Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What It Takes to Achieve Great Scientific Breakthroughs w/ Rick Walker [Ep. 453]

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

What does it take to achieve great breakthroughs in science? What makes Galileo’s approach to science still relevant today? And why is it essential for scientists to communicate their work to the general public? Last month, I was invited to Rick Walker's podcast to give his listeners insight into the mind of a scientist. We also discussed the cosmic microwave background, unifying the laws of gravity and quantum mechanics, and more.  Tune in! — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 01:18 Science, curiosity, and creativity  08:46 Entertainment scientists  12:59 The relationship between mathematics and science 20:22 Einstein’s unfinished dream  24:17 Heisenberg uncertainty principle  29:09 Galileo’s approach to science 34:51 My content creation process 39:49 The cosmic microwave background  48:16 Quickfire 52:25 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Check out Rick Walker’s Podcast: 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3V74xC3Qv8HZchgn_tYWoA  🎙️ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rick-walker-podcast/id1667818152 — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — 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 follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nature doesn't reveal her secrets. They're quite deeply hidden. So you need to kind of have this supernatural confidence that you can achieve greatness and that you can do what others haven't been able to do. And that's the goal of science is not to only confirm what other people have done. That's important, but to actually understand

and have conviction that you're going to do something new that no one's ever done before. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome Brian Keating to the podcast. Great to have you.

Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Great, great, great. Well, you've seen Brian both on Joe Rogan and Lex Freeman, very, very frequently, very, very recently, I think. Brian's the distinguished professor of physics and public speaker and Venter. He does everything. He does everything. He's expert in the study of the universe's oldest life, C&B Cosmic Markaway background,

which I think we're going to get into here in a second. Brian's a writer and podcast. You've seen himself all over the plate, very, very prolific. And he's also the best-selling author of what Amazon calls one of the best nonfiction books of all time. Welcome, Brian. Thanks so much. Yeah, it's great to be here. Great, great.

And we are hoping to discuss today, I'm getting an echo here. We're hoping to discuss today a little bit about your writing process, your creative process, and then also sort of the nature of genius within the scientific sphere. but I want to get started by talking a little bit about the idea of curiosity in your in your book into the possible and not even losing the Nobel Prize both fantastic readers I highly recommend and we'll link to below you really take this childlike curiosity very very seriously especially as you open up about your own childhood that the nature of of looking out the telescope and what it meant to you in your life there and I want to start off by getting your take on on this quote from C.S. Lewis in his book. the abolition of man. He says that the serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor, Brian, are twins. One was sickly and died, the other strong in Throve, but they were twins. They were born out of the same impulse. And so, Brian, could you tell us a little bit about from your

perspective, the relationship between this kind of childlike curiosity, this magic and science itself, especially for you as a kid and what it means to you today? Yeah, I often think about that kind of quote or that idea that science is pursued by scientists who are childlike. And that's actually very, very close to my experience that scientists are like children are curious, we're passionate, we are intense, we're focused and we get so wrapped up in what we're doing, but also like children, we don't play well with others. We love to get credit. We're jealous, we're petty. We don't share our toys. And so nothing is really a single. single-edge sword. Everything comes with kind of blessings and curses. I think, you know, the challenge

is to, is to, you know, kind of not grow out of the childlike curiosity, passion, and wonder, but do grow out of some of the lesser, more base characteristics that children are typified by. Yeah, and you call curiosity, but you call it the secret sauce that it's so important in scientific and really any exploratory work, and that it leads to resilience. somehow. How does that work? How does curiosity make science and sort of the exploratory arts more resilient? Well, I think, you know, passion can kind of only get you so far. I think people advise you to, you know, follow your passion and, you know, everything will go your way. But in reality, very few people make a living out of something that they're passionate about. I mean, you know,

for me, it would be ice cream tasting or something like that. And in fact, it's quite hard to become a a scientist and become a professor like I am. But the challenge that, you know, I think is worth overcoming, it can only really be overcome if you have more than just kind of temporary willpower. You know, you listen to people like Joe Rogan or Jocka Willink or people that David Gaggins, you know, they'll talk about willpower is depletable. You know, you only have so much willpower. But if you really change your habits, change your mindset and so forth, then it becomes sustainable. Well, I feel that's something about passion. You know, you might be really passionate and think about the goals of, you know, the outcome, the final product of being a scientist,

maybe getting attention, maybe getting, you know, credit and maybe really truly discovering something new. But there are no real ways to sustain that passion other than to have just in unwavering scientific curiosity. And so I find, you know, it's necessary to have passion, but it's not sufficient. You need to have something that will sustain you through the very challenging times, the boring times, the mundane times, the competitive times. These are all traits that require more than just pure passion. What do you think the relationship between passion, curiosity, and genius? I'm talking about global earth-shattering genius, things like people like Newton, Galileo and Einstein. Did they rely on curiosity and passion as much as maybe scientists

so do they need to that are not, you know, world-changing genius? Well, I think certainly they did. I don't think there's such thing as a scientist who's successful that's not incredibly curious. But they were also passionate. That's what I'm saying you need both. You need to have really this true kind of conviction that, you know, the struggle is worth it. But, you know, that's also not enough. You also need to have, you know, this enduring kind of unyielding, dedicated.

to the craft of being a scientist, like being an actor. Like everyone wants to be an actor. You know, come here in Southern California, come to Hollywood, and they want to be an active, passionate about it. But, you know, do they have the kind of fortitude to withstand all the things that aren't part of that craft? And that is, makes it part of the craft to kind of endure and be resilient and make up for the times when it's not going to be all, you know, award shows and so forth.

and being in TMZ or whatever these people aspire to be. So the trait that I see in common to answer your question is really twofold. There's two traits that you need to be a good scientist. And one is to have kind of supernatural confidence that you can do what you want to set out to do because otherwise you'll just be kind of lost. Nature doesn't reveal her secrets. They're quite deeply hidden. And most of the easy, quote unquote, easy stuff has been discovered.

you know, decades and centuries in some cases earlier. So, so you need to kind of have this, this supernatural confidence that you can achieve greatness and that you can do what others haven't been able to do. And that's the goal of science is not to only confirm what other people have done. That's, that's important, but to actually understand and can have conviction that you're going to do something new that no one's ever done before. That's a requirement to get a PhD, really, is you have to do novel research that no one on Earth has ever done before. And then secondly, the other counterbalancing trait is to have humility and to know that you, you know, shouldn't be overconfident and that you are flawed and that you will succumb to different biases and have different

challenges, I would say, in your pursuit, that you're not going to be able to eventually do everything and know everything because science is infinite. You may have heard of, you know, finite games, infinite games, a finite game is chess. There's a winner, there's a loser, the rules of the game, the object of the game is to end the game by you winning, but science isn't really like that. There's no winning science. There's no person who knows all of science or discovered all of science, not even the greatest geniuses that you mentioned. So the challenge is dealing with the infinite game of science, but knowing you have to play a whole bunch of finite games along the way, get into college, get into graduate school,

get your PhD, get a professorship, get into tenure, you know, all these things, get research funding. And to have that as a notion of, you know, how we do science, it's difficult to balance those two conflicting traits of confidence and humility. But the best scientists do that and don't let the overbearing nature of how challenging science is, you know, crush their spirit, but also don't get too overwhelmed by their own greatness that they have an inability to actually get things done because they think they know the answers everything already. So I think about the entertainment scientists. That's why I phrase it. The Michio Kakos, the Nilegras Tysons, people that fair that really are putting all their eggs in the MTV basket, as Bullfellow would say. I think you have connections to San Diego. I know he's rolled around there on occasion.

This idea that I can be sort of an all-inclusive scientist. I know Micho has some other things specifically in string theory, that sort of area there. But what is the role of science dealing with the public and how much is a good scientist spinning, I guess, effort on trying to communicate to the outside world, what exactly they're doing? It's a challenge because not everyone can do science and not everyone can communicate science. And the Venn diagram of people that can do science and also communicate science is even smaller. Any restriction makes the subset of people even smaller. And I think, you know, the challenges when you feel like it is your job or it's not your job to do either the communication or the distillation in terms of what the public can understand.

What I always say is I think it's actually almost a moral obligation that scientists have to the public who pay our salaries, whose taxes fund our research. And most every scientist I know would do what he or she does for free. They don't require funding for it. They don't require, you know, to have the passion. And we're doing what we were doing as kids. And we'd certainly get paid when I was 10 years old and then got my first telescope. And so we're doing what we would do for free.

And so the fact that we get to get paid for it is incredibly generous of the taxpayer. And for us to say the taxpayer is basically not our boss, but is responsible for our funding. So kind of like a boss to say, well, no, I'm not responsible for explaining things to you. You can't understand what I do. And therefore, you know, I'm not going to take the time to communicate it to you. And a lot of my colleagues in science will say, no, that's not fair. You know, scientists should do science and communicators like Mitchie O'Cocou or, you know, Neil DeGrasse Tyson or aren't doing active research.

They should, you know, they were scientists. They have done stuff, but they're not doing now as much. They should be the ones that rely. Then you get this really distorted message of who is a scientist and, you know, who can do the process of science. And I think that that's an incredible, you know, kind of bad message to send to young people that, you know, you can either do science or you can communicate science, pick one. And there are a few that do it, or very few, but oftentimes they'll say it's not easy for me to do it. You know, I'm not good at it. I'm better, you know, solving equations or I'm better doing laboratory work and building telescope.

And I'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, I know that, you know, you were born knowing quantum field theory and understanding the nucleus of the atom and quantum mechanics. They'll say, no, no, I had to study it. Well, okay, so you studied it. Why did you study it? Because it was important to me. Oh, so what you're saying is you could learn how to communicate to the public, but it's not that important to you. And then I feel like, you know, that they've kind of lost a battle at that point.

It is our responsibility to do it to communicate to the public, and we can all get better at it. And the ultimate benefit is that it becomes an asset to the scientist, to be able to explain things to people who aren't experts, both for their career and for the blossoming and flourishing of science in general. We need more scientists to communicate how awesome science is to the general public. And it shouldn't be so hard because, in fact, nature is the ultimate, you know, Oscar-winning script. There's nothing more interesting than are magical about science,

a famous quote by Arthur C. Clark, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So we get to be magicians, and then we're saying, oh, we don't want to do that. We don't want to explain how the tricks are done. Okay, well, fine. But just admit that you're not fulfilling the entire, you know, entitlement that you are owing, owed, you know, to do and that you have a tacit, you know, contract with the general public who pay you. Because eventually, maybe they'll stop.

And then we'll see how happy you are doing not science and not communication. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting. a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carrano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry and the best heavyweight in the world,

Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Well, that's so funny. So you had this other idea about how great science looks like magic. You also have this idea that I think Vigner put forth a number of years ago

in his fame paper, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and science, something to that degree there where he talks about this uncanny translation of science into mathematics. I was explainable in that. Where do you see the relationship between mathematics and science? So, yeah, the quote by Wigner is about, it's called the, you know, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. And, you know, it's kind of highlighting the fact that science is, you know, somehow distinct from mathematics. I mean, math, we take for granted that math, you have to be good at math to do science.

But actually, if you look at math, like pure math, there's nothing scientific about it. It's purely intellectual. It's purely conceptual. It's the properties of these completely, you know, immaterial. and in, you know, and purely psychological constructs, like numbers. Like, there is no such thing as a triangle. You cannot give me a triangle. You cannot make a triangle.

That's a perfect triangle, three zero-dimensional points, you know, range in some angles. And so for this reason, I think it's incredibly confusing to people that actually math doesn't necessarily have anything to do with science. And another, you know, kind of aspect that is pointed out. in this famous essay by Eugene Vigner is, you know, when you, when you ask, well, what's the, you know, bell curve look like for people's heights in a population? Or, you know, what's the average, you know, seven-year-old height? You get a bell curve distribution where there's an average and there's an upper bound, you know, that's kind of soft. You have some, you know, six-foot

tall, seven-year-olds, I guess, and, you know, a couple of much shorter seven-year-olds. But then you have some average where the vast majority lie in there. Well, that's a lot. that distribution, the normal distribution, the bell curve, it's called a Gaussian distribution in mathematics, and that Gaussian distribution has within it the number pi. What does pie have to do with anything? And the number that expresses the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter. What does that have to do with like the height of seven-year-olds? Well, it turns out to be very closely related to the properties of the function that describes the physical set of seven-year-olds. But that's a surprise.

And it's something that's very useful where you don't see it as much usefulness, say in philosophy or logic and in the laws of quantum mechanics, but you see mathematics everywhere in every branch of physics. So it is quite surprising. And I think it's quite beautiful. And the question I always think about is, does everything in math have some manifestation in physics? Like angles, geometry does, you know, the properties of integers and numbers do.

and pie does, but does every possible conceivable mathematical structure parlay itself into some physical thing that my colleagues and I could measure. It's an open question. I actually don't know the answer to it, but it's fascinating to think about. 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

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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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think it's something like string theory, you know, if you're working, let's say, let's say in 10 dimensions there, and if one of the requirements for something to be a science has to be, it has to be disprovable or falsifiable. It's really hard to falsify 10 dimensions without just using pure mathematics. And so things like that, are those, string theory, just for instance, is that a real science? Is that more of a mathematical endeavor? Well, there are some that say it's both and there's some that say it's neither. And everywhere in between there are people that say it's part of legitimate science.

It's well justified by sort of this reductionist concept. I should explain that for people that aren't familiar, you know, string theory asserts that the particles that we, you know, had long time thought were indivisible, fundamental, elementary. They cannot be divided into smaller and smaller chunks. The way that ordinary matter, a chunk of rock could be, you know, chopped up into smaller rocks, eventually molecules, eventually atoms. the atoms contain within them protons, which can be broken up into things called quarks.

And the question was, are quarks broken up into other things? And for many years, people thought no. But an interesting and speculative idea came about in the 60s that perhaps each quark was a manifestation of a vibration of a concept called a string. And the string behaved in a calculatable way and it had certain properties, which then were, possible to then bring together other phenomena like the property of gravity and unify that, the property of quantum mechanics. And we weren't really sure if that was possible, you know, to do necessarily. So I think it's, you know, it's an open question whether or not it's proper, you know, in terms of will it achieve its goals. The problem is that it doesn't seem to make

predictions that can be tested, and the job of a scientist is not to prove something right, it's to prove something wrong and prove as much wrong as possible. And then what's left has a possibility of being closest to the truth. But we as scientists don't prove things. That's a difference between science and math, that mathematicians do prove things like one plus one equals two, but they, you know, they do so in a very, very obtuse and very complicated way it takes to prove such an assertion, but it's possible to prove it in a way that's irrefutable. Whereas something in physics, I could say, you know, there's, there are purple unicorns on top of the North Pole of Saturn. And I could go there and observe that there are no purple unicorns there. And that destroys

some theory that had that as its prediction. But at least there's a prediction. So it can be disproven and falsified in the language of philosophy, Carl Popper and others. But the concept of string theory doesn't really make, seem to make predictions. It makes, kind of assertions about the nature of reality, but they can't be tested at the, you know, any, we're close to the, to the type of technology that we have today. So I think that that's, you know, it's an open question whether or not it will actually be, you know, be accurately represented by, you know, are these microscopic strings really representative of the ultimate building blocks of matter? And that's an open question. Yeah, yeah. That's,

That's fantastic. The idea, and I'm a business guy, so I'm sitting at a desk all day long, so this just fascinates me here. So the idea that string theory is maybe a kind of a theory of the interoperability of various domains akin to maybe the next evolution from relative theory to general theory and so forth. Is that the right way to think of it for us sort of common people? Is it a continuation of Einstein's work, or is it something very, very different than that? It is. It's related to Einstein's unfinished dream, which was to connect the laws of the largest scales of physics, which is the law of gravity that describes how the universe itself is composed and its structure on the largest possible scales, ranging out to the very beginning of our universe and the Big Bang theory is intimately connected to Einstein's theory of general.

all the way down to the scales of our solar system and planets and navigating to, you know, the moon and Mars and so forth. Those are all related to laws of gravity to make those sorts of excursions into space. And then the question of the ultra-small, the quantum nature of reality, the building blocks of nature, the protons and neutrons and electrons that may behave via a very different set of laws called quantum mechanics. And that type of behavior is not possible. to really combine with the laws of gravity. They don't seem to behave properly. Gravity doesn't

behave the way that the other laws of physics, the other laws of nature behave on ultra-microscopic scales. So when you're at a level of size scale of, you know, fractions of a billionth of a, of a meter, those scales are purely quantum mechanical in nature. And the question is, can gravity be made to be quantum mechanical. And it's not really clear if that's possible or not. So what Einstein tried to do is come up with a way to unify the laws of gravity with the laws of quantum mechanics. And he died not having accomplished that. So a lot of people venerate Einstein and I do too. And they seek to do what even Einstein couldn't do. And for good reason, it would be an incredible accomplishment. But the challenges were not really sure if it's possible to combine gravity and quantum mechanics. They may just be fundamentally

separated. The good news is that, well, it only really comes into play on the scale of the ultra-small, perhaps only in the very first instances of our universe's history after the Big Bang, in which case gravity and quantum mechanics would have to be combined. And the other place that gravity and quantum mechanics seem to be intermingled is in the center of black holes, what's called a singularity of a black hole is a region of space time where we think the laws of gravity and the laws of quantum mechanics would have to be reconciled or combined. And for that reason, we're also kind of immune to anything that happens at the center of a black hole excluded from any effects of it via what's called the event horizon.

So in both these instances, you know, 14 billion years ago nearly and at the center of a black call, we do believe that quantum mechanics and gravity could be related. But if they're not, there's not necessarily an indefinite prison cell that we're sentenced to that we wouldn't be able to recover from. So I think that this is, you know, kind of an interesting turn of events, but it's not necessarily mandatory that gravity and quantum mechanics be unified, the way that Einstein thought that they somehow must be. Yeah, and I think that I saw an article fairly recently, and I think it's like space.com or something more like that, talking about how there's been a discovery of Einstein's prediction that really matter of the periphery of black holes that then sort of waterfalls down to the black holes at speeds very close to the speed of light. But it seemed to me like Neil, Nils Boers discoveries in the early kind of 1920-ish type of timeframe where electrons were really moving around, not like faster this.

speed like, I guess the location is not approximate to speed or anything like it just, it just random placement of these electrons. If those are two different things, two different spectrums, even if you could get the matter that falls into these black holes at the speed of life, it would still wouldn't be as fast as what Neal's more instantaneous, I guess, synchronization of the electrons. Are those two different, two different scopes, two from magnitudes of speed and placement, or are those just two totally different domains? I'm not 100% sure the question.

I'm not familiar with those terms. It might be you're not using the terms properly, but... That's exactly what it is. I'm sure. I'm really, yeah, I'm not really clear about that. So, yeah, no, I'm not familiar with that, if that's indeed the case. So the electrons, they're in two different places at the same time? What's the proper way of understanding of that compared to the concept of

speed. Oh, yeah. So there's something called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Is that what you're talking about? I think so. It's it's incompatible to measure both the, uh, both the position and the velocity of a particle at the quantum scale. So these are things like, um, electrons or, or even, you know, quarks or subatomic particles or photons even. So the question of, of simultaneously being able to measure, it, it's actually not that surprising when we look at things like imagine yourself inside of a completely dark room. And I tell you, there's a ping pong ball rolling around the floor. So you know it's on the floor of the room, but it's totally dark. You can't see it. And I'm asking you to tell me exactly where it is right now and how fast it's moving.

And so you would set out and you'd wander around and you try to find this object. the ping pong ball rolling around. And then maybe you luckily come upon it and you stop it, right? So you stop it, you know exactly where it is in the room. Now you can turn on the lights or whatever. And then you know exactly where it is. And you know nothing about how fast it's moving. You've caused it to collapse and be in the exact position.

And in so doing, you've forced its velocity to be zero. So that's a challenge. That's a big challenge. And I think it's incredibly. interesting, but it's not so surprising when I use that example. And then you could say, well, what if you didn't have to use your hand to stop the ping pong ball, right? What could you do differently? Well, you could turn on the lights. And then you know, then you could both measure where it is and how fast it's going, using a camera, say, and making a movie of it. But to do that requires that

there's particles of light and those particles of light are bouncing off the ping pong ball. Well, the ping pong ball weighs, you know, hundreds of grams or something like that. But when you talk about subatomic particles, they weigh a billion, billion, billion times less than that. So a photon to them is like trying to see where the ping pong ball is using a cannon ball. So that would obviously change the result of the measurement very, very greatly. So the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is an expression of how the incompatement incompatibility of measuring something's position and momentum, which means that effectively, if you know something perfectly well, you cannot know another complementary observable about it

with any degree of precision whatsoever. And that came to become one of the great paradoxes of quantum physics that's not present in the example I used in so-called classical physics, where you could do a simultaneous measurement of position and velocity. Yeah, I think board called that a paradox of what's the opposite of a truth, it's a higher more ultimate truth. Something to that degree. And that is perplexing. So is there an observer issue with it?

Like does it, does it ever have any played with that? Yes. So the observer is the one who's doing a measurement. When you do a measurement that does force the quantum state or the object into one specific state that is not possible to really change it or modify it in any way. So yes, it does sort of force that place to be in a certain. configuration. Okay, okay. It seemed in your books that there is a lot of affinity towards the man Galileo, that there's a lot of respect, a lot of sort of backgrounding of your life in the story

of Galileo and Newton to certainly a bit, but Galileo seems to be sort of preeminent there. What does Galileo mean to you and why should people take sort of up a new cause of alluring about got later the man in his work. Well, he's really the first scientist in the sense, in the modern sense that we use the word scientist and someone that is using the scientific method of, you know, creating a hypothesis and then drawing inferences for what you would see in that hypothesis being correct, figuring out ways to disprove himself wrong, and that's a vital part of science is self-correction. and then iterating and doing so using the tools of science, modified versions of this.

Telescope is a very simple but extremely powerful tool, and that's what he used to create the very first scientific hypotheses in the modern age, 400 and, you know, 14 years ago. When he postulated that when he saw the little stars that seemed to surround the planet Jupiter, that those were actually moons. and those moons were orbiting around Jupiter, which we take for granted now, just as we take for granted the Earth's moon goes around the Earth. But back then, the predominant paradigm was that everything orbited around the Earth. So how could you have, including the Sun and including Jupiter itself?

So in this case, it was clear the moons were not orbiting around the Earth. They were orbiting around Jupiter. So that completely didn't prove that the Earth is not the center. It didn't prove that the Sun is the center of the universe, as many people, which is the truth, not the truth. I mean, the sun is not the center of even our solar system, let alone the universe. But back then, they considered the universe to be the whole solar system. So the paradigm that Galileo was trying to prove or substantiate or validate was that the earth was not the center of the solar system. So he did consider that and did prove that effectively via this observation and hypothesis that, no, actually, Jupiter is kind of like a miniature solar system in itself.

And that meant that we couldn't really substantiate the scientific method of believing that the Earth was the center of the universe. But people believe that for thousands of years. And so what Galileo did is show that evidence, a fact, a brutal fact, can destroy a beautiful theory. And the theory of the Earth being the center, it sure looks like that. I mean, if you ask a normal person in your audience to prove, you know, that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, it sure looks like that with the sun, looks like it goes around the earth, how would you do that?

And I bet 90% of the audience couldn't do it, even as brilliant as they are. And that's because we don't really teach these things. We don't really understand. But back then, imagine how revolutionary it was, and that Galileo had the courage to do that. He also made incredible blunders and mistakes.

And because of those mistakes and the ability to kind of have some humility, as I said at the beginning, he balanced that great courage, confidence, chutzpah, almost arrogance, but he balanced it with the notion that he could be wrong. And he was wrong many, many times, including about some of the evidence that he thought was the most convincing that proved that the Earth was orbiting the sun he was actually wrong about. And that's an interesting kind of topic in the scientific history of the Western world.

But because he had that balanced idea between being confident and being humble, And because he was so eloquent, he was such a beautiful writer, his prose and his literary devices. He wrote books in dialogue or trialogue format that are just so readable and his writing is so beautiful. It's actually almost poetic, but it's even more than that because he's teaching you science using a vector of a beautiful writing. And I had the honor of translating, not translating, but, but, taking translation from a written word only to an audiobook of Galileo's dialogue book. So I think that was an incredible thrill for me to be able to do. And I'm honored to have done that about three years ago.

I made the first ever audiobook. You can get on Amazon. It's called The Dialogue on the Two World Systems. And I share a co-authorship with Galileo. So it's pretty cool. I'm sure he was pumped about that as you guys went on the book tour together. I wish. I do have him here. He's right here right now. I've got this wonderful version of Galileo right there.

That's cool. He's a meteorite. So I want to extend an offer to your audience. If you go to my mailing list, Brian Keating.com slash list and you join my mailing list. Every month I send out one of these beautiful meteorites to one of the lucky subscriber each month, unless you have a .edu email address, and then I guarantee I'll send you one of them if you live in the United States. So, Briankeating.com slash list is where to get your own chunk of the four billion-year-old primordial solar system long before even the formation of the earth, this fragment of this meteorite, which would later hit the earth in Argentina, about 6,000 years ago. And I send a lot of information about how to view meteor showers. There's one coming up in about two, three weeks, called the Perseid meteor shower.

So I'll tell you all about that at my website, Brian Keating.com slash list. Yeah, yeah, we'll have a little linked to that. So I want to get into C&B, but I But now that you're on the newsletter topic as well, walk me through your content creation process because you are so prolific between the books, between the audio project, your podcasting, your guesting, that obviously your newsletter business as well. Walk me through kind of what your average week looks like. What does the team look like? Because you're pushing out a lot of content. Yeah, I have a great team called Legacy Media. And they take basically all the content that I produced.

They'll take this video. They'll probably make it into some clips eventually and put a link to your channel on it. But typically I really make two different types of videos of my own. And then I appear on podcasts like you and Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman and Pierce Morgan and Jordan Peterson, et cetera. And those are always really fun because I get to introduce my research and my thinking to a wider audience. So some of the issues come down to one or two different types of videos. Either I'm explaining something, the invention of the telescope or some cool new discovery in the cosmic migraine background, or acclaimed discovery about some new technology or superconductor.

I call those deep dives, solo episodes where I really try to explain it in a way that anybody can understand if they're curious. Again, that key ingredient, the thing that without which, you. you can't accomplish anything, that trait of curiosity really comes into play that, you know, they can follow it. And I provide references and stuff. But if they're really interested, I can go deep. And there's even more follow-ups and citations and stuff that people can dig into if they're interested.

Then there is a type of video where I do an interview with an author. So I'll have authors usually, and this is how the podcast really started back in 2020 during COVID, there was basically no authors were doing book tours. And that included science authors. And I'd always gotten into science because I would, I would read books by great scientists from Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Asimov, my favorite, and Galileo. And so I love authors. And when they were, um, canceled and their book tours were canceled, I also had been on a book tour for my first book, losing the Nobel Prize. Um, I got on a lot of books. tours for that and really enjoyed that experience. And I felt kind of depressed for my colleagues and

friends that couldn't go on and do, uh, and do, you know, interviews in person. So the next best thing was to do just like what you and I are doing. So I'd get their book from their publisher. And then I was able to get some really high profile big name authors and businessmen and women and scientists and astronauts and just really cool individuals, the highest, performers. And it helps to be at a top university and to have a nice title along with it. But yeah, in terms of what the origin of that was, I was able to get a stream of content going back four years now. And so I'm able to turn some of the old ones into part one, two, three, and kind of divide up into different topics. I talk about consciousness in the brain or artificial

intelligence and cosmology. And I talk about the origin of life. I talk about aliens and all these different topics. And so now I've got dozens of videos in each one of those buckets and, you know, make playlists for those and people get really interested in it. And I'm still now, thanks to having, you know, nearly over, no, 271,000 YouTube subscribers and another 70,000, 80,000 on audio, I can get, you know, pretty big name authors. I'm supposed to have a very, very huge name in the alien space coming on. hopefully soon, I won't say who it is yet. I recently talked to Richard Dawkins, who's the godfather of atheism, basically, and he invented the term meme and the concept of the selfish gene and so forth.

So I had him on two parts for a new book that he has. So I've just gotten kind of benefit of the content rich, get content richer, then I'm able to kind of leverage that and get more and more cool and interesting people on the podcast. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the impossible Tizai, your fearful host. Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that.

And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. I love that. I love that. So C&B, I think, helps us understand the origin of the universe. And I think that's a little bit about what your work was in your book, losing the Nobel Prize, which is just fascinating. What is CNB? Why should we care about it? and what usefulness is. It's like, is it going to be helpful for you in your conversation with Dawkins? You did that sort of thing.

Gives kind of a briefing about that for analysis. Yeah, no. So the CMB stands for cosmic microwave background radiation. It was discovered in 1965. And it was discovered by accident. And they weren't looking for it. They kind of found it. And then the interpretation of it became that it was the leftover heat from the origin of the universe.

So in some sense, it's the oldest light there is in the universe. It's the only, and it's not visible light. It's called microwave, which means you can't see it. It's in the same wavelength range, you know, ranging from the frequencies that your oven uses. And so what it traces is really an incredible amount, just as humans primarily interact with the world via our eyes site. And our eyes get so much emphasis in our brain and so much of our brain is dedicated to processing visual information. There's incredible amount of information encoded in the oldest, light in the universe, which is this cosmic microwave background.

So background means it comes in all directions. Cosmic means that it's from the origin of the universe. And microwave is the wavelength range that it's in, which is slightly shorter wavelengths than radio waves like Wi-Fi and much longer than visible light that we see each other. So its discovery really marked a transition from an earlier phase of cosmology where astronomy and origins of the universe, it really wasn't. taken seriously because there was nothing quantitative about it. It was kind of like, oh, there's some galaxies. They seem to be moving away with some speed and we can measure the speed of the

galaxies, but to have an actual leftover from the Big Bang itself that we can see any day of the year, any time of the year all day long, that became such a powerful resource for understanding that the early universe was a fusion reactor, that it was creating these collisions of very, very, very high energies resulting in the production of the elements and the periodic table. And then the very first atoms that formed. So an atom is the nucleus of an element plus some electrons that surround it. That process couldn't take place for about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. And then that took a, you know, that actually took the,

the notion to, you know, be much more precise that we can actually study the universe quantitatively. So, yeah, does that answer your question of why it's important? Yeah, yeah, yeah, very, very helpful. Okay, so we got about five minutes left. I want to ask you sort of some fun questions, Brian. And so the first thing, and obviously, as everyone knows, more than Galileo is the only one person in the whole world that you respect more. That's Candace Owens. What are your, what sort of your off the cuff reaction when you see people like her and me making scientific statements and trying to have an intellectual conversation with the real scientists?

Is it frustrating? No, it's actually, I mean, it's frustrating when people deny their real work of true scientists that are working hard to unravel the mysteries of the universe at very low pay and often in ups and. for decades at a time. And then someone can just come up and invalidate it and say, you know, the moon landing never happened or the, you know, the earth might not be round or, you know, NASA and science is pagan as they use their laptops communicating over wireless internet that was actually enabled by people that did discover the microwave background at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960. So it is sort of offensive to think that those.

kind of things catch on so much and conversations I've had with Pierce Morgan and and you know others like my friend Eric Weinstein you know the question is well how seriously do you take people that are anti you know narrative or heterodox thinkers people like Terrence Howard and and others that aren't experts but you know as long as they're not too conspiratorial or you know and some look some conspiracies turn out to be right I mean you and I had a conspiracy to record this podcast and have it get a million views. and it will, right? But, so it's not only a pejorative term, but in the context of undermining faith and things like she doesn't, I believe, according to Pierce Morgan, even do have any vaccines for her kids, those types of people, you know, have a lot of explaining to do of why that's actually the case. You know, they want to rely on things and generate confusion and so forth, but a lot of it is to generate outrage because outrage is what causes engagement. So I do kind of feel like they should be listened to, but they should be dismissed where appropriate with extreme discretion.

We should be able to, as a scientist, again, part of our obligation as scientists is to refute things that are nonsensical. Now, we can't spend all of our time doing it because it's way easier to create a theory that something never happened and then say that to disprove that this thing is a conspiracy and then actually did happen, you know, to disprove the conspiracy hoax model is a lot of work. And I'd rather be studying the Big Bang, to be honest with you. So I have to balance it. Sometimes it's worth the time to do it.

And sometimes it's an exercise in futility. Again, part of what I do and, you know, people when they disagree, oh, no, Candace can say whatever she wants and you're just like a shill for big. big NASA and big cosmology and we shouldn't listen to scientists. You know, they have as much ignorance as anybody else. And it's not really true. If we're subject matter experts, if we've gone through the process of obtaining and dedicating our lives to it, then it's kind of shameful to accuse us of having these ulterior motives, especially when they make no sense. I mean, I support vaccines for, you know, my kids have had vaccines and I've had vaccines myself. And the

of, well, I, you know, so am I getting paid by Pfizer? You know, I'm a cosmologist. Like, that's not how it works. I think it would be more damaging to Pfizer if I were a cosmologist endorsing some vaccine. But the bottom line is it's much easier for disinformation and confusion to be sewn and spread around than it is to actually refute it and teach, you know, kind of the good science that should be me. Yeah, yeah. So funny story. A little while back I had, I was in a private meeting with President Trump. No matter what you think about him. And so there were nine of us in the room, nine of us in the room. And most of the people there were very willing people.

One of the people in the room, she had a professional sports team, actually, too. She went on a rant about the vaccines. And after about three or four minutes, he stopped her and said, you realize the vaccines happened under my administration, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, people don't want to admit that. And also, you know, right. Yeah, simultaneously, people don't want to admit. that they suppressed the vaccine from coming out because Trump created it or because it was

created under warp speed, which he was responsible for. In other words, I've had, you know, very staunch Democrats that hate Trump or never Trump Republicans, that people like Sam Harris on my podcast, you know, hates Trump. And, you know, but they, they, and they support vaccines. So it goes both ways, right? And the Republicans who are, you know, condemning it and saying you're a fool or a shill in the case of a scientist. they also don't, you know, have answers to the question of, well, why did these people support the vaccine, you know, but not support the person who caused it to come about in the first place? So these are all people have cognitive dissonance and biases.

And it's just a matter of being able to sort through with some degree of accuracy, what incentives people have for saying the things that they say to you. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, quick, super quick fire. There were three names that caught my attention in your acknowledgments. How did you meet him and maybe a word that we wouldn't know about him,

maybe some sort of characteristic about him. Eric Weinstein, you mentioned a second ago. Yeah. So Eric's been a friend. You know, he's a mathematician, but he's decided to dedicate his life to physics and understanding possible new theories of everything. He's a theoretical inclined person. He's not an experimentalist like me.

And so, you know, the judge of a theory is an experiment. So how do you prove an experiment, you know, or how do you test, you know, prove meaning test, not improve meaning verify or validate. So you do an experiment. So what predictions does his model make that could be tested by experiments such as mine or my colleagues or my competitors? And those are the kinds of things that engage me about his ideas that he's thinking so broadly and so diligently about ways to perhaps make the world better, perhaps, you know, save us from ourselves and back up the planet, you know, rather than taking some chemical-powered rocket get to Mars, you know, well, what happens if the sun, you know, becomes a red giant in a few

million, year, billionaires, rather, keep paying your taxes out there, Rick. But the point is, you know, really getting far away from Earth could require changing and understanding Einstein's equations in a way that we, and Einstein were never able to do. So I like big thinkers like that. And so that's part of my, you know, kind of connection with Eric Weinstein. Roger Pinrose. So Roger is one of my long-term. guest. I had him on years before he won the Nobel Prize. He's an incredibly original thinker. He has created new kind of paradigms and everything from our understanding of Black Holes, which is wanting won the Nobel Prize for. He has ideas about the origin of the universe and how

it did not unfold the way that most of us think that it did. But again, I like the kind of iconoclastic ideas. He's also thought very deeply about consciousness, the brain, and how conscious ideas and thoughts manifest themselves in our mind and done experimental, you know, collaborations to determine that. So he's just an interesting polymath that can do millions of different things. And I find his ideas fascinating. And I know I'm not alone, even though, you know, when I disagree with him, he's a gentleman and we can always, you know, debate and come to some kind of understanding of where he might be

wrong, where I might be wrong. And I love that idea. And also his book was the first book that I ever read as a young person in high school. It's called The Emperor's New Mind. And that was about computers and consciousness and all sorts of really cool stuff that I never understood until much later in my life. So don't get discouraged if you're reading my books and you don't understand them at first. Like, hey, last one. Last one.

Dennis, I've known for seven or eight years. I'm Jewish. He's Jewish. He wrote many great commentaries on the Torah and the Old Testament. that I find fascinating. And he's a very deep thinker. He's had me on his radio show many times to discuss the big picture. It's always called the ultimate issues hour that I come on.

I talk about the James Webb Space Telescope. And, you know, I always say I love, you know, he's obviously very strict Republican and conservative. But, you know, I always say I love cosmology because there's no astronomy because there's no like Republican constellation or Democratic asteroid or. whatever, or the eclipse is an independent party. So it's a safe zone. I think human beings have too much politics, especially now. I mean, it's crazy how much politics just overwhelms us. And for that reason, I think it's important to get a break from politics.

And part of the reason is to go on shows and talk to people that might have a different, you know, biblical only approach and really talk to them and see, you know, if I can be of use to their audience and educating them about the most. interesting subject that I could possibly ever imagine, which is the our universe and the many wonders within it. Great. That's a great way to end. Brian, thanks so much. And of course, what we're all hoping for is this grand utopia where there's no more politics. We all get behind the same sort of work, which obviously is going to happen when your former Cedar Kamala and your governor Newsom that has made California itself a paradise, especially downtown San Diego, come and rescue

the entire world from our from all of our troubles for their competency and your lips to uh to their ear thank you right thank you yes yes