Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Year in Astronomy & Physics! (#287)

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

What a year we just had in physics and astronomy! I'll review some of my top highlights and your suggestions for runner ups. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 Audience and Capture phenomena 17:00 Let the topics begin! 20:00 Astronomy’s greatest hits 35:00 New physics that wasn’t 49:00 What to look forward to in 2023 Also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Can you do me a favor? Please leave a rating and review of my Podcast:  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. 🎙️On Spotify it’s here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2G3PRMUhxGQkyQzLiiCqlf?si=8656119458df4555 🎧 On Audible it’s here : https://www.audible.com/pd/Into-the-Impossible-With-Brian-Keating-Podcast/B08K56PXJX?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShar Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, dear listeners, and all science aficionados. And dare I say it, science nerds. Welcome to this year-end science rap edition of Into the Impossible. Our indomitable host, Brian Keating, is about to give you a fast and furious summary of our podcast's 2022 highlights. And for that matter, astronomy and physics writ large. The James Webb Space Telescope, Dark Matter, quantum entanglement, and more. This is a truly shareable episode. nothing else is going to make you smarter, faster.

As always, please take a moment to leave us an asterism of five stars. And we really appreciate all those cards and letters in the form of reviews. And now sit back, relax, and take in Ryan Keating's 2022 Year in Astronomy and Physics. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot-bay doors, please, how? Hello, everybody. Tis I, your fury. host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Broadcasting live on Friday, January 6th,

2023. I'm still writing 2022 on my checks and my paychecks with the sign the front and the back of your paychecks. Don't forget. And I thought it would be a lot of fun to answer some questions and also to celebrate the fact that you're going to be a lot of fun. that we have 80,000 subscribers on this channel now on YouTube alone, another 50,000 on audio. And I really want to thank you all for such incredible support, love, and generosity with your thumbs and your comments and all the cool stuff that you guys are doing. And it's really gratifying to see the growth of the community and all the feedback, tripling and doubling faster than a virus, and it's R factor.

And it's hopefully a positive mind virus transmitting to you all and sharing with you all. And I learn a tremendous amount from my listeners and guests, obviously. I just recorded two episodes in the last two days, one with a brilliant young postdoc in the UK and the U.S. Oliver Phil Cox, who is part of a team that's claimed detection of very, very interesting phenomenon called Cosmic Parasian. sorry, called Cosmic Parity Violation, which in the words of Mark Kamienkowski, one of the most eminent scientists alive and a friend and a mentor, could lead to a Nobel Prize for Dr. Phil Cox, and you'll see that soon. And I already have a Nobel Prize that I'm waiting to give him that I stole from my friend Barry Barish, who I'm doing a in-person interview with in about two weeks

at his home, new home institution of the University of California. So we're colleagues. He is at UC Riverside. And I'm going up there to give a colloquium, and he will be there, and he and I will do an episode about his life story and kind of follow up on the three or four conversations we've had. I've interviewed him, and he interviewed me once on the podcast as well. And that was a lot of fun.

Of course, he wrote the forward to my latest book called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner. and you can read all about that in that book. And I also want to encourage folks to subscribe to my mailing list. It's there, Briankeen.com slash list. If you're in the U.S., you have a chance to win real space schmutz. So meteorites, I keep them somewhere around here in my laboratory setting. Let's see. I'm out of loss for them right now. Oh, here's one. Here's one.

So if you want some, you've got some if you're in the U.S. And it's just been tremendous. Wow. T. Carr, my brother from another mother. The man, the myth, the legend. Thank you for a hundred dollar super chat. It's just insane. It's so generous of you.

Folks joining us from London, from Laos, from all around the world. Oh, my God. It's so cool. I never thought about this would be a possibility. Obviously, when I was a kid, but even a couple of years ago. This channel is only two years old. And we've had incredible growth and really the growth allows me to do a tremendous amount more and gives me the energy to really up my game. And I built out of a studio or in the process of building a studio here in the laboratory at Keating Labs at UC San Diego.

And we got all sorts of cool stuff coming for you this year. Just one more reminder just to please check out the video that Reese today, which not surprisingly confirm the work. An up-and-coming physicist, and that's Albert Einstein, whose gravity remains ununified with the notions of quantum mechanics. And some of that's due to the work of the famous Ice Cube experiment, which is located at the South Pole, where I've spent many a day freezing my took us off, as they say. And I love it down there, and he leads, Franz Halzin leads the Ice Cube experiment. I've had an interview with him, which is really one of my favorites of 2022. And he's just such a generous, honest, vulnerable, deep individual, new George LaMaitre. And we talked about that.

I talked about pedagongy, how to be a mentor, how to be a teacher, how to be a scientific leader. We almost, you know, ran out of time recording space. He has so much wisdom to share. So today's video is about Ice Cube's actual discovery, which looks. led to me inviting him on the podcast. And I actually had him as a professor a long, long time ago. Michael, Dan, how are you? Shabbat Shalom. And I wanted to kind of, you know, riff off that with a deep dive into the experimental

details of Ice Cube and what allowed them to make this announcement back in October in Nature magazine about a confirmation that Einstein was right that the laws of what are called Lorentz invariants are respected throughout the universe. So that was a really fun discussion I had with him. But the video is about the actual ins and outs of the detector and how it works and how they actually did constrain Lorentz invariance violation. And what we can do about that going forward so that we can really learn if gravity and quantum mechanics are actually unified or if they're not. There's no law that says they have to be unified. And a lot of people, people kind of act in physics as if it does have to be unified, but there's really no mandate,

as I say, letter from God that says we have to do that. And when I discuss this, you know, phenomena that is very difficult as a guest that I haven't gotten yet. He did promise to come on. Nima, Arkani Hamad has promised me to come on. I was supposed to be with him this week in Glasgow, no, in Edinburgh, Edinburgh. Enver. Not Edinburgh, as I said by accident, when I talked. to the great Neil Tarak. Neil invited me to a conference that's going on this week up there in Edinburgh. And I couldn't make it because I'm going on a super secret mission in the next week and a half. And it would have required me to go and just do some crazy stuff that I was unwilling to do given family demands. But anyway, we'll stay tuned for more information about that.

Today is all about the top hits of 2022 and what you guys think about it. whether or not you agree with some of the selections that I chose and what we can look forward to in 2023. And I did post a poll on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating, where you're watching right now, and it got over 1,400, 1,500 votes. And I was kind of reluctant to put down what I knew would be the greatest hit of all of 2022 in the world of astronomy, which was JWST. So I put down five different well, I put down four real options. Nuclear fusion yielding net positive energy output, which we talked about with Professor Charles Seif in late December.

The wormhole that was allegedly created in a quantum computer. The fact that the phosphine claims, which is a biomarker, that Venus was said to have had. About three years ago, I had an episode with Sarah Seeger and other collaborators from MIT and her group. and other groups that claim they had detected this molecule, which looks a lot like ammonia, except instead of having nitrogen and has phosphorus.

So it's pH3 for you playing at home instead of NH3. And that was said to be not only really consistent with a biological origin, but really consistent with that life form existing in the clouds of Venus, where we're used to thinking about only carbon dioxide and future hellscape that may await us on Earth if we don't take heed to Tim Palmer, who's past guest on the show, and his advice to create a CERN-like organization for combating climate change. So look at that episode. So there was that option.

That got the least vote. Six percent of you thought that was a big news that we ruled out a discovery that had been claimed several years ago to much fanfare. And actually that reminds me to plug a future video on the I'm going to do another solo episode when I hit 90,000. Maybe, I don't know. We'll see when I do it. But that's what I call the academic media hype complex. I don't like the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us against. But in this case, it's the super cycle that occurs when scientists and the media kind of form a flywheel, which then creates this unstoppable juggernaut leading through to perhaps unretractable claims and makes it

extremely difficult, high pressure on scientists, raises tons of ethical issues that we are wholly unqualified to address in most cases. Let me speak for myself. And I want to use some of my, you know, kind of personal experience with these phenomena, including my bicep experience I wrote about in my book, losing the Nobel Prize. And I also want to include some other things that have come out, namely the nuclear fusion issue,

the wormhole claim, and the phosphine retraction. And what these do not only to the public's perception of science, but also to scientists themselves in kind of the sociology of science. But today we won't talk about it. So look for that video, the academic media hype complex. And that'll be a fun video to do. And I hope to present it in the not too distant future. But if you want to help the channel, please, yeah, do things like you guys are doing.

Leave thumbs up. Leave comments. But most of all, really encourage your friends and family. People ask how to help me. I love money. I love money. I love money. And money's great.

It's great to get money, big super chats. But really, I'm trying to expand a mission. And the money will help me do that because I have to pay producers and technicians and so forth to edit this. And it's really so gratifying that you guys tune in. People watch thousands. You know, I look at these huge channels that have way more video, way more subscribers by a factor of 10. And you guys are more loyal and you're watching these videos longer. And I'm always, as I said, I'm trying to up my game.

And so if you like what I'm doing, you can do a couple things. one first thing is really encourage people to subscribe to the channel, but also subscribe to the newsletter. I send out juicy little tidbits of what I'm thinking about. And that's something that YouTube can't really squelch. I've had a bunch of videos lately, including the climate police, putting a stamp of disapproval in some ways on my video with Charles Seif. So we talked about nuclear fusion and how the nuclear fusion, you know, may be hype as well. And that video, which is about solving climate, you know, catastrophes, all right? If we have a, you know, kind of unlimited energy source, we could scrub the atmosphere of every single carbon dioxide atom that we have.

We're just limited by energy. So that was a positive thing that the human ingenuity can present a solution to climate change. And yet, the gods of YouTube sort of suppress it. They put a warning label on it, linked to UN. I don't know why to the UN. I was hoping they'd link it to Charles Schwab or the world economic form. But they didn't. But nevertheless, we keep going.

I had a very wonderful conversation, as you know, with J. Abacharya, one of his most revealing and deep interviews with, you know, the only faculty member that really runs a podcast like this and that has reached out to him. That was slapped with a COVID-19 Wikipedia, you know, warning and, you know, be careful and demonetized. So, again, money is wonderful. I can't thank you guys enough. For that, that is, you know, such a complete blessing.

But it would be great to really grow the audience, as I say, a lot of things will happen. If we get bigger, we can certainly get even more kind of phenomenal deep dives and guess. And I know I also am not afraid to take on controversial topics. And some of those will require your patience and your support. is a very, very good possibility that Jordan Peterson is going to not only come on the podcast, but maybe do it live in person, either here in San Diego at some point or in Toronto. And I know some of you guys don't like him. I just, I know it.

It's definitely true. And I don't agree with everything he says as well. But the fact is he's a brilliant individual. He's a cultural phenomenon. He has great insights into other dimensions of my personality, including being a father, including being a man and being a scientist and trying to understand essence of nature and so forth, but also being interested in topics like religion and think, I'm not interested in the culture war. I'm not going to talk to him about trans pronouns and COVID-19.

No, I don't care about that. But I do want to talk to brilliant individuals, and that will be, you know, a very, very cherished opportunity if I get it. And it looks likely I will need your help because a lot of people subscribe. I talked to my friend Kurt Jem Ungle yesterday. And he's been a great friend. And I was on his eight-hour marathon on a New Year's Eve, Eve last week. And we chat all the time. And he may be lurking here and there.

And, you know, he kind of advised me, you know, be careful not to lose subscribers. Because it's much harder to, you know, keep a subscriber and, you know, get them back. than it is to gain a subscriber. And an alien girl, I agree, Kurt Rawls. He's kind of been an inspiration to me. But I took slight disagreement. I said, look, you know, if you just do what your audience wants, then you might not really be in this for the right reason.

And I'm not accusing him to that. I'm just saying you might be captured by their intentions. And that may not take the channel where you need to go. I mean, look, if I want to monetize this channel and, really just amp it up and get, you know, quit my professor job and do all this stuff. I mean, we could do it. Kurt does do YouTube 100% full time and he's excellent at it. And I respect him tremendously because he's doing the real thing.

I am blessed that I don't have to do only YouTube. I have my books. I have my podcast. I have my university professorship. And I get to interact with the most brilliant people on earth such that if YouTube decides tomorrow to cancel my channel, you know, life will go on. I'll have other opportunities. Most of all, being a scientist working on cutting edge research at the literal top of the planet in Chile at 17,200 feet, the Simon's Observatory, which is my lifelong dream.

So, on the other hand, I don't want to be captured, but I also want to have good conversations and I want to grow the channel. So anyway, if you can help out, and by the way, Kurt was on Jordan Peterson's channel, so it's even more than, you know, than maybe I'll. I'm doing. So, you know, if Jordan's good enough for Kurt, he's certainly good enough for me. Anyway, let's move on to the stories, shall we? And so I'm not going to talk too much about the items that I mentioned, except number four on my list that got 33% vote was the fact that NASA has commissioned a panel for studying unidentified aerial phenomena. And that is, I think, a very, very, very important story because it really represents the first time that we were able to get buy-in

at the federal level from, you know, the highest or most respected agency, which is NASA. I mean, that's just a fact that studies space. I mean, space force is coming on strong, but it's still, it's still, you know, kind of an in a nascent phase. And it has a different mandate than NASA. So a lot of what we'll talk about today have to do with NASA's discoveries of starting with the very first thing that happened, you know, in the early parts of 2022, which was the arrival of this object in real form. So one of the cool things about being a professor at the greatest university in the world is that I have the greatest students in the world and they make me all sorts of presence. So this is available. I should give this to T-Car at some point. If he comes in visits,

so maybe I'll give this to him. And in gratitude, this is real gold. That's solid gold-plated. Hexagonal mirror. So in the real J-D-VST is six meters across, this was 3D printed by two of my students and lovingly assembled. It's real mylar down there.

How cool is this? I mean, I got these awesome students, and they're going to go out into the world and be even better scientists than I am if all goes as planned. JWST got to be tops of stories, at least in astronomy. And some of the discoveries that it made were just absolutely breathtaking from a visual perspective. But we astronomers, since the time of this guy, Galileo, have been looking up at the heavens with telescopes and making hypotheses, modeling what is going on in the heavens above.

And by doing so, we are able to really instantiate for the first time the scientific method. How can we form a hypothesis, use observations, refine the hypotheses, discard inconsistent phenomena, and come to a closer approximation to truth. And that reminds me there's a great YouTube channel called Closer to Truth. I'm going to be on that channel, which is coming out. It'll be also on television. I did some amazing video footage with my good friends who run that channel, Robert Cune. They've got half a million, a million more people, and look for a co-lab with them coming soon, along with my friend Arvin Ash, who's agreed to do a co-lab with me about the physics of time.

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So I think you're in for a really phenomenal 2023, but in 2022, this object, JWST made it to L2, this very special point called a Grange Point, number two, that orbits in a not stationary position, but it does orbit in a stable orbit a million miles from Earth, four times of distance to the moon, and took these phenomenal images. I suppose if I was a better YouTuber, I could fold in some of the pictures. Let me, I'll try to put up something here as we're speaking here. So just beautiful images here, the Karena Nebula. Let's see if I can get that going on the screen. Here we go.

Bam. Covers up me. And that's okay. Beautiful. And then we had, of course, the pillars of creation. Let's do that one. Here we go. This one gets a special place in the stream.

Ba'am. Let's see if that comes up. Look at that. That's amazing. That's beautiful. Now, as beautiful as these are, that's incredibly important. And of course, things like the Hubble Deep Field were incredibly important last year and in years past. But what do we get scientifically that we didn't know before?

We got a lot this year from JDAST, including the initiation of a great controversy. No, I'm not talking about the fact that James Webb himself was really exonerated from charges of homophobia that came out from past guest, Hakema Lachayee. you can find that episode. And I reposted it also in audio form. And there was a New York Times article on the front page of the New York Times really clearing not only James Webb's name but Hakeems as well

because he had come under kind of a very serious and vicious and unjustified attack, in my opinion, that sought to destroy his reputation. And a lot of that has been undone, thankfully. And it was great to see that in the New York Times and sort of the paper of record to get the attention that Hakeem deserves him to really clear the name. And also Barbara Webb, who may be out there, James Webb's daughter, watching.

She subscribes to my Twitter feed, as you guys all should, Dr. Brian Keating, as well as the YouTube channel. So it was really great to kind of do a kind of rehabilitation. Not that he needed my help, James Webb. I mean, it was phenomenal contributions to humanity through not the least of which, the Apollo program in the very extremely early portion of the Hubble Space Telescope with the Spitzer. I wasn't really called that back then. Lyman Spitzer at Princeton.

But these are some of the great triumphs of 2022. And I'm told that that interview that I did with Hakeem, Archie Hakeem's presentation, played a not insignificant role in the publication of the story that did emerge in the New York times. And so that's gratifying that I can play a role and so forth. We also had news about exoplanets from JWST. Here's a image here. That's way too small. I'll blow it up where we actually look at data and we see the presence of things of complex molecules, carbon dioxide, and other things in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, not just seeing that they exist, which led to the Nobel Prize in 2019, but the fact that they have complex chemistry in their atmosphere. Some say if you see

things like carbon dioxide, that's a harbinger of life. So it's not necessarily proof that life exists. It may not even be evidence of the possibility of life. In other words, it might not only be not sufficient. There's so many knots here. Not theory is my hobby. But it also may not even be necessary for life, as we knew from the phosphine claim that phosphine is a biomarker that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide. So that being ruled out, does that, you know, enhance or constrict the possibilities of life? I don't know. It's certainly, you know, we didn't spot, you know, space Disneyland on WASP 39 Bravo, but it's an important proving, you know, stepping stone, perhaps, towards confirming the existence.

of life on other planets or maybe ruling it out. And it's fascinating to think about what Webb will do in the next year. Of course, there was a, there was controversy regarding the, the existence of Big Bang itself. Claimed by an individual by the name of Eric Lerner, who may be out there as well. and I did two videos about the existence or not of evidence for or against the web telescopes, images of galactic structures, and whether or not those galactic structures provide any evidence for or against the Big Bang's existence. And I did one solo, and I also did one along with my four.

friend and colleague, Garrett Lewis, professor in Australia. And that was really quite delightful to go into a deep dive and avoid so-called, you know, paradoxes where we enter into potentially ad hominem attacks that Lerner had accused us of. But in reality, I think it's important to note that there are flaws. There are problems with the Big Bang. There are problems with what's called Lambda CDM, the kind of concordance model that we call it, that the universe is dominated by matter of an unknown character called dark matter. We had plenty of videos about that this year. And also its energetic energy budget is dominated by something called dark energy, which we know even less about. And we can't even access and get good limits on experimentally

in the laboratory, the way that we're doing stuff even here at UC Sandy. with my colleague, Kaishuan-Ne, past guest, and Elina Apriol of the xenon. One-ton experiment, phenomenal. World-beating limits on the amount of particulate dark matter. So we entered into some discussions of mod, alternatives to dark matter in particle form. What if we can modify the laws of relativity, but even before we modify relativity, we can modify Newtonian dynamics? What would that say for the not only present?

or absence of the type of dark matter that most scientists do believe exist. But more than that, we would have some inkling as to where, you know, the universe could be headed in terms of its future evolution on galactic and sub-galactic skills. So we did some deep dives there and talked about galaxies that don't have dark matter. We talked about galaxies that are only made of dark matter. or at least seem to be dominated by dark matter. And I think it's really fascinating to know that that's the way good science works. It's not as, you know, my friend Eric Lerner, I shouldn't say my friend.

That's usually connotes a put-down. Let me say, Mr. Lerner, it's not a sign of unhealthy, biased, sensorious, scientific process because you can't get your paper published. In fact, it might be seen by somebody who is truly pursuing knowledge that it may be that it's much harder. I've had very few papers accepted in my life on the first try. I published 200-something papers. They've been cited 13,000 times, maybe. And not one of the 200 papers, well, one of them was, one of them was just accepted as is.

And that was extremely gratifying paper I wrote. 10 years ago last month about calibrating cosmic microrate background polarization experiments like the kind that we work on with the Simon's Observatory. So these are things that we want to have in place that will perhaps point us to new physics. And the fact that some will claim that the inability for observations say by, by, web to be incorporated with the current prevailing paradigm. That's not a crisis. You don't just say, oh, all physics is moot. I guess I picked the wrong profession. I should become a YouTube streamer full time. And obviously, I don't have the talent for that. But the point being, we can't look at the gaps of flaws in current observational connections to our prevailing hypothesis. And

throw it all out. A good scientist, there's an article by James Peebles, renowned scientist, the grandfather of modern cosmology involved in everything from the discovery of the cosmic microbe background in 1965. He missed out and was scooped famously to our understanding, our first understanding of how dark matter really is inescapable given the distribution of what are called CMB antisotropies in the 1980s. I had a nice conversation with Professor Dan Green about that today in person, in a studio, about 10 feet over that way. And look for that.

Dan's, you know, another thing I want to do this year is not have like, oh, I have to get on every Nobel Prize winner in the world, but just the most brilliant people, some of which happened to live here in San Diego, and I happen to, you know, have the same person signing the fronts of each of our paychecks. You know, these are phenomenal professors that I'm blessed to have. And that's actually how the podcast got started. If you don't know, I mean, I am affiliated with what's called the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, which has been around for about 11 years. And in 2020, when the pandemic hit, I realized that all these brilliant speakers like Freeman Dyson and others would not be able to come through San Diego anymore. And so I want to start to do remote interviews with them and record those remote interviews. Before that, I had had Freeman on the podcast. In fact, he was my first guest on the podcast. in 2017, it was audio only, and I realized, well, we're not going to be able to get them back.

And sadly, he passed away shortly after the pandemic kicked off. But nevertheless, we had all these brilliant people coming through for the Arthur C. Clark Center. And I was kind of in this position. I wanted to give back not only to the 190 people that would come to a lecture by these great intellects and then I'd get to moderate, but to everybody out there in the world. and we've been able to do that through this YouTube channel. So I'm very grateful for that. So let's get back to some of the greatest hits of the past, of the past year.

So certainly the astronomy was really dominated by web. The fact that it not only worked almost flawlessly was hit by a meteor, but besides that it kept, kept spinning and was able to take images of everything from, from, these distant galaxies, the pillar of creation, to things in our own solar system like this object here. Neptune, oh, no, that's Jupiter. But then next to it is a moon of Jupiter. And it's pretty phenomenal. They also saw incredible images from Neptune and its moon, Titan, just phenomenal. And imaging it is really just spectacular. We also had a return to the moon, which, you know, is kind of interesting. We haven't been to the moon in 50 years. And I like to point out, it's longer that we haven't gone to the moon than the time period between the discovery and the, you know, kind of first explorers to reach the South Pole in 1911, 1912, took 45 years for people to get back to the South Pole.

South Pole. It's taken longer to get back to the moon. And the moon has just as many possibilities, not only for scientific exploration as I use it for Bicep. Ice Cube uses it for ice cube. You can see over my shoulder on this side. There's a picture of bicep at the South Pole. This one is of the polar bear telescope in Chile, where I just was last month. So it's really phenomenal. I hope we will get back there. I'm looking forward to Jessica Mayer, who is past guest, two-time guest on the podcast. I interviewed her once while she was on the space station. Talk about the, see if Neil Tyson can do that. I mean, come on, Neil. Got to up your game, my friend. Had her on while she was on the space station, and then had her on again. And she may be the first,

she may be the next person on the moon, but if she is, she'd be the first woman to ever go to the moon. And I would just love that because she's an incredible human being. She spoke in our commencement this past year. And I just had a wonderful time hanging out with her. Some of you mentioned this experiment here. Leave a comment if you know what that is. This is a picture of an asteroid,

which we slammed into unceremoniously. I wrote about that in my most recent Monday Magic email message list where I'd share a meme. No, I don't share a meme. I share a memory, an appearance, something that's genius, something that is a beautiful image.

and then a conversation, aka a podcast. So subscribe to the mailing list. And you'll get those. About every two weeks. I don't like to spam. It takes a lot of time. I like to put a lot of effort into it. So DART slammed into this double asteroid redirection test.

And it slammed into a moon of an asteroid. It's insane. Dymorphus. The moon of asteroid 85-803 didmius. in a test of planetary defense. That's incredibly cool because, you know, if you watch Deep Impact with Bruce Willis, they freaking nuke that thing.

And that's not the best idea. Or don't look up, the great kind of cautionary tale movie that came out last year, which I liked. It's depressing, but it's kind of funny as well. We also had on Chef Dolelson. And he,

Dolman, rather. And he explained this image here. What is this image of everybody out there? It is the monster black hole at the center of our galaxy. Here, it's over my monster in this mouth. And that's our galaxy's black holes. It's a follow-up to their smash hit from two or three years ago, where the image M87, perhaps the most energetic of all objects.

This one's really phenomenal because we can start to do multi-messinger astronomy where we can compare the image made by this vast planetary-sized event horizon telescope. which is a worldwide array of millimeter and microwave and radio wave astronomical telescopes from Chile to the South Pole in Europe and Africa. And we can take these images and compare with the results of my colleague up north at UCLA, Dr. Andrea Ghez and past guest, Brian Hart Gensel. I'm trying to get Andrea on all the time. So far, no good.

But I'll hope to have her on. So now we can compare optical and infrared imaging, direct imaging, with the event horizon, which you can't see using optical or infrared imaging that Andrea and Reinhardt do in their groups. You combine that and you can start to test deep aspects of general relativity and extreme gravity. We can never do that before. And you can't do that with M87. So this was more important. It was actually a bigger challenge because our Milky Way's black hole is thousands of times less massive than M87. But it's, you know, kind of the most important thing as any real estate agent will tell you is location, location, location. So we want to make sure that we have an

actual understanding of this enormous monster behemoth in our own celestial neighborhood. That was another incredible discovery. We had several other kind of runners up. As I said, the phosphine discovery was ruled out by this instrument here which you know I'm a pilot I like to fly a little Cessna's around my dream was to fly on this as an astronomer pilot and captain the 747 known as Sophia unfortunately it's shut down it's probably out in the bone yard it has a I think an 80 inch telescope on it and I'll never get to do it so I snoozed and I lose. So I won't be able to participate in this incredible stratospheric observatory for infrared astronomy. But they did manage to make this disconfirmation of this previously incredibly hyped up,

including by people like me, discovery of phosphine, allegedly on the planet Venus's atmosphere. So a swan song, final flight for the Sophia instrument. We had a couple other pieces of news. that were kind of null results. The dark matter has yet to be discovered by the liquid double gas experiments. We also had inkling that we're not going to rebuild. The Iresibo telescope, sadly. And we've had shows about many and many of these things here. So let's turn to physics now.

So that was just pure astronomy. There are a couple of great physics announcements. So there was, of course, the announcement of nuclear fusion being achieved on Earth in a controlled fashion. We've achieved many, many hundreds of times have we had nuclear fusion take place on Earth. Unfortunately, those are an atomic blasts. And those require nuclear fission devices to initiate, to trigger. But this one had a trigger using late 192 high-powered lasers that blasted into a Deuterium-tridium diamond. sized pellet, igniting it, and causing it to give off two megajoules of energy, I think it was,

with only less than one megajoule of energy input in the sense of the blast that triggers it from these lasers. And this takes place over a trillionth of a second or so. Unfortunately, it's completely and utterly impossible to use this technology to actually, or they use this fundamental physics breakthrough to actually accomplish a working electronic power generation system. But nevertheless, it was an incredible breakthrough in many ways. And I think the, you know, kind of hope springs eternal. And I think this will take a lot of our attention towards maybe commercializing this.

And just as commercial pressures have been great for NASA in terms of really getting us to the moon again, really probably wouldn't have happened without Elon Musk and SpaceX kind of really pushing them to up their game in the private space sector. And I'm hoping this will happen kind of in reverse where government will then provide impetus for private companies to then make leaps and bounds in their. in their fusion game. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton, for the stay. So other things that took place that really fascinated me this past year had to do with fundamental particle physics, including the announcement of the so-called discovery of a pentecharch. So pentaquark is not five quarks necessarily. It's sort of a description that this type of particle could include a particle with five quarks instead of the typical three or two, and even what they called a tetrach quark, which was a combination of two, two quark atoms,

and then synthesized into, or like, pions, which are quark, anti-quark pairs. And this, you know, combined was really, it was sort of expected that you could have behavior of hadrons in this, in this format, and it became, kind of interesting to me, if you look at it, it kind of looks like a chemical bond. Like, it looks like they're forming, you know, within this five quark system, which is made up of the letters here, S, the strange, C is charm, up is up quark, and then down, D is down, that they're, it's almost like a molecule. And then, but there's no electrons here. So it's, it's very different. It's, it's sort of molecular appearing, but it's, these aren't actually molecules. These are

hadrons and combining together with things like pyons in this very interesting and unexpected way. I thought that was a really cool discovery that colleagues at LHC had made. And we also had, of course, the announcement every October is Christmas for nerds. And we had the announcement of the Nobel Prize in physics. And that went to people that were entirely expected to win for a long time, including the man on the right shown here, Antin Zylaneir, who is a second cousin. I don't know.

He and I are related in some way, the guy with the glasses here, in that he worked very closely with my good friend and late colleague, Andrew Friedman. passed away two years ago, sadly. And Andrew had worked on this confirmation of the local realistic description of quantum mechanics using photons as sort of triggers from distant quasars. And so, in other words, they were able to understand the properties of so-called spooky action at a distance. And that was maintained and kind of ratification of the, more or less, how the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics that Einstein did not like, and verifying

that it actually did take place. And it takes place not only on Earth in short separations, but takes place over the vast volume of our entire universe. And so Andy had a great role in that, and some of the work was tangentially cited by the Nobel Committee. I just wish Andy could have been alive to witness it. So those are some of the top 10 hits. There was discoveries from the LHCB experiment, which had been announced to great fanfare last year, two years ago, a discovery of this is called Bottom or Beauty Quarks.

They had observed these rare phenomena. And then there was basically a claim that, no, we don't have new physics discovery. and that there is, you know, kind of less room in some sense for modifications to the standard model of quantum mechanics. And that was, you know, that was sort of upsetting in some ways to many people. Again, part of the academic, you know, hype cycle or whatever that we'll talk about when I released this video that I'm tentatively thinking of calling academic media hype complex. So that was, you know, kind of a disappointment. As I said, there have been, you know, many, many discoveries, but oftentimes there are discoveries that don't pan out. And there may have been other phenomena like that where you witness these huge announcements, but then the breakthroughs don't hold up. And that's a tribute and a testimony to the self-correcting nature of science. So I'll be talking about that when I release this video, the academic media hype. cycle. I'll even talk about my experiences with it tangentially in the phosphine announcement

from three years ago now and in the disconfirmation of that, but also in the Bicep 2 affair that led to the great revelation that we don't yet have information that proves or excludes inflationary cosmological primordial perturbation formation in the early universe. So it was an exciting year, a year to beat. Hopefully we'll have a great guest coming up. Again, my good friend Eric Weinstein has committed to coming down and doing an episode in-person at some point. I'll look for that. And look forward to in-person interviews galore, including one that I just recorded this morning with Professor Dan Green of UC San Diego.

I follow him at NU underscore phases on Twitter, and he had an epic tweet storm in December tweeting out the last 40 years of theoretical and experimental physics, discoveries that did not win Nobel Prizes, but perhaps will in the future. So look for that in-person live interview with Daniel in just a few weeks. Professor or Dr. Oliver Phil Cox, not a professor yet, but he surely will be. and his announcement of a very, very tantalizing hint of parity violation, normally associated with activities of particle accelerators on Earth, discovered by Madam Wu, C.S. Wu.

I have a video about that, the Nobel Prize that wasn't, something like that. But we've never really observed it in cosmological scenarios, which, in Oliver's words, as you'll hear, could imply that gravity doesn't obey parity symmetry. So parity symmetry is that if you reflect something in a mirror, it really is independently behaving than if you observe it directly. So if you look at the solar system in a mirror and then you look at it upside down, you can actually not tell which direction you're looking at it. Or if you look at some simulation of cosmic structure or the actual cosmic structures themselves and I tell you, oh, you looked at it in a mirror, you just didn't know it. There's no way you can tell.

But when you have more than a more statistical power, as Oliver and his team do, you can actually reveal the presence of very, very subtle parity-violating effects, which would have a stunning implication. I agree with Mark Kamikowski, that if this is confirmed, it will be Nobel-worthy. So look forward to those interviews, and we have more Phil Plate. The Bad Astronomer is coming on for his new book. I got it in the other room over there. Dr. Susie Sheehe wrote a book, The Matter of Everything is coming on in a couple weeks.

And that's a phenomenal book. And we'll be doing, as I say, a lot more in-person, high-quality, 4K videos. And it will be a year to beat. And hopefully we'll crack that magical, mysterious, mystifying, 100,000 follower threshold. And then I'll retire. No, I'm not going to retire. I'm going to keep doing it, keep providing you free content, greatest and best intellects, some videos from yours truly as well.

So do leave a comment, thumbs up. I hate asking you, people tell me to stop doing it. But the fact is, it's the rules of the algorithm, especially when you have people that are causing you to get suppressed, which is happening, the more controversial guests that I have, like Dr. J. Batacharya, and even Dr. Charles Sait. for Mr. Charles Seif. He's not a doctor, but he's a professor at NYU. And that gets slapped and demonetized and so forth.

So do me a favor and spread the channel. And it's not for the mailing list. Do it now. Oh, I should say, if you have a dot edu email address and you live in the U.S., I will guarantee send you one of these meteorites, one of these bad boys. Bad girls. I don't know. Here it is.

So this is a highly magnetized fragment of our solar system and its formation 4.3 billion years ago, sending you some information about observing those meteorites and meteorites. And you can get that chance at brian king.com slash list. But like I say, if you have a dot edu email list, those are my target audience, undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, professors. We have thousands of people, 10,000 people. And I just love it.

So please do sign up for that. A little dose spread the channel. Share the love. Thank you guys so much for wonderful 2020. 80,000 subscribers up from zero to three years ago now. And it's just incredibly mind-blowing that you guys are along for this ride into the brain, into the cosmos, and beyond. With yours truly, Brian Keating, Chancellor is the Singer's Professor of Physics,

Associate Director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Signing off, wishing you all a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much for joining me on this wonderful ride into the cosmos. For you all, everybody, thank you all so much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.