Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Inflation, B Modes and Losing the Nobel Prize | Brian Keating on the Cool Worlds Podcast

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Join Prof. Brian Keating as he delves into a thought-provoking conversation with Prof. David Kipping about the fascinating world of cosmology, focusing on inflation, B-modes, and the thrilling quest for the Nobel Prize. Explore the highs and lows of scientific discovery, the allure of the multiverse, and the ethical intricacies behind groundbreaking research, all while examining how human ambition and curiosity drive the relentless pursuit of knowledge. Don't miss this compelling exploration of cosmic mysteries and the dynamic challenges that scientists face in their quest for truth! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. Welcome one and all to the Cool World's podcast with me or host, David Kipping. This week I'm joined by Brian Keating, who is a professor of astronomy at UC San Diego and also a popular author. He wrote the Losing the Nobel Popular Science book and also most recently the Into the Impossible book, which of course maybe that name sounds familiar because it's named after his podcast, The Into the Impossible podcast, which I was on fairly recently and so we're kind of returning the favor of him appearing on the Cool World's podcast. Actually, he's probably a familiar face and a name to some of you because he's been on so many great, wonderful podcasts.

He's been on, let's see, Andrew Huberman just last week, I think he was on there. He's been on Jordan Peterson. He's done, of course, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, all of these big ones. And so now he's finally made it to the pinnacle of the podcasting world, the big, you know, the elusive moose that he hasn't been able to hit yet. He is here. He's finally reached the peak and he's on the Cool Awards podcast this week. So very grateful to have his time. And of course, as you might guess from his experience, he's a wonderful conversationalist,

but also has a really interesting story to tell. In the losing the Nobel book, which we get into during this conversation, he tells the story that has really been a career-defining moment for him, I think, of being involved in this mission, this program that was attempting to discover something that would have really been a guaranteed Nobel Prize had they seen it. It's something called a B-mode. We'll explain it in the podcast what that is. it would have been essentially the signature of cosmological inflation had it been detected

and how the team really got excited about this possible signal and maybe lost some of the precious objectivity that we need in science and ended up making a wrong step. I think it is a fascinating story. There's so many lessons in it, not only for scientists, but I think for all of us in life about how do you check that you're on the right track? how do you, what are those internal balances and those external balances that can fix those, those ideas which are going the wrong direction. So I really enjoy talking to him. And of course, we also got on some ideas about the future of academia with the AI revolution and potentially

the changing shift in culture of how we think about academia. So lots of fun discussions. I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you at the back end. I just wanted to start with you Brian just by talking about your journey into science. How did you, what was your origin? story. How did you find yourself into astronomy? Yeah, that's always the most... We arrive on Earth and media rays and, you know, people tell us what happened before we got there. So I really got interested in astronomy at age 12. I was randomly awoken one night, awakened one night, and I looked out the window and I saw the moon and it was, you know, brighter than these floodlights that we have in here. And it was just so amazing to look at the moon. I know you're

captivated by it. And then there was something next to it and I was like, what the hell is that? It was like equally bright as the moon. Except it was just a little fragment. And I was like, what could that possibly be? You know, it didn't move. So I knew it wasn't American Airlines, you know, flight coming into LaGore. I lived, you know, not too far north from here in Westchester County.

And so I couldn't, you know, wait to figure out what it was. There was one problem. You know, Google would take another 16 years to get invented. You know, Sergey and Larry's dragging their feet. You know, it was a mid-80s. So I didn't really have an opportunity to figure out what the heck am I actually seeing. So it was, it really led me to do actual research and I go to library, get a newspaper, and the New York Times used to.

They don't know anymore. Unfortunately, I don't think, print this section called Cosmos, and it showed the pictures of different celestial objects. And this was, you know, two or three days later, I figured things didn't really change that much night to night, you know, at least as far as I could tell. And so I saw it, they showed the moon. And then they showed this label and this black dot next to and I said, Jupiter. I was like, what the heck? You can actually see another planet with your naked I couldn't believe it because it was one of the voyagers, you know, cruising by the correction. And you're in New York, so you don't necessarily expect that. Exactly.

And so I was like, wow, this is what I can see with my eye. I imagine if I could, you know, afford a telescope, which I couldn't barely, you know, maybe scraped together some nickels, but I was working on a deli and Dobbs Ferry. I think it still exists called Venice Deli. And I was stocking shelves and it was like $1.80 an hour. I was like, this is going to take forever to get a telescope. But fun fact, you know, telescopes are like, they say a men's suit and an ounce of gold and something else, but also telescopes, their price is fixed as a medium of exchange.

So a telescope today, about two inches in diameter, say, a little bit bigger, smaller than the ones you guys have here, a refractor, is about $75 today, and it was $75, you know, 40 years ago. And so I eventually saved up about half, and then I got a small grant from a three-letter funding agency, the M-O-M foundation, my mother. She ended up giving me, you know, the other $35, and I ended up getting a telescope. I've dipped into that source a few times. There's only so much you can dip into it. Now it's the other way around.

We have to support it. So we kept getting a small telescope. I forget crazy eddies. You won't know this because they don't exist anymore. And it predates you here in this part of the country. So by a telescope and then took it. And it's amazing because when you see through a telescope, you don't know that you're not the first person to make a discovery

of the fact that the moon has craters and moons. on it and mountains on it and that Jupiter has these four dots that seem to you know go around it and that Saturn has these rings it's so obvious in that those smudges up there are actually galaxy but you feel that same thrill of discovery that you were galileo yeah yeah so it's and i always say it's the only type of science that can be done like unless you have 12 billion euros you know you can build your own large hadron collider and even so you don't know what it it quote unquote felt like to discover the higgs boson i mean nobody knows it because nobody did it but you know these historical events, the Herschels discovering like night after night, just like incredible.

That thrill, you're connected to them not only through what you see, but through what you feel. And astronomy is unique. We don't think of ourselves as kind of emotional creatures, but I think that's part of the thrill. And it has always been part of my origin story. So I wonder, that's really interesting. You kind of almost have this like classical romantic origin story of getting into astronomy. I remember also looking through a telescope and being inspired by it. But I felt like when I was younger, I was more into fundamental physics.

And it was more reading the books about fundamental physics that really got me excited. And it was only actually later in college that I sort of turned back to astronomy. But to have that origin story of really looking with the naked eye originally at the night sky, it makes me wonder whether you have a specific view about Starlink and potentially future satellite constellations, mega constellations, which, you know, if it keeps going to hundreds of thousands of satellites, it will become difficult to distinguish Jupiter from an artificial object in the sky. Is that something that you have a particular concern about, given it was an inspiration for you? Well, I think anybody who's, you know, has even a modicum of romance towards the night sky just to

look at it, be concerned about it. But, you know, I have to say for optical astronomers, they, you maybe even, I can say, have it, it's trivial compared to what we as microwave astronomers have to do. And I actually had the opportunity to bring this up with Elon himself on my podcast for like 10 minutes once. About a year ago now, I come to think of it. But I asked him, you know, you've gone to some links to darken these satellites, but A, you can't microwave darken, thanks a lot of thermodynamics. You can't shut off the physical. Almost everything in Earth's orbit has about the same temperature as the moon. It's about 290 Kelvin, 270 Kelvin, something like that.

And we're looking for something in nano-calvin-level signals I'm sure we'll get into with the B-mode polarization of the CMB. So it's billions of time. But not only that, they're not only just emitting their thermal radiation, which is unconceivable, not inconceivable, but you can't mask something's thermal radiation, but they're emitting in the exact microwave wavelength regimes that we need to look at, And not per se to see the CMB at its brightest. That occurs at about 2 millimeter wavelength or 150 gigahertz.

But to rule out foregrounds, which have flummoxed us and as a reason to the title of my first book. And that is we need to exclude from the signals that we see the presence of galactic synchotron radiation, which is this emission that's highly polarized due to the motion of electrons, gyrating by the Earth, by the Milky Waste magnetic field. And so that's a very pernicious signal. and they're broadcasting in those exact wavelength bands, low frequency called KA band, about 26 to 36 gigahertz. That's basically what 5G is.

Is that polarized as well? It's extremely polarized. So it's polarized, but it has the equivalent temperatures. So if you take a radio signal and you ask, well, what is its equivalent blackbody temperature? When it's that narrow band, it's incredibly, it's millions of degrees Kelvin. So we've got these screaming satellite.

So I said to Elon, and he got it immediately. I told him, you know, he has some physics training from his days at a lesser Ivy League school. We won't mention which one, because we're both associated with far superior ones. Just kidding. Out there, UPenn. Come on, I got one of my good buddies there.

Mark Devalin, shout out to Mark. But the point is, these cannot really be massed. So I said to him, Elon, you know about the laws of thermodynamics, and he's like, he didn't know that that was true, that it was so, it was going to effectively close off. It would be like putting a signal at 1,400 megahertz, you know, in the 21 centimeter ban. And just there should be bands that are excluded from use by commercial satellites because

they're astronomically incredibly, you know, precious. And he said he'd look into it. You know, it's been a year he hasn't looked into it. I haven't yet, you know, twisted the strings, pulled the strings, you know, because I never wanted to be like, oh, can you also come on my podcast and talk about, you know, you'd love to talk to him. As I said, you know, he's the second most requested person on the Into the Impossible podcast after after Professor David Kipping out there.

You'll see that episode. You have to catch that one. But yeah, so the question of whether or not he can actually deactivate them over called selective availability. There's only two sites on Earth, really, where the CNB is observed from now, South Pole and Chile, where we operate. And there's some hope to do some stuff in Tenerife and actually in China, Tibet. And so I said maybe four locations when you're over the horizon, can you turn them off? I mean, not that many people there. There's no one at the South Pole, effectively.

there's 49 people there in winter, so it's not going to impact his business, bottom line, too much. I think he understands it. It's just a matter of getting it on his radar again. It seems a semantle problem because there must be some way they could, you know, oscillate, modulate the signal in a way that would be clearly artificial. And as long as you have some access of separability, you could potentially identify it, right? That's right. Exactly. So, yeah, we mentioned B modes and this is obviously one of the major science. drivers that you've been pursuing throughout your career. It is one of those terms that I think a lot of the public are very confused about. It's a horrible term.

Yeah, so B is magnetic field. Obviously, B, B modes. But maybe, I'm sure you've given this spiel many times before. Not in this building. It's important, actually, to bring up why this building is so important. So there used to be a professor here, Mark Kaminkowski. He was one of my friends. I call him a mentor, but he's like four years older than me.

So he really can. He's now at Johns Hopkins after going from here. to Caltech for many years, which is where I met him as a postdoc. I was a postdoc. He was a young faculty. And I was at Johns Hopkins. And he's a National Academy member, just an incredible intellect. And one of my favorite people, great sense of humor.

If you can ever get him on, you should. Okay. But he was working with a postdoc, I think, a Lim and Wang. And then there was another guy, Andrew Jaffe, who is now at Imperial. And the three of them wrote a paper, and they called it the polarization pursuers guide. And that was about what you would need to detect different types of the microwave backgrounds polarization. And what Mark and his team had done earlier with another very good friend of mine in college. So this is just really rewining.

This is left over relic radiation from the Big Bang we're talking about. Okay. So this is that beautiful map that we see that's kind of blue, yellow and reds that you see the kind of poker dot ton of thing. That is the radiation that's been traveling for 13.8 billion years. years and we are detecting it at sort of 2.7 Kelvin. In that radiation, this paper was asking what kind of signals would you expect to see? How would you best optimize a detector system or how could you best detect such a signal with a particular emphasis on what heat? So the problem is sometimes in astronomy as in

business relations, as I understand it, there's a phenomenon called the second mouse gets the cheese. You know, so like Xerox invented the mouse, but then literal amount, the computer mouse, not the animal. And then Apple popularized it, et cetera. So the first company that actually do something isn't always the one that profits the most from it. Especially if it's Apple involved, which normally do that quite a bit. Great for copy.

That's exactly right. Facebook. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Actually, you know, there's another one. MySpace or something. That's right. Anyway, so Mark and his team at the exact same time along with a colleague named Arthur Kuzowski, who's a very good friend and collaborator now,

he's actually the current spokesperson of the Assignment's Observatory. They came up with a framework based on work by one of my great mentors, a Russian physicist who was at Queen Mary in London. And this was to say, if you have gravitational waves present during the first moments after the Big Bang, what will they do to that 3 degree, 2.7 degree cosmic glow that itself is the result of one of the earliest possible processes that one could observe? So we are, as cosmologists, we're basically archaeologists. We're fossil hunters. We're looking for different fossils. They come in different shapes. And those different shapes and kind of techniques, they trace different physical conditions present at the time of their formation.

So the very earliest things in the universe to be created that leave fossils that we can detect today is right here. So most of the hydrogen in this glass of vodka, no, in this water cup here was created during the Big Bang. We're not making tons and tons of hydrogen. It's actually relatively difficult to make hydrogen. And so most of the hydrogen is here, but not only hydrogen has isotopes. Hydrogen has two different isotopes that are heavier than normal proteum, as it's called, tritium and deuterium. And those isotopes and their ratios of their... It's only getting every customer's order right.

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at about a microsecond after the Big Bang. Now, we don't think of the Big Bang as synonymous or concomitant with the formation of time. That's sort of a misconception. People say, oh, the Big Bang is when time began. Not necessarily. It could be, but it's not necessarily the case. So as you go later and play the clock forward in time, you know, run the movie forward. The next major event, really nothing happens from the first three minutes after the Big Bang, a famous book by that name.

And it sort of ends within about 20 minutes. of the temperatures cooling down enough that the actual quarks wouldn't get shattered apart by the radiation present. And eventually, enough protons and neutrons and electrons and stuff can coalesce 380,000 years later. And when that happens, heat can then propagate. Light can propagate.

It would have been ultraviolet light at the time. And now it's free to propagate. And in fact, it can suffuse throughout the universe. And so we see that heat left over that wasn't, there was no longer sufficient to keep hydrogen ionized and to make the first atoms break apart. So that light also could have been suffused alongside with gravitational waves. So this is thermal radiation, which would normally be, by the way, unpolarized, right? It would be, yes, just like light from the sun is mostly unpolarized.

Candlelight is unpolarized. So in order for polarization, take, if we had a laser here, I don't know if you've got a laser in your laboratory, in the cool world's laboratory. By the way, thank you for turning down the temperature of this world for me today. This is great. in early January in New York City, it's so nice to get out in the cold, fresh air. Just for you, right. Yeah, we cooled it down for you. I left this morning, 70 degrees, sunny.

So if you have a laser beam and you shoot it off this water, well, the laser might be polarized or not, or you can actually make it unpolarized. But after interacting with a dielectric, liquid surface in this case, it becomes partially polarized. So you actually take that. You can take sunglasses and it's one of my questions

I give to my graduate students on their final exam. You know, can you prove that laser light is polarized or that polarization occurs from reflection, which it does. So the lesson is you can take unpolarized light and make it polarized. And that's the whole point behind polarized sunglasses. You know, when you go to the ocean, if you look just straight at the ocean, like the glare on this table here, if you wear glasses, one of those modes of polarization will get suppressed by the glasses, and that will leave the more contrast to light to see into the ocean, you know, below the ocean surface.

So the scientists realized this back in the 60s. Actually, Lord Martin Rees was the first to kind of think about these ideas, that if there was light and if there were some matter that could scatter that light, that even though the cosmic background itself is unpolarized, the resulting interaction would produce polarized light. And that would tell you, just like you can learn about actually the Navy does this, they learn about salinity and the water pressure and temperature from looking at the polarization of light from a satellite, looking at sun. So this is representing of hydrogen atoms. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So it was reflecting off the very first hydrogen atoms and whatever else was there to make those hydrogen atoms aggregate in one location versus another. So dark matter is one of the things that can do that. But also gravitational waves could do that.

Now, where do they come from? Well, there's a theory called cosmic inflation, which has been around for, you know, it's over 44 years now on Gooth and eventually Andre Linday and others, including, you know, Paul Steinhart, who's at Princeton now. they had ideas about what it would take to effectively create a universe in a purely quantum state from from no thing as you know has been said from no material thing from pure quantum energy if you like a quantum field called the inflaton which would possess and unavoidably fluctuations in its amplitude and and its and versus its position and that would cause not only there to be densities of curate and it's and its and its position and versus its position and that would cause um not only there to be uh densities of Excess amounts of curvature where the universe was expanding faster or slower. That's what that value of the inflaton does It controls the local rate of expansion throughout space time. So it would control what we call curvature perturbations, which would mean deeper gravitational wells for dark matter to fall into But it would also produce waves of gravity for reverberations stretching and squashing of space time and perpendicular planes and that the decaying of the inflatine field? Which is the gravitational waves? It's actually the oscillations of it.

Basically, the, the, the, uh, incommensurability of measuring, you know, effectively Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can't know exactly at, it's just like photons in this room can be described by photon field where we have creation and annihilation operators. Um, they would be produced during this extremely early epoch, about a trillions of a trillions of a trillionth of a second after the origin of what we call our observable universe. Not necessarily time equals zero. It could be.

We don't know. In many models, it's not. But in the inflationary universe, it is. It's basically there's a singular origin of the universe that occurs in our region of space-time that we can now access today. We call that region the observable universe. And the fluctuations in gravitational waves

would produce unique patterns. So now we're getting back to Mark Kavinkowski, Columbia University. So these primordial patterns, they get essentially kind of exploded and blown up into massive scale, right, during this inflationary period. So they might start off as these little quantum fluctuations,

but they end up as macro scale things. Yes. The entire horizon gets expanded. So everything gets expanded. If we're there, where you get expanded effectively. But it's actually space time itself can be endowed with ordinary curvature, like a gravitational lens, can distort the positions of spacetime, but it can also produce traveling modes that travel at the speed of light.

So this is one of Einstein's discoveries in GR, is that they're propagating modes. and those propagating modes are gravitational waves. The ones that would survive to be detectable today would be the ones that were very shortest at this extremely early time because, as you say, everything gets inflated, everything gets amplified,

and that's a bad thing when it comes to radiation. So redshift, as you undoubtedly encounter many times, the red shift of an object decreases its energy as well as decreasing its frequency, but the photon's energy is related to its frequency. For gravitational waves, the same thing happens. So by increasing stretching them during the inflationary process, their energy goes down by literally 10 to the 23rd power,

something like that. So only the smallest, tiniest ones really behave themselves to be observable today. But that's great, because those are the ones that are closest to, say, the plank scale. Those are the tiniest ones are the ones that are going to be the fossils, like the water here.

They're going to trace the earliest moments of the universe. Now, we don't see those directly like LIGO. Lago detects, you know, a gravitational wave comes into this room, shakes up their detectors, their laser beams measure, right? We don't directly detect it. We have a different kind of detector. The detector is the CMB photon shell of light. So it's kind of, it's easier for older people to think about this, actually. I envision it as if the CMB is a, is a photosphere, it's a shell that surrounds us, fictitious, a different one, slightly different one would surround you.

Someone on Neptune would see a slightly different one. And when you look at it, that's a shell of photons all released roughly at the same time. They're coming towards you. They're tracing their properties in their intensity, their color, and their polarization of what their physical conditions were when they started on their journey 13 billion 800 million years ago. And that physical conditions are traced in those three properties, polarization, color, and intensity. But if you look at the whole sphere of the last scattering.

surface we call it. We're really using that shell of photons as our as our LIGO detector. You know, LIGO use these mirrors. They get squished and squashed. We're using that whole shell and it will show these patterns of distortion of tor of basically this squishing and squashing on alternative planes. And that's exactly what Mark Kamikowski is a nano-kilvin you were saying. These are the distortions you're looking at. The equivalent of nano-kelvin. Yeah. So on top of the CMB, the CMB's intensity is 2.8 Kelvin. If you take away that's the monopole, what's called the constant temperature, that's the average temperature. If you then remove the average temperature, the largest fluctuations from isotropy just in temperature are at the level about 100 microkelvin. The polarization is another factor of 100 down, 10 to 100 down, a few microcalvin.

And then that's the polarization not associated with gravitational waves. And the gravitational wave polarization is a factor are 10 smaller than that. So it is really the hardest, you know, challenge in all of, you know, cosmology to measure these exquisite signals in the presence of, you know, a room temperature or even the South Pole or Chile or space. So it really is, from an observable perspective, it is a pattern in the CMB by which we mean there is a, there is a strip or a, yeah, some kind of form, however you want to draw it on there, where it is hotter by, you know, a nano Kelvin than the ambient conditions. And you're looking for that over the entire sky. It's even worse for that. It worse than that. Because what, so when you see these beautiful balls, you know, the NASA team made, maybe you have one.

I got a couple. And they depict the temperature. The temperature is a scalar quantity. It just has a value. No direction. It's not a vector. Polarization is kind of like a headless vector. So I think of it as little tiny spaghetti sticks or iron filings, even better.

Sprinkle some iron filings on that ball. But then you're only looking for a specific orientation or a pattern. that has a parity, asymmetry. You know that you're going to see many of them that have a symmetry wherein this pattern is exactly related to the fact that these wells of dark matter are established themselves in places where the inflatons potential was allowed for a deeper gravitational well.

So matter is falling into it. And if you like, if you like, it's dragging electrons and dragging the hydronams with it. So you're going to get a pattern that looks either radio, or purely tangential. That's great. And it was first detected in 2002. That's called E-Mode polarization.

Now, I hate that name because people are like, well, I thought light is an electromagnetic field. So isn't it always an E-mode? Like, where is the B-mode? So Mark's team, Arthur Kaczyowski and others, they had a more evocative name that I actually prefer to this day, but it got beaten out. So it's called grad and curl. So the gradient modes are the ones that look like they're from a gradient of a scalar potential, because they are, the density flow.

And then the curl pattern, they look like they're the cross product of the curl of a vector field. So it's exactly analogous to Helmholtz's theorem and vector calculus. That's why I always like Mark and his terminology better because it's more physically related. But, you know, it's fine. The other team got the more notoriety. So yes, they aren't called B-MUDs now, much to my sugar. Okay. So this signal, I mean, we'll get into B-Sept.

too a little bit, has not been convincingly detected? Is that fair to say? Well, here's where, yeah. So there's actually two different types of B mode polarization. Okay. And there's one that comes from the fact that as light propagates through asymmetric lenses, even if it had pure E mode to begin with, if it looked like it was a pure converging or tanget, purely circumferential field.

as it goes through this glass, the asymmetry of the optical, of the gravitational potential will cause a slight shear, which will cause some of the original E-mode polarization to acquire a tiny bit of B-mode polarization. That's not primordial B-modes. It's not primordial. That's the key thing. So it's really cool, very interesting. And that's been detected.

Actually, my team with Adrian Lee at Berkeley and others, and another team at the South Pole, did measure that effect, actually around the same time as the bicep. a result and became very convincingly studied. So now we've measured this particular pattern, which is interesting, but it's not as sensitive as the measurement of temperature gives you on gravitational lensing. It doesn't give you additional information.

But the, and that's at small scales, the sky scales of clusters of galaxies, arc minute scale. What we're looking for from inflation would be, as you said before, those modes that just could barely survive, the ones that just entered the horizon, roughly the size of the horizon or twice the size of the horizon,

at the time of decoupling when the C&B was produced. These are about degree or two on the sky. So these are huge modes. They're about the size of the moon on the sky or twice the size of the moon. So they're actually much, much larger than the arc minute or even arc second fluctuations that we have seen for a very long time.

Okay, so those primordial ones are still up for grabs. That's right. I guess my question is, if you had a, if we keep building more and more sensitive and you are building many more sensitive instruments to do this, and we keep coming up flat and we don't detect it, what does that mean? Would we, would that put pressure on an inflationary theory? Well, so part of the reason, it's a very interesting field in

cosmology that I inhabit. There are many personalities. I'm sure it's like that in your field, too, but the person has are so big, and for some reason, the stakes feel much, much higher. I imagine that if life is detected or if, you know, you can really, you know, blast through, you know, with exomones and so forth, that it'll also attract a kind of subculture where you don't only have to study the physics, you have to study the psychology of people, which is much messier, right?

I don't study psychology of my department chair. My former department chair is now here, by the way, Dimitri Bassoff. But the point is, when you get these larger-than-life personalities, they start to really ascribe extra-scientific or meta-scientific import to what we're measuring.

So, for example, Paul Steinhart, who was one of the founding fathers of new inflation, so around the time in the mid-80s, after inflation came about, Paul and others realized there was a fatal flaw that inflation would be occurring so fast that no structures could ever form. It was just the universe expanding superluminally.

You could never get enough matter together to form a universe. And he corrected that, and he improved it and came up with this called new inflation. And then there were add-ons by Andre Linday called chaotic inflation. That leads to things like the multiverse. I'm sure we'll talk briefly about that. But Paul came up with for a while.

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You could always say inflation just occurred, but it occurred at such a low energy. Yeah, it's just such a low energy. We'd never measure it. There doesn't have to be a guarantee from God or Gaia, whoever, that you're guaranteed to detect it and that we have the technology to do it. Look, if the CMB, if the universe was something like twice as old as it is, which, you know, okay, that's a big number. But in terms of, you know, physicists think of factors of, you know, exponentials, right? So, factors too much, right? So the CMB temperature would have been way too cold to measure using the tools that Belize Simpson did. So we might not know about it even to this day.

And that happens that it was at that. temperature and it was actually discovered people claim in absorption of cyanogen molecules and the galactic it's amazing how many things there are like that in science that seem to just to line up perfectly yeah i was thinking about that like uh right we don't the only reason we know so much about the spectrum of helium and the properties of the of the solar corona is because of this accident that the moon's apparent diameter is the same as the sun so it's like and it's the only moon in our whole solar system right that where that occurs so now you could say it's Some people do say things like that, but I'm not going to say that, especially not about inflation.

Although it's incredibly beautiful theory and it has a ton of circumstantial evidence for it, still the true smoking gun would only have to be. And this is agreed upon by Paul Starnhart, by all the competitors and enemies of inflation, including Hawking, not Hawking, including Sir Roger Penrose, for example, and many, many others, that it would be indisputable evidence for, for inflation, not circumstantial, if we're to detect gravitational waves. A background. It has to be a background. It can't just be, oh, there's some gravitational waves over there. It has to be seen over a cosmic scale, maybe over the full sky, perhaps, once you remove the galaxy. Which is what the B modes encode, right?

It's the beam modes. Well, you can actually see, the smallest you could ever get down to is a few degrees and few degrees, which is huge for an optical astronomer, but it's very tiny compared to, you know, the full sky. Let me just say, our measurement of the C&B patches that we look at with Bicep and with Simon's Observatory, tens of percent of this 44,000 square degrees on the sky. It's just enormous. Tens of thousands of degrees on a side. So it's really just like doing an all-sky survey. The full sky is 40,000, right? Square degrees. Yeah, about 44, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So,

so we're measuring, you know, good 40% of that. It's enormous numbers with these telescopes now. It's equivalent, it's almost like a full sky survey, effectively. So, and that's because you, if you have a phenomenon that itself only manifests its size, on several degrees to few degrees scales, you don't get that many samples of it unless you measure the full sky. So I think your question was, you know, what would be the, you know,

what is the sort of ultimate quarry or how we're going to actually obtain the signal? I guess, is inflationary theory falsifiable and vice versa? Right. Is it, it sounds like the answer to this is yes, that you could definitively prove it to be true, those two sides of the coin.

You can't, yes. So you can't prove inflation to be true, but you can falsify the other rival theories. It's a very interesting scientific. You can't prove it to be false? You can't, well, you certainly can't rule it out. That's true. But you can't prove that only inflation caused the phenomenon that we observe.

So let me just focus on what it can do because that's a little confusing. So all the alternatives to inflation, they all predict we will see no B modes. So either we see B modes or we don't. Let's do it your favorite, you know, P-kipping, given, David. Okay, so we'll do all that. So there's these different, you know, quadrants that we can look at. So you see B modes and inflation did occur. You see no B modes and inflation. You know, so you go through the only of all the theories, the only one that predicts you'll see B modes is the inflationary model, cosmological. And let's say we get rid of foregrounds, which, you know, spoiler alert, you know,

losing Nobel Prize because we didn't get rid of the foregrounds the first time. But we've learned lessons and we're applying those lessons. And so is the Biceb team, which I'm, not a part of anymore. So the main kind of thrust of your question, it is a good one. It is Popperian, you know, in that sense that like good science should be falsifiable. But, you know, even Popper, interestingly enough, he was not. This is Carl Popper, yeah. Yeah, Carl Popper. He was not really, he was not as Popper centric as we would think now. Like he agreed like, well, astrology makes, you know, falsifiable predictions. So is it science? No, of course not. So it's squishy. We don't really know exactly what we can say other than the fact that these alternative models,

like Sir Roger Penrose has this conformal cyclic cosmology, Paul Steinhart, I must call them Sir Paul Steinhart, because I love him so much. But Paul Steiner has this idea in Anahegis, who used to be here in this building. They have this idea of these colliding, oh, not these colliding, they had this notion called ect pirata cosmology, but that it's bouncing cosmological model, which doesn't have a singularity, and therefore it doesn't produce gravitational waves. There's no inflation. So those could all be ruled out by a positive definitive detection of these gravitational waves, putative producing these tensor perturbations that we call B modes. So you and just to extend this a little bit deeper because we mentioned the idea of multiverse and I think this is a topic.

I think I have one point I want to do a video on cool words about and something that's always bothered me and to some degree you can make the accusation about string theory or though it's been some recent studies claiming you can falsify string theory. But yeah, the idea of a multiverse in particular seems like one of the most egregious examples of something that really is like you can never disprove that. So what are we doing? Do you think, but I know proponents like just, yeah, don't worry about the proper definition. Throw that out because in the same way that the universe has a particle horizon, it doesn't mean the universe ends at that point, right? There was a certain distance we can see to just because the finite age of the universe and the finite distance that

light has traveled. But that doesn't mean the universe ends, whatever it is, 96 billion light years away. There is surely something else beyond that. And it's not non-scientific to propose that. And the multiverse feels like you could maybe make a similar argument to that. I guess I want to leave this open to you. Where do you land on the multiverse? Do you feel like it is a, besides the scientific arguments for it, do you feel like it is a credit? posed problem in science to say that there is such a thing. It's an interesting question because it really only can arise. Of course, there are people like, you know, my friend Max Tegmark will say there's many

different types of multiverses from Everettian many worlds type interpretations to what he calls the mathematical universe. But leaving those aside, let's just fix it on the cosmological multiverse. It has several interesting features. One is that it's intimately related. unlike the particle horizon, there's an anthropic connection. In other words,

the weak anthropic principle that we're here to observe these queer features of our universe only because we live in a universe that has those queer futures, right? So from any other perspective, we could say, well, we wouldn't be here to observe them.

Okay, there are many coincidences that you can kind of fixate on that may or may not be interesting. But just to point out that, you know, if you just talk about the horizon on the ocean surface or you talk about the particle horizon, It doesn't necessarily concomitantly with an anthropic justification.

So that's one thing. The other thing is that there's no models of inflation. There's no really well-studied models or accepted models of inflation. And this is straight out of the mouth of Gooth and Linday now, the biggest proponents of it, where you have inflation, but you don't have the multibutors. So in, I hate to plug my book, but in my, I love to plug my book. No, this is why it's here. So I have this example, which I want to, if you do,

don't mind I could show a plate for it is it's very meaningful for me in a couple of reasons. Okay, there we go. That's my daughter's birthday card. She's been reading it. Wow, she's my youngest fan. Even my kids won't read my books, David. This is embarrassing. Okay, so here, show a picture of in this book.

I speak about something called the Petrieverse. And it's meant to give sort of an analogy of what it is we're looking at. This was actually taken by a friend, Shull, Ben Jacob, who passed away. long before the book came out, and it was very hard to get that. He studies bacteria, or he did. He's passed away, as I said. So he studies bacteria,

and he would study and take these incredibly beautiful, artistic portraits of these different bacteria colonies, and they would be stained and beautiful, and they produce these fractal shapes, exactly like is proposed for the chaotic multiverse, where the universe would grow in these kind of islands of, you know, phosundity where life, or perhaps the laws of physics were compatible with life,

and they would proliferate, and ones that wouldn't have too many black holes or too much curvature, they collapse instantaneously. No one would be there to ask why they're not there. And so the analogy I made is like, if you're a bacterium, a single guy, you're floating around, you're stuck in this colony here, you have no idea. And they actually secrete toxins.

These different colonies all have slightly different chemical toxin levels that they're sensitive to. And they actually go to war with each other. And they produce, you know, they basically do battle on a microorganism scale. And so they sort of know about the existence of other ones, but they're not sure because they'll never contact them because to contact them would mean the end of their anthropic existence.

So what kind of bacterium who's really bright, a young, you know, bacteria kipping, you know, he's sitting there and he's on, he at least knows that he exists, right? Because there's this agar gel. There's a slurry of organic compounds. Kigida, egg, something. Yeah, it's exactly right. So he would know that he exists.

So that means that the potential for every, everything to exist. When we were kids, when I was a kid, the universe was everything. Now we, proponents of the multiverse say the multiverse is everything. And you have to convince me that it should be a universe. That's literally Andre Linda has told me. Why should it be a one universe? Why shouldn't you have to convince me of that? And I take for granted that it's a multiverse. In other words, our existence can initiate, you know, this notion that life is, is, is, our universes are common. And we're not thinking about life yet. Isn't that a little bit of a cop-out argument?

Because you could say, well, it's your job to convince me that the universe doesn't live on the back of turtles, right? Why shouldn't that be this? You could just kind of create anything you want in that space, right? I'm not sure. Right. We have to be scientific, you and I and our colleagues, right? So how do you appraise it? Well, to get inflation to start is a trick, but it's possible.

To get inflation to stop is very difficult. Brian Green, you know, a couple floors away. from here, E often likens it to a type of rocket fuel, like the solid rocket boosters on the space show or whatever. You couldn't shut them off, unfortunately, and it led to many disasters, right? So it's so good at producing universes that you really have to work hard to suppress it, meaning that everywhere at all times universes are being spawned into existence. Some don't last very long. But again, and then, yes, we find ourselves in a universe, which, again, it could be a cop-out as well, right? So, So the only notion I want to suggest to you and the viewers and listeners is that it's a very hotly

debated thing because it's not only a question of cosmology. It's partially related to the scientific method itself. If you say you can't test these things, then yes, it is effectively turtles or, you know, angels on the head of a pin. So if you, so my job as an experimentalist is to say, well, what is measurable, you know, as Galeo said, our job is to measure, what is measurable, and make measurable what is not yet so. And so we can have tools to do this. Unfortunately for us, we're going to reach the end of the road. Like you asked the question, you know, a few minutes back, you know, what happens if you just

keep measuring and you don't detect anything? That's something that keeps me up at night, especially when we have a $200 million. I worry about it too with XO means, right? We just keep finding no XO means everywhere. Exactly. And we have a proof, you know, we know our moon exists, right? So it's a proof that they definitely exist. So, yes, I think that it is a sociological question.

It's almost a psychological question. People have said, you know, there was 31 Nobel Prize winners and other luminaries wrote an op-ed in Scientific American about six years ago. Basically, assailing Paul Steinhart and Anaegis and Neil Turak and others who had suggested that the multiverse is effectively, as they call it, dangerous. Not just to science, but the society, because a scientific society that loses. faith in science is one that's destined for the ashland. Yeah, I really want to talk about that a little bit later on, actually. There's a lot to impact that. So before we drift too far into the philosophical, as much fun as that is, I did want to

loop back a little bit to Bicep 2, which, so you were the P.I. Bicep 1, I guess it was just called Bicep at the time. And then in your wonderful book, you sort of describe that journey. of how you were sort of ousted almost from from that leadership position into Bicep 2. So that's kind of part of the losing the Nobel title. So I love I love the fact you you get into this kind of personal story in the book because what is science if not done by people? It is it is it is done by humans and we sometimes forget that.

So I really appreciate that part. There was one part of the story I just wanted to touch on. There's lots. Yeah. Lots to get into here. But one part I've always found fascinating was this. slide by Jean-Philippe Bernard, right? So the brief setup here is that there was a dust correction that had to be done to the data that you'd collected. And there was a satellite

called Planck that the Europeans had launched that had the ability, in fact they had the data, I believe, to provide that correction for you. And an interesting thing we'd get into is why they didn't provide that to you. But anyway, there was a very good reason. Okay. So there was a slide that was presented at a conference by Jean-Philippe Bernard. And someone in the team took a screenshot or something or grabbed that somehow and that was used. Can you just walk us through that story? Because I think it's a fascinating of like really pushing things as hard as you can to get to get to the answer. It's almost like I never thought David I would write it. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix. are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th.

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6 p.m. Pacific time. Actually, I didn't want to write a book. People say, oh, you're good at teaching, you're going to explain things. you know um but i never i felt like i have one criterion for writing a book and and i have like i have all these different rules like how do you know when you should get married like that's another one i break out on my friends um you know uh and i have different heuristics for that but my heuristic for the book was the following it could be another book it just might be uh the criteria i had for writing a book at any time uh which uh was the following if there's a story and

there's only one person on earth who could tell that story. I'm talking about nonfiction here. I'm fiction. It's different ball of wax altogether. But if there's a story that I and I alone could tell uniquely so, and be fair and be honest and be vulnerable in that telling of it, then, you know, it's like an autobiography. Like everyone, you could write an autobiography and you're the only person that could read it.

I mean, I'd be interested in it. But like, you know, the random grocer down the street may not, he or she can write it. But it may not be of interest to many people. and that's something to be aware of when you're writing a book. You don't want to, people say, I don't care how many books it sells or I'm writing it for everybody. No, no, no, don't kid yourself. Like, that's not the way any series publishing process works. And so I said, if I'm ever in a situation where that happens, I'm going to do it.

I'm going to write a book. But I'm definitely not going to write a book if that never. I'm not going to write some, you know, ego stroking, you know, waxing. People do it and fine if they can do it. But I also wanted to write a book because there's many people's, many of them. been in this building and maybe here right now. I mean, you know, that have written books just brilliant theorists, Jan 11, Brian Green, you know, in these buildings, right?

But what do they have in common? Stephen Hawking, they're all theorists. And to my mind, there really hadn't been a truly, you know, sort of an autobiography mixed with an experimental physicist book. The books by George Smout was kind of like that, but he was also angling to win a Nobel Prize. And so I wanted to write the opposite. In fact, I put on the, you know, basically on the cover, you know, my, it's a, it's not,

the humility's up front. Yeah. Well, it's just that, you know, it was, it was, it was originally very much my intention to win a Nobel Prize. I was more or less, as much as you could be obsessed about it and not like, have it be an addiction that takes over, it ruins your family. It was something that drove me from an early age because I had this relationship with my father. And it was very contentious. He abandoned me. My older brother has kids.

And I didn't see him for 17 years. in the most formative years of my life. He was a famous mathematician, right? Yeah, he was. And he, but he, and he was great, he ended up doing physics. And, uh, but I knew for all the prizes, awards and honors he had, he was the youngest, full professor, he was a full professor at age 24 at Cornell. Yeah.

Another lesser Ivy League school. Um, but is it, Jeremy Axe? Was that the, James. James X. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's my father's name.

And so, um, but the one thing he didn't have was a Nobel Prize. So I grew up thinking, I didn't even, you know, have any relationship with him, but I was going to beat him. I was going to beat him in this quest to win a Nobel Prize. And he would finally realize he made a mistake by abandoning me and giving me up for adoption, right? I don't know. His last name. And so that drove me for a long time. And then coming to, you know, become a professor one day, and I'll say it now because the statute of limitations has passed. But Dmitri Bassoff, who is now professor here is one of my closest friends. I just love him so much, the experimental physicist. Devastatingly, he's here now. He was at UCSD for many years.

And I really love them and, you know, I can't wait to see him again. I saw him just a month and a half ago. And Dimitri told me once, and his father was Nikolai Bassov. Nikolai was one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the laser. Brilliant scientist, it's an incredible person. And he took me aside one day, he said, you know, Brian, we hired her to because we think you a very good shot of winning Nobel Prize. And I was like, okay, no pressure. This is like my first year of being at UCSD.

And so it was kind of like woven into the culture. Literally at UCSD, we have a street called Nobel through campus and then the one that's Le Bonn, which is Nobel's bell backwards. We have our physics department named after Maria Gepart-Mayer, Nobel Prize winner, York Hall. We have just all the, you know, so many buildings. Yeah, I think like Cambridge has the same kind of obsession, right, back in the UK. It's just rotten with it, right? So that was impressed upon me.

And actually, some of the readers I have that made a huge impression on me, one young lady wrote me and she said, you know, I'm so glad that I read your book, which is, you know, I wanted to call it a cosmic confidential after one of my heroes, Anthony Bourdain. He wrote this book, a kitchen confidential about like the seedy underbelly of New York City cuisine and world cuisine. That's one of my favorite books of all time. And I kind of wanted to do that like a tell-all, but not like make it so self-serving, right? And so she told me like when she showed that to her, when she read my book, she said, her, you know, it was like a weight had been lifted because her father convinced her not to become a scientist because he said only, you know, only someone who wins a Nobel Prize is a really good scientist. And let's face it, you're never going to win a Nobel Prize. I was like, who could say that to their daughter? But anyway, this was my obsession. It was incredibly important to me. But getting back, I think, to the- But I'm sure many people in the team also had a similar drive, maybe not quite as obsessive as you, but I think from the outside, it seemed like the Bicep 2 were really gunning very hard because it felt like it was it was realizable it was possible the first

person to fund the experiment when I had this idea I brought it to my postdoctoral advisor at caltech I've been fired from Stanford where I was a postdoc this is not like an advertisement to get fired and that's a that's a great there's actually I'm here despite that fact I wasn't a very good postdoc when I was at Stanford because I was obsessed with this idea of winning a Nobel prize by inventing an experiment that would take us to the beginning of time to measure the earliest moments that could possibly be measured with physical evidence, namely inflation. And eventually landed at Caltech. Andrew Lang was my mentor, a postdoc advisor, and he thought it was crazy idea, but he's like, let's try it. And along with Jamie Bach,

who's now a professor at Caltech, was then a scientist at JPL, we convinced David Baltimore, another Nobel Prize winner, who was the president of Caltech. He was like, I think this could win a Nobel Prize. So giving the money. I won this competition at UC Berkeley. It's always funny when I meet with Adam Reese because I came in first and Adam came in third. And it was on the celebration of Charlie Towns's Nobel Prize and his 90th birthday. And it was to identify winners that were young scientists under age 40 who are likely to win a Nobel Prize. So my brother always reminds me and says, you know, you won that battle, but Adam won the war. Yeah. And check out Adam's podcast. He was on, he was on recently on a court's podcast. Yeah.

So this was an obsession. Now, when we designed Biceb 1, we had the capability to see in different colors. Again, microwaves, like any form of light, radiation, have three properties. Intensity, have bright, color, their spectrum, and polarization. We had to measure polarization. We were going to measure intensity no matter what. It's part of what comes with these detectors. And then the question of, would you measure the color in multiple bands?

Would you have any color sensitivity whatsoever? Bicep 1 had three different colors, really primarily 100 gigahertz and 150 gigahertz. That meant we could see at most two things. So if you have two unknowns, you need two equations, right? So we have two data sets, one at 100 gigahertz, one at 150. So we could measure both the CMB and dust, which we knew would be a problem, but we didn't know how much. Bicep 2 didn't have that. Bicep 2, the philosophios, will go as deep and fast as we can because there were competitors, namely the Planck satellite, had been launched.

Bicep we started in 2001. I mean, it's the 25th anniversary, almost, of Bicep 1, and never thought we'd make a detection. I knew we had to upgrade it, just like you upgrade your iPhone or whatever every couple of years. You need more detectors, better pixels, better camera. Bicep 2 only had one color sensitivity, just at 150 gigahertz, which makes sense because that's where the C&B is the brightest. So it seems like by design it was kind of a gamble almost. It was like, let's put all of our eggs in this one basket of maximizing sensitivity. And that was partially attributed to.

Andrew Lang. So Andrew was a genius. I mean, he was one of the most brilliant people. It was just like I said he has it all. I described it in the book a TV show called Madman. It was like this handsome guy, forget his name John, whatever. He's just like, just classy, smart, debonair,

Urbane, you know, schooled Ivy League, travels Europe, won all these prizes. Didn't win the Nobel Prize at that time when I started working for it. It was like 40. Everyone wanted to work with him. They stole him from from Berkeley to Caltech, his wife, Francis Arnold who'd go on to win the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were the power couple.

This is incredible. He believed in me. He thought we could try this. He got us funding. We were together. He was like a father figure to me. And his thought was, look, we'll just try to measure it. If we ever see something, we'll go back and measure it, but we're not going to see anything.

Andrew killed himself in January 2010. It's exactly 15 years ago, I think today. And, you know, devastated me. I didn't, you know, I wasn't as close to him as his family, you know, of course. But also there probably some anger there that he chose to do that because it kind of leaves you in the wild a little bit. I'd say I was never angry on him. I mean, I cried over it. I, you know, was devastated by it as everyone who knew him was because he was just like, you wouldn't expect it.

Unless you really knew him, I mean, he had been separated from his partner, you know, from Francis at the time. They were actually, I don't think they were actually ever married officially, but they were common law. And then they were separated. But it was more like just some kind of emotion where it's, there's so much frustration combined with pathos. Like, you're so sad you couldn't do anything and you're frustrated, but it's not your fault. And but I look at it and, you know, maybe there were warning signs. Maybe there weren't. But the fact is, you know, when he died, there were a lot of consequences for, you know,

the whole planet, but, you know, thinking just perspective of the experiment, which he loved, he went to the South Pole. I mean, a lot of scientists don't ever even go down there. And he loved it. He had so much fun. He was like a kid in the laboratory. I mean, as you know, as you get older, you don't get as much time to spend time doing the stuff you did that got you interested in becoming a scientist, for me being in a lab or

using a telescope. I don't have as much time to do that anymore. And so when he would go to South Paul, he's just like a kid in a candy store. It rekindled this beautiful fire in him. Everyone loved it. And, you know, when he left, we didn't have anyone with the gravitas, the leadership, and kind of the perspective that he had. I'm almost convinced. I can't say for sure.

Well, I'd like to say that it wouldn't have happened. Like what, you know, what we ended up doing, which is to release data to use that slide, as you talked about. Now, there's one other wrinkle in this, which, again, I have to be honest, I am not as good a scientist as some of these people that I, describe in the book. And I'm candid about that. I also don't know if I have the same integrity. Let me give you an example. Jamie Bach. So Andrew and Jamie were responsible for building the high frequency detectors on plank, which had the capability of measuring the dust for their own mission, but also that we needed desperately. So here's Andrew and Jamie, and they're both working on building detectors for Bicep, Bicep 2, and then also for plank for this billion euro mission

that was going to be, you know, the B all and end all and clean up everything and measure the B modes and get all the glory, right? So they measure. Now, Andrew was gone. By the time we had the press conference to release, the claim that we detected inflation and gravitational waves was in 2014. Andrew died four years before. Jamie was alive.

And Jamie was intimate. And Jamie's one of the hardest, working, most brilliant scientist I'd ever. I've ever worked with. He's just incredibly, you know, he's one of this preternatural, you know, just, just, I call him,

you know, the kind of like super boy or whatever, but he's like, older than me now. He's not a boy anywhere. He's a PI of SphereX. I mean, this guy's incredible.

He's done everything from, you know, space missions to ground-based stuff, stuff, and he never stops. And I was like, Jamie's on Plank. He is inside,

he's in their inner sanctum. He built their freaking detectors. He must know that what we saw is pure CMB or as close to pure as CMB as possible. Because I know for sure as, you know what, I would have looked at their data. Like, I don't know that I could resist. I have to be honest with you, Dave.

I don't know if I knew that there was this thing standing between me and a Nobel Prize was in my email box. I could just look at it. So all you have to do is download that map. And then you'll know yes or no whether this is. You know, I think we're good. Let's go ahead with it.

Yeah, you can publish that because we're going to come out with that data anyway. I mean, what's the point of launching the mission if you're not going to publish it, I would have. I mean, I think I would have. I don't know. I really don't know. Yeah. I don't think I'm, you know, I have high, high integrity in my personal life, in my scientific life, and my students and so forth. But like that, especially in that moment of the fever of trying to. Jamie would have won enough. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Yeah. If we were successful. I don't, I don't know that I would

have. In fact, that's why it's called losing the Nobel Prize. The night before the press conference at Harvard, which I wasn't invited to. Remember, Andrew was gone. My protector, my, my, my guide, mentor he was long up and now the PI ship had been taken over by John Kovac at Harvard, Clem Pryke at Minnesota, Chal Enquo at Stanford and Jamie Bach and you know Jamie had made you know he was the original one. None of them had been on the project as long as Jamie in it. Jamie and I came up with this project more or less together. Yeah.

Playing tennis in Pasadena as we would every Thursday night when I was a young post-down. He believed in me too and you know I'm forever grateful to that to him for that. So I don't know if I could resisted it, but James he did. He never looked under the curtain. Must never have looked at it because we went ahead with that. So at this point, yeah, so you have this slide. You have this preliminary dust map. Yeah. You take this map and it seems like the signal's legit. And that's that temptation point right there where you know the team must have known that was a little bit questionable to take a slide like that. It wasn't the only set of evidence that would exclude dust.

So I think we had something like six or seven different models of what the dust could be. Remember, we didn't make a blunder. We didn't like forget to plug in a fiber optic cable. We didn't leave the lens cap on and say we saw, you know, whatever. We didn't detect, you know, some resonance and some quark, you know, that. No, no, we didn't make a blunder at all or, you know, claim dark matter exists with 20 sigma. Instead, we measured exquisitely a signal with a very, very high precision that was astronomical, but not astrophysical.

It wasn't cosmological, rather. It was from our galaxy. It was in space. You know, it's incredibly difficult, and it's the most sensitive measurement, still is far more sensitive than where we're at with Simon's array or Simon's observatory at this point.

We're going to overtake them eventually. Sooner rather than later, hopefully. So next time I come on, if there is the next time. I'll talk about the actual data. But the point is, we had this lacuna. We couldn't measure dust and the C&B. We could only measure one, the combination of dust,

plus the C&B, but not either or. And so we couldn't separate and tease out those signals. But we had six or seven different models based on other, you know, scaling up from Plank that had already been released, but not in this level of sensitivity. They also had kind of pitched it that they were going to detect the B-moats.

You asked like, I don't know what, you know, what they, they originally, George of Staddeu wrote a paper where in the early part of the year 2010, right after Andrews passed away, that Plank was gonna measure these, B modes if they were above this threshold. The level that we claimed was something like four or five times bigger than that level that George had predicted they could measure down to.

So we figured if we saw it at four, you know, they easily would see it. So that was this pressure. Now, why didn't they share it with us? I think that they still felt like they had a chance to prove, you know, to detect inflation for the first time. I guess that's my confusion because I would assume if they've already done this, they're at the stage where they have this dust map and they've just not decided to share it with you, I would assume they would have the sensitivity at that point to have seen the same thing you would have seen, right?

That's what the team was presumably worried about. So they must have known they hadn't seen it. In hindsight, we know they didn't report one either. So nowhere near what they claim. Yeah, I guess maybe I'm misrepresenting it. But if I'm in the plank team, we know we haven't detected anything. And another team who's trying to find the thing that we know we haven't found asks to share a dust map. Yeah.

What's the risk? Because they know they haven't, there's nothing there. Have you ever heard of something called the Bannister effect, related to Roger Bannister? Oh, yeah, the four-minute mile thing. The four-minute mile. So no one had ever run a four-minute mile. Then all of a sudden, everyone runs a four-minute mile.

High school students and everything. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so there's that thought. They were about midway through their mission. So I'm sure they thought, if this is, if they're right, then we can, we can still scoop them because they won't publish without actually having these data

that only we can give to them. And if they're wrong, well, we don't want to also, you know, kind of go down in flames to prove them just, you know, to duplicate them being wrong. But by the way, there was only a six-month delay between when we published, I think this also rubbed them the wrong way. The leadership team, again, I wasn't part of it. They had a press conference at Harvard, you know, Center for Asthma Physics, where John Kovac is a professor. They decided to not submit it to publication for fear that it would get scoop. Now, what I think they should have done, and many of us, I mean, I have emails where, you know, saying, well, aren't we worried about dust?

And Plank published this thing. And other people were, too. I'm not saying I'm some hero. But we all knew that this could be a problem. We all knew this was the most likely explanation other than, you know, seeing inflation. But once you start going down a path and you start saying, now there's a press embargo, now we're going to not talk to the press, now we're not going to share it with anybody else. You can't talk to your home media institutions anymore. you know, circling everybody around your graduate students.

You have to coach them what to say and whatnot to say. It became very, meanwhile, they were going to the press because there were articles published in the New York Times that day about, you know, Alan Gooth and John Kovac and all these things. And Andre Linday, they had made a movie at Stanford with three million views that same day that they had recorded a couple weeks earlier, right? So they were kind of going down this path,

and it's very hard once you're down that hole to turn back. To turn back. And it's a natural instinct. And I think the major fault in it that wouldn't have occurred had Andrews still been around, perhaps, or had maybe I spoken up more or other spoken up more. We never had like an independent audit, like a board, somebody made up of other people. They did take it to people. They took it to Andre Linday and Alan Gooth, but what do you notice about them?

And Lawrence Krause, they're all theorists. They didn't take it to a single experimentalist, David Spargel, Simon Page. Spurgel, of course, spoke about it quite open afterwards, yeah. Exactly. So it's a very interesting dynamic. And that's why I feel like, yes, only I could write this story. I think it's interesting. It kind of gives you a glimpse of what it's like to be a scientist, but it's not only about that episode.

I think it's about, you know, how we do science and why we do science. It's often very unrewarding. Many, many years go by between having an idea. You were telling me with this terra teletaroscope or whatever. I just think, oh, so cool. Like, how do we do it? And they're like, that's a great idea. It's 100% feasible to do it.

Will it ever get done? Maybe not, right? But it's so frustrating. It's a long journey. But when you have this thing and it's on the tip of your tongue or it's just right there, I want to just, you just have this propensity because we're finite creatures. We don't live. We don't last. We don't get paid that much.

This is our kind of currency. This is what we do. It's very hard to turn back. I don't fault people. I love this story. I mean, it's a tragic story, but I think it's a really important story to share. I think we spoke about this before, but in my own work, I remember once thinking I'd found an exo moon.

And this was in the Kepler data probably like maybe five or six years. No, probably long ago. Probably long ago. Probably 10 years ago. And I remember I got so excited about it. I couldn't even stay in the office. You know, I was like physically like almost shaking with excitement. So I had to go for a walk and I sat at a desk.

And I remember, it started at a bench. And I remember thinking, this could be like life changing, you know, if this is real. I mean, I wasn't thinking of Nobel Prize. thinking this could be life-changing for my career and be a big news and you get kind of easily seduced by your own machinations of glory that that you see in your future and I guess the soberness in my case came over me because I hadn't I consciously decided not to tell anyone because I was I mean there is another psychological effects that when you when you write something down or you post it on Facebook or you say it to a colleague you kind of feel an obligation

to double down upon that, right? You don't want to admit you were wrong. And maybe that was the problem that happened with, you've gone too far. The team had gone too far to back, to back away from that. Yeah, exactly, the sunk cost fallacy. And so then I sobered up a little bit,

and I said, you know, if anyone wants this to be true, it's me. And therefore, I'm the most biased person in this whole debacle. So I have to be the most skeptical of myself. And so I applied. do every single thing I could think of to try and kill it. And eventually I did successfully kill it.

But it's a fine line to walk because then you could also, I've also wondered too far, maybe I'm so overly skeptical that nothing will ever appease me. You know, nothing will ever be good enough to be that confirmed slam dunk signal because I'm always going to be my own worst critic. So I think as scientists, when you're trying to find something completely novel and new, but yet there is an expectation it should be there, it is a very difficult psychological game. you're playing of am I getting seduced by the glory versus am I overcorrecting too far the other way? And I know, I'm sure you guys struggle with that. I think I think it's 100% accurate. And it's,

it's people think that we scientists are just walking Wikipedia's and we have no emotion. There's nothing, you know, fundamental at stake. I mean, you just look at, these are human beings and we're doing things that are at the by definition, at the boundaries of human comprehension and and abilities. So of course we're going to fail. And you'll fail more often than you'll succeed. And so the only reason I would say, you know, it's actually warranted to be biased as you were on the pessimistic side because most things are wrong.

Like, you know, it's even hard. I did something just very simple like Monte Carlo simulation or something the other day. And, you know, I kept coming up and it was just, you know, supposed to get like 99.9.9% accurate. It wouldn't converge. It's something wrong. But I'm like, okay. That's just the way it is. There's no way you're going to be able to make this detection or, you know, and it was some

minuscule thing, not like bicep or not like an exo moon, but all the more so when you have that pressure. And I remember, you know, thinking at your colloquium when you gave it at UCSD astronomy last month, you were, you know, like you had the audience kind of suggesting reasons that you should be not as pessimistic as you are. Like they're saying, well, couldn't it actually be because of this, you know, this lag effect and maybe you're being, you know, and it was just interesting to see that. And also pointing out, like, there's so many things beyond your control.

Like, you had every right to expect that Webb would have the sensitivity in its camera that was advertised. You know, this thing only cost $10 billion to build. By the way, it was talking about how much it costs to build as if, like, that's all you've got to do is build that thing. No, rule of thumb and experimental physics is you need about 10% of the construction cost every year just to keep the damn thing running. So that means in 10 years, you've doubled the cost. So it'll be $20 billion or more, hopefully it'll last run. but like how would you know that the sensitivity would be what like 10 you know 10 times worse than they had advertised and you'll see we'll see you on okay well hopefully yeah stay tuned on that

yeah this isn't obviously an ongoing yeah ongoing work so it's hard to predict to the end of that story but i definitely take you a point that um uh you you have to you have to play this psychological game yourself a little bit about keeping yourself honest and it's hard and i think yeah you're right that having i think maybe a good lesson then is having not just yourself, having other skeptics in the team who are there to check you because otherwise you can, if it gets too small and too insular, you can talk yourselves into believing. One of the greatest things that Jim Simons did, and many, many things that he did, and I miss him tremendously, is that he basically put Paul Steinhart on this external advisory committee

for the Simon's Observatory. So Paul's an inflation skeptic, a multiverse, you know, know, critic of par excellence, he was one of the most, you know, biggest champions of the experiment because he said, I want to be, I want to know the truth. I don't just want to know that I'm right. You know, he's been right a lot of times in his life about many things. And so the point of putting a very, very good, you know, high quality person who's as much of a critic as David Spurgel, who's one of the founders of Simon's Observatory was as a proponent, and those two guys are very different attitudes and orientations towards inflation. And having both of those perspectives, the military calls it a red team perspective. You really want that,

but you want it to be, you know, I always say debate with love. Like you can't just purely attack somebody and just purely be pessimistic and criticize. You'll never have the enthusiasm that takes to endure those long years, decades sometimes of just coming up completely empty. It's just natural. Yeah. So you guys obviously are pursuing this still with future observatories like the Simon's observatory. And Bicep or A, the fourth generation of Bicep. Yeah. So I guess we should stay tuned and that it seems like this detection will still eventually probably win a Nobel at one point. Well, again, so again, I wouldn't say that. I, we really, I mean, the most likely thing is we just keep setting up our limits. I mean, there's no guarantee whatsoever. There's no truly good

lower limit in this field. There are lower limits in other fields. Like something very exciting and that is the reason that I won't abandon the Simon's Observatory ever is that we get all this other science for free. So one of the things we're going to guarantee to detect, as much as you can as long as an asteroid doesn't hit, is the, we know that there are three neutrinos, three flavors of neutrinos. We know that at least two of them have mass,

but we don't know what that mass is. We actually have a lower limit. Neutrino masses can't be lower than a certain limit, but they also can't be bigger than the upper limit. So we have an upper limit and a lower limit, but we don't have a detection. It's like saying... So the oscillations, the solar, do they measure primarily the delta mass? They're measuring the delta mass squared.

That's right, exactly right. And so you've got two pairs of delta M squared. And then you've got a limit on the sum of those masses. But only by making a detection of the actual sum of the masses, not just the upper limit on it. Can you resolve the three different masses? And there's so-called neutrino inverted mass hierarchy versus what's called the normal mass hierarchy. But we know that the neutrino-mars. mass must be greater than 0.015 electron volts.

So an electron volt is the, let me just say, the lightest, the lowest mass of all the fundamental elementary particles, the electron. And it has a mass of 511,000 electron volts in the Einstein mass units. And the neutrino has something lower than a millionth of five millionth of that already spelled. It barely exists. So yeah, it doesn't even exist.

They call them ghost particles. right yeah and so but here's an example of something that's a guaranteed result to get from the from the simons observatory we can measure that some mass signal um and so even if we never detect inflation we're going to do something i mean look at it there's only 17 elementary particles right we know the masses of 14 of them the higgs and the you know tau intrina a tau um uh tau leptan neon whatever so we know all the but we don't know three we don't know almost a quarter of the mass of the elementary particles It's embarrassing, right? But we're going to do that.

So I think that I couldn't keep doing it. If it's all, so Bicep only can measure gravitational waves from inflation. So we're different. We can measure gravitational waves, but we also have the large aperture telescopes telescope that can measure extremely fine-scaled signals. So I'm very excited. Yeah, with this experiment we're doing with J-Dist-T, of course, would be great to get the exo moons, but we're pretty much guaranteed to measure the

blatant of these exoplanes, right, for the first time. So it's that kind of baked in secondary science that, it gives you a lot of soberness, I think, when you evaluate your results, because your whole experiment isn't riding on this, on this gambit, right? That's a dangerous. Diversification. It's good for your portfolio on Wall Street. It's good for science as well.

So we're kind of getting late in time. So I want to skip ahead to some stuff I really want to ask you, but as a science communicator and as a scientist as well. So I'm sure you've noticed this as well. I've been feeling recently over the last sort of dead. decade, I think, a growing sense that the public is losing trust in scientists. I think it's, especially during, you know, COVID, we had this kind of surge of distrust in scientists. But it's not just anti-vaxxers and it's not even just flat earthers. I think, you know, the idea of, you know,

string theory has become increasingly under attack by, you know, popular scientists and science communicators in recent years. even dark energy, dark matter. I mean, dark matter is one of those topics whenever you talk to the public about so many people just hate it. They just do not want to, they think that scientists are just making stuff up, right?

So, but it feels like that has become more and more of a problem. And so I guess I'm curious, because obviously you have the Into the Impossible podcast, there's very successful podcast that everybody should check out. I was on there not, not too long ago, just a few weeks ago. Number one this week.

Oh, okay, great. Okay. This episode will probably a couple of weeks later. January, early January. Right, right. But I guess I'm just curious about your opinion on this. Do you feel as if the public is becoming antagonized almost by scientists, losing trust in scientists? Do you agree with that sentiment?

If so, what do you attribute the source of that to be? I think it's our fault in some sense. not you and me specifically. I'm not meaning to absolve myself. I don't think I do nearly as good a job as you and other people do in terms of, you know, first of all, let me take a step back. Because I think I've said this in a few different venues,

but I do believe that scientists in general are given the gift of, you know, that a Shakespearean actor would have killed for, you know, it's literally the most interesting script ever written. I mean, we already went into it, like this book is just one. tiny infinitesimal slice of science and yet it's got everything

jealousy drama greed envy love affairs suicide it's just incredible like Greek stories and there's like literally every single room in this building in my campus you can find similar stories and so we've got this incredible manuscript

and yet and yet most of our colleagues are some of the worst ham-handed you know terrible actors and actresses and for no wonder because they devote zero 0.0% attention to this side of their, their, you know, kind of personality and their responsibilities in their job. I talked to Jana Levin, your wonderful colleague here. She was on

the podcast recently as well. Yeah. I talked to her maybe three or four years ago. It was during the middle of COVID. And I said, you know, like, I loved your first book, you know, and even in your second book. Like, did your university give you any time off? And she's like, no, but they, at least they didn't punish me. I remember talking to Dimitri Bassoff and telling us. And asking him for time off. Are you kidding me? You're like, you're not paid to do that. So whatever, I did on my sabbatical.

I did it when I was on parental leave, right? That's my plans next year. Oh, really? Really? Oh, but you prevental leave, no. No, parental leave was real parental leave for me. You're a better dad than I am. So when I think about what we're given,

I always kind of jokingly say that we have a moral obligation. You know, if you told your chancellor or your dean or you know, like you can't understand what I do, Dean, you know, kermudgeon or whatever their name is. You can't understand what I do. It's very sophisticated. I use very special tools. Like, no, no, no, I'm pretty smart. Like, the public is pretty smart.

And to say that I'm not going to break it down in a way, at least that you can understand it and just appreciate how cool is science. And I think I had that when I was a kid. I thought, wow, this is amazing. Like Neil deGress Tyson says this frequently. You know, something like if you ask the average person, like how much the SpaceX, You know, how much of the budget is SpaceX or NASA? Let's say like trillions of dollars, and it's like less than Americans spend on lipstick every year, right?

It's a minuscule amount, but why do they think it's so like? Because it does such cool stuff. And science that gets done in America and throughout the world even, it's just, it's the most interesting story. It's a never-ending story. You can never win science. It's what's called an infinite game. But it happens to be made up of all these little finite games,

like tenure, getting into grad school, getting a Nobel Prize. Those are finite games where there's only one win. or one loser roughly versus science. Like you don't win science. So the perspective that we have to have, I think, is that if we don't pay attention to our bosses, it's natural they're going to turn on us. And our bosses are, you can't tell me just because someone's incredibly brilliant that they, unless they're self-supported, I don't see many self-supported scientists, you know,

that are actually doing experiments or building telescopes, you know, Jim Simons could have done it, but, you know, it's very rare. But that don't answer to the public, that don't interact with the public. And you may say, and people have pushed back, Sabina Hasenfelder, you know, push me on this. And she's like, no, I'm good at doing calculate. And she happens to be great at doing science channels, you know. She's definitely inspiration, fun and incredible person. But she's like, no, scientists should be paid to do what they do.

But I would say, the reason that they're not doing it is because they feel they're not good at it, which I understand. I wasn't good at it. You weren't good at it. You practiced at it. I talked to Brian a year ago. They practiced. They have training. Oh, yeah.

My first videos, if anyone goes back to the channel, you'll see. You'll see that it's not, does not come naturally. I love it. And that's, but that's great. You leave it up there. Yeah. You're not embarrassed of it. No.

You know, if you did it tomorrow, you would be. But no, that's part. If you make 1% improvements, you know, every day, every video, it adds up so quickly. But the other thing that I love to point out, it's fun. It's fun to communicate with the public. It's fun to see something in a kid's eyes when you explain it to them for the first time. Or when they actually get something. my son, my oldest son is going through a science fair right now.

And he's got this whole project using like kelp and so I'm like, can't you do something with astronomy? Like, you know, they're actually not allowed to get any help from their parents. So I'm not helping him at all. He's doing something like kelp in the ocean at Sandy, you know, whatever he's doing. It's really cool. And he kept saying like he was like almost in tears when he's like, the kelp keeps dying.

I can't even keep kelp a lot. I'm like, this is teaching you a very valuable lesson. In fact, if all your kelp dies, it might be better than you getting the answer that you expected of, you know, salt, water, levels cause you know kelp to die or whatever like you're just killing them all and maybe there's some fact and he found out yeah actually the the water temperature that he's using is way too warm and kelp actually prefer lower temperature so they were all dying and that taught him something and when he's when he got that it was like

when you solve a Rubik's cube or you get a Sudoku puzzle or a word all like you get a little taste of that thrill when we're kids we get that thrill as we get to be adults we have things we have to worry about but they still deserve it the people that are making a living, like cleaning the laboratories here or whatever, in my university, yours, the people that work at the restaurants, they deserve it, David. You know, we owe it to them. And if we don't, you know, one of my late-grade colleagues, Hans Parr, actually did his PhD here at Columbia with late-great Leon Letterman and others. He used to say, we serve at the pleasure of the public until there's a war, because eventually they're going to need us to do real things, not to look for

exo moons or multiverses. And we want to stave that off as long as possible we want peace. We love peace. But the fact is we owe something to the public. And I just find it's natural that they get skeptical. Now, do I agree? So you're actually that essentially scientists are not engaging in science communications sufficiently. And the ones that are, look, this is what I hear. When I came when I had Neil Grass Tyson on, Brian Green on Michi Okaku on the ones that are they're they're I won't say the word I hate the word G word you know the ends of right rifter right I hate that word um there these are people but they assume be so they're not doing actual scientific research like Neil's not doing something he's he's doing communication so he's not a real

scientist so I don't have to listen to him and I can actually criticize him when he says something so you get this like infinite you know uh he's not a research scientist no he's definitely not a research scientist but the point is like like who made him and Bill Nye and like who may and it's true like their careers unlike yours yours and mine we are paid very well and to do the stuff that we do as as scientists we give back because i think it it does something for us we love there's something about this you know side hustle that you and i do that's very fulfilling not just monetarily i mean you give back most of your money i don't make as much money so i can't really give as much back but but the point is it does something for you and it provides you with with an additional dimension of your

personality that didn't exist 20 years ago. And it's really fun to do it. But at the same time, you know, if you were to only do this, then people would say, well, this is your griff, this is all you're doing, you're just doing this to make money. They say this about Sabina, for example. I don't think either direction is fair. I think there should be some outreach to the public. The public are not our bosses in the sense that they can tell us what to do.

Even at a public university, they can't tell me what to do. But I do feel an obligation to give to them to keep them, to keep them notified and aware of the great, you know, precious nature of how we treat the money that they give us. Yeah. Yeah, I tell you, I certainly feel doing public outreach as a responsibility. I guess the thing I, we've talked about this before privately, and maybe we'll talk more about it, maybe after this conversation as well. And I still sort of evolve my thinking about it is whether every scientist has an obligation to do that. just because, you know, sometimes we admit students or postdocs here who are brilliant,

but they're very introvertous and they just don't, I mean, I'm a bit of an introvert, actually, believe it or not. But, you know, I think some people, they really lack social skills. But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for them in science just because you don't have that skill set. And maybe with a lot of mastery and training, they could get to that point of being a valid science, useful scientific communicator, but it's not obviously to me that's the best use of their time, because maybe an adjacent colleague to them who works in the same field and they're collaborating

together could equally explain that paper they worked on together much more skillfully without necessarily forcing everybody to duplicate effort. I guess that's maybe a concern as well. I guess, but if I were to push back with respect, you know, what if I said, you know, YouTube doesn't exist and, you know, we live in a multiverse branch. you know, in the chaotic universe. And it didn't exist. But you knew about this. And you knew that you couldn't do it.

Or let's say Columbia says, David, you got to choose. You can't do cool worlds. You'll have to do this. Or you could do cool worlds, but you can't be here. I imagine that would be a gut-wrenching thing. You wouldn't want to do it. I'm sure you'd figure out something to do because you're so bright. But the point is, but if you didn't,

but if I told you about this 20 years ago, you'd be like, what the hell is YouTube? Like, the point is, sometimes you have to fertilize. a field before you know what's going to grow. It's just a reality. I have had students, foreign students, domestic students, incredibly painfully introverted. I think Sabina's incredibly introverted.

And yet, when you get her on stage, when you talk to her in a podcast or I've met her in person several times, there's a certain energy that she gets. Another example, I heard Yitzhak Perlman. He was asked to do something with a donor after like some performance here. And he just said, no, I'm not going to meet with some donuts. They're like, he's a billionaire. He gave all this money.

We only have the Carnegie, whatever. And you're here on the same. He's like, if I met with him, it means that I'm not the person who practiced for five hours that very day before the performance and left everything out there. But it's ironic because he's also performing for the, he's literally in the public eye. So does he have to do more? I don't know. But for us, yeah, yes, I agree. There's something, you know, that it could be tax.

and introverts might not do it. But I always push back when people like Sabina said this, you know, it's very specialized knowledge. And I usually say, or I'm not that good at it. Like it's kind of an argument that adjacent argument to what you're saying, they're not that good at it. They're better at other things. There's someone who's better.

But I always say, look, did you know how to do Newtonian, where you talk to me about, you know, Trojan orbits or whatever? Like were you born knowing that? Yeah, so different equation or something. Yeah. You dedicated time to it because you felt that was a value to you. How do you know,

how does a student know, you know, student X know, that he or she won't be good at it. If she or he doesn't devote a bit, a minute to make just a YouTube video, like it would be cool if you had, every paper had,

like here's a simple YouTube video. Just imagine as a thought experiment, they have some budget at App J. And they're going to make it one minute video animating this thing or that thing. Like, they might really love it. And it might bring out something to them.

And the only, the last thing I'll say about this is, I've had students that are foreign students that like they're, when they came, they could not speak English. I don't know how they got in to UCSD. This is many years ago. But then I would say, look, there's this Toastmasters Club. Go to it.

And not only they come out like making good friends and speaking like, you know, proper American, you know, gentlemen and women, but they, they ignited something in them. Because communication is that unique thing that we do as human beings. Yeah. I guess, you know, come back to this idea of growing distrust. it makes me wonder about the future. And we've spoke about this again, privately a little bit,

but let's do it on the air a little bit as well. What does the future hold for academia? And I think, you know, one force is the changes with communication, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, people putting things online, Twitter, X as a way of doing science communication. There's also the growing way of distrust that we've talked about.

And on top of that, the big probably elephant in the room is the influence of AI and machine learning enhancing the productivity of scientists. Sure, that's already definitely happening. I did a video about that recently showing that that's irrefutable at this point. I think I was in that video. Yeah, you're in that video. A great cameo. But also, it is something that maybe some of us are worried about the potential threat of

AI. Like it could displace jobs. Certainly, that's a common thing people talk about. in the general workplace, white-collar jobs, but also potentially academia. It could end up displacing some jobs as well. What do you see as the future of academic institutions as a result of this confluence of sort of unique forces which it's facing, which is a very modern problem that's never really faced before? Yeah, there's this concept, I guess, in like social economics called the Lindy effect. Basically says if like you see two things at this, you know, if you see an old man

and a kid walking together, like, you basically know that the old man will be around, you know, the next day. Or here, a good example is like, uh, DOS, like Windows is going to be around for a really long time. Like, whether Huawei's latest, you know, like innate operating system or Claude AI or these AI pendants or they're going to be around, I don't know, but I know Windows is going to be around. It's supposed to the doomsday argument. Yeah. Like you take how long something has lasted for and it's probably going to last that long again.

Exactly. That long again. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. 100% correct. So I thought in my weaker moments that COVID basically was going to be maybe the death knell for the traditional academic setting. Look, we're in a monopoly. You and I are monopolists, you know, were protected by the biggest brand, the brand on earth that has the most social cachet.

You know, no one will like basically mortgage their house to buy like an Apple, you know, iPhone or a Hermes Birkenbag. They really shouldn't. Yeah, no, they shouldn't, and they do. And tuition have gone up three times exponentially, you know, third power more exponentially quickly than salaries have gone up. The attendance of Columbia, I bet, has grown two or three percent per year. Most of the IVs have been like that. And they're trying to represent and kind of add on these DEI initiatives that don't really

address, like, true diversity. It's more like racial diversity rather than economic diversity. So they're doing all these. things a huge social experiment and and then we were doing everything on zoom and I was like there's just no way like paying they charge the same tuition like we charge the same tuition for that couple of year or year and a half of zoom um wearing mask and I was like if this doesn't kill the university then basically linda is right lindy's right it's not linda this the cosmologist l indy and d y and y and that's that um universities more or less in this form have been around since the year 1080 like the first

Western University was in Bologna, Italy. Yeah, North Carolina. Yeah. And Oxford is not too much farther behind, but it's a little bit younger. But these are this better part of millennium, right? And they're still here. And it's not like so different. Like it's, it was back then there was some guy with a rock and he was scraping on another rock and a chalkboard. And there was a bunch of rap student. The only thing I point out is back then the students could go on strike. And then the professor wouldn't get paid. And now we have tenure. So thank God for tenor. Barbarity. I think this spark barians.

But COVID didn't kill it. So where do we go from here? I don't think AI is going to do it. Even though I was kind of optimistic I actually made like because I went on this, I was making a series of videos and an in-depth series of about Galileo. And I love audiobooks and, you know, even reading my own book, as you saw a couple minutes ago, I couldn't really find my. But so I love audiobooks. And I was like, I want to read Galileo's. dialogue for the first time. Never read it before. But I don't want to read it, read it. I want to listen

to it at 2x so I can, you know, drive my kids to school or do it work out and listen to it. Didn't exist. So I was like, shit, what am I going to do? So I ended up recruiting Carlo Rovelli and my friend Lucio Piccarello is my, you know, kind of uncle from graduate school, Jim Gates from, who's up around at the time, Fabiola Giannati, and Frank Wilczek. And we recorded the first ever audio book of the dialogue, which really trial. between these three characters set in, you know, Venice in ancient, not ancient, but Renaissance, Italy. And it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. And I was like, hmm, now I've got the definitive English translation by Stillman Drake, incredible translator, all of Galileo's, you know, a million words of

Galileo bot. I'm going to make a Galileo bot. And then down the hall at the engineering department, they're working on 11 labs. They're doing these, you know, it's very accurate synthetic voice reproductions. They're doing with video games, very high accurate fabric modeling, which is very difficult to do, apparently. Not AI, just actual, you know, high resolution GPU high intensive operations. And I was like, I'm going to make a Galileo bot. Why should I teach my kids, students, I say, about inclined planes? I can have Galileo teach them. He's much better than I am.

Or Einstein, teach relativity. Or, you know, David Kipping, teach, you know, whatever. There's enough words that you've written and said that we can digitize you, make it. perfect avatar, headless, YouTube channel, whatever. But people don't care for it. They don't resonate with it. And I think the future is actually going to be more in person. It's going to entrench universities, you know, much to my dismay, in some level,

because I don't think it's healthy to have monopolies. I really don't. And the way that universities fail to innovate to do things, I mean, you don't teach a different branch of astronomy or physics than we do, even though Ivy League versus public school. But why is that? Like the tuitions, like what? would it take? What would a different university look like? I think it's going to be less virtual. I think it's going to be in-person events. Like I think it'll be cool, like, you know, do some in-person,

more in-person. Brian does that with the World Science Festival. People love that stuff. They want to be in public because I think they were denied that. And humans are social creatures. We're mammals. We want to be feeling each other's, you know, pheromones. I don't know what they do. But the point is in-person, I think, is the future. And that means more and more in-person universities. I think the brands are only going to get stronger and more entrenched, and that will discourage innovation, unfortunately. So it's up to people like us or even younger people like you. And, you know, think about how can you leverage these tools to truly improve the educational outcome?

I don't know. I worry more the next year, our kids generation, how is this going to affect them? Is it going to be screen-based? It's going to be, you know, holograms. I mean, I've been hearing about this for a long time. I still don't think there's a killer app for it. You know, chatting is not a great interface. People don't like that.

Conversing is good, but people like to multitask. It's hard. It's really hard to say. I think in person is the future, which is like kind of ironic because it's a thousand-year-old model. Yeah, it's hard. It's actually hard, you know, we watch Zoom lectures all the time from different universities, of course, even now. It's much harder to maintain concentration. Yeah.

Than just being, you know, sat in an audience, seeing the performance. Yeah. It's much more engrossing. It's weird. There's something built into us that prefers that nature of communication. And it's the same with podcasts. I mean, you can, I think there's something on Spotify or something now where you can, you know, the wrapped thing. Yeah.

And I think there's a way you can, is it Spotify or another app where you can get like an auto-generated podcast of all the stuff you listen to? So it creates two AI bots. They're like, hey, let's talk about all the stuff you listen to this year. It's a Google notebook. You can upload your paper and be like, hey, a Kevlar is 1601V is like really. And David really brings it home when you thought it's amazing. You can have that and it's impressive. It is impressive to listen to for a couple of minutes.

But you're like, this isn't real. I mean, like, who, why am I listening to two robots or to each other? I don't really see the point. So I'm, whenever I detect and there's so much of it on YouTube, you see something that looks AI generated. I'm like, I'm out. Yeah, it's the uncanny valley. I mean, kind of skip past the uncanny valley now.

Like, it's so realistic. You can see, you could have like, and again, Again, some of this is really detrimental society. They have girlfriends and people committing suicide allegedly from, from. So I think what are we going to know is real? It's going to be in person. And I think that resonates with your previous question, which is trust in science. Like if you're just getting this stuff and it's coming from these, you know, people on high

through a video channel on a two-dimensional screen, it's not the same. I don't know how you can scale that up in public. I was, you know, kind of honored to do in person hosting of Richard Dawkins in Vancouver in October. they flew me up there and we spent you know two hours on stage and you know he's his last tour right yeah he was the final bow yeah he's amazing 83 he's had a stroke relatively recently he's cruising from city to city um you know and then he went to europe and did a whole other tour he went all down I think as far as like Bulgaria amazing amazing endurance I hope you know that age I can do the same but people just loved it and we were in a theater and it was like no one was like looking at their

phones or you know like we do on Zoom unfortunately and they have the chance to ask questions I think interactivity is going to be a big positive but there's something about that that you know this person's authentic he's right there she's right there Janet does this great at pioneer works not too far from here but the problem is very hard to scale those things I don't know I can't imagine how to do such a thing you know other than these few people that are really good at it but I think that's a way to kind of restore the trust like scientists or people you know we do these bar night what do they call the tap astronomy on top yeah those are cool yeah those are cool

but it's very low it's hard to scale and and as I get older I'm like well you know how many people you know it's like the the life raft you know there's only so many seats you want to get as many people as possible because I only have so much time and attention right what me and you will sell out a stadium right we'll get to the biggest thing we can find we'll do a show yeah you do the take on the cosmology I'll take on the exoplanets We'll see if we can fill it with 100,000 people.

Exactly, right. Yeah, that gives me some hope. And I think it's going to be, we live in very interesting times. That is certainly for sure. So either way, we're going to probably find out in our lifetime. And just like how the Victorians could not imagine people walking on the moon in their lifetime, the world transformed around them. And there is certainly a feeling that we live in similar times.

I do. What a time to be alive. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be alive. live at any other time. It's quite incredible. I mean, if you could go back in time, would you change anything about your past? No, I mean, I don't think you can. At least your journey. You can't. You can't maybe have misgivings about things you did, but you can't, you wouldn't be the same person anymore, would you? So I don't think you can change anything. But I think, yeah, I'm, I just hope I get to live a long life to watch this, this wonderful show play out in front of me, right? It seems like

the world is going to, I think the greatest tragedy of being mortal is that you don't get to see how the story ends. That's, for me, has always been the greatest annoyance of my life. I want to know what happens to humans in 100,000 years. Like, where do we end up? Like, what happens to us? reminds me, five men said something like that. If you ask an ordinary person, you know, would they want to live forever?

They're like, hell no, I don't want all my, you know, pets to die and people I love die and I'll just be alone. and, you know, well, I guess this guy, Brian Johnson is, you know, halfway. Yeah, he's trying to live forever. But maybe a lot of work. But he said, you ask a real scientist, no, they'll want to live forever because they want to see all the discoveries and, like, imagine conversing with Newton. That's the only kind of really killer thing I would love to do with, like, AI. And I've tried to do this with, with, um.

Go to the holodeck. Yeah. With that. And, but also, like, could you, like, train the spot on all of Galileo's writings and then teach him quantum mechanics? Like, is it possible? Or Einstein and teach him. strength here or whatever. Can you, you know, or conversely, like, could an AI do the unique things that they did to, to, you know, consider the tides of the earth or, you know, the perihelion of

mercury and look at these in this unique way. And if not, you know, like I said, in the short clip I did on your channel, you know, what, what is the threat? Like, I actually don't think, I don't know about you. Maybe we're running out of time, but I would say, I'm not threatened by AI simply because I think there's this notion called the lock-in effect. Basically. Training on data that you've generated, basically. Not only that, but like it's sort of a first mover disadvantage. Let me give you an example.

Have you heard this thing that's allegedly not true, but I actually think it's true, that the space shuttle's orbit was determined by the width of a horse's arse. Have you ever heard this? Okay, so I wasn't expecting those words to cry your mouth right there. I promise I would say bollocks, okay?

So the solid rocket boosters for the spatial are made by a company called Morton Thuyacol, which are located in Utah, and the shuttle would launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. So you had to get these boosters

from Utah to Florida. Okay, that sounds easy. Except you have to go through tunnels along the way. There's no route across the country. in which the boosters will not have to traverse through a tunnel at least at one point. Tunnels are a certain width and a certain height.

There's not like just a hundred foot tall tunnels and it makes no economic sense. So the tunnels are roughly the size of the roadway. Now, a roadway is roughly the size of a railway. It's basically two railways. And a railway was based on the width of the original Roman chariots, which were two horses, pulled by two horses. So the width of the wheels on a railway right now is about, the width that I am or 1.3 meters of a of the of two horses side by side so so that

people say okay so now that's at the size of the railway the railway set the size of the roadway the roadway set the size of the tunnel therefore the tunnel which determine the area of the solid rocket boosters which in turn determines the altitude against it okay yeah so this is a lot so it's proxy proxy proxy exactly another thing is um QWERTY the QWERTY keyboard that you are a master of that's actually was designed to slow down typing because you type too fast the keys on a typewriter. Have you ever seen a real typewriter? Yeah, sure.

When I was a kid, I had one too, but a lot of the younger viewers don't. So they had these keys that would come up mechanically and they would strike a ribbon coated with ink and that would press on two pieces of paper. When they would come up, if you hit too fast, they would start to expand or whatever. They'd just like and then that was bad because you couldn't type as fast. So they made the query keyboard, the positions of the letters are optimal to slow down your typing, not to speed up and yet every keyboard on earth uses them, right? So that's a lock-in.

So what you, it's the first mover determines kind of almost all the trajectory of everything that comes after it. And so with these GPU plus LLMs, that's kind of what people mean with AI nowadays. It's very different than what the brain does or physics does. And so I don't know because where's the money going to go? Like open AI is trying to raise, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. They're building nuclear power plants not far from here, you know, cooping. Three Mile Island down in Pennsylvania. They're doing all this to have more GPUs, which use the same energy,

which are two-dimensional processors that were used to make video games, not to do like physics problems. So are we going to be threatened by that? Is that going to come up with, you know, general relativity and, you know, Riemannian manifolds and, you know, supersymmetric groups? I don't think so. There's something different about that. It's not going to need the training data from like the reason that we don't have string theory

right now or theory of everything is not because we haven't yet trained it on Fast and the Furious 11, which comes out next month or whatever, it's because there's something completely orthogonal to that architecture needed to get to a theory of everything. At least that's what I think.

I think you can't, I guess my slight push back to that would be I agree if you had made a neural network that was not an LLM, but I mean, I guess the original Neurox did have this in mind to be inspired by the brain. if you really did believe you were imitating the structure of the brain,

it was just a question of scaling that up until you reached a human brain-sized number of neurons and connections, then perhaps you could have confidence that, you know, if a flesh version of this thing can do it, then surely a digital version of it, a silicon version of it could do the same thing. But you're right with LMs, it's such a different, it doesn't think the way we think. There is no guarantee. but it also doesn't preclude it either, right? It's kind of similar to the, you know, the B-Modes, right?

You, it may achieve that, but there's no guarantee it will achieve that either. Very good. I couldn't imagine, you know, tying into that better myself. Yeah, I agree. I guess the thing that fascinates me is the work of Namchomsky. I'm not a fan of him as a person, but as a thinker, you know, he has this notion that embodiment. Like when your kids first learn how to speak, there's something. about the embodiment of a mind, of a soul, whatever, not just a neural network and that computers

certainly lack, right? So there's just no way to mimic that an inviscerating feeling of being in a body and how that may be crucial for us to express language rather than tokenization. Well, one way, they could have a body though, right? They could, you know, it's not. I mean, they have bodies now for like, you know, robots, but where the, there's something generative about the gradical structure and learning it rather than just I'm trained on seven billion tokens now and I can turn up the temperature of how much correlation you know two three four pairs of tokens have to have and just the sheer amount of data like right now we're taking in you know terabytes of data and it's just like a lot of it we're excluding we're focusing very narrowly but you know will

computers have that ability to do it all I'm saying is that there is something different about a fundamentally two-dimensional architecture that was made from GPUs. I'm not disagreeing at all that someday, quote-unquote, AI can do what Einstein or you do or what I do. But the point is, in their current form, LLM plus GPU, I'm skeptical about it. I do think the lock-in, and because the financial incentive is just build more of that, have bigger GPUs, more terabytes, more tokens, and go down that realm. Will things emerge? Literally emerge?

Probably, but I don't know if it'll be novel. I think it's fascinating. I think it's one of the most interesting. You know, we have Nobel Prize winners, you know, winning Nobel Prize for AI stuff, but, you know, will there be AI's, just pure AI's winning Nobel Prize? Well, I mean, if you believe the latest from opening out, of course, they believe they've already reached AGII essentially. I keep hearing. I hear people say, hey, they have, they haven't.

I talked to Jan Lacoon not too long ago. He doesn't think it's why any means assured. Yeah. Max Tagmar, men they do. It's very interesting. I mean, we're certainly not ready for it, but it's the genie's out of the bottle. Yeah. And we kind of have to react to it.

So in our local neck of the woods and being the faculty and professor, I don't know. I just, I don't know, you know, I love it. I actually enjoy interacting with them. It's brought a new kind of reinvigoration of like capabilities for me and allowed me to go into different fields. But, you know, is it essential to the instructor, you know, how much I think of myself as being a professor, a teacher? I don't know yet. I just don't know. Well, we have an interesting times ahead to find out.

Brian, I've had you for long enough, and I appreciate your time very generously. You've just come off an airplane and come straight for a podcast. It was very generous of your time to do so. I know you've got a busy day tomorrow with the Simms Observatory. So, yeah, thank you so much for coming in. And I hope to have you again. This was great. Thank you.

Next time the temperature will be a little colder, though. It's a little too warm for me. So that was my conversation with Professor Brian Keating of UC San Diego and host of the Into the Impossible podcast, definitely check out that podcast if you've not seen it before. Here's so many wonderful great guests on there, including yours truly, maybe not his most famous guest,

but I was on there fairly recently. So you can check that out if you're interested in hearing our conversation over there and all the other great conversations he's had. You know, I really enjoyed talking with Brian because he is one of those few people who openly takes on this elephant in the room that science is done by people

and people have egos and make mistakes and we cannot assume, therefore, science is this pure objectivity pursuit. There are always going to be mistakes, but, but that does not mean that science is somehow in jeopardy or as a flawed enterprise because the other beautiful element of science is that it's self-correcting. And that's what happened in his story of losing the Nobel, right? There was this claim that they made and it made lots of headlines and for a few months, maybe a year. That was what everyone thought was the real deal. And then it didn't take too long, of course, for other teams to investigate it, to be skeptical.

That's how science works. We're always skeptical of such claims. And they found out that something was wrong and didn't make sense. And it ended up being this whole dust map thing. So I think it is a kind of a wonderful example of how huge stories will be made in science in the future. There will probably be, I think, in my field, there'll probably be like the detection of life one day, right? There'll probably be a story that says, we've kind of already had it a few times, but we'll probably have another one in the near future saying we detected either, you know, a UFO or something or an alien

spacecraft maybe, probably more realistically, a biosignature or something like that. But in any case, I think we should always be very skeptical because there have been many, many claims in the past. And that does not mean just because the claim has been made that it is true. Science has this peer review process, which is definitely a first check. But it's not the last check. There is one or two people that do those referee reports, right? That's just not enough. You really need the entire community, which is hundreds, sometimes thousands of people

to skeptically interrogate that claim, especially when it's a huge claim like the discovery of essentially inflation in the case of Brian Keating's work. So I think it's a wonderful example of how just don't, as soon as you see a story, assume it's true, it's true. There is always other people out there

who want to be a bit more cautious and careful, And quite often these things do disappear. They evaporate under greater scrutiny. But over the long time span of science, the truth is kind of boils out, right? It's like a crucible where you boil away all the irrelevancies, all the things which can't survive that scrutiny. And what you're left is this pure product of science, the scientific truths. And those are the things which have gone through not just one or two reviews, but hundreds, thousands of people, experiments, people trying to rip it apart.

Scientists love nothing more than trying to rip apart things, and yet it remains. It survives. And those are the things. Those are the gems, the precious examples of knowledge that we're really seeking of. And that might really advance. It's human knowledge is when we get those types of information. So it's a wonderful story. I really enjoy that conversation.

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