Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Peter Timbie: My Academic Father! (#159)

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

More than any other person, my Ph.D advisor Peter Timbie, taught me how to be a scientist. We discuss Peter’s advisor David Wilkinson (namesake of the WMAP satellite) and Bob Dicke. Learn the history of the Cosmic Microwave Background told by one of best teachers in the Universe. Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a special Father's Day edition of the Into the Impossible podcast with yours truly, Professor Brian Keating. And it is no stretch of the imagination to say I wouldn't be a professor without today's guest. Peter is my PhD advisor. And as much as you can say in academia, he is basically like my academic father. And we talk about our influences, his PhD advisor, the late great David Wilkinson, after whom the NASA satellite called the WMAP satellite was named. He had a tremendous career. also connected to the initial discovery of the cosmic microwave background, famous being told by one of his colleagues, Bob Dickie at Princeton, as you'll hear, boys, we've been scooped by Penzias and Wilson. But Peter fulfills that role, as we say in the Russian language, the word for scientists translates to someone who was taught. And to me, that implicates the scientist as having a duty and obligation morally or otherwise to teach and to teach people, but not only in the laboratory, teach them the short. Ertner equation, perturbation equations in quantum mechanics or in general relativity, or in my case,

how to build a microwave radiometer and look for the polarization of the microwave background, but also in life lessons. Some of my greatest mentors in life were scientists, scientists such as Peter, such as Andrew Lang, the late great Andrew Lang that I write about in losing the Nobel Prize. And these men and women that advise students have a solemn duty, but also we become part of each other's lives. So Peter is in my life nearly 30 years after I met him as a bumbling, fumbling graduate student at Brown University. Now he's at Wisconsin. He still makes time every time I need something from him or I want to talk to him. And this is really just a highlight. And to have it as

my academic father, literally, is just such a treat. So I hope you'll enjoy this video. It's a little bit different, talking about personalities, talking about influences, talking about the biggest picture topics in science, but not only within the laboratory, also outside of it. I hope you'll enjoy it and let me know in the comments what you think about it. Should we do more conversations with scientists about life outside the scientific laboratory or research setting? Or would you like to hear more of the videos that we've done lately deep dimes into things like loop quantum gravity, into black hole physics and otherwise? So for now, please do subscribe and also sit back and enjoy this ride into The Impossible with my academic father, Professor Peter Timby of the University of Wisconsin.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And today we are speaking with a man who more than almost any other person has taken me to the heights or the depths. It's not clear if he gets credit or if he gets blame. It's Professor Peter Timby of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who is my PhD advisor and who has been a good friend, a, a loving mentor and really, you know, one of the guides on how to be a good scientist that I've attempted and obviously failed because I'm not as good an advisor as he is. Anyway, Peter, how are you today? It's still March. And so I assume that the thaws will set in any, you know, month now, any quarter now. How is it out in the middle of the West? Yes. So, hello, Brian.

It's great to see you again. We're doing fine here. So, you know, even though it's not San Diego, we have winter is over. So we've got the lakes are still frozen though. That'll continue for some months. But snow is gone and birds are out. So yes, it's been a while since you've been in Wisconsin and spent your own days at the observatory and through the cold winter and so forth.

But we're, yeah, we've passed into a new phase before the bugs have come. Yeah, I was there probably 10 years ago. Maybe I'll come back. But I have recently thought out from that visit, which was, you know, the coldest July 4th ever. No, no, I was there in the fall. And it actually was so tempting, you know, my wife. And I only had one kid back then.

And they were like, why didn't you like it here? And I was like, well, I loved, you know, the people. I loved the university. But this thing called winter, it would usually kick in around, you know, September. and usually thaw by June, and it was the greatest, you know, kind of three-month period that you could ask for. But actually, it is a lovely place. The university is phenomenal. It is top-notch. And I thought we'd kind of like maybe review some of the past history, but also, I want to talk to you about pedagogy, because when I was under your tutelage, the thing that I

always learned is that you would give me a lot of freedom and one, and you'd make a lot of connections for me. And I kind of wanted to obviously express gratitude for that, but also to kind of ask you, because I never really knew it, you know, whether that was intentional or whether it's like with kids, you could never know what you're going to get. Because you introduced me to somebody named Alex Polnarev, who is a Titanic figure in theoretical cosmology and came up with a lot of stuff we do, studying B mode, polarization, et cetera, looking for waves of gravity imprinted on the cosmic Mike Ray background. And you let me work with him, and he was sort of a surrogate advisor in a sense, or additional supplemental advisor, rather. And he's a theorist, and you're an experimentalist.

Was that part of your plan, or was that just the way that things worked out? Is that intentional that you gave me this extra kind of care, you know, an attention that I surely did not deserve? Yeah. Well, I think you're actually giving me a little bit too much credit because, so So Alex came for a visit to Brown for an extended time to talk to Robert Brandenberger. And so I think it was during that visit that, you know, all of us connected. And I think, though, where I probably gave you a lot more slack than many advisors would do is I, I think for your first, I don't know, half a year working on the project with me, you were working mostly with him, right? So the idea was where you actually, you and he were leading a paper about this experiment to look at CMB polarization.

And so just laying out some fundamentals about how that experiment might work, what, you know, whether it would be feasible. And so, yeah, I think you basically were working almost entirely with him for quite a while before you actually got your hands dirty building stuff and doing what I really needed and wanted you to do. So it was, for me, it was great, though, because Alex, you know, of course, a world expert on these kinds of things provided a theoretical background that I, you know, I couldn't do. So I yeah, so it was, it was I think so you're not giving yourself enough credit because you really took a very mature approach to dealing with this authority to figure and and, you know, getting what you know, learning what you could from him, which is, you know, consistent with what you've done, I think, for with lots of knowledgeable people. You know, so you've kept in touch with me over the years, and I know you have with lots of people in the field. So, you know, I think, yeah. But it is true. I do, I was really happy to see you sort of taking the initiative and taking, you know, doing things independently.

And, of course, I continued, right? So I think I cut you enough rope to hang yourself with on your thesis itself. But that was, you know, that actually connects to the way I was trained by Dave Wilkinson when I was a grad student. So I think I was channeling some of the techniques that he used in advising difficult people like myself. Not as difficult as you, but it turns out at least some of those techniques in mentoring. worked well, I think. Yeah, I've been known to win the Nobel Prize in obnoxiousness. And I wanted to say one thing that Alex Polarev, our Russian colleague that we spoke about earlier,

that he communicated to me early on in our engagement together was that in Russian, the word scientist means someone who was taught. In other words, it's basically connotes that you are educated, but that you could not be a scientist if you weren't, you know, mentored and educated. And for me, that also means that you have this obligation to become a teacher once you're a scientist. And I've gone off on rants lately about, you know, how basically we should be forced and strapped into, you know, communication, you know, thunder domes where we are forced to communicate what we do because the taxpayers pay so much for us to do this fun stuff that we'd probably do for free in a lot of cases.

I mean, I always was having fun in the lab. And, you know, despite the pecuniary, you know, salary that you paid me at the time, which I think was four digits, you know, tall. I'm not, that's standardized. It wasn't Peter's fault that I was paid so low. But then I started thinking, you know, like, yeah, you were connected to David Wilkinson. I met him a couple times, thanks to you. And then I have a student, Darcy Barron, who's a professor at the University of New Mexico now.

And then now she has a student, Kayla Mitchell, who's a student at the University of and they're writing papers about microwave radiometers. And I'm thinking back how, you know, this connects through to you and to David Wilkinson and to Robert Dickey in this huge line. And we'll show in the in the B-roll footage, as the Wong's will say, you know, we'll show our genealogy, our PhD genealogy, which goes through me and through you, goes all the way back to a guy by the name of Leibniz, but not the famous Leibniz, another Leibniz, I believe it was. And this is, you know, an amazing person who had a wife and his wife's

name, her maiden name was Schmuck. I always thought that was appropriate, you know, at least for me. But let's take a step through how we came our origin story together. So we were at Brown. You were a professor, a young assistant professor at Brown. I was a neophyte, a novice. I'd come into graduate school thinking I might do theoretical physics or condensed matter of physics. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. And I did some research with some of the professors there. And I asked around, you know, their students, you know, and one of them had a had a white beard.

And I remember being very intimidated by this student who had yet to graduate in his mid-50s or something. I won't say who his advisor is. His advisor is no longer with us. But anyway, and I start, you know, who are the cool new professors, the young, the young, the young, upstarts that will be hungry and will kind of be a good steward, regardless of what they studied. And it was your name and Professor Valis, Jim Valis, who I know is a good friend of yours. And there are a few. And that was basically it.

And I said, cosmology. I was always interested in astronomy. But one thing that really appealed to me is that you were doing stuff that was new. And in retrospect, that was really risky. And I'm wondering, you know, how did you balance the risks to your career? I mean like obviously you wanted to get tenure you were in assistant you had only been there for a couple of years what year did you start at brown again uh 1990 90 yeah so this was 93 uh late 1993 when i showed up and there were you already had a couple of students uh some of whom are faculty grant grant wilson and others nowadays so you've got many offspring as is one lesson i want to communicate to you and offspring of offspring that are now graduate students it's amazing uh but were you scared i mean was it a risky thing was it not risky for you to take on this huge new project stuff studying something. This is, you know, right after Kobe had detected an isotropy in the C&B, but nobody thought, some said it was impossible to detect the fluctuations and polarization

of the C&B. Were you scared? No, I wasn't. And actually, you know, it's interesting how I remember actually deciding that this was a really good project to do because I was actually at a meeting probably in 1992 or something at Princeton, and I was looking at the direction the field was going. So this is a, you know, a meeting about microwave background measurements. And at that time, it was, you know, temperature antisotropy was what everybody was doing. And there was a talk that Wilkinson gave about, you know, what was the next step. And so he put up a slide of a, a, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, you know, sort of his view of what a satellite mission would look like.

Basically, this was the first anybody, first online had to see somebody talking about something to follow Kobe, the Kobe satellite. And this was maybe the first time he had what became the W-Map experiment, which, you know, went on to do amazing things. But it was at that meeting, I was thinking, well, you know, here I am. am in this room with, even at that time, you know, it's a fairly compact field. There were maybe 100 people there. So all, you know, all people working on the microwave background radiation and thinking, you know, how am I going to make an impact on a, on a, you know,

field that's obviously exploding. And, but also where most of the energy is going towards a few few ever expanding experiments, and one of them, of course, the W-Map experiment. And so it seemed to me that it was going to be best for me to try something a little bit different, right? Especially, you know, because of tenure coming up, I only had a few, you know, you only have a few years to do something.

And so, you know, to do something brand new, although risky would also, you know, It'd be a lot of fun for one thing, and also I wouldn't have to figure out how am I going to plug into an experiment that's going to have a timeline that's much longer than that. So I was still, you know, I still maintained involvement in ballooning experiments, the Top Hat experiment and the what was called the M-SAM experiment, the medium-scale antisotropy measurement. So these were looking for temperature fluctuations in the CMB from balloons. But, yeah, the polarization experiment that became your thesis was really distinctive, and nobody else is doing something like that at that time. And so it was a way to feel like I had some,

and in my group could have some breathing room so that we weren't plugged into some very competitive field. Of course, the field remains extremely competitive, as you know, and I think maybe a theme for research projects that I've tried to follow is to try to see if there's some angle I can work that might be a little bit different, something that other people aren't trying. Sometimes that's worked and sometimes not so good, right? And so, yeah, so I guess I wasn't really too worried about this.

This seemed like just a really cool thing to do. Yeah. And even I think it was prescient in a sense that we were looking for the large angular scale polarization of that microwave background. And it's true the microwave background has these three distinct properties, its temperature, it's blackbody characteristic, its spectrum, it's anisotropy, and its polarization and these features, you know, to this very day are still relatively unexplored. And the fact that the cosmic way background remains our oldest, you know, fossil relic of the,

of the infant universe will continue for quite some time, obviously, with the Simon's Observatory and the Simons Array and Bicep Array and all these incarnations of large angular and polarization measurements means that we're not done yet. And I remember coming into the field and meeting with a past guest on the show, Paul Steinhart, who you had brought, he was at the time at UPenn, and you had brought him in to give a colloquium, and basically saying, we're never going to detect this, you know, B mode polarization or at that time. And he had worked on the polarization in the microrate background from gravitational waves and saying it's impossible. And maybe it is impossible.

And maybe that's why we have the name of this podcast into the impossible, because we are not scared to challenge ourselves. I want to ask you about your recollections of David Wilkinson and of Dickie, of Bob Dickie in any way that you care to kind of comment on them. You're kind of this vital stepping stone, at least in my mind and people that you know, and have interacted with. But you're also, you know, obviously a font of wisdom on your own. So how did they inform your thought process as a scientist, as a mend?

Tori already mentioned a little bit of kind of the freedom that David gave you. But how do they augment the kind of nascent ability that you had as an educator and as a scientist? How do they develop, help your career develop in the way that it did? Yeah. Well, so first of all, yeah, so Dave Wilkinson, you know, I worked with him really closely. Not so much with Dickie. So Dickie was around and, you know, a significant presence. at Princeton, you know, while I was in graduate school as well. But most of my interaction was with Dave.

But they were, you know, they were both really supportive and, you know, I guess, you know, they, they there was sort of a dual role that they played. One was to set a really good example. I mean, this is for both of them, really good example of what a great scientist could, was like, but they were also really encouraging in the sense of, yeah, just helping young people like myself. And it, you know, I remember, you know, getting to graduate school thinking, and, you know, even when I finished graduate school thinking, there's no way I'm going to be like these people.

And realize, you know, I realized very early on that there's, you know, comparing, you know, myself to to almost anybody at Princeton in those days was not a not a helpful healthy thing to do but Wilkinson in particular was just really really supportive as you know as as we were working together on my thesis project which was an early attempt to measure the temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation this episode is brought to you by Netflix Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry.

And the best have you wait in the world, Frances Nganoe versus Felipe Lins. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. And so, yeah, so we were talking before about my pedagogical style trying to keep you in line as a graduate student. So Dave was, you know, he gave me also lots of slack, right? So I would, you know, part of it was, you know, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to do on a thesis. And he let me run with that, which was really good. but he would

and he would drop by the lab which was right next to the coffee machine strategically placed there and he would just sort of wander in hand in pocket and the other hand on the coffee mug and in the most gentle way try to find out what I was doing

and then without pressuring me without my even realizing it, he was just checking out that I was on the right track. I don't remember him ever saying, you're going about this all wrong. There were times when I came away from the conversation and realized that was really what he was trying to say, but he was just very diplomatic. And so, yeah, I don't know if I was, yeah, I'm pretty sure I was equally diplomatic with, with you, Brian.

But he, yeah, so he could simultaneously, you know, provide this inspiration that, you know, drove me ahead in my career, but also make it clear that, you know, just provide a supportive environment where I could, I could make my own stakes and mistakes and grow without out the heavy hand, which I know, you know, other advisors have different techniques. And for me, this worked really well. Do you think some of that was because he was involved in so many

projects from, you know, kind of wrapping up Kobe? When you were, you started there, what, in mid-80s or when were you there? He's actually 79. He started in my first year on the job. So Kobe was really in the middle of its development. You know, this is like a 15-year, program. And yeah, he was pretty busy. He was, I think, I think in a way he was, you know, he was just, he was very careful with his time. So he, you know, he didn't over-schedule his, you know, meetings with me and with anybody else, as far as I could tell. But he did have Alon at his plate with the Kobe thing coming along. And then he was running this big, the big gravity group there at Princeton after this is, you know, in the years that Dickie was retiring and stepping down from that role. So he didn't have a lot of time. He was also, though, very good, I learned something else from him, which I've tried to imitate, and that is very good at trying to carve out what he needed.

He was a very gentle fellow, but he, you know, there was like a sort of a fist inside of a glove, right? He had a very strong sense of himself, but on the outwardly, just being a really wonderful person to deal with. But he would reserve Friday afternoons for his own work. So he had a toolbox in the lab that had a skull and crossbones on it. Nobody was to go into this toolbox. And Friday afternoons, he would be at a drafting table or putting together stuff in the lab. This is for a balloon experiment he was building to measure the absolute temperature of the microwave background radiation. Sort of in a way of follow-on to the original experiment he'd done in the 60s to actually discover the microwave background.

Right. And so he didn't do things that he didn't want to do. And so I could tell, you know, the time he spent with me in the lab was, you know, he really wanted to be there. And he enjoyed, you know, he enjoyed, you know, talking about new ideas. And, you know, he just, he liked being a mentor. I think that's maybe the bottom of the line. Yeah. And you mentioned, obviously, the, you know, the connection that he had.

I always, you know, from afar, again, I only met him a couple times. but I always knew from afar that he was really fascinating. I mean, he could do anything. I think his thesis was on like the muon and anomalous magnetic moments or something while he was at U. New Michigan. But really his one true muse was the cosmic microwave background. And maybe even, you know, within that, the essence of his fascination with it was

measuring it, detecting it for the first time, whether it be its spectrum or. its antisotropy pattern or eventually its polarization. He didn't live to see that, unfortunately. But I wonder, you know, you arrived there in 1979. That was a year after Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background made serendipitously not far from where you were at, you know, just a year later, or a couple decades later, but in Holmdel, New Jersey, where I've been. And I wonder, you know, did he, did he ever talk about that or was it like, you know, they say for old, you know, military veterans from, you know, the Spanish-American, you know, they don't want to talk about it, you know, what happened to them.

He was famously, you know, the story that I relate in losing the Nobel Prize, where you're prominently featured in six of the 13 chapters was, you know, we were scoop. Boys, we've been scooped, as Dickie's famous alleged commentary when he heard from a third party that this measurement had been made at the labs. They didn't really know how to interpret it. And could Dickie give this interpretation? And lo and behold, was related to what he and Role and David people's were working on. So did he ever talk about it?

Or was it like, no, don't talk to David about that. It's a sore point. You know, so while I was there, no, I don't remember him talking about it. But I do remember, you know, after coming here to Wisconsin, And this is many years later. So I had him come out and give a colloquium, and he talked about, you know, this is in the early days of the W-Map satellite, I guess, you know, pre-flight, and, you know,

was talking about the design of it and what the science was all about. But he also, he took, you know, he spent a whole day here, and he spent a lunchtime with us. talking about the story. So he said, he volunteered. He said, you know, would you like me to talk about the discovery of the background radiation? Well, yeah, I said, sure.

So, so I, you know, got the group together for lunch and there were, you know, a bunch of, you know, a bunch of undergrads, grad students. And, you know, he had a sort of an outlet. line, he had a single page of showing the, you know, from the earliest days, when the first, earliest concept of that their first suggestions that maybe there is, would be a microwave background worth looking for. That is, you know, some relic radiation from the Big Bang, from the calculation done by Gamov and others in the 40s, which, um, was, you know, the calculation was published, but basically forgotten by Dickie and not known by Wilkinson and the others in the 60s.

So he had this whole process of how through various miscommunications or missed opportunities, the discovery in the 60s was really a surprise. while in retrospect, you know, there are lots of reasons that we should have known or Dickie in particular should have known. In fact, Dickie himself had made a measurement of the background back in the 40s. It was an upper limit. But it was, you know, the first measurement. But he had basically forgotten that he'd done that himself.

So anyway, so, you know, when he was telling the story, it was, you know, there was no, I had, didn't get any sense that he was upset about this, you know, having missed this, you know, I think he just saw this as part of the big picture of how science works. Yeah, certainly never came across as bitter unlike me or anything like that. And I wonder, what was their relationship like between Dickie and Wilkinson? Obviously, he cast a long shadow. And he lived quite a long time. I mean, he did pass away. And I think while I was still at Wisconsin, maybe 97, 98, something like that. And, you know, I remember you and, you know, talking about it. It was a sad day. But what was Dickie's influence like on you personally, but also on, you know, kind of the field as a whole of both gravity research? He was. He was. was kind of this Renaissance man, was he not, that could do theory, that could do experiment. And yet, we don't hear very much about him compared to a fine man or, you know, one of these modern physicists that you hear so much about hawking and so forth. But he, to me, it was a very, very special and unique scientist. Can you talk about what your recollections are of him and what was his relationship like with David? Yeah. Yeah. So they, you know, of course, Dickie was the

senior guy there and had brought on Dave and also Jim Peebles. You know, he was just, you know, just sort of beyond comparison, right? I used to think sometimes, you know, in some discussions with Dave that, you know, maybe I had one up on him. You know, he didn't understand something. And this is because I'd been, you know, I was working on this experiment, you know, night and day. And, you know, this is something he just stepped in and now and then to look at it. But Dickie, you know, there's just, he was just, you know, it's just, yeah, he was just, yeah, he was just from another realm, right? The fact that he could do experiments and theory, you know, one person who could do that, I, you know, I've never met anybody like that since then or before then. He was just really remarkable. I do remember actually, you know, my first year in grad school, we had this journal club. You know, we'd meet once a week and people would give presentations,

and there would be a half hour for grad student and a half hour for one of the faculty to do one. I was the organizer one year, and so, you know, this just meant making sure that we had a schedule. And so just before one of the meetings, I saw that, you know, Dickie was on the schedule. And so I went to his office just to make sure that, you know, he's retired at this point. He didn't, you know, didn't have to come to these meetings. But I just wanted to check in and make sure if you remember he was talking. And so, and I think I was also talking that day in the graduate student spot. And I had been preparing and reading some paper and trying to prepare my presentation for, you know, for a week.

And, you know, almost a nervous wreck over this. And I went into his office and he said, oh, yes, we, yes, we have journal classes. today and he went over to his filing cabinet, old-fashioned, you know, big gray metal things and pull open a drawer, you know, thousands of, well, hundreds of papers that he'd written and he said, which one do you think people would be most interested in hearing about today? And I, you know, it's just, you know, if at times, so this is, you know, in the 90s, he was mostly talking about quantum mechanics. That was something, you know, it was a big theme for him throughout his career. Yeah. So he probably talked about quantum mechanics. But the fact that he had done,

you know, he had written the radiometer equation, then all these things, I started written the radiometer paper that we both know and love. At the beginning of his career, all the way up through gravitational wave or gravitation, and you know, a new theory of gravity, the CMB, part of the invention of the laser, all these things is just mind-boggling. So anyway, so their connection was close, but they weren't working together day-to-day. Really, Wilkinson was sort of taken over from as far as leading the group. Right. And when I think about that paper, of course, we're talking about the very first paper that I was ever assigned as a graduate student by my soon-to-be graduate student thesis advisor.

And maybe for those that aren't familiar, I'll just say, you know, it's a, it is a very close relationship between the mentored and the mentee or the mentor or however you want, mento. Is it mento? I forget. I don't think it is. Protaget. And we had so many good times.

And you really made, you know, what was not an easy situation. I mean, graduate school is never easy. I don't care who you are. And I remember at one point kind of getting disillusioned. I kind of reconnected with my father and I was getting a little bit more torn towards learning about the fundamentals of quantum mechanics maybe or mathematics. And you said, well, you know, it's not a thesis if you don't have at least one crisis, crisis of confidence.

And I remember you say, you know, you got to choose what side you're on key. No, no, you never did that. That would be, that's in the movie, but that never happened. But the point is that you, you know, you were extremely your gracious person. You are incredibly skilled at mentoring. And I think a lot of that is you had this natural ability, which kind of is, on one hand, it's very, you know, exhilarating and appealing. On the other hand, it's kind of scary because I feel like we're never taught how to be advisors,

just like we're never taught how to be parents. You know, most of us have bad, you know, kind of bad examples for parents. So I feel like we're, you know, the old saying in psychology, we're all victims of victims, you know, but for me, it's kind of like learning on the job. And yesterday somebody asked me, who was a physicist, he became, you know, now he's into like sustainable energy or something like that. But he, he was asking me like, you know, what is it about like this relationship in graduate school? And I said something like, you know, my new kick is that science means knowledge in Latin, as you know, having studied Latin, sciencia means knowledge. but it doesn't mean wisdom. And wisdom is something different. It's a different word in Latin. And the point is that, you know, knowledge you can get from, from Wikipedia nowadays. I mean, back then it didn't exist. But but what you can't get even to this day is wisdom. And he was like, well, how do you apply wisdom in your daily? And I was like, well, it's kind of similar to what happened to me as a graduate student. I now am dealing with my graduate students, some of whom are

considering jobs and and it's very unusual because the thing you do once you know you get your first postdoc once well i mean for me i got fired for my first postdocs so i actually had two post two first postdocs if you will but we won't get into that uh but nevertheless you know from the perspective of being an advisor the you know wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad which you know is a fruit but how do you actually apply that well i think it's it's it's experience and the problem is how do you get experience as as as As you know, I'm a pilot. I took you up one time and one time only in a rental plane over Lake Mendota in Madison,

and you almost lost your life and a very perilous accident. No, no, it wasn't an accident. The window popped open, right? The window fell apart, right? The plane was collapsing, right? Yeah, you had to land. I was freaking out. So for somebody with a fair of heights, as you know and knew at the time well,

What could be worse, right? Yeah, exactly. But we made it. We made it back. And, you know, that, you know, on final approach to landing, I said, I'm graduating next week, right? And, you know, what choice did you? I would never do that. Actually, you know, it was a wonderful experience.

You did leave Brown in the middle of my third year, second year to go to Wisconsin, obviously where you are. But I remember, you know, you really made it like a family. And I'm genuinely appreciative of that because I don't feel like I've been able to replicate what you did and the way that you, you know, kind of had a group that felt like a family while you were raising young kids and while your wife, who's also a professor, was dealing, you know, with her career and your joint career. And yet you always made us feel that it was a family.

Did you feel like, you know, were you trained in that way? This isn't like David was necessarily like that. I don't think of them like that, right? He wasn't like this kind of grandfatherly. I mean, he was later in life. But how did you come about that? Was it just who you are? And if so, what hope is there for other people that aren't as naturally gifted?

Yeah. So, well, yeah, I mean, I think it is kind of, you know, just what I was comfortable with. I mean, again, it's not so different from what Dave did. He, you know, he would host the Gravity Group picnic at his house. you know, every summer. And so, you know, that was a very welcoming thing. Yeah, I remember the first one of those I went to, you know, I was really, really a nervous young, young grad student thinking, you know,

do I want to go to this picnic where, you know, you've got Dickie and Wilkinson and Peebles and, you know, these other famous people? And so I remember kind of scouting this thing out from afar, trying to decide at the last minute whether I should show. And he saw me, right, sort of peeking in. And he, you know, he came out and he grabbed me and said, you know, come on over. And, you know, he really was, he really was, you know, very friendly, very nurturing kind of person.

And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know if it was conscious or not of, me or not, but I've tried to recreate something like that, you know, with my own students. And, you know, I guess it's partly who I am, but also having a tremendous role model. You know, I often think about, you know, what would he have said in such and such a situation. and it's great to just have those, you know, some very vivid memories to fall back on. Yeah. So I want to turn to the paper that you did assign me. Again, we're talking with my Ph.D. advisor, my friend, my mentor, inspiration,

one-time sparring partner in basketball. We won't talk about those defeats that were handed to you, courtesy of a much skinnier kidding. But I do want to tell you. Sorry. That'll be for the rebuttal that you present on 60 minutes. I want to talk about this paper, measurement of thermal radiation at microwave frequencies. I emailed it to you, but you don't necessarily have to read it as we're going now. It's a paper you know well.

You assigned it to me as a young incoming graduate student in your group. And by the way, we used to have weekly meetings, and I do replicate some of the DNA from the Timby Lab. Nowadays, we have weekly afternoon meetings where we have a student present some cool new paper. even who has nothing to do with what we're doing. And I gave a bunch of those, you know, irreverent, irrelevant, and incomprehensible talks in the Timby Journal Club, in addition to presenting a paper like this, which you had assigned. And I now assigned this to my students. And I don't know. I'm going to check with Darcy Barron, my student who's professor in New Mexico, and see if she assigns it to her students.

And maybe we can get this tradition going for, you know, 17 more generations. But this paper is really a very interesting one in the history of physics because it was embargoed, I think, until after the war. This is published in 1946 in the Review of Scientific Instruments, now known as RSI. And this was only the 17th year, I think, that it was even in existence. And it was published after the war, 1946. And it's about this outgrowth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in their so-called radiation lab, which was kind of a counterpart, right, Peter, to the Manhattan Project, the more famous of these great projects that the United States military slash academic physics community put together to

help win World War II. And in this paper, which was, so it was published when he was at Princeton, he arrived, I guess, in Princeton, it says, there's a footnote now at Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton University, 1946. But the work was done at MIT, and he talks about this really kind of delightful analogy that one can make. And between the laws of thermodynamics on the one hand and the laws of radio reception and radar on the other hand, can you talk a little bit about your recollections of this paper? What made it so important to you? How did you find out about it? I mean, it's not like, you know, this was even common knowledge back in the 70s and 80s when you were a young graduate student. How did you find out about this paper? Yeah, so that's interesting.

So I guess at this point I can admit to a case of scientific theft. So I actually, the first copy I had of this paper was stolen from Wilkinson, actually. So it's the same version that you see, you know, printed out, but it had his name written in the upper right hand corner. And so now my copy, I mean, I still have that. Wow. And so it's now yellowed and so forth. So I'm, you know, I'm sure this, almost certain that this is something that Dave assigned to me, or at least recommended that I look at in the early days of, you know,

learning about, you know, how all this stuff worked. You know, how do you make, how do you measure the temperature microwave background radiation? And how do you, how do you, how do you understand it as well? And so this is a great combination of experiment and a little bit of theory that, you know, just perfect, right? You don't need to understand a lot before you go into reading this, and then you can get a lot out of it. 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 included. Live the game like never before with Game Changer. Create your free account today at gc.com. Yeah, so yeah, the paper, I'm sure this was required reading, you know, in grad school for people like me. So looking over it, what really strikes me is the very deep, you know, kind of grounding that he's giving to people thinking about this new technology. It would be like, you know, blockchain for physicists. I don't know, for people that are intelligent enough to understand stuff, but then it was something that was embargoed.

I mean, it was really a matter of national secrecy at one point because even to this day, we can use this type of technology to, to, you know, make observations about potential threats to the United States or, you know, in the space force, which I'm going to volunteer to join any day now. But to monitor things in space, everything emits black body radiation. anything that's made of matter will emit blackbody radiation. And so anything can be detected by some of the means of detection that are outlined for the first time, really, in this paper. And one thing that came out of it is a very, you know, kind of famous laboratory technique that's used to this very day and can buy examples of these. It's the so-called Dickie switched, a radiometer, phase-sensitive detector. Can you talk about what that was like? Did Dickie invent that?

what is sort of the history of that particular invention that's used in one form or another in every experiment that we do, but also in commercial applications as well? Yeah. Yeah, as far as I know, he did invent. That's certainly the idea of phase-sensitive detection or sometimes a lock-in detection, at least in the context of radiometry, which was, of course, what this paper was about. But I think, you know, just as a general laboratory tool, this lock-in detection is something that maybe had been used before. But, you know, you remember Dickie started a company in Princeton that made a commercial lock-in amplifiers.

So basically, it's a scientific instrument that, you know, that labs would buy. I think we're the only source for many years for getting one of these things. You know, I'd still buy one today. And so they're very powerful tools. But I think he, in fact, invented this, may have invented the technique altogether, both for general purpose electronics as well as radiometry. So, yeah. So this, you know, and he describes how this works in such a,

such a simple and logical way, right? So the illustrations in this paper include, you know, sort of cartoons of radiation coming into instruments that are beautifully shown. So, yeah, so I think to me, this is a great paper for a new. people to look at just because of the style. The writing is clearly trying to explain how something works rather than trying to show off. And so it's very different from most of the papers you find in the literature these days. Yeah, absolutely. To me, it was, you know, it was a delight to read because it's understandable. It's comprehensible. It's evocative. You can kind of instantaneously get what he's

getting at. He makes certain approximations. And while I was reading it the first time, I was like, why is he making these? And then later on, do you, I realize, oh, he's just like really simplifying it. Like, he chooses this arbitrary noise figure, you know, we'll get wonky for a second. He chooses it, like, to be nine. And then later, we, we, we, I learn that, you know, you add one to the noise figure and that tells you something about the tax. So later on to make the calculation be, uh, simple to do in one's head, you know, multiply 300 by 10. He had to choose the noise factor to be 10 minus one or nine. So it seemed arbitrary to me. Uh, anyway, it's very, uh, it's very delightful to read it and just kind of look at this magician who's going through these, these kind of

relatively challenging things to understand, but making it such that we can understand it. Of course, I love all the little side notes that go back to, you know, the 1940s. He talks about the Journal of the Franklin Institute, which doesn't exist anymore. And then he has, yes, those delightful cartoons undoubtedly drawn by, you know, some proto-graduate student or draftsman with an OUG. H.T. And then he thanks, who does he thank? The Grider is, so he's right, I'm gratefully indebted to Dr. G. E. Ullimbe, is of course, very well known, and Ms. M. Wang, so these are things that we don't do anymore. But he talks about the, you know, kind of the parameters. He gives an

example. He describes how one might make it. And then he talks about the most important aspect of all, which when I'm reading it, you know, with the benefit of all the hindsight that I have or whatever insight I might have. And I think he talks about what's called calibration. And one of the most important aspects of all the science that we do is calibration. And in some sense, I don't know what your opinion is, but I feel like Penz Jason Wilson, they were using the same radiometer that was used by this guy, Edward Ome. I don't know much about him, but he used the same home-nill antenna. He had a very similar receiver. But what he didn't have is the Dickey switch that would compare the temperature coming in, which we now know was, was dominated in some sense by the cosmic background

after getting rid of what are known as systematic errors. But the other way to compare it is they were comparing liquid helium, which has a very well-known temperature of four degrees, with the eventual temperature in the microwave background, which is three degrees. And they were doing that many times per second using this Dickey switch. And I'm just thinking about it, reading this section on microwave calibration, he talks about, well, there could be fluctuations that you misinterpret as being attributable to something coming into the antenna, in the case of the CMB from astrophysical sources potentially. And you might attribute that, but it's really a fluctuation in your instrument. And so you can freeze your instrument by chopping between a calibration signal and the

signal coming in from the astrophysical objects. He talks about measuring the sun and moon. And I'm just thinking, you know, like 20 years later, he would have this, you know, opportunity to measure the microrate background. And it was measured. using his technique, and he didn't get the credit for that discovery. He just had so many ideas that, I don't know. Yeah, he didn't get the credit for it. He didn't get credit for a lot of things. And it's a little mysterious to me still why that's true.

I mean, people all have recognized he's an amazing guy. Yeah. When I look at, you know, his career, again, you know, this file cabinet effect where he just had so much stuff in the, in the file cabinet and the Rolodex in his mind. Yeah, maybe I'm okay because I don't have that many good ideas. And therefore, if I have one, I'm just going to be obsessive and think about it. You know, one thing I realized when I was writing my book was that it wasn't clear when they wrote their companion paper. So he famously got this call. The New York Times is going to publish this, this result.

that the Big Bang had been discovered at Bell Labs. It was a leak to the New York Times by some radio astronomers and some people in the public. And Bell Labs had kind of tried to get credit early. And so they ended up publishing a companion paper right after Penzias and Wilson, which is like two or three times longer than Penzias and Wilson's paper in the Astrophysical Journal in May, I think, 1965 or so. And in it, the paper that Dickie People's role in Wilkinson wrote, they don't mention the Big Bang at all. The Big Bang is not mentioned whatsoever in this paper.

And it's actually overshadowed in any sense by the notion that there might be a cyclic universe going on. And this was still kind of in vogue in the 1960s, now that you could have this quasi-steady state universe that could expand and produce observations that matched what Hubble and friends had seen. But also you could have formation of the elements, but you wouldn't need to do that in stars. You could do that in some early dense phase of the universe, but that could have been preceded by a cycle. And I find it interesting that we're still kind of in that mode, like Sir Roger Penrose, Paul Steinhart, and other scientists are still very much thinking about cyclic universes. So what is it about these kind of cosmogynes formation stories that are so persistent that they refuse to die? Why are people so interested in explanations other than a single big bad? that produced our universe.

Well, it's the scientific method, Brian, right? You don't want to throw away. I mean, you know, so I think the cyclic ideas are powerful because, you know, it's difficult to think about a singularity. It's difficult to think about, you know, everything coming from, you know, a single time of Big Bang. And so in a way, at least to me, sort of, you know, pushes the question of the origin of the universe

farther back in time. Yeah, I don't know. I guess it doesn't help me that much to, but it does avoid the problem of, you know, something very special happening at one time. And then, you know, the question is immediately what, you know, what happened before that? So this at least says, well, we've got a model for that, but, you know, what happened before that? And that's, I don't know.

Right. Yeah, it's like infinite regress. Yeah, it is, it is, it is very fascinating to see how people make, you know, kind of everything that's new is old again or everything new again or old again. I don't know. But I want to ask you, speaking of things that are new in our remaining time before I get to the questions of the alligator. that are unsettling and the alligator, the alligator, Peter, that allocated them. I want to ask you what you are working on nowadays, because I know you are ever wanting to branch out and never stay stagnating, resting on your laureate-like laurels. So what are you up to nowadays? What is the

Timby Lab buzzing with excitement about these days? Well, most of what we're doing these days is trying to map out larger chunks of the universe than we've been able to do before, what people have been able to do before. So essentially, I'd like to think of it as creating many maps of the universe at different slices of distance from us. So imagine the universe being like an onion and looking at each of the shells and the onion, each one farther from us. And so these shells go, you know, go all the way back to the microwave background radiation itself,

which, of course, has told us a lot about the cosmology and will continue to do so. But the technique that we're working on is to use the radio emission from hydrogen gas, neutral hydrogen gas, as a tool to zero in on different. epics in the universe. So because the universe is expanding, more distant or older parts of the universe are appear to be receding from us at ever higher velocities. And that is causing the wavelengths of light that we see from those places to stretch out or the frequencies that we look at them with to be lower than when they were emitted. So we're trying to make maps of the a particular spectral line from hydrogen gas as a function of redshift,

which translates into a function of distance from us, and basically to try to capture as much information about the structure, three-dimensional structure of the universe as we can, between where we are now and as close, as far back in time to get as close as we can to the time when the microwave background was emitted. So, yeah, so it's like a super C. I'd like to think about that way, so we can analyze each of the maps at each of these different red shifts and extract more cosmic information even than we've been able to get from the microwave background. So it's a very challenging experiment.

It reminds me of the early days of the CMB experiments to, you know, where the signal was not, the signal size was not known. and it wasn't clear whether the technique would work. And so at this point in my career, this is something I really want to try to do. Maybe I'm willing to take more of a risk than a lot of people would be at this, you know, who are younger. And so, yeah, so that's the main focus of what we're up to these days. Sort of a combination of microwave background measurements, but sort of expanding that to the, the whole universe, pretty ambitious. And what kind of technology is that using?

So that is using radio receivers not very different from the basic idea that Dickie came up with. But these are ground-based radio telescopes. There are a few of these that people are putting together on the planet. that work by, so to make these things sense of enough to see what turns out to be a pretty small signal, you need a lot of, basically a lot of telescopes. And so these are arrays that are arranged as radio interferometers so that you, which basically means that you can combine the information from all the independent antennas to create maps as if they're coming from a single large antenna.

And with the additional sensitivity of having multiple copies of each antenna. So it's actually using fairly stuff that is directly traceable to things from Dickie's paper on radiometry, but now much more sensitive than he was able to put together because of, you know, huge technical improvements in sensitivity of receivers. Very good. Okay, Peter. Well, we have reached the end of the regularly structured interview, and now we're going to play a game if you are willing to do so.

And that is, I'm going to give you a rule. Cubics Cube with five of the six sides have been solved, but the six side remains to be solved. And I want you to solve it in real. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not going to do that. Thank you, Brian. That's the only way I can. So, actually, I have to go to office hours. Oh, okay. Well, I don't want to keep you. I'm so sorry. I thought I've kept you over. I'm so sorry. All right. Well, this means you have to come back again.

Yeah, happy to come back again. This is a joy. And, yeah, thank you for, you know, being a gracious host and not exposing the warts and so forth. The underbelly. The underbelly. I'm sure you can edit this in such a way that that all comes out. All right, Peter. We love you. We are indebted to you.

And I can't wait until we speak again. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. appreciate hearing from you and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for

his informative newsletter at briankeating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur Steve Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Velko and Brian Heating.