Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - James Webb Space Telescope First Results Q & A with Project Scientist John Mather, Nobel Prizewinner (#240)

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

@NASAWebb Senior Project Scientist, and @NobelPrize winner, John Mather answers questions about the JWST from listeners of Into The Impossible. 📺 Watch my #JWST explainer here https://youtu.be/1MjR_A5oDyI Please join my mailing list; for your chance to win 4 billion year old space dust click here 👉 briankeating.com/list 📝 Get your copy of Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner here: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW  Please join my mailing list to win cool prizes; click here 👉 briankeating.com/list 📝  Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel to watch these interviews and other cool content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everyone to an exciting episode of The Into the Impossible podcast featuring yours truly Dr. Brian Keating alongside a friend, a mentor, a past guest, and a chapter in one of my books, John Mather, who's the senior project scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope. And if you've been paying attention to the news or know anybody in the world, you know that the James Webb Space Telescope released its first images and spectra this very week. And I'm so pleased that I had the opportunity to talk to anybody from the Webb Telescope during what must have been an incredibly ambitious and incredibly exciting and demanding week for any scientists, but especially to talk to the senior scientist like John, who is not only a Nobel laureate,

but also an incredibly in-demand scientist for comments and for actually setting the stage and the direction of instruments like Webb and being at NASA for as long as he has been, it's basically his whole career. He's extremely connected to the future projects that NASA itself is going to be producing, not just the phenomenal science that he and his colleagues get to work on. So I released a video this week, earlier this week. In that video, I went through the five images or so that web released to the public with my interpretation and a little bit more information.

I did release that as a podcast as well, although you certainly should check out my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, where I solicited questions from you, the audience, for John Mather coming up for the interview that you're about to hear. So not only by subscribing to the YouTube channel where you get to see the stunning visual delights and some animations and some explainer content that I put together after the description of the images in the spectrum, but you'll also get to ask questions of all my upcoming guests, and there's a huge number of them in the can, so to speak, not the, you know, kind of bathroom, that'll be weird. But in the case.

can in the context of we've recorded and are processing and a lot of these guests, the majority, in fact, have come on the YouTube channel when the interview is premiering. And so therefore, you can communicate with the guest. We had that with Anaegis recently, Will Kinney. And we'll have it again in about a week from the time you're listening to this interview with Govert Schelling, who's a renowned author, a science author of many books. But this particular book is called The Elephant in the Universe. And he's written about the hundred years quest to understand dark So that's coming up soon. That for anybody who detects it will certainly result in a Nobel Prize. But it may not exist, according to my upcoming, upcoming guest after that, whose name is Mordecai, aka Muti Milgram, who's a scientist in Israel, who works on alternatives to dark matter.

Instead of looking for tiny particles, which we haven't seen for many, many decades, Mati and collaborators and allied theoreticians predict that there might need to be a modification to not only Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, but Einstein's as well. So stay tuned for that. Now we're going into the Impossible with Dr. John Mather from a live Q&A session that he was so kind and generous and gracious as he always is. You can find out more about John in my second book, which is called Into the Impossible Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, available in all formats. And you can even find a sub-podcast and a sub-playlist on my YouTube channel where you can watch the whole interview for free. but the book is quite fun because it's really distilled down to the most delightful, important,

and keen nuggets. And we'll have more Nobel Prize winners coming up. I have an interview with Bill Phillips. You'll hear about that. I did one recently with Adam Reese as well. And stay tuned. I'm still trying to get more of these really just, as I say, gracious and generous individuals who do what I believe I need to do, which is to have the moral obligation, the moral

courage to give back to the public. I don't charge for this. I do like it when you support the sponsors that does help. But in reality, I don't really make any money from this project, but I do get tremendous satisfaction. And I hope that you'll share the channel in the podcast with your friends, and I'll have more to say about that at the end. But for now, sit back and enjoy this ride Into the Impossible with Brian Keating, yours truly, and Dr. John Mather, who is an incredible munch, as you will soon hear if you didn't know already answering so many questions in the rapid fire segment at the end. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please. Help.

The power of the internet. All right, there we are. We are live with a Titanic figure in my life and in cosmology and astronomy. Dr. John Mather, senior project scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been in the news for some reason. We don't know. I mean, maybe it's because John, his chapter in this book, which he doesn't even have a copy of, into the impossible. This I'm going to send you right after this interview, John, for giving.

John, how are you feeling? How are you doing right now? I'm great, and I'm greatly relieved, because now that we've gotten to this point, I'm just beginning to think of all the things that were dangerous along the way. Yes, everything that could have gone wrong, didn't go, or could have gone wrong,

didn't go wrong, but it still must have been, incredibly nerve. And we've survived everything. And well, I wasn't nervous, but maybe I should have been. Other people were because they were actually taking care of all those things that I should have worried about. And so plenty of people were nervous doing their job. So anyway, we're so appreciative and so thrilled that it worked perfectly. It is so perfect. It's beyond expectation. It's almost beyond hopes. so the optical quality is brilliant. So we promised diffraction limited quality of images at two microns wavelength, and it's almost twice as good as that.

And John, just from a human perspective, I believe you started working on this in 1995. I did. Kobe was still going on back then. How did this work for you? What was this career step like for you? How did you have the courage to do this? And what does it mean after almost 30 years?

Oh, my goodness. Well, Kobe was just finishing. We launched the Kobe in 1989, and we ran it for four years. So I was more or less finished with my part by 1995, and I'm thinking what to do next. And I was surprised I got a phone call from NASA headquarters. Would you like to work on this new mission? We're starting a study. And I thought, absolutely, this is the coolest thing I've ever heard of. I went to work on this, and I still think it's the coolest thing. And that's saying a lot, because Kobe changed,

changed my life because it happened right was I was starting graduate school back at Brown. I see it. Yeah, yeah, it certainly did. And it changed your life too. Eventually you would win a Nobel Prize with George Smoot for that work. Did you have, I know like those of us that have children are blessed to have children, those of us that are blessed to have more than one child, we always say when they're when they ask us, I used to ask my mom, you know, we have, there are four of us, four of us brothers. So mom, who's your favorite kid? She said, that's like asking me to choose my favorite arm and I'd say mom you're right you're left-handed you're left-handed mom come on all the stuff that web can do do you have a favorite well I just I think taking pretty pictures is my emotional favorite

so what's the science behind that well the first objects that grew out of the big bang material that's the continuation of my fascination with the history of the universe something's out there that we didn't expect I think so so just recently we're just getting a a hint from theoretical predictions about how the first gigantic black holes might have grown. It's one of those top mysteries of science. We detected the dark matter effects. We detected the effects of dark energy and we still do not know what made the giant black holes grow. We know little ones can grow from stars that blow up, but we can't really figure out how the big ones got there. And since there's a big one in the middle of every galaxy, that's a disaster for

under comprehension. We've got to deal with this. So we got predictions, of course, but now we have to get pictures and data. And so that's one of our top challenges. Yeah, yeah, indeed. So I was able to take some questions from my audience of over 100,000 people that are part of this project that I call Into the Impossible. It's your second time on the podcast. And I'm so so grateful that you took this time during this week. We only have about 20 minutes. before your next series of meetings. But I wanted to maybe start off with just a personal question. Not a personal, a question from me.

When we look at the results and the impact you're having on society as a whole, to what do you attribute this fascination? Is it the pretty picture phenomenon? Or is it really the public has gotten accustomed to these fantastic, not only images, but the data from things like Hubble and things like all the other great NASA projects and ground-based projects too. What do you attribute the fascination of the public? This is so arcane and it took so long.

Why is the public so interested in this? I think they're interested in. The same question I'm interested in. Where did we come from? What's the history? How did we go from an expanding universe with the hot and cold spots in it that we measured with the Kobe to here we are, having our little planet that's a nice place to live?

How did that happen? And there's so many steps that astronomers can work on. The formations of the stars and the galaxies and the black holes and all that stuff. How do the planets grow? And of course we want to know. And we also really want to know, are we alone? Everybody wants to know that. My personal opinion is, no, we're not alone, but the neighbors are really far awake.

In other words, a good planet is hard to find. And even though we know most stars have planets, quite a few. We have not found any systems that resemble our own solar system yet, which is to say three or four little rocky planets in the middle, then for so big cold gas giants way out there, we don't have anything like that to point at in what we've found so far. So what's the going on? Our solar system might be special. So we know Earth is already special here in the solar system. It's the only place where we can live and so what's going on how come there's a lot of mystery here and of course we all want to know is their life on mars and we can find out by going there and getting some pieces and bringing them back

how about other places in the solar system that are maybe possible like Europa where there's an ocean under the ice or how about on titan where there's lakes and rivers of methane and ethane stuff could be happening that we could find by actually bringing in pieces home. That would be even, maybe even more exciting than our beautiful pictures. Yeah, exactly. And actually, that dovetails nicely with the first question that I received from one of my listeners. And just a reminder on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, you can submit questions for almost all my guests. I always give a preview of who's coming up next. And I had on maybe not so near neighbor to you as well, nearer than those aliens that you talked.

about John. And that was Bill Phillips of Nist and Gathersbury. He was on recently. I solicited questions. His episode's coming soon. But the first question does involve planets. And it's from April Van Ryan. And she asks, my main question is, does Webb have the potential to see a small rocky planet close to us? And what is Miri likely to see when she's used to her maximum potential? I have a billion questions, but those are the first. So I guess it's about it's about Mary and about the small rocky planets the wasp 96b which you did release a spectrum of this week your team is is a gas giant not unlike Jupiter as I understand it but but can you see a small rocky planet like the distance from the earth to the sun we can see them indirectly we see them when they go in

front of their star it's called transiting and even well here in the solar system we watched Venus do a transit across the sun a little while back and And the sun detected got extremely tiny bit fainter for a little while because some starlight sunlight was blocked. We do the same thing with little planets way out there. We will have several dozen planets in the first year, including about two dozen little ones. But unfortunately, for us, the only ones we can study are the ones that orbit very small stars, M stars they're called. And so the planets are in very close, and it's a pretty hostile place for a planet. So we'll study them.

Some people think they will surely have atmospheres. Other people think surely they will not. So we will be trying that experiment as soon as possible. I'm not sure when the first ones come up in the schedule. It's pretty soon. Right. So we'll try that. So the other thing she was asking was about the mirror, which is the mid-infrared instrument,

and we will be using it for this transit spectroscopy study. also. It is neither, none of our instruments are capable of seeing a little Earth orbiting a sun-like star. It's just too faint. But we do have pretty good performance for our chronographs, which enable us to see brighter planets orbiting their stars. So we are going to be trying that. We're obviously going to try the obvious cases. What about Alpha Centauri? What about Proxima Centauri? We will look. Plenty of people think we won't see anything, but of course we have to look. Yes, that's right. It's the Wayne Gretzky principle. You miss all the shots you don't take. Absolutely. But there's so many, and the resolution's so phenomenal. But I want to go a little bit

further out. One of my listeners, or viewers, rather, Jimmy Jazzy, asked the question, can Webb rule out or comment on the uniformity of the universe? Exactly, he's referring to the cosmological principle. There's been. some claims recently by groups in Europe and other places that you can actually potentially have questions about how much the CNB dipole and the distribution of quasars and other galaxies align with that or don't. What about going to cosmology in a survey sense? Is web equipped or positioned in any way to look at things and see potentially to comment

on whether or not the cosmological principle might have some need of an update. Good question. We, of course, did not set out with that as a major objective. We just said we will study everything you can see with an infrared telescope because it's all new. We got the pioneering observations with the Spitzer telescope. If you want to answer questions about is every place in the sky basically the same, you need to study a lot of sky. So the next big telescope going up for that purpose will be Euclid from Europe.

And then the next one after that is ours from NASA. It's called Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It's a 2.4 meter diameter, same as Hubble, but takes 100 times as much sky at one bite. So it will be really good at surveying to look for those cosmological questions. Is every place really the same, or is there some funny business going on about the expansion? So too soon to answer your question, but... Yes. So another listener is asking a viewer, H.C. Traveller is asking,

when will the Trappist one system or will the Trappist one system be viewed by web? I think we're starting right away because it's an obvious candidate. I do not remember for sure when the first observations will be. You know, we cannot see every target all year. But I think I heard that this one's coming up soon. So how does the prioritization work? Again, you know, thinking back to children and, you know, we scientists are kind of like children. You know, we're curious, we're imaginative, but, you know, we don't play well with others.

We don't like to share our toys. How do you prioritize? You know, I mean, all these phenomenal science goals that you have equipment to look at. How do you prioritize today? We're going to look at this. Tomorrow, we're going to look at that. Okay. Well, of course, we do it with committee.

that's the natural thing for astronomers. You have to send us a proposal, Brian. If you want to observe something with a telescope, you have to write it down, send us in for a discussion. You have to prove that this is a good idea and that you know what to do with the data when we give it to you. And by the way, you are supposed to tell us

everything about the concept, but you're not supposed to tell us who you are. We want to review this without knowing whether you're, I don't know, We just want to be fair as much as possible. So one curious result of that is that about 10% of the proposals we chose were submitted by graduate students. So this is really great for young people to get in. We welcome that.

And it's a lovely surprise that so many young people have succeeded by writing the best proposals. Oh, and of course, if you choose which organizations are going to get the picture, then you say, Now what time of year are we going to observe it? And so that's governed by a calendar. When are they in the line of sight? When can the telescope point at that target? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG.

Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host and style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice. Shop Appliant Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, U.S. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store Online for details. How long will Webb last in an optimistic scenario?

How many years? We are expecting at least 20. We were requiring 10 or even 5. But we got a really good launch, a basically perfect launch from the Ariane 5. and so we didn't have to use any extra fuel for compensating for its errors. And now it turns out we're not even using up fuel as fast as we thought we would. So maybe even more than 20 years as possible. So if you've just been born, you might still have a chance to use this telescope.

That's right. So some of our graduate students, graduate students, hopefully we'll be working on this, our grand students. W.D. Ask a question. Thanks to you for your great service, giving us eyes we've never had before. The question is now that JWST is a reality, are there any projects on the horizon that not only will self-assemble the way that the web did, but maybe you self-replicate? Could you see a telescope factory in L2 the way that that Web is, but making other telescopes for the future? Is that even a conceivable possibility? Well, people like to speculate about that, and we draw sketches of how we would do it.

But so far, it looks kind of fanciful because we haven't gotten to the first steps. Everything we've done in space required astronauts to put it together. So Web is sort of the most elaborate self-assembling thing we've done for astronomy. And it was pretty scary because, you know, when you put it together, you say, what if it doesn't work? Oh, my gosh, what do we do then? And that is so, well, when we started, it was impossible. now it is possible to get a rocket out there with help.

So we do design our next missions with this in mind, the possibility of sending help, either robotic or human. But at least Webb was done without that possibility, and that's pretty scary. Yep, you took the advice. You went into the impossible. You did the impossible. Missy Carr is a good friend.

She's saying, this is so great. Thank you. You're the coolest thing. The question is now about in our solar system. What can it do with regard to say Europa? Can we look at Europa and where is most of the exoplanet science going to come from with web?

Is it images or spectrum? Oh, OK. Well, first Europa. We will be watching Europa because it's got an ocean with ice over it. And there are cracks in the ice where water comes spitting out. And we discovered that with Hubble. We will be looking at those same places with the web to see can we see it with the infrared signals?

And I don't know. We will try it. And why would we care? Well, you'll learn something with Webb, but we're also planning to send a mission out there to fly through those plumes of water and see do they have other molecules in them, like organic molecules. And I don't know whether they do or not, but personally my guess is that ocean could be alive. Why not? And in that case, look for complicated molecules. So we'll do that.

So the other question was more about what are we going to observe about exoplanets. And so we'll be working on the easy ones and the hard ones. The easy ones are the big ones, like the one we already showed, where it's a big planet and obscures quite a lot of the starlight, and we already know that it's got water in it. But when we say water, we really mean steam because that is a planet. It's right in there close by to its star. And so we will be looking at a wide variety of these things, some hot and some cold, some big and some small, because we just do not really know where to look.

We should look at everything. Don't just look where it's easy. Look where it's hard. Don't assume you know the answer of what the right place to look is. As you know, everything about exoplanets was a big surprise. When Mayor and Kelos looked at their data to see if there was a planet there, they didn't expect it. Other people had taken data and they hadn't even looked at the data to see if there was a planet in there because, of course, who wants one of those? We want Earth.

Well, there wasn't any Earth in that system, but there were these other remarkable surprises and everything's been a surprise. So I don't know what the next big surprise will be. Maybe it'll be all those little rocky planets have atmospheres. Maybe it'll be that none of them do. And too bad, no, you can't do chemistry on nothing. So go build the next telescope. That's what that will tell us. Yeah, there are questions about that too.

Maybe just when we look out at the current data, it's just astonishing to think that you started working on this project in 95, and that's when the first exoplanets were really coming to the light of reality. And so that wasn't, as I remember, that wasn't really part of the original mission design of web, but it kind of has become this almost unique niche that Web can accomplish. I wonder, John, can you talk a little bit about the partnership between experimentalists like you and observers, but also a theorist.

A question is coming in about that. What kind of tight-knit partnership? I remember on Kobe from an outsider's perspective, you benefited tremendously from the involvement of theorists. How does that work with Web? How do is there still an opportunity for theoretical? contributions or is it basically they're going to look at the data and like everybody else? How does that work? Okay, well, it's sort of a lot of different phases of a project. When an instrumenter like me says, well, I've got an idea, oh, that's cool, that's just an idea.

Well, why would you want to do that? And then you have to say, if you could do it, what would you find? What might you find? What are the mysteries that that would really address? So for that, we need imagination. We need the people who have already done the work of observing and they say, well, I can't see far enough. Or the people who do the calculations see, I imagine that this could be, but how can you tell? So we can't get the resources to build that equipment unless you tell us to. So that's at the beginning. Then after we do get along the ways, then suddenly theorists say, I better predict what they're going to see before they see it. So I can get my credit for my proper kind of imagination. And that happened with the Kobe satellite.

When we started, there was no prediction anybody could believe. By the time we launched, there were some really good predictions. And some people got it right, what we would see. Other people were completely amazed. They thought, oh, that can't be right. So when we published the map of the antisotropy with the hot and cold spots, there were a few people that had a pre-written scientific paper that was only waiting for the information to come from our data release,

and in a day they had it submitted. So we expect some of that for the web as well. We told people what data we would take, and they will be ready to plug it into their papers and say, here we are. We know what that means. So, John, I know you only have about five minutes left. I want to be so respectful of your time.

We have so many questions. People are just so delighted that you're taking your time. I mean, you've always been a public servant in such a wonderful way, both as an inspiration to young scientists, like when I was young, I'm not young anymore, but my current students, but also to the public. You do such incredible outreach. I want to commend you for that, because not all scientists do that. I always make fun of science. I say, you have a moral obligation to do outreach to my fellow colleagues. I want to do kind of rapid fire just because there's so many questions that are coming in.

Andy Oates, who's a very good friend of the show, he asks, is there a chance that the first definitive detection of an expert? so moon could come from JWST. Oh, I would love it, but I don't expect it. I don't know how you do it. I know theoretical predictions have been made, but I don't think anyone predicts that we could be able to do it. This is really, really hard. Yeah.

And some claim it's important to the establishment of life that we have the moon to block, you know, asteroid impacts and so forth. So who knows, it may keep the neighbors even farther away from us. Gunner, McSabby, which is kind of scary name. He asks, are there models of what look like the SMACS cluster would look like in previous years versus today? Is there any way to do a differential between these very distant galaxies and see how many more galaxies? Is the universe producing more galaxies that we could see from the web data that you have? Okay, well, I don't know about that specific place, but we do have movies that are made by a supercompetes.

You say, I know how the universe started. I've got the hot and cold spots. I know gravity works this way. Start the computer running and simulate everything. And you can get beautiful movies of how the galaxies grow. And we have gotten pretty far with that project. Not only can you make movies about how the galaxy stuff would grow, but you can even now make simulated web telescope images.

Since the web telescope image is not a movie, it's a sort of snapshot of pieces of the universe at all. of the universe at all different times from now, all the way back, as far as you can go into the distant past. So, a superposition of movies of different places, all seen in one picture. So we can do that now, and someday somebody will be able to answer this question well, but not today. So question coming in again from Ollie Wright is a good friend. This bears more on the guest who's Chapter 1 in this book, and that is our good friend.

friend Adam Reese. So you'll get your copy. I'm going to send this out immediately. Your chapter, your chapter eight, but Adam is very interested in the Hubble Tension. So Ollie's asking, are there observations plan that weigh in on the so-called Hubble Tension from Web? Absolutely. It's a top priority. And Adam, of course, has proposal in. I'm not sure when it's scheduled. It's a hard project because what you have to do is survey the universe even more accurately than we've done before. So web has the capability in principle to do this, but it requires so many steps. This is a curious situation where we use the brightness of objects to determine how far away they are, but now you have to establish that you know how bright they really are.

And so this is a pretty tricky problem. So anything, Adam's working on it, and so is competitors. Yes, exactly. We will see what they get. And the way things usually go is we do not resolve the tension. We just get more and more sure that we're right and the other person is wrong. But eventually we'll find out. So in the last minute that you have, John, there's a question.

Do you have advice to people in the field just starting out maybe young graduate students or even undergraduates? Do you have any career advice? We talked about that in the last interview. I'll put a link to John's previous interview and of course to the book. as well. But do you have advice to young people? It's just starting on astronomy. Yeah. I would say that our field is changing rapidly as new technology comes online. And so you can't really say I know what I'm going to work on in 10 years because it probably hasn't

been invented yet. So try to get in on the latest wave of things and you may catch that wave. And like I've said, graduate students can propose successfully to observe with the web telescope. So don't assume you can't do it just because you're young. Just give it a try and see what happens. That's my motto in life. Give it a try and see what happens. Yes. And so, John, I want to thank you.

I know it's 10 a.m. out there. You've got another important meeting. Hopefully we'll come back maybe in a few months when we have more phenomenal data from the James Webb Telescope. For now, I want to thank you. This is John Mather, who's been a Titanic figure. in cosmology. You don't see me. There's John. He's a picture. John, you'll be getting his book, signed copy along with some other gifts from yours, Julie. And there'll be many other investigators to tell you stories about what is found with the web. Many other people that know more about their

topic than I can ever know. So they'll be fun for you too. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Bye, everybody. Tune in next time. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable. from magic. Well, that's a wrap on this really rapid fire, but delightful voyage into the impossible. My friend and mentor, Dr. John Mather, of NASA Goddard, he's been working on Webb for almost 30 years.

Can you imagine how he must have felt like right before it lifted off and blasted off, could have blasted apart into trillions of little pieces, but it didn't. And it couldn't. And now it's returning such stunning phenomenal images. So I want to remind you, if you haven't already, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

You have a moral obligation to do. No, I'm just kidding. But if you do, you'll be able to ask questions. Like you heard, all these guests, I rarely asked any questions of my own. I wanted to really turn it over to you guys. I can hopefully ask John my pressing questions offline. But I wanted to ask your questions. And if you watch the video, you'll even see your name will pop up on screen.

If you use your real name. If you don't, there's some noms de plume, nom de guerre, that's on there as well. So I want to leave you with a small request, two of them. Actually, one is to join my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list, in which case, if you're in the U.S., I can send you a tiny fragment of the proto-solar system called the meteorite. And I can only send those within the U.S. because of mailing restrictions and just cost to me.

I have to go and get stamps for all these things. But I'll send you one. And hopefully if you're not in the U.S., you'll be entered. And at some point in some giveaways I do have my books and digital content formats, My audiobook just came out recently, the dialogue on two world systems with John Mather's fellow Nobel laureate, Frank Wilczek and Carlo Rovelli and my other friends. And so that's the one thing I want to ask you to do up front. And then the second thing to do after you'd go to Brian Keating.com slash list and join up my mailing list is to leave a review or at least a rating, a small constellation and asterism, as I say, of stars. And I read each and every one.

We're up to over 500 worldwide. We're up to 411 when I'm recording this today and in the USA alone. So no matter where you are, it helps the podcast. So do that. You can just click on your favorite podcast app, usually almost all of them, even Spotify, Audible, and certainly Apple, I'll give you the ability to leave a rating. Star, no, some number of stars, hopefully five stars, although I'll take any. Today I'm reading to you one of them, which is a four-star review.

So it's not perfect, but everyone has room for improvement. but this one has a title understandable and wide-ranging podcast, and it's by Autopism. Autotopism, I don't know how to pronounce that name. It's all one big word. And underneath that, very delightful. So on Apple, you can leave a written review. And if we get to 500 this year, I will stop bugging you to leave review. So that should be an incentive for you guys to leave review.

Anyway, autotopism says Dr. Keating is jovial, self-effacing, and let's guess make their points. But you will learn a lot. You will learn a lot from the podcast. But I recommend Dr. Keating read the history of the internet on Wikipedia to continue claiming that physicists at CERN are the reason we have the internet is a bit like claiming the post office built all the roads and highways just because it gave people a zip code. Okay, that's fair enough. I don't think I actually said that. But my guest, Frank Close, who wrote the book about past Nobel laureate, Peter Higgs, called Illusive, which was an interview I released a couple weeks ago. He did make that claim.

Don't blame the autotopism. I don't think I say that. I agree with you. Anyway, all of you out there in The Into the Impossible fan base, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and I can't wait for you to come back with me into The Impossible with more great guests coming up on the podcast. Stay tuned and keep doing magical things. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th.

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