Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Mat Kaplan of Planetary Radio introduces a New Host and Interviews Brian Keating for an Update on The Simons Observatory (#270)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Hello and welcome to another wonderful edition of the Into the Impossible podcast. Why so wonderful? Well, I didn't have to record this one. I didn't do anything except show up and be a guest with my friend Matt Kaplan on the Planetary Society's Planetary Radio podcast. And it was Matt Swan Song. So sad because he is such a phenomenal, incredible podcaster, friend, supporter of all things around the universe. And I'm really going to miss him as the host of this phenomenal podcast. They really got me interested in podcasting and upping my game as a podcaster.

Starting point is 00:00:35 And Matt's leaving, departing as host of the Planetary Radio podcast host and producer of the Planetary Society. And he's going to be replaced by, although no one can replace him, by Sarah Al-Ahmad, who's currently the digital community manager for the Planetary Society. But Matt's been really, Matt, but Matt's really going to be missed. And I really wish him the best. And I thank him for recording this conversation way back in July of this past year with me in person and documenting what we're doing with the Simon's Observatory. And so I think you'll enjoy it.

Starting point is 00:01:05 I wanted to bring you this swan song of a great astro communicator, science communicator, friend of all things astronomical. And I want to just also encourage you to subscribe to the Planetary Society, donate to them and their podcast as well. I'll have a link to it in the show notes below. And I want you to leave a review of this podcast. Wherever you're listening to it, you can leave an asterism, which is Astronomer Speak for a small,

Starting point is 00:01:30 constellation of five stars, hopefully. And you can do that anywhere you're getting the podcast. You can leave a rating. But you can also leave a review on Apple Podcasts, formerly known as iTunes. And I'll read to you from a recent review that I received from a person in the United States named P. Galae calls the podcast something not to be missed.

Starting point is 00:01:53 And then follows up by saying any sufficiently intelligent podcast listener will find Brian Keating indistinguishable from fascinating, accessible, and fun. It's like magic. Thank you, Pigal. And I do encourage you all to follow up and stay in touch, leave a review, subscribe to my YouTube channel. I have a link to the video of the Simon's Observatory,

Starting point is 00:02:11 Ask Me Anything event that we held at the Wavelength Brewery in downtown San Diego. Prior to the All-Star game, not being played in San Diego, my beloved Padres got eliminated in the championship series of the NLCS, but they'll be back next year and we'll have even better performance. I'll be able to stop my famous joke that the easiest job in the world, as San Diego meteorologist, because everything's always the same day after day perfection. And I'll be able to finally stop saying the hardest job in the universe is San Diego SportsCaster. Go Padres.

Starting point is 00:02:41 For now, enjoy and sit back with the final, final swan song. The Coda on a wonderful career, my friend Matt Kaplan, Planetary Radio, production of the Planetary Society. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the five-bay doors, please, help. We've talked with Brian Keating before. The experimental astrophysicist, cosmologist also works, is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego,

Starting point is 00:03:14 where he is with the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. Brian also leads the worldwide effort that is building the Simon's Observatory high atop the mountains of Chile's Otacama. Their hope is to literally shed light on our cosmic origins. After years of meeting virtually, all 300 team members were invited to gather at the university last July, and many of them made the trip. It was the kickoff event that brought me to the Amplified Aleworks Kitchen and Beer Garden in downtown San Diego. They gave the July 10 public event an irresistible name.

Starting point is 00:03:53 We are cosmologists. Ask us anything. When I arrived, Brian was talking with an eager young undergraduate. And that frequency is where the microwave background photons are the brightest. So that's where we optimize the resolution or the refraction limit of the telescope. So yeah. Courses do you teach at UC San Diego? I teach everything from intro to physics for pre-meds to all the way up through cosmology for graduate students.

Starting point is 00:04:16 This past quarter I taught cosmology for advanced undergraduates. And what's really fun is that a lot of them go on to intern in my lab or do research with me afterwards. It's really fun. I'm entering my third year in astrophysics at UCSan Diego. and I'm looking at a lot of the cosmology classes, the astrophysics courses, and I'm beginning the mechanic sequence and the electromagnicism sequence. Next spring I'll be teaching again, the Cosmology Physics 162.

Starting point is 00:04:42 You're welcome to enroll. It'll be fun to see you there. But in the meantime, yeah, go to my website and check it out. Yeah, totally will do. Brian and several other team members then joined a panel discussion in the outdoor setting. Minutes after it ended, beers in hand, Brian and I had this conversation. Brian Keating, a bunch of cosmologists walk into a bar. I don't know the punchline for that, but there must be one. Yeah, I'm waiting for the rabbi, the priest, and the minister to show up, Matt. Hopefully they'll come by soon. Those are the proto-cosmologists. That's right. Yeah, they're all interested in Genesis or the Big Bang or any of these things, and we are welcoming all of them.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Just like you and just like, I mean, what brought everybody together here today, or maybe I should say, this week? I think the love of the universe, first of all, is palpable. People, you know, love, of learning about the cosmos, the universe at large, the planets, and everything else. But in particular, we're about two days in advance of the release of the data from the James Webb Space to Alloscope, the very first light images and spectra from this magnificent device. And people are printing it everywhere from the Union Tribune to the New York Times. All over the world, people are getting so excited about this instrument that a few hundred scientists built, catapulted a million miles away from the Earth.

Starting point is 00:05:53 And we, on the Simon's Observatory, the project that I co-lead with my collaborators, we're hoping to dovetail our data with their data. And in combination, this conjunction will allow us to unravel, unfurl the universe, as they like to say, in more precise detail than we really could have imagined, even back when Hubble telescope was launched. It's a phenomenal. I'm going to come back to that, how that dovetailing might work. By the time people hear this, those first science images from the JWST will have already wowed lots of You surprised me when you said the thing you're most looking forward to among those first images.

Starting point is 00:06:30 We know we're going to see an image of one exoplanet, that you're looking forward to that more than some of the stuff that's a lot farther out. Yeah, stuff that's closer to what I do is the early universe, cosmology, the first stars, the first galaxies to form. But actually, I kind of feel like maybe I get enough of that in my day job as a cosmologist. But really what excites me is the prospect that we might someday discover life on another planet. I'm not super sanguine that that would be in the offing. I'm sorry to disappoint the many listeners of the planetary society. I know that planetary radio. They love thinking about exoplanetary species and civilizations.

Starting point is 00:07:06 That notwithstanding, I do think that the images that were released from this WASP 96B, I love that name. I got to get it on my license plate. Those spectra really can set the stage for what we're about to see. when the flood of data come in from the web telescope. This is just the first light images in spectra, and the quality of the data that are being released just blew us away.

Starting point is 00:07:31 And for us to think about, we're just extrapolating a few years from now how much we're going to know every single square degree of the sky that we look in. There's an exoplanet. And not only the exoplanet, we'll be able to see, we're not going to see little cities there

Starting point is 00:07:44 or little green men there, but we're going to see the telltale signs, perhaps, of civilization, be it in the form of, an agriculture or oxygenation or some event that's taking place on this distant exoplanet, if indeed life does exist. And to me, that is the second most interesting question in all of science. The first being, you know, was there a single big bang?

Starting point is 00:08:04 And I'll bet, in spite of your well-founded skepticism, you would be the first person to cheer if that data came back and said we're not alone. I would love that. Because, you know, for me to know that we're not alone in the universe is a very powerful thing. Because I doubt even if we do discover a web does discover eventually life or other, the many, many other collaborations, not just Webb, this is the golden age. Someone asked tonight about how do we react emotionally to the fact that we're living in a golden age of astronomy, exactly paralleling, although with 10 times better equipment, the golden age that previously existed in the 1900s. I mean, it's not so often that human beings forget about scientists live in an age where they have so much a wealth of treasure trove of data coming in from the universe at large as we do now. So we're really blessed to live in this time.

Starting point is 00:08:50 But yes, if we do find that there is evidence, I will be overjoyed with the light to know that because I think it will make our impression of our own existence that much more stark to us. You know, we're living through a time of economic crisis, of political chaos, of warfare, death and destruction on Earth. And to think about, well, we did discover life potentially in the next couple of years, perhaps we will do that.

Starting point is 00:09:15 But it won't be life like ours. I think it's very parochial to think that we are the only form of life. Everything will be like us. But it will be maybe subdominant to the type of life form that we are. And that will make us hopefully take our own life on Earth so much more tightly and be more precious and careful with our own tenuous existence on Earth. One would hope. All right, let's look a lot farther out and a lot farther back with the Simon's Observatory.

Starting point is 00:09:42 Tell me why so many cosmologists have gathered here. and we're able to come out and enjoy a beer or two and listen to this great panel. Yeah, so we are hosting in the middle of July, we're hosting the first face-to-face gathering of the 300 observers of the Simon's Observatory, which is the world's premier cosmic microwave background observatory located at 17,200 feet in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile.

Starting point is 00:10:09 Even higher than, I've been to 5,000 meters. You're even higher than that. Good Lord. Yeah, exactly, a couple hundred feet higher than that. And that allows us this unrivaled glimpse, almost as good as being in space, not quite, but for one hundredth of the cost of the web space telescope or maybe even less. So we are going to this phenomenal observatory site in order to make these infant baby pictures of the early universe. Every one year we would gather in previous pre-pandemic times.

Starting point is 00:10:35 We'd gather in person somewhere either UC Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, or UC San Diego. And this is the year that we had slated to be in UC San Diego. And thankfully, we're able to do it in person. person after two years being on Zoom. So this is just a joyous occasion for us. We see people hugging each other. I got kissed by my Italian collaborator, Carlo. I hadn't seen them in three years.

Starting point is 00:10:58 And it's just you become a family. When you work with, you know, I would say if you're not comfortable spending 10 years with the people you're working with, don't spend one year with them. And these are such phenomenal people. I'm going to be spending hopefully 20 years with these people. We've already spent six, two more years before we get first light data from the Simon's Observatory. and I hope that we're funded for another five years after that.

Starting point is 00:11:17 And maybe we, who knows, even beyond that. So it's just, it is a family. And I always talk about that my welcome address tomorrow at UC San Diego, where we host the project office, the leader, kind of the center of power where we disperse all the funding and administration for the observatory, which is a full-time job for myself and my colleagues, that we will, you know, be setting the pathway to get those precious first light photons from this magnificent instrument built by 300 people who all,

Starting point is 00:11:44 all happen to be enjoying sunny san diego this week your summer starts now with memorial day deals at the home depot it's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill four burner gas grill on special buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the hampton bay west grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499 this memorial day get low prices guaranteed at the home depot while supplies last price in value 14th or may 27th u.s only exclusions applies See homedipo.com slash price match for details. So as we speak, the new issue of Scientific American has an article about these big questions about the beginning of the universe, the Hubble Constant, and the fact that we still don't

Starting point is 00:12:32 know, pardon the expression, what the hell's going on in some ways, you're hoping to help answer some of these questions, right? Yeah, well, to quote, you know, the rapper Biggie Smalls, he used to say, you know, more money, more problems. But in this case, we have more problems, more money, because we actually are able to look for these tensions. There are anomalies in physics that don't make sense to us. And the universe is created in such a way that to test the properties of the smallest particles known to human beings, the subatomic particles, the neutrinos, and dark matter, which we don't know much about, dark energy. We need the largest possible laboratory. Well,

Starting point is 00:13:11 you can't get any bigger than the universe itself. So we're using the entire universe as an accelerator, as an atom smasher, if you like, as a collider to experiment, to probe the universe at the highest possible energy scales. Conversely, probe the smallest possible link scales. So we are learning about these anomalies, these problems that may point to flaws in what's called the standard model of particle physics,

Starting point is 00:13:35 a standard model of cosmology. I like to look at that, as Leonard Cohen said, the cracks let the light in. So where are the cracks in the standard model? The edifice, the artifice that we made up about the universe, which is a lot. We know tremendously precise details about the universe. We know so much about it that we know that it doesn't quite make sense. There are anomalies and those point to tensions that we can hopefully resolve with these instruments.

Starting point is 00:13:59 So it's a golden age. The more crises, the more fun for scientists, I say. One of the things that blew me away, listening to your colleagues from some of these sister campuses, some of the technical details, what it is taking to put together this exquisitely sensitive instrument and the kinds of things you have to achieve at what is it, a tenth of a degree above absolute zero? I'm just marvel at the fact that humanity is capable of taking on these kinds of projects. It is, and it's not even just building it. When we go down to San Diego Bay, you see an aircraft carrier.

Starting point is 00:14:37 It wasn't just built to be built. It was built to be going out and projecting power into the world, right? So there's an operating cost that we typically account for about 10% of the construction cost goes into each year of operations, meaning in a decade, you double the cost of the instrument. So I was calculating, and I'm going to show this in my opening remarks tomorrow, we are equivalent to the cost of, say, a Boeing 737 max 900, you know, it's a commercial passenger jet. That's about how much our observatory cost, all told, be about $100 million. That airplane costs $10,000 an hour to fly it with fuel and the pilots and insurance and everything else that maintenance.

Starting point is 00:15:15 Our observatory costs a lot less to operate, but it costs about the same capital to build. So that means we can operate maybe longer than a Boeing 737 we'll last for. But when you think about how many parts are in a Boeing 737, how exquisitely they all have to fit together from different suppliers. We have scientists in all seven continents working on the Simon's Observatory, speaking 30 different languages, eating different cuisines, my favorite thing to talk about. And when you look at the universe that we're trying to unfold, of course, it's much more complicated than this instrument. But I ask you, Matt, would you get on a plane that you designed and built yourself?

Starting point is 00:15:48 No, of course. So you have to build in a lot of safety and checks. And there are people involved. We actually have to think about safety at high altitude, as you mentioned, wearing oxygen. We have to bring diesel fuel up. We have to have road maintenance, concrete. All these mundane things that I never thought as a 12-year-old kid with my little refracting telescope, looking up at the moon, I'd be thinking about diesel fuel and some generated.

Starting point is 00:16:08 that's not working and that we need a maintenance plan for this type of conveyor belt. It's incredibly the mundane things, but without the mundane things, we don't build the instrument. So it's incredibly complicated, operating near absolute zero at atmospheric pressures, pressure is lower than one billionth of the atmosphere that we are enjoying here at sea level. So for all those reasons, yeah, it's an incredibly complicated instrument machine, if you will, and multiple machines that working in Congress together and hopefully providing this unparalleled glimpse, into the early universe. Just one more, the greater significance, the human significance of this.

Starting point is 00:16:44 I think it's also wrapped up with why you wanted this group to get together today at a bar in downtown San Diego and reach out to other people. This has real significance for humanity, and it goes beyond a lot of those terrible problems that we're dealing with across the rest of society. Yeah, that's right. So I think that science in general appeals to the one thing. that it used to be nonpartisan. Maybe most of science can be free of politicization, but some of it has been politicized.

Starting point is 00:17:16 It's true. And yet, and yet, astronomy, in particular, cosmology, it's very difficult to politicize, the origin of the universe, the big bang, and the distribution of matter and light and energy. And yet, I'm sure some people would want to do that. But in any case, that type of polarization doesn't come into play in what we do. It creates kind of a safe space that we can enjoy and contemplate philosophical questions that were unanswerable up until now, basically this very day. And I always say on my podcast, I always say that scientists have a moral obligation

Starting point is 00:17:45 to explain to the public in words the public can understand what it is that we're doing with their money. They give us this precious commodity that's fungible, their money, taxpayer to every single scientist here, every scientist you've ever known. There's no such thing as a privately trained scientist who didn't get anything from the government, which means from the taxpayer. So I believe it's our moral obligation. I strive to do that in my outreach efforts.

Starting point is 00:18:07 But I've tried to inculcate that in my students and my colleagues as well, that we're giving back to the people, but really we're getting more in return. John Muir is to say, by looking out, I really realized I was looking in. We're looking out on the biggest possible skills. And conversely, we're learning more and more about what it truly means to be human beings. I saw that you ran out of meteorites that you were handing out to people. So you started giving away books. We'll do that at the end of this show.

Starting point is 00:18:32 We'll give away another copy. We've already given away one when you and I spent time a while back. of your first book, right? And now you have one more that's in print, which I look forward to reading. You gave me a copy today. And then there's that Galileo project. I was going to let you go,

Starting point is 00:18:48 because I know there are people waiting to talk to you, but say something about these newer works. Yeah, so I was privileged to record an audiobook, the first ever by Galileo Galilei, the famous dialogue of two world systems, which is the one that got him imprisoned for the remaining nine years of his life by the Pope who had formerly been.

Starting point is 00:19:04 It's an incredible backstory behind this book. And so that's an audiobook. It's 21 hours long. It's available anywhere you get audiobooks or on my website, Brian Keating.com. But if your listeners go to Brian Keating.com slash list, they'll see a form that they can fill out, and I will send them a piece of meteorite space dust

Starting point is 00:19:23 from the early solar system, our planetary society, if you will, that it used to be. So if you go to my website, it's only people in the USA, unfortunately, just from shipping demands and so forth. But if you go there, and then you can check out my books that I've written there, You can download a copy of the audiobooks, or you can buy a physical copy of the physical books,

Starting point is 00:19:41 think like a Nobel Prize winner into The Impossible and losing the Nobel Prize or Galileo's dialogue. But yeah, don't miss your chance to get a fragment of the early planetary system, aka a meteorite. Thank you, Brian. Have a great time this week with your colleagues, and I sure look forward to first light from that amazing observatory. Thank you, Matt.

Starting point is 00:20:00 It's been a pleasure. It's always great to see you. And in person without a mask. I love it. UCSD experimental astrophysicist Brian Keating at last July's We Are Cosmologist's public event in San Diego, California. You can learn about the Simon's Observatory

Starting point is 00:20:16 and much more at planetary.org slash radio. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Matt Kaplan and his final episode of Planetary Radio. Please subscribe to hear the new guests, Sarah Al-M.

Starting point is 00:20:37 who will hopefully be featuring more great content, just like Matt has done for a decade now. And just a reminder, leave a rating and a review of the podcast. We're up to 700 ratings around the world, 525, just in the USA, and I read each and every one of them, and I thank you so much. Subscribe to my mailing list at brinecating.com slash list for your chance to win a real piece of space schmast, a meteorite. You'll enjoy that, I know.

Starting point is 00:21:01 And for now, I want to wish you a wonderful and magical rest of your week. Take care. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly, big board buck slot machine by aristocrat gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamaba's history. Club Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29th.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Mat Kaplan of Planetary Radio introduces a New Host and Interviews Brian Keating for an Update on The Simons Observatory (#270)

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