Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Should We BELIEVE In Science? DemystifySci & Brian Keating (#394)

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Should we believe in science? Is there any room to scrutinize the scientific method? And does Eric Lerner have a point? Recently, my dear colleagues, Dr. Anastasia Bendebury and Dr. Michael Shilo DeLay joined me at UCSD to discuss how scientists come to conclusions about the world, the role of belief in science, and what we can learn from modern controversies in cosmology. Dr. Anastasia Bendebury and Dr. Michael Shilo DeLay are scientists and explorers who host the weekly podcast DemystifySci. Each week, they interview a new theorist about the ideas that will rewrite our understanding of nature.  Join us as we explore the complexities of science and the scientific method! Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Should we believe in science?  00:07:07 The nature of science and truth  00:11:31 What is the scientific method?  00:17:17 Controversies in modern cosmology 00:33:27 Does Eric Lerner have a point? 00:35:08 On paradigm shifts 00:41:01 Back to the scientific method 00:43:09 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Check out DemystifySci: 💻 Website: https://demystifysci.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/demystifysci 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! 📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, there's been a growing sense of skepticism about science. The question arises, is the skepticism justified or should we maintain our faith in science and scientists? And how exactly do we do that? Arriving at conclusions based on incomplete or inaccurate data. I had the pleasure of discussing these questions and more of two young philosophers, Anastasia and Michael, host of the Demystified Science podcast, where they explore the edge of what's known to the world's best brains. Join us as we take a delightful journey into the world of faith, science, and scientists, providing an accessible gateway to understanding the complexities of human nature and the world around us.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. We are at UCSD. We are at Dr. Brian Keating's office, and I think that we're going to talk about the history and the context of science. the ideas that underpin the way that we come to conclusions about the world. And it seems like it might make sense to start with something that we've probably heard a lot about over the course of the last few years, which is this idea that we should believe in science or trust the science. And I feel like that comes with a lot of baggage because as scientists, we know that you have

to believe in the process, but not necessarily in the theories that come out of it. And so I wonder how you're processing that as we sit at the point in time where the James Webb is starting to show kind of interesting things about the galaxy. Yeah, but right over there, yeah. Right? And so. You guys have a James Webb on display right in front of you. Be afraid to touch it, but don't break it like my kids did. Yeah, well, first of all, it's great to see you guys in person, meet and live. I've enjoyed be listening to your show and also being a guest. It's my second appearance on your show. And it's great to have you in San Diego and be in person.

I think we've missed out on so much due to the pandemic was horrible, awful, tragic, and devastating to millions of people. The only good effect that I can tell besides spending more time with my kids and, you know, feeling less intensity in the workday schedule was I got to start my podcast. And that allowed me to meet, you know, literally speak to millions of people, 25, 26 million people in the last three years alone. As we speak in the end of 2023, it can't believe it's been over three years since,

almost four years since it first came on the scene, that thing that we shall not mention. But it's great to be in person, and that's one of the lessons I took away. So, you know, the end of it is certainly a wonderful boon to all of humanity and especially podcasters. So thank you for being here. I always say, yeah, I never say I believe in gravity.

I don't say, I don't say, I believe in evolution. I say, I have evidence for evolution. They're copious amounts of pieces of evidence for evolution. But that doesn't stop people for not believing in it or not treating it as if it is something worthy of belief and faith, the way something like religion would be apprised. So I don't, I don't really, you know, really react violently to that statement, believe in some. I sort of know what people say. They're either saying something in a political basis, like we try. trust the scientists, we follow the scientists.

It's sort of a shorthand, you know, trust the science, follow the science, I believe in science. So when it bleeds over into cultural phenomena, like belief in UFOs, belief in, you know, vast conspiracies and so forth, then it does sort of take on the patina that science and these kind of hypotheses, if you will, are on equal footing or that even religion and science are an equal footing because you believe in God, you don't say I have proof of God, although there are people that claim that they do have proof of God's existence, or that they've had God revealed to them in the form of personal revelation in Christ, for example, it's very common. But those aren't fundamentally subject to the scientific process that we can ascertain whether or not

conjecture is true via the tools of epistemology, of ontology, of figuring out what is the actual ground-level, base-level truth. And just like no one can convince me, I always hate when people say, you know, let's go off for sushi or whatever. I'm sorry if it's your favorite food. But for me, I hate it. I hate fish. I hate everything that lives in the ocean. It's always trying to attack me, kill me, bite me. I've got to go surfing here. I always get some kind of painful reaction to the denizens of the deep. You think that would make you want to eat them more. That's right. I hate cows. I just hate cows. So in this case, we, you know, so no one can make me feel better. And they always say, oh, well, like, I know this place that makes such good fish,

it doesn't even taste like fish. I'll say, I'll do you one better. skip the middleman, just don't have the fish. You know, it's like, if that's the biggest compliment that what you're eating doesn't taste like what you think, anyway. So it's a matter of taste. And it's almost like that. Like, do you believe, you know, or do you have taste or faith in something? So it's fundamentally not scientific.

Doesn't mean it's bad. Doesn't mean it's wrong. I mean, think about all you guys know way more about philosophy than I'll ever know. But, you know, you think about things in philosophy, classic, you know, categorical imperative. That's not like something you can prove that that is the ultimate way or the golden rule for my religion in Judaism and Christianity. It's not something you can prove, right? And you can say something can appeal on the basis of reason that it might be, you know, more proper way to live or the best way to live even and actually, you know, ascribe it some value. But it doesn't mean that it's scientific.

And so it's a challenge. I've done videos about, in fact, I did one called I don't believe in gravity. physics professor doesn't believe in gravity. And that's because we have so much evidence for it. But the other thing to keep in mind is whether or not scientific facts are truth, right? We take it for granted that once something is scientifically brought into the canon of science, that it's true. It's a fact.

But I always say it's completely the opposite. Scientists don't go about proving something being true. Mathematicians do. And philosophers can make certain statements that are provisionally conditional and logical assumption. But they can't prove anything in science. I can't even prove that the Earth is around. You know, if this is a beach ball not representing this cosmic macquarie background, if it was a beach ball representing the Earth, it would be have much more in common with the actual shape of the Earth than this table would that many people believe is true. The true

shape of the Earth is flat. But it still wouldn't be true. And neither would the description of the Earth is a perfect sphere because it's not. So everything in science is provisional. And that's okay. You have to be sort of comfortable in this anxious state as a scientist that you'll never know the fundamental truth, the actual answer, because it requires an infinite amount of time or energy or patience or activity. But that's okay. And that's the branch of life that you might define science is that which can't be proven, but is as close to the approximate truth as possible. It's like a different kind of truth, too, than you might access through something like religious truth. You talked about the golden rule. That's proved out, right?

I mean, that seems to be true by experience, but it's a very different kind of truth. Like, in science, we're just building models. I feel like we're always reaching towards the truth, but we never expect to reach it at the same time. And so the scary part of that is you have to open yourself up to the idea that the theory that you're in love with, that seems to be so close to the truth, there might be a better option at any given points. And it seems like in our modern age, the difficulty with that is that we build our whole, identities around our scientific careers, right? And it can become a very combative sport at the highest levels, right?

Absolutely, yeah. And so how do you navigate that as a scientist is the real trick? Like, how do you maintain that epistemic humility, if you want to call it that? Many don't, I think is the short answer. And that's a very, very, you know, perceptive observation. Because if you look at the typical person to becomes a scientist, let's get into it, the most dangerous branch of science, sociology of scientists, right? So what do scientists do?

What do they like? To what can we analogize them to? And I always say scientists are like children. I have children, thank God, and then, you know, they're wonderful. And they're just the most amazing, innocent cherubs, and they're adorable, and they have great ideas, incredible imagination, just mind-blowing curiosity, passion. Eventually, you know, you're talking to them, and they'll keep asking, new questions and me as a scientist and they'll assume I know everything. And last night,

one of my babies told me, you know, I'm not a good professor. So that, that stunk. But, but it's okay. Because, you know, he said, you're not even a real professor. I said, what are you talking about? I'm not one of these fake professors on the internet. They'll keep asking me. What was the evidentiary basis that they used for that claim? Well, this guy's got a little problem with me because I wouldn't give him his, his, his, his playdo that he wanted to play with In bed, you know, not a great idea to do that to a five-year-old. But anyway, so, but it's sort of revelatory of the nature of children, right? So when you have a child, their base level curiosity is infinite.

They just want to know everything. And because they know less than an adult, they're curious and they have hypotheses and they don't know that their hypotheses have already been ruled out. So to them, they're Aristotle, they're Socrates, they're Galileo, they're Einstein. Right. And so they'll keep asking you, they'll come in some idea, and then you'll say, no, that's not. And they'll say why and keep saying why, because. And then eventually get through the base level of reality with parenthood, which is because I said so.

And if you don't, you're going to lose your own marvels, right? So let's apply to scientists. Scientists are incredibly curious. They're incredibly passionate. They don't like taking no for an answer. They're anti-authoritarian by nature. They don't like rules being, you know, pounded down on their heads. They love their own toys.

They treat their own toys very, very, you know, person. They don't like playing with others. They're jealous or petty. So it's like there's no such thing, you know, life has yet to invent a single-edge sword, right? So there's wonderful qualities of children and scientists and then they're negative and less desirable aspects of both groups. I think, yeah, the notion that scientists are somehow walking Wikipedia's that are infallible

that are also open to the epistemic humility that you mentioned, you know, I think it's farcical. Like we're just these automata that just apply science. scientific method. I mean, you guys, and I'm not going to put you on the spot, but I could say, what's the scientific method? Hello, students of the impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little homework assignment to interrupt your podcast. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast or following us on your podcast app of choice. Get some research and actually only about 50% of you are actually following or subscribing to

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You'll forget. If you're looking to really boost your position on the grade curve for some extra credit, make sure to leave a rating or review of the podcast. It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show. Do you want the bickonian method of like variables? I don't even think you should answer because there is no sign.

I mean, there's multiple ones, right? So there's not one, right? I would say that the scientific method, as you understand it, is very much adapted to technological progress, right, where you iteratively test ideas out and you can characterize something with equations that parameterized your system and then you can iterate on it until you get closer to approximating the phenomenon. And then maybe if you want to build something, you can use those parameterizations and so forth. I think it's a very industrial method in some sense. But I think that there's a philosophical approach to science, which is more. based in almost like reason and the kind of evidentiary presentations that are more common in law, where you spend time philosophically trying to understand the implications of the thing that you

have discovered through experimentation. Because I've been teaching this course on microbiology for kids, and so it's a lab course. And it's... Kids, college kids. I know. I'm old enough that I'm like children everywhere. But it's really fascinating because there's something about science that has to do with just the process of this is the independent variable, this is the dependent variable, we are going to measure one thing and then see how nature responds. But then there's this other process of it which is to ask, well, what does it mean that nature responds that way? And I think that what Shail is pointing to is that there's a method that allows us to say, nature responds this way, here's the equation. We can

apply that equation to be able to build an engine, a rocket, a telescope, and microscope, whatever. And that's almost enough because then we can collect more data and then that lets us do the next thing. I wouldn't disagree with much of that. I would just say, you know, by some of those definitions, it's not clear for, and we don't have to debate it, but it's not clear that Aristotle was a scientist by those definitions, right? Because he would clearly do things in a scientific fashion, but the scientific method wasn't invented for, you know, 17 centuries hence, right? But also, he would come up with observations that would neatly fit the data and the data were absolutely accurate.

And this happened with our good buddy Albert, too, or he conjectured a static universe because there was nothing, absolutely nothing to reveal otherwise. And yet it's as different from the actual universe we think we live in as humanly possible. So how could both of those propositions be part of the same canon of the scientific method? I am only asserting that there is no one definition. I mean, there's multiple ways to get at scientific truth. There's serendipitous discoveries. There's deductive approaches to the scientific methods, inductive approaches to scientific method.

But I think we love this. My friend Eric Weinstein calls, you know, scientific method, the radio edit of, you know, popular consciousness and scientific, you know, awareness. Because it's something that I can point to, oh, you didn't apply the scientific or you're not applying or you claim to be a scientist. So it's kind of used as a. as a Shibboleth to kind of, you know, as a shortcut. And I think it's fine, but, but again, getting back to the original question of whether or not there's, you know, there's a problem with this notion of belief. I think, you know, scientists are as dogmatic as, as any other person

and to expect them to be otherwise is, you wouldn't expect, like, lawyers to be more moral in general or more rational than other people, right? Half the time, half of them have to defend people that they know are guilty, right? So, so how could you, you know, do something more, purely morally? I actually think it is good that we have such a jurisprud system, but now we're getting pretty far astray. I do think it's valuable to have a branch of society in order to have a culture and a civilization where you have a branch, a practice, a craft, where you have artisans of that craft that apply common tools, common techniques, but maybe violently will disagree on occasion. I think that's a sign of a healthy field. And if you don't have that, you have kind of group think or politics or something that is. I think ultimately might be interesting, but it's not certainly something I want to spend time on.

So personally, I think all of our predilections come into play, just like I don't like fish. I'm not going to take you guys to a sushi restaurant. But at the same time, it may be that some abstract, maybe fish is the best for me. So I'm actually acting against my best interest. I think scientists do that all the time. It seems like as long as people are focused on the fact that our job is to understand nature, to physically understand nature. I mean, for physicists, right?

Our job is to understand the mechanistic basis for all the phenomena that we observe. As long as we remain inspired about that and excited about getting to know this place, this incredible place that we wake up into one day when we're born. And if we center that, then we really meditate on that on a daily basis, then we're less likely to fall prey to, I love my pet theory or, you know, I love my advanced degree or whatever it happens to be that people tend to get side-true. by. Yeah.

But in the context of cosmology, this is kind of playing out, right? To some extent right now, we talked about the James Webb. What's going on? So it seems like there are, well, there's, like we mentioned gravity, maybe that's a good place to begin, right? There's these anomalous motions in the celestial world, right? Let's say the galactic rotation or Big Bang dynamics, things that people are really having to rethink the fundamental basis of these phenomena for the first time in a long time, right?

It's been maybe a century that people have been sitting on general relativity as the end-all be-all, and it's kind of gotten concretized in that fashion. So what's unfolding? What are the specifics of this trauma that are playing out right now? It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah. So it is fascinating because it is an example of kind of the, battle between, say, groupthink and, you know, what I call big cosmology, you know, and then these lone geniuses like the Einstein's or the Galileos that send to get the

lionized share of the credit, right? The most kind of raging controversy right now in my field of cosmology is whether or not the Big Bang happened, which is like saying, you know, did life form on Earth or did evolution occur? So that claim is an extraordinary claim that the Big Bank did not happen. And it's been stoked in the media by a real handful of, I wouldn't say, borderline crackpots, okay? I would say people that are very, very unorthodox in their approaches. Some are not practicing scientists. Some have ulterior motives. They have, you know, a business interest, if you can imagine it, in understanding their particular application of the alternative to the Big Bang called the plasma universe, some of which was developed in this very

building by Alvin and who is a Nobel laureate who had some outlandish ideas about the origin in the universe as well. And in this very office was inhabited before me by a Titanic astronomer named Jeffrey Burbage, a theoretician who along with his wife, Margaret, who is even more exceptional than he was, they came up with Fred Hoyle and Willie Fowler at Caltech. They came up with the concept of the nucleosynthesis of stars making the heavy elements, like I'm going to give you guys. So here's your gift. Your holiday gift is a meteorite. So that's for you. Thank you. Stasia. And Sheila. There you go. So these are the byproducts of a process that they first indicated, which is called stellar nucleosynthesis. Yeah. So there you go. I'll zoom in there.

So show up to the camera. So I actually give these away to anyone with a dot edu email address. It smells smelling. Smells so interesting. Smells meaty, right? Yeah. Well, it was traveling, you know, 26,000 miles per hour at one point. So these are real meteors. These are the kind of fossil relic of a of a stellar process called the supernova type two supernova blasting material out into the solar system. So the burbages and their colleagues came up with a theory to explain why this is here and why the iron in this meteorite is identical to the iron in your blood. So it's true what Carl Sagan said. I have a ping or puppet him somewhere too. You know, we're made of star stuff, right? So the star stuff is literally flowing through our veins.

They came up with that process. They did not believe in the Big Bang, at least two of the four of them. I don't know about Margaret, but Hoyle is the one who came up with the term Big Bang is a pejorative, which means orgasm, apparently, in British English.

Although I made that statement at the Royal Institution in London this past summer and they kind of looked at me strange. So I think it's fallen out of favor. We don't say that, yeah. That's right. We have proper ladies and gentlemen here. So he,

coined the term as a pejorative to say, this is ridiculous. The universe didn't have some orgiastic beginning, right? And yet, so now we think it does. And the evidence for it is supported by not that authority really plays into it, right? This whole notion, 97% of scientists believe it's been subjected to hundreds and hundreds of independent cross-linked and uncross-linked and uncorrelated types of examination, ranging from the isotopic abundance of all sorts of different things from the water you're drinking, to the balloons that in helium that you can go at a party store, to the lithium that we take to be normal. No, I don't know. I'm taking it. I'm not, not, no, God, I have to be careful making any microaggressions, but there's lithium, there's

beryllium. All this stuff. They came up at that. And then it ties into the causal chain that leads to this meteorite, which was predicted as a consequence of the stellar formation endpoint called the supernova that hoyle, the guy who didn't believe in the origin of the universe through a big bang, believe in what's called the quasi-steady state universe. These are photographic plates. Some of these were made by... It's not the sepheed variable plate, but it's one of the plates that Margaret Burbage used with an amazing astronomer named Vera Rubin.

So Vera Rubin was in this very space in UC San Diego. She learned how to map out the rotations of galaxies for Margaret Burbage, who was the wife of the man who had this office, Jeffrey Burbage, and the two of them taught them that she could be... She was discriminating against because she was Jewish and the woman. And for many reasons, she became the household name that we know today because of the work that she learned here and rotation curves of galaxies. Now, if you look at rotations curves of galaxies, and you ask, how fast should this galaxy be rotating? How many times should a star like the sun have lapped around the galactic center in the past n billion years since the galaxy formed or since the Big Bang form?

So this guy that you're mentioning wrote this book, the Big Bang never happened. That book came out when you were probably a newborn or maybe you're not even born, 1999, two or three. And that book was issued on the occasion of the release of the Hubble Deep Field, one of the most iconic images in all of sign. I'm going to be teaching a course. I'm starting an online university at some point soon, just for fun because so many people are interested in this stuff and getting such good feedback.

I'm going to do a course on the top 20 astronomical images of all time. And this is like number one or two. I'm not going to give it away. You have to buy the course. 99, 99. It may be free. I'm not even sure. But the point is, it's one of the most iconic images. And that image shows galaxies. And it shows galaxies and an epoch when traditionally thought by people like Lerner back in 1994, they shouldn't exist.

That these types of galaxies, their structure was far too mature. And therefore, it needed not only to be true that the Big Bang never happened to have an eternally old universe, which can't explain host of other examples, but that type of universe also adheres to this plasma cosmology of his hero, Alphen, who also, I don't know what about you see San Diego attracted so many. I know, you came here. So, like, attracted so many individuals who don't believe in the Big Bang, but it had a surplus of them. Anyway, nowadays, so now the web telescope deep field comes out, images the exact same field, sees the exact same galaxies that Ler and Hubble and everyone's like because they're publicly domain. And it sees more stuff

because it's seeing infrared wavelengths as opposed to just optical wavelengths. Therefore, can see farther back in Redshift, which is farther back in time. It can see back to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Now, Lerner is now claiming, oh, this has caused astronomers to panic. And in fact, I did a live interview with Allison Kirkpatrick, who's a professor in Kansas. And she was quoted as, you know, she can't sleep. Everything's every shit. But he just took all this stuff out of context. And then a couple of months after that or almost a year after that, there was a publication of a reestimation. of the age of the universe, also using a kind of outdated model for the evolution of the universe.

Now he did this professor Gupta in Canada. He did have a universe that had a big bang, but now he claimed the universe had to be twice as old, and then only twice as old. So it'd be 26 billion years. Well, my friend Joe Rogan picked up on that, and then he all of a sudden was kind of going off on how amazing that is. And then Elon Musk chimes in and says, well, this is just incredible. But what's really sketchy is dark matter. So I'm like, these guys are just like throwing all this nonsense. Yeah, they're just like armchair experts. They can say whatever they want.

But and it's fine. And I like both of them. But the point being, having a galaxy that rotates either faster or appears more mature in its structure is not in any way a falsification of the Big Bang narrative anymore than if I say, well, there are primates on the surface of a blue green planet that's orbiting around a type 2G star. and it is in the Goldilocks zone. And those individual primates, according to my theory of evolution, they should not even exist, let alone have these electronic, electrified pieces of silicon and glass that they communicate telepath. That's impossible. Therefore, the Earth didn't form.

I mean, it's ludicrous. It's absolutely ludicrous. So they might have a complaint against the version of the models for galaxy formation, galaxy rotation, galaxy composition. But it's like saying you found this type of fern, you know, in the fossil record that shouldn't have existed until 100 million years later. You would never say, well, that throws off the theory of plate tectonics. You would just say, we don't understand plant biology well enough or our models are wrong.

Maybe maybe they're wrong. But to say, A, that this is new information is totally false. It's just every 20, 30 years, whenever there's new technology, I'll see farther back into time, doesn't mean that they couldn't have had these things. Now, if they saw a galaxy prior to the CMB, which is 380,000 years, a thousand times younger than the oldest galaxies that they claim to find and see and do indeed see, then that would cause me to reevaluate understanding of structure formation, maybe the origin of how the heavy elements were produced because these galaxies have heavy elements, which produce red or light in some cases. And so we would have to reeval. It still wouldn't make me reconsider and falsify the notion that we understand. understand the first few microseconds of the universe.

But they're always playing upon this. They get a lot of attention. I'll have some responses. I'm working on a, what do you call those reaction videos? So Lerner keeps making the circuits. He was in Europe this summer. And they've asked me to put out a hit piece on them. I'm not going to do that, but I'll put out a video that shows exactly what we know,

the 10, 20, 50, different piece of evidence in favor of the Big Bang. And the astonishing thing is that there's a disagreement within the scientific community. about the most fundamental fact in cosmology, the most important parameter in cosmology. I'd say, like, if you wanted to know how long you'd live, you know, hopefully you guys are gonna live to 120, as we say. But what would you do? What would a doctor, not like me, or you guys maybe,

but what would a real doctor ask you? What would be the first thing? They'd say, what would they say to you? Say, we'll start with you with you Shail. Like searching for your health? Yeah, what would they ask you? What kind of questions? Probably what do you eat?

Do you exercise? Yeah. Your vital signs, maybe. What else would they ask? I haven't been to a doctor in a really long time. Will they give a different answer to you now or when you were 10 years old? How long, how many more years you're gonna live?

Oh, in that sense? Yes. Do you believe in the singularity? It depends on if you have like a futurist doctor because I know that there's a regenerative medicine center on campus. And so this is the thing, right? It's like to some degree there's an expected lifespan,

but there are also things that we change in the process of living and doing all of the science and the environment and everything. I'm not even getting that. You guys are so bright. You guys are always anticipating 20 questions. I'm just saying to know how many more years you have to live, left to live. They also need to know how old you are now, right?

So what I'm saying is right now astronomers are making predictions about the future of the universe and the universe with dark energy. Is it a cosmological constant? Is it a quintessence model that might evolve? There are other types of dark energy, types of dark matter. But they need to know how old the universe is. And right now, astronomers, no debate. There's a huge thing.

There's huge, what's called Hubble tension. The Hubble constant is effectively the reciprocal of the age of the universe. One group of astronomers using the Cepheid variables, the same types of observations that Vera Rubin and Margaret Burbage did to make these plates here. This is real historic artifact. I'm lucky to have it here. But they come up at an age of the universe that's effectively younger than the age of the universe predicted by astronomers, cosmologists that study the cosmic micro-es,

background radiation and its patterns. Both of those are indicative. This is like asking a toddler and take what's your vital signs, what's your family history. It'll predict a lot. And in fact, very accurately, the actuarial tables, insurance tables, they do predict lifespan very accurately. There's always some uncertainty. But within the uncertainty of each one, I should say this, the uncertainties are at the 1% level for both the cosmic microwave background. It's actually half a percent. The precision that we are quoting, we, my colleagues, and I quote on the age of the universe, effectively from this are at the half a percent level. And from the Cepheid variables in the later universe, that's at the three quarters to one percent level. But many different

types of sephiates, supernovae, white dwarf, all these different things, and then a complete different type of cosmology from the C&B. They both have percent level or less errors, and they differ at nine percent. So they're differing at, you know, this is called the Hubble Tension. It's called the bubble tension. So if you look at it and each one could be at, let's say the lowest one is at as high edge of its error bar and the highest one's at the lowest, then they're discrepant at five standard deviations. This is something to take seriously. Because that five standard deviation, the 10% difference between them means the universe could either be 11 billion years old or 14 billion years old. That's a huge spread, but it's not enough to account for this,

in any case, for the age and maturity of these different galaxies. So all in all, that's a healthy thing that these groups disagree, but each one has incredibly exquisite precision. Now what could cause the universe to change over its lifetime? Like if you ask your toddler, how many packs a day do you smoke? If they answer, you're a bad parent, right? But by the time they're your age, maybe you smoke, maybe you don't. Maybe we vape or we do an edible, no edibles? No.

Okay, come on guys. You're letting me down. I thought about, you know, what are you guys, Generation Z or something? Anyway, we're wasting your youth. I love how young you think we are. I know how old you are approximately because you told me when you guys. I did want to say something like to. So I got to know, Eric, he came and actually did a guest lecture for me while I was teaching at Columbia.

Well, I was actually teaching at Barnard across the street. And one of the things that really mattered to me when I was a kid was it was, you know, say what you will about his theories or whatever. But the fact that I found a book in the library that was saying, hey, there's, there is dissent possible. Like I had never imagined science. I had always thought of it as this monolith. story that was handed down and, you know, iterated on. And so he also has this really beautiful section at the beginning of his book. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, you take the pendulum thing. Yeah, where he points out this way that consensus moves from one place to another because science comes

with cultural, social, metaphysical burdens that are carried by the people that are putting the theories together. And so when we talk about... Yeah, at a certain point. And then, and then, but he will claim that there's an active, it's very confusing because on one hand, he'll say there's an active conspiracy to suppress the truth coming out of him on behalf of people from literally like the union of professional cosmologists, which doesn't exist. And then he'll say, well, look at me, I got this paper published. So he says, things will be rejected and not even evaluate it. And then he'll say, but look, I have this paper that was published in, um, in the monthly notices of the Royal astronomical society with several typos, by the way, in it. So it tells me the referee process

was kind of shoddy. But at any rate, fine. So you can't, but you can't have it both ways. I can't say there's a vast conspiracy against the ideas that Brian Keating is promulgating. And furthermore, that same conspiracy is also allowing me to, you know, be like they're publishing, you know, the 9-11 truthers information that's all out there. And then they're also suppressing that there was a conspiracy to call, I'm not even going to wait into that. I'm just using as an example. I think blaming the world for anything is kind of the lowest, lowest possible place on the totem pole. It's certainly true what he says, but I don't think it's very, you know, it's very significant. And that he's trying to argue that because things have changed in the past,

and because people that we respected and paradigms we respected in the past were overthrown. Therefore, this time when people call those people crazy, this time they're calling him crazy, I get emails like that all the time. You know, you're going to think I'm crazy. They called Einstein crazy. He wasn't good. I mean, they make up all sorts of stuff. There's actually a really funny crackpot index that floats around that has like, I don't know, 30 or 40 different characteristics on it. And one of the main ones is equivocating your position in the world to the position that Einstein was in at the time when he created his theories. And so I guess the point is not that Eric Lerner is correct or that, you know, the Big Bang never happened. But it's more that

there is this really beautiful aspect of science that has to do with our, spiritual relationship to the ideas that seem possible at the time. And I always think about it where... What do you mean by spiritual? Because I mean... I think of that maybe not in the context of science. I know, I know, because it's like it's a word that we tend to not look at very closely because it's like, well, we're scientists. We're generally like atheistic. We don't like let that enter. I don't care about atheistic, just objectively, factually, evidentiary, etc. But I'm like, I think about Newton trying to figure out how light works. and he didn't have the evident he was missing pieces and so he could never fully come to a model

that made sense and it tortured him like do you know what newton did for the last half of his life after he wrote the principia after he wrote alchemy he did a lot of religion he joined the royal mint as their like lead counterfeit officer and he would dress up and he would go to pubs pretending to be this down on his luck dude to catch counterfeiters in the act And then torture, though. I've got. We overseed their torture, yeah. I have a video coming out where I talked about that with Joe Rogan as well.

Yeah, he was kind of a jerk, shall we say. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com. or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. But I think that there is this metaphysical aspect

where he had a worldview that was governed by the limits of what he could imagine and the limits of what everybody around him could imagine. And so when I say spiritual, I kind of mean this zeitgeist influence on the way that people think. And when we talk about paradigm shifts, the notion of paradigm shifts is that the paradigm shift kind of comes out of nowhere, right? Like Thomas Kuhn, when he writes about it, it's that there's the sudden stepwise projection where it just ratchets forward. And I'm like, I think that what actually happens is that there's a group of people who see things in a specific way. And at some point, that way of looking at things becomes impossible to ignore.

And so they've been doing all of this work in the background. And then all of the sudden the moment arrives where the tension with the old ideas is so high that the only thing that's left to do is to switch. And from the outside, somebody looking in, it's just like, oh, well, all the scientists decided at one fine moment that, like, it was time to switch. Yeah. But I think in practice that I don't mean to say that, you know, Kuhn's ideas are outdated or outmoded, but I don't think they're universal.

I mean, when you look at the Big Bang for a whole, to call it a paradigm shift, I don't think, you know, my 19, you know, uh, 79 Fiat, you know, shifted even slower than that. I mean, it's taken forever to actually come up with that. And the fact that, you know, it's still not agreed upon, you know, the finest details of things. And there's, there's one or two lacunae in the, in the, in the big bag model that, that learner hangs his hat on still.

And then there's just giant grand canyon gaps in his, like, the one thing that he can't explain is a tired light and had his tired light. actually occur. He doesn't understand the mechanism in a non-expanding universe. He has to account for redshift. That's like the number one observable in all of cosmology is the redshift because we can't measure distances directly, because we can't measure distances directly, because you have proxy. Anyway. And that's where the Big Bang started from what I understand, right, was off of the Hubble relationship. Yeah. So the Hubble relationship was the key idea, it was the key observation. The idea came earlier from LaMaitre and as you guys probably have

talked about and know about and others. And it was a consequence of Friedman's application of Einstein theory of general relativity, which can actually be proven using Newton's laws of universal gravitation. So all these things had to come together. So you're talking about like the 1700s, Principia, all the way up through now. And to say that, you know, one thing that I've been teaching about it to general audiences recently, the Big Bang, and one of the things I talk about is how this steady state model was still popular up until the 60s and even into the 1970s. And it really wasn't until the 1992 measurement of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background by past guest on the show, John Mather and others, and the Kobe FIRAS instrument that it was known to be

a perfect black body. And up until that time, even Jeff Burbage and other people in this office and Fred Hoyle and others maintain that, no, the steady state could still accommodate. The red shift was caused by dust grains and so forth. And it turns out even into the year 2000, my friend, Professor Anthony Aguirre at Santa Cruz, you guys should interview him if you haven't. He's a phenomenal intellect. He wrote one of the greatest papers I've ever read about it, you know, how dust can

explain, you know, the Hubble experiment. And this is right before the W-Map experiment was long. Now nobody believes, and no professional cosmologist really working believes that the CMB is produced as a byproduct of dust or something. But getting back to it, so one of the foremost proponents of, you know, the steady state from a philosophical standpoint was actually the late great noblest. Stephen Weinberg. What Weinberg said is that the reason that people like the steady state model is because at least resembles the account of Genesis 1-1. Has no beginning. And most scientists,

he recognized are atheists or agnostics, as the case maybe. And that having, that was a philosophical virtue, according to Weinberg, is that it didn't rely on anything connected. And it was as far apart from a biblical narrative as could be countenance by someone who is a card-carrying atheist his whole life. And so it really wasn't. And he claims if indeed the steady, the, the, if indeed the cosmic microbe backgrounds spectrum is found to be thermal, then that will spell the death now for the steady state theory. But it hasn't. So has the paradigm shift really occurred or are we waiting for it? Is it necessary for every single detail to be nailed down to the six decimal place to understand it?

Like I said, we know the age of the universe. But it differs in different models and differs kinds of not just calibration. errors or analytical errors or noise. It differs because of the way that we interpret data arising in an evolving universe with dark matter and dark energy itself, which were not our contingent ideas that are not part of, you know, they're kind of bolted onto the Big Bang model itself, the so-called Lambda called dark matter paradigm. To wrap this to the place where we started, where you asked about the scientific method.

And I think that the paradigm shifts when the theory can let you do so. something that the other theory didn't let you do. Like if there's some aspect of science, specifically technologically, like if you think about the theories that we have of like immaterial gravity of space time, where if you can figure out how to manipulate space time to produce, let's say, anti-gravity devices, like let's say that's possible or be able to use propulsion off of manipulation of space time directly somehow, which I think is like a pretty sci-fi idea. Yeah, it certainly is. But I'm like, in theory, if we understand it,

I don't see why it's significantly different from like a nuclear bomb. Like if you told somebody about a nuclear bomb 200 years ago, they'd be like, what are you talking about? Yeah. The question I always ask is, you know, in the analogy I would use is, you know, we're talking, we're using these microphones or connected to computers or cameras. They're all transistors, right? So transistors effectively, you know,

one of the most simple in some sense quantum mechanical device to explain. Did anybody look into the, you know, the Schrodinger equation and then say, you know, Bartine, you know, Shockley, et cetera, they look into it and say, oh, let's design this thing to do that. No, it was completely technological. And only afterwards, we understand exactly how to manipulate and improve upon it vastly. So while it's true that, you know, Einstein recognized E equals MC squared, it wasn't like, you know, Oppenheimer looked at the E equals MC square and said, oh, that's how we build a bomb, right? So the problem with science is that sometimes, yes, it does produce technology. But the question of scientific coherence of so-called the virtues of a theory and a model, they're kind of speculative. And the reason I say that is because you can't agree upon it any more than I think I made the case earlier. You may or may not agree that there's no one scientific method. In other words, we wish we were mathematicians. We have deep, deep, abiding, mathematicians.

We all physicists want to be mathematicians because they have a proof of what is mathematics. In other words, or not mathematics in terms of girdles in conclusion. completeness theorem. They can specify that there's axioms that cannot be proven within the formal contextual, you know, scope of mathematics or things that are not provable within that scope. We have no such thing. The closest people, the most common thing at a bar, someone will say popper, it should be falsified. But even that's a joke, right? Because I could say to you, you know, what's your what's your horoscope sign? What is your horoscope sign? When is your birthday? Are you asking what it was 2,000 years ago when they invented the horoscope system?

Were you an alfayukis? Yes. Oh my God. I've never met an Ophiukas. Okay, so people out there are like totally freaking confused right now. Probably Libra. Let me say leap. What do you celebrate now? The funny thing about the horoscopes, Shilohs told me about this, was that when they were, because it's like the house of the constellations where they are like when the sunrise is, where the sun is located on the day are born. But they've changed. That's right. But when you were born, what constellation? What is your what is your birthday? It's in January. Okay. So it's coming up. So. I forget, Aquarius.

Anyway, like that. So I could tell you your horoscope. I could tell you, you know, people don't know. They think I'm an astronomer. No, I also do astrology. I side hustle. I sell stars. You've got some tarot cards.

I thought I sell in the front office. So I could tell you, like, tomorrow you are going to, you know, get, you know, a huge promotion of your podcasts is you guys are going on Jimmy Kimmel Live tomorrow night. Okay? That's my, I'm predicting. I guarantee it based on the stars. I see this happening. And, you know, Jimmy Kimmel is a star, right?

Tomorrow night, you can prove me. right or wrong, right, if you guys got on Jimmy Kimmel. So therefore, it's falsified. Therefore, astrology is science. It's ridiculous, right? So we wish we had that. We wish we had something like girdle provided for mathematics, but we don't have it. So we come up with all these like, you know, copes to deal with the fact that we don't have it. And many other people have written about it, updated it. What should really constitute actual scientific, you know, be part of the scientific corpus? It's evolved. That even that evolves. There are many such virtues, but simplicity, organizational, coherent, self-conherence, not having

inconsistencies or internal problems with it, subjected to test and criticism. Some even include beauty, which I don't. But all those things comprise what are sometimes called by Professor Michael Keyes, K-E-A-S, sort of similar related, called the theoretical virtues. I did a podcast with a couple of folks, Luke Barnes and Garrett Lewis, great Astronomer. cosmologists. You guys could talk to them too. But it's called the Cosmic Revolutionaries handbook. So how do you overthrow the theory of cosmology, the Big Bang, the steady state, what kind of virtue should your model have? How should you go about confronting it? How should

you be open to criticism, to refutation, or to even, you know, examples that bolster you. And for that, yeah, I think it's a fascinating subject and it's, you know, we'll have to do a part three to be continued. Sounds good. Yeah. Thanks for giving us. your time, man. Yeah. Appreciate it. Good to see you. Thanks. Yeah. Good to meet you in person and everything. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll

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