Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Nobel Prize Winner Rainer Weiss: Feeling Spacetime Shudder: Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Nobel Prizes! (#105)

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

MIT Physics Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss won a 1/2 share of The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 For his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. He was born in Berlin, where his father was a doctor and psychoanalyst and his mother an actress. His father was of Jewish descent, and the family fled Nazism to the United States. After schooling in New York, Weiss studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctor’s degree in 1962. After a couple of years at Tufts University and Princeton University, he returned to MIT, which he has been associated with ever since. Rainer Weiss is married and has a daughter and a son. Professor Weiss’ Nobel winning work come out of one consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the existence of gravitational waves. These are like ripples in a four-dimensional spacetime that occur when objects with mass accelerate. The effects are very small. Beginning in the 1970s the LIGO detector was developed. In this detector laser technology is used to measure small changes in length caused by gravitational waves. Rainer Weiss has made crucial contributions to the development of the detector. In 2015 gravitational waves were detected for the first time. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:08:00 Concerns about Getting The Nobel Prize 00:12:55 Imposter Syndrome? You too!? 00:18:46 Theorists V Experimentalists pros and cons 00:23:22 Thoughts on STEM Pedagogy 00:27:21 Essential Skills: using your hands and the role of electronics surplus and music. 00:33:39 Dropping Out And Finding MIT and Atomic Clocks 00:35:52 Philosophy of Experimental Science 00:39:44 Thinkng about Einstein-What’s his most cited paper and why? 00:40:54 How do you know when to quit an experiment? 00:42:26 On LIGO and the art and science of detecting weak signals. 00:48:02 Did you have doubts about detecting gravitational waves? Thoughts on Eisntein’s original work on general relativity. 01:00:00 The nature of scientific collaborations (and rivalries). 01:21:00 The circular logic of singularity theory. 01:22:38 What if there was no big bang? 01:26:56 Why did your MIT Dean draw a huge zero? 01:28:10 Staying at MIT 01:30:34 What’s it like to work on “fringe” projects? 01:33:39 Can experiments get too big? 01:40:00 What would you do with your own billion year time capsule? 01:41:00 What advice would you give your younger self? Watch my most popular videos: Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose https://youtu.be/H8G5onAqlVo?sub_confirmation=1 Juan Maldacena’s First Podcast Interview: https://youtu.be/uIzTliTHn7s?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM ‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each year on December 10, thousands of worshippers convene in Scandinavia to commemorate the death of a man once known as the merchant of death. This categorical ritual features all the rites and incantations befitting a pharaoh's funeral, haunting Durge's play. As the worshippers, be decked in mandatory regalia mourn the merchant. He is eerily present. His visage looms large over the congregants as they feast an exotic game, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers, imported from the deceased merchant of death's mausoleum. The event culminates with the presentation of gilded graven images bearing his likeness. This ritual is, of course, the annual Nobel Prize award ceremonies held every year not on the date of Alfred Nobel's birth, but on December. 10th, the day he left this mortal coil. And today you're in for a treat, a conversation with a very alive, Ray Weiss, who those of us who know him, know him to be nothing, if not, incredibly,

incredibly interesting, provocative, mercurial, mischievous, and an all-around delight. I talked to him about so many things in this wide-ranging interview. It's really one of the highlights of my career, and it's fitting we did so on December 10th, which is, today. The anniversary of the great Alfred Nobel's last breath on this planet. I heard some never before discussed stories about some of the personalities behind the pursuit of gravitational waves, ranging back even to Einstein's Day, but even closer to in time to people who sadly as well have passed away, including Joe Weber and

Ron Drever, who are characters in my book as well in losing the Nobel Prize, as well as in other accounts of the famous story of detection of gravitational waves from black holes in 2015 and 2016 in the announcement that reverberated around the planet, resulting in Nobel prizes for three gentlemen, two of whom I have now had on the show, and the third one, Kip Thorne, I'm hoping to have on in the near future. You're going to hear Ray. advice for life and he's a real live wire. He talks incessantly and persuasively about why it's important to do something you're curious about, even if it means that you change directions in your career every five years, re-evaluating these fundamental questions that Ray will always ask himself. Even now,

at age 88, he is still going strong, he is still sharp as attack. What are those questions? tune in and you'll find out. And you'll also find out about lessons that you can apply, even if you're not a physicist looking for wispy imprints of the Big Bang in my case or in Ray's case of collisions of massive stars, billions of light years away from Earth. You'll learn about how to form a team of rivals, how to persist when those rivals seemingly turn their backs on you and maybe even in the whole project you agreed to go ahead with. I'll also learn about his upbringing and how different it was and how you can get a little taste of the kind of curiosity that he had and instill that either in yourself or also in your children or people that you

are close to, young people that you are close to, to keep your projects, your science, your research, whatever you're doing to keep it interesting and fun. And these are the key traits and takeaways you're going to learn on this episode. I had just such a spectacular time Ray is a hero of mine. And I can't wait. You're going to hear about his new book that's coming out, written with Barry Barish, past guest on The Into the Impossible podcast, as well as Kip Thorne, who I do hope to get on the podcast.

You'll hear some other Nobel list name dropped, but not for merely the sake of name dropping, but to really investigate what's wrong with the Nobel Prize and how is Ray personally going about trying to rectify the various ills that he perceives existing within the current Nobel Prize structure. Nevertheless, he still believes it's crucially important, and it's hard to argue with him. I tried my best. I didn't succeed, but I hope you'll enjoy going into the impossible with none other than the legendary Professor Ray Weiss. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But I do want to start, so I'll start now by welcoming everybody to this episode of the

Into the Impossible podcast. I am your fearful host, Brian Keating, during these pandemic podcasts. Today, it's quite a treat to talk to a hero of mine, although he doesn't remember it. We've met a few times at MIT when I've had the honor of visiting there and speaking there, but I left my normal insignificant impression upon him, as I do on many people. But it's quite a thrill to have none other than Ray Weiss, a legend in his own time. Ray, welcome. Where are you joining us from today? Well, I'm at home in Newton, but let me correct something that you said. I didn't remember. remember, but now you tell me, yes, of course I remember. Okay. But we never worked together. That's what,

and that to me is the thing that makes me really memorable, have memorable things, okay. Well, I know you gave a colloquium, but I, you know, okay. Right, yeah. You, you fell asleep after Alan Gooth fell asleep. No, I didn't know. Alan always falls asleep. I never fall asleep. I mean, listen, that's something else. Exactly. Well, right, you have been a mentor. And in many ways, I wish that I had work with you or had the chance to work with you. And, you know, who knows, maybe I'll, I'll help proofread your upcoming book. But I want to introduce you. So Ray Wise born September 1932 is an American physicist, known for his contributions to

gravitational physics and astrophysics. He's a professor emeritus at MIT. And so he's one of the leaders of the LIGO experiment for which he received a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. So Ray, as you know, today is December 10th. Do you recall where you were two years ago on this date? The only reason why I think I might remember is because you ask. I think it has to do with Nobel Prize because a lot of what you're thinking about.

But I wouldn't have known that unless you would ask that. And it's actually not, it is the typical day, is the day that you received the Nobel Prize, of course, in Stockholm in 2017. But it's also the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. I always find it interesting. Oh, I did not know that. Okay. Yeah, they give away the Nobel Prize. is not on his birthday, as a sane society might do, but on the day of his death, it's kind of

a scatological, as they say. Well, what did he want to know? I mean, what did he start? You started dynamite, right? That's right. So you've got to be careful with a guy like that. Exactly. And actually, he started the prize.

It's rumored. I talk about this in my book, that he started the prize out of some sense of guilt that he had for both the destructive power of dynamite, but also because his brother died, his older brother, Ludwig, died in 1888. And the Parisian newspaper in the city that he was living in Paris printed a headline that said, Alfred Nobel, the merchant of death is dead. And they were kind of gleefully celebrating Alfred Nobel's death. And so this is like, you know, Ebenezer Scrooge or, you know, somebody, George Bailey finding out and it's a wonderful life how people are going to react. And so death plays a big role in the Nobel Prize. And in fact, I do want to talk to you about the death of your colleague,

Grandriever, you know, who even Barry, you know, I had a conversation with Barry Barish, your colleague and friend. And I want to talk to you first and foremost, what is the best aspect of winning a Nobel Prize and what's the worst? I've heard you describe it in German as, you know, it's an additional thing in German, which I can't pronounce, but there's some word in German like crank or bag. Not that's too. I mean, but in addition, but no, look, it's a complicated story. And I'll let me be dead honest with you. When I was younger and, And I had never had much interest in the Nobel Prize. It was not something on my mind.

And even when it happened, I had double feelings about it. And I'll tell you what it is. And it's something that you may, because you are close to it too, have worried about, is that how do you now, and I'm not saying anything profound that others haven't said, but it's got to be said. And that is in our day and age, when you're talking about people, you're a member of, I don't know how many people in your group, several hundred in the, okay, I'm in a thing which has certainly from Caltech and MIT alone, 50 or so people, and then a collaboration which consists of another thousand or so. That, these are the people who actually, I didn't, not that I didn't do something too, but this was a great big group of people. And it's sort of awkward for to be pulled out of that group and given something, which is actually a group effort.

And I know that that's part of the mystique of this thing. And it's part of the thing. It's the hardest to really come to grips with. I mean, the thing is how when you now have a large scientific effort going on, and that's true whether you're doing cosmic background work or the B modes or the cosmic, almost almost any large project nowadays. It was not thought about by Nobel, if that's the person we have to blame or give the credit to,

it's not the way we do science anymore that is an individual who is the person who is responsible. In fact, I think that they must have a terrible time, especially the committees that look at this, to decide who, and they must do terrible investigations to find out, well, you know, this guy did it and this guy did it, but he did a little more than the, I mean, I can imagine the argument.

that go on in the Nobel Prize committee meetings. I've been on others, so I know the Gruber Prize, for example. I know exactly what goes on. And so it's very awkward then to be in a pulled out. And the only way I came to terms with it is to say, I can't change the way the world goes. But I can try to make myself into something which is halfway believable. Namely, I can be a symbol for the others.

Yes. And that's the only way I can take that thing, okay? in all your talks, in all your talks, including your TED Talk, you first and foremost, always give credit to the team and say, basically, you're a stand-in cut out for the rest of the... Yeah, but it's true. It's true. It's not just the crazy modesty. It's true. And I understand why they can't do it. Now, I know the people who are trying to get around that, and I wish them luck is the breakthrough people. Yeah. They're trying to do it with the whole team, and I'm very pleased that they can do that. But it does, and I had discussions with the people, and I had discussions with

people in Nobel Committee when I was there about this. Not that, look, I'm sure everybody who parts a part of a team has that kind of feeling. Yeah. And actually, the Peace Prize is won by team. It was won by a team this year, the World Food Program. Right. Right. Well, yeah.

So the thing is that, that, so that's a complicated thing, is a complexity that comes with it for an experimenter. The good parts of it is, and I think the world needs certain symbols. And the symbols in this case are symbols that here is something that, The society thinks is something that they relish. They think it's good. And they have given it as a thing, as a symbol to that science is something which the society badly wants and loves.

And that piece of it is the part that we all share. So you don't want to screw it up by dumping on it. And that's one of the things that is very tricky about this. And the thing is that part of it being able to talk to people, especially high school kids, grade school kids, they're all over you because I've got Nobel Prize a big deal, you know. But on top of that, I've done this for years, even way before the Nobel Prize, I've been talking to kids in high schools and grade schools because I love to do it. But now it has a significance that they take a little more, let's say they're a little more,

they're a little more serious about it. And I hope I convince some people that they ought to go into science, you know? I mean, that's worth something. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think, you know, it's so striking to me. I asked two of your colleagues and friends, one, your colleague at MIT, Frank Wilczek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize. And I asked your friend Barry Barish, a co-winner with you, I asked them, do you ever suffer

from the imposter syndrome? Oh, of course. And only one of the two of them said yes. And I want to ask you, which one do you think said yes? And then do you suffer from the imposter syndrome? I suffered for it right away. I can tell you where I cannot guess between Frank and and Barry. I don't want to challenge that one.

You tell me, okay. I, because I know them, I know Barry well and I don't know Wilchuk so well. Okay. And I mean, Wilchek's a very bright man and I love to listen to him talk. He's just full of ideas. And Barry is a superb physicist and an organizer par excellence. But so I don't, you tell me, but what, what, What the imposter thing was, I'll tell you, I think we all share that, what most of us do,

is that you go to this thing. And I was remember looking at the king. See, I'll tell you a little bit, maybe you know all the mores of this. There were three of us. It's in our case, okay? And the oldest one of us is the one who goes first. I don't know if you know that. No, I didn't know that. I knew that you went first, right? Yeah, you had to go from the oldest one went first. So that you were breaking all the ground. and my deepest worry was that when I got to the king who was standing there,

looking like he badly needed a smoke. You know, I mean, he wasn't old and tottering, but he looked to me very uncomfortable. I said, and here is this heavy thing that is holding, and how we can make sure that neither of us dropped the goddamn thing, okay? And so my worry was, let's make sure we don't screw up either of us. And that was my biggest thinking as I was walking, toward the guy. And then walking away from him, I says, this is ridiculous. I mean, look,

where does I, how do I fit in the same group as Heisenberg or, you know, or Fermi or, you name it. I mean, this is a completely, you know, nonsense. And so that's where the imposter thing comes in. Yeah, that's what Barry said too. Barry said he, he looked and he saw this little guy, he saw the signature of this guy in a book. I guess you have to sign this book. take delivery of your law and and barry said um no i didn't i i couldn't take it i got and i got goosebumps thinking about you know barry we all have tremendous respect for for barry and if this guy has imposter syndrome what help is there for me and then i talked to frank a day or two later and i said frank you discovered the phenomenon that would eventually lead to your Nobel prize when

you were 21 or 22 you didn't receive that Nobel prize until you were 50 something years old 31 years later in 2004, was that excruciating for you? And how did you deal with it? And he had already said that he never felt the imposter syndrome. He kind of felt the anti-imposter syndrome like he knew enough that he should know even more effectively as Franks taken. And those of us who know him know that that's, you know, he's sort of this wonderkind and just, just an amazing scientist in the grand tradition. But he said that it was excruciating to wait, you know, for 30 years, plus to receive this, you know, this, I call it the golden engraven image. I have a piece of Hanukkah guilt here.

Today is also Hanukkah. So, you know, this one's about 10 years old from when I went to the gift shop there in Stockholm. But what were you there for? Well, you were there for John Mather or what? No, no, I didn't go to, I went to, there was a conference at the, at Nordita in the, in Stockholm. And I couldn't resist stopping by this about 10 years ago and kind of, you know,

dreaming about it. But it's just so interesting to think, you know, everything that you've done, it seemed like, yeah, it's sort of this additional thing that is nice. You're not going to turn it down. It's interesting. No, people have turned down the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize in literature, but no one's ever turned down a physics prize. And I wonder why that is. I also wonder why, you know, with people like Einstein, you know, who has denied it for many years, as you probably know, because of him being Jewish and practicing what was considered non-Aryan science. Well, that was part of it. No, Einstein got the award for one of his interesting stuff, but not the most important thing he'd done. Yeah. As you know, they couldn't settle on special relativity. They couldn't settle on general relativity.

I mean, that was completely off the rock. I mean, you know, nobody had really proved that that. Oh, my God, that was just too modern. No, that was the problem. The Jewish stuff came later, I think. That's at least, look, I look, I know a little because I've had, well, I mean, the people who really went after Einstein. were Stark and Abraham, not less Abraham, but mostly Stark.

And Leonard, Leonard also. And Leonard, yeah, Leonard. And they went, and Stark in particular, was particularly unattractive about this. And I hate to think of it. My thesis as a PhD thesis was measuring the Stark effect. I can never get over it. Well, I think, you know, Einstein, you know, basically provided the theoretical underpinning for the Leonard effect, you know, which is kind of ironic.

Yeah. And that's why he won the Nobel Prize, or at least. that was a citation, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion and contributions, you know, kind of a grab bag. But I want to ask you, I've been doing a lot of interviews. I've interviewed people like Carl Weiman and Wyman, rather, and then Barry. But most of I've had the chance to interview people like Adam Reese, who's an observer, and other people that are more on the theoretical side like Frank and Shelley Glashow,

crosstown rival of yours in the Boston area. And I noted that, you know, when you. hear about black holes and you hear about, you know, Einstein and wormholes and, and Roger Penrose was on the show a couple of weeks ago, too. And of course, he just won the half share of the Nobel Prize in 2020. And I wonder, why do you, what do you think is the reason that? I missed that you, you went out, we went dead for a second. Oh, sorry. I want to know, why do you think that the Nobel Prize has recognized experimentalists and, and observers much more than theorists. And yet, in the popular imagination, the theorists get a lot more attention.

I mean, Kip Thorne is known for many things, but especially his work on Interstellar, and you look at Roger Penrose and even people like Stephen Hawking making these contributions as theorists for things that were never observed, like a singularity has never been observed directly, we've never observed a wormhole,

and people will talk about it as if they're as real as the actual detections that you make. So I guess what is your take on the difference in prestige of a theory, theoretical scientist versus an experimental scientist like you or me. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe.

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I mean, I don't know enough of the history of the early Nobel Prizes, but most of the people who won Nobel Prizes in the early days, what I mean by that is before the revolution of quantum mechanics and so forth, were, well, they were, you know, pretty pedestrian. I mean, some of those things. The guy who invented a particular way of making a loud lighthouse go around. Yes, Dalan, Gustav D'Alen. Yeah, I don't know them all.

But that, you know, eventually they got around to understanding what were the things that might be considered important by others. But the thing is that I think there isn't in the physics of Europe during the epic of this, and this I do know from people like Vicky Weiskov who had lived through this and others who I know in the early days. of physics in Europe. And I mean by that, let's say the time when the photo-to-photo effect was discovered. And it was the experimenters that were considered the people who did everything. In other words, and theorists were considered something which was more mathematical. They were not really the scientists. They were, and you look ahead and you'll see, you look back.

It took a while for that group of people in Sweden to recognize theoretical. theoretical work. In the United States, it was the other way around. I think the theorists were more, at least you probably know better than I, because you've been studying this, but I think there was a higher acceptance of theorists much more quickly. And I have a funny feeling about why that might be the case. And just this is a surmise on my part. And that is that the, I'm not sure this is right, but I think it has to do an arch, an arch, an case with people who made opinions. For example, I.I. Robbie, I think, who certainly was a, forget about the Nobel Prize for a minute, was a central figure in American physics. Yeah. And when he was at Columbia, he's, Columbia was the center of physics in the country. I mean, let's face it, in the 30s, the mid 30s and so forth. And he had a, I mean, I met, I know him. I mean, I worked on stuff that he, that he had worked on too. My, it's my,

the guy who was my thesis advisor was one of his postdocs. And also later on, very much. very close friend of I.I. Robbie. So I got to meet Robbie in both as in his manic ways. And he was wild, by the way, and on top of, because he was extremely aggressive about certain things. And that's not going to all of that. But he was a very interesting person. And he began to realize that the work in this country was well divided between theory and experiment. See, a lot of stuff he was doing in the atomic beam business couldn't been, could not have been done without people like Schwinger who helped them. out. People, you know, other people who had been around understanding the quantum mechanics at a level, which was complicated, let's face it, where you had to deal with, and this wasn't just matrix

mechanics. It was quite complicated to think it through. And then all these, this Clepsch-Gordon coefficients and all this mathematics, oh my God, they needed theorists. Okay. And so instead of being the handmaiden of the experimenters, they became individuals on their own. I think that happened faster in the United States than in Europe. That's just my guess. I think that does comport with the history, at least as far as I referenced it. They actually would look down upon people that did theoretical science in Europe, you know, because real men did experimental science according to... And I, of course, I've been on the...

I mean, later when I got into my age of being in physics, I resented the theorists because they represented what was important to do. And otherwise, I always said, screw it. I have ideas about this too. Right. And, you know, my ideas, even though I can't formulate them as beautifully as you can, they're just as good. Yeah.

And I want to work on things that I'm interested in the hell with what you telling me that's more important than something else. And I had the opposite thing. I didn't like the theorists getting in the way of everything. Okay. That's my own hang up. Okay. That's a different problem.

Right. I want to talk about that in terms of pedagogy and how things have gotten, have really changed, even since I was a kid, you know, 30, 40 years ago, between then and now. I used to be able to buy a chemistry set, and it had, you know, ferric acid and then had hydrochloric, you know, it had all this stuff. Nowadays, I've got a bunch of kids and they're into chemistry. I buy them a set, and it's like, you know, this warning, do not ingest the contents of this

thing. And it's, and what are the contents? Is it, you know, hydrochloric acid? No, it's vinegar and baking soda and some chalk. And that's it. And I wonder, you go back to what you're, story, I wonder if you wouldn't mind recounting it, how you got, you know, basically battled a raging inferno to get equipment to build phonographic record players, to build stereo

high five. What have we lost with the art of tinkering? I mean, nowadays, my kids can't even work on a car. I mean, not that they're old enough to work on a car. Neither can you. I mean, I know that. That's what I'm saying. It's a goddamn computer that's killed that.

So talk about, you know, that pedagogy at the early age, your auto-didact that learned about experimental, you know, radar. from surplus kids and things that would kill you nowadays. Well, now, be careful with that. Look, I think my own instinct is I know exactly what you were saying. I mean, you used to be able to go to a drugstore and buy mercury. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, that's true.

And many of us had pockets full of mercury. I mean, you know, because it was fun to look at and it. Quicksilver, yeah. Quicksilver, of course. So anyway, no, it was a complete change. I think it has to do with lawyers. It has to do with a litigacious aspect of our country. So I don't know if it's the same in Europe.

I don't know if it's the same in China or India. That's worth finding out. But most of the people that I know of who had experiments, and this is where it's different, your kids, you buy a kit. That's because that's one way to do it. But many of the people who have gone into experimental physics, let's say a while ago, got most of their experience by being the fixer in the house, doing things.

You know, like I'm not denigrating your children because they want to work on chemistry sets. But, you know, it's always very good to have, for example, a kid who works with it in a garage, again, works with people in a garage, or works with a plumber as an apprentice, or works with an electrician as apprentice. And I think, and I recommend that over and over again when people, high school kids say to me, what should I do to be able to do physics? I said, go rent yourself off to a guy and learn something.

Yeah. Develop a trade. You had a trade at a 14-year-old, yeah. Exactly. And that then teaches you a couple of things. the most important thing is it teaches you to how to problem solve. In other words, you watch the other thing, you're something that's screwed up.

You try this, you try that, and you begin to make a Venn diagram. You don't say it that way, but you say, yep, it's none of these things. So you sit there's screw about it. And so eventually you get it. So I don't know. I mean, for example, most of the people that were in my generation

that went into physics did that kind of thing. I didn't remember having chemistry sets. That's the thing. You know, I'm not saying you shouldn't have chemistry. No, no, no, yeah. I mean, I also had, I worked on a car as a 16-year-old because I couldn't afford to get it repaired, you know. That was a 1979 car. Yeah, that was good for you.

And you learned more from that than you could imagine. That's right. Yeah. I always ask my students, you know, they send me, oh, well, I've gotten, you know, all this Java coding and I've gotten this differential geometry. I'm like, do you know how to weld? Like, tell me something cool, something interesting that you can do with your hands. And uniformly, I think they've gotten a distance from it.

but I would be remiss if I didn't ask you to talk about those useful skills that you, what drove you to do that, right? Because it's not normal, even for kids back then. I mean, they said Feynman used to fix radios and Queens by thinking about it. So he would hire himself out, and he was a theorist. And you were doing the same kind of thing, but with record players, what we used to call record players or phonographs. Talk about that and this neat kind of relationship between the microscopic vibrations of a tiny needle

and then the reverberations of space time. I mean, do you feel like there's any connection there? It seems too good to be true. You're making it too dramatic. Yeah, yeah. That's what I did. There is a connection, and people have noticed this, which I didn't realize. But it's the noise.

But that noise is the thing that kills you in one and kills you in the other two. I mean, if you're interested in music, you don't want noise. I mean, have you ever listened to a 78 record? Of course. You have. I'm not that young. Yeah. I listen to 45 also.

Well, 45 since 33s have vinyl. That's different. No, I know. I know. The old ones had, what, Sherlock or something? Well, that's right, exactly. And the Shalak records were terrible. And you noticed it, especially if you were interested in listening to slow, quiet music,

like the second movement of Beethoven Sonata. It gets destroyed by that goddamn hiss, okay? And so, you know, that was my big problem when I had to do things. No, look, I cannot tell you a good, I don't have a nice story to say of an uncle or of my father or anybody like that. why I got interested in electronics, I think it had to do with availability. It was a puzzle. It seems like it was a puzzle.

You love to solve these puzzles. No, it had to do with the end of the Second World War. All things have to do with certain events that happened. And I remember, I used to be a guy who would love to go to Cortland Street in New York. I don't know. You're not from New York. I am from New York. Oh, good.

Cortland Street is down where the world's trains. Well, no, no, it's north of the battery. But it's pretty much. much near where the World Trade Center was. And you could go down to Fort Cortland Street. During the war, you couldn't find much. But by 1944, 1945, when I was, see, I was 13, 12, something like that. And I read popular mechanics and popular science a lot.

And that kind of, those magazines, and they still exist, I think. Popular mechanics may not. And in there, you could make a relay that would keep a rat trap that would close the door when you cut the rat. I mean, we had rat problems, so we had to build things like that. Okay. So anyway, the problem, the thing was that in my case, it was simply that there was so much stuff coming back as salvage from the Second World War that it was, I just saw it on the sidewalk.

And I said, what's this? What's that? And I had friends who in those, some of the people ran those stores. Yeah, they told me, hey, we got a nice thing just came back from, you know, South Pacific. you'll have to get the varnish off it if you want to do it but we got a whole radar set there and you want you want the oscilloscope and sure i want the oscilloscope but how much is it worth oh i don't know a couple of bucks something like that i mean that was a big deal a couple of bucks oh yeah okay anyway so that's it was i don't know it was the availability i'm tell you

i don't i cannot give you a you know a specific purpose a specific source the thing is that in my life the thing that was important was music And there was at that time in New York, and I won't go into this much more, but what was the fact that all of a sudden, I didn't have the discipline to learn how to play an instrument. That takes discipline. Later on in my life, I tried to do it and still doing it, but I never got any good. I'm not really good at it. But so I was interested in what you could pick up on, you know, making electronics, because that was a lot easier than learning an instrument. And it was very, that was a lucky coincidence of three things.

that happened and that's what started the whole thing one was the junk on courtland street okay the other one was that there was a movie theater in brooklyn that had a fire behind the screen and i was able to pick up these alt-tick lansing loudspeakers by unscrewing them from the back of the screen and the third thing was that fm radio was coming in and fm radio already existed but it had become commercial and you could now pick up on fm radio which is full dynamic range and 20 hertz to 20 20 kilohertz kind of sound. And you could listen to the New York Philharmonic on the radio, and it sounded like you were right in the hall.

And that, I built several of those things with those speakers and all that stuff. And that started a business, which was never intended. I mean, I would invite other immigrant parents. You know, Europeans love music, too. I mean, many of the Jewish families that came were interested in classical music and stuff like that. I had friends who parents were. And they would come over and listen to the setup.

And they say, God, this is fantastic. Can you build us one? You know, and I, yeah, I'll do it for parts. But eventually I didn't realize how many people wanted that. And I got in the real trouble. And then the phonograph record was the last piece of it. And that was an unsolved problem, insoluble problem. Because I tried, see, that's where the difference between what I call street electronics,

which is what I knew, which, you know, street electronic, all this sort of half-assed experience that some of it's right, some of it's wrong. But you have enough so you can. get things done. But then with real certain mathematics applied to it, that's a different story. That's real engineering. And I didn't have that. So the challenge was, how do you get rid of that goddamn record is? And there were certain properties of it that you knew. It had high frequencies in it mostly, and it always was there when the music was quiet. So could you make a thing that changed the bandwidth of the system as the music was loud and soft? That was an idea which

sort of was quite obvious. Later on, people who really knew how to do that, did it? Right. But I didn't know enough. And so all the cures that I could come up with, but worse than the disease. Okay.

But it got you acquainted with solving. Oh, yeah, got you doing it. Yeah. So I went to college for that. I went to college for that reason. Hey, everybody. I just want to stop in the middle of this podcast as you're super excited and super interested

and all the cool stuff we're hearing about from today's guest. And I want to do so to make an advertisement. No, this isn't for manscaping or some other type of product that I've been pitched to pitch to you. I don't think I've found quite the connection and resonance with manscaping, but maybe other things will fit the bill. But I do want to advertise on behalf of some other podcasts. And why would I do that? Well, it's kind of like when I get asked to blurb a book. After all, books are zero-sum games, too.

If you're reading somebody else's book, you're not going to read Losing the Nobel Prize or my upcoming book. which I hope to be announcing shortly on this very podcast. But instead, I do want to recommend to you that you listen to some podcasts by my good friends, some of whom gave me a start on their podcast long before the Into the Impossible podcast. First one is a young man, a graduate student named Brandon Dratchler. Dracler. You can find him on Twitter, a T-S-O-T-U pod. And that stands for the State of the Universe podcast.

And just recently in late November, he interviewed Dr. Daniel Whiteson, who's one of the other podcast hosts that I'm going to recommend to you. So Daniel and his colleague and friend Jorge Cham, they host the Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe podcast. You're going to hear a lot of universes here. And these podcasts are really interesting and valuable contributions to the scientific podcast world. And I really enjoy listening to them. and they've had me on their podcast. Both of these podcasts have hosted me as well. And the last podcast that I want to recommend is a podcast by two up-and-coming

podcasters who started a podcast over the summer. And they are named Daniel Hooper, another Daniel. And Shalma, his co-host, Shama, is a graduate student. And I believe she's at Columbia is Shama. And Dan is a physicist at Fermilab. And so what makes them so interesting is that they go deep into the podcast world. And this is Shama Weggsman. I'm sorry, I forgot to mention her last name.

But she's soon to be a PhD. Or maybe she already is a PhD at NYU. And she is a co-host of the Why This Universe podcast with Dan Hooper. They do tremendous work. Also, there is a podcast Twitter account called Why This Universe. And they claim to discuss the biggest ideas in physics broken down. and they come out with episodes every other Monday. So please turn into these podcasts and I hope you'll stay subscribed to the Into the Impossible

podcast where we do cover things in the universe and beyond into the Multimers. But we also do other things that I hope you'll find fascinating as well. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with many more Nobel Prize winners, as well as with maybe even a solo episode or two, about my ideas as to where I think experimental, physics should be going. I've had a lot of guests on the podcast, and I will continue to do so, folks like Eric Weinstein, folks like Garrett Lacey, Stephen Wolfram, and Julian Barber is coming on the show. But I want to think maybe a little bit less in 2021 about theories of everything and more

about experiments of everything. So stay tuned for that, as well as guests totally outside the realm of the physical sciences. Look for an interview with psychologists and with lifestyle optimizers and maybe some brand name podcasters that you know and love. So with that, I'll end this quick quote unquote advertising break, return you to the action on today's podcast episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Thank you so much for being a friend of the show. Please do help me out. The biggest help you can do, cost you nothing, is to rate the podcast and share it with other people. So I hope you'll rate it highly. I read each and every comment. So if you want me to check out your theory of everything, leave me a comment.

And I'll at least read it. And that will be one way that we can continue to grow and share the love of this wonderful, magical, mysterious multiverse, perhaps that we inhabit. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. And now, please enjoy the rest of this podcast of Into the Impossible. You actually, as I recall, you dropped out of, well, you dropped out of, was a college or graduate school.

I forgot. I dropped out of, I dropped. That was a different story. That has to do with being sort of a kid and being adolescent. No, I ran into a wonderful girl who was a spectacular pianist, and I just couldn't live without her. But she could live without me, and that was the problem. And that eventually brought you to Princeton, right? No, that took me to Chicago, where she was a student.

And then I flunked out. And then the transformation, and this is, if you're interested in the transformation, that transformation took place after I flunked out, this was in the middle of the junior year. at MIT, and I walked all around an old building at MIT called Building 20, which is where the radar was developed. And I found a lab, which looked to me like they could use an electronics technician. And it turned out they could. And I became a union member. I dropped out of school completely and became a card carrying a union member and became electronics technician for a couple of years in a lab of Gerald Zacharias. And he is the guy who saved me in every way possible.

And the thing he was working on in the end was atomic clocks. And he wanted to do, he put me into the bug of Einstein. The experiment he proposed to me was after we got to know each other well. And since I was expendable, I wasn't taking, I was not a student. You know, I didn't, there was no responsibility. There was no PhD to give, you know, nothing like that. So he said, I want to do an experiment, he said to me, where you and I and maybe somebody else, we build some new clocks, which are better than the ones we have, and we'll do this

experiment in Switzerland. You with your new clock will be on top of the Jungfrau, and he will be down in the valley and in the Jungfrau Valley, and we will send signals to each other from these atomic clocks and measure the Einstein redshift. That was the big experiment we were going to do. And what happened is that this fancy clock that he had invented to do this didn't work. And that's a long story, I don't think I want to go into it. I have heard you describe that, the Seism found or beams and so forth. I don't want to talk about that specifically, but I want to talk about a general question in the philosophy, which I don't think gets talked about as much.

I know you're not like huge into philosophy, but the philosophy of experimental science. And this question is as follows. How do you know when to shut off an experiment? We can always turn on an experiment, keep it going. If you keep shoveling in more money in the NSF, which we'll get into, keeps approving your funds. And you have graduate students and they don't abandon you. But when do you shut it off? How do you acquire that wisdom or judgment?

Because I think that applies to things outside of science as well. Well, I have several examples of that because I failed in a few places. My first failure was making a better clock. I was a technician at the time, but still. And what happened is Gerald is the one who gave up. Gerald. He had very big fish to fry. For example, and this was all in 1956.

I mean, before most people that I know were born. And what happened, he got the idea that American secondary and primary education in science and mathematics was really screwed up and he was right. So in 1956, he got a idea of how to fix that. And you're probably a beneficiary of that. I don't know. It was called the Physical Sciences Study Committee. And they did a beautiful job. a really modern textbook and so forth, among other things.

They also, then, so he decided that he was going to quit that experiment. It was for him, which he had more important things to do. Right. Well, what did I have to do? I want to find out why the goddamn thing didn't work, right? And so I didn't cost anything. The thing was there. And so we found out what was wrong.

I mean, it took a couple of months to do that. And in fact, there's a flaw in the way we teach statistical mechanics. I don't know. I mean, I might as well tell you right off. Yeah. It's what the idea of this clock was that the big idea of getting a better clock was always to get more observation time for the looking at the atomic system. The longer you could do that, the smaller the uncertainty in the frequency.

Okay. I mean, that was the basic idea. And so what you do, oh, you use higher frequencies. That was the other way of doing it. But you were stuck here with cesium, 10-killer, 10 gigahertz, okay? So the idea was, how do you get in an ordinary apparatus, a small atomic clock that takes a millisecond, You have about a millisecond to watch the atom.

And he said, well, can't we get up to a lot of second to do this? Okay? That would give you a factor of a thousand. And his idea was to throw them up like baseballs. Like a fountain, yeah. Make a fountain. Well, I mean, what did I know? Which is used today, yeah.

Of course, it works beautifully. It's called the Zacharias fountain. Yeah. And, but it didn't work in those days for a very simple reason. You're dealing with a tiny part of the fraction of the Boltzman distribution in the beam, you know, 1 20th, maybe 1 30th. And the fast guys are coming back and they're hitting you and the took us. Okay?

So here, here's this beam going up and trying to come down again. And the fast atoms are many, many of them. And what they eventually do is throw all the slow ones out of the beam. Interesting. That was the problem. Ah. And if you start, and I was able to prove that by putting, measuring the time of flight at different heights in this apparatus. But the apparatus grew to be three floors high, but even if you could, we could be.

He never did, didn't want to give up. Looking for faster atoms, faster Adam. No, no, none of them work. And so consequently, what happened is that, uh, nowadays, as you, as you point out, you can take and make a, that's how these, some of these clocks work. You can take a ordinary, you know, a standard clock now, let's say, uh, on the sodium with any of the optical clocks and lift it up by a centimeter. Slift it's lifted up by a centimeter and you can measure the redshift.

Yeah. It's really amazing. But in 1957, you couldn't, right? It was a Mosspower effect. No, no. Mosspower, well, that's how Pound eventually did it. Yeah. And that became, the whole thing became less interesting.

But it was that business of learning what Einstein and learning about Einstein and how he was, how he thought. I fell in love with the guy. I mean, that was fundamentally the end of it. He's had a, you know, he had a reputation for some blunders, you know. Oh, of course. I know them all. And that's not the point. Do you notice most cited paper is, Ray?

I don't know which is this. It's the EPR paradox paper. Oh, that's a shitty paper. I'm sorry. I know that. No, I know that. I know it shouldn't be. It's a crappy paper.

It's a bad idea. And I hate that paper. And I think it's Podolsky's way of staying in the United States. It was all that very complicated thing where he was trying to help all these immigrants who he had assembled around him. And he, you know, if he hadn't been the first author of that paper, nobody would have read it. I think that's a trouble. Yeah. And it really.

was, I think they had animus towards each, or he had resentment, at least, towards Podolsky ever after. But getting back to the experimental, you know, kind of shutting down. So as you know, from being the pioneers in the field of cosmic microwave background radiation research, you know, I always point out, you know, Kobe could have detected, you know, the polarization of the microwave background if you kept it running for like 100 years or something like that, just to make an extreme case. In other words, we win, but we win very slowly with, time. We only win as the square root of time. So to get twice as good, you need four times as much time. So I want to ask you, when you make a decision to end a lot, is it like, you know, like killing your

pet worm or is it like, you know, unplugging a computer? What does it feel like to end an experiment that's successful? Yeah, but let me, let me say, it's always something a little different than what you think. I mean, take that's a good example. You could have run Kobe for a long time, except you wouldn't have enabled the liquid helium wouldn't last. That's a real problem. Okay. And on top of that, where they were detectors you would now even think of using anymore. I mean, they were so crude, you know, the biometers with 10 to minus 15 NEP or something like that. You wouldn't even touch them anymore. That's ridiculous.

So it turns out generally you give up on, I mean, generally when I gave up on experiments, it's either one of where you want to know what went wrong because there was something wrong, and I learned something out of that, okay? I learned that the maximal distribution doesn't work, okay, in a beam. That's a piece of knowledge that you ought to tell people about, okay? That's a result. On the other hand, most of the time it is that you've worked on it. It hasn't worked.

You do the noise analysis and you've convinced yourself that you need another two orders of magnitude or something like that. When you finally understand the experiment now. And then you say, I can't do that. That's just too big a jump. And then you find that. Somewhere later in your life, you suddenly find out, oh, my God, here's this piece of technology that solves that problem that I worked on that didn't work before. And sometimes that is very useful. And by the way, that's remarkably what happened in LIGO a lot.

In LIGO, for example, the fact that NOVA, none of us gave much attention to squeezed light, for example. Yeah. Okay. And then all of a sudden, it turns out that, yeah, oh, my God, we can use this, you know. That was Bergensky, right? Bruginski was his calling card for many years. No, be careful with that one. You're right, but not quite right.

Okay. What it was is that Brighinski saw right away that a mechanical bar would be troubled by the quantum limit. In other words, that the thing that senses the bar is going to put enough noise into it, the quantum noise into it, so that it'll mask the signal. And then he tried, and he didn't come up with a very good way of doing that first. He kept thinking about something he called quantum non-demolition detector systems. And these are all second order things. These are still, I don't think they've paid off yet, but they will. They will. It's the idea that you, I don't know, the closest thing to it is, which I, it's funny that people now talk about measuring weak, weak measurements. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where you don't actually force the system into an eigenstate. Right. It's a second order kind of a perturbation theory. Yeah, exactly. And that is what he was actually, I think, pushing. And the guy who actually is responsible for the squeezing and its application is Carton, caves. I don't know if you know of him. He was probably at Caltech when you were at Caltech.

He was a student of Kip Thorne's. And Kip, by the way, this is something you probably don't know about Kip. Kip has a very, what I will call tactile sense about physics. It's not, he's a theorist, yes. And he doesn't make mistakes when he makes equations like I do. But, you know, he, He thinks and he does it right. But he also has a wonderful feeling in his gut about the physics. And let me say what he did. Kip did two things. He convinced Carlton that there was something wrong with the way we thought about where

the noise comes in into the interferometer. I don't know. It comes, that's a long story. I don't think I want to tell it unless you want it. But the important thing is that the carton's discovery was that the noise, which we had always thought was shot noise and momentum noise, which is the other two noises that come in a photon system that those were independent in a way of each other and they're not and it turns out they come in not where you think it is they come in where the detector is that there they are fluctuations in the

vacuum field and that vacuum fluctuation distributes itself in the interferometer in such a way that it if you could somehow reduce the vacuum fluctuations coming in the dark part of the interferometer you could win and that is squeezing ah okay oh So it wasn't the kind of complementarity that Brigginsky, Briggins? Yeah, he had the... It was very different. Very different. Yeah, actually, I didn't appreciate that until just now.

And what it is, is maybe just one step further, so you'll have a little bit... It's very easy to see it. What you require is paired photons. What you want to do is for pair photons at the dark port, so that they either have, as a pair, they have amplitude sidemans or phase modulation sidemans. And those are the two variables that are the quantum canonical. Vanguants, yeah. The conjugates, okay?

And so consequently, you can adjust that, whether you make the pair of photons. You see, the way it does, you have a medium with gain. In comes the vacuum fluctuation. The vacuum fluctuation causes an induced emission in that medium. That's a spontaneous emission, if you want to call it that. And you can tailor that so that another photon comes along with it. So there are two photons.

And those photons can either be noisy in amplitude or noisy in phase. And in different frequency regimes, of the gravitational wave detector, you use one way or the other way. And that was an invention that was made by Carlton Kays. Interesting. Among other things. So on that front, you know, there's, as you know, there's a lot of lore about LIGO. It's a wonderful story. It's a tale of many, you know, hundreds of millions, if not a billion dollars. It's a tale of- No, there's a billion dollars. Yeah. It's a million running. It's a 50 million a year to run it. Yeah, exactly. Everybody always always says, oh, this new collider will cost $20 billion. And I'm like, yeah, and $500 million a year to run it.

But I say, you know, Jan 11 was a friend of mine. She's been on the show multiple times. And she wrote a beautiful book about it, which you're a major character in. Yeah, I know the book. And I know you guys have had conversations. But it's a wonderful story. And part of the story is the suspense, like, will they detect it or won't they detect it? And I'm going to pose kind of a little bit of a provocative question to you. When you say, out to measure this. A, you had Einstein. Again, we're going to keep talking about your friend Albert over here. You had Einstein, the genius who'd most of his predictions panned out in one form or another, except, you know, even his blunder was a blunder because we now later found out

dark energy was a necessity to include in our cosmological model. But when I try to measure with my colleagues on the Simon's Observatory or Bicep, we try to measure inflationary gravitational waves, we don't have like Halson Taylor, you know, standing in the background saying, thank us guys. You know, we measured that gravitational waves are real. Yes, we didn't directly detect them. But, I mean, was it really such a surprise? I mean, tell me the honest truth. Did you really doubt that you would ever make a detection of gravitational waves or that they existed? Youth sports families and fans huddle up. Wherever life takes you, game changer keeps you connected. Stream games live and full HD when you can't be there. Get play-by-play updates right

on your phone and share game highlights with everyone. Full bragging rights and included. Live the game like never before with Game Changer. Create your free account today at gc.com. Okay. Well, you've entered the realm of science history there. Yes. I mean, the book that tries to explain a little about is Kennefic's book. Do you know Daniel Kennefic? I know. I haven't read that book. I've read Harry Collins' book. But I... The hell with Collins' books. Take a look at Daniel Kennefic, who is careful. He's a physicist. Yeah. And he has written a beautiful history of just what you asked about. And it goes way back.

It goes back to 1916. I don't know if you know that. No. I mean, that was right after the general theory. Yes. And the very first thing that I'm, I mean, I'll tell you now, just to wet your appetite. Yeah.

It turns out 1915 is, of course, the full theory comes out. Okay. In 1916, he writes a paper on the perturbation theories that you can use so you don't have to solve the metric exactly, okay? And he picks a couple of examples, then the parallel in advance again. And he shows a, that there's Newtonian limit,

and he introduces gravitational waves for the first time. And he does everything right, he gets the kinematics right, and he takes a big guess that they travel at the velocity of light, which we now know to an exquisite precision. But then he completely screws up the relationship between the source and the field. Okay?

The two sides of the equation. In other words, G and the T. No, he finds that a system that there's equation you'll find right in the sort of near the end the paper, you have to read a little German, but now it's translated. You don't have to be German. Yeah.

So anyway, you'll find out that all the terms in the, are terms that have to do with the second derivatives of the moment of inertia of a system. And it turns out the signs for all the terms are positive. Those make a grad. So that says a thing that's spherically symmetric, that expands uniformly and the contract uniformly, will radiate.

That's a no-no. Okay? It goes back even before, Yeah. Okay. So it turns out, but in that paper, at the very end of the paper, he starts doing a little bit of a dimensional analysis, even though he had the thing wrong. But the numbers are still not wrong. In other words, the orders of magnitudes of the strains, the metric terms, they're still about right.

It just for the wrong motions, okay, because it has much of it right. And it turns out he makes one very, very simple statement at the end. He says, here is an equation, which equation he writes down. And it says, you know, this thing we have just been talking about in this paper will never have any influence in physics. Yes. It's much too small to even be contemplated. He said that about gravitational lensing, too. No, he said that about gravitational waves.

Yeah, I know. He said it about both and both have been detected. Well, yeah, but this one, I've given talks trying to invent what Albert was thinking about. You know, and indeed, if you look what he knew at his time, it was impossible. you're talking about strains of 10 to minus 42, okay? I mean, that's for a train smashing into another train in the radiation zone makes a strain of 10 to minus 42. I mean, that's the biggest thing you can think of it.

You can make it's unmeasurable. And then he looks at binary systems and sees that binary stars with a period of a year, you know, will, yes, they'll do what Taylor Hulse have, but he recognizes they should fall toward each other, but at the rate they fall toward each other is so small that you have to wait something like 10 to the 12 years, 10 to the 13 years, to see it. The telescope, you'd never see it.

So anyway, he comes to that conclusion. And so then he has an in 1918, he writes another paper, which is solely about gravitational waves. And he gets right now the relationship between the dynamics at the source and the field. But he doesn't say anything about the believability of seeing it. Okay, so good old Kennefic will tell you about that. But then he'll take it in 1936, where he really gets himself into trouble, again, with one of the immigrants. Okay. And this is a paper where he is with, I'll forget the name of the, I'm sorry, I can't dredge it up right away.

It's the paper where, which they, he and X, who has name I'm trying to remember, submit to the physical review. They solved to see if there is a solution of the Einstein equations, which is pure. in other words, you know, that you have a really rigorous solution that is source-free in effect and can it propagate as a radio? And they prove to, they prove that it can't be done. And so this physical review gets this. Do you know about this? Yeah. I mean, I vaguely, but I don't think the audience will know about it. So it's worth continuing. Well, so at any rate, the, and so what happens is they publish it, the guy named Robertson, the, the Met, trick, you know, who was at Princeton, Richard Robertson, I think it is. I don't remember. It gets it to the

review and it takes a while for the review to take place. Einstein gets miffed about that. It hasn't been published yet. He calls a physical review. What's going on with this paper by X and Einstein. And he gets told that while they send the things out for review, and he gets pissed off at that. And I don't know if you know that. That was legitimate. In Germany, they don't do that. And so, okay, and then Robertson's review gets there, and Einstein sees what he did they wrong, and then in chagrin, sort of effectively submitted to the Franklin Institute Journal.

Okay, so mistakes are all over the place. At any rate, the final mistake and the one that we had to live with, and that's why we were specifically worried. And I don't know if Barry told you this, and Kipp will certainly tell you this, I'll tell you, is that it was the disaster associated with Weber. Yeah, I was just going to get to that.

But yeah, please go on, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I knew Weber pretty well because during Kobe, I would go visit him a lot. You know, he was right there next to Goddard. So I went to me, you know. Yeah, he's sort of a pitiful, you know, pathetic character in some ways. Well, he was a great scientist, right? He's a very good scientist.

I mean, some people will reject what I just said. And I'll tell you what the trouble is. He didn't have enough self-critical, the ability to be self-critical. That's, I think, the fundamental trap that he fell into. Would you say that's like confirmation bias? Like he saw what he wanted to see and discarded. Well, I can't prove you that. That I can't do.

But I can tell you what I know for a fact. Yeah, please. And that is that I would visit him. By the time he had published, I mean, it really became most, he published in 69 that he had detected gravitational waves. Right. And I kept started going to Goddard a lot for Kobe in 1972. Okay.

Really? Kobe started that early? Yeah, well, John Mather invented Kobe and as a graduate student. Oh, okay. Oh, the FTS and I didn't know that. Have you ever had John on your little program? No, I know, John, but I haven't had them on. I'm going to have them on.

Oh, boy, you'll be fascinated. Yeah, yeah, I will. Okay, okay. That's a great idea. And so what happened is that I started realizing that Weber was, a lot of people, I mean, the Weber's thing went on. A lot of people didn't see anything. That caused a great deal of problems.

For example, there were physical society meetings where a guy like Richard Garwin, who was a very good scientist at IBM and Columbia, had built a little bar much more technically sophisticated than the one that Weber had built. And he knew exactly how sensitive it was. He knew everything in the noise about it. And he said he didn't see anything. And Weber, only defense was you didn't do it my way. And that's not a defense, you see. But do you think, do you think, Ray, that he might have been felt burned from the experience that he had with Towns and the Mazur? No, that's a, he didn't know.

That was a not, he felt, I don't know about that one. You know, that was the place where he should have, he didn't vote with his feet. You understand? How do you mean? How do you mean? What I mean by that is it was, he wrote a paper on negative temperatures in a triple IE, an IRE journal, okay? Towns had written it in a physics business and actually was working. on it. And a lot of people in microwave spectroscopy were trying to figure out what to do next.

And he didn't, it didn't look particularly attracted to him. I know at least he wasn't going to do an experiment to look for negative temperatures. But he made, wrote the paper. And so he, as I say, didn't vote with his feet. He didn't actually go out and do the experiment. And the experiment was done by towns and others with ammonia, you know. And so, but yes, I look, that was a sad story. But I, the, The important part is that here, he invented a lot of things which we now use for the gravitational wave thing. He invented the idea that you want to look for a strain. He had it differently than we have it. He was looking for tidal force, but that's just the way of writing it.

We look for an actual change in the geometry. It's the same story. Just another way of talking about it. And then he had the idea that there would be a non-Gausian character to the noise, and he had to have coincidence. Coincidence experiments. And we do the same thing. Yeah. And, but he had the idea that, and it was, look, the people who worked with him at that time with John Wheeler, Wheeler actually suggested to him to look into how one might detect gravitational waves.

And they spent time together. Dick Kipp will tell you all about that. Yeah. So anyway, no, the sad part is that when it came to defending what he had as a measurement, he didn't do it in a way that most scientists would do. He just, he said, you didn't do it my way. And that is not a way. He didn't discuss the sensitivities. He didn't discuss how he measured his sensitivity.

He, you know, eventually all of that was done. But he didn't actually talk about, let's compare the notes. How did you do it? How did I do it? He just said, you didn't do it my way. Yeah. So it wasn't collaborative. And it was never collaborative.

And it was quite hostile. But I can't say Richard Garwin was friendly either. I mean, you know, he might not have been. But he, look, you take. take a guy like Richard Garwin, you pay attention to him. He's no dummy. I mean, you know. And so the, anyway, what happened is I noticed the following,

and I got very interested in what might be troubling him. After I taught a general relativity course at MIT, the students got fascinated by, by, this is before he published, they were very interested how you could measure gravitational waves. And I knew only about the Weber Bar. And in that course, I invented the idea of free masses. That's a separate story.

But, and, and, um, And other people have thought of it too. It's just that's a better way of doing it. But what happened is I had an undergraduate who was interested in it. And I said, look, why don't we find out maybe this guy's measuring magnetic pulses? And so I built a little coil, you know, a helm a little coil. And with a little electronics to store signals to store the pulses that might be measurable. Magnetic coil, a multiple turn coil, about the size of a armchair, okay?

had one in my house in Newton, Massachusetts, another one at the lab in MIT, and another one out in Chicago where Weber had his other detector. And we saw typically two or three pulses a day that was simultaneous. And what were they? They were in 10 to minus three gauze lasting for about 10 to minus three seconds. Okay? What the hell was that? And I went with that, one of those visits to Weber during the Kobe day. days, I gave him our list of our, when we thought we'd seen things.

And he was totally disinterested. And what he effectively said, do you think I'm so stupid not to think of magnetic field? Oh, so he was oppositional and he was, right, defensive. That was enough for me to say, well, look, you know, here's this thing that you don't know yourself what it is. You know, at least, have you actually measured the magnet? I mean, it was insulting to him to that, that somebody would come along with that. like beneath them, right? And I wonder, you know, with scientific collaborations, many of them are very

fraught. There's oftentimes, you know, clamoring for credit, for recognition, sometimes for prizes. They were studied done by a historian of science, like how many collaborations stay together after the Nobel Prize is awarded to one or two of them. And most of them dissipate for one reason or another. I have heard from some of my listeners that they felt they should have been included in the Nobel Prize in 2017. I won't get into that necessarily with you. But I want to know more generally speaking, how was it, how, I mean, obviously it was important, but how difficult was it to construct what, you know, Doris Kearns-Goodwin would call a team of rivals with Caltech on one side of the, of the country, and MIT on the other. And you guys are kind of rivals in a certain sense.

You compete for students. I'll tell you what the real problem was. It was a problem. Look, there's no denying it and in this book that that Kipp and all of the group of us are trying to write we're trying to deal with that oh good because it's not trivial it turns out to be extremely difficult what was really the problem and now i will come it comes down to one real problem it's less to do with it has less to do with rivalry that i think is the wrong word it has to do with style of doing style of doing. Okay. And what never the, and I hear I blame Ron, not so much me.

I mean, I can be tough to deal with also, but it was, it was a different problem. The problem was that Ron, very clever guy, let's say exactly a lot of the ideas that made our detection possible, several of them are due to Ron, but not exclusively to do to Ron. For example, one of the most important ones called power recycling was also invented by one of the German scientists who was at the Goshing Institute who had started working on this as well. One of the ideas that the other very important idea, I think that one that he's singularly responsible for is how to lock a laser to a cavity. In other words, you have a Fabi Pro cavity. How do you do it? And many of us did not think of this.

The guy who had thought of it first was Bob Pound, the same guy who did the. the Mosperor. Yeah, but he did it during the time when he was in Radlab. I don't know. Have you ever worked with a Kleistron in your life? Yes, yeah. I mean, I got a good sunburn from it once, yes. Kleistron, really?

Well, that mean, they're miserable devices. They're different. I mean, they're more miserable. I don't know if they're more miserable than magnetrons, but they're pretty miserable. And what Bob Pound did is during the war, Second World War, he invented a very clever technique for locking a chlystron to a microwave cavity. And that idea was then repeated by Drever in an optical setting. And it worked beautifully.

And so I want to give the credit to both pound, but mostly to Dron, for thinking about that. And that now is a tool that is used by everybody in everything that involves lasers and getting single frequencies. Right. It's called pound-driever-hall locking. Okay. So look, I don't want to take away from Ron anything. It's just that here the problem you do have to realize is that he was a child.

That's the problem. And it's even goes back to the things that must have been true when he was a young kid. The transition he couldn't make is a transition that a lot of people can't make. And that is from tabletop physics where you are making all the decisions with your graduate students. And he barely listened to his graduate students. And he never listened to his own postdoc. I mean, he would order what to be done. That was a very unfortunate part of the way he operated.

So he never got the benefit, the best use, out of the people who worked with him. Okay. And that will be in that. Unfortunately, that will be in our history. But here comes the real problem. Why did we get into trouble? We got into trouble because I was ambitious about, which had to do with MIT more than Caltech. I was ambitious because of the way MIT was looking.

looking at the whole field of gravitational wave physics. At that time, when I started, MIT wanted no part of it. And I couldn't put graduate students on the prototype. Why? Because it was an engineering fight. Right, yeah. And there wasn't going to be any science coming out of it. And I was told that many, many times. And so they weren't going to risk a graduate student's life on a thing which didn't look to them

like it would be worth of trouble. So, and there was nobody at MIT who believed in black holes at the time. Phil Morrison, who was probably, you may not know, but maybe you do. Yeah, I know. Bill was dead against, I mean, he would invent the most incredible schemes to make it so you didn't have to invoke a black hole for what the X-ray astronomers were seeing. So consequently, there was no sympathy for black holes at MIT at all. So they felt the technology was too hard. And also there were no sources anyway, the hell with them.

And so I was in a very complicated situation. And what came of it is that I felt the only way I could stay in business at MIT in this business is to immediately start pushing for a LIGO, a full-scale thing. Because I could prove on paper. I had proved. You could not do it with a small device. Okay. So there was a mindset that was already different between Ron and myself. That was when Ron got into this thing, which was some numb-n-n-n-dum.

of years later, I already, because of the experience with having to prove that there was science in this, I had made this next step. Even though not everything was working yet, I said, look, if I'm going to work on this thing, it's got to be on a scale. It has to be scaled up. It can't do it. It has to be scaled up and we're going to have new problems when we do that. We got to find out what those problems are. Did they think the 40 meter at Caltech could detect any to do any science? Yeah, well, that's what Ron's in his secret, his little, in this little head. He kept thinking he's going to do it and run around all of this, okay? And so you know, that's absolutely true.

That's what was going on in his head. I mean, and the so what happened is here's the tragedy. This is where the tragedy happens. It happened that I was already had made the transition from tabletop to bigger physics. And Ron had not. And he could. And there's a difference in style when you make that. The style is a small group and you were running it yourself.

is not that much money involved yet. Well, you know the self. You've been through this. Yeah, of course. And then when you go to something big, you have groups, you have subsystems, you have organization. And that's where the thing fell apart. It reminded me of, you know, sort of like Apple computer or something like that. You know, they start off and they're in their garage.

And then there are those that say we can change the world, you know, I just need to build a bigger garage, basically. And then there was those that think, you know, it's just, this is what got us here. And so we, you know, we have to keep this, the spirit. it alive and you see a lot of companies, you know, go out of business. I always say that entrepreneurs and experimental physicists have a lot in common. I mean, we both have budgets to manage. We have people to manage. We have travel. We don't make any profit. In fact, we lose money on every sale. But, you know, I don't disagree with you. Yeah. The motivation is different. But how did you personally deal with that? So I have to say, I paint a little bit more of a sympathetic, I didn't know him at all.

I never met him when I was at Caltech, but, but, you know, I make the point in my book in losing the Nobel Prize here. I'm going to send you a copy because I don't know if I gave you one. But the point that I make in the book is you guys made the announcement in, say, February 10th of 2016. And that was 10 days after the nomination deadline had closed for Nobel Prize nominations, of which I was one of the nominators that year for the 2016 Nobel Prize. And I kept waiting because I had heard this rumor from Lawrence Krause that there

was big news coming out of LIGO. And I remember I gave a colloquium there in September, MIT. September of what? September 2015, right when you guys were analyzing. Well, that was a day it happened. No, no, it was September 20th. It was like a week or two afterwards. We, okay, I'll tell you that one.

Okay, that's important that you get that one right. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So let me tell you. Yeah. We didn't know what the hell we had. Okay. He says you did.

Krause says you did. No, well, what the hell does he know? He's a theorist. I know Larry, and he was sniffing around. I mean, he heard, because of the collaboration, and there were people, I don't know where he got it, feed the people at Arizona. I don't know who gave him this bad piece of information.

But we didn't know what we had, okay? And let me give you some of the drama that went on between the 14th of September, 2015. And Boxing Day. And February, whenever the hell we published it, the third, tenth, to what I had forgotten. It was 2016. That was hell to pay you were going on inside of LIGO. I mean, we thought, the very first thought we was, I don't know, you know this story or not?

I don't know. I probably know it, but my audience may not. So please share it. Okay, okay. Well, I mean, the thing is that we thought the very first thing we had put, we had already done putting blind injections into the data. That's famous story. Yep.

And, well, it turns out that with the very first, everybody went around, sniffing around. The people who were going to make the blind injections hadn't even written the software yet. Okay? So that was out. But it took a day to find that out. But that didn't end it. That was easy. The next one was, how do we know we weren't hacked?

Hackers, yeah. And that took a long time because what happened all during that time, I remember we were living with the Paul of Weber in our heads. Yeah, and Bicep 2, right? I mean, Bicep 2 is a different story. I know. It's an announcement of gravitational wave detection. Well, look, the day that happened, I went and talked to, who's the guy from J-J-J-J-P-L, who was on the bicep team?

Jamie Bach. Jamie. I said, Jamie, why did you do this? We remember in our committee, we said, you need more channels. You can't do it with, and then I remember Andy saying to me, look, we ought to at least find out what's there. That's what the idea was. Yeah. But then to publish, that was a piece of bad judgment, I thought. Yeah. I mean, no, I don't want to dump on you guys.

Look, I dump on myself in the book. I quote Andrew. I quote Andrew. Andrew used to say, you know, the first thing we'll do is discover if there's any there there, and then we'll follow it up. And we did everything except for follow it up. But you're right. You were saying that really wasn't affecting a Paul, a shadow, the way Weber did 30 years.

No, very different. The Weber thing had gone to the point where people were writing books about it being a pathological science. Okay. And in fact, Garwin was responsible in part for that because he was, that's a whole story internal to LIGO from 1986. I mean, when Garwin saw that LIGO was becoming something that they were even contemplating in the NSF, we'll get back to the story in a minute. but Garwin sent a letter to the head of the physics division, who he knew for other reasons, and said, look, if you're going to continue in this idea,

and it wasn't written in a nasty way, but it was written with, if you're going to continue with something that could embarrass the NSF like this, okay? That's the tone of the thing. You ought to have a summer study of this. And we got a summer study together. I did it personally.

So they forced the summer study on us, and they gave us very good review. But the thing is that Garwin thought that the whole thing, the whole idea of gravitational ways was something that was colored by the arguments that he had with Weber. Okay. And we lived with that. And so that's why we were being especially careful. And so let's go back to the hacker hypothesis. The hacker hypothesis took us almost four or five weeks to get rid of it.

Really? We had a very good man within the LIGO, Matt Evans, who's now associate professor in MIT, who took it on. He made a team out of looking, first of all, looking in, did the hacker get into the software? Did the hacker get into the tapes that recorded the data? Did the hackers get into the hardware? Did the hackers get into the photo detectors? Did they get into the laser?

I mean, in other words, how did they do it? Right. And they kept studying and they're looking. We even locked up. all the instruments. You couldn't open the chassis because we had tape on them because we didn't want anybody to mess with it. So it was a, I mean, one, a tremendous thing.

And eventually they never could prove. We could never prove there was no hacker. But the hackers had gotten so smart that they knew so much that it became very implausible. And so, but that isn't the end of it. It turns out, it looked like we could not rule out, but it looked implausible. It looked easier to say nature did it.

And then for many of us, and you can ask Barry this also, maybe you maybe you did, what was the thing that finally triggered it that you were willing to go forward? And it was the Christmas, the day after Christmas event. Boxing Day event. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, he said that as well. And, you know, I questioned, what would have been the history of science? What would have it looked like if that event didn't occur in this galaxy far, far away? And then he said it was all, but, you know, is... It would have been, you know, a couple of months later.

Yeah. And then you had the binary neutron star. Well, that's two years later. That's a whole other... I mean, that must have been a whole other level of kind of confirmation. I mean, you must know there are people in Europe, at least, and maybe in the U.S. who claim that there are, you know,

there are challenges still with the interpretate, you know, we always... Oh, yeah, I know for willing. And I want to, you know, because I know you don't have, you know, too much more time, but I do want to ask you, you know, specifically about, you know, some things I did talk to Barry about that involve maybe the future of this type of science. And that involves, you know, the question of which is more scientifically interesting to you. Well, let me first ask you a question. I've asked this of people like

Shelley Glashow and Frank Wilczek and others and Roger Penrose, that we talk about black holes as if they're real. And we sort of know that they're real, but the fact that we know that they're real. And you are one of the main people on Earth that's responsible for the actual visceral feeling of reality that they can note. But how do we know that we can take the leap from there to saying that they have a singularity at their core? And I've pressed this with Roger Penrose. And I haven't gotten a satisfactory response from anybody. And maybe you will provide the first satisfactory answer. No, so you won't get it from me. I'll tell you what, the way we established it was a black hole. It was only from two things. It was from the fact that the Kerr solution,

You know what the Kerr is the guy who did a rotating black hole. That the Kerr solution, which is nothing more really than adding angular momentum, it's just more mathematics. It's another model for a black hole. That that predicted and be careful, there's one step further. If it hadn't been for numerical relativity, I don't know if people told you that. And Kip will certainly emphasize this when you talk to him. If it hadn't been for numerical relativity,

most of the people would not have been, they would queasy about it because the last splash, the last, let's say, few oscillations of that waveform where this velocity is close to one, half the velocity of light, the relative velocity of 0.6 the velocity of light, none of the post-Newtonian expansions

that you can make of relativity. You can do that. You can do it in orders of power of V over C. You can do a metric expansion in powers of V over C, And you have to go to some incredible order, 11th order or something like that. And, you know, I don't know if you ever done these goddamn things. Everybody who does them, you make a sign error and the whole thing blows up on you.

It's no good. I mean, it's just endless paper. I mean. I remember walking around Caltech and the halls of West Bridge and hearing Sterl Finney's office, and he would visualize the chair, and he would go, whoop. And it was just like all day long. I go crazy listening to that all day.

No, but that's okay. The chirper is not the least. It's getting it right to the end point. Yes. And the thing is that sure comes straight out of Newtonian physics. I mean, you don't have to do much with a little bit of the quadrupole formula. So you can get the first part of the thing very beautifully. But you're asking how much of the black hole's mystique do we know?

Of its essence. And the essence of the black hole. And you will really know the black hole being different than a neutron star only from two things. And I think we're close to it, if not already proved it. there is the solution, the dynamics, the Kerr solution dynamics, gives you the waveform we see, and you can compare the waveform we have with a numerical relativity waveform

that is now good to arbitrary, I don't know if it's good at exactly C, but it's goddamn close to it, okay? And the two match, they match. I mean, they match to the signal of noise in the measurement. So that's very, very important. That gives you the confidence. Well, that's part of what gives you the conference.

But what's even more important, that came after the paper was written. Two things have happened, that paper, was that we've also now begun to see the normal mode oscillations of the metric around the black hole. In other words, when the two black holes come together and they form, things quiet down. But there is still oscillations going on in the geometry. Of course. Okay. And they're going on and they have normal. modes. It turned out they're quite heavily damp by

gravitational radiation. Those have begun to speed. We can begin to smell at them. And that is distinct from say a compact object. That's the state from a neutron star. Okay. Okay. Now what it tells you about the singularity inside the black hole, I don't know. I just don't know enough theory. Or that has an event horizon, you know,

I mean, the event horizon telescope, you know, I'm trying to get Shep Dolman on the podcast, but I've had on other people. And, you know, what we're really seeing in that mystical image that we saw over a year ago now, it's almost two years ago, is the light shadow, you know, it's not actually, no, you're seeing two things. Okay. Seeing the light shadow is one.

Yeah. That's the, you know, that's the important. One of the things you're seeing, but the light shadow is the black part. But you're also seeing something else. You're seeing the photon ring. That's a ring that forms outside. We're going away from the black hole. We're going out from the black hole toward us.

So the first thing you see that's closest into the soul is the dark, the dark part. Okay. Now that can be seen better if Shep had more detectors. And that's what he's doing right now. They're working on that now. Because they had a lot of, they had to do a lot of modeling to get that, you see. And he knows exactly what has to be done. Then the bright part, that ring you saw is something which is a very different thing.

That's quite far away from the event horizon. But that's the next event in that picture. And what is that? These are photons that have come in with close enough to R equal to the event horizon, but not yet at R an event horizon. And they get captured in a ring. And what happens is they collide with each other, the photons in that ring. There's perturbations of that ring effectively.

They come about because of, and then they sometimes leave the ring, and that's what you're seeing. Yes, the trajectories. It's a photon ring, but you haven't seen the eventorizing. You're not going to see that. Yeah. Nor will you see the same. singularity. And here's what I often hear. The singularity, you will never see. There's only one singularity in that damn black hole.

It's not the eventorizing. No, I know. Yeah. It's the thing that's deep inside of it that tears everything apart. Right. Well, here's my, you know, my, what do you call it, fracas or my complaint against the, you know, this notion of singularities. I feel there's a lot of circular logic. In other words, we'll hear things like we need a quantum theory of gravity. because we don't know how to explain the properties of matter and energy and gravitational

fields at small distances and higher energy. In other words, we don't understand it. And where do we find two scenarios where fundamentally gravity seems to need a quantum analog to it, like a graviton description, and that is at the singularity of a black hole and possibly at the singularity at the Big Bang. You guys are going to find it. I mean, that's the thing. And so this is what I want to ask you.

You're in, you're, no, no, but, but wait a minute. That's very important. That to me is the next most important thing that's going to happen in this field. Now, where the B modes do it, and I hope they do, I hope you can get around all the foregrounds. And I think, I don't know if our point O.O.1 will do it. I know that's about what you can do. That's about it. Yeah.

What I've heard. I hope it can do it. But that's not the end of the story. I think if you see something or if you don't see something, the next generation, of people who go into the business in the gravitational wave detection will push like hell for something that can do it, that can actually measure it.

Okay, so but, but that will be called, I don't know if you know this, it's called Big Bang Observer. Yes, yeah, I talked to, I talked to Barry a little bit about the future plans for it. But I guess I still haven't made the final point, which is that even if we see B modes, we're not seeing gravitons. We're seeing the classical analog.

Oh, yeah, that's right. And certainly we'll never see the singularity in a black hole. So my question is, what if there is no Big Bang? My friend Paul Steinhart, my friend and your fellow laureate now, Sir Roger Penrose, they have very bright minds. They have super brains, right? And they don't believe there was a singularity at all. In fact, they believe evolution is purely classical.

And so my question is, is there a generation of young theorists that are perhaps wasting their time because they're pursuing something which can never be seen in the case of a singularity at the core of a black hole, or may not exist in the case of a singularity at the origin of time. So are we wasting? I mean, you're asking a hard question for a person. I'm not a theorist, but I, my prejudice is that it would be quite, quite amazing, giving all the analogies between electricity and magnetism and analogies.

They're not perfect analogies. And I can give you many, many examples where the analogies break down. But there is enough there that I think it would be a miracle to me if there wasn't a quantum theory of gravity. Interesting. There's got to be, I mean, why should that be left out? And the thing is that not that we have seen it, and many people say, well, can't you do that by looking at the granularity of the waveforms you're looking at? Well, I wish we could, but you know, you're dealing with the number of gravitons in there is, you know, in the 10 to the 30 department, you know, that kind of thing. So it's not, and looking for what you're asking about, looking for some evidence of the singularity in the black hole that you can see from the outside of the black hole is probably iffy.

One place where I think you might be able to do something is from the spectrum of the spectrum of the gravitational radiation that you may not see in B modes because you're going to see an integral. Yeah. But that you could do if you actually looked over a few frequency bands. Yeah. So if you had like the Big Bang Observer plus the CMB and you both detect it, yeah, you'll get what's called the tensor spectral index. And that would be, you know, at least some more circumstantial, if not convinced evidence. Well, I'll tell you. I mean, the fact is that I, this is you'll love this story, is that during the Kobe days, I would occasionally, I would go from MIT to Goddard a lot.

And on one occasion, Alan Goose wanted to go to give a talk at Goddard about where Kobe was going. And you want to give the people on Kobe a little pep talk about this new idea. And so I'm driving on that road on the highway to Washington from the Baltimore airport. And we'd been talking and talking and talking. And I finally asked him, you know, don't you think there might be gravitational waves that come from inflation? And he didn't say anything for a while. And what we knew at that time, a lot of people had guessed that, including Steve Weinberg, that maybe there would be a one degree Kelvin background of gravitational waves,

which of a Planckian variety, which is absolutely hopeless to detect. Okay. And when we got to the gates at Goddard, and he said to me, probably not. And there probably are none. And so there is Sterobinsky's papers on what might have happened. And the difference between Alan and Sterabinsky is Alan didn't, he had particles that did it, but he did the calculation classically. Sterebinsky did it as particles, but quantum mechanically. And to him, the big thing that caused the gravitational waves were the fluctuations.

Interesting. The quantum fluctuations are what caused the gravity waves. And that's a spectrum that anybody who's working in that field now uses as, I mean, there are other points less. less well-defined, like, for example, phase transitions from different epics. Right. That's certainly there. But the thing is that if it's there, but the one that that actually has to do with inflation has to do with the quantum theory.

And if Sterebinski's right, that's the only way I think you're going to get any evidence for the graviton. Interesting. So there'd be that, yeah, the spectral kind of encrypting. Very interesting. I want to turn to a couple of questions from my friends and your friends that are at MIT. So one comes from Professor Max Tegmark. And he asked me to ask you, why did your dean draw a huge zero on a piece of paper decades ago? Well, I think I told you that in about half an

hour ago. Yeah, that's the lack of backing that I think was not, you know, Kip and Barry and Ron didn't have to contend with that. I mean, Caltech has had a long history. Mainly thanks to Kip, right? Well, it's more than that. I mean, I give Kip and Caltech credit for the fact that we didn't, the whole field didn't go under. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, and I can, I have, in that book we're writing, I have, if my sentence stays in the book, it was a, it was a watershed for the field that Caltech went into this. Did you ever think of leaving MIT? Uh, it's hard. When you have, how old are your kids? I've got, well, I've got five of them and nine, nine down to two. Well, they're not old enough yet.

You could still move. Is that an offer? Are you propositioning me, Ray? No, I'm not propositioning you. No, I'm very happy here. I would also have to deal with a death sentence from my wife. No, what I'm talking about is that once you have an interest in boyfriends and girlfriends and you have become part of the society, and that means you become an adolescent that's very hard to move kids. No, I know.

And I love it here. It's phenomenal. And I love MIT. MIT's a wonderful institution. I'll tell you one cute story about it. about that. One of my colleagues, David Shoemaker and I had gotten quite desperate about this. And David is one of the older gentlemen in the field now. And we had thought, this is back in, we had made an offer indirectly by Stanford. And it wasn't, whether we didn't know it was

Stanford or Stanford Accelerator that was making the offer, that to take the whole laboratory, our laboratory, they knew about problems. That was not a mystery to anybody. Right. And at Stanford. And so what happened is he and I went out there to try to sniff it out, see if there was anything. It looked pretty good. They wanted to build the LIGO next to the accelerator. They wanted to have a network on GPB, right?

Yeah, yeah. But that's part of the story. So anyway, we get to the, we're getting to the down to it. Joe Taylor was in particular, one of the guys. who was very anxious to see gravitational waves at Caltech. So I went to speak with the head of the department, who was the then later became head of Department of Energy, Steve Chu?

Steve Chu? Yeah. And I go in his office, and he looks me square in the face, and he says, look, says, we've got one crazy experiment. We don't need two. Matt ended it. Yeah, I talked to Clifford Will about this not too long ago. He was on some of the review committees for this 50-year-long experiment, which some say was a huge boondoggle. But somehow they kept getting funded and funding.

I tell you, I'd have a different view. They measured it. They did. Yeah. Oh, I think they did. But how long did it take? How many careers did it take? How much money did it take?

And what did it do to Stanford? I mean, it was a huge, you know, albatross, according to many of my friends, I was a postdoc there during the late 90s. And, you know, a lot of people felt a lot of reason. Who were you with? You was church? I was with Sarah Church, yeah, before she fired me. But that's a story for another time. I want to end with one other question.

Before I get to the question, I ask all my guests that are honoring me by your presence. And this is from David Kaiser, who is a professor alongside. Yeah. So we talked about, you know, how it was to kind of work on projects when it was sort of considered to be almost like fringe. and I wonder, you know, you're kind of different because it was like, I don't know if you know this guy, Michael Jordan, the basketball player, right? So I know the name, but I don't know what he does. Yeah, he was like the, I mean, considered the best basketball player in history. And then he quit and retired at the top of his game. And, and then he went off and he tried to play baseball.

And it kind of reminds me of, you know, like my friend Jim Simons, who's sponsoring the Simon's observatory. His kick lately is that he should win the Nobel Prize for this churn Simon's. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. So, you know, so I'm thinking, you know, Jim is worth, you know, he's an MIT grad. He's worth billions of dollars. I didn't realize he went to MIT. Yeah, he was an undergrad. I think he worked with Singer and he was in the math department. Oh, so he was right. We've worked with a cosmology guy. Yeah. Singer if he, yeah, Singer is a complicated. Segal. Siegel is the comp, is the cosmology. Oh, Siegel. That's right. Yeah, you're right. He was. work with Singer. But anyway, they're both interesting guys. And I think, you know, like you had,

you had Kobe, you know, which eventually garnered two Nobel prizes. And then you had LIGO. And for so long, I made the point to Barry. I think for Barry's career, the cancellation of the Super Collider was like the best thing that could have ever happened to him because he went on to go and work on LIGO after that. And if he had stayed with the Super Collider and if it had succeeded, he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize because that went to none of the experimentalists on the LHC, right? So I said jokingly, and he's like, I don't play those games. But with you, you already had copy. I mean, you made this phenomenal impact on so many people on the discovery of something so foundational. And yet, you still kept working on this project that many people consider to be fringe. So what gives you that

courage? Is that just the way that you were born? Or, I mean, is there some tangible lesson that we can learn from your experience of having super successful thing and then a moonshot that could be a big waste of time and money. Well, I never think that way. See, that's the trouble. I don't think the way you're talking. And let me tell you that the Nobel Prize or where this particular experiment ends, whether it's successful or not, isn't the thing that is in my mind.

What's in my mind is it interesting? That's the first question. Am I going to do something which isn't interesting to me or even anybody else? and another one which is much more pedestrian is it fun okay and i found both of those things kind of fun and important and they started in my lab at about the same time and can it you told me over dinner we had dinner with alan goof and and the late great andy friedman who passed away sadly this year and max tegman and you said you know at any given time there are only four or five people who fully understand LIGO from soup to nuts. And, you know, I wonder, you know, can experiments

get too big? I don't think there's anybody who understands like every aspect of the LHC or maybe even of the Simon's Observatory that I'm working on. Can an experiment get so big that it loses that interest and fun factor that made LIGO appeal to you so much? Well, be careful with that. See, there's a difference between LIGO and high energy physics still. It's not quite, you are not yet regimented completely. And that's something my colleague who made trouble. This is the Driever never really understood. There was still, within LIGO, so many things that used your imagination and made you feel that, yes, you had a job to do. And if it succeeded, you would have another interesting thing to work on. And so you still felt within a constraint that, you had a job to do. And you,

you couldn't take crazy things on anymore, but that you were functioning in something which was very important and what you were working on was fun. I'll give you many examples. For example, you know, for a while we were screwed by Barkhausen noise. That's something I worked on. Why? Because it was making noise in the magnets that that pushed the masses around. So I did a whole experiment on that and then it came up. Yeah, it turned out it was a problem. That was fun to work on. In the beginning. We had done something completely idiotic. We bought a lot of switching power supplies. Stay away from switching power supplies. If you're doing anything delicate. They were just, I mean, you couldn't even walk near the place without getting a note from the

FCC saying you guys are a radiation hazard. I mean, a radio radio. So anyway, there were many, many puzzles, puzzles like endless puzzles that came up. And I got mixed up. I'll tell you something very pedestrian. The vacuum tube, the vacuum of the vacuum tube, of the big long tube. In fact, that became very important in my life for about four years. So it turns out everything I touched, there were people who I enjoyed working with, and they were things that didn't regiment. It was still,

it was still not yet in a regime where you couldn't see what was going on otherwise. I think there are people. There are people in LIGO who know enough about everything, part of it, that they can say, yeah, if there's a problem, it's probably in this subsystem. Interesting.

So that was kind of micro projects that add up the success of the whole project and each micro project is fun in and of itself. I think that's wonderful. So I want to ask you a couple of questions before we conclude. And these are questions that I ask guests who all, you know, honor me on there by coming on my show. And it really, you know, harkens essentially aspects that are important to me of life outside of physics. Because I think in the conclusion of my book, you know, I I lusted after the Nobel Prize until I went through this episode where I came close to, you know, possibly being involved with a project for it. And I came to see it as, you know, a byproduct over my shoulder over here. You can see Maria Gepart Mayer who won the

Nobel Prize. And she has a quote, you can't see it, but it says, winning the Nobel Prize was only half as much fun as doing the work. And I didn't. She's right. That's good. Good. I'm glad you have that there. Yeah.

So I keep that in. And that's actually on a poster. I have two daughters and I put her poster up in each one of their rooms. And the other day, my older daughter, who's four, she said, dadda, is Maria still alive? And I said, no, she's not alive. And then my daughter, she says, did she die? Did she? D.

So I said, yeah, she died. But she made wonderful contributions. Okay. These are things that involve death, unfortunately, but I'm not going to get too gruesome here, Ray. But it is the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. He did die 124 years ago in 1896 on this very day that we are speaking December 10th. And that's why they give the Nobel prizes out on this day. Typically, although this year they didn't do it because Stockholm is locked down, right? Because of COVID. So Alfred Nobel had a will and it said that the prize should go to the person who made, um, the greatest discovery or invention, and conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. And as you know,

Alfred had no wife. He had no kids. He had no errors in that way. So he left basically all of his money to the prize. Plus, he endowed what's what we call in Hebrew an ethical will, an Azava-a. It means a wisdom will. What do you want to leave to your errors in terms of wisdom that you've accumulated in your 88 years on earth and may it live to the biblical age of Moses, 100,000? We need you, Ray. But I want to ask you, what kind of piece of wisdom would you leave to future generations that you've accumulated? Well, you're going to be very upset with me, okay? I can tell you that already. And it's just advice that I give everybody, but I give it to myself also. If it isn't fun, get the hell out of it. That's great. Okay, that is perfect. Thank you, Ray. Okay, next one is a question

I ask, you've seen the movie 2001, a space odyssey with a... No, I don't know it, no. Well, there's a scene in it. We can skip over part of it. I do want to note that there was a Voyager satellite that Carl Sagan, here's a puppet of Carl Sagan. Someday, we'll get a puppet of you, Ray. I have a puppet of Nolmchomsky, your neighbor down all there.

But I'll get a puppet of you someday. He's still alive, right? No, he isn't dead yet. No, he was on my show earlier this year. Actually, I think he's younger than you. I think he was born... No, he's the same age. He was born in 1932 on December 7th.

So he just turned 88. So he's a little younger than I am. Maybe a couple of months. A couple of months. Yeah, exactly. So there's a plaque affix, a golden disc, a fixed with a phonograph needle can play it, that they put Carl Sagan convinced NASA to put this record on the Voyager satellite that contained sounds of planet Earth.

And it was meant I actually talked to Carl Sagan's widow, Andruyroian. She runs his cosmos program on TV and is written. and she actually had her brainwaves recorded and transcribed onto this phonographic disc, which appeals to your past upbringing and your experiments that we talked about at the very beginning of this podcast. But this disc is meant to last for a billion years. And it's sort of a time capsule that would go out into infinity, so to speak. Hopefully it will be discovered and on it is inscribed all these wonderful things.

I want to know if you had your own billionaire time capsule, what would you put on it. You know, Richard Feynman said this as a famous cataclysm, you know, destroyed, all of, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed. And only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures. What sentence would I, Richard Feynman, make that contains the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around. I want to ask you, scientific or otherwise, what would you like to put on a time capsule that would last a billionaires.

Well, that's a hard one. Boy, I haven't thought about that. But I think the most important thing is look around and see if you can draw conclusions. That would be my, I mean, I don't think I can tell you anything better than that. Yeah. It's kind of the experimentalist perspective. Yeah, drawing inferences from what surrounds us in nature. Last question, and then I'll let you go.

You've been so generous with your time. I want to go, instead of going forwards in time, to your ethical will and your billion-year-old time caps, I want to go backwards in time. So I don't know if you know Sir Arthur C. Clark or what he said, but he said a couple of famous things. He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. I like that one at the faculty lounge. I like to use that phrase. And then he said, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible, is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's the name of this podcast. We're named after this phrase. I want to know, what advice would you give to a 20-year-old Ray Weiss from an 88-year-old, Ray Wise, you know, advice to your former self that seemed impossible back when you were a youth, but now seems eminently doable because of your courage or insight or just sheer drive.

Well, I mean, that one's easy. I mean, at least from you can't leave you with an easy one. You'll come back when your book is out. No, no, no, no. What you do is, you know, once you've learned a little bit, you can't just, and this is one of the problems that I think a lot of the kids have today, that it doesn't take some investment to do what I'm about to say, okay? And this, I think, has happened because of the barrage of information that comes from everywhere. But you just don't make anything up that is of very much value until you've been around to think a little bit about it. That's one of the things.

But the thing I would say is make sure that you keep looking at the fresh ideas that occur to you. Because some of them might actually be interesting. Okay? And don't just say it's too hard. If you think there's something there, well, it's worth your time. And I can say this with what's happened to me over and over again. I mean, you know, you're somebody who's starting a new field. And that's another thing.

I don't know. You don't always stay in the same. I don't know what you've did, but I say to most people, look, if you don't every five years, especially as you're young, you get your PhD and field X. And if five years later you're not, if you're still doing field X, you haven't asked yourself enough questions.

But you should at least ask yourself the question, am I getting what I like out of this? Is it still fun? Is it still interesting? And then you might just jump into something else. That's not the reason I went to gravitational waves. That was there all a while. But that's a questioning of is what you're doing interesting still to you?

Or has it become a habit? It's something you've got to figure out for. And are you learning something new? Yeah, I have you. Is there something new that occurred to you? And boy, it's worth thinking about that. It is. Your mind is remarkable.

I don't know how it gets stuff. But, you know, it's amazing what comes out of it. Yeah. It's amazing. This computer made of fat, you know, can do so much stuff. It almost makes you religious. You got to be careful. Let me ask you a quick.

You were going to tell me something. Now here you are Keating, which is a nice wasp name. That's right, Irish Catholic. And you're a good Jewish boy from New York. I am. Tell me what happened. Okay, well, I'm going to send you a copy of my book so you can read it. But the short story is, both my parents are Jewish.

They're born biologically Jewish. And I was raised maybe once a year on Christmas, we would go to synagogue maybe or Chinese food. That was about the extent of our Judaism. Then my parents got divorced. and my mother married an Irish Catholic man with nine brothers and sisters named Keating. So I changed my name from Axe to Keating when my stepfather adopted me when I was seven years old. And then to make things even more complicated for you, I became an altar boy in the Catholic church at age 13, which you'll recognize is the age when Jewish boys are supposed to have their bar mitzvah.

Exactly. I never had a bar mitzvah. I was an altar boy in the Catholic church and I loved it. And then I went to college, became an atheist. And then after 9-11, I started to realize this country of Israel seems to be important. It seems to be involved in a lot of affairs on planet Earth. And I knew nothing about it. I knew more about Christianity and atheism than I knew about the religion of my birth.

And I was kind of stupid because I said, well, Christianity came along after Judaism. Jesus was Jewish. We know that. And so they must have, like anything that was wrong with Judaism, Jesus and the further Christians must have, like, kind of tweaked that and made it agree with data or imperial evidence or whatever. And so if I can rule out Christianity as being like, I don't believe in this transubstantiation or resurrection, then I can disprove modus ponens. I can disprove Judaism.

So that's what I did. And so I was an atheist for a long time until I started to get serious about wanting to have a family and get married and learn about this vast, wonderful history that I felt had been kind of denied and literature and so forth. So now I study Talmud, I read the Torah. I actually know more, at least I can read Hebrew now. And I do want to wish listeners a happy Hanukkah, tonight is the first night of Hanukkah.

And I thank you for that question. I'm going to send you a copy of this book, so I'll email you for your address, Ray. And I would love it if you gave it a read. Barry read it. He enjoyed it and he wants to talk more about it as well. So hopefully I'll have you and Barry and Kip, and then I'll have you all back when you guys come out with your book next year. God willing,

we'll have a better 2021 than 2020. I want to thank you so much, Ray. Okay. Well, thank you for this. You're a good interviewer, okay? You did well. Thank you so much. I hope we'll talk again. We'll zoom again. Bye, right. If you enjoyed this episode into The Impossible with Professor Brian Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes.

For more information, and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list, go to Brian Keating.com. Follow Professor Keating on Medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center, go to Imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director, produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Volko.