Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 3: Isaac Asimov -- Atomic Habits

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Starting point is 00:01:23 It's Isaac Asimov. And not the sci-fi Asimov, not the foundation, not the I-Robot, not even the essays on AI. We're talking about the science fact, science, non-fiction Asimov, the chemist. The professor, the man who made the periodic table sing. and the man who wrote more nonfiction books than any other human being who ever lived. And unlike most science books, his didn't feel like textbooks.

Starting point is 00:01:53 They felt like conversations. Fast, funny, brilliant conversations. Isaac Asimov influenced me so much that I really am a scientist today, largely in part to him. After encountering Flatland, episode one, I started to just devour Isaac Asimov's books, and I never really got into a science fiction.

Starting point is 00:02:14 I'm ashamed to admit. I never read I-Robant, Foundation, any of those books, but I did devour many of his nonfiction books, and sadly, they're not really available. It's very difficult to find them nowadays. You may find them in libraries. You can find use copies, but they're not really in print, which is kind of strange because, you know,

Starting point is 00:02:34 it's not like the history of chemistry changed a lot since 1967 when he wrote one of the books we'll talk about today, for example. simple. So here's the plan. Today I'm going to tell you about five of his best chemistry books. Now, I'm a physicist. I like to think of chemistry as direct-in, as applied physics. But his chemistry books actually involved a lot of physics and history. And it's actually my favorite way to learn history is through reading science and chemistry and physics in particular, and astronomy too, of course. So Asimov really was more prolific. I like to think of them as you know, still writing from heaven or wherever he is.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Actually, he's an atheist. He was an atheist, pretty devout atheist. And so he certainly needs to believe in heaven. But I like to think he's still writing, and that was his greatest joy. And it's great for us. It's a joy for us because without these books, you know, maybe I wouldn't be here talking to you. So maybe he gets some of the blame or credit. So I'm going to tell you about his five best books, in my opinion, while they're,

Starting point is 00:03:37 and I'm going to tell you why they're still better than about 99% of what else is out there. there. He didn't write in today's hyperbolic style and, you know, the fabric and mystery and majesty of the cosmos. He wrote a history and he wrote some speculations, but he was such a great writer. He was as good a writer as Stephen King as anyone else writing, you know, fiction, but he applied his, and he applied his fictional abilities to his nonfiction writings, which makes him unique. There's really no one else like him. And of course, his prolific output is literally unmatched in any genre, but especially in the science and science fiction genres. So Asimov was born in 1920 in the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union in Russia,

Starting point is 00:04:23 Smolensk. His family, a Jewish family, immigrated to Brooklyn when he was three, and his father ran a candy store. What did they sell at the candy store? Well, lucky for Isaac and for us, they sold magazines and science fiction, pulp fiction novels. And little Isaac read every single one of them. And by the time

Starting point is 00:04:44 he was 11, he was writing his own stories. And by 19, he had a master's degree in chemistry, and later he got a PhD in biochemistry. But what he really wanted wasn't to sit in a lab coat doing titrations. He wanted to titrate your mind to explain things. He started off in the

Starting point is 00:05:03 nonfiction genre, and only later did he move to the fiction genre that he's much beloved for and deservedly so, I guess. I mean, I haven't read the books, but they've been made into films and and so forth that I have seen. But I found with him and Arthur C. Clark as well that I really prefer their nonfiction to their fiction. That's astonishing to say for someone whose podcast is named after Arthur C. Clark's famous dictum, the only way of determining limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. But be that as it may.

Starting point is 00:05:31 Isaac wanted to take the hardest, most complex topics in science and chemistry, engineering, physics, math, and make them so simple and so fun that you would devour them just like a fiction novel. And so not only would you enjoy them and love them, you would understand them. A first book I read came out in 1965, and it's hard to believe, 60 years ago. Same year, the CMB radiation was discovered across the Hudson from Brooklyn and New York City in New Jersey and Holmden. It's called A Short History of Chemistry, and it really is short, and it's really easy to devour. I mean, I read these as a 12, 13-year-old, and I couldn't get enough of them. So it was published in 1965, as I said, and it is a masterpiece. This is the book that every chemistry teacher should be forced to read before teaching their first class.

Starting point is 00:06:21 It starts with the Greeks, with Democritus, and with Adams, and he walks you all the way through atomic theory, which is physics, as I say. It appealed to me probably more as a budding physicist than a chemist. although it was really fun to try to blow things up when he discussed the formation and discovery of gunpowder by the Chinese and others in this book. And this is done in less than 200 pages with no equations, no homework problem sets, just pure story. And it's an incredible story at that.

Starting point is 00:06:48 He writes so beautifully and poetically. It begins, chemistry began as a quest for gold. It ended as a quest for understanding. Now, this is not a book about chemistry. It's a book about why chemistry matters. He tells you about Lavoisier discovering oxygen and then getting his head chopped off in the French Revolution, and that comeuppance for him really set back science an incredible amount. Surprisingly, for those in the age of reason and the so-called scientific enlightenment thinkers,

Starting point is 00:07:19 but there's a lot we can blame the French for. That's a podcast. Asimov explains how we figured out that atoms have weight. Individual, microscopic, subatomic, and invisible, and these things have structure. They have composition, electrons, protons, neutrons. You finish the book and you feel like you understand the chemistry, the science behind the chemistry, behind the physics behind the chemistry. Again, not because you memorized anything,

Starting point is 00:07:47 but because the puzzle came together through his masterful storytelling. It's really a page turner. I'm going to see if I can find some links to it. But what often happens is when I interviewed the late great Jim Simon's, my mentor, and father-like figure to me in many ways, He suggested a book that influenced him more than any other book called The Captain, and that book is out of print and sold out very soon after. The interview that I posted with Jim in 2020 came up because so many people went out and bought it, trying to replicate his billion dollar fortune. Now, Asimov didn't die as rich as Jim Simons, but they both shared an ability to simplify the complex.

Starting point is 00:08:26 And both were professors and very prolific in multiple fields. don't forget, Jim Simons was a masterful hedge fund pioneer mathematician and codebreaker par excellence. And only later got into cosmology and philanthropy, the stuff that we are now carrying on his legacy with with the Simons Observatory. Okay, second book number two, The Chemicals of Life. This gets you into biochemistry, specifically your body. He's talking about you, people. He's talking about enzymes, hormones, vitamins, and how these tiny molecules run. everything. He explains why you can digest food, why plants produce photosynthesis, and how

Starting point is 00:09:06 the similarities between the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. It's very vivid. I remember reading this book and getting incredibly interested and perplexed because it was curious to know that there was a physics reason, a quantum mechanical reason perhaps, behind maybe my emotions, why I felt happy or sad or sick or tired or exhausted, or more likely than not, hungry. He doesn't just say, well, this is a chemical called serotonin. He says, this is how it was discovered. This is what serotonin does. And this is the guy who discovered it. And why he originally thought he was going insane. And yet, his discovery changed medicine forever. It's a master class in storytelling science. It's drama. It's a thrilling example of how biology and chemistry and physics

Starting point is 00:09:57 should not ever be taught in a dry way. They should be incredibly captivating. I've often taught this to my students, instead of teaching them the equations for a ball rolling down an inclined plane every freshman nightmare, I say, look, Galeo discovered the laws of motion at a time when there were no clocks.

Starting point is 00:10:17 He didn't have calculus at his disposal, and he was locked away in prison in Italy for the thought crime of heretically suggesting that the Earth orbit around the same, son, not the other way around. And that was done in his famous discourse, his last book ever published. And that had to be smuggled out of Catholic Italy all the way to Calvinist the Netherlands and the Netherlands and Holland. That's a moment more exciting than saying, well, here's the equation and you can make the measurements more accurately if the slope of the plane is not inclined as much.

Starting point is 00:10:50 So boring. We can't do that people. Educators, I know are listening to this. Please look at the controversial things. Look into the people, the lives, the history behind the science. Don't just teach the equations. Teach what they meant to the people who discovered them. Okay, book number three, this one's totally underrated. It's called Asimov on Chemistry. You can still find this one a little bit more easily than some of the other ones. It's a collection of essays. There's 17 essays altogether. And it's really delightful work because what it's doing is explaining through his personality and his voice how the hydrogen bomb came to be through chemistry, how the men and women who invented it came up with their ideas that were done for a purpose, typically for engineering, but in the

Starting point is 00:11:39 case of the Manhattan Project, which he goes through the chemistry of it, not just the physics of it, that we learn from Oppenheimer. There are many, many chemists involved with it as well. And it's at heart, a chemical story, the elements and so forth. But he goes all the way from the smallest atomic elements, hydrogen. and the subatomic components thereof, electrons, quarks, and so forth, all the way to the most massive things in the galaxy, stars, giant stars,

Starting point is 00:12:04 and how stars are chemical factories as well, element factories, fusion factories. And one of those poetic lines that really has stuck with me for four decades now is that the human brain is the most complicated chemical factory in the known universe. And it writes books about itself.

Starting point is 00:12:21 And of course, that's very self-referential. He's writing a book about the process of writing a book, and it really harkens back to what Carl Sagan, a man will encounter very soon. And just a reminder, you can suggest scientists and books that they've written. The only criterion is it can't be you, and it has to be somebody for which there's a book written a biography or autobiography, a memoir, something that's very telling about them. Just in case I haven't read them, I've read over 400 books. Most of them have some biographical elements of some great scientist within them, very few or pure descriptions of theories or models or observations.

Starting point is 00:12:58 And you can suggest them on my website, briankeating.com, and you can send me an email at Brian at briankeeting.com. And I read everyone. I don't answer everyone, but I read everyone. And I also do monthly gatherings where we get together and talk about ideas on the YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe to both my YouTube channels, Dr. Brian Keating, where I do my podcast where you're listening to this, an audio form. On video form has its own separate feed, and it's The Scientist's podcast with Brian Keating on YouTube, has his own channel because I didn't want to confuse the algorithm with a YouTube channel that has no video content for now. Let me know if you think I should include actual videos of me discussing the books and then

Starting point is 00:13:42 adding content and B-roll footage. I kind of don't want to do that because I just want to have communication stream of consciousness thinking with minimal editing that i can just kind of do myself without involving my whole team and productions and thumbnails and everything else i want to keep it low lift but high content so you really are inspired to read these great books and we kind of have this intellectual book club where we talk about ideas with one another okay so brian keating dot com sign up for my mailing list you can send me emails as well so book number four life and energy this is the one where Asimov takes on thermodynamics and chemistry of life and then brings that back as he always does into chemistry and at its heart, physical chemistry is physics, quantum mechanics.

Starting point is 00:14:27 He explains ATP, airline transport pilot, the rating that I do not have, would love to have. If there are any airlines hiring out there that want middle-aged physics profess? No, I don't have time to do that, but I do have all the other ratings, interestingly enough, except for certified flight instructor. I'm working on that as well. So I can teach my kids how to fly. Again, another podcast. We talk about something to do with aviation and physics.

Starting point is 00:14:54 Perhaps we'll get into one of those books. There are books like that, including the Wright brothers. So this talks about ATP, this adenosine trifosate, the molecule that fuels all of life. And he describes it almost as if it's like money or currency. Energy comes in, energy comes out, the books have to be balanced. You're going to die if you stop breathing

Starting point is 00:15:17 and these reactions stop taking place. Not in poetic terms, but in terms of molecular transactions. And it's a unique perspective on biochemistry. It made me really think about what is life, what is energy. We experience energy, just like we experience time. There are many ways to define time. There are the arrow of time thermodynamically. There is the arrow of time quantum mechanically.

Starting point is 00:15:39 There is an arrow of time in biological processes and there is an hour of time psychologically. And it's so interesting to know energy is like that too. And of course it is. As I read it, as I read the book, we have to always consider, not just from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that energy and time are conjugates to each other.

Starting point is 00:15:58 In other words, if you measure something exquisitely accurately in time or frequency, you have infinite uncertainty about its energy and vice versa. But you also have these conjugates where you experience energy physically, of low energy, high energy, psychologically, motivationally, obviously in thermodynamics, there are many different types of energy,

Starting point is 00:16:19 free energy, Helmholtz, Gibbs, Boltzmann, Maxwell, all these different approaches to energy and to time. And this was the book that really highlighted that for me. So it's a really wonderful example of how something that's very hard to define but is well understood by most people as the Supreme Court, justice one said about pornography.

Starting point is 00:16:42 I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. We all kind of know what energy is or we know it when we see it. We know what time is. We know it when we see it. But Asimov tells us in his constant refrain as thesis that life is a temporary victory

Starting point is 00:16:57 of energy over entropy. That we're all trying to locally reduce entropy, although we know globally, that's relativistically and thermodynamically impossible. So if that thought, that life, is a temporary victory of energy over entropy. If that doesn't give you chills, maybe you're already dead. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

Starting point is 00:17:21 To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

Starting point is 00:17:47 Okay. Book 5 is actually a two-part book. It's called The World of Carbon and the World of Nitrogen. These are two different deep dives. Carbon, the king of the periodic table, backbone of life, and the very molecule, the element, rather, that is responsible for us having the diverse types of chemistry that we have. It's really, in some ways, the king is. the periodic table. It's complex. It's only almost miraculously constructed in stars and what was

Starting point is 00:18:18 called the Hoyle miracle, the state that lasts for femtoseconds, that midwives through almost an enzymatic process between the creation of the triple alpha process that allows three alpha nuclei to come together to make one carbon 12 nucleus. And of course, carbon has multiple facets, that's including it different isotopes, which Asimov has already explained to us in the history of chemistry, what an isotope was, how it's discovered, how we can measure them today using mass spectrometers and other things. You know, the brilliant approach that he takes is that he uses carbon, it's kind of like a protagonist in a novel or a memoir, and he goes through the different ways that it forms the backbone of everything. And how the relatively simple arrangements of it from individual carbon in a lattice to carbon and hydrogen allows, for the very multifaceted nature of life, the famous dream vision of the scientist

Starting point is 00:19:17 who conceived of benzene as a ring as a snake eating its own tail on uroboros, that was just quite fascinating to go through the human aspects of it, but also very deep dive into the different arrangements, the allotopes of carbon, the isotopes of carbon, and of course carbon dating and radiocarbon dating, and how that has proved

Starting point is 00:19:38 more useful than just pure laboratory applications. I mean, it's allowed us to do archaeology, anthropology, study historical artifacts of things we could never witness and make sense of things as diverse as, you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls to cave paintings in Mesoamerica and in early Europe. It's just an incredibly important molecule, the different tools that we've developed,

Starting point is 00:20:03 and works just carbon-based life forms. Of course, he speculates on other types of life as well in the same book. Now, the world of nitrogen, you might think of as incredibly quiet and boring, just like the gas that's more or less inert, but it's everywhere. It's in our DNA. It's in fertilizer, the nitrogen fixation process and ammonia that was used by Fritz Haber and others to create the first large-scale fertilizer production methods in the early 1900s. And then it was later used to profit and make money for Haber and then later fuel his ambitions into chemical warfare

Starting point is 00:20:44 creating chlorine gas and other chemical weapons in World War I that killed tens of thousands of people and he goes through how Haber and others Nobel Prize winners were some of the most vociferous supporters and ardent believers in making chemical weapons and not only making them but witnessing them being used on people and troops and the Allied troops because these were all Germans in World War I. And Fritz Haber, although he was Jewish, was an ardent German nationalist. And ironically,

Starting point is 00:21:16 and tragically, his life led to much suffering and tragedy, as pointed out, he ends up having at least one child, I believe, commits suicide. I think his wife commits suicide. The guilt in this family is overwhelming. And then, of course, later on, the company that he found through the Haber Bosch process, the fertilization method of making the most. for fertilizer, then goes on to make chemical weapons, including Zyclan B, which is the very gas that's used to exterminate some of the members of Haber's own family. So it's an incredibly tragic story. And Asimov goes through in this incredibly beautiful prose. And as a writer par excellence, there's just no one like Asimov. And I hope that you can find some of those books. I really do.

Starting point is 00:22:03 They're really gems. And it doesn't matter how old the copy is that you have. If you can find it online, even better, you know, send it to your Kindle or whatever. These are incredible books that I really still treasure. They influence me throughout my life, but both as a scientist, becoming a young scientist, getting interested in science and the way I teach my kids and teach my students, but also in my writing style as well. If you can be as interesting as Asimov explaining the benzene ring, you have a pretty good shot at being able to write some very powerful nonfiction and maybe even some fiction.

Starting point is 00:22:37 I don't know. I haven't yet gone delved into fiction writing yet, but maybe I will. So it really was someone only like an Asimov who could take a subject like nitrogen and weave it together in a way that could be linking together, fertilizer with chemical bonds and chemical bombs and then eventually into chemical weapons and eventually into the way that it's nourishes. half the planet, including you today, if you ate anything that was either grazed on vegetables or vegetables themselves. You had ingested some of the, you are the beneficiary of the ingestion of some of the processes that come from nitrogen. You know, as we wrap up, he wasn't just a writing machine. He didn't write for, you know, to become wealthy. He was driven to write. He was a personality, a character. He loved puns. He loved puns. He didn't. He didn't write for, you know, to become wealthy. He was driven to write. He was, he He loved puns.

Starting point is 00:23:37 He was hilarious, and that's ironic or maybe not. His name in Hebrew means laughter. Isaac Yitzhak means laughter. He hated academia and gatekeeping. He wrote every single day. His process was unmatched, 10 hours a day. People would ask him, why don't you take vacations? And he would say, writing is my vacation.

Starting point is 00:23:56 He didn't chase prestige. He wasn't known as a phenomenal professor in Boston and his university. but he chased clarity and he chased education for the masses. He loved searching and explaining truths that he thought, and I believe he succeeded, that anybody can understand and only if it was explained the right way. He was a servant of knowledge, a servant of the reader, and he didn't just explain chemistry.

Starting point is 00:24:25 Again, there's many more books he's written from astronomy and physics and many other science nonfiction books in addition to his fiction books, which I'm not saying you shouldn't read just because I haven't. Please don't take that away. But he didn't just explain chemistry or biochemistry, et cetera, or history of science. He explained via the joy and the sheer pleasure that he took in understanding, the thrill of making sense of things, of walking into the dark and flipping on a light switch in your mind.

Starting point is 00:24:58 And so when you read these books, you'll read them not just to learn, but to see, to see how a scientist thinks, to see how a master visionary thinks, to see that the world is made of atoms, that those atoms tell stories. And Isaac Asimov? Well, to me, he was the best damn storyteller Adams ever made. And this has been The Scientist.

Starting point is 00:25:23 Episode 3, Isaac Asimov. Stay tuned for next time. Please do like, subscribe, comment on this video, or the audio where you're listening suggest a topic, a personality, a scientist for me to come up with and to discuss in the future episode.

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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 3: Isaac Asimov -- Atomic Habits

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