Taken from JRE #2023 w/Brian Keating:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6eY2ryN7khNgIZSv9MrpOL?si=7a93764a4a614244

The Jerogan Experience I made a video once, I said, this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly get a kid.

Because with it, you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw.

Light pollution does not obscure the, you know, the planets.

Light pollution does not make impossible.

I'm not advocating for light pollution, but I'm just saying, right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San Diego, I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is the center of the solar system using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation.

Like, say, if you wanted to look at Jupiter, how much can you

You can see the shape that it's a planet.

Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives

So, I love etymology, and stop me if I'm nerding out too much, but planet means wanderer in Greek wander What is it wandering against the fake stars?

So the thing the fact that you have names for things, you know I always I always think it's funny like I'm Jewish and we have a name for people that aren't Jewish goyim It's not an insult.

It just means non Jewish means nation Actually Israel is a goy which is a nation But we like But we're 0.2% of the world's population, like what the hell, wow, are you making up names, they should make names for you, right?

But we have names as astronomers, There were only 5 things they could see that would move in space, and those were the planets from Mercury, Venus.

Obviously they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, but they couldn't see anything else, so they named those things the wanderers, and they wandered against the fixed stars.

Now we know the stars do move and actually the whole galaxy moves and potentially we'll get to this maybe later and maybe the universe in some sense can be said to be moving in a vaster landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point.

But what's so important is what Galileo saw.

Jamie, if you could show this, it would be amazing.

Galileo, in the winter of 1610 in northern Italy, where he was living, he used a telescope Not any better than this.

In fact, this might be better because the glass is better, even though it's a Chinese piece of junk I bought on eBay.

He was able to measure Jupiter and see it, and hopefully we can see it on the screen.

So if you want to see planets, you can differentiate them right now by the fact that they do not scintillate, they do not sparkle, they do not twinkle, twinkle like stars do because they're extended objects that we can actually see through the same and different parts of the atmospheric column.

You know, like a sniper rifle, they correct for it.

That's to avoid the thermal radiation from the Earth.

Like you're shooting something, or elk or whatever, at great distance, there's thermal radiation close to the ground, and then the air is much cooler, and so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere that causes differential refraction, which changes the color and the position of where the deer is, and that's not good, right?

So they have to correct for that using what's called adaptive optics.

Anyway, but the same phenomenon happens for the planets.

Stars are massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system.

But because they're close to us, they don't appear to be points.

So if you want to identify a star versus a plane versus a planet, the planet will be the thing that doesn't move and doesn't twinkle.

They do not scintillate the same way that stars do.

So what Galileo did in January of 1610 is he made a series of observations of the planet Jupiter.

He was the first person to, these things that we just take for granted, like Joe, do you know that they didn't have clocks back then?

They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night?

So, Galileo tried to invent the first clock.

It was actually part of a precursor to the Nobel Prize.

It was something called the Longitude Prize.

I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is.

You just look for Polaris, the North Star.

You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth.

But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian unless you had an accurate way of measuring time.

So Galileo was 1 of the first people to try to compete to win this prize, which was worth like a million dollars back then in those days.

And he tried a couple of different ways to invent time pieces.

But the 1 that he tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's moons.

Jupiter has 4 moons, and you can see them with this telescope.

And I'm going to give this as a gift to you for

know, if Jupiter's out, and you know where to look, and you kind of use a little bit of creative.

But I wonder if, if Jamie, if you could find.

I'm trying to find something that wasn't great.

If you look up a starry messenger starry messenger Galileo sketch Jupiter So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609, and then in 1610, there they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars.

I've seen a friend of mine owns this copy, a first edition of these books, and you're looking at it and actually...

Not only that, yeah, the first edition, but it has his handwriting on it in pencil.

Oh my God, that's got to be worth a billion dollars.

Jamie, could you please go back to that, those illustrations?

Man, imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on.

So this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the beard looking down like Andrew Huberman, at the guy with the white beard.

So, he's showing these Venetian senators in Dode, because they were in charge of the military budget.

So, even back then, there was a scientific military connection that he realized because he because Galileo was it kind of a cad.

He had a bunch of mistresses, he had some illegitimate children.

He had to support his his brother who's kind of a no-good Nick.

But anyway the sketches in the lower right show the planet as you will see it with this telescope.

And those 4 little dots, there was an image a couple of pages back, Jamie, that showed the planet as a disk, and then there are 4 stars, and if you go back 1, I'll point it out to you.

Yeah, see that thing in the lower right, Jamie?

I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers

In the upper left you see the sketch of the moon with these giant craters on it.

That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope Okay.

Now the interesting thing is see that big crater.

His father, Vincenzo, was a beautiful musician, a well-known musician.

Because, Joe, he wanted to convey not only what it looked like, but how it felt.

He was conveying, and when you see it, you'll feel like it's that big, but if you actually measure it, it's about 10 times smaller than that.

Oh, so he just made it larger than it really

And what's so cool about that, if you wanna know, you've had on, like my friend Sean Carroll, I mean, he talked about the Higgs boson when he was on the first time.

If you want to feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson, you need 10 to 20 billion euros and you need a large hadron collider.

I don't know if Spotify is gonna, you know, hook you up there.

But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight.

You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history because it's your own history.

You're experiencing it for the first time.

There's no other scientific tool, nothing.

Even the microscope, it's not the same viscerally.

will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago feeling, he was terrified.

When he saw those pictures of those dots, He realized what he was looking at was not just like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter he realized he discovered another solar system a System in which there was a massive gravitating object Jupiter and around it were orbiting satellites were orbiting moons around it today They're called the Galilean satellites He actually named him after his benefactor those patrons the Medici's who were the richest, you know people in that part of Northern Italy.

Maybe this, It would be like if we named the, you know, whatever, the Higgs boson, we named that after, you know, the European, you know, equivalent of the IRS, right?

He was kind of a kiss up, you know, in some ways.

But it had to save his life and he needed money and so forth.

But when he drew that, he realized, wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said there is only 1 center to the solar system, and it's the Earth, not the sun.

Aristotle, Plato, everybody had believed that for a long time because it said it was natural that heavy things should fall towards a center.

And the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the Earth or the Earth itself.

Therefore, the Earth must be the center of the universe.

Remember, the solar system was the universe for a long time.

Then for an equally long time, almost, the galaxy was the whole universe.

And now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about.

So this was just incredible realization to him.

Imagine, like, you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person in human history ever to feel that.

Do you have any documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these ideas to people that had very strong religious beliefs?

Because obviously it turned out to be a catastrophe for him.

But what did he, did he convey in his writing the frustration that he had?

I always make a provocative statement that like we don't need English departments, We should just teach like physics and astronomy because some of the great scientists of history, men and women, were tremendous orators.

They were tremendous writers and they could convey things through the written word that was pure artistry and mastery.

And Galileo would say things like, I do not believe that the same God who has given us senses to understand the world would require that we not use them, I'm butchering the quote, not use them in order to better understand it.

He would write things that he had discovered things, you know, only as a way to open a portal into the universe such that minds more astute than mine may be able to walk through this portal.

And he was being a little falsely humble.

So you can learn a lot from scientific writing.

So therefore, if you only had to choose 1 thing, I would take the books of Galileo.

And this geocentric version of the universe that they've...

It's actually, you know, the atheists, so I call myself a practicing agnostic, which I can define later if you like.

Meyer, which is partially the reason that I'm here, I think.

But to have the discussion about, you know, the influence of religion on science.

And he made the claim that without religion we wouldn't have science on the show a couple weeks ago.

In other words, we wouldn't have the tradition that the world is intelligible.

It's not the capricious will of gods playing with human beings as Greeks and others had identified.

So the notion of, you know, how religious a scientist could be or how religion impacted him was very clear.

He would say he was a very religious person.

In fact, 2 of his daughters were nuns and because of his, you know, I always say like imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci or, you know, Francis Collins or somebody that they had, they were not only the scientists, the expert scientists say, but they also control the government.

In other words, the most powerful force on earth at that time, at least where Galileo was, was the Vatican.

He never left what—Italy didn't exist back then, by the way.

Tuscany and Venice and Rome and so forth.

But the notion that it was a Catholic band of jurisdiction and Catholic church had sway over that part of Italy and Tuscany where he was.

But he thought that he could say things like if he proved that something scientifically was true, he didn't understand why that couldn't be part of the religious canon.

In other words, he felt that the signature of God is truth.

So if he discovered truth, it wouldn't be a problem for the, it wouldn't be threatening.

But I argue back then, it was kind of threatening.

Like if you started having a bunch of people say, oh, the Bible's wrong, we've been misled, and they're the government, not just scientific authority, they're the government, it could lead, I'm not saying it's good, but it could lead them to want to suppress that, right?

It could lead to whatever, and rebellions.

And that could be perceived as very threatening to the state.


Speaker 0: The Jerogan Experience I made a video once, I said, this is the best Christmas gift you could possibly get a kid. Because with it, you can see the same craters on the moon that Galileo saw. Light pollution does not obscure the, you know, the planets. Light pollution does not make impossible. I'm not advocating for light pollution, but I'm just saying, right here in the middle of Austin or in the middle of San Diego, I can see the exact same things that caused Galileo to realize that the sun is the center of the solar system using scientific reasoning and evidence based on observation.

Speaker 1: How good are the telescopes? Like, say, if you wanted to look at Jupiter, how much can you

Speaker 0: see? You can see a lot. What you can see... You can see

Speaker 1: the shape?

Speaker 0: You can see the shape that it's a planet. Do you know what the word planet means or where it derives

Speaker 1: from?

Speaker 0: No. So, I love etymology, and stop me if I'm nerding out too much, but planet means wanderer in Greek wander What is it wandering against the fake stars? So the thing the fact that you have names for things, you know I always I always think it's funny like I'm Jewish and we have a name for people that aren't Jewish goyim It's not an insult. It just means non Jewish means nation Actually Israel is a goy which is a nation But we like But we're 0.2% of the world's population, like what the hell, wow, are you making up names, they should make names for you, right? But we have names as astronomers, There were only 5 things they could see that would move in space, and those were the planets from Mercury, Venus.

Obviously they could see Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, but they couldn't see anything else, so they named those things the wanderers, and they wandered against the fixed stars. Now we know the stars do move and actually the whole galaxy moves and potentially we'll get to this maybe later and maybe the universe in some sense can be said to be moving in a vaster landscape called the multiverse, which we can get to at a certain point. But the planets, you can see them. But what's so important is what Galileo saw. Jamie, if you could show this, it would be amazing.

Galileo, in the winter of 1610 in northern Italy, where he was living, he used a telescope Not any better than this. In fact, this might be better because the glass is better, even though it's a Chinese piece of junk I bought on eBay. But he mapped. He was able to measure Jupiter and see it, and hopefully we can see it on the screen. And he saw it as a disc.

So if you want to see planets, you can differentiate them right now by the fact that they do not scintillate, they do not sparkle, they do not twinkle, twinkle like stars do because they're extended objects that we can actually see through the same and different parts of the atmospheric column. That's what causes scintillation. You know, like a sniper rifle, they correct for it. They use what's called adaptive optics. That's to avoid the thermal radiation from the Earth.

Like you're shooting something, or elk or whatever, at great distance, there's thermal radiation close to the ground, and then the air is much cooler, and so you get these boundary layers of the atmosphere that causes differential refraction, which changes the color and the position of where the deer is, and that's not good, right? So they have to correct for that using what's called adaptive optics. Anyway, but the same phenomenon happens for the planets. They're so big, they're so close to us. They're not bigger than the stars.

Stars are massively bigger than any of our planets, including Jupiter, the biggest planet in the solar system. But because they're close to us, they don't appear to be points. And only points will twinkle. So if you want to identify a star versus a plane versus a planet, the planet will be the thing that doesn't move and doesn't twinkle. That's called scintillation.

They do not scintillate the same way that stars do. So what Galileo did in January of 1610 is he made a series of observations of the planet Jupiter. He knew exactly where it was. He also invented the tripod. He was the first person to, these things that we just take for granted, like Joe, do you know that they didn't have clocks back then?

There was no clock.

Speaker 1: They couldn't measure time.

Speaker 0: They had sundials, but what are you going to do at night?

Speaker 1: What was the first clock?

Speaker 0: So, Galileo tried to invent the first clock. It was actually part of a precursor to the Nobel Prize. It was something called the Longitude Prize. They offered a prize. I don't know if you've ever done any boating or whatever, but when you're out on the ocean, it's extremely hard to determine what your longitude is.

It's easy to find your latitude. You just look for Polaris, the North Star. You measure your elevation, and that's going to complement where you are latitudinally on the axis going from South Pole to North Pole on the Earth. But it was impossible to tell where you are east to west from the prime meridian unless you had an accurate way of measuring time. So Galileo was 1 of the first people to try to compete to win this prize, which was worth like a million dollars back then in those days.

And he tried a couple of different ways to invent time pieces. But the 1 that he tried to settle on was this use of the planet Jupiter's moons. Jupiter has 4 moons. I came for that look, Joe. I came for that look.

Wow. I finally got it. I can die happy. I got the look. Wow.

Jupiter has 4 moons, and you can see them with this telescope. And I'm going to give this as a gift to you for

Speaker 1: your birthday. That little

Speaker 0: tiny 1? You could say it, yeah.

Speaker 1: If you

Speaker 0: know, if Jupiter's out, and you know where to look, and you kind of use a little bit of creative.

Speaker 1: How much power is that 1?

Speaker 0: This 1, this one's about 12, 15 power.

Speaker 1: So you could do it with 15 binoculars?

Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah, easily. Yeah, you'll see what you'll see. On a tripod? These 4 moons. But I wonder if, if Jamie, if you could find.

I'm trying to find something that wasn't great. If you look up a starry messenger starry messenger Galileo sketch Jupiter So what Galileo did is he turned the telescope to the moon in 1609, and then in 1610, there they are, Jamie, on the right with those stars.

Speaker 1: Look at that illustration of Galileo.

Speaker 0: That's his handwritten. I've seen a friend of mine owns this copy, a first edition of these books, and you're looking at it and actually...

Speaker 1: A first edition? The actual copy that he wrote on?

Speaker 0: Not only that, yeah, the first edition, but it has his handwriting on it in pencil. Whoa. It's insane.

Speaker 1: Oh my God, that's got to be worth a billion dollars. Oh, it's... Jamie, could you please go back to that, those illustrations? I have that,

Speaker 0: this thing.

Speaker 1: That's the handwritten stuff? Yeah. Oh, wow.

Speaker 0: I couldn't tell what this was. That's why I didn't want to bring it up.

Speaker 1: Man, imagine having a piece of paper that that guy wrote on.

Speaker 0: Can you imagine? So this is a depiction of him showing, so Galileo's the guy with the beard looking down like Andrew Huberman, at the guy with the white beard. He does look like Andrew Huberman.

Speaker 1: Look at that beautiful chiseled beard.

Speaker 0: That's right. Muscular. So, he's showing these Venetian senators in Dode, because they were in charge of the military budget. So, even back then, there was a scientific military connection that he realized because he because Galileo was it kind of a cad. He had a bunch of mistresses, he had some illegitimate children.

Speaker 1: How dare you Galileo.

Speaker 0: He had a support.

Speaker 1: How dare you not be pure.

Speaker 0: He had to support his his brother who's kind of a no-good Nick. But anyway the sketches in the lower right show the planet as you will see it with this telescope. I'll let you know when it comes out. And those 4 little dots, there was an image a couple of pages back, Jamie, that showed the planet as a disk, and then there are 4 stars, and if you go back 1, I'll point it out to you. Yeah, see that thing in the lower right, Jamie?

It's a Pinterest thing. I don't

Speaker 1: know if that's a bad...

Speaker 0: Yeah, click on that. So here's a couple of... See, it says January... Well, it's hard to see. It's January 1610.

That's Galileo's handwriting. And Ionis is like Jupiter, okay? So he's...

Speaker 1: He had shit handwriting. Oh,

Speaker 0: I know. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I always thought people back then just wrote perfectly with feathers

Speaker 0: Who knew how to read it?

Speaker 1: Good point. That's a very good point. He's got like a doctor's handwriting.

Speaker 0: Exactly. So this is his first major book. In the upper left you see the sketch of the moon with these giant craters on it. That crater, yeah, so if you go back.

Speaker 1: Yeah, click on it.

Speaker 0: So click on that, James.

Speaker 1: That's his sketch?

Speaker 0: That's his sketch of the moon through this telescope Okay. Now the interesting thing is see that big crater. Mm-hmm. That doesn't exist Really? It does not the

Speaker 1: 1 on the top.

Speaker 0: Nope. The 1 on the bottom

Speaker 1: that 1 doesn't exist

Speaker 0: does not exist Now, why is it there? He was a smart guy. He was an artist, too, by the way. His father, Vincenzo, was a beautiful musician, a well-known musician. He was a sketch, I mean, it's hand-drawn

Speaker 1: sketches. Why did he put that there?

Speaker 0: Because, Joe, he wanted to convey not only what it looked like, but how it felt. He was conveying, and when you see it, you'll feel like it's that big, but if you actually measure it, it's about 10 times smaller than that.

Speaker 1: But. Oh, so he just made it larger than it really

Speaker 0: is. To emphasize it. And what's so cool about that, if you wanna know, you've had on, like my friend Sean Carroll, I mean, he talked about the Higgs boson when he was on the first time. If you want to feel what it was like to discover the Higgs boson, you need 10 to 20 billion euros and you need a large hadron collider. Okay, good luck.

I don't know if Spotify is gonna, you know, hook you up there. But the feeling that Galileo had, you can have that tonight. You can feel what it's like to see things for the first time in human history because it's your own history. You're experiencing it for the first time. There's no other scientific tool, nothing.

Even the microscope, it's not the same viscerally.

Speaker 1: You

Speaker 0: will be connected to Galileo 400 years ago feeling, he was terrified. When he saw those pictures of those dots, He realized what he was looking at was not just like some stars that happened to be next to Jupiter he realized he discovered another solar system a System in which there was a massive gravitating object Jupiter and around it were orbiting satellites were orbiting moons around it today They're called the Galilean satellites He actually named him after his benefactor those patrons the Medici's who were the richest, you know people in that part of Northern Italy. So he named, he was clever, right? He was trying to curry favor with them. Maybe this, It would be like if we named the, you know, whatever, the Higgs boson, we named that after, you know, the European, you know, equivalent of the IRS, right?

He was kind of a kiss up, you know, in some ways. But it had to save his life and he needed money and so forth. But when he drew that, he realized, wait a second, the Bible and all teaching heretofore said there is only 1 center to the solar system, and it's the Earth, not the sun. This is called geocentrism. Everybody believed that.

Aristotle, Plato, everybody had believed that for a long time because it said it was natural that heavy things should fall towards a center. And the center that everything seemed to fall towards was the center of the Earth or the Earth itself. Therefore, the Earth must be the center of the universe. Remember, the solar system was the universe for a long time. Then for an equally long time, almost, the galaxy was the whole universe.

And now there's the universe and maybe the multiverse that we'll talk about. So this was just incredible realization to him. Imagine, like, you come upon this thing and you realize you're the first person in human history ever to feel that.

Speaker 1: Do you have any documentation of his struggle with trying to convey these ideas to people that had very strong religious beliefs? Yeah. Because obviously it turned out to be a catastrophe for him.

Speaker 0: That's right.

Speaker 1: But what did he, did he convey in his writing the frustration that he had?

Speaker 0: He was, he's such a fascinating person. I always make a provocative statement that like we don't need English departments, We should just teach like physics and astronomy because some of the great scientists of history, men and women, were tremendous orators. They were tremendous writers and they could convey things through the written word that was pure artistry and mastery. And Galileo would say things like, I do not believe that the same God who has given us senses to understand the world would require that we not use them, I'm butchering the quote, not use them in order to better understand it. He would write things that he had discovered things, you know, only as a way to open a portal into the universe such that minds more astute than mine may be able to walk through this portal.

And he was being a little falsely humble. But Newton was the same way. Newton would write as a great orator. So you can learn a lot from scientific writing. So therefore, if you only had to choose 1 thing, I would take the books of Galileo.

Speaker 1: And this geocentric version of the universe that they've... How is it written in the Bible? Like, how do they describe?

Speaker 0: It's actually, you know, the atheists, so I call myself a practicing agnostic, which I can define later if you like. But you had my friend Stephen C. Meyer, which is partially the reason that I'm here, I think. But to have the discussion about, you know, the influence of religion on science. And he made the claim that without religion we wouldn't have science on the show a couple weeks ago.

In other words, we wouldn't have the tradition that the world is intelligible. It's not the capricious will of gods playing with human beings as Greeks and others had identified. So the notion of, you know, how religious a scientist could be or how religion impacted him was very clear. He would say he was a very religious person. In fact, 2 of his daughters were nuns and because of his, you know, I always say like imagine we're living in a time where someone like Anthony Fauci or, you know, Francis Collins or somebody that they had, they were not only the scientists, the expert scientists say, but they also control the government.

In other words, the most powerful force on earth at that time, at least where Galileo was, was the Vatican. He never left Italy. He never left what—Italy didn't exist back then, by the way. They were only city-states, right? Tuscany and Venice and Rome and so forth.

But the notion that it was a Catholic band of jurisdiction and Catholic church had sway over that part of Italy and Tuscany where he was. He was very religious. But he thought that he could say things like if he proved that something scientifically was true, he didn't understand why that couldn't be part of the religious canon. So he was surprised. In other words, he felt that the signature of God is truth.

So if he discovered truth, it wouldn't be a problem for the, it wouldn't be threatening. But I argue back then, it was kind of threatening. Like if you started having a bunch of people say, oh, the Bible's wrong, we've been misled, and they're the government, not just scientific authority, they're the government, it could lead, I'm not saying it's good, but it could lead them to want to suppress that, right? Because it could lead to insurrections. It could lead to whatever, and rebellions.

And that could be perceived as very threatening to the state.

What facinating discoveries are they talking of?

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Cosmologist Brian Keating on The Fascinating Life and Discoveries of Galileo