The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Brian Keating: Probing the Early Universe and Communicating about Science

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Find Brian’s INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/39UaHlB and on Spotify here spoti.fi/3vpfXok Brian Keating is an observational cosmology whose work has focused on measuring a possible imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) that could have come from the earliest moments of the Big Bang, and could even give possible indirect evidence for a multiverse. Indeed, an experiment he worked, called BICEP 2, in 2014 announced a possible result which electrified the science community, and clearly would have resulted in at least one Nobel Prize, had it been verified by other experiments. Unfortunately it turned out that the observed signal was due to an unanticipated dust background in our Galaxy. Brian has written about this experience in a book.Brian has not given up the search however, and is spearheading a new major observatory, supported by the Simons Foundation, to push observations of the CMBR to continue to probe for primordial signatures of Inflation.In addition to his scientific work, Brian is engaged in a host of projects aimed at improving the public’s understanding of science, including his own podcast, and also work he has done in San Diego to help excite kids about mathematics—running programs that I have been fortunate enough to be involved in.We discuss all of these activities as well as his own rather unique background in a refreshing discussion about the ups and downs of science, the importance of public understanding, and also the exciting possibilities for the future of cosmology. And we have the kind of give and take discussion between a theorist and experimentalist that may be useful for non-scientists to listen to.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krause and welcome to the Origins Podcast. This week's episode is with Brian Keating, an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist, an old friend. I've, in fact, appeared on his podcast some time ago. Brian has studied for most of his career one of the most interesting bits of data from the early universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang, in particular was involved in an experiment looking for an imprint in that radiation that would come back from a far earlier time, in fact, the very earliest seconds or less of the Big Bang itself during a period called cosmic inflation. If we could measure that signal, it would reveal to us an incredible amount about physics and maybe even about the existence of other universes.

Brian and I talked about those aspects of physics and physics more generally and his own experiences as a scientist, and also his interest in science popularization. It was a fun discussion. I hope you'll enjoy it. You can watch it on our substack site, Critical Mass. If you subscribe to that site, you can see the ad-free video of the podcast. Or you can watch it on our YouTube channel, or you can listen to it on any channel that allows podcasts to be broadcast. Either way, I hope you'll really enjoy the discussion. And I also hope you'll consider supporting the podcast through the Origins Project Foundation,

which runs the podcast and also other public events and outreach activities. Well, Brian, it's great to be able to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, it's nice to be here. The origin of this podcast. Yes, and I appreciate you, you talk to me even though you're recovering from COVID or are now recovered safely from COVID. Yes, I've never been so positively happy to be negative. That's right. Well, it's nice to talk to us from home, that wonder of communication in the modern world. Look, we have chatted before and it's always fun and I want to have a chance to talk about some things we haven't had talked about, which is

mostly your work and your background. And as you know, this is an origins podcast. So I like to talk about people's origins. And I want to begin with yours because I've known some things about it, but I want to be, I want to be able to go into depth in a way that I hadn't before. your father was a well-known mathematician, right? It's a melanom mathematician. But, well, I wonder who, but I'm also, I also know that you sort of were disconnected for a bunch of years when your parents got divorced and you later on reconnected.

And if you don't mind talking a little bit about that, I would be happy to find out about that sort of influence because I guess, I would guess that his influence as a mathematician, affected you later rather than earlier when you were very young. And I wonder what got you interested in science at the beginning? Like, what's your mother? Was your mother a scientist? So those are all a bunch of questions.

No, no. She was, yeah, she was brilliant. She is brilliant. She is thankfully is still alive. My father, of course, passed away, very young, 69 years old. But no, my mother didn't give me any scientific. I mean, it's kind of, I'm a scientist, despite my father being a scientist.

And despite my mother being a non-scientist, It was kind of a way to teleport me away from the strife that the divorced children go through, or children of divorced parents go through is very deroguer in the 1970s, as people may know, it was kind of the hip thing to do. And they were very much influential on me. My father more at a distance. And almost despite, you know, sometimes Lawrence you can be just as get just as much value from a weatherman who's always wrong and one who's always.

right. Although, you know, speaking here in San Diego, it's hard to be wrong very often. It's always, yeah, cloudy in the morning and Sunday afternoon, but anyway. 72 and Sunday. So, you know, my father was kind of a counter example and I wanted to be as different as possible. You know, I felt like he had abandoned me and my elder brother at a young age and gone off and done stuff for himself and despite his brilliance. So, for example, he was a, he was the youngest full professor in Cornell University Math Department history. he was 27. I think he was a full professor. Now mathematicians get tenure earlier anyway, but he was full professor age 27. And when I applied to Cornell as an undergraduate,

I didn't even mention that my father had been a professor there, the young age. And so I wanted to succeed in my own merit. Of course, I didn't get in. Neither time did I apply that I applied to. But I went to the best Ivy League school eventually anyway, Brown University. Well, we can debate that. But if it, I was not acceptable. of Cornell, which was my safe school for graduate school. Because I had two professors of mine in an undergraduate, and they both did their PhDs at Cornell. So I figured, oh, well, that's my safe school. I never got into MIT instead, but it, but it, yeah, so it's all kind of random.

Yeah, life works out in a way. But I ended up, you know, going to Case Western, where you would later become my incoming department chair as I left. And that was a wonderful university for me. They were phenomenal professors. It was four to one teacher to student ratio. And I was back there a couple of years ago for it to speak at homecoming. And I really didn't take as much advantage of that university as I probably should have.

Always thinking about, oh, I should have gone to MIT or Cornell or whatever. But again, you know, it didn't seem to harm me very much. So I think my father's influence, I really didn't discover. I didn't talk to him from age seven to age 21. Wow. 22 when I started to have inklings that, you know, maybe there was a virtue to making peace with this, you know, by then, older man who, you know, I didn't even remember what he looked like. Wow. And so my brother and I got in touch with him through, you know, these are Jewish grandmothers.

They weren't talking to each other, but they were, they had friends that talked to each other down in the Bermuda Triangle of Florida that I call the Yentonet. And these Jewish grandmothers, grandmothers, Bubbies got together and connected me to my father. And one day he called me up at Brown and my dorm room. And he said, this is James Axe. And I said, oh, okay, wow. I recognize his voice instantly. It was pretty funny.

And this is 1990. Yeah, it was, I didn't know, I hadn't really heard his voice. And you know, the voice is so powerful. Yeah. It's even more powerful than the visual in some ways. And I felt this connection. We talked for hours on the phone. and he had moved to Los Angeles and was living outside of L.A. and invited me and my elder brother to come visit him.

And, you know, one of the first things we did is take a paternity test to prove that he really was our father. Did he require that? And he required it. Yeah. And I was kind of, my mother was very insulted. He probably still is to this day. And, you know, I was so sure that it would come back, you know, positive, you know, with, with, no uncertainty that I was willing to do it just to prove them wrong and, you know, get on with my

life. And then by the time we came out there, got the results, it was 99.9.7%, you know, as he used to say genetic garbage. And, and so, yeah, so it was pretty, I said, no, nobody's perfect, you know. But for a long time, I couldn't or really bring myself to even call him dad. Like, I would just, I would say you or, you know, hey. It was very hard because I lived with another man for, you know, Who brought you up? Essentially your father. Yeah, not your biological father, but your father. And, you know, that's Ray Keating.

And that's whose name. He adopted me. And so my brother and I changed names. We changed religions. I was brought up Jewish. And then when they got divorced, my mother remarried an Irish Catholic man with nine brothers and sisters. And I converted at the time to being that most Jewish boys would have their bar mitzvah. I was converted to being a Roman Catholic altar boy in the church of St. John and St.

Mary's in Chappaquin, New York. You, that was a, that, oh, in Chappaquin, New York, okay. Well, you, you were lucky that you missed the bar mitzvice stage. I think that's a, that was a gift, having gone through it myself. I'm going back, Lawrence, you'll be interested to know. So next year I'm going to be 52, and that's the fourth anniversary of my bar mitzvah, and I'm going to go to Jerusalem and do my bar mitzvah at the wailing wall with my family, God willing, and that will be an event for the ages, because, you know, it's,

it's kind of funny that I grew up, as I said, as an altar boy in the Catholic Church for a few years. And then the person that converted me away from Catholicism was, was this guy, Galileo, Galilei. And I discovered him, even before I discovered you and cohorts that made me really question the Catholic Church. And I don't think it was that sophisticated, to be honest with you, Lawrence. I feel like a lot of people go through this phase.

And you and I talk when you were on my podcast about, you know, know, at what level would I accept the refutation of, you know, right now there's all this brouhaha in the popular press that the Big Bang never happened. I don't know if you're following this, but there's this guy who's been around since I was a kid, Eric Lerner. Yeah. He's not even a, you know, a scientist really by training. He has no formal education, but he, you know, he puts a lot of videos. Anyway, he's saying all this. And I was thinking, well, he's very convincing if you're, if you're not very sophisticated, a lot of the things he's saying makes some sense. And But when you look deeper, you know, I was thinking maybe he has like, you know, an understanding of certain topics and people want me to debate him.

And I always find it, you know, kind of almost a waste of time because you're not going to change the ideas of somebody who already is so committed confirmation bias to want to believe something. And you give it oxygen. And so I put out a video kind of debunking some of his claims about the JWST findings that supposedly are crisis in cosmology. And but I was thinking, you know, way back when, if I had heard this as a 13-year-old, or maybe I would have believed it, maybe not. And so I think that's the challenge of, of, you know, overcoming staunchly held ideas. And that wasn't really your question. But going back to the influence of people, I think I was always looking for a father figure.

And I've been blessed to have people remote, dead, long dead people like Galileo and Einstein, all the way up to people like, you know, the modern day, people like Barry Barish, we were just speaking about. He's become a mentor if you want. You could say, I don't want to ever take the chance that it goes to your head. Yeah, no, heaven forbid. Yeah, heaven for that. That would never happen. Barry is a wonderful guy.

So it's great. Well, look, I think, did you, speaking of father figures or at least going back, because I want to go back, did you read much? And for me, reading about science was really what turned me on when I was getting. And in fact, I don't know if I've told you in our podcast, but it was actually a book about Galileo that was the one that that really turned me on to think of science as romantic and daring activity. But did you read much science and popular science when you're? I did. I did. I actually read a lot more science than science fiction, which kind of puts me at strange odds. As you know,

I'm the co-director, associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for your imagination here at UC San Diego where you've visited me a couple of times. It's nice when you come to town. And but I always read the science fact or science nonfiction of Isaac Asimov. He was really the biggest influence on me as a kid and so much so that that I wanted to be like him to write books, to be a professor, to teach, to educate at scale, which I think, you know, you and I both do nowadays. And for me, that kind of blend of the creativity, the poetry, it was only much later that I read Galileo's work as an, from a nonfiction perspective and had the honor along with,

Frank Wilcheck, your friend Frank and Carla Rovelli and many others, Fabiology Anante, to record the first ever audiobook of Galileo's dialogue. And that changed my life. Yeah, I want to get to Galileo at the very end. But yeah, I mean, the dialogues are amazing. In fact, I've always, I think I told you, I've always required my non-physics and non-science students when I teach physics to read some Galileo, as we'll talk about. But we'll get there.

But, you know, certainly, and by the way, Asimov was one of the ones who had a big effect on me, his nonfiction books. I never actually, I never read any of his science fiction. Yeah. You know, people, everyone thinks I'm like a science fiction, a fiduciano because of the physics of Star Trek. And I did read, I read a science fiction a guy named John Wyndham more than the other people. But science fact always still continues to fascinate me more than science fiction. Yeah, I mean, Carl Sagan said, you know, is, and I know you're a huge fan of Carl's and I heard your podcast with Jeff Marcy. Yes, absolutely. These long dead P, books speak to you in your head.

And I think now with audio books read by authors, and you've read your book, The Greatest Story Ever Told, I listened to that again last year, at a second time. And, you know, having the actual voice now, you know, a lot of people say, well, what are you going to leave for your kids?

And, like, there's millions of hours, literally, that are available people can watch and so forth. And I feel like, you know, I just can't imagine what have been like to have Carl Sagan or, or Isaac Asimov or, you know, even Jane Goodall in her prime to be on a podcast. I mean, it's just so incredible. And but I think, yeah, that search for father figures, you know,

less, you know, unfortunately just less so from other figures is just what was in the reality back then. Now, thankfully, there's, you know, tremendous numbers of good authors on both sides of the gender spectrum. But I do feel like books are becoming sort of second tier. You know, I wrote my first book, one of the marketing people at Norton, you know, I said, well, who is this for? And I started to say, well, for everybody.

And they're like, that means nobody. And they asked me, well, what's your competition for your books? I said, Lawrence Krause is now. I said, you know, it's, it's a Brian Green or something. And they said, no, you're wrong. It's every cat video ever made on YouTube. Like, that's your competition. Because people now, it's so digestible.

They can just get stuff without even selecting. You know, the benefit of TikTok now is that you don't have to have decision fatigue. You just get this thing fed into your brain. And I forbid my kid. kids to watch it, are these stories and so forth, because it takes no effort, not even the effort of listening to an audiobook. It's so detrimental to the developing mind. And I don't think I would be a scientist nowadays if I grew up with all the paradoxical choices that we have. It's overwhelming. And I think it's ultimately, to the intellectual mind, the scholastic mind, I think it's very,

very damaging. Well, yeah, I think that the fact that people don't read or don't read long things, They can digest short little tweets or whatever. And that's that's the, that is the problem because, you know, to do anything substantive, it requires thinking for more than a minute or two. And that's the training that that's useful in many ways. And I mean, that's part of the training of physics. And speaking of that, I guess I wanted to, you know, okay, so you got interested, you were sort of interested in science by reading scientists as young.

And your mother encouraged that as well. She didn't want you to be a doctor or anything like that. She was she. No, not like you're, I think your mom only would be a doctor right now. She became a Catholic. She's one of the rare Jewish mothers, you know, who doesn't like obsessed with me. But she ended up getting a doctor and my brother was a lawyer. So, you know, she got the Jewish mother's dream. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that the really the transformative thing that she did is didn't stand in my way of what I was passionate about. And I was actually pretty motivated. I had a job as a kid. I was stocking shelves and a delicate contestant in and Dobbs Ferry, New York.

And I saved up my money because I really wanted to buy a telescope. And I realized that I, you know, I always say like, I'm in no way comparing myself to Galileo. But the mere fact that you can buy a little telescope like this. And I'm going to go into, you know, someday I'm going to start making my own telescopes because so many people ask me, what should I get from? I'm just get any sort of telescope. Do not point it at the sun. And anything that you can see is the exact same thing that Galileo saw 400 years ago. All the craters on the moon, all the phases of Venus.

the ears of Saturn, as he called them, and most importantly, the moons of Jupiter. And Lawrence, I don't know, I mean, I don't know if I've ever said this to you, but I don't think there's a way as a sign in all of science that you can replicate the visceral feeling of discovery that you can when you look through a telescope. You can't do it with a large Hadron Collider in your backyard. You can't do it looking at, you know, with an electron microscope. But if you look through a telescope, immediately get transformed to the feeling that Galileo had when he looked up. I think that's remarkable. I think it's

unparalleled in all of science. It could be. I mean, there's a difference, of course, that you know, the big difference is that Gallagher didn't know what he was going to see. But no, you know, I have a telescope here, which actually I just bought, I had a telescope as a young kid, but I bought a fairly large telescope,

which I never, I never bought one when I was living in Arizona because they lived in the city or when I lived in Oregon because you couldn't see the sky. I couldn't see the sky, but you couldn't see stars but when I moved here it's just so beautiful so I knew I I buy one and I and I a neighboring kid is now just gone to university our next-door neighbor saw me there and he he didn't know he'd never thought about it and brought a friend down

and I showed them you know moons of Jupiter and also Saturn and it was just like an awakening experience for them and but you know what the interesting thing is it's it's interesting I first realized this I remember I was on in I would I did it's a movie about Voyager once. And there was an, I went to Ireland, I think, and where the director was from. And there was an audience question. And it was only then that I kind of realized something

I should have realized before that every time a young person learned something, for them, it's the first time in the history of the world that's been understood. And we, you know, this set, we should treat it always as discovery rather than regurgitation and in the sense that it is always brand new. But you're absolutely right that in the telescope,

it's really visceral. And no matter how he pictures of Saturn you see, when you look at it through the telescope and you say it's there, it is, it still blows me away every time. Yeah, every time I look in a telescope.

You know, for me, I started, I bought a little marble notebook and I taped the pencil inside of it, and I would sketch out the Messier objects. And I was doing research, you know,

and I was doing research. And I wasn't on this track. You know, as I said, you know, growing up with parents divorced, you know, it was probably traumatic for me. I mean, I always like, you know, people are, you know, one of my sponsors on my podcast was this online therapy company.

I won't say the name of it in case you're all the sponsors. And I was like, I never really had therapy. You know, I'll give it a try, but I don't endorse things that I haven't used personally. So I started doing it. And I was like, well, what is he going to bring up? I mean, it's so obvious to talk about, you know, parents, divorce, et cetera. But really, you know, I'm in my 50s now or just turned 50 last year. And I started thinking, well, you know, like, is it going to be this goodwill hunting moment?

I have to like start sobbing over the phone on Zoom on this guy that I've never met, you know, and I feel like those are not really, you know, the cathartic moments that really, you know, the impactful moments, at least in my life and my career, it was these serendipitous things that really came up. And that discovery and whatever it felt like looking back on it makes sense. I was doing scientific research. I didn't know that's what it was. I had idea.

There was no internet in 1986, 87. There was no Google. So you couldn't look these things. So you had a struggle. You had to actually invest some effort. And from my case, I was like, the Sunday New York Times had this section, which they no longer do. And it was like the sky at night, basically, Cosmo section. And you could see these.

And I was like, holy crap. I saw Venus. Like, I thought you needed to have a spaceship. It was during the Voyager time. And that thrill, you know, it's not for everybody. But once you know that that is accessible, you can get teleported away from, I think, a lot of earthly concerns. And then it's kind of a rabbit hole that you just want to go down. And now it's easier than ever.

But I wonder, as I said, I wonder if that's a good thing. Like the fact that my kid, you know, one of my kids is obsessed with like perpetual motion machines and he sees something on YouTube and he just gets totally drawn into it. It's great. And he talks about electron plasmas. And he actually had a good suggestion, Lawrence. I want to get you as a particle physicist. He said that the electron really should be called the negatron. I want to start a movement to call the electron the negatron.

and the positron. It's probably a little bit late, but, but it's, you know, I think, you know, if it were logical, of course, you know, if it were logical, it would be called the positron. Because it was Ben Franklin who got it wrong, because really it's the carrier of electric charger, and that's the one you want to make, you want to call positive. They just got it wrong, and we're stuck with it now. So tell your son, tell your son it really should we call the positron and see what he said. Okay, that'll be really up enough people for.

Anyway, so your interest in science came through astronomy, which is a little bit different than me. I had a telescope, but I was kind of interested in lots of things. And I think I mostly, well, I use the telescope part-time to look at the sky. Let me put it that way. But what, so in school, did you gravitate to science subjects? Did you have good teachers? I did. I went to public schools, my whole life. I teach you to public school now. you know, that being said, I think, you know, public schools have changed a lot, at least here in the States. But back then, it was wonderful. They had in a library, they had Scientific American, a one's great magazine that featured many of your articles and expositorial statements.

Now I can't really bring myself to read most of it. Yeah, me too. But when I looked at when I would go to the library and really you had to subscribe to these magazines, Sky and Telescope, Astronomy. And I still subscribe to them to this day. For me, that was the, that was the entree. And then I had to learn about math. And because I think, you know, my, my lack of influence, my mother totally enumerate and my father just not being in the picture. And my stepfather being really out to, you know, just a workaholic, alcoholic maybe, even as well, having to deal with that at home was a big challenge and feeling like, well, you know, I wanted to have a, uh, an escape.

And for me, that escape became taking, you know, taking this telescope out. Now, then I realized I need to learn about math. And I wasn't put on the track to learn about math at that age. I was in the track to just to, you know, to graduate from high school without taking calculus. Wow. And so I had to kind of take on myself to learn trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus in the span of, you know, only two and a half years. So I could take the AP exam, which I did and did well on and got out of my first, you know, kind of required. classic case Western. So it was really self-motivation. I think just to learn more what is parallax.

How do we know these stars are that far away? What is redshift? And what can you see through this? It was around Hallie's Comet, the last appearance of Hallie's Comet. I really wanted to see that. I didn't think I'd be around for the next appearance and still another 50 years, 40 years away. So those things to me were, and you're right, most people didn't really care. I mean, if you look at Andromeda through a telescope and you're expecting, you know, like this picture behind me, if you're watching on YouTube, you know, you're going to be disappointed. And I think that's, you know, we never should have launched Hubble because it makes these, these pictures too accessible.

JWST should be canceled for many reasons. So, yeah, so I think, but, but I became kind of like an apologist, Lawrence. I was like, well, you see, there is a smudge there. And if you, if you use averted vision, you can actually see the equatoral bands of Jupiter. And people like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, it's just a peach colored schmunt. Yeah. But to me, I knew what I was, the eye that has a brain, as Homer Simpson would say,

that that was the thing that was so appealing to me. The connecting a hypothesis to an observation, writing in my logbook. And these are, you know, $50, $60 you could do that and make potentially an inroad to a career for a young person. Okay. Well, you're a great advertiser for getting a telescope and thinking about these things, but I'm intrigued. I want to know why were you drawn to, well, I guess it was a strong of me.

Why were you drawn to physics rather than. Did he ever think of doing biology or anything else, or was it always because of astronomy that you wanted to do? But you remember at Kayser is a professor Peter Pesh. Yeah. And he was a very famous astronomer. He's still alive. I heard some good news about him recently. He's still working, I think.

Anyway, he was a friend of another astronomer who was a friend of one of my cousins. And this astronomer's name is Dave Passacoff, who's very famous. He wrote the Menzel guide after Menzel died at Harvard. They wrote the field got Peterson God to the stars and planets. And that was like my Bible. I read that every night, you know, before I do observations. And so I became friends with Jay Passacoff or, you know, at least he was friends with my cousin. And he said, Case has a great program.

Go to Kate. So I went to Case. And this was about the time where I had worked over the summer. I'd saved up some money working in restaurants in Westchester County. And my stepfather got fired. He was unemployed. So we had just enough money to not qualify for financial aid my freshman year. and I was about to get kicked out of Case Western,

but for the generosity of donors and even the president, Agnar Pitta, who you probably remember. Ag was one of the few good university presidents I've ever known. And one of the few honorable university presidents I've ever known. Yes. Anyway, with courage, which is a very rare trait for university. I mean, I recruited me, so I have a special attraction.

Anyway. And he would meet with me. I was some freshman that, you know, had a decent GPA, but it was going to kick. And then he said, well, we have this program now. physicist. He was also, yeah, sorry, go on. That's right. Yeah. So he ended up saying, well, you did so well in your SATs that if you had applied one year later, we would have given you a full ride. So they ended up, he ended up cobbling together a full ride for me one way or another with some loans and, and support from an alumni. And so I ended up still remaining a case. But I figured, I need something practical. Astronomy is not practical. It's too, it's too much fun. Like, who's going to pay me to do this? Like being paid to be an ice cream taster or a wizard, you know, one of these roller coaster test. By the way, if you ever want to see like the definition of jaded, if you come to San Diego SeaWorld at 830 in the morning, there's a guy who gets paid to ride the, uh, the Atlantis

roller coaster, which is like one of the most terrifying roller coasters in the world. This guy has to sit in the front seat all by himself for liability reasons. I once brought my binox there with my kids and I zoomed in on his face and he was like this. Like going at a 45 degree angle at like 200 miles and a, I'll be like freak. This guy is so jaded. He does it every day. Anyway, well, it's the first thing you do at work. It can't be exciting.

Yeah, anyway. Yeah, exactly. That's right. So I ended up thinking, well, I need something practical. Let me do engineering. So I switched to civil engineering. I hated it. It was terrible.

And then that summer, like stepfather, Ake Heeding, again, he gave me some great advice. He said, well, why don't you do something that's like a mixture between practicality and philosophical, you know, kind of intrigue that you're interested in. Physics is a good blend between the two. And so I switched my major to physics. And I never look back. And yeah, so I went to, when I went to Brown, I was a physics, you know, Ph. My department is now switching to half astronomy and half physics. But I've been a physicist my whole life. Well, you know, you indirectly got, I think, the right route. I was going to ask, in a tree me, having been, I was a professor, obviously, I was chair of the physics department, but I was also in the astronomy department there. And Case was one of the few universities that had an undergraduate major. you're in astronomy.

That's right. And I tell, and when students ask me who I want to be astronomers, and I say, do an undergraduate degree in physics because that's the right preparation. So I was really intrigued that you, here's what you're interested in astronomy, but you went through physics, which is exactly the right thing to do because that's the right background. It used to be, you see, before you were born, maybe, but when you're younger than me, but it used to be that astronomy is quite different. It's kind of like botany in the sense that it sort of was labeling things and now

Now astronomy is essentially become astrophysics and and merge with, and so the distinction between astronomy and physics is very different. But when I first started, it was, it was really a distinction and it was interesting to me because I became a professor in both departments from the time I taught at Yale onward, but I never had, I never once took an astronomy course in my life, not once. Yeah, but because it was. I didn't know, and I'm teaching, I teach astronomy, I teach cosmology. I never took these classes.

Yeah, physics is the right preparation. And all, by the way, I also used to, when I was chair at Case, I used to tell the potential engineering students, because Case is primarily in engineering school, I used to tell them that, you know, we created a program in engineering physics because I used to say, that's the best of both worlds because, you know, you get a physics training and you can become an engineer, and if you really need the job. And by the way, I don't know if you know this, but a large fraction of people who are called engineers in, in, in industry are actually trained as physicists. So they don't, Oh, yeah. I would say if you want something soldered right, you know, the last person you call is an electrical engineer.

It's the most flexible. I have zero unemployment. I've graduated 18 students over the years and four of them are faculty. And not one of them is unemployed. And it's the most flexible job. Some of them work for Amazon. Sure. It's a great training. Yeah. No, I mean, I have students in all of those. Yeah. So I used to argue when I was recruiting that physics is a great training. But I won't do that recruiting spiel here. But anyway, you locked in. into the right department, and the physics department at case was a great department and when I was very pleased to become chair there. And a long tradition, especially of spending a lot of its energy and undergraduate education, that one of the things that I was very proud of when I was there, but it was a tradition

that had been created before I was there, is that we generally tried to put really good teachers, especially at the earlier levels, and not always have sort of lecturers teach the big introductory courses. When I started, there were some, but we moved it away eventually to where we could get our really good faculty. Because that's where they really should be as sort of motivating young people. Anyway, it was nice.

You graduated the year of the year I arrived. And so just we sort of passed like ships in the night. But and then, and then you, as I say, you went on to that, that unknown Ivy League University, Brown, I think it's called. Yeah. And anyway, but before before and then before we get to your physics career, I do, you did touch on this interesting conversion. You made two conversions, religious conversions. You went from being a Catholic to be an atheist and then sort of from being an atheist to being Jewish. Of course, being Jewish and being an atheist is not inconsistent. But I wanted to, I couldn't,

I don't want to dwell on this, but I'm intrigued what caused you as someone who would, you know, had been influenced by people and whoever they were and maybe was one of them. But to, I think it's hard to be a scientist and not be an atheist. It's not impossible because there are a lot of good, there are a number of good scientists who aren't. But that, and it's never sort of a catharsis, usually a small sort of a drift when you begin to realize you don't need the fairy tales, that the real world is pretty interesting without them. But why don't you talk about that, why you decided to sort of then, if you wish, adopt Judaism, do? Yeah, I mean, again, I think the, Revelation, if you like to call it that, hello, it's not meant in this way,

was that I had rejected something as a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old. Actually, this is the way the syllogism worked for me. I thought I could reject Judaism after rejecting Christianity. In other words, I felt like Christians are very smart and they're going to know things. And so they must have known what came before them, namely the Old Testament, the Torah, as we call it. And so they must have gone through and reconciled. and rectified all the issues and the problems and the flaws and said, we're going to improve it.

You know, so Christianity in some sense is, you know, Judaism 2.0, this is my logic. And per force, if I can reject Christianity, then, you know, all the more so can I record, you know, a fortiori, as they say, I could reject Judaism. So I really didn't think about it from the time that I gave up Catholicism, which was mainly due to this, this absurd treatment of Galileo, which by the 1980s, and in fact, he's never been pardoned, formal. by the Catholic Church.

He was ruled by John Paul, who was a great man. And he ruled that he was correct in 1989. I think it wasn't an encyclical. But he'd never forgate, I mean, never pardoned him. So I felt in the 1980s when I was like, well, how can I be adhering to somebody, something that would torture? I thought they tortured him. Little did I know it.

You know, Bernie Madoff would easily gladly trade the prison cell that he had, you know, for the prison cell that, you know, quote unquote, Galileum. had, which I hosted a conference and his villa in our Chetri outside of Florence in 2015 for the 100th cent of tent, many, all of relativity, which of course, Galileo started, right? So anyway, it wasn't that bad a place to do your bid. Galileo's daughter had a much harder time, in fact, than Galileo. But anyway, yeah. Both of them, yeah.

And so, but how could some, how could I adhere to somebody that tortured this, this person? And of course, you go through all the things, well, like, you know, Judaism condones, you know stoning children and doing this and doing that. But I realized, I really knew nothing about Judaism. I actually knew more about Islam because it was so prominent in the early, 2000s. It was impossible to not be affected by it.

And I knew a lot about Catholicism, Christianity, because I had converted and baptized, confirmed, and altered one. So, but I knew nothing about Judy. I didn't know how to read Hebrew. I never studied for, you know, all I knew is that on Hanukkah, I used to remember getting a pair of husky trousers instead of getting, you know, an Atari or Commodore 64, you know, so like my Gentile friends. So I felt like it was almost a negative to be associated with Judaism, but I knew nothing about it. And in my 20s, I start to think, well, Judaism sure is playing this big role in an outsized impact on society.

And, you know, at least behooves me to learn something about the religion of my birth, even if I will ultimately reject it. but to reject it without any confrontation as an adult. You know, Einstein used to say that he never asked questions like, what would it happen if I traveled at the speed of light and looked in a mirror to his father when he was five years old? And it was good that he didn't ask his father that question because his father would have told him the wrong answer because it took Einstein and senior to actually come with the right answer.

So he said it was blessing that I never asked my father these big questions. And I feel like for me, the richness of Judaism, you know, when you all you learn is like you said this miserable training for your bar mitzvah and getting embarrassed as your voice cracks on the stage in front of all your friends and your and your and your bubby he's going to pinch your cheeks too hard and yeah you might get some money those are very superficial and i felt like there was a depth to even reading even as an atheist i think as an atheist you can say there is wisdom in in traditions that that last for thousands of years there are conflicts there are challenges but i think that the main thing so warrants like one thing you

know, that I think is a misconception about Judaism is how much is really present in Judaism in what you and I do, which is cosmology or particle physics. So I once looked at the Torah, the Old Testament, and I look, how many sentences are there that have anything to do with science in the Torah, not the Talmud, which is 2700 pages long in the second, but in the Torah itself. So there's at most 32 verses that have to do with the first seven days. And by the way, of course there are things that make no sense scientifically, like the sun was created on the fourth day. Like what is that? But they're not stupid, right? I know you've called them Bronze Age peasants and stuff. But let's just stipulate that there's a rich. They weren't stupid. They were just ignorant.

That's a big difference. Well, of course, but ignorant about science is one thing. If it's a science book, I would say, if I look to a brief history of time or the physics of Star Trek, if I look to it, like, how am I going to raise my kids or how am I going to deal with, you know, peacefulness in my home? or it's not you didn't write it for that i didn't write my books as a guide to how to raise my children or for wisdom that could last presumably for for some time and so i start to look well what are these things like stoning a kid that's barbaric that's that's that's disgusting that's preposter's how could anybody adhere to this and that's in the old testament that's not that's not some abstract thing that appears yeah it's right there was the what was the context of that

so i started to look into it well let me let me look through the sources of it so first of all Jews are incredibly good at documenting and scholastic research and they had train of of custody for all these things going back. There's not one recorded instance where a child was ever killed by his parents in all of recorded case law, which is what the Talmud is. And I said, well, that's interesting. Why would you have a law that has no purpose that you never did? And I realized, even to this day, Lawrence, there are places in the Middle East in certain parts of Africa where kids are killed and they're killed by their parents. And so it wasn't the parents. The law actually says you will take your kid and you'll bring him to the Sanhedron, which is the court, and they will stone the

kid. Okay. So what does that do? Well, it took the ability to kill children out of parents' hands for the first time. I said, that's pretty interesting. Also, divorce. Divorce was not common. You're being quite charitable. You know, right? They were like chattel, right? They could be bought and sold his late. Yeah. Right. So what did Judaism do? So I have a document hanging in my kitchen, which is my prenuptial agreement. And it tells all the obligations that I owe my wife. And if I don't give it, she has to be able to be permitted to marry another man. That was never done in the ancient world. In fact, in this very moment, there aren't people that are subject to basically chattel slavery and so forth. And I start to ask, of course, you still realize that the fact that there's not a

similar document that where you'd be permitted. I mean, the fact that she'd be permitted, Many people would say those words are offensive today, but in any case. Well, whoa, but the alternative was I kill her, right? No, no, I know. I know you're absolutely right. It may, I mean, I think that's the important point. We live in the society nowadays. We're fixated in the fact that people, gee, people behave badly 50 years ago, 100 years ago,

a thousand years ago. But you're absolutely right. Compared to the alternative, it was much better. And you can't hold, you know, you can't judge people by modern standards. a hundred years a century ago or a millennia ago and that's that's like something i wish young people understood now but they don't right no they they want to say that the world started spinning you know the day that they were born and all these people that came before them if they had one fault and i'd like to say well do you eat meat you know because in a hundred years you could be subject to the exact

you know Barack Obama eats meat right so it's the picture of eating five guys hamburgers right yeah so like is he going to be canceled someday he could be and so i feel like that's very dangerous to say that. So when when when when I was a kid and maybe be even before there was a don't trust anyone over 30. Yeah. I trust a book that's 30 centuries old. Like I remember reading I read I don't know if you've ever reread Stephen Hawking's books. Of course you know everything in it. But but but he talks about inflation as being proven. M theory being proven and it's it's a vindication of all his ideas with hard all it. It's all nonsense. And I said I said to myself he really would be happy with his books being relevant a hundred years from now.

Yeah. And I would be terrified. The science that you and I do now and talk about in our works is still like cutting edge and has never been overthrown. That would be very depressing to me. And so I look at, I didn't close the loop on the, on this like just the accounting. So there's 30 verses in the, out of 30,000 verses in the entire Old Testament, plausibly it could say is related to science in some way or another or cosmology even

or Adam and Eve, whatever. So that's point. percent right so one in a thousand so if you looked at the book and it said you know great NBA stars and you started reading through that book and 99 of the thousand pages were about like the Oliver north trial and this book is not titled like it's not correct like this is idiotic like it's i was misled so i think there there is a natural and people talk about science and religion and conflict i think that's kind of stupid i mean honestly they're too completely there are useful things that that you can glean, I don't think you can glean any wisdom necessarily from, you know, from the

Feynman lectures. I think you can gain a tremendous knowledge. Oh, I think you can gain some wisdom. I think we disagree. In fact, I would argue get as much wisdom if you read it carefully and critically as you might from the Bible. But anyway. Well, look at you, Lawrence. I was very touched when you when you wrote about your mother. Your mother was a tremendous influence on you. You don't write so much about your father. Certainly I wrote a lot more about my father. But I know that the Fifth Commandment in this, you know, schema of things is honor your, honor your parents. Honor your father. Actually says, it says, fear your mother and honor your father.

Because it's kind of the natural inclination. Like kids kind of tease their father. I was sure. Yeah, exactly. And the word is is cavode. It means to make heavy. It means to like be in fear and awe and turn. Now, I don't know that the man who treated me the way that my father treated me,

if he necessarily deserved the filial devotion that I showed to him in his waning moments of his life, which was strenuous for me and for my older brother. I don't think I would have done that if I didn't feel like there was an injunction in the commandment. Remember, it says, honor your mother and your father so that your days will be long on this earth. Now, what does that mean that you're going to live longer? I don't think so. I think it means your days will be filled with more life. And I think you honoring your mother, the way that you did and you do posthumously,

I think your life is improved from that. I think it's inarguable. I think that you being in the sun. Now, you can say you didn't need the Bible. But I think, again, you came from a rich tradition of people in our religion. I don't think our religion is better. People argue, oh, the number of Nobel Prize winners. I think that's nonsense.

I think it's racist. But there is a tradition related to argumentation. As I said, when you were on my podcast, the word Israel means fights against God. It's the exact opposite of Islam. So I feel like that's our tradition. And for me at least, maybe I'm not as sophisticated as you or something. But I felt like having a code where you're saying from a very early age, putting things in the mouth of your children and teaching to them in a way that they can understand a value system that has a preponderance in my estimation of good deeds and goodness on earth, I think it's a good thing. So I use it mainly to answer a long winded way of answering your question.

I view it as practical. It has made my life better to have a code, at least to measure and calibrate against as we do as a scientist. You need some standard to compare against unless you're making it up yourself. I didn't feel I was sophisticated enough to make up my own moral code in my life and my children. So it does provide a useful calibration standpoint. Sure. Look, look, my point is that, you know, whatever floats your boat,

you know, you take it as if religion helps someone, and as long as doesn't get in the way and lead them to irrational and seemingly evil behavior, I have no problem with it. I also especially have no problem with it if people realize, hey, this is allegory, and as you do. And I mean, there is a real conflict in science and religion in the sense that when there are scientific statements, they're generally wrong in the Bible. But that's okay.

You're when you, your point, you weren't the first person to point out the Bible is in a scientific document. St. Augustine certainly did. But so, you know, if it works for you, my, My whole point, however, is, and I'm sure it's my whole point, but one of the key ideas I like to get across for people is that, is, you know, just like Sam Harris seems to think you need to do psychedelics to understand the world, which is nonsense, you don't, if it works for you fine, and if it's productive and leads to good behavior, great, but you don't need it. You don't need it to be

moral, you don't need it to lead a good life, you don't need it to come to moral conclusions. And that's the biggest problem with religion is that it's kind of usurped or monopolized morality, that it's viewed in a modern society. If you're not religious, you're not moral. I just don't want to conflate, you know, like fatwas and a coercive Islamist. In Judaism, as you may know, it's forbidden to proselytize. I mean, that's one, and it was forbidden from the Romans by force, but nowadays it's not, like, we're not forbidden to, I can, you know, reconvert you back to Judaism. I could do that and then be perfectly legal in America.

But we don't do it. In fact, you're supposed to turn away converts. A lot of converts, women convert to marry Jewish men and vice versa. Although it's a little more rare. You're actually supposed to be turned away. You're actually supposed to be turned away. I think you're proselytosic right now. So we'll go to another area.

Anyway, it was interesting to see what your rationale is. And I know, my brother happens to be a very religious Jew. So these conversations are not, not new to me. I just, I just, I don't quite under, you talk about the wisdom of ancient books, and there is some wisdom, but there's, but I, but most ancient books, I tend to think we've actually progressed, even in our wisdom compared to back then, and therefore I tend to, although I, I, I'm an avid student of history and I love ancient history and I used to read it. And by the way,

when I was younger, I read all the religious books because I just read everything. But, but, but, But I don't think we have to, I think it's, again, a worry when people say the wisdom of the ancients, because they seem to think that it's all there, but I think that we've discovered a lot of wisdom in the... Well, I look, here's just one last example, and you'll cut me off of from proselytizing. In the Bible, there's no positive stories of family dynamics in the entire book of Genesis. There's not one story of a loving husband and a wife. Now, why is that? I mean, shouldn't most religious texts start off with the godly nature of these, of their

progenitors, right? Even in Christianity, right? Not in ancient Roman and Greek history. They have great gods because those gods were just behaved like humans and they were pretty vicious. They would have all these boybles. So what happened to teach? Well, most families, as Tolstoy said, right? All unhappy families

are miserable in their own ways. But I think it's part of the human condition that you didn't have to be, you could achieve greatness if your brothers tried to kill you, if your sons tried to deceive you. These are things that happen. I look at a Tower of Babel story now, Lawrence.

I see so many power. I mean, I'm not literal, but like with people rewriting language and using language as weapons, physical weapons, and what is the reason that they say? They wanted to make a name for themselves. They wanted to take down God. Okay, so that's a matter of allegor. But they wanted to do it to make a name for, they want to build a tower out of composite materials so that they can make a name.

And then what does God do? He disperses them and confuses them. and confuses them and their language is dispersed. So now they're going to be talking in gobbledygook. I see so much of that as relevant today, at least from my perspective on a college campus, there's so much newspeak going on right now. I don't think even the Bible comes close to covering.

Well, there you go. You just point out to another reason why God was not, was, is no one to be, to be worshiped because God wanted to get in the way of knowledge and make a name for humans to make a name for themselves, in my opinion. But in any case, so look, there, you can extract wisdom and there I extract wisdom in Hans Christian,

some of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales. Wherever you get it, it's fine. Whatever literature or whatever you, look, and the Bible is literature, and it reflects a perception as its time, and I read it when I read it, I read it, I think, well, I was curious, more than knowledgeable, but if I were going to read it again, it's sort of a reflection of its time,

and therefore I find it fascinating to see what humans were thinking about, just like, as I said, just like I happen to have Clutarch's lives down here, and I love to read them every now and then, because seeing both the continuity of thought and the difference in thought is fascinating for me. So anyway, no problem. The last thing I would say, Lawrence, and I know you do, I want to move on too, but I think it would be fascinating because I do see you, I know you call yourself a militant atheist. No, I don't.

Not anymore. I call myself an apathist. Yeah, yeah, I used to. Because my friends, yeah, but I think now I'm more because I'm an apathist because I don't think God's relevant to anything. But anyway, go on. But no, I think there is a virtue in, so there's something called the Habrusa, a partner method of studying where two people sit down and we just go back and forth. And these commentaries go back thousands of years. Like you said, we're not going to be the first ones. But we're going to approach it from a specific point of view. And I have had, you know, kind of at least from a purely, you can take it purely literally, literarily.

but going through stories Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, these are obviously very rich and impactful on Western civilization, but I even think that they'd be interesting to you, not just from like, oh, I'm going to study sociology of the world and world history, but actually going through it and saying like, well, what does it mean when the serpent, like, says, did God really say you couldn't touch the tree? Oh, no, no, no.

And then the woman that you gave me, like, told me to eat the tree. No, she didn't do. like and and obviously they knew that there were these contradictions i mean they're not stupid as you have said they're not stupid they just knew what their time they're ignorant of scientific it okay fine i'm just saying i would love someday to do this havrusa talmudic description because i think it would enrich as it as it rich my life not trying to convert or proselyt but i do think it would be to see the modern resonances i think it would be it would be fun it would at least be fun that's all i think it would be fun but my point is it'd be fun with almost any ancient book or any modern book

to do the same thing. So there you go. I mean, I would love to talk about Cash 22 with you, which I still think is a much more motivating and much more, had a book that had much more impact on me than the Bible. But any case. Okay.

But no, look, this was an interesting, and I appreciate your discussion in this regard. And, but let's go from the ridiculous of the sublime and talk about physics. And I want to, and so you went to do your PhD in physics, but you started, your PhD, in the cosmic microwave background, which has been the area of research for your whole career. What was that just an accident of who happened to be a supervisor, good supervisor, Peter

Timby, I guess, at Brown or, or did you, did you think about that? Did that, I mean, clearly it merged your interests in the sense that it was physics, but it was applied to astronomy in a sense. So what caused you to get interested in the CMB? Well, I always, what, I should say, for those. Yeah. Yeah. So I always, I always, wanted to like tinker and like build stuff i had an old volks wagon you know i used to take it apart and put it back together so i always like working with my hands i knew i probably didn't get started earlier enough in my math education um to to really go into theoretical physics although it has always interests me and i continue to try to maintain it at least a conversant nature with theory although i don't do theories new

theories novel theories but i i pride myself with that i know a lot more about theory than many of my experimental colleagues. And I wanted to do something, you know, impactful. And it was right after when I started graduate school, was right after Kobe released their results in 1992, is a year after that. And my, and I started at Brown with a young, there was a young professor there, just come from Princeton where a lot of Kobe had been designed by David Wilkinson, who was my grand advisor, who was his PhD advisor. And we, and we hit it off. He was very young and energetic and he had made the first proposal to go after the polarization of the microarray background. People hadn't thought about that. Yeah, it was early on. No one was talking about it at the time,

at least few people were. That's right. Yeah. And so I got connected with him and he also was, somehow he got connected with a student of the great Yaakov Zeldovich, who had emigrated to the UK named Alexander Polnarev. And Polmarov had made some of the first predictions about what gravitational waves would do to the cosmic microwave background's polarization. So this is way before we even discovered that the CNB was definitively polarized. And so I thought this was so exciting. And it was before we really had an inkling that inflation, the primordial epoch of hyper-accelerated expansion,

could impact the cosmic microwave background with a particular class of polarization categorizes now called B-mod polarization. So it was long before that. But I found it so fascinating that you could actually measure with a radio telescope that we could build on the roof of the Barrison Holly building at Brown, and we could actually set some limits or maybe even make a detection. And lo and behold, this became my thesis project looking for the large angular scale polarization of the micro-rate background.

I even spent a couple of months with Alexander Polnarev in Queen Mary, and we did the first modern treatment of what the expectation would be for the polarization of the micro-ray background in 1995. And we made predictions what we'd see if there were gravitational waves, if there was reanization, which is, which was still, you know, kind of unexpected at that time. And so it's fascinating to me that you could use a small radio telescope, a couple hundred thousand dollar project and make a deep impact, especially right after Kobe had done this, you know, really, really incredible work detecting for the very first time using the exact same technology that I was using, except mine was polarized, highly polarized, sensitive. we could maybe make a detection, maybe as big as what Kobe had discovered. And of course, we're still waiting in some sense to make those detections. But the stakes have grown ever higher in this field, just kind of paying out like a stockholm

slot machine with Nobel Prizes. And that became a big moment. I wondered how long would take you to get. I wondered how long would take the word Nobel Prize because you're fixing. Yeah, right. But we'll talk about that later. Actually, I keep trying to get you over this fixation with that. But anyway, I want to parse this more carefully because this, to me, this is obviously

an important area. It's obviously personally important to me. And it's kind of fascinating to me when I think about that you having left Case right around that time. And when I moved to Case, I had just, I'd been fascinated by Kobe. In fact, had been tried when I taught at Yale to get Yale to hire George Smoot, but I couldn't convince them to do it. But, and ran a big, actually,

Fran, the first workshop that brought together theorists and experimentalists on the Cosmicrow background when I was at Yale. They didn't used to talk to each other. And then that was the workshop where they decided to start doing things in multiple moments and developing a term. You know, the question is, what could you measure? See, no measurements have been made. So what could you measure that you could interpret in terms of theory?

And it was a fascinating meeting. And Dick Bond was there. And so for me, as a, as a, you know, wasn't my main area, but I, the need to bring theorists and experimentalists together was so ripe because the minute you did get a measurement, it didn't mean anything unless you could, unless you could sort of say how you could compare things with theory. And it was fascinating to watch. And obviously, I was interested in inflation. So we, we just around then wrote papers, but never think you have polarization, but how to distinguish inflation from other things.

And I worked with my student Martin White at the time, a bunch of things. But I want to take back because I want to, what I was working on is irrelevant. I want people to be able to understand what the significance of this is. So we have to take people back and I want to parse a little more carefully because polarization, the experiments you're doing and are still involved in could be obviously incredibly important.

As you know, I was actually on your Bicek experiment, as you know, I was asked to write the companion sort of paper talking about it's significant. So I want to get people to where Bicep was and what it did and what it didn't do and why and why it was interesting. So let's step back a little bit. So the Cosmike microwave background is a, as I'm sure I've talked about in this before, but it's probably worth talking about again, is a signal of. of what the universe looked like when it was about 300,000 years old.

It's the most direct bit of data that, as again, I've also said in other people, but it turned cosmology from an art into a science. When I was, back when I taught it, when you were an undergraduate, when I was a case, and at Yale before that, was convinced you'd never be able to measure any fundamental cosmological quantities that astrophysics would get in the way. And the cosmic way background changed that, because it's a direct signal. So why do you talk a little bit about it? You're the experimentalist.

Yeah. So I think that is the important thing. You know, there are the people don't really realize that you can do experiments in cosmology because we typically think of experiments as having a control and then modifying some variable and then you get the impact of the output. But of course, with even astronomical objects, any out, you can't change the temperature of the sun very easily or change the cross section of the neutrons inside of the sun. So, so how do you do an experiment, and especially when you only have one thing, or at least when I was a kid, we thought there was only one universe. That's what uni means, right?

So the conception of the CMB is, it was fascinating to me that you could build an instrument, effectively a radio telescope that sees the microwave wavelength radiation, which is the fossil relic heat, the oldest heat or radiation in the universe. That's the leftover schmutz that comes from the fusion of the lightest elements in the periodic table, and lasted for at least of 371,000 years when the universe was basically a plasma of protons and electrons and none of my favorite croutons floating around. But it was very simple physics, which is very useful for physicists to make predictions, a plasma, fourth state of matter, sometimes it's called.

And its properties are very, very simple and easy to predict in a certain sense, acting under the force of gravity with a certain amount of dark matter. And people don't usually realize that dark matter's, you know, first evidence that was really quantitative, as Lawrence said, as a science, was coming from the fluctuations in the CMB and their magnitude, not only from rotation curves of galaxies. So there's very simple ingredients, dark matter, a couple, two different types of ordinary matter and photons.

That's all you need to make, to make this leftover signal, which was detected by Penzias and Wilson, 1965, serendipitously, they weren't looking for it. They found it by accident. And those discoveries I claim are the purest and most important in scientific history. And that was certainly one of them. Another one was dark energy, which you, of course, weren't intimately involved with, at least in the theoretical side of things. But anyway, so this plasma is very simple.

So you want to mine scientists are simple-minded people. We want to mine as much as you can from as little input information as possible and make as many predictions about what you'd see. So these fluctuations also can imprint. When light interacts with matter, it can become polarized, which means that it'll have a preferential axis of orientation or oscillation. Waves of electromagnetic character have a polarization, which is the plane of oscillation. So if you're watching this on YouTube, I've got a polarizer here. It's reflecting my camera. I've got another one here.

And I can rotate them at right angles to each other. and one will completely obscure what the other one is transmitting, and it will go through alternating cycles every 90 degrees. There's 90 degrees. It becomes completely opaque. And then it goes another 90 degrees, 180. It goes back to being transparent. That is the sine qua non of polarization.

And it's what allows us to build effectively polarizing sunglasses, but for microwaves. And they allow us to look into the CMB and see the subtle imprint of the interoperative. of the interaction of light with matter. So the river behind you has a glare because there's sunlight striking it and it's reflecting some of the polarization and it's absorbing some of the polarization as well. That's why when you go out on the river, you bring polarized sunglasses. When I go fishing, I have polarized, yeah, so you can see under the water.

Yeah. Yeah. So that removes the glare, which now your eye has more sensitive contrast and it can see into the water. That's exactly why we use polarized sunglasses. So what's the lesson? Polarization is a tracer of the scattering of unpolarized light, in this case from the sun hitting the river, off of matter. In that case, the water, the dielectric material water behind you. The same thing can happen in a plasma in the early universe. And instead of tracing the distribution of where the sun is and how bright the sun is, it's tracing the fundamental composition of the matter, the electrons, the protons, and the dark matter. And the, the, the, the, the properties of potentially other forms of radiation, in this case, gravitational waves,

which could be suffusing the early universe at the same time that the CMB is produced. That's what we're looking for it. Those telltile interaction. And for me, and to add, that was a beautiful description. And it's an incredibly important probe, and the fact that you can do it still amazes me. I'm always amazed by what experimentalists and observers can do,

especially since I usually underestimate them. It just seems so difficult. But for me, as a theorist, what was most interesting was not just the fact that, you know, if polar, astrophysics involves a lot of dirty stuff and yasha, the light can interact with matter and you learn about, you learn a great deal about astrophysical environments, but as someone who was a particle physicist and was sort of interested in fundamental things,

what amazed me early on was that it could not just end up being polarized, but it could start out being polarized because it could have been created in a way that, because of properties of what happened in the early universe with inflation. And in fact, I don't know if I ever talked about this, but, you know, the first paper, because my student Martin and I were, White and I were thinking about these things about how you could probe stuff. When Kobe first came out, Kobe, as you know, measured actually what we call the quadrupole antisotropy, that is sort of the, there's north, south, east, and west,

and you can sort of compare the east-west and isotropy of the microwave background with the north-south if you want to think of it that way and and have having already been thinking about gravitational waves the paper we wrote showed at the time that you could explain the entire Kobe signal as as a quadruple signal from gravitational waves and and we worked it out what the what the scale of inflation would be and it was what the scale of inflation we thought you know was was reasonable at the time and and it was and it's funny because up to that point no one I think had been thinking about whether the gravitational waves could give a signal on the microwave background. But, you know, it could get, but because gravitational waves are,

are what are called basically quadrupole waves. They are, they, they, there's two things they can do. They can imprint directly a quadripoenae and it ought to be or, and so that's what we looked at, or the other alternative is they can produce a polarization signal that reflects that quadripoly and srophobic. And it took a while later, what people said, hey, maybe you could try and measure that directly and see gravitation waves from the beginning of time, which I think is what the bicep experiment that you eventually became involved in was aimed to do. It was not so much to look at the

scattering of light of matter, but to try and look for these primordial modes, which would be the first really direct signature of something that happened almost at the beginning of time. And that's the most exciting thing. And because light or gravitational way, any form of radiation, as you know, but for your listeners and my listeners, they'll be tuning into this. As the universe expands, all weight links and all forms of radiation dilute as a very steep power of the expansion or scale factor, the fourth power. They expand their number density decreases as the universe doubles in size. The volume goes up by eight.

So their number density goes down by eight. So that's three powers of the expansion. But also their wavelength gets lengthened and therefore their energy goes down by another power. of the scale factor. So it actually dilutes as the fourth power. That means if you're trying to measure these waves of gravity from the earliest epoch of the universe's history called inflation, if inflation exists and there's a huge debate right now,

it's getting resuscitated and getting, maybe we'll get into that alternatives to inflation, sorry, that that expansion factor would be a trillion times a thousand to the fourth power harder to measure today. So I start to realize in early 2000, along with your late friend and my great mentor, Andrew Lang, another father figure in my life. So this is a story of, you know, father figures is maybe the right title for this episode. So he came into my life at a very propitious time for me that he believed in me.

He was at Caltech, a Wonderkin. And you were a postdoc there at that time. So he was a postdoc. Yeah. Yeah, I'd been fired from my first postdoc at Stanford University or I was working for Sarah Church. who was a professor there. I like to say Galileo and I both got fired by the church. But she did me a huge solid favor by getting me in touch with her former postdoc mentor as Andrew Lang. And I accepted the job offer before the words came out of his mouth.

And I realized how privileged I was to get to work with him. And this is right after the boomerang experiment, which you wrote about many universe from nothing and another projects you've worked on. And his, you know, he was basically short track for a Nobel Prize. in fact, his wife or his ex-wife, widow, won the Nobel Prize in 2018 in chemistry. But for the chance to work with this great mentor who had just come off the spectacular achievement along with Palo Di Bernardis and my colleague, Paul Richards, to measure the fluctuations, the antisotropy in the microarrate background, definitively, you know, after my colleague Lyman Page and Amber Miller and Mark Debblin had measured it with the Toko experiment, They had hints and boomerang and maxima came out. There's a revolution in the spring of 2020 of 2000, rather 22 years ago.

And then to get a job offer to work with him was just spectacular. And he and David Baltimore, who is the president at Caltech, another president with Vision, decided that they would back this idea that I had come up with on the tennis courts with my colleague, Jamie Bach. And that was to build a refracting telescope, not unlike this glass refracting telescope, here, except one that had instead of retinal cells attached to it, superconducting bilometers or semiconductor ballometers, depending on the incarnation. And we built this experiment called Bicep, which is just a 30 centimeter diameter diameter

primary aperture lens. And we took it down to the South Pole where we had a base, and we've had a base there for 65 years or so, at the very bottom of the world, which happens to be the driest, highest continent on Earth. And why is that important? Well, in the atmosphere, there are water molecules over every part of the Earth. And water is a very efficient absorber of microwaves as anyone who's ever heated something up knows in an oven. So you'd like to be in space, but space costs 100 or a thousand times more expensive than doing an equivalent experiment on the ground. And with polarization learns, you can do an experiment on the ground almost as well as you can from space. In some ways, better,

because you can't launch our current experiment called the Simon's Observatory has a six meter diameter primary mirror, which is bigger than the JWST. And that had to be origami unfolded in space. We couldn't do that for less than tens of billions of dollars. We can do it in Chile for a mere $100 million. So that's quite exciting. So there are things you can do on Earth that you can't do in space. And the penalty you pay is you get excess emission from our atmosphere that's unpolarized,

thankfully, but it makes the experiment take longer, but my colleagues at Princeton and Penn and Berkeley are so exquisitely ingenious at making detectors that we can basically carpet a six-meter diameter cryostat filled with detectors at 0.1 degree above absolute zero. And we believe we can go after these signals with unprecedented accuracy in just the next two years. We get first light in April of 2024. Okay. Well, and the fact that you, you know, the right place and that and that Andrew was interested in the idea of polarization, which, you know, again, you were at the right place. You've done that as a graduate student and trying. And, you know, Bicep, for people who weren't around, and one of the most exciting moments was

when I heard the rumors and then I got contacted by one of the heads of Bicep to read the paper before it came out so that I could write a companion paper for the American Physical Society associated with physical review. Was this amazing, for me, one of been, was an amazing, remarkable discovery and the greatest surprise that, that it claimed to measure these primordial waves from inflation, which would change everything. It would be the first direct observable of what happened at the beginning of time, and it was incredibly exciting. And it was unveiled in an incredibly exciting way. And it's gotten a lot of bad press as if they did something wrong. But I still don't. I think they were pretty careful about they just didn't. They had no,

it was it was not that they misquoted what they did. It was that they weren't aware of a, of a source of noise. And nor did they expect there to be, at least maybe you can correct me, but as far as I can tell, nor did anyone necessarily expect there to be noise that could mimic the signal that they saw. And it was only later that that that that so why do you take take us through that unfortunate. And I don't mean unfortunate. On my opinion, they did everything right, except they just didn't realize that there was another source of. Yeah, we didn't make a blunderer. So, so, you know, I was involved. So what happened as I invented Bicep 1, which we later called Bicep 1. And it was an acronym that's a different background imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization. And just like

your iPhone, every couple of years. years, you upgrade the number of megapixels and has and so forth. And so we upgraded it from 49 detectors to 256 detectors by making transition from the detectors that were made of little semiconductor chips up into superconducting chips. And these superconducting chips are not more sensitive, but they're easier to fabricate. They're all what's called lithograph, like in an Intel or Apple semiconductor fabrication. They can all be made on a planer array. and so they're functionally as sensitive, but they can be mass produced.

And because you win, not as the number of detectors, but as the square root of the number of detectors, if you quadruple the number of detectors, you only reduce the sensitivity or improve it by a factor of two. So we went from 49, call it 50 to 250. So we had a factor of square root of five improvement by making what was called Bicep 2. Everything else was the same. Same telescope optics, same cryogenics, same. location, same observing patch on the sky. And we had known from a very long time, and this was

Andrew's philosophy, Andrew Lang, that we would observe until we saw something. And then once we saw something, we'd go back and see what it was. And Bicep 2 had an Achilles heel, which is that it only observed at one frequency. And that's fine if you only have one unknown, which is the Cmb itself. Or if you can convince yourself that the CMB is the only signal that you're seeing. As soon as you add in another signal, be it contamination from the atmosphere, say, which we could roll out, or from the galaxy that we're inhabiting, we are peering out through a galaxy that's a bubbling. And Lawrence Krause's words, a bubbling bitches brew, protons, electrons, synchotron radiation, dust particles and everything else.

And by the way, Lawrence, I want to give a special offer to your podcast listeners. If they subscribe to my mailing list, which is briankeen.com, I will send them, if they're in the U.S., I'm sorry, I can't send it to dangerous locations like Canada. But if you'll subscribe, I will send you the villain of my book, which is this little piece of space schmutz, which is not focusing. It's a meteorite. This is an honest of goodness iron nickel meteorite, which I have acquired the old fashion way. By buying it.

But I will delivered by gravity and the U.S. Postal Service. I will send you the villain that covers the dust jacket of my book, losing another well prize. And this was the contest. this is the actual signal that we saw. So we saw the impact of trillions and trillions of tons of microscopic grains of mostly magnetized dust particles, which are the result of a failed star, exploded star in our galaxy. So it was an astrophysical signal. It was not a cosmological signal. It does not represent the primordial gravitational wave signal that we were looking for because it emits at much higher temperature,

these grains of dust are 10 times hotter than the CMB, which means that they're 10 to the fourth times hotter in terms of radiation emissivity than the CMB. So we were doomed unless we had a way of removing both the dust and measuring the cosmic signals, and then we could subtract the dust-only signal from the dust-plus cosmic signal, and we'd be left with the cosmic signal.

Now, the failure that I think the team had is that we only went to esteemed readers like you. We didn't actually solicit the, and I wasn't involved with this. This is John Covac. Yeah, I interacted with the people at Harvard, John Covac. That's right. And so they were interviewed,

and Mark Kaminkowski was at the press conference. There wasn't a single member of an experimental team. And there were many that would have been happy to look at it. And there was huge rivalries. And I can understand. But I wasn't involved with that. By the time Andrew died, and he took his own life. He died by suicide, as they say.

Just a few months, Lawrence, I don't know if you remember, it was a few months after Bicep II was fielded. So he never got to see. And maybe, maybe not, things could have been different. Some say it could have been. But his philosophy was we would keep studying until we could say for sure what it was. But he never thought we'd see anything, let alone a signal representing as energetic an epoch of inflation that we claimed on March 17, 2014 to have witnessed. So again, we didn't make, and there were many of us who knew. In fact, we tried to get as much data from that was publicly available, including a famous example where we scraped a PDF slide that the Plank team put on their website.

I'm not intending it for any quantitative research. We quoted that in the first paper, which by the way was submitted to PRL, FISREV letters, almost prestigious journals, and it wasn't refereed by the time of the press conference. So there were a lot of things we could have done different. And why were we doing that? in my opinion, we were worried about getting scooped. We had been told by people like George of Staddeu and others on the Plank team that this was well within their reach. If we could see it, a billion euro project like Plank could have seen it as well. So these leadership, which I wasn't a member of, decided we're going to go forward.

We're going to have a press conference. We're going to put the paper on the archive and people can investigate it. And almost immediately there started to be questions of all different types, some legitimate, some not, that we had made a mistake, not a blunder, not leaving the lens cap on or not plugging in the fiber optic cable and thinking we saw a faster than light neutrino. There are many, and in fact, the biggest proof of that, Lawrence, is that the experiment has gone through two more generations

after Bicep 2, still going right now. And in fact, is currently the world leader in limits, not measurements, but limits on the microrate background's intensity of beam mode polarization. And it's going to be a while before myself and my teammates on Simon's Observatory come anywhere close to what the bicep team, which I'm no longer involved with, by the way. I'm still friendly with the leaders, but I'm 100% dedicated to the Simon's Observatory right now. So we have long held to climb to get to where they are.

But effectively, what was measured so far, we can't say with any confidence that we have any evidence for inflationary gravitational waves, which makes some people in the theoretical community quite happy because they don't believe inflation actually occur. Well, you know, first of all, let's let me parse it as a theorist first. I mean, I watched it from a different perspective. Let me say there was another, there was another. First of all, yeah, no one doubts, I mean, the signal that you claim to see was a signal. It just wasn't a signal of what you thought it was. I think it's fair to say as a theorist, but also it was an unlucky circumstance because it was, there could have been other directions that your experiment could have looked at,

where the dust signal would have been much, much smaller. It was an unfortunate circumstance that you happen to look in a direction where the dust was larger. And I'm not, I think it's a priori until your competition, the Planck satellite measured what they did. I think many people would have thought that maybe the dust hadn't been as significant. So I think it was not an unreasonable expectation that dust wasn't going to be a problem. At least that's my perspective in retrospect.

Yeah, one of my students picked this path. based on the existing evidence from WMAP back in the Bicep 1 era, that this was the least contaminated patch we could look at. But fundamentally, the Achilles heel is that we only had one free frequency internally. Whereas Plank could do more. But the other thing, by the way, and this may be new to you because you're watching for distance, but it's another. So yeah, you rush to announce because you're worried you're going to be scooped.

It's part of the sociology of modern science. The interesting bit of sociology that I don't know if I've ever talked about, but it's another bit of sociology, was the journal rushing. Because I remember getting contacted by, I was actually not John Kovacs initially who contacted me. It was the physical review letters who contacted me and said, hey, we've got this discovery paper. We'd like you to write a companion paper to explain it.

And they were so excited by, you know, it could have been submitted to nature, it could have been submitted to anywhere else. They wanted to push it very hard. I think it was the first, I do believe it was probably the first FisR of Letters paper that violated the four-page limit. They allowed it to be as long as possible. And I was just shocked, but it was because they were so excited that they were going to have what they thought of as a Nobel Prize winning discovery in their journal as opposed to another journal. And therefore, they pushed

it as very much as well as anyone else, which is another unfortunate characteristic, I guess, about the modern sociology of things is that journals are competing against each other, just like experimentalists are. And they wanted to promote it. And as I said, that's how I first found out about it. And they were willing to make it arbitrarily long paper. It's called letters because it used to be required to have to do four pages. And as someone used to publish in that journal a lot since I was a graduate student,

always the hard part was used after there were three requirements, timely, important, and also short, and the hard part was often short and getting things into four. And so it was very jealous to see that you guys could have as long as you wanted. But in any case, it was not an unrealistic expectation, and it was unfortunate. But indeed, it turned out to be a signal of something other than what you've seen. And then the question is, can you push the limits down? and Bicep has done it. And I have to say that one of the, again, as a theorist, one of the smoking guns that made people worried is that the signal was about as large that you claim to see,

was it about as large as you could possibly imagine a signal being, whereas you might have expected inflation, which produces these primordial modes. In fact, that's why it's such a good, inflation is basically the only producer of these kind of modes. Inflation can prove, explain many other things about the observed universe, and it does, but, you know, it could have, there are other things that might. Well, yeah, I mean, even before the paper was put on the archive that, you know, Monday and Tuesday of 2014, there were, you know, 300 papers about, oh, this is evidence for string gas cosmology, by, you know, my former teacher, Robert Branenberger, all the way Katie Freeze,

this is evidence for, you know, power law inflation. And I mean, I think you're maybe overestimating the creativity of your fellow theorists. Oh, no, no. No, no. But what I'm saying, it's the only first principles. I mean, it's a generic feature of inflation that you'd look for this. And you can measure it. And the thing that I like about this test, and I'm very good friends with the arch, you know, kind of rival theory to this, which is goes by the name now cyclic or bouncing cosmologies.

I wouldn't call it a rival. I think that's unfair to the word rival. But anyway, go on. It's another theory, which is held by about four physicists as opposed to maybe the one that's held by 20,000 or so. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, I don't appeal to authority, right? Yeah, no, I want to appeal to it.

The Bible Lawrence. No, no, but the difference is, the difference is, and I've talked to Roger Penrose and Al-A-Guth about this, is that one relies on known, on well-established physics and one relies on extrapolating what we know. And it's, it's, it's, so one makes definitive predictions based on physics that you can, that you can trust. And the other one requires you to say, well, okay, maybe this happens and maybe this happens. But anyway, go on.

Right, right. I think the virtue, there is a virtue. Well, first of all, let me say two things. Sociologically, it's good when there are rivals. Sure. And I think to say, yeah, I mean, I personally agree about Rogers theory. I think, I think the, the modern bouncing or cosmological models that there is a virtue, of course, that these things avoid singularities.

And I think the failure and the dream of what I'm doing, my job depends on it, as Upton Sinclair would say, and might make me prone to want to accept the inflation occurring in younger, more frivolous days. And now I think I've gotten a little more grizzled about it. But to say that you have a rival that predicts the opposite of what this theory predicts is extremely valuable. Of course.

You kill so many different competitors if you make this one. That's the definition of a crisp measurement. Now, where I also make fellow traveling with the alternatives is this multiverse issue. And that I don't know if you're aware of this, but I mean, it's almost become like Holocaust denial or, and in fact, people have used this term multiverse deniers to talk about those that are skeptical or are fine difficulty in this notion, which we should probably explain for. listeners might be so common concomitant with inflation in Alan Gooth's mind in Andre Linday's mind and even in the competitors is that the multiverse this chaotic runaway kind of profligate universe is going to be a feature of inflationary universes it's almost impossible not to have you have to suppress multiverse phenomena you create many different

just let me parse it for people I mean people we've talked about multiverse in this podcast before, but for people who haven't heard of that, the multiverse in this case is simply regions that are causally disconnected. They're so far apart that they can never communicate, and it's possible the laws of physics could be different each one. And inflation generically predicts, in inflation is generically eternal. And it says most of space is actually very different than the universe we see. And within that very different space, other universes could be being born or dying. And if you wait long enough, there'll be ultimately an infinite number it'll go on forever. So that's the idea of a multiverse. There are different versions of multiverses,

but that's the most sensible kind of multiverse. It's just regions that we can never see, and which it's possible in inflation where there are seeds of new universes, the laws of physics could be different in those different seeds. Sorry, go on. And my question to you, because I have you on the line, is why would it only be the laws of physics? In other words, why wouldn't, you know, modus tollens not hold in universe, you know, force 42 next door to ours. In other words, why is only restricted? It seems pretty arbitrary to say, well, only the speed of light would be different or only the Newton's constant would be different.

Could the laws of logic or even math be different in another universe in the multiverse paradigm? Well, of course, asking that, we only have math as a language. But the nice thing about inflation is because it isn't hand-waving in that sense is that it tells you specifically the kind of different possibilities that exist in different multiverses in different universes. It tells you that each universe is describable by the same physical theory and how it relaxes in different ways will lead to different physical constants. But once you give up, you might ask, well, is quantum mechanics generic to all of them? And then the answer is,

well, if it isn't, then the whole used quantum mechanics to calculate it. So if it isn't, then calculation doesn't make sense. So as a theorist, it's like you work with what you have. If you're drunk, you won't get under the light. And so this allows real calculations to be done and it could be compared to experiment. And it predicts a certain subset of possibilities, not anything is possible, which unfortunately, I just read someone say that they were, quantum mechanics allows anything to be possible. It doesn't. And quite importantly, it doesn't. And so what's nice is, in fact, that's one of the virtues of inflation. It explains precisely the kind of differences that can happen, which might,

if the multiverse is real, allow you to probe for those differences in one ways or another. So that's what I like about inflation. It's quite restrictive in the sense of what it allows. I mean, it still allows a lot of possibilities. And is there an easy way to understand why, say if the landscape, you know, which is an allied concomitant, description that some say is relevant, pertinent to inflation. So when they talk about this 10 to the 500 different vacuum states, is it clear to you, or can you explain to me, how could it manifest as a change in the speed of light?

Like, if I change a vacuum state here, it's immeasurable, right? And it's not something we have access to absolute value of the vacuum or ground state. So how is it that changing the ground state in universe 42? Again, how does that couple to the speed of light, the vacuum state? Well, it does because the ground state, determines the relevant forces that are relevant at low energies. And the speed of light is determined by two fundamental constants in nature, the strength of magnetism, the strength of electricity.

And it's because at low energies that electromagneticism manifests as a force because the photon is massless. But you could imagine a vacuum which electromagnetism might not be the sole low-energy force, and then the relationship between electricity and magnetism would be different, and that would produce a different speed of light. So it's just precisely the fact that those fundamental constants are reflected in what forces are manifested at low energies, and that's a property of the vacuum. And different vacua would allow different forces to potentially be manifest, and in fact,

it would make the masses of particles different as well as—in fact, most importantly, you could imagine a vacuum where the light isn't massless, which of course would be a very different world. But you could certainly imagine a vacuum where the photon is not massless. And that would be, of course, then the photon wouldn't have the speed of light and it'd be very different laws of physics.

So that's precisely the relationship between the vacuum and the speed of light. No, it's good. I was going to ask you to ask me questions. So this is a good thing. Yeah. But now that since you're asking, you wrote a paper with Wiltsch,

which I think you won a gravity prize about, about quantum mechanics and the B mode, the gravitational wave imprint that I study and we claim detection of. And the challenge I always have is when I think quantum, I mean, what's the most, I'm an experiment. I'm just a simple, humble experimentalist, right, Lawrence? So I think of the double-flit experiment. Like, I would want that to be kind of, again,

the sine qua non of quantum gravity. I often hear that if we, not only if we detect, you know, B modes, will we have detected the inflationary epoch and the multiverse, but it'll be the first evidence for quantum gravity. Well, that's what we demonstrated. But if I observe right now, I'm seeing these photons. And let's say, you know, I have a, I have a Michelson interferometer done at Case Western, right? Yeah.

And I measure the wavelength. And I have a classical wave. And that's all that these waves are when they imprint the CMB at 371,000 years post-Big. Yeah. So how is that evidence for quantum nature of gravitons? That's why I was so surprising to us, and I was so excited about it when I first kind of recognize it. But the simple argument is that it turns out that in order for inflation,

everything we see, galaxies are classical objects, but, but you know that they come in inflation from originally quantum fluctuations. And it turns out that what we're able to show is that. so, you know, lumps of matter are very classical, but they originated as quantum fluctuations in inflation. And what we're able to show is that if and only if there were quantum fluctuations in the gravitational field, would you produce a remnant classical distortion in space and time?

Just like, and we showed basically if quantum mechanics wasn't true, namely if electrons didn't interfere with, other electrons, which would happen if Planck's constant went to zero, then if Planck's constant went to zero, there will be no gravitational wave spectrum from inflation. Basically, that's what we were able to show mathematically. And so we basically are able to show in a very, actually, in the best of all possible ways, I showed it quite in a complicated mathematical calculation, but then one of the things that Frank did was to show, okay, using what we call dimensional analysis, you could arrive at the same result.

But basically, on a very fundamental level, if you took this thing called Planck's constant, which went to zero, then the amplitude of those waves would go to zero. As the square of Planx constant, it turns out. It's a square of Planx constant. So it was almost analogous to the Planx derivation, the Blackbody formula.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just as analysis, and it would be nice. I thought of it that way now. What's so interesting to me about this field, So I kind of feel as an experimentalist, I should have long shots and I should have, you know, base hits.

I should have, you know, grand slam, swing for the fences, but also get some points on the board. So in this field, what's been so delightful to me is to know that you can measure these effects, but they're guaranteed signals. So inflation is not guaranteed at all. There's no matter from from God or, you know, Guy. In fact, I'd have to say generally I would expect, and I, you know, that's why I always admire experimentalists, they can spend 20 years of life on something that I think is a long shot. Generically, I would say it's quite likely that while I think inflation is the best game in town,

it's also quite likely you'll never see the signal you're looking for. Yeah, it could be, right. It could be inflation didn't take place. It could be inflation took place at too low in energy scale. Generically, it's, you know, in order for you to be able to see it, it's got to be up near the highest level and it's quite possible in inflation. We all know that if inflation was an order magnitude lower, then you're not going to see it. I'm thinking this generation, probably why you're live. And that's why, you know, I think what's been so exciting for me is that, you know, my colleagues in the field have, and some, you know, I have to take some credit myself for making this, you know, more prominent in the eyes of experimentalists. And I see a lot of residence between what's happening

in the current state of the CMB and where I was back in 2001 when I first kicked around these ideas for Bicep. And that has to do with measuring what's called Lorentz invariance violation, which doesn't really get that much attention. And there's leave. No, it's actually Levi's little sister. This is, this is, oh, that's his baby sister. What's her name? What's her name? Tasha.

And she's, no, no, it's not, that religious component is that. And Tasha's 15 years old. She's my mother's dog. Tribe of, of Kraus. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. So what's interesting to me is that we are able to measure departures from fundamental

symmetries using the exact same. Not like I have to build another detector. And what's so interesting to me is to look at my colleagues. And they're almost apologetic, like, oh, we're only searching for one number. You know, it's kind of, we're searching for the tens of staler ratio. And if we detect it, that's great. I'm like, you guys, we're doing so much more than that.

And any, you know, I was just talking to, I won't say which experimental, but it's an experimentalist that can only do one, one number. Literally, it's like a massive particle or some, you know, transition or resident. And they have tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe. I'm not crying poverty because the foundation, Heising Simons and the Simons Fund, I've been very generous to us. But they are really looking for one number. and it may not exist and it may be kind of a fool's error.

For us, we not only are capable of measuring, you know, these amplitude of primordial perturbations, but we're capable of measuring things like the mass of the neutrino, which people have not been able to measure on Earth. We have an upper limit and we have a lower limit, but we have no detection, right? So with the CMB type experiments in collaboration with optical surveys and so forth, we are going to be able to measure for the first time,

detect the mass of neutrinos because we know the lower limit is sufficiently large that we have the sensitivity to make a multi-sigma, multi-many-sigma confidence level detection of that measurement. So that's one thing we can do in experimental cosmic microbe background science. We're also measuring the properties of dark energy via how these galaxies and clusters of galaxies, how do they evolve? What's their density on the sky as a function of redshift? Again, we can measure things like the Hubble parameter. And as you know, there's a, there's a so-called tension or anxiety.

As Stephen Weinberg used to say, physics thrives on controversy. Luckily, there's no crises in cosmology today. Of course, that was in 1987. So there's a crisis in cosmology from the Hubble tension, violently disagreeing at 5-Sigma between C&B and optical measurements. Then we have the opportunity to measure what I think is probably maybe even more interesting, see if you agree or not, which is, Does the universe obey Lorentz invariance?

So not Lawrence invariance, but Lawrence invariance, which is the statement that physics doesn't give a crap about where you are, who you are, when you are, what you may have. The laws of physics shouldn't depend on any of those properties. And we only have really tight limits from solar system, scales, and so forth. And it turns out the polarization of light is a very, very, almost the optimal ideal tool to measure things like parity violation, preferred axes in space, and so forth. So I actually tease my colleagues,

if God gave me the ability to measure only one thing, the tensor to scalar ratio, or the violation of these fundamental symmetry, CP violation, I would take the latter because that would really upend physics. We're always talking about, well, we want to see, we want to be surprised.

That would be the ultimate surprise, wouldn't that, if the universe doesn't obey Lorenzen's invariant symmetry. Well, you know, it's, of course it would be the ultimate surprise. It will, but for that reason, but it's fascinating to try and it's important to be able to detect it. And I, you know, I've written papers on on ways to try and probe those kind of violations of something called the equivalence principle. But what's wonderful is I, you actually took me through. I wanted to get away from Bicep and I want to say, what's next? What might you, what might you be able to do?

And I wanted to ask you about the, and you've sort of a list, you've listed a whole bunch of the scientific goals of why this field remains relevant and interesting, even if you can't measure inflation. But one of the things I wanted to ask you, first, tell me about the Simon's Array. And, yeah, first tell me briefly about that. Yeah, so the Simon's array is a precursor to the Simon's Observatory. The Simon's Observatory is a $100 million class project. Both of these projects are funded by the Simon's Foundation. The first was proposed in 2012, so it's coming up on 10 years, and it's three telescopes. Each one is three and a half meters in diameter at the Atacama Desert site where we operate for the past 11 years now.

And that is at 17,200 feet above sea level in what was known as the driest desert on Earth, the highest desert, the highest construction project on Earth effectively. That's continually being an operation. we have to build the roads. We have to build the diesel plants that provide electrical power generation capability. We have to have safety managers on site. We have cranes and we have all sorts of, it's a real honest to goodness, concrete pouring construction site with, you come down there, you need a hard hat.

And so that's a precursor that uses 20,000 detectors. The next generation is called the Simon's Observatory, which is going to be an array of four telescopes, three refracting, telescopes, not unlike bicep, but much more capable, much bigger, and also crucially alleviating, putting the Achilles heel guard on, we are measuring three frequencies or two frequencies simultaneously in each of three different telescopes. So we can measure the CMB and the dust and eventually synchotron radiation, which is much lower frequency manifestation of galactic electron acceleration. And then we have a six meter diameter telescope, which can do the very fine scale

arc minute scale, 130th the diameter, the full moon scale, mapping of about 50% of the sky. The South Pole is great, and it was the ideal location in many ways to do what we were doing back in the early 2000s, but you could only at most see half of the sky because the sky is basically gyrating underneath the South Polar cap, and so you only have access to one hemisphere in the sky. From the South Pole, from the Chilean site, we can see almost 80% of the sky because of its location 20 degrees south of the equator. So it is in some ways a better site from what our perspective in some ways than Bicep.

Of course, my feeling is we need at least two flowers to bloom. We need no one's going to believe Bicep. And I used to say this again. If Bicep tomorrow comes out and asks you to write another op-ed, Lawrence, I would think twice, I would think twice if Simon's Observatory asked you to write an op-ed, right? Because you need to have confirmation. That is the lesson not only of Bicep 2, but of almost every experiment to date. And I think, well, it's the fundamental lesson of science is that you need confirmation.

Yeah. Yeah. And we had said that in the paper as well. So I'm not casting aspersions of my former colleagues. But the bottom line is this experiment will have the capability to do even far beyond what Bicep did. It has more detectors, more sensitive detectors. And the ultimate prize the community is looking at is a billion dollar experiment, which has the most winsome, delightful name in history called CMB Stage 4 Experiment,

which is a Department of Energy slash Department of National Science Foundation project. That could be as much as a billion dollars. And you as a theorist might know this, but not. But anytime you hear a number from the experimentalist, always double it if you want to actually operate the experiment for a decade. It costs about 10% of construction cost to operate. So never believe this. Oh, it only costs $10 billion to build the Webb Telescope.

yeah, that's to build it and throw it away. If you actually want to use it, it's going to cost another 10 billion bucks. But that's okay. That used to be, 10 billion used to be a lot of money, but that was the old day. I know. We start throwing around billion. It starts to add up. So this project is, yeah, it's due for completion on Jim Simon's 86th birthday in April of 2024.

And I was just talking to him this morning. And he is more excited than ever. We just got the first accepted at the factory, these telescope, the large aperture telescope, the six meter diameter telescope. There's a link of my website to it, scanning around. It's built in Germany. We have the three small aperture telescope platforms are in Chile. I'm going down in a couple months to start setting them up and getting ready for first light,

which we'll get first light next year, and then we'll get science quality data the year after and time for his 86 birthday bash. Well, look, you know, I know you have to go in a few minutes. And so because I have a lot of things I wanted to cover. So I'm going to be picking on. I wanted to ask you about the CNB for the supernova. Instead, I wanted to hit another topic, which is because I have you here, which is kind of unique, and I hope you don't mind talking about it. And it goes back to the beginning, which is your father, Jim Max, okay?

Jim Simons, by the way, as you know, has been on my podcast, and I've known him for a long time, and I have great respect for him. He became very wealthy as a mathematician. One of the reasons he became wealthy, I think, is because he was also recruited really good people like Jim Axe. And so there's it's not it's not a, it's not a accident that that you're involved in the Simon's observatory because of course Jim Axel's work was was, was work with Jim Simons and and to make a lot of money. And and that's fine. But I want to ask you and so it's great if you can leverage that that relationship. That's wonderful. It's good for science and good for you, but also good for science.

So I don't want to explore that aspect of relationship. But I do want to talk about the fact that we're seeing how you feel about the modern sort of patrons of science, which is an example of this is called the Simons Observatory. It's not called the NSF Observatory or some name of some old NSF official like JWST or a NASA official. It's Simons because Simons is providing the money. And Simons has a tremendous amount of money,

which is wonderful, and he's using it for good causes. But we're seeing that more and more that scientists are turning to patrons because those patrons seem to have more disposable income than the U.S. government. And I'm someone wondering, do you think it's a good thing or that we're being driven to that or bad? So you have a personal experience with it. So I thought maybe we'd end up talking about that. Yeah, yeah. We can certainly.

So with the Simon Foundation, they've always had an interesting relationship with the federal government in that they have the ability to act as a problem. private organization without some of the fetters of the government kind of bureaucracy. That said, they work very closely with the government. So the current president of the Simon's Foundation is, you know, Jim retired. So he's playing golf all the time now. But he retired. So David Spurgel is now the president of Simon's Foundation.

And David Spurgel is an eminent astrophysicist and NAS member, incredible contributions throughout cosmology, WMAP, dark energy. He led the Flatiron Institute, CCA. He was a student and we wrote one of his first papers together with me. Anyway, go on. Oh, I didn't know. And he was at post-talk. I was at Harvard when he was a student there.

Yeah, go on. Oh, yeah, that's right. Right. So he's, and so he didn't choose, you know, somebody from any one of the other computational branches that he works in or he's interested. He didn't choose a mathematician. He didn't should. So, yes, this is a big project. Now, the Simon's Foundation gives away, I believe, over $300 million per year.

Yeah. So he's taken an incredible. it's only in the basic sciences and autism. And those are, you know, areas, of course, that the government plays a huge role in. And I think they'd be more than happy to only do autism or only do math or what have you. But they see a need and an ability to agilely take advantage of talent without so many different fetters. So, for example, Ernst, two years ago, you may remember there was a Black Lives Matter protest throughout the world. And in particular, it hit us in science.

So we were dealing with COVID. We had a cohort of young individuals who, you know, didn't have any outlet. We're protesting social justice, Black Lives Matter. And meanwhile, we were the scientists and we wanted to react. But what are we going to do? We're going to, like, change the policing in Minneapolis. Like, what the hell am I going to do? But what I can do is I'm a scientist and I can mentor people.

I'm very good at that. I love to educate and I think I have some abilities to do so. my colleagues, David Spurgel and Stefan Alexander, who was the president of the National Society of Black Physicist, we came to the Simons Foundation. We said, we have some discretionary funds here in UC San Diego where I'm the director of the project office. We're going to use some of those funds to do internships for kids from black colleges, historically black universities, to come to places like UC San Diego virtually or the Simons Foundation. Back then, it was COVID, so they couldn't be in person. We did mentorship. You know, we have not been able to do this.

the NSF yet. We've been trying for a couple of years now. I'm actually trying to work with the National Society of Hispanic Physicists to replicate this thing. And it has been kind of not, I don't want to say copied, but we've influenced places like the Event Horizon Telescope to also partner with the National Society of Black Physicist. Simon's Foundation, if they didn't do that, there were 30 or 40 kids who each wouldn't have received $5,000 for the summer, written papers, gotten to graduate school. I've got a graduate student who's coming this year. She's from this program. These are things that the government, as wonderful as the government is, are too sclerotic to actually implement in an effective, agile, nimble fashion that the foundation has done. And so they've

contributed a lot of things, high risk, high reward. I think what we're doing still qualifies in that way. And I think that they become a model for it. And I think they're tiny compared to the government. I mean, 300 million sounds like a lot, but compared to the, you know, 300 billion that was just forgiven for student loans in America. Well, but it's small compared to what the government spends on many things, but not that small compared to what the government spends on fundamental science. It's comparable. And it's kind of interesting to me.

No, look, and I think, you know, you've described how useful the Simon's Foundation is in many ways. And I think you're absolutely right. I'm not opposed. You know, I was involved in another program, Breakthrough Start, one of the breakthrough programs funded by a Russian billionaire looking. And specifically because I thought these are programs, where I don't think the public should be paying for it. I think they're so speculative that it's,

why not waste someone's private money? Now the programs you're in are not that way. They're the kind of things government can fund as well. But I guess I want, in the interest of, you know, I return to the James Axe axis. I want to return to the Galileo axis in some sense, where are we becoming, so Galileo was able to do what he did

because he had rich patrons. Right. And it was good for science. It was a good, it was good, you know, worked out pretty well. Yeah. And so do you think, you know, some people wonder or worry about the fact that these projects are going to be determined, what's being done is determined by the whim of certain ultra, ultra-rich people. And so I was going to say, is it a bad thing or a good thing? And, you know,

I can see arguments on both sides. But I, you know, it worked for Galileo. Maybe what's wrong with these people have a lot of money spending some of it on science? And if it's their own personal interest, well, that's their prerogative. Yeah, I joke in my book. I say, you know, Galileo in his time, he named the discoveries after his patrons. You know, he called the moons, the Medecian moons. And nowadays, what do we call them the Galilean moon? So I think it's going to work out for scientists just the same. But in all honesty, I think there is, I think, I think the public funding, I mean, the price that it's come to and thinking purely of scientists right now, I have an 8% chance applying for a National Science Foundation grant out the door of getting it.

And that's with a lot of support and overhead at the university. Once I get that Monday, Lawrence, as you know, my university kindly takes 61% of that to support the philosophy. I'll use your favorite department, the philosophy department. And some of my best friends are philosophers. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one. Anyway, go on. So there's a tremendous burden on scientists.

And this is totally absent from my role as a teacher. as an administrator, as a committee chairman, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So there's so much waste. Now, when the Simon's Foundation, yes, I had to write a 20-page proposal. I have daily meetings on stewardship, accountability. They do run it. And ultimately, the thing that tickles me is Jim doesn't care what we discover. It's so interesting.

He actually, Lawrence, prefers the cyclic models, as you may have gotten into on your podcast with him. But he actually prefers the non-inflation because he doesn't believe that time can start. So if he was truly interested, he'd say like, Brian, make sure if there's any gravitational waves that you know, he actually is so curious about the world. He actually wrote a story called the last three minutes that I'm hoping

to publish someday, maybe in my next book. He is so generally curious. So maybe in cases, and I don't even think of like, when I think about Uri Milner, I've had Avi Lowe on my podcast, and I said, look, Avi, you know Yuri Milner, why not just get him to send a spaceship

to Amuamua rather than proximate century B. And he said, no, he's not interested in doing that. We're going to wait and see what Rubin says. Look, I think ultimately, I would worry if there were, like, speculative people, like people saying, I want to prove that global climate change isn't taking place. I want to prove that evolution isn't true. You mean like the Koch brothers?

Well, they're called the Koch brothers. Yeah, although they've had the Renaissance now. Anyway, go on. But when you have actual scientists at the helm of these organizations, like I think Jim or David Spurdle now, I, I, personally don't have these concerns. And I don't, and I say that as a citizen scientist, right? David is now actually volunteering to lead a, this program to look for unidentified aerial phenomena at no benefit to himself for NASA. So I think that we all have a strong incentive. We also

want to do things for underrepresented groups. As I said, I think these are great things to do. And I think they're beneficial for the scientific community, but also for scientists. And I feel like if that is a priority for the, at least for the U.S., I think that actually more of this type of phenomenon will be beneficial. I don't think Jim Simon is going to pay $10 billion to launch to JBST, too, but I do feel like there's nucleation. And then, by the way, the government can save money when we build C&B stage four if we collaborate as we're in negotiations with them to leverage our designs, our resources, our personnel, our data analysis pipeline, and combine it with them to maybe reduce it from a billion dollar project to you know 500 million

and say so hopefully it will end up saving taxpayers not not cost yeah well exactly i think you know this is an important discussion to have and i agree with you that it might be the also the thing to worry about is that or the thing to say is that these people it's a it's a it's also a small drop in the bucket compared to their net wealth but it seems to me if wealthy people are willing to spend some money on science it can't hurt and and and he has said and as long as the government as long as the government doesn't give up supporting science at the same time. Well, look, and I don't think that they want to. No, no, no, they don't want to.

And I think, look, I know you have to go. Tasha has to go to the bathroom, which is why I'm holding it right now, because she's been bugging me. But I think what I've particularly enjoyed about her discussion, and I hope that the public will take from this is not just learning a little bit about the science. And I did want to spend some time on your public, you know, your popularization of science. Maybe we'll do that another time. But is the give and take between experimentalists and theorists and talk?

talking about these issues that they sort of hopefully can just sit as a fly in the wall and watch the kind of discussions that you and I might have had even if we weren't doing this podcast. So I really enjoy, I really appreciated you taking the time to do this. And it's always fun to talk. You know, when I was a kid, I thought astronomers would spend all our time on telescopes, but I actually spent all my time on telecons, which I'm going to run to you now. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Lawrence. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization

whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more,

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