Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Think Like Galileo: My Brown University Commencement Address (2022)

Episode Date: October 12, 2024

In 2022, I had the honor of delivering the commencement address at Brown University. I used this incredible opportunity to talk about a personal hero of mine: Galileo Galilei. Galileo was a scientist like no other. He boldly challenged the status quo through his discoveries and relentlessly pursued the truth, even when persecuted for doing so. His journey offers timeless lessons for scientists today, especially for graduate students who will shape the future of science. My goal with this lecture was to inspire the next generation of thinkers, and I hope it does the same for you. Tune in to learn more about how Galileo set the gold standard for scientists. Key Takeaways:  00:00:00 Intro  00:02:06 My early days at Brown University  00:08:08 Galileo’s legacy  00:24:18 Losing the Nobel Prize  00:40:48 Interstellar dust and mistakes  00:46:48 My motto  00:48:29 Audience questions 01:03:39 Outro Additional resources:  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://x.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 ✨ Member's only playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMOmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Today's topic is think like Galileo Galilee, how to remain relevant for half a millennium. Please join me in welcoming, Dr. Keith. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dean Campbell. Thank you, Associate Dean Lewis, and my good friends, Dr. Gang Zhao, my former professor,

Dr. Jim Gates, who inspires and mentors me in many different ways, gives me life advice from the avuncular perspective that only he can provide. And thank you to Professor Stefan Alexander, my oldest friend, my best man at my wedding, and you're going to hear a lot about Stefan today. We're going to talk a little bit about how the early connections that I made here have endured and how it led me to the precipice of winning the Nobel Prize, but losing it, ultimately, spoiler alert, it's called losing the Nobel Prize. And unfortunately, because I'm winning the Horace Man Medal, now I cannot write the book

Losing the Horace Man Medal. So that's unfortunate. But it's all worth it. And so glad to see so many people here. Today's talk will only feature 75 equations and it will only require relativistic time dilation to solve. So I'm going to go back in time today. And I'm going to take us back to when I came here.

And today we're going to focus on the power of mottoes. Galileo Galilei is. my mentor that speaks to me in a conversation I like to think we're having across the millennia. And with Galileo's support and his advice, I've been able to overcome some strong obstacles. And I think the relevancy of an individual who can last for half a millennia and probably for many millennia to come should inspire everybody, even if you're not a scientist. And I hope that this lesson will be communicated through some of the lessons that I learned here at Brown starting in 1993.

So I came here in 1993. I got my PhD after being away, and you'll find out that I actually never wore the cap and gown that summer over there. And it's a good thing I didn't wear it maybe back then because I don't think I could fit into it. You know, it's pretty hard to not fit into a graduation gown, but given as much as our bodies change over the decades,

I probably wouldn't fit into it. So I never did go to my graduation ceremony from here. So I am looking forward to it, and it's kind of one of my regrets. And I want to talk about the power of regret, the positive power of regret. But it all started here. This is 1993. First day of class, I met a young man. And he was from New York like I was, except he was from the real New York, real city New York,

Bronx, New York. He had a Bronx accent. I traded it in my Long Island accent for, I don't know what I had at that point, but maybe a Cleveland accent coming from Case Western. And we met in the dungeon, the dungeon, which still exists. Barrison Holly, room 122. Any physics students here, remember that besides me and Stefan and Professor Zhao? And there I also met my future boss, Peter Timby, who's now a professor at the University

of Wisconsin, Madison, and Peter's been a lifelong friend of mine as well. The connections, I've made more connections here, you know, people say in high school, it's the best time of your life, then college's the best time of your life. for me, I found here was the best time I life. The connections I made here endure to this day. I can scarcely say that about other connections that go back even farther. But I've known Stefan, you know, twice I joke with my wife. She should be jealous because I've spent more time with Stefan over the years.

I once tried to kill him. You'll find out about that in just a second. Also here at Brown. And really, I became a scientist here. I became an intellectual. I began to hopefully follow in the great footsteps of some of the faculty that taught me. and also to really be inspired by the tradition of scholarship that this mentor, Galileo, had laid down for us

as a sort of a challenge through the generations. And I want to explain to you that his flaws make him even more endearing to me and the failures that he had. And he had many lacunae and many setbacks in his life, as we'll talk about. But he had a set of principles that he live by. And I want to maybe see if they resonate with you today.

So friends that you make 30 years ago, almost to the year, 29 years ago, can endure. And that's kind of the first lesson. You make a network in life. And I've lately become more, I don't know if this is true for younger people. In my early life, when I would see something that's really sad, it would make me emotional. But now I get more emotional at like happy things and seeing things. And kind of that's what inspires me. But to think this guy that I met, I would be there when he got and he would give me the first ever printed copy.

He only had two of these. He gave me the first ever printed copy of his first book, which is called the Jazz of Physics. Everybody should get a copy. And then he would later endorse my first book and continue to be a mentor as he has risen through the ranks and a colleague. It's wonderful to have colleagues that are mentors too.

That was one of Galileo's great strengths. He was competitive, ultra-competitive, and you'll see some of the things that he would do to trumpet and kind of the puffery that he engaged in. Later, Stefan would speak at the TEDx Symposium in San Diego, and I was honored to be there. And then earlier before that, as I said, I almost tried to kill him in this very plane. This is November 5208, Quebec, stationed at the mighty Lincoln North Central State Airport. Has anyone ever been to Lincoln besides us this morning?

Okay. It's a pretty rare place. There is a huge airport there that can land like bombers and stuff. I took stuff on in a ricketed ink plane, flume over Providence, asked him to look over the calculations of my thesis. And if he didn't, the parachute was non-functional. But we've remained ideal friends. Even despite things you do, you almost kill somebody. And they still love you and remain at your side through the ups and downs.

And he's really been with me forever. I can not really repay him. So who are you guys? You heard a little bit about me from that speech that the dean read, written by my mother. and hopefully not to be rebutted by my mother-in-law. But the Brown graduation, as I said, I never walked. I never walked. The only graduation I ever attended was my college graduation,

high school graduation. The only time I wore one of these ridiculous pieces of regalia that's completely non-functional. Thank you, Susan, for arranging to get me an outfit for tomorrow. One of my sons is here, and he asks me if I can keep it. I'm like, what am I going to use it for? I guess I could become a judge or something in the Supreme Court. And I want to harken to what I first saw back in 1993.

I got a crisp linen envelope, the most beautiful envelope I'd ever seen, embossed with this beautiful color red, not crimson, but red. And underneath it were written these Latin words, which in 1992, 1993, Google didn't exist, okay? That would take several years more. And it said, endaio sparamus. How many of you know what endo speramus means? it means in God we hope. And I started thinking, this is an amazing place. That they look up to a heavenly being, even if you don't believe.

That's not important to me. But they look to the heavens for inspiration. Another thing that Galileo often did, we'll explore that. But also the power of hope. There's Hope Hill, Mount Hope, Hope Street, and in God we hope. What is hope? Hope is an expectation. Hope is sort of a plan of where you might get to and where you might go.

And when I saw that, I felt like Brown saw that I saw something that was hopeful about me and that maybe I could go on to be following the footsteps of some of the great faculty and students that have come from here. So I want to ask you, do you have a creed? Do you have a motto? Galileo had a family crest. It was a ladder, a ladder with its base on the ground, with its top kind of tapering off towards the heavens. And he didn't have one motto.

he had three. We're going to go over his three mottoes of what would later become famous to me and resonate with me throughout the millennia, as I said. It was born in the 1560s. Amazing that's almost 500 years since he was born. Died in 1642 at Archequerie, Italy, where I've spent many a time, even with Stefan as well. He had three children, no spouse, which made it very difficult

for those children at that time to go through life without any bonded maternal and parental unit. So they were kind of ostracized. His two younger daughters, especially the famous Maria Chalas, she was a nun in a convent, and they were considered illegitimate. And Galileo had to support him, his son, and his daughters, as well as many, many jilted ex-lovers. Speaking of fatherhood, he didn't invent the telescope, but he did perfect it.

He was the first person to use an instrument to compete and conduct the scientific method. And he, for that reason, is called the father of modern science by none other than the famous Albert Einstein. And we'll get into another one beautiful collection and connection between Einstein and Galileo in just a bit. His first law is a very famous one. He said it in the induction that he had

into the equivalent of the Nobel Prize ceremonies back in the 15 and 1600s. That was called the Academy of the Links. or the Linzayan society. And he was very proud of that. That was kind of like the Horace Man Medal back then. And he wore that title with great pride. And he made use, the lynx has these huge eyes,

this animal with enormous eyes, to observe. And then to observe the things that you can measure and make measurable what is not already so. He used the telescope as sort of a lever. And with this lever, he displaced figuratively the earth from the position of centrality. in the universe that it had enjoyed for millennia. So to do that required an incredible forceful intellect. He also came up with the theory of relativity, and that's one of the connections

with Einstein. It's called Galais and relativity, and it shows that your motion, whether physically on earth or throughout your career, is determined by no absolute forces. It's determined and relative to the perspective of an observer. There is no one omniscient, omnipotent observer from the perspective of physics, at least. Now, some of you here are going to become academics. Some of you might follow in the footsteps of Jim Gates, Stefan Alexander, Gang Zhao, Andrew Campbell. You may become a faculty member. And so to do that, you've heard the aphorism, publish or perish. Well, Galileo published a lot. And he was not only a great and wonderful orator, speaker, writer, he was also an artist. And that made him unique. He synthesized both sides of his brain into one. I can never remember which side

controls your artistic side. I don't know. That probably makes me one of the... Anyway, the middle diagram there shows not what the moon actually looks like, nor what the moon looked like even to Galileo. Remember, he was the first human being in the history of our planet to glimpse another world through a telescope, revealing details that would transform our understanding of our place in the universe. And yet, he was brilliant in that he could, a he could visualize for you, the viewer, the visceral feeling of what it felt like for him. There is no crater that looks like this one over there. There is no crater.

But when he looks through the telescope, that's how it appeared to him. He demonstrated through the observations of other moons. He quintupled the number of moons that we had. Went from one moon to five moons in our solar system. He recognized that when he looked at the planet Jupiter, which he depicts here, This isn't one of his most artistic creative. Even I could reproduce this kind of thing. The Circle shows the planet Jupiter on one night.

This is in 1610. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa.com

slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply. The next night, there are two stars. And I would have stopped there. I would have said, okay, the planet's moving. They knew the planets moved. In fact, the word planet in Greek means mover or wanderer. But then he came back the next night and the next night,

and he does this for days and months, and it becomes kind of tedious, looking at his sketches in the Cedarius Nunzius, which is written in Latin. That's important. Remember that fact. Latin for the starry messenger. He was communicating things from the heavens.

And so he depicted it. What he realized through the power of his brain and through the visual depiction, This is the epitome of a renaissance individual. Arts and science blended together. He realized he was looking at a miniature solar system edge on. It was the only way to explain the periodic behavior that he eventually would propose as the first precise clock in history.

We take for granted the measurement of time. There's a clock back there telling me I need to finish in the next 95 minutes, which I promise I will. And yet he was able to depict these things with such regularity that he realized for the first time in history, it could be used as a precise timekeeping device, anywhere on earth, almost any time of the year, and in so doing, set the standard for timekeeping,

which yet fascinated him as a young man, probably listening to a sermon by a priest or something, that he got so bored in church that he apparently was watching the pendulous oscillations of a chandelier overhead. And then he realized he could time the, this is at age six, that he could time the oscillations period using his pulse,

unless he fell asleep, and then he would wake up and start timing again. He realized that the period was independent of the amplitude. One of the first laws of precision motion, 100 years before Newton would codify those laws. Amazing individual. So he published a lot. He published one book in 1600 called The Compass, which is really about a slide rule.

Can you imagine a book, which is worth several million dollars today, about a slide rule? and back then it was all the rage. This is just a sampling of his books. He published, and then the question is, of course, did he perish? We all know something happened to Galileo. What happened? After he invoked and overthrew the Ptolemaic, the Aristotelian, if you will,

the biblical view that the earth was the center of the entire universe, the so-called geocentric cosmos, he overthrew it and said the sun is the center of the universe. And that was done with the earth. aid of his mind and the spyglass, or what he called the perspiculum, the perspective tube. Because looking through a telescope is a time machine. It shows you the way things looked in the past. And I'm looking back naturally. It's only natural that you look back when you give a speech like this to where you were and see if your life even makes sense. And as Sir in Kierkegaard said, life must be lived forward, but you can only understand it looking backwards. And the telescope

is this powerful tool that does that. It literally moved, in the human mind at least, where the earth was centered. So did he publish? Well, the Pope generously allowed him to study Copernicanism. He published the Sidurius Nuncius, the Latin for Starry Messenger. He published that in 1610, March 13, 1610. And he published that book. That book was a scholarly work.

It wasn't considered a popularization, like the jazz of physics, fear of a black universe, losing the Nobel Prize, and other books. It was considered a work of pure scholastic interest that people didn't speak Latin on a daily basis. The dialogo, on the other hand, he was forbidden to write in Italian, which was the common parlance of the day. The dialogo means the dialogue, the conversation. It's actually a trialogue between three characters, and I've had the honor, along with my good friend, Professor Jim Gates, to narrate the first time in human history, a book by Galileo turned into an audiobook, just this year. No one had ever done it before.

And I thought, well, you know, I only like to listen to things. I listen to my own podcast. I only listen to audiobooks now. But it didn't exist when I wanted to research my hero, Galileo. So I said, let's see if we can do it. With the help of Carlo Rovelli, a renowned science popularizer, Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize winner up the street at this technical college called MIT. He narrated the introduction by Albert Einstein, and Professor Gates narrated the translator,

Stilman Drake. And for me, I narrated the part of an intelligent layperson. His name is Sagredo. It just means like some normal person. Then there's two other characters. There's Salviati, which means the savior or salvation in Italian. And Salviati is espousing the views of the Jews. genius Galileo. And then there's a character that espouses the views of the Pope and the Catholic

Church. And Galileo gave him the unfortunate name Simplicio, which means the simpleton. Not so smart, but it shows you great men, great minds, great women can have great flaws, great blind spots, even when they use their telescopes. So he wrote this book, and you see in the top, he's putting his version of the Horace Mann or Nobel Prize. It says he's a member of the Linzayan Society. on the cover of the book. He was very proud of it. And we should take pride in our accomplishments and the things that we do. We look back. And I am so grateful to have good friends like this at Brown and around the world. So Galileo had another motto when he was first confronted by the Pope that he had perhaps violated an injunction against teaching. Remember, he was allowed to

research it, but he couldn't teach it. Nowadays as academics, we cannot fathom that. What do you mean? You're not going to let me talk about my research? In fact, I joke with my guests, in my podcast that scientists and other people, we have a moral obligation to share what we do with the public. Not just, you know, it's good if you can do it. No, no, no. You have to do it because you in the public pay my salary. I'm at a public institution.

I'm a product of public schools as Horace Mann commenced for this great country. And our country is primarily great because of our wonderful public school system. And of course it can be better and it will be better. But I'm a product of it. I teach in a public university. And so there's a message of Galileo and our, of Horace Man resonates with me. But Galileo getting back to his story kind of in the middle of the three acts, his second motto, he said to the Pope, I don't think you're reading this right.

The Bible and science are two different things. The Bible shows us the way to the heavens, and science shows us how the heavens go. In other words, they're what Stephen Jay Gould used to call non-overlapping magisteria. They don't really have that much in common. And it's true. I once looked up, how many verses are there in the Old Testament, which you'd call it Torah in Hebrew? How many verses about the Big Bang are there really? There's about 35 verses about creation. And then there's 35,000 more verses.

You're talking about 0.1% of this entire book. So Galileo is right. The Bible isn't a science book. Any more than a jazz of physics or a brief history of time is a book about ethics, morals, and how to live your life. So I think it is important to take heed to what Galileo said. And then he kind of sticks it to the Pope and he says, I do not believe that the same God, Deo,

who endowed us with sense and reason intended us to forego their use. So he's really saying, no, the pathway, if I can interpret the great permission and indulgence from the dead, this brave-looking man right here, keep that image in mind. If I can indulge, he's really saying, if you want to access the mind of God or the highest power, call it Mother Nature, then science is perhaps your best vector to do that. The best vehicle to understand the sublime is to use science, in my humble opinion. And I should say that Galileo made many blunders, not just political blunders.

He also had what we call now confirmation bias, which is the tendency that scientists and normal people have to accept evidence only when it conforms to their hypothesis. And to reject or file away evidence that might be contradictory, disconformational. And we have to grapple with that every day as a scientist. And I often said, the only thing I didn't learn here, and it doesn't mean that I didn't learn to be an ethical person from great teachers like the late-grade Jerry Gerellnick

and people that became like uncles or father figures. I learned that you should be ethical. But we don't teach ethics the way medical students do. We don't teach them in the way law students do. And I think scientists can be held to these high standards of ethical imperatives. So that's just my little hobby horse, along with the moral obligation to scientists to give back to the public who pay their salary, the learning and the education that we are getting on their generous funding roles. So Galileo thought the tides on the earth were caused purely by the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the earth around the sun.

sort of a sloshing, like in this bottle of water. As you spin around, it kind of sloshes back and forth. In reality, it has nothing to do with that. But he put that in the dialogue because he wanted to prove this idea that the earth is in motion around the sun and not the other way around. So in doing so, he actually made the biggest blunder of his life because it has nothing to do with that diurnal and annual motion whatsoever. It's caused by the moon.

The very beautiful object he sketched, through the perspective tube on those nights in early 1610. And so now you see a less kind of proud, brave-looking Galileo. He's in front of the Holy Office, which is a euphemism, as I like to say, in the same way that the Internal Revenue Service is a euphemism for like the money-donation service or what have you. So here he's looking kind of a little bit, he's cowering. There's a guy with a big stick there.

And there's the Pope, Pope Urban, who had been his student and had been his student and wanted to learn about science, but Galileo thought his brilliance could evade the injunction against teaching. And nowadays, we should take advantage. We don't have such injunctions. We're free to do anything in this country and from this great university launched to do anything. And we should, and we should share. And we should go where the science takes us and beware all the time of these biases that we have. Now, there's a popular myth that he was tortured. He was thrown in prison. He actually got to live less than a kilometer from his beloved daughter, Maria Chaleste, at the convent where she was in our Chetri. Stefan's been here. This is a lovely place. I mean, I think Bernie

Madoff would have been really keen to be spending a time in this kind of a prison, quote unquote. You can see the Duomo, not far away. There's this beautiful quadrangle. He could go see his daughter. His daughter would come see him. And he had grape vines and olive trees, and he wrote some beautiful poetry. And he wrote another book here, under house arrest. So can you imagine such a thing happening if he was truly tortured and imprisoned? He wrote his final book with the help of Jim and with God. Perhaps we can translate again, the Discourse, the dialogue on two new sciences, where he really lays out the scientific method for the first time in human history.

He couldn't publish that in Italy. So it was smuggled out, published by Elsevier, the same press that we all know and love today, in the Netherlands in Leiden in 1638. So six years after the dialogue. And then he died four years later. 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.

But getting back to Brown in those famous times when I almost killed Stefan. So Brown used to own an airplane. And when you hear that Ivy League school owns an airplane, you know, then the dean's ears get really excited. Dean Lewis, Dean Campbell. Maybe we can get a Gulfstream for Brown. Let's chip it. No, no, this was Brown's University's plane. So even the Ivy League has to

have modest means. This is a two-seat plane. Tail number November, 5208, Quebec. I got my pilot's license in my second year of graduate school. And on the very first day after I got my license,

I went out, took Stefan, as I said, almost killed him. But he came back safe and sound. And this is where I learned some lessons about perseverance. It's cliche to talk about grit, resilience, perseverance, and kind of a commencement forum like this. But it's true.

I learned especially about the power of wind. And the power of wind should not be over or underestimated. And what I learned from my instructor there with Stefan and I fly off into the sunset, has to do with a little math lesson. I said there's 75 equations. There's only two equations in this whole talk. Hope you'll indulge me. First one goes like this.

California, where I am, between San Diego and San Francisco, where we're going to go next, is about 500 miles. If you fly there from San Diego to Stanford, where we're going to go next, as I say, it's about an one-hour flight if you go on a commercial Southwest jet. The jet goes 500 miles an hour. And let's say you have a tailwind, pushing you along, smooth flights, tailwinds all the way. So you're going 600 miles an hour, it will take less than a hour. than an hour if it's 500 miles away. Now, you come home that night going back to San Diego,

what happens to you? Well, now you're battling a headwind, pushing you at 100 miles an hour, reducing your speed. So I want to ask you, show of hands, is the only equations you have to solve. I will solve for you. So let's say you come back in a tail on. How long does the round trip take? Does it take more than an hour? Raise your hand if you think it takes more than two hours round trip? Okay. Raise your hand if you think it takes less than a round trip. Okay? Raise your hand if you think it takes less in two hours round trip. Remember, you have a tailwind going there, headwind coming back, and now raise your hand if you didn't raise your hand. Raise your hand if you're terrified of raising your hand in public. Okay, so let's do the math. How long does the thousand mile long

round trip take in a plane that can go 500 miles an hour when there's no wind? It takes longer. You can never benefit, and you can just see this for yourself. What if the tailwind was 500 miles an hour? You get there in a half an hour. How long would it take to get back? infinite all right very good good student in the front it would net you'd never get there do you spend more time fighting against headwinds than you do breezing along in a tailwinds i learned that from my instructor gregg van denacker when i was here in 1995 uh it's just amazing so i actually as i said i got my master's degree didn't walk in that commencement uh commencement ceremony didn't walk in my PhD ceremony in 2000. So I'm really delighted to be walking tomorrow, whatever I'm going to do

tomorrow, wearing a silly uniform. I think we all should do that as much as we can. And I went off to Stanford University. Stefan can vouch for me. This is my dream place to be. Stanford, beautiful campus, lovely students that go there. And I wanted to be a part of the Stanford community. And it was home to many Nobel Prize winners. And I was going to work for a young assistant professor by the name of Sarah, Sarah Church. And I was always kind of living in that moment. When am I going to get my PhD? When am I going to get my PhD?

And how many of us PhD students, former ones, can kind of vouch for that. The campus is really, you know, there's a reason they call it the brown of the West Coast, right? I mean, it's one of the most beautiful campuses in the entire country. It looks like this. It has multiple logos, multiple mottos,

but we're going to focus on this motto here. So we just talked about the power of headwinds. This one says, De Loft de Freche-Vrette. Can I ask, where is, any Stanford graduates here? I know there's one here. Any other ones?

Do you know what the motto means, sir? The wind of freedom blows. So it's not Latin. It's not in English. It's in German, which will be important later on. It's almost as old as Brown, not quite. Try harder next time, Brown.

Stanford, I mean. So it means, the winds of freedom blow, and guess what happened? I blew over to Stanford, and I immediately got obsessed with an idea that Galileo had inspired me about when I was a 12-year-old kid, which was to build a type of telescope. I didn't know how when I was 12, but I sure as hell knew how to do it once I left this August institution. I was a trained scientist. By the way, the word scientist in Russian means someone who was taught. So it doesn't mean like technical stuff. It means a person who was taught. So we're all scientists here.

Anyone who's curious, anyone who seeks imagination, can be a scientist. So we're all scientists. And I knew, after the training I received here, that I could perhaps go back to the very beginning of time, which is the epoch of inflation, so-called cosmological inflation, when the universe expanded, not the monetary inflation that you hear about,

the universe expanded by 30 orders of magnitude in a time period less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, an event more violent than any of a moment, than any other event in cosmic history. And it would leave shrapnel in the form of waves of gravity percolating through the universe that could be detected by instruments

that we could build. So the cartoon diagram that is from the Washington Post from Bicep when Bicep made a huge announcement in 2014, they depicted it pretty well in schematic form. Inflation is the spark that ignited the Big Bang. And we are the byproducts.

Every helium atom in the universe that we know about, with the exception of those produced in stars, and every hydrogen atom in the water that you drink and the water that's in your body was produced during the Big Bang. But how did the Big Bang get hot? What put the bang in the Big Bang?

That is inflation. And so I wanted to detect inflation. I wanted to detect the analog of these signals Harbinger Impromator signals from the origin of the universe. The biggest unsolved problem in cosmology. So while I was at Stanford, working on Professor Sarah Church's other projects.

I spent most of my time dreaming about other projects, projects that I would do. And I was a terrible employee. I was not a good postdoc. So postdocs here at Brown, please do not follow my lead, although, as you'll see, it worked out well. I ended up designing mentally and embodying when I became a postdoc at Caltech,

this obsession, which we call bicep, the background imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization, which is a refracting Galilean telescope. I'm convinced if Galileo could be teleported to now, wherever he is or soul is, or if you believe in such things, he would instantly recognize, hey, you stole my idea. Because this telescope is a refracting lens-based telescope. Except unlike Galileo's telescope, it uses transition-edge superconducting detectors

cooled down to 0.3 Kelvin, properties of which I learned about in Professor Zhao's class many, many decades ago. and it has features that Galileo would instantaneously recognize and realize is uniquely capable to go after the signals that we're seeking. Hello, students of the impossible. It's Professor Brian Keating here with just a tiny little homework assignment to interrupt your podcast. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast or following us on your

podcast app of choice. Did some research and actually only about 50% of you. of you are actually following or subscribing to The Impossible podcast. And it really mean a lot if you could subscribe and keep up to date with me and with all the greatest content. I'm putting out tremendous amounts. Podcast has grown in popularity, but it can be better and bigger with your help. Do that.

Please do it now. Don't wait. You'll forget. If you're looking to really boost your position on the grade curve for some extra credit, make sure to leave a rating or review of the podcast. It really helps. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show.

Unfortunately, then, I got fired. I like to joke that I was fired just as Galileo was imprisoned by the Catholic Church. I was fired by the Sarah Church at Stanford, but we're still on good speaking terms. And actually she did me the biggest favor of my life because she got me another postdoc with her former postdoctoral advisor, the late Andrew Lang at Caltech. I realized that Stanford and speaking about getting fired is not too bad a thing for a commencement-type-speaking engagement. You all have probably seen this. I'm never going to give any kind of address.

I've given high school commencements. First thing I do is go back to Steve Jobs' famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford, where he talks about getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. And the only thing I haven't gotten with Steve Jobs, perhaps, is that that statement's true for me too. If I didn't get fired, I probably wouldn't be here today. Because what we did is eventually we moved to another. institution that has, I moved to University of California, San Diego, whose motto is let there be light, spoken by another G, God, OG, the original God. And that's usually we say it

in English, because nobody understands Fiat Lux. And it's one of the most exquisite places to be, and I'm just incredibly blessed to work with these people who help me design, build, deploy, field, analyze, and publish, can't forget to publish, data from the most sensitive instruments ever built by my wonderful team around the world, and in particular my UC San Diego crew. Now, we couldn't do this measurement from Providence.

We can't do it from California. We had to take it to the coldest, driest, highest continent on Earth, which is the South Pole Antarctica, which Galileo didn't even know existed, if you think about it. They didn't know that the South Pole existed until 19, and people suspected it did, 1911, when it was first reached. It was quite a trip to get there. And you see the two teams that were battling every bit as much in competition as they

battle to land on the moon for the first time must have been. This is the moon race of the early 1900s. Two teams, different technological approaches, be like one team, you know, wants to have wings and flying to space, and the other one has a rocket. Which team do you think made it there first? the team that used these types of animals to pull their sled, or the team that used these types of animals to pull the sled. I'll give you a hint.

The station is named the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, because Amundsen got there first, the others died. They died in March 1912. Just three weeks after missing being the first to the South Pole, they all froze to death. Because they didn't plan properly, and remember the hope is a plan. And deosparamis, you can't only hope.

Hope is not a strong. strategy. It's an element and a component. It's a motto. It's a creed that are important. Without hope, nothing could get done. But they failed to plan. And when you plan to fail, you fail to plan. So they died, unfortunately, just a few weeks later. Scott saw the Norwegian flag from a distance. He realized he had lost this moon race of the 1900s. Be like Neil Armstrong stepping out of the eagle and standing on a Soviet flag. It must have been the most disappointing thing that ever happened in the history of humanity. And then to know they're probably going to die

because they got there so late. So nowadays, it's a beautiful place. Your tax dollars, again, are at work here. They built this station, this $100 million station, where I would go for free. And in fact, tourists paid to go there. So you guys paid for me to go down there for free multiple times with my students to get training

to build the most sensitive instruments ever built. Of course, you have to take a selfie, put it on Instagram to get there. And I said it was dangerous when Scott and Amundsen were there. I failed to mention how dangerous it still is today. This video, it's grainy, but you'll see it's also quite dangerous today. The natives... But maybe they don't like...

It's kind of like faculty. They don't like each other, right, sometimes, right? So maybe they would be fine with people. And one of my kids is here. He loves penguins. He asks me, can you bring me back a penguin? So I tried. I honestly tried to get a penguin from my beloved son.

And that's what happened. So you've got to be very, very cautious with these. They look gentle, but they're not. 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 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. So remember I said we're trying to detect this pattern of gravitational waves, would be the imprimatur of the inflationary epoch, that would signify how the universe came to be, and perhaps be a harbinger of other universes in a paradigm subsumed within the inflationary hypothesis, called the multiverse hypothesis, which is a whole other talk.

So we made this announcement and there was a media storm. In fact, one of the founding fathers of inflation was by then he had emigrated from the Soviet Union to Stanford University. So Stanford keeps appearing in this talk. On the day of this announcement, which was held at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard, Stanford had prepared a video weeks earlier showing this professor Linday receiving congratulations from one of my colleagues, Professor Chalin Kuo, at Stanford. University and he weeps on camera. It's amazing. It's a very touching video. Three million views, the first hours that it's out. Unbelievable. That same day in March of 2014, we were on the Washington

Post. We were on TV. Here's live from CNN. I like this. Remember, I love mottos. I collect mottos. I collect creeds. Does anyone know whose motto this is, reaching for the stars? You guys are all too young to remember Casey Kasem. Keep your feet on the ground. Keep reaching for the stars. Anyone remember that? Jimmy, remember that? No. Okay, so they even bring in the motto. It was on the front page of the newspaper of record, the San Diego Union Tribune.

There's me, staring wistfully up at the heavens. There it is in the New York Times. Scientists detect space ripples signifying the Big Bang's smoking gun. Really, the first physical evidence of the origin of the universe. What could be more excited? I like this headline,

politically incorrect headline in the economist. It says, like, some guy, he just saw the big bang. Amazing. That's amazing. Phenomenal. So we got a tremendous amount of attention, but we were actually, this is a depiction from a review of my book, losing the Nobel Prize in nature, because we had been told that we would win a Nobel Prize. Whoever came up with this idea, maybe me would be in a short list to win the Nobel Prize. So nature depicted it as all these cosmologists are looking to the heavens to see the sign of inflation, the multiverse, the big bend. Shorefire Nobel Prize.

And in fact, the day I got here and Stefan got here in 1993, there was a Nobel Prize to Halse and Taylor, and Holst was a graduate student working with Joe Taylor when he won the Nobel Prize. 1993, the day that Stefan and I were here, Nobel Prize, a graduate student won the Nobel Prize. Maybe it could happen to us. We always thought about them.

But you know you've made it. when you appear in the most august, most important. Most prestigious journal in all of science? The onion. The onion is here. So they did a headline, the top theoretical physicist, R&B singers, meet to discuss the meaning of forever. And down here, you see, we can observe long-term phenomena,

like the CMB, primary B-mode polarization, and the love between India Ari and her man, all of which seem to have existed since the universe's infancy. You got Diana Ross, you got Michi Okaku, I think Jim Gates is off to the right over here. You can't see him. And Smokey Robinson. So you're in the meme culture now.

Now we made it into the memeverse. But always in the back of your mind, are you making the same mistake that Galileo made? Maybe we won't get tortured and put in jail or whatever happened to him. But maybe there's something else leading to a sense of confirmation bias, precluding you from seeing the truth. Maybe something as small as a grain of dust can impede your view of how the universe came to be.

And you may mistake the dust for the primordial signals that would lead to golden treasures. So here's a famous cartoon by Sidney Harris. It shows two housekeepers. Sure, it's beautiful, but I can't stop thinking about all that interstellar dust out there. Now, we had thought about interstellar dust

as an interloper imposter signal that could mock the imprimatur of inflation. We had taken that into account. We couldn't get access to the data. Those were held by Italian and European collaboration. And they wouldn't share with us because they didn't have the data fully analogs. They didn't want to be premature. But we went ahead with it.

We published it anyway. And just like all those things that were printed on the front page of newspapers, we got barely a blurb in the Saturday edition of the New York Times when the retraction of these results came out. And so we actually retracted this. That's why my book is called Losing the Nobel Prize, not winning the Nobel Prize. And it's not a how-to guide. I don't want anyone to lose it prematurely,

but it was signifying that we had made a mistake and that we needed to do better. And with the help of our theoretical, analytical, and other experimentalists, we are now building a new project because we now know the cosmos isn't so pure and pristine. It's not this pristine view from here on Earth, looking all the way back to the beginning of time.

No, it's a lot like Boston at rush hour. It's smoggy, it's smoky, and there's a lot of schmutz to look through. And you have to be a two, to it and remove it by paying as much attention to it as you did to the prize you're seeking to find. So to that end, we are building the Simon's Observatory. And I'm here to report progress on this observatory and it will begin taking data in just two years from now. This is a hundred million dollar plus project that I'm pleased to co-lead with my collaborator, Suzanne Staggs,

who's the spokesperson at Princeton and I'm the director of our project office. And we have over 200 researchers on all seven continents. and in multiple different countries, I'm almost adding names to this wonderful list as each passing talk goes by. This is our location in the Atacama Desert. It's called the Desert of Deserts in the highest Atacama Chilean Andes range.

And this is a beautiful shot of it. 17,200 feet above sea level. It's funded by members, all those members you saw pay membership dues and contribute in cash or in kind to this. immense observatory so that we have, as Jim Simons often says, skin in the game. We need to have a stake, a venture in this project. Here's a team.

We're going to have a face-to-face meeting for the first time in three years at UC San Diego. Here's my particular team at UC San Diego, working on one of the three refracting Galilean-type telescopes that will hopefully see not only the signals of cosmic inflation, but also the dust simultaneously. And to that end, we're building three of these instruments. And then we're deploying them to Chile, which is at 17,000 feet above sea level. This is a video taken last month. Hopefully the video works. Yeah, it's a time-lapse video, so it looks kind of funny.

I like these instruments. This is the class telescope. They're kind of whirring around. We're delivering those platforms that will hold the three telescopes. I'll speed it up because it's kind of long. So we have these cranes. We have to do everything. We have to build the site.

Bring the concrete. Bring the diesel fuel to run the generators. Bring the oxygen that we have to breathe or else will pass out and die. And we have to maintain a culture of safety and respect and respect the indigenous people that populate this land to this very day. And so it's just an immense privilege to be affiliated with these people. And it's going to be building the most sensitive experiment ever made, not only to measure the CNB signals, but to measure the dust signals as well. So I want to finish now with a statement that even Galileo's broad, parapetetic intellect was so expansive. he even thought about that classic question.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? According to my friend Philip Goff at Durham, he was the first person to ever think about the role of consciousness in the physical world and in physical perception, and even to the extent of considering such questions that we all ask ourselves as kids. And so let's go back to that tree and that motto that we just heard from a graduate, the Luft of Freight Red, the winds of freedom blow. So I was blown free of a paycheck from Stanford University. But when you think about these trees, like that logo that Stanford has,

it makes me think about how the tiniest of seeds that grow into enormous sequoia trees, the tree, this immense largest biological organism on the planet, they start from the very smallest of seeds. And that's the way something can happen in life. The word providence where we are is another form of serendipity. It means serendipity, divine serendipity, if you will. And everything that I have started because of what I learned here and coming from here. And in fact, 11 years ago, I brought a guy.

He was just a little sprout. Now he's in the audience. And he wouldn't be here because I wouldn't have gone from where I did at Brown to stand. to Caltech to UCSD wouldn't have met my wife and had the blessings that I have to call part of my family and to be part of this grand scientific tradition. So I thought it was the worst thing that happened to me, like Steve said, getting fired. Only time I ever getting fired as a postdoc after leaving Brown, how dare they? But it happened. And it made me think of my motto. And I think we have to have models. So this is my final motto. It's in Yiddish combination of Hebrew and German. And it stands for, it says, man, tracht, God lacht. It means man plans and God laughs at your plans.

It's kind of, you know, the bittersweet humor of the Yiddish language. But it made me think of all the wonderful things, and that we do need to have in life, mottoes and creeds like Galileo. We do need to wear robes and regalia. This is precious. We only have a very short amount of time together on this wonderful planet and to enjoy, to not enjoy the fruits

that you get to accumulate, the people you get to meet, the networks you get to enjoy, and benefit from intellectually, physically, spiritually, emotionally. So remember that Providence does stand for this divine sense of serendipity, and from which, for me at least, all beautiful things have afloat. And I think it's very important that we have this perspective, as Galileo called the perspective tube, to look back, gives you perspective, to allow you to lead and go forward in your life. So I think the last thing I will say is it all began for me with that motto in Deos Phramas.

Have hope, hope and higher power perhaps. But for me, everything started with hope. And with that, I thank you very much for hosting me today. It's such an honor to be back here at Brown. So as the Horace Medal medalist, Dr. Keating will get the Horace Mann Medal at commencement tomorrow. So we'll get to see and receive that medal. In the meantime, we have a couple of microphones in the aisle.

If there are questions, please come to the microphone and ask your questions, please. Good day. Yes, Professor. Well, first of all, Brian, I want to thank you for just a terribly engaging presentation that basically lives up to Horace Mann. I've got two things for you. You mentioned, and I'd like to get your reaction, You mentioned that teachers need to be free to teach.

And yet we live in a country nowadays where certain histories are not allowed to be taught. So I'd like to get your reaction to that. Second question. Horace Mann said what I believe is the ultimate in commencement comments, which was, Be afraid to die until you have rendered some service to humanity. And I'd like to know what is that service that you've rendered. So those are my two questions. Simple question.

Usually paraphrase that with simple questions from Jim Gates. That qualifies as simple. I'll start with the first one. So Harvest Man was a towering intellect. He recognized that the foundation of freedom is education. And he was a huge, it was one of the early and most powerful voices of abolition against slavery, starting in the 1850s and beyond, and recognizing that we shouldn't just free the slaves to make them, you know,

because it's a good thing to do. he recognized the biblical injunction. He was appealing to biblically literate people that it was actually a sin. It was no less than a sin to enslave another person. But he added, and you know this to him, he said, it's not enough just to give them freedom, ship them on their way.

We had to educate and keep them, basically, he said he wouldn't be satisfied until they had armies, that basically armies of freed black slaves, that that was when they would know that they had made it and that America had lived up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence.

And he resonated very much with Frederick Douglass in that effect. So I agree entirely. And we see that, oh, it couldn't happen again. We couldn't have that. There's a place on earth where slavery takes place to this day. And it's a great tragedy. And the thing that I want to understand is,

and I started to think about this in answer maybe to your first question about service. For me, what I think about... You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't... on 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. That service, I think about something I also learned here, which is about networking, but not like social climbing. It's about building connections between people. So you guys all know this, and many of you know this. The basis of a network is that it scales as not the number of people in the network, but the square of the number of people.

Because all of your connections may have connections amongst themselves. And what I tried to do and embody in my life is I ask, well, what if you like kind of short-circuit a connection? What does that do to the rest of the network? And so for me, I ask the question, well, what you should do in life is that which, if taken away from you, would devastate you. In other words, you should have those connections that you can't live without. For some, it's children. Some people don't have children.

Some it's friendship. And that type of service in the mind and recognizing, I do what I do because I'm free. One of my colleagues, the late-great professor Hans Parr at UCSD, he said, we're only allowed to do what we do as theoretical and experiment physicist because there's no war. And the country doesn't need our resources devoted to a mass project to kill other human beings. And so I think about that a lot, how blessed we are as intellectuals in this room and outside of this room.

And that's how we should serve. To do that, to give back to the public so that they experience the return on their investment in our education. Because everybody here is benefit. I don't care if you went to private school all the way through Brown, which is private school, all the way to graduate school, teach you to private school. I don't care. We all benefited from this investment in our civilization.

And to the extent that we squander that, that will then be a time to be disappointed. In the promise of America, the check that Frederick Douglass talked about not being cashed. So before I worked at Brown, I worked at University of Chicago. And we were working toward fundraising for the giant Magellan telescope, also in the Atacama Desert. I was wondering, are they next to each other? I understand that's a great place to do that kind of work. Are they different types of instruments? Yeah.

Yeah, so I actually had the honor to visit, along with Jim and Marilynne Simons. We broke ground. So I had the 20th richest guy in the world and his beautiful wife, Marilyn. We were up at 17,000 feet with shovels. I had them shoveling dirt, and he's wearing oxygen, try not to smoke a cigarette. And then we went from there down to a ceremony to watch the total solar eclipse at the giant Magellan Telescope, which is under construction, 26 meter wide diameter telescope, larger than his room,

and it has the capability to look back and see completely different things than what we would see with the Simon's Observatory or Bison. It can see the atmospheres of exoplanets. It can see the very first stars that form, but it cannot see these signatures of inflation or gravitational lensing, gravitational radiation, neutrinos, et cetera. So they're complementary,

but I think they both serve the two highest purposes. I actually think there's three highest things that people can study in one way or another and interest me. How did the universe come from a non-universe? How did life come from non-living chemical matter and had a consciousness emerge from living matter? Those are the three kind of big bangs

that I'm most interested in are chicken and egg problems. And so that will, we're hopefully invested in the first of those three and the second of those three is the purview of the giant Magellan telescope. But yes, they do need money, but I think Brown needs more money. No, I'm just kidding.

So my question, one of the things I would say, I was worried about behaviors of the belief that are really the enemies of creativity. Thinking about what you did, how you wrote science, going from Brown and Stanford, and going off and doing your own thing, I just think about your relationship with your own students in terms of how you mentor them and guide them. Do you say, don't do what I do, do what I say, or do you say, you know, how do you have that? Yeah, so I always say that, you know, scientists, is cliche scientists are like children. They're curious, they're inquisitive, they're imaginative. and I say, yeah, but they're also like children. What? What do you mean? I said they're like children, yeah.

They're jealous, they're petty, they don't play well with friends, they want their own toys, they're not going to share with their sibling. Science is kind of like one of many double-edged swords. It takes a certain amount of humility to do science to know that you could be wrong and have the courage to say the most powerful words in science, I don't know. But also you need to have some swagger. You need to be able to say, I am capable of revealing the mind of nature, of mother nature. that a human mind can comprehend, as Richard Feynman said,

I'm an atom in the universe and a universe of atoms, a molecule contemplating the cosmos. And so we are unique. We don't know of any other life forms in the universe, for sure, besides us. A lot of people think there are. I personally don't think there are, but that's for another talk. But a fun talk about exobiology. But on the other hand, we know for sure that we exist.

And yet, as Jim brought up, you know, we also don't treat each other very well. Even scientists don't treat each other well. And so I think to communicate to my students, I have a big plaque made by one of my graduate students. Darcy Barron, who's now a professor at the University of New Mexico. She has graduate students. I have grandbaby grad students, if you like. I have a plaque that was made by her parents in honor of me when she graduated, a beautiful bronze plaque.

And it shows my PhD genealogy. And it goes back 17 generations before Galileo wrote that first book, The Compass. And it's an awesome responsibility because the chain doesn't end. You know, it goes back both that way. We just don't know their names. And it goes all the way down into the future. And that's the notion of what this Russian phrase interpretation of scientists mean, someone who is taught.

That means to me you have an obligation to teach as a scientist. But to give back is also meaning that you also have to have a little bit of humility, but swagger as well. And balancing those two, it's the hardest thing to do. Thank you. That was great. Thank you. Outside of Galileo, can you name one other person who's inspired you and why?

Ah, so in science or without science? I would say, besides my wife, who is the most inspirational person I've ever had in my life, she really has truly endowed me with a complete other side of my brain. Again, I don't know which side it is. And maybe, you know, as we were saying earlier, any of the faults are with me and any of the good things come from her. So besides her, in that sense, as a sense, as a scientist, there are many, because science to me means that you don't back away.

There's another famous blunderer in science. He had seven blunders. He thought that quantum mechanics wasn't real. He thought that their universe didn't have dark energy. He thought that there was anomalies in the basic foundations of physics. And his name was Albert Einstein. He was wrong. As many times as he was right, he could have won seven Nobel Prizes,

and he could have won seven Ig Nobel prizes. That's greatness. When he saw that the universe had evidence that the universe wasn't static as he presupposed it was, he said, I was wrong. It was my biggest blunder. And to have that kind of humility,

also he had a tremendous amount of chutzpah. He had that hope and that ability to have confidence in himself. Balancing those two, he is a great exemplar of it. There are other people that, I respect tremendously, scientifically and outside of science as well. But I think, you know, in terms of what can I actually learn and apply, people like those two are probably at the top of my list as a scientist. So when you were at Brown, and we're not going to ask you to pick favorites.

I know you probably have about five or six, but in terms of professors here, when you were, you know, a young and who do you, because, you know, who exemplifies some of those things? to you. Yeah. I know you have a few, but... Yeah, no, definitely a few. I mean, I can't ignore my advisor, Peter Timby, you know, but while, you know, he and I are still the best of friends, so it's hard and impossible for me not to thank him, Professor Ballas, you know, he was like one of the guys and, you know, you could relate to him. There were people I couldn't relate to because they were so brilliant. People like Michael Costellitz, Professor Costellitz, Professor Cooper, who is incredibly incredibly debonair and stylish as a physicist.

But I think the one that I most resonated with, and I regret that I didn't spend as much time with as I could have, was late Jerry Garalma. Jerry was a tremendous human being, individual. I'm blessed to be in touch with his son and his wife. And he taught me some of the greatest lessons that I still think about. In fact, one of my favorite ones that I use almost on a daily basis, I can hear him saying it.

We'd go after class. Jerry is a vuncular professor, brilliant professor, came up with the idea for what would later be called the Higgs boson. I would go and open the door for him to get out of class. I say, no, I never let a grad student walk behind me. You don't know what they're going to do. So he was a mensch. He was a real mensch, and I try to embody that,

along with the swagger and the flare. And from Professor Zhao, this is true, you gave me some of my lowest grades in the class, that's okay, but you believed in me, and you allowed me to demonstrate when I didn't know something that you gave me a second chance, and you allowed me to come back and show you that, okay, that was just an off day. You had grace, you had graciousness that really did speak to me. And I try to think about that with my students today. During the pandemic, these kids are dealing with stuff.

They're all over the world, literally, calling in all hours of the night. I'm not the greatest teacher, but I try to have some. graciousness and understanding that these are individuals. And I think I learned a lot of that from this very institution. And of course from you. I can't, I already, I already spoke about you for like 10 minutes, brother. I mean, come on. No, it's true. You did. I dedicated my book to you. Don't forget that. We have time for one more question. How powerful was Galileo's telescope in comparison with a modern telescope? Ah, very good. question. So Galileo's little tiny telescope was about an inch and a half in diameter. There's one

lens out of the hundreds of telescopes that he probably made. He would never tell people how he made it because he had a monopoly on it. It would be like Steve Jobs explaining how did the iPhone work, you know, so somebody can copy it. Once you have a monopoly, you want to keep using it. So he wouldn't tell people how he made it. Instead, he published the Sidarius Nuncius, which showed what you could see with it, which gave you anticipation, desire. You wanted it. and he published that, became instantly famous across the whole continent of Europe. He never left Italy. This telescope, you can see these objects.

And in fact, you can see with a telescope from the middle of Providence on a clear night, every single thing that Galileo ever saw, nebulae, he saw these planets that had moons around them, the phases of Venus are depicted in the bottom left corner. The rings of Saturn are depicted. This is something you can get if you buy a Keating brand 2000 telescope for only 1999. I really do want to go into business and get, make tellic. But on Amazon you could buy for $50, you can buy the exact same telescope that inspired me as a 12-year-old to go into a life of what would later be called science and kind of rediscover these same discoveries. And I always say you can't go on build a large Hadron Collider.

You can't go out and build a giant Magellan telescope, but you can feel the exact feeling that another human being had who's been dead for 500 years because when you look and you see Saturn and you see the craters on the moon, you immediately say these are not like anything we've ever seen before

without a telescope. So you'll feel what he felt. No other scientific instrument can do that. So I encourage parents, get your kids, grandkids, telescopes please, and I promise to take your money someday when I build my own telescope company.

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