Brian Keating is an experimental physicist at the UCSD, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, and host of the Into the Impossible podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Books and resources mentioned:
Losing the Nobel Prize: https://amzn.to/3E6GSHI
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:27 - Telescope
5:51 - Beginning of the universe
26:04 - Science and the Soviet Union
31:30 - What it's like to be a scientist
50:26 - Age of the universe
53:17 - Expansion of the universe
1:01:18 - Gravitational waves
1:04:30 - BICEP
1:29:45 - Nobel prize
1:52:47 - Joe Rogan
2:00:02 - Recognition in science
2:08:11 - Curiosity
2:15:59 - Losing the Nobel Prize
2:28:53 - Galileo Galilei
2:47:41 - Eric Weinstein
3:06:01 - Scientific community
3:23:42 - James Webb telescope
3:28:42 - Panspermia
3:32:12 - Origin of life
3:37:40 - Aliens
3:43:22 - Death and purpose
3:47:34 - God
3:53:30 - Power

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The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USSD and author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible.

Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called into the impossible.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Brian Keating.

As an experimental physicist, what do you think is

the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device you've ever worked with or humans have ever built.

Maybe for now, let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.

Yeah, I'm slightly biased towards that particular instrument.

But certainly the telescope to me is a lever that has literally moved the Earth throughout history.

The 1 invented Not by Galileo, as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.

And it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type.

And so people for the first time in history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.

So looking at a printed word now, we just take it for granted, 12-point font, whatever, and that's what the eye charts are based on.

But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have perfect vision, And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type.

And at that time, people realized, hey, wait, I can't read this.

My priest or my friend over here, he can read it, she can read it.

And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer.

And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, 2 lenses and go like, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there until Galileo.

So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing.

So he 10x'd it, which is almost as good as going from 0 to 1, as going from 1 to 10.

And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species.

Because we're using tools not to get food faster or to preserve our legacy for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.

Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able to see the stars, maybe there was some kind of makeup of the atmosphere which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars, that we would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there?

As opposed to, maybe this is an over-romanticized notion, but like looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival, not being eaten by a bear slash lion.

If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder, what is my place in the universe?

You think that's modern humans romanticizing?

I think it's a little romantic, because they also took the same.

They took the same 2 lenses and they looked inward, right, they looked at bacteria, they looked at, you know, mares, In other words, they made the microscope.

And so, to have a telescope serves a dual purpose.

It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time.

In other words, you can see a microscope, you don't think, oh, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know, 1 nanosecond ago.

I'm seeing it on that No, you don't think about it like that But when you see something that's happening, you know on Jupiter the moon and drama to galaxy you're seeing things You know back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti Plains and for that I think that took then the knowledge of relativity and time travel and so forth.

It took that before we could really say, oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain.

So I think that might be a little too much.

But nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine?

You know, it's like we can look back in time.

We see things as they were, not as they are.

And that allows us to do many things, including speculate about that.

But 1 of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with.

I don't actually look through telescopes very often, except on rare occasions when I take 1 out to show the kids.

But a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral.

I mean, it's much less cool, because you look at it and you're like, all right, it looks cool, it's kind of weird shaped thing, looks like it belongs in sci-fi, it's gonna blast the Death Star or whatever.

But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object, if that object fills up what's called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope, it's called its beam.

If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor, just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object it's looking at, which is pretty amazing.

It means you're actually remotely measuring, you're taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever in effect.

And so it's allowing you to basically teleport.

And there's no other science that you can really do that.

If you're an archeologist, you can't, let me get into my time machine and go back and see, what was Lucy really like?

So the same thing happens, this is where I learned about this from March of the Penguins when the penguins huddle together, the body temperature arrives at the same place.

So you're doing this remotely, This is the March of the Penguins, but remote.

And we do it from Antarctica, too, so there are some penguins around when we do it.

I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize, you talk about time machines.

So let me ask you the question of, take us back in time.

What happened at the beginning of our universe?

Ah, okay, usually people preface this by saying I have a simple question.

So, you know, what happened before the universe began?

I have a simple question for you, let's take 2.

So when we think about what happened, it's more correct, it's more logical, It's more practical to go back in time starting from today.

billion years from today, that's some day, right?

I mean, you could translate it as some day, right?

So on that day, something happened earlier than the moment exactly now.

Let's say we're talking around 1 o'clock.

So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor.

It started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements.

After that period of time, going forward back closer to today, less, you know, 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, or later rather, coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like.

And in fact, all the hydrogen, to very good approximation, in the water molecules in this bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period.

So I would say, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.

You know, most of those light elements, besides hydrogen, aren't really used in your encounter, right?

We don't encounter helium that often, unless you go to a lot of birthday parties, or pilot a blimp.

But other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment.

The question became, how did the heavier things like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.

And I brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor and a different type of process explosion as well called a supernova.

However, if you go back to the beyond those first 3 minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable, in other words, going backwards from the first 3 minutes, as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book, we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over.

In other words, we can't speculate on what happened 3 minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe.

We just don't know enough about that epoch.

There are many people, most people, most practicing card-carrying cosmologists, believe the universe began in what's called the singularity.

However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe with evidence, and really only occurs in 2 instantiations, the Big Bang and the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable.

And so for that reason, there are now flourishing alternatives that say, you can actually for the first time ask the question, that day, Tuesday, in the first moments of our universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that, 24 hours times 7 days before that.

That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today.

When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no 1 really considered anything besides that Big Bang, that there was a singularity, and people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know.

But they would say some future incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer.

But now there are people that are saying there is an alternative to the Big Bang.

And it's not really fringe science as it once was 50, 80 years ago when these models—by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe.

The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.

And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.

So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten's court, he'd have a pretty high H index right about now because people have been using that cyclical model from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis and right up until this very moment.

Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to the Big Bang theory?

So there are many alternatives, starting with, so the singularity, quantum cosmologically demanding singular origin of the universe, that stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning.

Many of them feature cycles, at least 1 cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles, called by Sir Roger Penrose.

And they all have things in common, these alternatives, as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation.

Inflation can be thought of as this spark that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood.

So it's an earlier condition, but it's still not an initial condition.

In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock or a pendulum swinging back and forth.

You look away for a second, you come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth.

How many cycles is it gonna make before the, you can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions.

In a very simple system, like a one-dimensional simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum.

Think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions.

It's a tremendous lacuna, a gap that we have as scientists, that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology, determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.

So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch we can't, because you can infer things about the pendulum before you show up to the room in our current epoch, correct?

Right, yeah, so if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?

So that depends on how much energy it got initially, and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance, you had infrared camera, you could see it's getting hotter maybe, and you could do some calculations.

But to know the 2 things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.

Boundary conditions, we're here on Earth, it has a gravitational field, it's not going to excurs or, you know, make excursions, you know, wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.

But in other words, you can't tell me when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now.

In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now?

But what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended, but it says nothing about how it itself took place.

I mean, you don't really, look, what you care about, like, big bang nucleosynthesis and the elements got made and these fusion reactors and the whole universe was a fusion reactor, but don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?

And the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the Big Bang.

We can't answer that in the context of these alternatives.

So you asked me about some of the alternatives.

So 1 is Aeon theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose.

Another 1 that's, that's, it was, was really popular in the 60s and 70s until the discovery of the primary component of my research field, the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB, the 3 Kelvin all pervasive signal that astronomers detected in

That kind of spelled the death knell, in some sense, to what was called the quasi-steady state universe.

And then there was another model that kind of came out of that.

That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.

And most Scientists believed in that for millennia, basically.

The universe was eternal, static, unchanging.

They couldn't believe that after Hubble, so they had to append onto it, concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady, it was quasi-steady.

So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space.

And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant, but because it was producing more and more every century, as centuries pile up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand.

And it doesn't match observational evidence.

way, did Einstein think the steady state universe is infinite or finite?

I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know, if something had a no beginning in time, then it would be very unlikely we're in like the center of it or it's bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.

I wonder what he thought about infinity, because that's such an uncomfortable question.

I'm sure you're familiar with that silly joke, right?

there are only 2 things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe.

Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke is a good example of the joke.

Okay, So, sorry, you were saying about quasi- All the alternatives.

All the alternatives in the quasi-steady state.

And the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that, people say, well, it's your favorite alternative, right?

Inflation is not transitory, it is quasi-permanent.

Sorry to interrupt, we're talking about cosmic inflation, so calm down cryptocurrency folks.

That's right, although the first Nobel Prize, and 1 of the first Nobel Prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.

It's a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.

Exactly, it's time translation invariant.

So when we look at the alternative that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, These have serious virtues according to some.

1 of the virtues to me just as a human, I'm just speaking as a human, 1 of the founders of the new version of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt.

He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences at Princeton University.

And he was 1 of the originators of what was called New Inflation.

In other words, he was 1 of the founding fathers of inflation, who now not only has no belief or support for inflation, he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society.

So here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world, the universe of cosmologists, such as it is, it's not a huge universe, but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.

Some do both, but this man created this theory with collaborators, and now he's like, I joke, I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity, like you're like a deadbeat dad, now you're saying like inflation is bogus.

See, this is what's very important about approaching things as an experimentalist.

You've got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful.

He or she has to be confident to say, like, I don't care if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.

And nobody likes the exterminator until they need 1, right?

But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea.

Like inflation is a beautiful idea, but it also has consequences.

And what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science.

And in that sense, I can see support for what he does, but none of that detracts from my respect for a man.

You know, imagine like, you know, Elon comes up with this, like, really great idea, you know, space, And then he's like, oh, actually, it's not gonna work.

And he's like, SpaceX is not gonna work, but he's now created an alternative to it.

It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done.

Doesn't mean I'm gonna have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea or I respect the man and his colleague, Ana Aegis, who works really hard with him.

But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.

And what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.

So it takes away 50% of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity.

You've talked a lot about quantum gravity.

You talk to people, eminent people on the show.

Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything, there is a theory of quantum gravity.

But there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.

So that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory, so in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?

So, okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society from believing in cosmic inflation?

So, you know, 1 of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation, according to its other 2 patriarchs, considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state.

It has to exist in this Hilbert space, and the Hilbert space has certain features, and those features are quantum mechanical, endowed with quantum mechanical properties.

And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.

So inflation can get started, but then it's like 1 of SpaceX rockets.

It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?

You need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion.

Which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now, spawning an ever-increasing set of universes.

Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish, and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.

It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence, not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more we're seeing it in string theory as well.

So that, you know, sometimes 2, you know, branches coming to the same conclusion is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.

So 1 of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena that we can't, that are outside the reach of experimental science?

Or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?

Like it makes us, maybe it makes life seem more meaningless?

Is that where he's getting at a little bit or is it not reaching that far?

Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive.

The answer is a little of both, because in 1 sense it's meant kind of to explain this fine-tuning problem that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly façade, that has features consistent with our existence, and how could we be otherwise?

On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything, literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.

Like if I say, Lex, you know, you've been working out, you look like, you know, yeah, you're having, yeah, it's great.

You look like you're, you know, about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.

Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's horribly imprecise.

I don't contribute any what's called surprise or reduction in entropy or reduction of your ignorance about the system.

So me telling you that tells you nothing.

In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist, there has to be at least 1 place that we exist.

But the problem is, it's a manifestation of infinity.

So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and ML and everything else, that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right?

So if I say to you, like, what's bigger, the number of water molecules in this thing, or the number of real numbers?

Or if I say, what's bigger, the number of real numbers or rational numbers, they're all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be.

Infinity to the infinity power, you know, when you have kids someday, they'll tell you, I love you, infinity.

You have to come back, I love you, infinity plus 1.

Right, so, But the human brain can't really contemplate infinity.

They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature, right?

Is there anything that you can contemplate in the observable, you know, Einstein's little quip aside, that's infinite?

Like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature, energy, that's infinite.

And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it.

But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus 1?

You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.

How does it go from like to half of infinity?

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Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize | Lex Fridman Podcast #257