Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The BIGGEST Questions In the Universe! (#347)

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

In this special edition of the Foundational Questions Podcast, physicist Brian Keating discusses his book Losing The Nobel Prize, which recounts the ill-fated BICEP2 announcement--and retraction--of the claimed discovery of primordial gravitational waves in 2014. Listen for the special treat at the end. A poetic ode to cosmic dust. https://fqxi.org/ 🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! ➡️ Follow me on your fav 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 follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And scientists, despite the stereotypes that were dispassionate, purely rational, observers that are purely sinking truth and not these accolades, prizes, awards, and fame, I think that's a distorted narrative. And I want to portray it, warts and all, including my own foibles and my own kind of failings as a human being, you know, who is desperate for a Nobel gold. But also tell them in a story that is one of redemption and that we don't only have to be defined by our failings. and that by failing, we can actually construct a success in the future. Welcome, everyone, to this replay edition of Into the Impossible, featuring your host, Brian Keating on the foundational questions podcast from the Foundational Questions Institute. FQXI is an independent grantmaking agency at Think Tank,

which provides support for Blue Sky Research and the Physical Sciences. The Institute supports unconventional high-risk specular science. This podcast is therefore an at-place for your host, Professor Brian Keating to talk about his quest to solve some of the greatest mysteries of cosmogenesis and his book, Losing the Nobel Prize. In this in-depth interview, Brian takes us behind the curtain of high-stakes science and what drives him. He'll get some personal insights into Brian's first book, losing the Nobel Prize, and his ongoing research into the essence of the Big Bang. If you love thinking about the biggest questions in the universe, including its origin,

please keep into the impossible on your fees by subscribing and following it. Please help us by paying it forward with the share to curious friends. Jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating, and subscribe there too. Please let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review. We read them all. And now, your host, Brian Keating, being interviewed on the Foundational Questions Podcast. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, please help. I'm Zia Morali.

Welcome to a special edition of the podcast from the Foundational Questions Institute. I'm joined via Skype by Brian Keating, a cosmologist at UC San Diego, and director of the Simon's Observatory. Earlier this year, Keating published Losing the Nobel Prize, a memoir that covers, in large part, his role in the development of the Bicep 2 telescope in the South Pole, which was searching for signs of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that were set off when our early universe inflated. And for a few months in 2014, it seemed like they had succeeded in their goal and were on course to win the Nobel Prize. Keating is here to tell us what went wrong and why they had to retract that result. He's also going to tell us why he blames the Nobel Prize for driving the Bicep 2 team to make their premature announcement. So, Brian, thank you very much for joining us today.

Well, thanks for the introduction. It's great to be here on one of my favorite podcasts. Just to set things up for our listeners, you know, we're going back about, let's say, four years to March 2014. And there was a massive press conference that some of our listeners may very well remember at Harvard, in which the Bicep 2 team announced the first detection of something called B-Modes. Now, that's not the most exciting name in the world, but it represented a sort of the detection of a weird twist in the polarisation of light in the cosmic microwave background radiation. So that's the relic radiation left over by the Big Bang.

And this was detected using a telescope, which you were involved with at the South Pole. Now, these B modes were thought to be caused by primordial gravitational waves. And this would at the time have been the first evidence of any such kind of ripples in space time. This came before, you know, LIGO, which is now famous for having found gravitational waves. But this would also have been the first direct evidence of infestined. inflation theory, which is this idea that for, you know, a very brief fraction of a second in its infancy, our universe expanded at an exponentially fast rate. And it was this growth spur that triggered these ripples in space time. Exactly.

So now, this was absolutely huge news. It was in the New York Times. It was hailed as evidence of a multiverse of parallel universes created by inflation. You know, one of our directors at FQXI, Max Tegmark, was at the press conference. and declared it to be one of the most exciting moments in the history of science. That's right. And, you know, astronomers behind the Bicep II experiment seem to be a shoe in for the Nobel Prize. And then a few months later, as again, many of our listeners will know,

it all turned to dust, quite literally. And I'm sure you're really sick of hearing that pun. You know, there was criticism, some more data, some further analysis. And then the Bicep 2 team had to declare that, you know, twisty B-mode pattern that they had seen, was actually literally due to dust and not to primordial gravitational waves caused by inflation at all. So we had, you know, this once famous, now notorious Bicep 2 experiment, sort of turned from being this exciting moment in the history of science into one that was sort of an exciting moment in the sociology of science, I guess. Brian Keating, you're with us. You masterminded Bicep 1, the predecessor of Bicep 2, and you were head.

heavily involved in Bicep 2. And now you've written a book dissecting the whole debacle and taking a swipe at the Nobel Prize along the way. You're going to know. What I want to know is what the heck went wrong here. Yeah. Well, what we had discovered, according to our data release press conference and so forth, was that we had discovered a background of gravitational radiation. So these waves of gravity were theorized to originate at the inflationary epoch itself. Essentially from this very mysterious epoch formerly hidden from cosmologist's view and only open to ideas of, you know, pure speculation until we released the first direct evidence for its existence on March 17, 2014, as you mentioned.

You know, your big competition at the time was the Planck satellite. But, you know, this is a huge international collaboration. It's a massive, extremely costly project. By comparison, Bicep and Bicep 2, of course, they cost a lot of money. but they were much more humble in a way. So the fact that they could maybe, you know, make such an exciting discovery potentially is quite amazing. I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about how you can manage to do something on a relatively cheap scale that could compete with these kind of massive international billion dollar experiments. Yeah, as your listeners are

undoubtedly familiar with, the microwave oven in their kitchen, microwave energy gets absorbed by water molecules extremely efficiently. And so if you're trying to capture, these precious microwaves from the wispy afterglow of the Big Bang, then what you want to do is build it in a place that's completely free of water and water vapor. So that impels you to go perhaps into space where there's zero atmospheric water vapor, obviously. That's about 100 times more expensive than an equivalent experiment on Earth. So we built Bicep 2 and Bicep 1 for about $10 million US dollars. And the equivalent Plank satellite, which was launched around the same time we started observing

with Bicep 2, that experiment was built and launched into space with a telescope that's not that much bigger than our Bicep 2 telescope, which contributed to some of the reason the Bicep 2 telescope was cheaper by far than a satellite. So this instrument that we built was done at also very cold, very distant for voting location, but that was the South Pole Antarctica. And there you get sort of a poor scientist satellite because it's about 2,000 meters above sea level, close to 3,000 meters above sea level elevation. And that provided a platform that was above about a third of the Earth's atmospheric water vapor.

So it wasn't bad. But the other aspect that it gave us was round-the-clock visibility of a single region of the sky to observe for. Whereas Plank had to spread out all of its observing time over the entire sky, observing the galaxy and sometimes the sun or planets and things like that, we could actually tailor our time so that even though we were much less sensitive in a certain sense, we were much more sensitive because we could drill down deep on what we thought. was a patch of sky that would be free from contamination from the galaxy. And based on our earliest and best models, we were looking in that patch. And that patch, we called it in anticipation

of how clean it was, we called it the Southern Hole. But of course, you know, from the title of the book and even the cover of the book, which shows Bicep looking up at the words Nobel Prize through a hazy cloud of galactic dust, one can get the impression rightly so that actually the patch that we ended up selecting, despite our best efforts and best models, was actually not the most keen place to do these observations. So let's go, I guess, to the point before you realized it was all going wrong. When you first were getting signs amongst your team that actually you'd made a really incredible discovery.

How do you feel at that time? It was a very unusual feeling because the signal was so big that not only did we kind of get startled by its enormous magnitude, but we also were gripped by a notion of fear that the plank satellite from its brilliant vantage point in space, millions of kilometers from Earth and free from contamination, that it was actually going to scoop us, that we were seeing a signal that was basically twice as big as what the most plausible signal size could be from the swirling, twisting pattern of microwaves from inflation. So you're excited because you've seen this really big signal that could be due to primordial gravitational waves,

but you're also wary because you could be seeing an effect that's caused by light bouncing off of dust. So in order to be able to kind of rule out that dust effect, you need more data. And that's data that you couldn't collect with the Bicep 2 telescope. But your competitors, the Pletka, bank collaboration actually were measuring the data that you needed in order to be able to... 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. Rule out dust. Plank had nine frequencies on board its spacecraft, and in doing so, it could actually detect not only the CMB, but theoretically eight other signal sources, whereas Bicep could really only see the CMB, and we had to rely on models and even measurements made by our competition, in this case, Plank.

So Plank had the data to actually reveal the missing information that Bicep lacked. And we were desperate to get them to collaborate with us before we went public or at least share their data, if not collaborate directly. I don't think we would have co-authored a paper, say, I'm discovering this signal. But we desperately wanted to borrow their data. And when we couldn't borrow it, after begging for it, we basically stole it. That's part of the mystery story and detective story in the book, how that rather remarkable turn of events and went down. And just to say, because, you know, from the outside looking in, when we're looking at this kind of Bicep 2 announcement unraveling, you know, we're sitting there

thinking, you know, this is a team of brilliant scientists, these aren't charlatans, these aren't particularly stupid people. So how on earth do you end up, you know, making a mistake or announcing a discovery, what you made a discovery, but sort of with the wrong interpretation? That's right. So let's talk specifically about this slide. This slide that was given at a talk by a member of the Planck Collaboration, because it's a lovely little story that comes through in the book. So you need data about what level of dust might be out there. And you have a good idea that the plant collaboration has it. And you approach them and ask them if they could share this with you.

And it would help you then kind of analyze your own results and maybe subtract the amount that might be due to dust, kind of masquerading as these signals of inflation. And they say no. And I can kind of understand why they might say no, because, you know, they're obviously chasing the same signal and maybe they don't want to give their competitors, you know, the chance to make this magnificent discovery and win a Nobel Prize ahead of them. So, okay, so they say no. You need their data.

So what do you do? Or what do members of your team do? So what you described is exactly correct. So we had a limitation, as I mentioned, of only one frequency in. bicep two. We had some extra frequencies in Bicep 1, but Bicep 1 was drastically less sensitive than Bicep 2. So it really could only sort of rule out certain hypotheses. It couldn't actually determine the intricate aspects of what the dust was actually composed of or what it was contributing to in a significant way. But then we had used the slide from the Plank team that had been

published basically at a conference. And it had been, the PDF was available online. And so we felt like, well, it was okay to use the slide, and we started off using the slide, but we really knew we needed the data that was underlying this slide. So we reached out, John Kovac had reached out to the PIs of Plank, and they rejected their request to get the actual data. But by then, some of our graduate students had already started to digitize this slide. It's still available online, made by John Philippe Bernard, who later became a very good friend of mine and is a good friend of mine. And his slide showed the actual dust map measured by Plank, the data that we had desperately wanted to get, you know, by collaborating in some way with Plank, and there it was staring us in the face for free. And so some of our graduates since digitized it and turned this qualitative image into a quantitative model.

And in fact, it was the key enabling model that gave many of us the confidence to go ahead with the result. I also had sort of a secondary motivation for believing this result and succumbing to confirmation bias. And that was that, again, a sociological phenomenon. One of our leaders, Jamie Bach, who was the co-creator of Bicep 2 with me, he was a leader on the plank team. My supposition was as a lead collaborator on plank, he knew and could see the data on his own. And I certainly would have taken a peek at the data. It would have been hard to prevent me from looking at the plank data. if I had full access to it.

So I assumed incorrectly, as it turned out, that he was as devious as I am and would have taken a peek at the data. And I'd say so on the book, but he didn't. He actually had enough integrity not to look at the data from the Planck experiment. So in the end, what ended up happening is we published a model based on the results that digitized version of that slide from John Philippe Bernard. And that was the undoing in some sense because that slide had a tremendous amount of uncertainties associated with. it and was in no way fit for the way that we consumed it and converted it to quantitative information. And in that way, I think it really set kind of a bad taste in the field's mouth. We have not only done that, you know, taken qualitative data and made it in quantitative,

but even if that was right, even if like that wasn't the undoing of our experiment, I think scientists would debate that today. In other words, if Bicep 2 was never retracted and disconfirmed, the ethics of whether or not it's okay to use somebody else's data in that way. We're really, I think, and still should be debated and discussed in a lot more care than we do. We, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about errors and systematic biases and stuff, but we don't think about our own human biases at all, really. And I would like to see that change.

Absolutely. And you're quite frank about that. I mean, you're frank when we're speaking now. And it's kind of riveting to read in the book. You're very honest about, I guess, the kind of driving factors behind this. this and some of the things that were done that were perhaps a little bit shifty, a little bit dodgy? Well, I think the thing that resonates a lot with my readers, and I've been really blessed to get these kinds of reviews from people that are not scientists, is the personal

aspect of the story. You know, you're a very, you know, well-known author. I'm sure you wrestle with these same questions. Do I really want to tell the exact same history of the Big Bang, of a particle accelerator? Do I really want to do that for the 150th time? And you do it rather brilliantly in your book, but I feel like I was daunted by doing that simply because there's so many other better thinkers and writers than I am, you know, ranging from, you know, Sean Carroll to Lisa Randall, to Max Tagmark, just to name a handful. You know, what am I going to add to it? But in going through it, I think the one thing that I felt that some of their accounts were

lacking, if I can be so, have the temerity to be so bold, is that it really didn't reflect, a, an experimentalist point of view. And scientists, despite the stereotypes that were dispassionate, purely rational observers that are purely sinking truth and not these accolades, prizes, awards, and fame. I think that's a distorted narrative. And I want to portray it warts and all, including my own foibles and my own kind of failings as a human being, you know, who is desperate for a Nobel gold, but also tell it in a story that is one of redemption and that we don't only have to be defined by our failings. And that by failing, we can actually construct a success in

the future. So actually, you know, in preparation for chatting to you today and while I was reading your book, I kind of went back and I had a look at some of our own reporting on this story. And, you know, as I've already said, Max Tegmark was very, very enthusiastic at the actual time of the announcement. But I think, and if I recall correctly, I think it was, you know, maybe at most two days later, I was at a conference, or actually a couple of conferences in Cambridge in the UK. And I was chatting to Jureau Magagio, who we actually ended up quoting on the podcast, who you all know is a theoretical cosmologist. And he has his own kind of horse in the race.

He has his own theory that's kind of a competitor to inflation. So he was not the type of person that's going to be as enthusiastic about proving inflation to be correct as perhaps some of the other people out there. And, you know, just two days after this announcement was made and I was talking to him and he said, you know, well, my worry is. And a lot of us are very worried about this just being. you to dust. And, you know, a couple of weeks later, I interviewed Andre Linday. And the very first thing he told me, and again, this was on our podcast, was, you know, I sort of said to him, you know, congratulations, you must be very excited about this result because he's the theoretical physicist, or one of them, who is one of the founders of inflation theory, and he kind of went, well, if it's true.

And it's a very big if. So already within a number of days and a number of weeks, people in the community were worrying. You've sort of said you were sitting there. You knew that people were kind of thinking about this. You had a slightly dodgy slide that you'd built your analysis on. At what point do you go from thinking, okay, you know, people are taking shots at us, but they're missing. You know, we're okay. We're on solid ground. And then you start to think, oh, no, hang on, hang on. You know, maybe, maybe we're in trouble here. You know, it's not like we published results without a lot of neuroses. You know, I describe us as being, you know, a collection of woodie. Yowlands. And we measured a signal that is still, as I said, we have more confidence statistically

in the veracity of the data than ever. What was the problem then? It was our interpretation. It was our overreach. It was our grasp for the Nobel Prize, in my opinion, that led to this real focus in the paper on inflation being the only and best explanation for the data's strength and the size of the magnitude of the signal that we saw. It was a mistake of interpretation and overreach that, in my opinion, came from a desire to not lose the Nobel Prize, which ironically is what happened. It seems like, you know, if you had made the announcement, but maybe tempered it and said, you know, this could very well be a signal of inflation, but it could also be dust, that you wouldn't, we wouldn't be talking in quite the same way about this. Absolutely. Yeah.

So you're 100% right. So I think the interpretation is always dice. And you saw this recently with this 21-centimeter discovery from the edges experiment. I'm actually glad that you brought up the 21-centimeter line and the detection of the light from the first stars. We talked about it on the podcast in an earlier edition. And when I was reporting on that, coming from the science journalism perspective, you know, there was a question of, well, you know, where does this rank on the Bicep 2 scale? Right. Bicep 2 has now become this kind of marker of, you know, is there a danger of overhyping? And I had a reporter from physics today here in the United States tell me that he talked to the people.

Judd Bowman of Arizona State University, and he said that the Bicep II affair was part of the motivation for why his team only published in nature the results. And there's a companion paper that's still very controversial that suggested that early dark matter in the universe coupling with the light from the first stars and the CMB, that could actually provide the evidence for why the signal has the shape and size it does. Lygo, there was a book written by Harry Collins in the UK at Cardiff called Gravity's Kiss. which he records email transactions between different leaders of the LIGO team. And they say, we got to be careful. We don't want to have this result leaked. We don't want to have a press

conference before we have confidence in the data because we don't want to be like Bicep 2. So ironically, Bicep 2 has had a tremendous influence on science, not the one that we had originally envisaged, but I think it will have a lasting impact as a cautionary tale, but not in any way as a blunder. And I want to make that clear to the listeners out there. And so you've brought up a couple of things there that I'd like to talk to you about now. One is perhaps not your feel, but more mine, which was whether the media went too far with hyping something. And, you know, tied to that, the fact that this announcement was made before Bicep 2 had put their research through peer review. Yeah.

So just why did Bicep 2 go public before going through peer review? Yes, that's a very good question. So I want to read to you a little excerpt from a very well-known researcher. He was giving a dedicated version of a book where he released his result. And he said, it is necessary that I make excuses to you since the book that I'm giving you is not printed with the magnificence that befits the magnitude of the subject. Because lack of time did not permit it.

And I did not want to prolong publication, lest I run the risk that perhaps someone else might have discovered the same and preceded me. And of course, this is the first, you know, being to ever use a refracting telescope, just like Bicep, and that was none other than Galileo Galilei in his apocal book called the Starry Messenger, Sedarius Nuncius. So he gave a copy to his funding agency. He self-published it, and he did not have any peer review. Most of his presentations were correct, but there was always a tinge of confirmation bias, that he always wanted to prove the

hypothesis of the heliocentric universe, just as we wanted to prove the inflationary theory. because improving inflation would do several things. It would be a confirmation of one of the things that's very near and dear to your organization's heart, which is quantum gravity. It would be another form of gravitational wave detection, and it would be direct evidence for inflation. Any one of those three would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.

And in fact, some of those have won Nobel Prize in since in the case of LIGO. So the story was so good. It was such a beautiful story that everybody wanted it to be true. And I think, you know, no one more than us, not only because of the thrill of scientific discovery, but also because of the Nobel Prize. I mean, it's impossible to disconnect the Nobel Prize. It's not that scientists set out, and that's their main goal, but it's the most public form of attention that scientists get.

But anyway, getting back to the media and the reason for this press conference, we did not want to wait for the Planck satellite to scoop us. They had put out, you know, basically a paper not too long before our results that said that they were about to detect it, that they had the capability to detect it. That was pure bluster in the end because they are nowhere near the capability to detect this. But it really threw us off, and it made us have one of the two emotions

that I call the lenses that refract reality for a scientist, and those are fear and greed. Furthermore, I think we had confidence that the results were going to hold up. And that's just a sense of hubris that many scientists have felt throughout time. In the end, the paper didn't change that much. They published version accepted,

by physical review letters, that paper, the conclusions didn't change that much. And even the results that we included didn't change that much, with the exception that we were forced to remove the purloined slide from plank that was taken without their sort of blessings. I don't think that publication and peer review guarantees anything. I mean, look, there's a famous phrase, kind of a joke that goes, you know, just because it's published in nature doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. Because, you know, Nature just recently had something like 64 different papers that they had to retract because of actual unethical research practices. Science magazine has published many, you know, there's the two most prestigious, arguably, journals in the world.

They've all had these blunders and retractions. And that's after peer review by multiple authors. And there's a sort of an entirely separate issue there of why the journalistic community were not as thorough as they should have been, whether it was peer reviewed or not. when put in front of a press conference, it's always up to you to go and talk to someone who has a differing point of view. And as I say, within a couple of days, there were many people out there that could have been spoken to, and their point of view could have been put forward earlier. We had people on Facebook, the world's most eminent cosmologists, reviewing our results within hours, whereas you wouldn't have had that if we had waited for peer review.

It just would have appeared one day. Then we would have had the press conference. And that might have actually delayed the ultimate day, new month, that came to dust. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

You know, you've described it as a cautionary tale, but I wonder, in honesty, if your team was going to do it again, whether you might just do it the same way, because it's almost just like a gamble, the way it turned out, you know, if you'd been right, yes, you would. have avoided being scooped by the plank team, it would have been worth, you know, saying forget about

peer review, let's just release this result. As it turned out, it was embarrassing. But I don't know that it's really had too much of a kind of bad effects on the careers of the people involved. Yeah. And, you know, maybe it was still worth doing it anyway, maybe just taking that embarrassment and being a little bit sheepish for a while. You know, maybe it was worth a gamble. I don't think the way the Bicep 2 announcement and so forth was handled. And then, media and the viral YouTube video with Andre Linday at Stanford, I don't think I would repeat that. I think that that was ultimately bad for science. And you can have a contamination of your soul, sort of as a scientist. If you're not careful, for my new project, the Simon's Observatory,

we have an external advisory board made up of our competition. So people that are not collaborators on the Simon's Observatory have a direct input into decisions made for, say, publication, outreach and how the scientific apparatus is built and how we should focus our attention in terms of which science goals do we pursue, I think Bicep had that. We wouldn't have made the eventual decision to go forward in the way that we did. And we wouldn't have just gone through the echo chamber of theorists that wanted to prove the result and confirm the result. Now, you've mentioned that one of the driving forces behind some of these bad decisions was this hunger for the Nobel Prize. And that brings us nicely to a

major part of the book, which is dedicated to explaining how to reform the awards. So can you tell us in your opinion, what are some of the problems with the Nobel Prize? Yeah. In the book I outline, what are the ways that the Nobel Prize has deviated from what Alfred Nobel, very nobly, L.E, intended 122 years ago with his will, which was endowed by his invention of dynamite. So his will wanted the Nobel Prize to go to in his first. words, the person who had created the most important experiment or discovery in physics in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit on mankind. So there were three stipulations, a single person who did something in the preceding year that benefited all of mankind. So that was in his

will. And I'm an academic. So I was actually invited just a few months after the Nobel Prize dissipated for me, thanks to Duss, I was invited by the Nobel Committee in Physics to nominate to 2016 winners of the Nobel Prize. So the Nobel invitation letter to nominate said, oh, don't worry about that. Instead, you can choose up to three people and you could choose something that was discovered decades earlier and they made no mention of the fact that the discovery awarded, in my opinion, had to benefit mankind. Some of the changes that they've made, ostensibly, seem to be more inclusive. For example, instead of the single person Alfred Nobel wanted to win it, they now allow up to three people to win it.

And so you might think, oh, that's really great, except when you realize that on Bicep 2, say there were 49 collaborators. On LIGO, which won it last year, there was 150 people involved with it. And on the LHC experiment, there were 6,000 people involved with it. And even the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to groups of people. And when it was awarded to the International Panel on Climate Change, IPPC, and that was thousands of researchers. They won half the prize, and Al Gore won the other half. So there's really no reason they couldn't do that with the Nobel Prize in physics. That's part one.

So you could give it to Ray Weiss, Barry Barish, and you could give it to Kip Thorne, half the prize. And then you could give the other half to all the other researchers who were on the Nobel Prize winning experiment called LIGO. So those are proposals I make in the book, but they don't address the most pernicious aspect of the Nobel Prize problems. In addition to only it only having gone to two women in history out of 207 laureates, which means that only two more women have won the Nobel Prize in physics than there have been female pope. which is kind of shocking. But the actual most pernicious aspect of the Nobel Prize that I claim needs rectification immediately is the forbidding of posthumous awards.

There have been people, including just last year, there was a scientist named Ron Drever, who was a Scottish scientist who ended up working at Caltech, founded LIGO, and was critical to its success. He ended up dying six months before the Nobel Prize was awarded to LIGO, and it went to a third scientist named Barry Barish instead of Ron Drever. But I note that if the Nobel Prize had been awarded in 2016, the year that I nominated, I was not allowed to nominate them because they didn't announce the results until February

11th of 2016. My nomination period closed on January 31st, 2016. So that means that they missed the deadline by 11 days. This doesn't sound so bad, except when you realize that's 11 days out of a signal that took 1.3 billion years to get to Earth. So these black holes crashed together 1 billion, 300 million years ago, traveled at the speed of light, entered LIGO in 2015. They made the analysis. And if those signals had occurred 11 days earlier, then Ron Drever would have won the Nobel Prize in 2017. I think it's kind of a cruel and fundamentally unscientific and unethical thing that they do. And it's one of the aspects I wish they would most reform. So yes, I think what you're saying is for the most part uncontroversial, and I think most

people would certainly agree that there are deserving scientists who missed out because they passed away, or, you know, they hadn't passed away, but they were just snubbed by the Nobel Prize Committee. And I think people would agree that more women should win the prize. But here's the thing that I want to pick you up on. Let's say that the Nobel Prize organizers read your book, and they listen to everything that you say and they think, oh yeah, this sounds really great. This sounds, you know, brilliant. And they make all your suggested changes immediately. But, you know, you've done this great job in the book of setting the Nobel Prize up as this tempterist that caused, you know,

the Bicep 2 team to behave unethically and hastily. Even if the Nobel Prize organizers make the changes that you've suggested in that book, would it really stop scientists in the future? from behaving just as badly out of lust for the prize? That's a very perceptive question that I have not been asked in the last couple months. My belief, as I expressed in the book, you know, you encountered this in your book too, which is very courageously written by you, I have to say. Most of us scientists are atheists or humanists.

They're ill equipped to sort of admit that they may be very devout religiously. And the actual religion that they practice, in my opinion, is Nobelism. And I describe it in the book how it has exactly the same trappings as a religion does. It has holidays every year in October. The call of revelation goes out when the Nobel laureates are awakened at three in the morning. Then they have the feast on December 10th, which is Alfred Nobel's date of death, not his birthday, strangely, where they have this ceremony. Not only do you have to maintain protocol and bow to the king, who's sort of like a religious figure in Sweden,

which is a very secular country, as you know, they have to bow down to him to get this gilded graven, not crucifix, but a gilded graven medallion. And how is that any different from a religion that has a golden crucifix or golden calf? And I have no problem with any of the people that win it. I don't think it's their fault what becomes of it, but they are elevated to the status of sainthood.

And that's another aspect of religiosity of noblism. And even I succumb to it. But it's impossible to resist this notion that human beings have a compulsion to have figures of worship. So I think there will always be this cult of personality. For me personally, I'd no longer worship in this church. Although I freely admit I did, and it was one of the reasons I wanted to invent the bicep machine, was to win an Nobel Prize.

You know, for many things to both prove something to my father, who is an eminent scientist, which I never got to do, as you will find out in the book. But that was a huge motivation to me to win his pride and satisfaction. And I think I no longer feel that compulsion. Now I'm a father of five myself. And I know that there are greater journeys to go on than the one to Stockholm, Sweden. And I've come out with a liberation that's come courtesy of this redemption, if you will,

of the end of Nobelism for me personally. Although I do say, you know, people have said, well, you just have sour grapes. You're a sore loser. You know, you wouldn't turn it down. And I say, well, if you want to see if I'm sincere, they can just offer me the Nobel Prize and see if I'm. Well, on that note, thank you very much for joining us Brian Keating. And I should say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would highly recommend it.

It's a fascinating story in the sociology of science, and I really admire Keating's bravery and honesty at describing the events that led up to the Bicep 2 fiasco, even when they paint him and his colleagues in a bad light. But more than that, it provides a very novel retelling of the history of cosmology from the eye of an experimentalist who does not simply cut straight to the successes of famous scientists of the past, but explains how they too were often plagued by dust, clouding their observations and making them make mistakes too. Interwoven with all of this is a moving tale, as Keating just alluded to there, about his own personal history,

as he reconnected with his estranged father. On the podcast page www.fxI.org slash community, we have links to Keating's website and also to a page that he is set up, especially for the book, where people can make their own suggestions

for improving the Nobel Prize. And as always, you can reach us by email at podcast at fqxI.org, on Facebook at FQXI Physics, and on Twitter at FQXI. Thanks again to Brian Keating for joining me for this space. edition of the podcast. To read us out, here's a poem from the book by Keating,

an ode to the very dust that foiled his Nobel dreams. Conscious Star Stuff. Dust grains are mysterious things, attached to your toddler they surely bring, grime and grunge in rooms unkempt, signs of love and life well spent. From a star's nursery dust arose, only to be belched out in its death throws. Through space we sail on a cosmic moat, trying to read the first prologue ever wrote. Tracked by shoes into the cellar and riding upon winds interstellar. Dust allows a fleeting existence, but it pays to scrub it with persistence. Dust covers playgrounds filled with laughter and accompanies the sarcophagus to the hereafter. We were warned long ago from the mount,

for thine own dust thou shalt account supernova's slag flows through our veins dust causes worlds to wax and wane iron filings pyroxine whiskers silicate shavings squelch noble whispers it can't be emphasized enough the dust is us conscious star stuff Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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Follow Professor Keating on Twitter at DR Brian Keating. That's Dr. Brian Keating. And remember to always be curious. Pay off your home. Travel for life. Drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot Machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person.

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