Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Joy of Ex-perimental Astrophysics with UCSB Professor Ben Mazin (#172)

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Benjamin Mazin is the Worster Chair in Experimental Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He attended Yale University, graduating in 1997.  He then attended the California Institute of Technology, graduating with a doctorate in Astrophysics in August, 2004.  After a short post-doc at Caltech, he went to work as a scientist at JPL in March, 2005.  He joined the faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara in September, 2008, where he leads a lab dedicated to the development of optical/UV/X-ray Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) and astronomical instrumentation for time and energy resolved studies.  His current research focus is building and using MKID-based instruments for detecting and characterizing nearby exoplanets.  He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2010, and the Worster Chair in Experimental Physics in 2017.Ben Mazin, is a part of the Department of Physics at UCSB.  We are focused on using a unique detector technology called Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) for astronomy in the near infrared, optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray. MKIDs allow us to determine the energy and arrival time of individual photons without read noise or dark current. The applications of this technology spans a wide range of vital research areas, including detecting Earth-like planets around nearby stars, untangling the emission mechanisms of pulsars, determining the redshift of billions of galaxies, and detecting dark matter. https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~bmazin/index.html Thanks to our sponsors! biOptimizers for better sleep https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to a special summertime edition of the Into the Impossible podcast. I'm your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, and I'm joined by another distinguished professor from the University of California, Professor Ben Mazzine. I don't think I'm a distinguished professor. I am the Worcester Chair of Experimental Physics, though. And Ben is in town for a super secret reason that we can't.

can't talk about, Jason. But we will. Maybe we will. We'll talk a little bit about that, but I want to expose you to the world of experimental physics, because we don't get enough of that on the end of the Impossible podcast. Because my friends, some of my best friends are theorists, Ben. I don't know. I'll forgive you. But they write these wonderful books, and very few experimentalists write these books. And because of that, we have a bias, unintentional as it is, towards our brainiac friends,

including Sarah Seeger, who was recently in town visiting as well. Now, I want to make the point that there are many branches of physics. There's not only astrophysics, although that's what Ben and I happen to do or specialize in, but within astrophysics, I claim there's no more diverse type of physics that you could do. Because you have to do everything, right, Ben? Yeah, I think an astrophysics, really, it is the mother science. You have all science happens in the universe, right? therefore it's astrophysics.

So I do think it is the mother science. And we were talking over lunch about this notion that, you know, kind of the prevailing way that people think about astrophysics is, oh, it just depends on things that are out there. But with the exception of biophysics, although now we're getting into astrobiology, maybe that is a part of astrophysics. So talk a little bit about what you do,

the type of sensors and detectors that you make, and then we'll get in and we'll talk about aliens, which I think that you might be forbidden to talk about. All right. Sounds good. So the work in my lab centers around a technology called Microwave Kinetic Inductance detectors or M-Kids. These are detectors that are extraordinarily sensitive photon sensors. We use them in the optical and near I are where I work because they give you unique advantages over the conventional detector technology like the CMOS detectors based on silicon that are in your cell phone.

So while the M-Kids, these fantastically sensitive detectors that can sense a single photon, tell you the energy of that photon, and tell you when it arrived to within a microsecond without any false counts with no re-noise or dark current. So while those detectors are the core competency of the lab, it's the application of those detectors that I think is really exciting. So what we do is we take these detectors, we develop them from the ground up. We're very vertically integrated in ways that very few physics labs are. So we do material science to develop new superconductors. Then we do condensed matter physics to understand the detectors and to make them into the best detectors we can make. Then we do lithography and sort of standard semiconductor type processing to make arrays of these detectors. we then take them in the lab, we do testing on them, we iterate and improve them.

And when they're ready, we package them up into a camera and we build a big camera around them, then we'll bring that camera to the telescope and we'll point it at the sky. And the thing that I'm most interested in, the thing that I point at the sky most for is looking for extra solar planets. So we're trying to look for planets around nearby stars, and we're doing this using a technique called direct imaging. So most of the techniques for finding planets are indirect techniques where you look at the influence of the planet on the light of the star. In direct imaging, you're trying to actually take a picture of the solar system.

So you're looking at light either reflected by the planets or emitted in thermal radiation from the planet itself. This technique is extremely technically challenging because it relies on a couple very hard things. The first one is something called adaptive optics. So adaptive optics is a technique where you... look at a bright star and figure out all the distortions that the atmosphere has introduced into the light that's coming to you. And then you use a rubber mirror, so it's a flexible mirror with pistons behind it, to correct for those distortions thousands of times a second. What you're trying to do is remove that atmospheric turbulence and give you the same kind of diffraction limited image you'd see in space. So that is complicated and has a lot of ways to go wrong.

The second thing you need is something called a coronagraph, which blocks the light from the star, but passes the light of the very nearby planet. And the third thing you need is a science instrument that sits behind them to collect this information and to do as good a job as possible at distinguishing photons that came from the star versus photons that came from the planet. And that's where my technology, the MCIDS come in. We currently have a 20,000 pixel MCID camera, the largest superconducting array on the planet, at least maybe until Simon's observatory comes online, sitting behind the eight-meter Subaru Observatory Telescope,

behind the Skex-A-O adaptive optic system in coronagraph. And that instrument is what we're using to try to take these pictures of these extra solar planets. The long-term goal is not just to take pictures of these planets, but to use the energy resolution that our detectors have, the ability to tell what wavelength every photon is, to actually look at the spectrum of light that comes from these planets. Now, if we look at the reflected light from the star off a planet,

we can look for atmospheric, we can look for changes in the spectra that are imprinted by the passage of the light through the atmosphere as it reflects off the planet. And that can tell us whether the atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium or not. And if it's not, we're going to ask, is that because of life? And so that's one of the things that we're really aiming for. It's going to take another generation of large telegram. telescopes for us to get there. We need sort of the 30 meter class telescopes, but that's our goal in the next 10 or 15 years.

And if we had a 30 meter class telescope on another planet, Earth-like in every respect, including brilliant scientists like yourself and your students, how far out could they detect us? How far away in our galaxy could they see us? So the bad news is we're not going to be able to see from the ground. We're not going to be able to see Earth-like planets around stars like the sun. sun because the contrast ratio, the brightness of the star of the sun to the brightness of the earth is about 10 billion. And so it's really hard. What we're going to do to make it possible is we're going to look at M. Dwarce, which are stars that are smaller than the sun, which means the habitable zone gets closer.

And so the contrast ratio between the star and the planet shrinks to something like 10 to 8, 10 million, 100 million, somewhere in that range. and that becomes doable with our technology. But because of the planets are so close to their stars, even with the 30-meter telescope, we're probably looking only out at something like 10 parsecs, which is about 30 light years. So it's really just our local neighborhood.

You start to need enormous telescopes to look out even farther. The galaxy is very, very big. Yeah, and the speed of light is very, very slow, at least in some ways, because there was a tweet today from Andrew Rader or Radar. I forget how you say his name. I mispronounce it, the way I pronounce your name all the time. And he just did a quick back of the envelope calculation

that suggested a grain of sand from here at La Jolla Shores or wherever would impact a spacecraft traveling at 99% the speed of life, maybe 99.9.9. With enough energy, if you agree with this calculation, one third of a Hiroshima-class nuclear world. Oh, I can easily believe it. Yeah. So, you know, not only is the galaxy very big, but the speed of light is slow, and yet it's energetic enough to be dangerous, kind of like I am.

But thinking about life in the universe, we've had on a lot of the discussions in the past couple of months on this channel and other channels about extraterrestrial technology, et cetera. First of all, do you believe that there is any kind of sense about asking whether or not there is not only life but intelligent life and not only intelligent life, but technological life? in the universe. Is that a sensible question? I think it's absolutely a sensible question. I don't think we have much ability to answer that question, but I grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek like everybody else in my generation, and I'm of course fascinated by these questions. I would say that, you know, I can say as an astronomer, from me to you guys, we've looked at a lot of things in the sky with astronomy, in a lot of wavelengths, radio, optical, near infrared,

x-ray, gamma ray. and we really haven't seen anything that points towards an origin that is not explicable with natural phenomenon. So unfortunately, I don't think we've seen direct evidence of technological civilizations modifying their environments on a, on galactic scales, at least. If we did, you know, wouldn't that not change your research direction? In other words, if we had unequivocal, Bayesian, high confidence, credible evidence that there are extra-gertic, I know for me it would change what research I do. Absolutely.

It would impact you. Yeah, no, I think it would absolutely change at least the flavor of what we're working on. I think, in my personal opinion, based on very low evidence, is that we're going to find that single-cell organisms are going to be relatively common throughout the universe. I figure if it happened on Earth, you know, chances are pretty good. There's going to be a decent amount of planets with simple life on them. My guess is that intelligent technological life is going to be significantly rare. Maybe we may be the only ones in our galaxy now.

It's very hard to know. But I would be, I think it's going to turn out to be a rare phenomenon. What would interest you the most about an extraterritional, intelligent or otherwise, species technological? I mean, you could have dolphins. or, you know, Benelvos. What would you see most, their biology or their physics? Well, I have to say my understanding of biology is limited enough that I think the answer is going to be their physics.

It would be fun to compare notes with an extraterrestrial civilization. You know, one of my personal, I've done a little work on dark matter, and I've thought about dark matter detection experiments because the detectors I work on are also very well suited for sort of low-mass dark matter detectors, which have gotten a lot more interesting now that the Wimp Miracle seems to be losing steam. So those kind of, I believe dark matter probably is some kind of particle, although I don't think I'm going to be doing a lot of work on it

because it's a bit of a fishing expedition. We don't have much theoretical guidance. I will say, though, that dark energy is kind of a very strange thing, and it wouldn't surprise me very much if we had pretty much just misunderstood something fundamental, about the way the universe works, the way geometry works. It'll be very interesting to see what happens with that in the coming years. When I think about experimental physicists, I think about people, actually I think about someone like Fermi,

who was very synoptic in his understanding of theory and experiment. I do feel like you're kind of in that mold, not to put too much pressure on you, where you have a deep understanding of theory and are the best in the business. You have a brand as a physicist, correct? So we were talking over lunch that, you know, we basically have this budget to operate our laboratories. It can be in the millions of dollars per year that a grad students never see,

and we just take care of it. And then when they become postdocs and professors, then they realize, holy crap, I really owe my advisor a lot. Kind of like the way that we do it when we become parents, right? We realize how much our parents did for us. But talk about that, the cultivation of a brand as an experimental scientist. What does that mean to you? Yeah, so I'm in a pretty interesting spot because when I did my thesis,

in these M-Kids, they were a new technology, and there wasn't very many other people working in the field. But my advisor was a submillimeter astronomer. Jonas. Yeah, Jonas Musenus at Caltech. And so I decided that I didn't want to work in sub-millimeter like Brian and Jonas because it's extremely hard. The sky is on fire, your telescopes on fire,

you're trying to look through all this fire, and it's just incredibly difficult. So I went to the optical and near I are where astronomy is a lot easier because the sky is transparent and is not glowing. And so I brought there and I was sort of, I planted my flag, you know, in that regime as superconducting detectors for optical and near infrared. And they're, you know, to this day are not any other U.S.-based professors who are,

who are planted their flag in that particular area. We've had a monopoly. And I've had a lot of success. And that means we get to, you know, we get to have a lot of the fun. That said, I do hope we get more competition. I hope my students go on to faculty positions, and there are something like four groups in Europe that have started up to do optical and near infrared M-Kids.

And I think it's really important for my lab and for the field as a whole that there's more people so that we have a bigger community and more brains working on this problem, because there remain large problems to be solved in our detector physics and our instrumentation and our algorithms and our technology. It turns out that we can talk about this next perhaps, but the complexity of these experiments is extraordinarily high, and it takes a lot of people working simultaneously to attack them. Talk about the detector technology. Don't shy away. My audience is one of the most brilliant in all the known multiverse, which I know you're a big supporter of. Just kidding. But we've had nine Nobel laureates, including John Mather, Ray Weiss, Barry Barish, multiple times. Talk us through. How do these detectors work? What fascinates you most about them and do not, under any circumstances, quote, dumb it down. I never do that with my eye.

All right. Fair enough. Okay. So what are detectors look like are a small LC oscillator, right? So you have an inductor and a capacitor hooked together. They have a resonant frequency in the gigahertz range, usually between, from my detectors, usually between 4 and 8 gigahertz. We can set the resonant frequency during lithography at anywhere in that range of 48 gigahertz. So the cool thing is, so you have this little superconducting resonator.

Since it's superconducting, it has very little loss. We have internal cues, we call it, of hundreds of thousands. So the resonator, the quality of the resonance is very high. There's not much loss. So what we do is we send in a microwave signal at the resonant frequency of the device. When, and the device oscillates as it's being like a driven harmonic oscillator, a photon will come in and hit the inductor. When it hits the inductor, it breaks up the carriers of superconductivity, which are known as Cooper pairs, creating two electrons, one spin up and one spin down.

If you wait about 50 microseconds, those electrons will find each other and pair back up into a Cooper pair. But for that brief moment after the photon hits, they're broken up and you have these free electrons. Those free unpaired electrons change the surface impedance of the film. So the way to think about this is that the inductor in our circuit is a photon variable inductor. A photon hits at the L changes. It actually goes up, which is interesting. So what happens is when we watch this microwave probe signal that we send into our resonator, we watch the phase of that microwave signal.

And when a photon hits, you've got a big pulse in the phase, and then it decays back down to zero and a time constant of about 25 microseconds. And the height of that pulse tells us how much energy. was in the photon because a blue photon will break a lot of Cooper pairs and give a big pulse, and a red photon will break less and give a smaller pulse. And we can tell when the photon came in from when the photon rises. So the real advantage of this M-Kid technology over some of the other superconducting technologies out there like transition edge sensors is that we have built-in frequency domain multiplexing.

Because the resonator is a high-Q resonant circuit, it looks like a little notch filter. it doesn't affect microwave frequencies that aren't right on its resonance. So what we can do is put 2,000 of these LC circuits and hang them off a single microwave wire called a feedline. And that lets us read out essentially 2,000 pixels with something we call it frequency division multiplexing on that wire. And that's what lets us get to these 20,000 pixel M-Kid arrays that we're working with now. And these have to be cooled down, in some cases, close to absolute zero. Yes, this is the downside of working with superconductors for your detectors, is that you need to get cold to make them work.

You can think about this in a thermal sense. As you get cold, things stop moving as quickly, and so the noise from thermal jitter goes down. Essentially, that's what's going on with the M-Kids. And so that lets us, so we operate our current M-Kids at 100 milichelvin, 0.1 degrees above absolute zero. Our future generations may run closer to 20-millimeter. them. And this is, while this sounds daunting, you can go on the internet and purchase a fridge like this that'll get to these temperatures off the shelf. It'll cost a little money, but it's, it is doable.

Yeah, one of our colleagues, Mark Devlin, who's co, the co-spokespeople for the Simon's Observatory used to call these 10-year killers when you were trying to build a delusional refrigerator back in the bad old days. Oh, that's not fun at all. We're going to get to tenure and stuff later, but on the academic hunger games, as I call it. But I want to ask you, you mentioned a little bit of collaboration. the diversity of intellect that you have to achieve in order to have a healthy, successful field. Talk about your partnerships with people that we know here like Shelley Wright or just glue or all the optical astronomers and people that you work with across the broad spectrum of astronomy that you engage in. When you put these cameras under vacuum, by the way, we didn't mention that.

They have to be a vacuum, what, a million times better than atmospheric pressure or something like that? They cryopump themselves to some extent. But yeah, it's a very good vacuum. So now you take this, put it at a huge telescope's focus, eight meters. diameter, nine times a collecting area, 10 times of collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope, on top of a mountain in Hawaii, they put it all there, but the object is to collect data. And what is that data? What do you do with it? Who gets to look at it? Where does it go to? And what does the spectrum of astronomy look like in terms of human capital, the most

precious research? Yeah, so it's definitely a challenge. So we have a big team. So at UCSB, where we're working on the detector, I have somewhere between six and eight graduate students, at a given time, three or four postdocs, a staff scientist. So we have about 12, 13 people plus a bunch of undergrad researchers who are all working on improving the pipeline and the instrument and the data analysis and the science, all that stuff. But outside UCSB, we can't do this alone. So we work with Olivier Gionn and Julian Losey at the Subaru Observatory,

who built the SkexAO instrument. We interface with them every day to worry about how to get our instrument. And they have a team of a lot more people than they just. mentioned who are supporting that. We work with people all around the UC and elsewhere on the data analysis and on the algorithms and techniques to get the most out of our data. So we're currently funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation to work on a direct imaging technology program. So we have collaborations like with Jared Males at Arizona. We're actually bringing one of our instruments down to Chile and the Magellan Telescope, hopefully this fall, to do some direct imaging

work from the Southern Hemisphere. We work with Mike Fitzgerald at UCLA, Rebecca Jensen, Clem, at Santa Cruz. I've worked some with Quinn Konopacki here at UCSD, and there really are too many people to mention. But, you know, it takes big teams to be able to pull off this work. And I think my MKid stuff is actually getting to the point where the C&B field, was maybe 15 years ago where we're getting to the point where future instruments might be too big to pull off in one group. So hopefully we'll generate some new groups to help us out. Let's talk about that. Before we do, just remind people talking with Ben and Zine of UC Santa Barbara.

One of these days I'll get his name pronounced correctly. And he is a distinguished professor. He is a cheer professor up there. And Santa Barbara is one of the best places on earth to live outside of, I think, La Jolla is pretty darn nice, Ben. Pretty nice. Yeah, I like it down here. What do the data look like? Before we leave our Nordisms, let's talk about what do you get out? You get out like a map like we do in the CMB,

and then it's clean, calibrated, process, filtered, and then what do you give to the optical? You share this data with the community, by the way? So what happens is when we take the data, every photon, we can't record our raw data because the data rate from our 20,000 pixel array is actually about a terabit per second. It's too much to record. So what we do is we do a lot of onboard processing.

with FPGAs. And what we end up with at the end of that is every photon gets turned into a 64-bit packet that tells you the X and Y position where the photon arrived, the time of its arrival, and what its energy was, essentially. And so what we get is not an image,

but an extremely long table that includes where every entry is a single photon. And so we have a M-Kid pipeline. If you want to see what it looks like, you can go look at it on GitHub, under GitHub slash Muzine Lab. And our pipeline takes that data, takes calibration data that we take,

you know, usually before the observations, and rolls it all together into a calibrated photon list. And then from that, we use a drizzle algorithm, much like HST, to take that and make either image cubes or, you know, the data product depends on what the final analysis that you're doing is. Sometimes you want to work with that time-tagged photon list where the calibration process gives you RA and deck and photon energy for every photon. Sometimes you want to work with image cubes, which are a bunch of images, each of different wavelength. So depending on what the exact analysis we want to do is the pipeline has ways to put the data into different formats.

But there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into that part of it. You know, the glamour might be, you might think it's staying up all night, taking the data at the telescope. But that's just the fun part. You know, there's people sitting in front of computers for person years of time, making the data pipelines, making the firmware that actually took the raw data and compressed it. There's a lot of work in all of these stages of this work. Imaging, it might be a year. It might be a thesis. Yeah, we get, well, we take two or three terabytes of data on a single night of observing sometimes.

And that's after throwing away. That's after throwing away a huge quantity. So if you saw something, first of all, what would it look like? What would be the next step? Is it going to be in the nearer Tons front page? Or is it more an astronomer's telegram? So we just published a paper by my excellent grad student, Sarah Stagger, that showed, discovered a new substellar companion. So it's a star, an A star, which is a bright star bright in the sun with a little M dwarf right next to it, very close in.

And we use this interesting technique using the arrival time of the photons to distinguish the light from the star that gets scattered and diffracted into speckles from the planet. And so that we just publish this. You can find it on the archive if you search for my name. And so what our data looks like at the end of the day is basically an image with the center blacked out and hopefully some bright dots that are more significant than the background dots, which are the planets we hope to see. Now, in the regime, while we're using these eight-meter telescopes like Subaru or a 10-meter like Keck or a six-and-a-half meter like Magellan, we're only looking at the tip of the distribution of planets. We're basically looking at young, hot planets that are at least past Saturn's orbit. Like, they're more masses than Jupiter, young and hot, and that's what we can see with our current technology. What we're hoping to do with this next generation of telescopes is to be able to push in closer to the star and go deeper.

and see the fainter planets. And the reason we can do this is because in this adaptive optics regime where we're diffraction limited, the figure of merit we call it, which tells us how well we do at this direct imaging technique, it goes as something like the diameter of the telescope to the fourth power. So going from an 8 meter telescope to a 30 meter telescope, it increases that figure of merit by something like 200. And that's what lets us go from just barely seeing Jupiter's to hopefully being able to see

terrestrial planets around low-mass stars. We talked earlier about the kind of pathway to people being interested from maybe science fiction and thinking about as my friend and former guest, Adam Frank, calls them, you know, creatures with

prosthetic foreheads, you know, they kind of intrigued the mind. Before we get to that, and also this super secret entity that you're affiliated with that I'm so curious about, I just want to take one detour into academia, which you know, you and I have managed and we are the survivors of this huge apex in a predator kind of hunger game, as I call it.

What do you make of the future of academia? I mean, here we had a search. The last search we had pre-COVID was, you know, 390 people for one spot. And I don't even think that converged because COVID came and they took away the money. I've had top talent in my lab at the faculty level. That's people better than me. Can't get a job. On the other hand, my postdocs, who are the most brilliant, I'm sure you would say yours are too,

they have a very easy time getting a postdoc. And so I liken it to a very surprising situation, as if the Major League Baseball was as hard to get into as it is now. But AAA Baseball, you know, we have our beloved, you know, Elsinore, Lake Alessonore Storm and the El Paso Chihuahuas. I know you follow those regularly. Regularly. But one of the benefits of living in the city like San Diego is we have a very strong baseball. we used to have a football team racket hug with them

because we want to keep it clean but it would be as if you could get into the I could get into AAA baseball in terms of academia there's a surplus of jobs for every postdoc and there's almost no jobs to good approximation to the half percent level you can't get a job in academia

as a faculty member like you and I so what do you say to that to people that are coming up after us we made it up are we pulling up the ladder behind us and saying good luck yeah I don't know if it's us who's pulling up the ladder I put a lot of the blame on the funding agencies. I think inflation has not been 2% a year. I don't care what they say.

It's a lot higher. And our costs are going up, but the size of the grants are not matching it. And the success rate of getting those grants has gone down, and that, especially in astronomy. And I think that has driven some of these issues. I will say that while it is easy to get a postdoc, I don't think it's that easy to get into a high-quality grad school. The applicants we're seeing to get into grad school,

grad school are really, really good these days. And so there are a lot of great people who still want to go. So they go to grad school. They can get a postdoc. Part of the problem might be that, you know, my last three graduates, two or three graduate students, a couple have gone to industry and they're getting offers of 150 to $170,000 a year straight out of grad school to go working. What we make is full professors? To work in, and that's the ones who are working in quantum computing. If you know how to be a dilution fridge jockey, there's a job for you. And the data sciences has pulled a lot of people away too. So that's true. But it is, but the problem remains that it's very hard to get a job as a faculty at a research institution. And I think that's

because the field's not growing. I think deans and people who make the decision about where faculty FTE are allocated, they look at astrophysics and they see the amount of money that people are bringing in. And then they look at a field like biophysics or quantum information. And that's, I think they're putting there, they see that those fields are exploding. And I think astronomy is kind of stagnated a little bit. And I hope that we'll get some energy re-injected with some of the administration's new plans, Chuck Schumer's new, you know, there's the Chips Act and the, I forget what the new frontiers at, whatever it's called.

I know these are currently working their way through Congress. And hopefully those will come to fruition and there'll be more, and we'll get a little life injected in the field. because we're in a place where it's really hard to get things done. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499.

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It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Experimental physicist, I think it's appropriate to have people with, I always say that we're kind of like the Swiss Army knives or the McGivers or whatever, and in my new book, upcoming book Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, I interviewed nine Nobel Prize winning physicists. And they really, you know, I would say, we physicists, I'm not that good at anything, but we're not maybe the best coders, we're maybe not the best engineers, we're maybe not the best, mathematicians, but nobody can

maximize the length of that combined vector within this abstract Hilbert space utility players than physicists. So it's natural that you, and of those, my personal prejudice is towards experimentalists because to be a good experimentalist, tell me if I'm wrong, I think you have to understand the theory. You don't have to do new theory, but you have to understand the theory as well as a, you know,

beginning grad student, advanced grad, however you want to say. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, so, but in the context of, you know, governmental agency, and you know, used to be kind of a joke. What's the biggest oxymoron? It's, you know, military intelligence. When I look back at the events of 2020, things that rhyme with lovid or movid or things like that, I remember, you know, my friends in academia and elsewhere, and even in the military saying things like, oh, look at, look at what's happening in China. You know, there's such a repressive way. They were locking people, doing whatever they were doing. And I'm not going to speculate where it came from or how it came about. We're just going to say the narrative was was in place in January. I remember hearing about January getting invited to speak in Tibet and having to kind of reconsider going because of what might happen with COVID and then of course nobody could go but if I knew back in you know how come the advanced apparatus of our NSA our TSA our CIA how come you know and the jasons and whatnot how come there wasn't more kind of coordinate like this is strange we should maybe stock up on some

you know 50 cent masks like how can we reconcile a government that can do you know you know, almost nothing to prevent something that's 100% predictable. If CNN knew about it, there's no reason the NSA or the Jason should know about it. So, like, how do you reconcile those? Well, remember, the Jason's only work on things that they've been contracted for by the government. So they, you know, they give them direct technical advice on topics where specifically requested to comment on, not policy advice. But the other answer, I think there's two, there's two answers.

The first answer is it's been 100 years since the last. pandemic and we forgot the lessons that we learned through it. And the second answer is that the Biden or the Obama administration handed off a document called the pandemic playbook to the Trump administration and they didn't implement it. So I would say that you can you can put the blame where you were. But I think we I think in 2018 we had the structures or at least and I think there's as well documented Twitter history or real life history of this as well. I think it was a mismanagement at the federal level. And we should have been better prepared. And I think we need to make sure that next time this happens, we are better prepared because new viruses are emerging all the time, global travel. This is far outside my field of expertise. But yeah, I will say I was fully stocked up and ready to be isolated for three or four

months by the beginning of March. So if you read the news, if you read the newspapers and did some. and did some projection. It shouldn't have been a surprising conclusion what happened. Yeah. And I'd also like to say to all your viewers, please take the vaccine. COVID is a, it's a horrible way to die. And the vaccine is very effective.

I have it. My kids have it. It's a good thing. Take the vaccine. One of the things that I remember you doing in the very beginning is making a model on open source on Google, student notebook or something on what could happen to Santa Barbara, you know, COVID. That was very early days. Yeah.

I just wanted to know, you know, when do I need to start freaking out about the number of ICU beds and do a simple model of it? But it was amazing how naive we were back in the day. But this is the way a physicist thinks, and that's kind of what struck me about it, that you were kind of just thinking and modeling and actually from an empiricist standpoint. I think we have to do as experimentalists, which brings me maybe to the final set of topics tangentially related to Jason. But I've heard, you know, people say that, you know, and I've been on a lot of channels alien scientists. I've had on, you know, people from the pro-UFO community, the anti-UFO community. And people saying things like, how come Ed Witten doesn't know about these UAPs that are excited not far off the coast of where we're sitting right now? I've talked to some of the pilots in Alex And Dietrich and others who was affiliated with Commander Fravor and stuff like.

So, anyway, the question I have is if there was. credible. I'm not saying that there is or has been or whatever, but would the Jasons get called? In other words, do we have a appropriate response within the community of physicists or a physical scientist? I'm not saying everyone in Jason is a physicist by any means, but would they be part of a frontline defense? And, you know, if you can't talk, just blink twice about this. No, I don't think it's, again, it would have, the government would have to come to them and say, we want you to do a study on this. And I think they would be pretty wary about taking that kind of study on. I, I know I, I, I would would be wary about working on it.

Not only from the, I think, especially if there are preconceived notions that there may be, you know, that these unidentified phenomenon might not, might be of alien origin, which I think is extraordinarily speculative. So there is all kinds of phenomena and we don't understand. There's all kinds of things that can fool the human eye and fool cameras and radars. So it would be, I think, it would be a hard thing to make a realistic doable study for an organization like Jason. And as far as I know, they've never been asked to look at.

But I don't know everything, that's for sure. Right. Yeah. No, just to, again, a lot of the themes of, you know, as the Simpson say, you know, who's watching the watchers and Homer says, I don't know, the Coast Guard. You know, like, yeah, so who's, you know, who's kind of manning or personally in the watch? Yeah, it's not us. So good luck.

Well, you know, I think it's fascinating to think about, again, at worst to me, it's kind of harmless fun, right? Because you're thinking about the physics of the 29. Yeah, I worry, though, that we give people an idea that the credibility to these ideas that they may not deserve, there's very, it's very hard to take isolated incidents like this and make a leap to alien visiting us. Because there are very, I mean, as an astronomer, I'll tell you this. We've looked at a lot of, we've looked at a lot of stars in the Milky Way with a lot of different sources in the optical, the x-ray, the near-infrared, the gamma-ray. We've looked at, we've looked at other galaxies very closely. And in all, in everything we've seen, we do not see any evidence of alien technology. Now, it could absolutely be there, but we don't see any evidence for it.

And, you know, the distances between stars are awfully long. We have no evidence. I'm sorry to rain on people's parades. We really don't have any evidence for physics beyond the standard model that would allow things like a warp drive. You know, that stuff looks like pure science fiction, unfortunately. I would love one as much as the next guy. But it doesn't seem to be there. And so, and, you know, we do very sensitive experiments.

We look at, you know, we look at couplings between the standard model forces. and gravity and things that would let us do technologies, they just don't seem to be there. We haven't seen any fifth forces with very good experiments. So, you know, in the combination of those things and also, you know, all the things we don't understand about nature anyway, makes me very dubious that these events are anything, but, you know, atmospheric phenomenon or things we don't understand.

Now, I definitely could be wrong, and I'm open to it as an experimentalist, If I'm given a clean data set, you know, I'll change my conclusions. I do think that's one thing that a lot of people in this field, too, think that physicists are exceptionally closed-minded and we have a model that we like. I think that's overplayed because if you are right and you do have a new theory, that is then proven to be correct, that you get the, that's the biggest reward there is. So the problem is that new theories have to fit the existing data. And that's the problem where most of the theories end up getting tripped up, is that we do have a lot of data on the universe, and your new theory has to fit in the context of that existing knowledge.

Yeah. To me, it's not even clear what constitutes data. Like, if you look at, you know, I mean, this point, you know, in the repository of all scientific knowledge on Twitter, and that was, you know, the Hubble Deepfield, okay, it's data of a certain kind. Just the image, right? It's a type of data, you know, if I hand you a picture of the bicep two map, yeah, it's data. Yeah, it's data, but it's not data, right? No, you need context. Right?

Yeah. So you need calibration, you need filtering, you need process. All the stuff that you throw away, which with, you know, and LHC throws away. I won't say we throw away. We incorporated into the analysis. Right, yeah. You're not discarding it. But I'm saying most of the events, just to say at CMS or Atlas at the LHC, 99.99% of the actual day are just

background events that are not important. So they have filters, you know, how many Higgs-Boson events were there that led to the 2013 Nobel pro, 2013 Nobel Pras, it was a handful, two handfuls maybe. So I think, but and the other point that you make is, which is well taken, is that nobody would be more excited about this. It's not like, you know,

big physicists, you know, there's something like big physicists or big pharma, and just suppressing, you know, the free, generic alternative, no, I mean, I would love more than almost anything. I just said, and I think you might have even agreed, if this were verified, if there were something like evidence, beyond

a reasonable doubt, that there are extraterrestrial phenomenon, maybe in the product of technology, we would maybe change our whole research focus because it might be the most interesting thing that happens. I want to close with the question that I ask all my beloved guests who honor me by coming on a series of questions that I call the Into the Impossible thrilling three. And as a friend, I'm very curious about how you want to. So first one involves what in Hebrew, and you speak Hebrew or know some Hebrew, but it's called Zava'a. It's called Zaba'a. It means ethical will. And it's something not unlike what Alfred Nobel did when they bestowed the Nobel Prize for the benefit of all mankind.

In other words, not just money, but something to engage the ethical component of humanity. I want to ask you, Professor Musin, what would you leave as your ethical will when you reached the biblical age of 120 years old, many, many decades from now, what ethical wisdom or knowledge that you've accumulated to date or to that point would you leave as an inheritance for your ideological errors, not your biological? That is an interesting and tough question. I have to say that when I do my research, there is a component of selfishness in it because I work on what I find to be interesting. Many people have issues with this.

They find that the research they're doing in astrophysics doesn't have enough impact on life on the ground. And so they find other things. I've come to terms with the selfishness of inquiry and doing what following my, what I want to do and what I find most interesting. And so my advice to those future generations would be let your curiosity take you where it leads. And, you know, go out there and, you know, allow yourself to think about the things that interest you and work on them. Because those are the things that you're going to work on the hardest that are going to give you the most satisfaction. beautifully said. I remember seeing you in the lab late at night in Westbridge 20 years ago. I don't believe it. At least.

I've known you for 20 years. And we should get together more often because there's someone to be together. I learn a lot from you and I benefit a lot too. I don't know if you ever went upstairs to that little reading room where they had a bust of Feynman, right? You're supposed to rub his nose or something? I don't know. Did you ever do that? Did you ever rub five men's nose? I do not recall rubbing Feynman's nose. I am not particularly superstitious. Yes. So, so Feynman is reputed to say upon asked the question of what single sentence would encapsulate the most information in the fewest words, he said the atomic hypothesis. Everything is made of atoms, whirling around, in its velocities, and everything's composed of atoms. That was 60 years ago. I want to ask you, what would you put on a monolith, like in 2001 a space obviously, a time capsule designed to last for a billion years or more that summarizes the current state of human, knowledge, technology, engineer, whatever you see appropriate,

that is most impressive about the accomplishments of the human race. Wow. That is a question that encapsulates a lot of ideas and will be very hard to generate on short notice. But I will say that the universe is extraordinarily vast. We're extraordinarily small. And just the fact that we're here is enough. for me. You know, I think people get philosophical about it, but in the end, you have your life, you live it as well as you can, you take the pleasure where you can find it, you treat other people

well, and that's all you can ask from a person. And so that's what I, that's what I would say, you know, just live our lives, you'll chill out, and we'll learn about our universe, and it'll be okay. Very good. All right, the last question involves the title of this podcast, which is Into the impossible. It derives from one of Sir Arthur C. Clark's famous three laws, one of which is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. Number two is any sufficiently advanced technology. It's indistinguishable from magic.

And number three is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. That's the in my podcast. I want to ask you, if I had talked, if you could go back to Westbridge and a night in Pasadena, many decades ago, 20 years old, 30, whatever you were, 25, maybe 26th. What would you tell? What one piece of advice would you give the young Ben

to give him the courage to go into the impossible? Basically, advice to your former self. Yeah. Well, I have to say I've never lacked in self-confidence. So I don't know if I would have needed that boost. I think that I think I would probably not mess with my timeline. I think I would probably not give myself any advice. I think things turned out pretty well.

I'm happy with the way things are going. And, you know, I'd played my hand that I was dealt. Okay. It's kind of the Abraham Simpson advice. You never go back in time a million years. Don't step on anything. That's right. And Homer didn't take that advice.

Ben, it's great to see you in person. Thanks for being a friend and helping us on the Simon's Observatory as you've been in the past. And for coming down here and doing what you do for the country. I do actually have a great deal of respect. you might, you know, kind of be too modest to admit it. But I do feel it is a service incumbent upon all scientists that receive public funding to do some kind of giving back, some kind of outreach to the public. And we're all byproduct of public schools.

Sure. You know, I don't know. But we're supported by grants. You're doing your part. I laud you for that. And may you have great success in the rest of your endeavors. Anything you want to plug graduate students, our graduates apply to UCSA. So, yeah.

After UCSD. We do have, we do recruit one or two new. graduate students a year, you can go to my website, www.miseenlab.org. And yeah, that basically sums it up. You know, if you have questions about M-Kids, if you want to make donations to the cause, you can find my website and we'll be happy to talk. And you've got to write a book now because we need more experimentalist writing books. Yeah, yeah. I wrote a thesis. I figure that was close enough to a book for me. But, you know, maybe nobody read it. Who knows? Maybe Jonas Redding.

Benazine, thank you so much for going into The Impossible. Okay, thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thank you for listening to Into the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. that's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

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