a that that is the purpose and i think gould agreed with this that you cannot do specifically that you cannot say that one has a purpose and and without opening up the possibility that then okay so you're going to use the Torah you're going to use science to prove things in the Torah well then what prevents you from trying to say that the Torah is going to teach you things about science that to me is very perilous because there are tons of things that aren't addressed in the Torah at all dinosaurs evolution um and more or less the perspective and this is not just me

these are i've had rabbis and other people um who are scientifically are periodite, including the former chairman of the Caltech math department, Barry Simon, who's a Torah, you know, very Torah true Jew, as anyone who knows him knows. And there is a great difficulty with some of the scientific proofs, quote unquote. So let me give you an example. So it doesn't, he doesn't say this. He's much too brilliant to say this. But Schroeder said something like the universe will never accelerate. It will never get. the universe expanding, but the expansion will never increase with time. It actually doesn't even mention it in this in his book from 1996. Why? Because we didn't know that the universe is accelerating

or expanding. That completely changes the dynamics not only of our future, but of how the first few days behaved. And so we cannot want, we can't trust to the precision that he's trying to wedge together. We cannot trust that scientifically to be actually. when when he wrote his book we didn't know anything about this mysterious force which dominates the amount of energy and matter and energy in our universe causing it to accelerate and so all the more so can we not use the Torah itself I mean you have to say even you might love Schroeder I know many of you do but you can't say that he's superior to Moses I don't care how much you love him and so Moses is

silent on this right and and there are many statements that are troubling if you think of the Torah as a science book. And so I say, again, Torah means wisdom. It means what you teach to your children. This Torah. I don't teach my children a brief history of time by Stephen Hawking. Actually, Hawking had a lot of problems. As a parent, as a husband, I don't want to get into it.

But I don't use him to teach my kids wisdom. I use them to teach him knowledge. Knowledge by definition is meant to be eventually refuted. Torah is meant never to be refuted. So if you try to wedge something in too closely, it could be like saying the earth is spherical, when in reality, better that we know science, we'll know that that's not true. I'm not saying don't read it. I'm not saying I don't respect the person.

I'm just saying there is a great deal of controversy among scientists about it, his way of interpreting it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah, great response. I think just to be respectful of your time and everyone's time that's on, I think we'll wrap it up. You wanted me to do this one last question that we had, you have time? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we'll wrap it up with this last question here from Chad. And it is, can the formation of mass be seen as a result of inflation or expansion?

Oh. No. So mass doesn't have to do with inflation. In mass, we think about as the formation or conservation of energy in cosmology there is no conservation of mass in physics or in cosmology you can create mass uh from pure energy and some say that the universe itself was created from pure energy and that has a context in religion but it also has a context in it's called quantum field theory that you can play certain uh uh uh roles in quantum mechanics that then can allow you to borrow energy on very brief time scales, such as those that prevailed at the beginning of the universe, and that could actually be used, in a sense, to instantiate matter, which has mass. So, no, we can't, the fields are allied and concomitant that if you did have inflation,

it would explain what powered and propelled the Big Bang to expand. But no, you can't get directly the, there's no current, that doesn't mean there never will be, but there's no current mechanism from pure inflation to get pure mass. It was a very sophisticated question, though. Amazing. All right. And with that, I think we will wrap up today's talk. Again, thank you so much for speaking with Dr. Keating and for all the support from all the other Jewish leaders in our community,

Robert Rattel, Lisa and Ken, thank you so much for being here today. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino,

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