Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - No, No Nobel: How to Lose the Prize: Brian Keating on Scientific American's Science Talk (#328)

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Physicist Brian Keating talks about his book Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor. Past episode with Avi Loeb on Youtube: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The prestige, the honor, the dominance, the kind of perspective that one gets when they do become elected to this ultimate kind of pantheon of scientific heroism, I think that has a huge impact on science and the public's perception of science. Welcome to this Wednesday replay edition of Into the Impossible featuring your host, Brian Keating on Scientific American Science Talk. In this interview with Steve Murksky, Professor Keating reveals his personal science journey and how it led him to write his first book, losing the Nobel Prize. You're going to get some unique insights into how science works. And the world's most prestigious prize, the coveted Nobel. It's no secret that Brian has some controversial opinions about the Nobel Prize, and you're going to hear about them here.

If you love science and thinking about the biggest questions in the universe, please keep into the impossible in your feeds by subscribing and following. Please help us by paying it forward with the share to curiosity. his friends. Jump over to the YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating, that's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too. Please let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review like this one on Audible, a positively thought-provoking podcast, whether or not you're a serious fan of

science. I believe into the Impossible Podcast with Brian Keating does a great job of curating some of the most important voices in the world that people should be listening to. And now, your host, Brian Keating, being interviewed on science talk about his book, Losing the Nobel Prize, and more. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot bay doors, please help. I'm Steve Merski. On this episode, Brian Keating. He's a physics professor at the Center

for Astrophysics and Space Sciences of the University of California, San Diego. And he's the author of the book Losing the Nobel Prize, a story of cosmology, ambition, and the perils of sciences highest honor. He visited New York City late last fall before social distancing was a thing. So we spoke face to face at Scientific American. Losing the Nobel Prize. This is a provocative title. So tell us about your journey through this process and folks may remember the bicep experiment, which was a really huge deal. It has an interesting place in the history of physics. And it's still going. Yes, correct.

It's still providing useful data, but there was some controversy about a particular interpretation at one point. So anyway, back to losing the Nobel Prize. How did you go about doing that? Well, you know, I wrote it as a how-to guide for all of us, you know, who wanted to go out and have alternatives to the books that are entitled how to win a Nobel Prize and how, you know, how to succeed at all these things. And I realized, you know, at one point, how many people win Nobel Prizes? How many total living people have won Nobel Prizes? And it's, you know, fewer than how many people have visited the space station the last 10 years or something like that. It's an astronomically, you know, small number.

And I thought about that immediately when I thought about the, you know, kind of the books events and the central theme of the book, as you say, is centered on this extraordinary epoch that I not only got to witness, but I played a decisive role in by virtue of creating the first experiment. designed to go after the signatures of essentially what's called the spark that lit off the Big Bang. What force, what field, what energy source could have impelled the universe into this explosive growth that it's witnessed over the past 13.8 billion years. And this has been a mystery, as I describe in the book, throughout the recent cosmic history going back to the early 1900s when it was first thought the universe was static by luminaries such as Einstein and then Hubble and others helped prove that wrong. the universe was dynamic, but in cosmology is pretty interesting. It's not only your professors in college who, whenever they give you a homework problem,

there's actually 10 problems encoded within it. But whenever you solve a problem in cosmology, it immediately brings up at least two or three more problems. So in the case of the steady state universe, the cure, the solution was the Big Bang. But that brought up a whole host of other problems, how the universe get to look how it does today, so flat, geometrically, so smooth in uniform, et cetera. and that ushered in a great deal of thought in the 70s and 80s, and that was to determine what were the initial conditions like that impelled the universe into existence,

and that later became known as inflation. I devised an experiment to look for inflation. Our signature of inflation, the imprimatur of inflation, which would be waves of gravity imprinted on the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the universe. And that experiment succeeded, and we saw these evidence for these waves of gravity a twist and torque the universe in its early state. And for a very brief moment in time, it was considered

by many people as one of the greatest discoveries, if not the greatest discovery ever made in cosmology, certainly, maybe even in all of science. And this, you know, was sure to usher in multiple Nobel prizes. The question was, who is going to get them? And along the way, I realized that there was a couple, there were a couple things that were going to happen. One of which is that we would be eventually confirmed to be correct by a competitor or another experiment. And by the time the announcement was made on St. Patrick's Day 2014, I had kind of been moved and relegated off to the side of the leadership of Bicep 2, which is a successor to the instrument I invented.

And it follows a variety of some tragic events in the history of colleagues and personal losses that we all bore that I describe in the book. But by the time we actually made the announcement, I'd been sort of cast out of the leadership role that I had formerly played. And so I knew if we were right, I would lose the Nobel Prize because the other four people, only three people can win the Nobel Prize. And there were at least four people in front of me on the experimental leadership team. I was still on the team, and I still am formally. But then there was also the alternative that we were wrong, in which case none of us would win a Nobel Prize.

So I knew at least I was going to lose the Nobel Prize, so to speak. even though I've been hinted at being one of the top people to actually win it in this informal poll of physicist on the internet. Yeah, you were number four. Yeah. I forget who the top two were, but they were really famous. Yes, they're theorists. Yeah. Good.

Right. And I reasoned that just as in the case of the 2011 discovery of dark rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 2011, the discovery of dark energy, the accelerating universe, that it wasn't the theorist that came up with the idea for dark energy. And arguably that could be ascribed to people like Einstein, you know, 100 years ago or more, of his famous cosmological constant. But instead it was given to the observer. So I was like, hey, I'm an observer. Maybe they'll skip the first three theorists in front of me and I'll get this free ticket to Stockholm. And that 2011 sold Permanier.

Yes. He got something even more valuable than a Nobel Prize. It's not mentioned in your book. Right. He got a parking space. That's right. He did. Berkeley campus.

Yes, and now he has not only a parking space, but at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has a road named after him. So it's literally, the Nobel Prize has this outsized importance in society and certainly a physicist. In San Diego, we have two streets that intersect. One is Nobel, another one's Le Bonn, which is Nobel-spelled backwards. And that's because of our famous previous to 19-2018, the last woman to win a Nobel Prize was at my home institution. You see San Diego, Maria Kat-Barnier. Right, and in 2018, we finally got a lot of it.

got the third physics Nobel female. Yes, right, Donna Strickland, yeah. I point out, though, that the Nobel Prize wants to achieve equity with women. Then for the next 75 years, it has to only give Nobel Prizes in physics to women. And that's not too likely to happen. This year, no woman won the Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry. And you have, in addition to this really interesting story about your work on Bicep and the grueling time you put in Antarctica

and your own personal journey through all this in your own life. You also have this really fascinating history of cosmology that starts really at the beginning of humanity, but really starts to take off with Galileo. And you talk about when he saw what we now call the Galilean moon. moons and of Jupiter and which he called the Medician ruins because he was sucking up to the people with the money. We still do that.

Yeah, exactly. But you also spend a good part of the book talking about what's wrong with the Nobel Prize, especially in physics. Yeah. But, you know, I like to cover the Nobel Prizes because I think it's a way to introduce people to areas of science that they probably haven't heard about. But I recognize and agree with the fact that there are a lot of problems associated with the prize. First and foremost is like what you just spoke about, the lack of recognition of women like Vera Rubin, who of course should have won a Nobel Prize.

Jocelyn Bell. And the other fields, you know, Rosalind Franklin is the poster person for this. But there are other problems with it as well, the fact that only three people can win any one. So, you know, if four people are on the project, somebody's getting aced out and they probably deserve it at least as much as the other ones. And there are other problems. So let's talk about, you know, what you see as the problems with the Nobel physics and what can be done to try to fix that. A lot of people say, you know, well, you're just like the Fox or whatever in Aesop's fable, sour grapes, right? You didn't win it.

So you just have sour grapes. Not that great anyway. They don't taste that good. But they neglect to realize a couple things. One, I was kind of on the short list potentially to win the Nobel Prize. And arguably it created this experiment, which led to the discovery, the experiment that made the discovery. But more than that, I was asked shortly after the day new month of the story, which maybe we'll get into later and what actually happened to our discovery, I was asked by the Nobel Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, which is not something that most people get to do. and I later realized probably why they were doing that, why they were asking me,

and that points to another problem with the prize that we can get into. But suffice to say that when I got this document, I treated it purely scientifically. I didn't have bitterness about it. I always say, you know, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite, just get them to award me the Nobel Prize. And if I don't reject it, I'm a hypocrite. But in reality, when I was asked to nominate the winners for the 2016 prize, I went back and read Alfred Nobel's will. And as you know, I speak fluent.

No, I don't. But they have it on their website. But what's interesting from a journalist perspective, I'm sure you find this interesting, they keep changing his will. They keep changing, even things that, like, I would agree with to make it, you know, either up to date. For example, they changed the award stipulation was that it should go to a single person who made the greatest, most important, greatest benefit to mankind in the preceding year.

Those were the three stipulations. I talk about those at length. So it says mankind in his will. And he wasn't like politically correct. He wrote mankind. Now they changed it for. for humankind. If you look up as well, it says humankind. Okay. So, you know, it's making it up to date. But, but it's not like translating it from Swedish. I mean, it's changing a little bit of some of the

character. That's fine. They change it to the persons, which he didn't write. Right. Yeah. So that's, as a journalist, you know, I treated it like a journal. I treated it like a scholar would. I want to go back and see, what did he want? And what moreover? Because I actually liked the Nobel Prize in a certain sense. And it's not, it's not, you know, I don't think it's fair to say only if you win a Nobel Prize can you criticize it any more than you would say not criticize, you know, the president because you're not the president, right? You don't have to be a laureate to criticize it. So I looked at it as, as, you know, as a scholastic way of saying, what did he intend? And to preserve the good things about it, as you and I both know, it has many good things.

It brings a lot of good attention to science. I'm worried what's going to happen to it is similar are things that happened to, say, Hollywood when it didn't reckon with the rampant misogyny or the, you know, even harassment that was endemic to it. And there are problems with the Nobel Prizes. And, you know, maybe hopefully it's not, although there was a sex scandal that afflicted the literature prize two years ago that caused it to be delayed, not postponed by a year. Nevertheless, I feel like, you know, who better to really kind of rally for change than someone who, you know, was in the experience and wants to use its luster.

to burnish it for its relevancy in the next century, which is what my mission, I think, is. So let's talk about it. What kind of ideas do you have? You know, let's start with women. Yeah. So when the prize was originally constructed, it was for a single person. And, you know, presumably it was meant in the beginning to recognize inventions and awards. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in addition to 355 other things. and he was one of the richest people in the world, and he wanted to quickly disseminate scientific knowledge that could be used for practical purposes. Later on, that changed, and I'm fine with that,

that it changed to more pure research. That's what I do, after all, and less applied, although the first one was for the X-ray, invention of the X-ray machine, basically by Rankin, and so on. And I think with the later changes to the prize have come this sort of effect that's known, at least in many circles, as the Matilda effect, where a woman will make a discovery, and those discoveries will be later attributed to her, you know,

sort of male partner, colleagues in the case of Rosalind Franklin, or her male PhD advisor. And that's a really serious thing. I have multiple female graduate students. And I'm very proud of my first, the first graduate student I have had to go on to become a professor as a woman. And she has a graduate student who's a woman. So I'm the grand graduate advisor of two women, of a woman and her advisor. and knowing how difficult it is challenging to be a woman in science. They still make up a very small percentage of the overall faculty,

but they only make up less than a percent of all the laureates that have won Nobel Prizes. Part of that trace is to the fact that there is a sort of old boys network at work. There's a Swedish Royal Academy who has ultimate authority over things. It's basically mostly men in Swedish Academy of Sciences, 500 or so people. But they also enlist outside experts, such as myself, to nominate women. And then there's one class of nominators who's always eligible. And that's if you've won a Nobel Prize in the past. This is all in the letter to me asking me to nominate.

Most of them are men. It's the lemmermen. And they have a network and there's been a studies done on the probability enhancement of either working for a Nobel Prize winner or advising a Nobel Prize winner. And that's the Matthew effect. That's the rich get richer. So there's two effects, Matthew and Matilda effects that are both come into play that I think do serve. And there's a very simple way to record.

this. There's nothing in the Nobel Prize statutes. They changed the laws in 1974 to prevent posthumous awards. So it's too late for Rosalind Franklin. It's too late for Ria Rubin. They tarried too long. But it's not too late for Jocelyn Bell. I've talked to my physicists, even my friends and colleagues like, you know, Lisa Randall up at Harvard. And, you know, she agrees with a lot of it. She wrote a very powerful op-ed after Vera Rubin died. But I said to, you know, I said to her, and I've said to other people, you know, I said, why make me the argument that that, that, that Jocelyn Bell can't win the Nobel Prize. Oh, it was already awarded to her.

Oh, yeah, I forgot. Newton's eighth law is that once you've won a Nobel Prize for a category, you get, no, of course not. And people say, oh, because she was a graduate student, but I point out many graduate students have won Nobel Prize. Last year's physics. Yes, exactly. She was a graduate student. There's nothing that prevents them from going back. And I challenge them to do that.

And there's, even in their own stipulations, they could go back tomorrow and award a Nobel Prize. Why don't they do it? I think it's because, you know, it's a monopoly. Let's face it. The fact that you and I want to preserve that monopoly is, you know, is, you know, it's kind of understandable. But it doesn't necessarily take away from the fact that most monopolies are concerned with maintaining their monopoly. And it is the most prestigious award. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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Maximum of three, not three author, but three laureates. In any given year, in any given field. So why three? Right. Originally was one. Right. Right. So why did they stop at three?

Why not five? Or why not an entire institution? The Peace Prize has gone to institutions. And the CERN won a physics prize, if I remember. No, they haven't won a physics prize. No group has ever won a physics prize. It's only been individuals. So they, you know, might have been like a UN nuclear organization or something like that.

But that's exactly right. So nowadays, I'm honored to be the director. of the Simon's Observatory, which is 260 people on 40 different institutions around the world. And, you know, I can't point to any one of them. I had dinner with Barry Barish and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for the Lago experiment. And he said, you know, there were probably like 200 people on that experiment who deserved the Nobel Prize. I said, well, Barry, you know, you could have turned it down. You know, whatever.

I love him. He's a sweet guy. But the fact is that it has so much prestige, it's very hard to do things to agitate. for change if you're kind of enmeshed in that system. And I said, you know, if you lost any one of these thousand, forty-eight people that were on the LIGO team, you know, could the experiment have been pulled off? And he said, well, maybe one or two, but not like 200. And then you come into this calculus.

This happened to my late professor at Brown, Jerry Goralnik, who was one of the authors of the Higgs mechanism that basically led to what we call the Higgs boson discovery in 2012 that was awarded to none of the scientists who discovered the Higgs boson. So you get this very awkward parceling of credit. And so then people say, again, they say, well, it would really dilute the prestige of it. Well, I don't really think so. By the way, you know, if you win, the smallest fraction of a Nobel Prize you can win is actually a quarter. So one person can win half and two can get the other quarter each.

But nobody ever says, hmm, you know, Arno Penzias, you know, you only won a quarter of a Nobel Prize. We're not going to put you at the head of Bell Laboratories. We're not going to name a street after you in New Jersey. You know, it's just, it's kind of ridiculous. So there's nothing that prevents him from doing it. And in fact, many of the modern prizes, like the breakthrough prize, which Lady Jocelyn Bell won about a year ago, can be awarded to hundreds of people. And I think there doesn't dilute from it, as has been shown with the IPCC who won it in 2006 along with Al Gore in the Peace Prize. There's nothing that prohibits it.

You know, baseball has, well, I'm jumping the gun because I wanted to get to the posthumous aspect. Yeah, right. And point out that, you know, baseball, when they're there are a committee. for the Hall of Fame voting that go back and look at eras in baseball long gone and say, well, who did we miss who really belongs in the Hall of Fame? And so you're proposing sort of a similar kind of thing. That's right. Retroactive, there's nothing against it. It would only burnish their reputation. So you give Einstein, you can give him seven. Galileo, you know, give the literature prize to Shakespeare a few times. So where do you

Where do you actually make that fact? Right. Yeah. I think it's, it's, you know, it's something that I think distorts the way that science is done for bidding posthumous prizes. In the fact that, for example, in 2017, again, Barry Barrier's friend of mine won the Nobel Prize. He would not have won the Nobel Prize. According to his own admission, if the Nobel Prize had been awarded in 2016. And the reason it wasn't awarded in 2016 is because the LIGO team made their announcement 10 days or 11 days after the deadline had passed for nominations for 2016.

So I was actually asked to nominate the 2016 Nobel Prize winners. I was waiting for a lot because there were rumors swirling around here and on the internet and elsewhere that there was a detection and that this would be the one of the greatest discovery since Galileo. But they didn't announce it and I had to send in my nomination form before the end of the month of January. 16 days later or whatever was 10 days later, they made a press release that they had detected gravitational waves from a galaxy 1.2 billion light years away. traveling at the speed of light, gravitational waves, propagate at the speed of light. They eventually came into the LIGO detectors in Hanford and in Louisiana, and they ended up making this detection. But if they had come in 10 days earlier, I would have made a nomination, presumably, and many, many others. I think that's why they asked me, that would have included a man by the name of Ron Drever, who is a Caltech physicist, widely credited as being part of the Troika, as Jan 11 describes in her wonderful book called Black Hole Blues.

they were called the Troika, these three physicists, Ray Weiss, Kip Thorne, who did win the Nobel Prize, and Ron Dreiber. But for the fact that Ron Drever died in March of 2017. So if the black hole had spiraled together with his companion, 11 days earlier and history played out, and there's no reason to say the Monte Carlo simulation wouldn't take place, right? He wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize. Instead, they go through all these gymnastics in the documentation

to award it to Barry instead of to, Ron Drever posthumously. And I just think it's a shame. So there have been posthumous prizes, two of which have gone to a Swedish gentleman in the past, Dag Hammershold and another man, and won for the Medicine Prize as well. So there's precedent for it. There's no reason they could have done that. They shouldn't have done that for this physics prize, for example. I feel like it did rewrite history in a certain way and presumably for Vera Rubin as well. Yeah. I remember the Medicine Prize. It was only a few years ago, and their controversy was whether he died two or three days prior to the announcement.

Yes. And there was controversy as to whether the family had maybe kept that quiet in the hopes that he would be named a Nobel laureate that year. And at that point, it would be too late to not give it to him just because he was dead. Yes. And that's, you know, the reality is they decided once they announced it and it was determined that he had died just. you know, literally, you know, maybe 55 hours earlier, they decided to allow him to still be a recipient. And, you know, whether or not the family did that is up to speculation. Yeah.

But he did become a posthumous winner of the prize. And so if they can do things on compassionate grounds, what would be wrong with doing it on, you know, ethical grounds of people that like Rosalind Franklin, who really was, you know. And back then, you know, so I wrote this article for this. online magazine called The Conversation. And it was the first time, to my knowledge, that anyone from the Royal Academy, let alone their secretary, who's Gustav Hansen, Gordon Hansen, sorry, he criticized my essay. And he's, of course, defending it. And in his criticism, he's saying, well, what do you want us to do? Go back and give the money to Rosalind Franklin's family or take away the money from someone else. You don't think should have won. And I'm like, you're making it all about money.

That's hardly the reason that people want to win the Nobel Prize, right? It's worth a tenth, potentially, of what the breakthrough prize is worth if you win it solely. And so I feel like that's kind of, you know, describing these venality to scientists, which isn't really there. On the other hand, the prestige, the honor, the dominance, the kind of perspective that one gets when they do become elected to this, you know, ultimate kind of pantheon of scientific heroism, I think that has a huge impact on science and the public's perception of science. So your book has a lot of prescriptions that I'm pessimistic that anybody in a position to act on them will until a day comes perhaps when the prize seems to be losing its prestige. And maybe that's already started because every year when the prizes are announced, you'll see a whole bunch of commentary about why this is an outdated idea and why it should be abolished. and why people shouldn't pay attention to it. And yet, it's the only time when you will hear a chemistry or a physics story.

Yeah. Not so much with medicine, but on the news round up at 8 a.m. On your CBS radio station. Right. Yeah. You know, you're never going to hear a physics story other than Nobel Prizes were announced. Right. Absolutely. So that's why you use the luster to burnish the image so that it doesn't become irrelevant.

That's my hope. I feel about it as well. And also, you know, you talk about Einstein. Einstein makes the prize prestigious, not the other way around. Correct. Correct. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's people wanting that kind of, you know, association.

And ironically, as I pointed out in the book, he was denied for many years because of his Jewish heritage. Yeah. This is a really interesting chapter in history that if people don't know about. The theoreticians, it was called Jewish physics. Yeah. And there were a lot of people working to, uh, try to deny Nobel Prizes to that field and those people. Correct.

And I think, you know, when you look back in history and thank God, you know, there's no branch of Aryan physics as, you know, Hitler maintained with previous experimentalists who were the real physicists, the Aryan physicists. Thank goodness. But, you know, the past, it was plagued by this, by this racism, my anti-Semitism. Why is it so hard to think that it could suffer maybe from problems of misogyny or from discrimination? I mean, no African American.

And I was just the honor to be inducted into the National Society of Black Physicist. As an honorary member. As an honorary member. I am not black. That's correct. I was an honor, I elected as honorary lifetime member. And I look at it and how painful it is that there are brilliant physicists that should have been recognized that aren't.

And, you know, they're working to change that. And I think, you know, in some sense, one of my goals with the book was to, you know, write the book I wish I could have read years ago. And I got very high praise from a female reader who read it and said, I wish you wrote your book 10 years earlier. because when I was in college, my father said, you're never going to win a Nobel Prize. You just don't have what it takes. So maybe you shouldn't go into science at all. And she became a phenomenal science writer and everything. But by the same token, physics, what did astronomy miss out on?

We don't, we'll never know. And it's because of this almost idolatrous respect that we hold the Nobel Prize in for. And they're just people like me and you and, you know, they're normal people. They put their pants on, you know, they go and they have trouble deciding on which entree to choose at breakfast a daily event. So I think to hold them up on this panthe, it's not fair to them either. You also in the book, this is one more interesting thing I'd like to talk about in terms of modifying how the prize would be awarded. You would like to award the Nobel Prize for discoveries made serendipitously rather than looking for a particular thing. Yeah.

I think some of the purest discoveries are those that, you know, like we discussed making independently or Galileo's. discoveries, Hubble's discovery of the expanding universe, Vera Rubin's discovery of dark matter, et cetera, et cetera, and dark energy discovery, as we've already discussed, that there's a purity to that type of discovery because you're not looking for something. And because you're not looking for something, you're not susceptible to an inevitable bias and a prejudice that sneaks into all scientists' minds, which is called confirmation bias, the tendency to see evidence as confirming what you believe. and discrepant evidence as being an aberration, you throw it out.

There's many different names for this. There's ways to hack, you know, results. And it's very pernicious because it's very tempting, especially when you have things like the Nobel Prize at stake. You talk about Ome in the book. Yeah, I talk about Ed Ome. This is not Ome from the resistor. Right. Correct.

Yeah. So Ed Ome was a scientist operating at Bell Labs in Hombone, New Jersey in the early 60s who made a discovery, but he instead described that discovery to a much more prosaic source, which was noise in the instrument. And he had been doing so lost his own Nobel Prize to Penzias and Wilson, who then capitalized on a new technology using this type of amplifier that they were able to build and did very careful calibration to show that he had not made an error at all. Actually, he had discovered the cosmic microwave background, but he didn't realize it or maybe he was scared to actually, you know, interpret further or he had to get it out for one reason or another. He had data points he decided not to include because he didn't believe them. Yeah, he shifted the error bars, which is something we teach our undergrads never to do. And I think it's, I think it points to the fact that, well, if you're looking for something, a lot of times you find it. And there's a temptation to do that with people you meet.

You might have racial prejudices and things like that. Those are very pernicious and they're harmful to society. In science, it's very pernicious as well to allow your own personal predilections, whether it's for the purity of the scientific quest, like, oh, I really want to be the first person to discover this. Or it's the, you know, it's the impurity in a certain sense. I want to win a Nobel Prize. I mean, I was told early on to get tenure. I have to be on a short track, a short list of people that could win a Nobel Prize.

To get funding for an experiment has to be a field that's worthy of a Nobel Prize. And so all those things, I, you know, it's been the most controversial suggestion, I think, to say that. But I think, you know, in some sense, it actually would bring back some purity to the, Now, there's no law that says you have to give the Nobel Prize every year either, right? There's no law of nature that says it. I'm a professional physicist saying that. So I think that there's a tremendous backlog of serendipitous things that we have not awarded that because there's, you know, like the Higgs boson, you know, that was something that they looked for. They knew it would be there.

The theorist made a theoretical serendipitous discovery, including my late professor, Jerry Garalick. So I do think that that in terms of being a purist in comparing apples to apples, the things like. that Alfred Nobel wanted to recognize were discoveries or inventions. Inventions by definition are new things that had not existed before. So I think that would be restoring as I act as like an executor of his will. Part of that is to say kind of get into his mind. What did he really want to do? And I took it very seriously because as a nominator, you know, as somebody, you know,

somebody, we're all going to die. And I thought, well, what if I have this will and the will has a twofold heterodoxical kind of component? One is practical, money is given away, but the other is for ethical reasons, which is to benefit the world. What if I felt like, you know, my wishes in either case weren't being obeyed? I mean, either one, I'd be upset, let alone both of them. So I do kind of feel like getting back to the purity of it. That would be one attempt and it would remove a lot of bias and potentially award people like Rosalind Franklin, like Vera Rubin, like Jocelyn Bell, that made purely, you know, purely serendipitous discoveries, inarguably. Yeah. So let's get back to the what happened with Bicep.

Yeah. And you have just an amazing line of the book, The Dust was the Dust and the Plank was the Plank. It's so good. It won't make sense to you, listener right, right now, but after you tell the story, maybe it will. Right. So, yeah, I tell kind of a convoluted history of my own excursions into religion. You know, but the only one I'll really get into right now is that,

You know, the book is kind of a memoir. It's not just a pure popular science book. It's really a memoir of what it's like to strive for anything, come up short, and then literally dust yourself off and get back to work. But I always wondered, you know, why is it that we are so obsessed with this question of what happened at the very beginning? And I always say to people, you know, what's the most important day on the calendar to you or just for you personally?

Your birthday, right? So why is it? Because that's when you came into existence. As if like the world starts spinning the day you're born, right? Wait, wait, wait. My wife's birthday. Yes, exactly. Let's edit that out. Yeah, our anniversary. Right, exactly. So, but again, that's a beginning, right? Either one of those is the beginning. But in the case of the universe, it's not clear. Maybe the universe didn't have a beginning. Maybe it had an infinite number of them. Maybe it did have one. And what could be a bigger question than that, as evidenced by the, you know, the number one bestselling book of all time, right? The Bible. That starts with the beginning of everything. And the question is, why? And I'm, you know, I'm not here to, I don't care if people believe or not. But, but. But the point is, it's the biggest question of all because it's really, without that question, existence is meaningless.

Like, we wouldn't be here to even be asking the question if the universe didn't exist. So I was always fascinated by these big questions. And I was also obsessed with winning a Nobel Prize for a large portion of my early scientific career. When I started at Brown University in 1993, Russell Hulls and Joe Taylor won the Nobel Prize for discovery of pulsars, emitting gravitational waves. So pulsars and Russell Hulse was a graduate student at the time he made the third. this discovery. So just like Jocelyn Bell, except he was a man. But anyway, the discovery really pointed out to me, hey, I could be doing work right now that could lead to a Nobel Prize.

And everyone was a buzz. We had a Nobel Prize winning professor, Leon Cooper. And, you know, there's kind of saturation with this. This is like the All-Star team, you know, the baseball All-Star team. This is, you know, a much smaller group of people are physics laureates than MLB All-Stars. And the question became, you know, what could I do to do that? That would also satisfy, this thirst I had to answer the biggest questions available. And that was to go back to the very beginning of time, potentially, if time indeed had a beginning. And so after graduating from Brown, I moved to Stanford and spent way too much time thinking

about this idea to build a telescope that could see these waves of gravity imprinted on the oldest photons in the universe. And those are called the cosmic microwave background photons. And these photons could be encrypted with a signature of early primordial waves of gravity. Remember, this is before the LIGO direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015. This is 2001. And by then I moved to Caltech and I work with my late advisor, Professor Andrew Lang, and he and others encouraged me to put together proposals. And we wrote very successful proposals to get funding, including from David Baltimore, the president then of Caltech Nobel laureate in biology or in medicine physiology.

And they gave us the seed corn like the Medici family to build a refracting telescope, which we took to the bottom of the bottom of the body. the world, Antarctica. Fast forward, you know, three or four years later, we built an upgrade to it. That was called Bicep 2. It was called Bicep because I wanted to be evocative of the fact that what we're looking for are curling, twisting patterns of polarization. It's just like, you know, I'm told when you go to the gym, you curl with your bicep. And it was an acronym that stands for background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization. And that instrument was situated at the South Pole. It was a small refractor. It's, you know, bigger than a refractor you could buy comfortably for optical use, but for microwaves, it was cheap. It was about a foot in diameter, the lenses,

and it had these incredible detectors that were cooled down to almost absolute zero, making them the most sensitive detectors possible for waves of light that would be encrypted with signatures of waves of gravity. The logical syllogism that was being drawn by many people was that if you detected these waves of gravity and the cosmic scale, that they would be indicative harbingers of an earlier epoch of inflation. And if inflation, were true, then the multiverse hypothesis would have its first true experimental observational support. And so the stakes really couldn't be higher. The multiverse hypothesis being that our universe like our planet is not the only planet,

our galaxy is not the only galaxy. So maybe our universe is one of an infinite number of other universes. And that seems to be inevitable in most models of inflation. So the stakes couldn't be higher. We set out, we made the measurements from the same location at the South Pole where I've been a couple times. And the team was about 50 people and all were essential to building this experiment, analyzing its data. And we took data for a combined total of six years. And then we analyzed that data. It took us about a year. And we kept seeing the signal. We weren't, you know, we weren't

ignorant that it was there. And we tried to explain it by every other means possible. We tried to explain it by, you know, contamination from the earth or from radio stations or whatever. and also from the galaxy. We knew the galaxy had potential contamination source due to the fact that our galaxy contains many stars and after a few billion years, a lot of stars blow up in spectacular fashion and they pollute the interstellar medium

with micrometeorites with tiny little pieces of magnetized dust. And those dust grains, because of the last product that a supernova makes before it explodes cataclysmically, those can get aligned in the Milky Way's magnetic field, which everything known that we can see with telescopes or on Earth has a magnetic field. That magnetic field can orient the dust grains, and they can then emit, like little tiny radiators, polarized, curled, twisted microwaves.

We knew that. The problem was we didn't have data at more than one frequency, and you need multiple frequencies to see both the cosmic background radiation and the dust signature. And so we thought we could rule it out theoretically. And then we noticed that there was our competitor who was really breathing down, are next, but from a million miles away from Earth, called the Planck satellite. And this is a European Space Agency primarily led project launched in 2009, built in a large part with resources from my late advisor, Andrew Lang, and others at Caltech, JPL. And they had been observing for as

many, you know, many years as well. And they had forecast that they could detect these signatures if we could detect them. But they also had the advantage they had these other data that we could look at to reject the hypothesis that dust was causing the signal. So we begged them. We pleaded with them. Please give us the data. And they refused. And so I being kind of a suspicious person, paranoid person and others started to think, well, maybe they have the data that proves that these B mode curl mode polarization patterns that we're all seeking. They have that. And so they're not going to share the data with us. I mean, we wouldn't share it. So I kind of felt like they were being, you know, kind of bad poker players. They could have bluffed and said,

we'll get it to you someday or whatever. Why do you want to know? But actually, it turns out that they didn't have the data from the Big Bang potential gravitational wave signature, but they did have the dust data. And we realized that they had present, someone had presented a talk. A member of the plank team had presented the talk. And by law, they have to post their slides online. And so we actually took a image of their slide and digitized it and turned a qualitative

image into a quantitative one and used that to really give us more confirmation that the models that we had used and the best data that we had already existing were correct. So it was kind of like an additional data point. It really wasn't the only data point. In the end, it turned out that what we had seen was dust, that we had actually detected very sensitive dust detector in addition to, you know, other types of signals that could lurk in there. You can't rule out that we did detect these gravitational waves, but they were subdominate to the dust curl patterns that we had hoped that we had rejected. So then about five, five, or six months after the initial paper release, we started working hand and glove with the

plank team. And together, the two teams showed that what Bicep had announced as evidence for the imprimatur of inflation was in fact dust. And that was, you know, humiliating on one hand. It was an example of humility on another hand. And it was an example of good science because we were working, you know, as I said, hand and glove with this team that had been our competitors. And because of that, the synergy between the two. Now, do I wish that we had known this before we had the release in 2014? Of course. But, you know, that hindsight was clouded by these dust clouds, right? So I think the lesson to take away is that Bicep was in a phenomenally successful experiment. It is still going on. It has been upgraded many times. It has the best limits on these gravitational waves that have

ever been made. And it now has capability to see dust as well. So in the end, we've taken, you know, we've dusted ourselves off and we've made these really tremendous technological leaps. And they've become the foundation. I'm not so involved with the Bicep experiment anymore. I joke, you know, my next book is going to be called a farewell to arms. Because I'm not in Bicep anymore. But I think that title might be taken. But anyway, the experiment goes on and has led to a huge influence on my field of cosmic microbe background polarization,

including my current experiment, the Simon's Observatory, and experiments going on in China and on balloons and going to be in space soon. So it's phenomenally, and it's not like we made a blunder. We didn't leave the lens cap on. We didn't claim we saw faster than light neutrinos and things you've reported about. It was good data. It was great data. I mean, we detected a signal, and it's true.

It happened to be an astrophysical signal, not a cosmic signal. That's at the level of a few parts per billion of the surrounding temperature, even at the South Pole. It's just, it's a, no one could have predicted this. If you ask Penzias and Wilson today in 1965, could you foresee this? And they'd say, no way, because it requires faster than Moore's law, even, growth of detectors and sensitivity. Thanks to my colleagues, this has been just a tremendous progress. So just to wrap it up for the listeners, you have the Bible quote. So, right.

So in the New Testament, Jesus implores people basically not to be hypocrites. He tells people, this is not my tradition, but he does tell people, he says, you go around criticizing the speck of dust in your neighbor's eye while all the while you have a plank meaning a log in your own right it's often you call the beam the beam right but it's also called a plank plank yes the plank in your own eye right and then you say in our case in our case it was plank with a sea like max plank and the plank uh the plank telescope that's right in our case the dust was dust actual dust yeah and the plank was plank right it's great it's This was great fun.

Yeah, that's a pleasure to meet you finally. I'm talking. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure, Steve. Thank you so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening. Keep in touch, inspired and informed by signing up for Professor Keating's Monday Magic email at briankeeting.com slash list.

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