Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 0: Obsessive Geniuses

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Welcome to the debut episode of "The Scientists," a captivating new series from the Into the Impossible Podcast Network, hosted by Brian Keating, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. Each week, Brian takes us on a journey into the extraordinary minds behind history’s greatest scientific breakthroughs—not just exploring what these giants of science discovered, but delving deep into who they were, what drove their relentless curiosity, and the very human obsessions that shaped their careers and our world. If you’re curious about the messy, intensely human reality behind monumental discoveries—and how these stories can reshape your worldview—tune in as we venture into the lives, the questions, and the obsessions that made science possible. Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 - Key Takeaways: 00:00 Exploring Scientific Pioneers Podcast 06:08 Exploring Scientific Genius Insights 07:46 Visionary Inventors and Iconoclasts 12:48 Exploring Intellectual and Business Obsessions 14:35 Scientific Revolutions and Genius Insights - Additional resources: ➡️ 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/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Scientists, a new podcast under the umbrella of the Into the Impossible Brain. I'm your host, Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. And each week on the scientist, I dive into the life and legacy of a legendary scientist, an experimentalist, a theorist, an observer. All of them, uncovering insights you can apply to your own work and your own worldview. Science didn't appear fully formed. It was built by real people. solving real problems under pressure with very human desires. Their ideas still shape our future.

We'll examine not just what they discovered, what drove them to make those discoveries, and most importantly of all, who they were, from their obsessions and honors to their most spectacular ideas, their most brilliant blunders, and their most beautiful of all human flaws. I've spent my life obsessed with the minds

that have shaped our scientific understanding of reality, I aim to do for science what the podcast guru known as Dave Senra does for business leaders on his founder's podcast. This is sort of a version of that, a scientific founders, how they founded and forged our understanding of the cosmos, both on Earth, in the heavens and even in the microcosm, the innercosm of our minds. I'll be talking about everything that we talk about on the podcast with our generative guests. Hmm. Except I won't have any guests on this podcast and I won't have any video. I'll push it to video channels just for distribution. But this will be an audio-only podcast, which will hopefully let me go deeper into storytelling and kind of the backstories behind these wonderful books that shaped who I am and I hope we'll shape who you are too.

And if not you, maybe a young person in your life. And in fact, the very first book that we're going to encounter soon is Flatland by none other than A-square. That was his name. Well, it was actually Edwin A. Abbott, Abbott, Abbott, Abbott. His last name was his middle name. So he's sort of A-squared. And we'll be talking about that book, subtitle, A Romance of Many Dimensions. I can't get him on the podcast.

and ask him, as I often do, to judge his book by his cover because he's been dead for nion 100 years or more. But this book, more than any other, really made me a scientist. Age 12, I remember reading it on the New Jersey Shore in an un-air-conditioned house that we rented for a couple weeks to get some surf and sun in playtime at Asbury Park in Point Pleasant. which for us, Westchester County dwellers, was like as exotic as going to Hawaii. And I still remember the great video games and funnel cakes of the mid and early 1980s.

I hope it's still there. I haven't been there in many, many years. We'll be discussing these biographies and books by the greatest minds who ever lived, and Flatland is no exception. I'll get into that in just a bit, But the real obsession I have with these obsessive geniuses is what makes somebody a genius. Is it raw intelligence, a capacity to see connections that others miss, or perhaps something deeper, an obsession with understanding that borders on mania? I've read over 400 biographies, memoirs, books about scientists, and books by scientists, many of which I read before, starting into The Impossible Podcast, and

2017 or so. And in that time, even long before that, reading scientific books and books by scientists, biographies, and others, I've come to really believe that the quality of obsession is the sin a quannon, the sole distinguishing feature that separates transformative thinkers from the merely brilliant ones. And I think it's the willingness to pursue a question relentlessly. a great personal cost, we'll be describing their personal lives where we have access to it. And scientists are not perfect. They're human beings. Not walking Wikipedia's.

So there's the inability to let go of a problem, to hold fast to it, tenaciously, even when conventional wisdom suggests it's unsolvable is what is the true separating factor. Now, on the podcast, on the Into the Impossible podcast, you know, I've talked to 21 Nobel Prize winners and climbing. I think it's more than almost anyone on Earth. I've written now my second book where I distill their wisdom, knowledge, and self-help tools and tricks into a guide. I'll be talking more about that. As the year goes on, it comes out on September 9th, which is my birthday. And that's the second volume of the Into the Impossible series.

The first one was Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. The second one is called Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner. It's really a productivity book based on the geniuses that are so obsessive with their focus. And that will be a thing throughout this. mini-series within the into the impossible zoo so this podcast is going to take you inside the minds of these geniuses scientists who weren't content with incremental money you know with incremental progress but really reimagined entire fields of science each episode's going to immerse you in the life and mind of a scientific pioneer whom bodies this obsessive quality you'll hear their

words, experience their breakthroughs, and understand what unconventional thinking led to them and enabled them to do and see what others couldn't or wouldn't. So it's not a typical history podcast or a science podcast or science history podcast. We're not going to just recap facts and accomplishments and focus on, you know, the milestones in people's lives or even in the history or philosophy of science. And that's not my intention. I really want to focus on their mental mind. models, the habits, their cognitive frameworks that these geniuses affected such that you can apply

these tools to your own thinking, potentially, or be inspired by them, or see them as human beings, flaws and all. The episodes will fall into about five different buckets, I would say, each one will illuminate a different facet of scientific genius. We'll talk about obsessive practitioners, People like Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, Stephen Weinberg, Enrico Fermi, scientists who were maniacal about their craft, often working themselves to the point of exhaustion, are even radiation sickness in the case of Marie Curie. The second type of scientists will encounter people like Galileo v. Rubin,

underdogs who fought against all odds, battling hostile orthodoxy to champion their observations with their passions and their theories and observations told them was true. We'll be right back after this short break. Third bucket are we'll be inventors, people who invented visionary technology like Alan Turing and John von Neumann, who built entirely new paradigms that forever changed the way we think about mathematics, computation, information, and even intelligence,

consciousness, and reasoning itself. Fourth, we'll talk about famous failures, brilliant blunders, people that made mistakes like Linus Pauling, who advocated for vitamin C as a cure-all, or the brilliant Fred Hoyle who rejected the Big Bang, even after giving in its name, showing us that even geniuses can become enthramped by their own theories, their own biases, their own foibles. This is not incidental to the definition and identity of a scientist. The point is to avoid these things, and I think by reading history,

we can prevent bad history from happening and hopefully engender positive results in positive history and outcomes for the heroes and heroines that did eventually have their day in the sun. And the last bucket, so to speak, will be an iconoclastic thinkers segment, or a bucket outsiders in the field, like David Deutsch, who I hope to have on the End of the Impossible podcast someday.

I've communicated with him a few times. And the late great Freeman Dyson, who was my very first guest on The End of the Impossible podcast? These are outsiders who really broke from scientific orthodoxy, not through rebellion for its own sake, but by following fundamental principles, first principles, logic. Two, there are inevitable, if even uncomfortable conclusions. So let me say just a couple more words about why I created this series. Throughout my career as a physicist and science communicator, I have observed a disturbing trend, the sensationalization of science and the sanitization of scientific history.

It's a phenomenon where we celebrate discoveries, but we strip away the messy humanity that produced them. It was part of the theme that ran throughout my first book, which is a memoir. losing the Nobel Prize, about how, among other things, we always publish the discovery on the front page of the newspaper of record, yes, the San Diego Union Tribune. And the retraction, if and when it comes, is published on the weekend edition, page B-17 in small font and a column next to a yard sale or upcoming President's Day weekend sale. We celebrate what is veneratable, lionized the lions, but we don't always react to the way

science actually plays out. Science advances through obsession, but also through failure. And occasionally pure stubbornness has to battle against the forces of truth. And that just because you're stubborn doesn't mean you're right. And so by erasing these elements, as we often do with our students, we just teach them the experiments that won Nobel Prize is in our lab classes, for example. We often misrepresent the history of science and rewrite it, as happened with the Nobel Prize itself, as I may clear in my first book. We make science itself, therefore, seem inaccessible, as if you can only do it if you're a fully formed superhuman braniac from birth. And that's simply not true. Even Einstein

wasn't Einstein in his earliest years. And I refused to dumb down this complexity. and just purely celebrate scientists for who they are. I think that's what David Sunderer does well. He paints a picture of people like Warren Buffett. Of course, he's going to paint their glories and demonstrate their phenomenal accomplishments. But he also will point out, you know, what is Warren Buffett like to live with?

What was he like as a husband, as a father? Those things go into the complexity and the totality of a person. And I won't whitewash it. 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 speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

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was inextricably related with the compulsion, the compulsion that drove him to crack safes and get in trouble at Los Alamos as an iconoclastic anti-authoritarian participant of the Manhattan Project. He was also not great to his female and male graduate students and their wives and so forth. Same with the venerated Stephen Hawking. We talk about Einstein. We can't separate his stubbornness and his incorrect approach to quantum mechanics, to theories of everything. And these aren't footnotes.

They come through in the many books about these great geniuses and buy these geniuses. So as I said, where Senra focuses on obsessive business builders and entrepreneurs, examining commercial obsessions that they enjoy, will investigate intellectual obsession, minds driven not by profit, nor even by the Nobel Prize, but the need to understand reality itself while they still can. Each episode is going to feature a dynamic pacing between reading scientific memoirs and other sources. Sometimes I'll draw from multiple books, paraphrasing complex concepts, and sharing my own excited reactions to pivotal moments,

and my recollections of reading those books, some of which I haven't read in 30, 40 years or so. For those familiar with the work that I do in YouTube, you'll see a similar type of approach and I never shy away from technical depth, but I ensure that every concept will be accessible. And at the end of each episode, I'll distill what I call nature's laws, the three fundamental principles we can extract from each genius's approach. This is similar to what I used to do in the podcast, where I used to do the final four, the thrilling three, these existential questions. I haven't done it so much on the podcast. I might bring that back. These are meant to kind of evoke the human side, the scientists that I have the honor and privilege to talk to.

But I can't talk to many of these people like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and more. So I have to kind of conjecture. Maybe I'll conjecture how they would have answered the final four, or the quintessential quintile. And as I said, we're going to start with a work that not only altered my worldview, but also none other than Albert Einstein himself. Flatland, the first science book I ever read, is a geometry book, but also a voyage or romance of many dimensions that presaged Einstein's four-dimensional journeys through space time by many decades and influenced him just the same. When we talk about Feynman, we have to explore his influential mentor, John Wheeler, his thought experiments that revolutionized our understanding of black holes. And when we talk about Einstein, we have to explore the influence of the great mathematician Emmy Noider and her brilliance that uncovered deep connections between symmetry and conservation laws and many other phenomena.

So this is more than a podcast. This is an exploration of what happens when the human mind, a tenement. to operate at its limits. When someone becomes so consumed by a question they cannot rest until they've torn apart all of conventional wisdom, reconstructed our reality, and how we understand the nature of scientific revolutions. If you've ever wondered how science progresses,

not from funeral to funeral, as Max Planck said, but from revolution, from paradigm shift to paradigm shift, from revolution to revolution. What separates transformative thinkers from the merely competent or how you might apply the mental models of history's greatest scientists your own thinking, this series is for you. I've spent four decades now reading and studying and learning from these brilliant, obsessive minds, teaching their discoveries to my students,

sometimes conversing with them if they happen to be among the living, and have applied their methods in my own research and my own writing, And now I want to take you beyond the equations and textbooks into the actual thought processes that changed our world. So join me each time as we explore and examine the lives of the minds and the methods of science's most obsessive geniuses and extract lessons that can transform how you think about problems in your life and your work. And if this approach resonates with you, if you believe we get closer to truth by questioning

assumptions and pushing beyond the boundaries of comfortable consensus. I hope you'll consider again subscribing to the podcast wherever you're listening to it. And share it with others who shares your obsessions as well. I'm Brian Keating. And this is The Scientist on the Into the Impossible Podcast Network. All 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 a $1.6 million dream package.

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