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

1. 0:00 – 0:27

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USASD 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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now here's my conversation with Brian Keating.

2. 0:27 – 5:51

   Telescope

   1. LFLex Fridman0:27

      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, uh, background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.

   2. BKBrian Keating0:45

      (laughs) Yeah, I'm slightly biased towards that-

   3. LFLex Fridman0:46

      Yes.

   4. BKBrian Keating0:46

      ... particular instrument, but, uh-

   5. LFLex Fridman0:48

      We'll talk about that in a little bit.

   6. BKBrian Keating0:49

      Yeah. But certainly the telescope, to me, is, is a lever that has literally moved the earth, uh, throughout history to-

   7. LFLex Fridman0:56

      So the OG telescope?

   8. BKBrian Keating0:58

      The OG telescope, yeah. The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lippershey in, uh, in the Netherlands. And, you know, it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500s, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type and so people for the first time in history, uh, had a standard, uh, 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, they're just fixed height. But back then there were no, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have, uh, you know, perfect vision, and there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and move- movable type. And at that time people realized, "Hey, wait, I can't read this. You know, my priest or my, my friend over here, he can read it, she can read it. I can't read it. What's going on?" And that's when, you know, these people in, in, in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of, you know, 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, you know, two lenses and go like, "Hmm, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there," uh, until Galileo. So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of 10, so he 10Xed it, which is almost as good as going from zero to one is going from, you know, one 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, as a species because we're using tools not to get food faster or to, you know, preserve, you know, uh, our, our, our legacy for the, for future generations, but actually to in- increase the benefit of, to the human mind.

   9. LFLex Fridman2:43

      Somebody mentioned this idea that, um, if humans weren't able to see the stars, maybe there was some, some kind of, um, 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.

   10. BKBrian Keating3:03

       Yeah.

   11. LFLex Fridman3:03

       As opposed to, um, maybe this is an over-romanticized notion, but, like, looking at the ground it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival and not being eaten by a bear/lion. If you look up to the stars you start to wonder, "What is my place in the universe?" Do y- y- you think, think that's a modern human's romanticizing?

   12. BKBrian Keating3:21

       I think it's a little romantic, um-

   13. LFLex Fridman3:22

       All right.

   14. BKBrian Keating3:22

       ... because they also took the same-

   15. LFLex Fridman3:24

       I tried.

   16. BKBrian Keating3:24

       (laughs)

   17. LFLex Fridman3:25

       (laughs)

   18. BKBrian Keating3:25

       They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at, you know, hairs, and in other words, they made the microscope.

   19. LFLex Fridman3:32

       Yeah.

   20. BKBrian Keating3:32

       And we're still doing that. And so, you know, to have a telescope is, it serves a dual purpose. It's, it's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time. In other words, when you see a microscope you don't think, "Oh, I'm, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know, one nanosecond ago." Light travels one foot per nanosecond. "Uh, I'm seeing it in nan-" No, you don't think about it like that. But when you see something that's happening, you know, on Jupiter or the moon, Andromeda 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, you know, relativity and time travel and, and, and so forth, it took that before we could really say, "Oh, we, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain." So I, I think that might be a little too much, but, but nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine, you know? It's like (laughs) 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 them. But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with. So I'm a radio astronomer. I don't actually look through telescopes very often, uh, except, uh, you know, on rare occasions when I, when I (laughs) take one out, uh, to show the kids. But, um, but a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral. I mean, it's much less cool 'cause you look at it and you're like, "All right. It looks cool. It's kind of a weird shaped thing. Looks like it belongs in sci-fi. It's gonna blast, uh, you know, uh, the Death Star or whatever." But when you, um, 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, uh, field of view of a radio telescope is 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, in, in effect. And so it's, it's, it's allowing you to basically teleport and there's no other science that you can really do that, right? If you're an archeologist you can't, "Let me get into my, you know, my, my time machine and, and go back and see what was Lucy really like." You know, it's not possible.

   21. LFLex Fridman5:33

       So the s- the same thing happens... This is where I've learned about this from March of the Penguins when the penguins huddle together.

   22. BKBrian Keating5:38

       Mm-hmm.

   23. LFLex Fridman5:39

       They, uh, you know, the, the body temperature arrives to the same place. So you're, you're doing this remotely.

   24. BKBrian Keating5:45

       Yeah.

   25. LFLex Fridman5:45

       This is the March of the Penguins, but remote.

   26. BKBrian Keating5:46

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

   27. LFLex Fridman5:50

       (laughs) Okay, excellent.

3. 5:51 – 26:04

   Beginning of the universe

   1. LFLex Fridman5:51

      You, uh, mentioned time machine. I think in your book, uh, Losing the Nobel Prize, you talk about time machines. So let me ask you the question of, uh...Uh, take us back in time. What happened at the beginning of our universe?

   2. BKBrian Keating6:07

      Ah, okay. That's a... Usually people preface this by saying, "I have a simple question." So, uh-

   3. LFLex Fridman6:12

      I have a simple question.

   4. BKBrian Keating6:12

      ... you know, s- so, what happened before the universe began? What happened-

   5. LFLex Fridman6:15

      Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.

   6. BKBrian Keating6:18

      (laughs)

   7. LFLex Fridman6:18

      I have a simple question for you. Let's d- take two. I have a simple question. What happened at the beginning of our universe? There you go.

   8. BKBrian Keating6:24

      All right, good. So when we think about what, what happened, it's more correct, it's more logical, it's more, uh, practical to go back in time starting from today. So if you go back, uh, 13.874 billion years from today, that's some day, right? I mean, you could translate it into some day, right? So on that day something happened, uh, earlier than, than, you know, than the, th- the moment exactly now. Let's say we're talkin' around, uh, uh, 1:00. Um, so at some point during that day, uh, 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. Um, after that period of time, you know, going forward back closer to today, less, you know, 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier (clears throat) or cl- or later rather, coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like. And in fact all the hydrogen, you know, it's a 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, you know, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements in the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

   9. LFLex Fridman7:34

      Well done, sir.

   10. BKBrian Keating7:35

       (laughs) You know, most of those light elements, besides hydrogen, aren't really used in your, you know, in your encounter, right? We don't encounter helium that often unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pilot a blimp. Um, you don't need lithium hopefully. Uh, you know, but, 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 h- we can get to that later, and I brought some samples, uh, 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 three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable, in other words going backwards from the first three minutes as the famous Steven Weinberg, uh, titled his book, um, we actually... marks a point where ignorance takes over. In other words, we can't speculate on what happened three 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. Um, and we can certainly talk about that. Um, however, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe with evidence, um, and really only occurs in two instantiations, the big bang and the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable. Um, and so for that reason there are now flourishing alternatives that say you can actually for the first time ask the question, that day, you know, Tuesday, you know, on the... in the first m- mea- moments of the... our universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that (laughs) , 24 hours times seven days before that. That has a perfectly well-understood meaning in models of com- cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today. When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one 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." Um, but they would say some future in- you know, 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, uh, 50, 80 years ago when these models th- by, by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe. The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra and, and, and the temples of, of Egypt in thr- in the third millennium BC. And in that, they talked about cyclical universes. So I always joke, you know, that guy, Akhenaten's court, you know, he'd have a pretty high H-index right about now-

   11. LFLex Fridman10:12

       (laughs)

   12. BKBrian Keating10:12

       ... because people have been using that cyclical model from Penrose to P- Paul Steinhardt and aegies (sic) and, um, uh, right up until this very moment.

   13. LFLex Fridman10:21

       C- can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to, uh, the big bang theory?

   14. BKBrian Keating10:28

       So there are many alternatives, um, starting with... So the s- the singularity, quantum cosmologically demanding singularity, uh, origin of the universe, that stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning. Uh, it h- it, it... And many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles, um, called by Sir Roger Penrose. And, uh, they all have things in common, these alternatives, as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation. Inflation is sort of... can be thought of as this, uh, 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, imagine I, I, I show you a grandfather clock or a pendulum swinging back and forth. You look away for a second. You know, ac- you come into the room, pendulum's swinging back and forth. "Alex, tell me, where did it start? How, how many cycles is it going to make before the end?" er, 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, um, determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.

   15. LFLex Fridman11:45

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

   16. BKBrian Keating11:55

       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 got infrared camera, you can see it's getting hotter maybe, and, and you could do some calculations but to know the, uh... Two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions. Boundary condition where here on Earth has gravitational field, it's not gonna excurse or, you know, make excursions, you know, wildly beyond the length of pendulum. It's not, um... You know, uh, uh, it has simple properties. Um, so but... And this is, uh, like in other words you can't tell me, you know, 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? Um, now that's a pretty pedestrian example but what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch i-... 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, and that's really what you're asking me. I mean, you don't re- m- look, what, what... You care about like Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and the elements got made, and these fusion reactors, and, and the whole universe was a fusion react, but like don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time? And the, the problem is, we can't really answer that in the context of the Big Bang. We can answer that in the context of these alternatives. So you asked me about some of the alternatives. So one is Aeon theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose. Another one that's, that's, um... 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 three Kelvin all-pervasive signal that, uh, astronomers detected in 1965. That kind of spelled the death knell, in some sense, to the r- what was called the quasi-steady state universe.

   17. LFLex Fridman13:42

       Mm-hmm.

   18. BKBrian Keating13:43

       (clears throat) Um, (clears throat) and, and then there was another, um, uh, model that kind of came out of that. You hear the word quasi, so it's not steady state. Steady state means always existed. That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe. Um, and most scientists believed in that for, you know, millennia basically (laughs) . The universe was eternal, static, unchanging. Um, they couldn't believe that after Hubble, so they had to append onto it, concatenate this, uh, 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 so that's how they developed it.

   19. LFLex Fridman14:30

       But slowly.

   20. BKBrian Keating14:30

       Very slowly, and it doesn't match observational evidence, so th- but that is a whol- an alternative.

   21. LFLex Fridman14:35

       By the way, did Einstein think the, the, the steady state universe is infinite or finite? Do you know?

   22. BKBrian Keating14:40

       Um, he... I th- I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know... If, 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 in some sense.

   23. LFLex Fridman14:54

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

   24. BKBrian Keating14:57

       Oh, he has this f- silly joke. I'm sure you're familiar with his silly joke, right?

   25. LFLex Fridman15:00

       What's that?

   26. BKBrian Keating15:01

       His silly joke was that, um, there are only two things that are infinite, um, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe, so.

   27. LFLex Fridman15:08

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

   28. BKBrian Keating15:13

       (laughs)

   29. LFLex Fridman15:13

       It's very meta.

   30. BKBrian Keating15:14

       Yeah.
4. 26:04 – 31:30

   Science and the Soviet Union

   1. LFLex Fridman26:04

   2. BKBrian Keating26:04

      It's Хлеб.

   3. LFLex Fridman26:04

      (laughs)

   4. BKBrian Keating26:04

      That's my favorite Russian word is like, "Would you like a piece of Хлеб?"

   5. LFLex Fridman26:07

      By the way, even that, uh, that word Хлеб-

   6. BKBrian Keating26:10

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman26:10

      ... which means bread in Russian, as you say it and, like, you were jokingly saying it now, it made me hungry because it made me remember how much I loved bread when I was in the Soviet Union. When you were, like, hungry, that was the sort- that was the things you dreamed about. I don't know.

   8. BKBrian Keating26:25

      You know, what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today and they were completely in hiding. Like, there was no Google. They couldn't look up on SCHOLAR.

   9. LFLex Fridman26:35

      Yeah.

   10. BKBrian Keating26:35

       They had nothing. They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get appro- and then, and then and only then if they weren't a member of some clo- I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists, you had a passport that said Jew on your passport.

   11. LFLex Fridman26:48

       Yeah.

   12. BKBrian Keating26:48

       And Zeldovich, the famous, um, uh, Yakov, uh, Borisovich, uh, Zeldovich, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnarev, um, and he had to... Only because he was, like, at a Nobel level and, you know, was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program could he even get his Jewish student, and he was Jewish too, but, but only by virtue of his standing, of his intellectual accomplishments would they give him the dispensation to let his student, you know, travel to Georgia or something. And it makes what we complain about... And I complain about academia and it's like, "Oh, well, what can I talk about? What can I..." We have no idea of how good it is. And that they were able to create things, like inflation, completely isolated from the West. I mean, some of these people wouldn't, didn't meet, like, people like Stephen Hawking until, you know, he was almost dead. Uh, and they just learned this thing through smuggled in... You know, it was, it's, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology. There are so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working, uh, they could, they could pass off as, "Well, we're doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well," which they were.

   13. LFLex Fridman27:48

       A- at the same time, there is, um, interesting, uh, incentives in the Soviet system that, maybe we can take this tangent, uh, uh, for a brief moment, that, uh, because there's a dictatorship authoritarian regime throughout the, the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.

   14. BKBrian Keating28:07

       Mm-hmm.

   15. LFLex Fridman28:07

       And because the state prioritized it through the propaganda machines, through the news and so on, it actually was really cool to be a scientist.

   16. BKBrian Keating28:16

       Yeah.

   17. LFLex Fridman28:16

       Like, you were highly valued in society. Maybe that's a better way to say it. And I, I would say, you're saying, like, we have it easy now. In that sense, it was kind of, um, beneficial to be a scientist in that society, because you were seen as a hero, as... There's, there's, there's fame and celebration.

   18. BKBrian Keating28:32

       Yeah, Zeldovich was hero of the Soviet Republic.

   19. LFLex Fridman28:34

       And that, you know, there's positives to that. I mean, I'm not saying, uh, I would take the-

   20. BKBrian Keating28:39

       (laughs) Go back in time.

   21. LFLex Fridman28:39

       (laughs) ... negatives with the positives, but it, it is interesting to see a world in which science was highly prized. In, in, um, in a capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist, let's just say the American system, the celebrities are the, uh, the athletes, the actors and actresses, maybe business leaders, musicians, uh, and, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers and... lawyers. (laughs)

   22. BKBrian Keating29:08

       (laughs) Yeah. Right.

   23. LFLex Fridman29:09

       Uh, so it's interesting-

   24. BKBrian Keating29:11

       Oh, it's true.

   25. LFLex Fridman29:11

       ... to think of a world where science was highly prized, but they had to do that science within the constraints of always having Big Brother watching. It's, uh...

   26. BKBrian Keating29:21

       Yeah. The same in Germany. Germany had, you know, highly prized sci- I mean, one of the most famous, tragic to me, cases is Fritz Haber, who invented the Ha- you know, Haber-Bosch process that allowed us to... I don't know. Have you eaten yet? You look, you look s- I mean, I know you fast-

   27. LFLex Fridman29:33

       Thank you.

   28. BKBrian Keating29:33

       ... intermittent fast every day and you do that. You know, I said Хлеб and you, and you got s- still a little drool, but-

   29. LFLex Fridman29:38

       He says, "I'm lifting and I look slim."

   30. BKBrian Keating29:41

       (laughs)
5. 31:30 – 50:26

   What it's like to be a scientist

   1. BKBrian Keating31:30

   2. LFLex Fridman31:30

      You opened so many doors 'cause you also bring up our, uh, Ernest Becker in that book. So there, there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the Nobel Prize that's fascinating to explore, and we will.

   3. BKBrian Keating31:47

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman31:48

      And we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the, of the universe, which we'll return to.

   5. BKBrian Keating31:54

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman31:54

      But now since you opened the book, wow, pun unintended-

   7. BKBrian Keating31:58

      (laughs) .

   8. LFLex Fridman31:59

      ... of, uh, Losing the Nobel Prize, can you, uh, tell me the story of BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization Experiment, BICEP1 and BICEP2, and then maybe we can talk about BICEP3. But the, the thing that you cover in your book-

   9. BKBrian Keating32:15

      Mm-hmm.

   10. LFLex Fridman32:16

       ... the human story of it.

   11. BKBrian Keating32:17

       Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman32:18

       What happened?

   13. BKBrian Keating32:18

       Yeah. That, that book is, is in contradistinction to the second book. That's like a memoir. It's, it's really a description of, uh, of what it's like to feel, what it feels like to be a scientist, and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, which, which I cover in the later book in more detail. But, um, to really feel like you're doing something, uh, and it's all you think about. It, it is all-consuming. And it's something I couldn't have done now 'cause I have too many other, you know, wonderful, delightful demands on my time. But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated by the night sky, as a 12-year-old, 13-year-old, and really mixed together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all, which I think is the existence or non-existence of God. So I, I call myself a, a practicing agnostic (laughs) . In other words, I do things that are, that religious people do, and I don't do things that atheist people do. And I once had this conversation, you know, with my first podcast guest, actually. I shouldn't say. Oh, I was just, just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson.

   14. LFLex Fridman33:22

       Yeah.

   15. BKBrian Keating33:22

       But he was actually my first guest.

   16. LFLex Fridman33:23

       Yeah.

   17. BKBrian Keating33:24

       And I miss him.

   18. LFLex Fridman33:25

       Name drop.

   19. BKBrian Keating33:25

       Name drop, yes. Uh, I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of comments about how I made that up.

   20. LFLex Fridman33:29

       So, so in, in case people don't know, Brian Keating is the host of Into the Impossible podcast, where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists in the history of science, physicists especially in the history of science.

   21. BKBrian Keating33:43

       So when I talked to Freeman, I said, "You know, Freeman, you're an agnos- you call yourself an agnostic too. Can you tell me something? Like, what, what do you do on Sat- on Sundays? Do you go to church?" He's like, "No, I don't go to church." Uh, and I'm like, "Well, imagine there was, like, an intelligent alien, and he was looking down, or she was, it, z, I don't know, thing was looking down, and it saw Freeman. And on Sundays, like, a group of people go to church. But Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church, and those are called atheists. But Freeman calls himself an agnostic, but he does the things that the, like Richard Dawkins. He doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to."

   22. LFLex Fridman34:17

       Yeah.

   23. BKBrian Keating34:17

       Right? So I said, "How would you distinguish yourself, if not practice?" So I'm a behaviorist. I believe you can change your mentality, you can, you can influence your mind via your bodily physical actions. So when I was a 12-year-old, I got my first telescope. I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church. It's kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York. Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not. Uh, but, um, I was just fascinated by these (laughs) these-

   24. LFLex Fridman34:40

       Uh, well, can we get into it for a second? (laughs)

   25. BKBrian Keating34:42

       Yeah, okay yeah. Let's, all right, let's go.

   26. LFLex Fridman34:45

       All right. Let's, let's go there.

   27. BKBrian Keating34:46

       Let's go. All right.

   28. LFLex Fridman34:47

       Let, let's go to baby Brian, or young-

   29. BKBrian Keating34:49

       Young (laughs) -

   30. LFLex Fridman34:50

       ... young, young Brian.
6. 50:26 – 53:17

   Age of the universe

   1. BKBrian Keating50:26

      It was embarrassing.

   2. LFLex Fridman50:27

      Can we, can we actually take a-

   3. BKBrian Keating50:29

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman50:29

      ... tangent on a tangent on a tangent on a tangent? How old is the universe? Can you, can you dig in onto this number? How do we know, currently with those, I, I guess you said five, four or five, uh-

   5. BKBrian Keating50:41

      Significant figures, yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman50:41

      ... significant, uh, digits.

   7. BKBrian Keating50:42

      So we can come about it from two different ways. One, uh, basically they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units. It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed. And what is the speed you're measuring? Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away, so a galaxy at one megaparsec away, this isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects, uh, but if you go out, say, one, uh, megaparsec away, I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers per second away from you. And every galaxy, except for the local, very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half a dozen galaxies, out of fif- 52, sorry, sorry, out of, uh, fif- uh, 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies, so 12 out of that number (laughs) are moving towards us. The rest are moving away from us. So that number, if you invert it, if you say, "Well, when did those things last touch each other, all those galaxies?" Now they're really far apart. We know how fast they're moving away. It's a very simple algebra problem to solve. When were they touching? That's where you get that number from them.

   8. LFLex Fridman51:52

      So there's the local 12 and then the rest-

   9. BKBrian Keating51:54

      Ignore the 12, yep.

   10. LFLex Fridman51:55

       ... and then ignore the 12 and then look at the others and, yeah, the, uh, then solve the algebra problem. Uh, how does the stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this calculation of-

   11. BKBrian Keating52:07

       Very little because actually we understand, um, how, there are some other ingredients that go into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera, there are, and how much ordinary matter like we're made up of, neutrons, protons, croutons.

   12. LFLex Fridman52:24

       Okay, so th- let me, (laughs) .

   13. BKBrian Keating52:27

       Morons. (laughs)

   14. LFLex Fridman52:31

       It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older. How does that make sense?

   15. BKBrian Keating52:38

       Oh, oh, yeah. So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe.

   16. LFLex Fridman52:49

       Yeah.

   17. BKBrian Keating52:49

       Naively you would say that the, the, you know... So you're right. If the universe were static, um, if the universe came into existence, and you can conceive of this, the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe, so the universe just ex- started off, and those galaxies were, you know, they could be moving towards us, away from us, who knows? Um, that you could say I can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light. That would be true. But the fact that the light

7. 53:17 – 1:01:18

   Expansion of the universe

   1. BKBrian Keating53:17

      is expanding along with the expansion of the universe... So imagine there was some very distant past that we were near a galaxy. It's gonna produce some light, and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us. The light's gonna be getting more and more redshifted as it's called, and it's gonna be moving farther and farther away from us a- uh, as time goes on. There'll be some acceleration as we get into the era of dark energy. Um, the light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance if you will, um, from which, which represents all the events that we could've received information from. We can't currently communicate with that galaxy. It l- it sent us some light, and now it's moving away, and it sent us some light, and because the space is also dragging the photons with it if you like, the photons are being, uh, participating in the expansion of the universe, that's why they're redshifting, that we can see things to out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing. And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years with no sign of slowing down yet, which is a huge, uh, surprise, serendipitous s- surprise, um, that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us. So we can see, let's call the age of the universe fif- 15 billion years just to make the math simple. We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction, and we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction (laughs) just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away. So that means we see things that themselves are f- are 90 billion light years away from each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We don't know. Some conjecture, there's not only one. There's an infinite number of them.

   2. LFLex Fridman54:51

      How are you emotionally okay with the fact that our universe is expanding? So like...

   3. BKBrian Keating54:56

      It's gonna be like Annie Hall like with Alvy, uh, Singer?

   4. LFLex Fridman54:59

      Uh, this is, I-

   5. BKBrian Keating55:00

      Have you ever seen that?

   6. LFLex Fridman55:00

      I grew up in the Soviet Union.

   7. BKBrian Keating55:02

      (laughs)

   8. LFLex Fridman55:02

      We watched propaganda films.

   9. BKBrian Keating55:03

      I- I realize that you did, yes. Uh, so there's a famous-

   10. LFLex Fridman55:05

       Annie Hall?

   11. BKBrian Keating55:06

       Annie Hall.

   12. LFLex Fridman55:06

       Is that some kind of a-

   13. BKBrian Keating55:07

       It's a-

   14. LFLex Fridman55:07

       What is the-

   15. BKBrian Keating55:08

       ... Communist Party of propagandists.

   16. LFLex Fridman55:10

       (laughs)

   17. BKBrian Keating55:10

       Uh, movie with Woody Allen, uh, certainly canceled, but-

   18. LFLex Fridman55:14

       Yeah.

   19. BKBrian Keating55:14

       ... uh, but nevertheless back when he was, uh, uh, not canceled yet, uh, he made a movie called Annie Hall in which as he ge- it's his self depiction. He's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David, neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn, and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore. He refuses to do his homework. His mother says, "Why?" He goes, "'Cause the universe is expanding, and it keeps on expanding. Uh, everything will rip apart, and then we'll never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless." Uh, and I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to. (laughs) Uh, and, and she goes-

   20. LFLex Fridman55:44

       (laughs)

   21. BKBrian Keating55:44

       ... "What are you talking about? We're in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" Uh, and that's true. Brooklyn is not expanding. The solar system is not expanding. Though oftentimes I get asked, "What is the universe expanding into?"

   22. LFLex Fridman55:55

       Right.

   23. BKBrian Keating55:55

       That's one of my favorite questions. Uh, what is it expanding into? And I say, it's actually an easy question if you think about it. Um, you've seen your friend, Elon, he goes out in space. He's got a rocket, right? What's outside of the rocket? If you take, if you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, go outside the rocket, you know, get, sip, sip on some Tang, screw on the cover of it, what's in there? Is it empty? (laughs)

   24. LFLex Fridman56:20

       Uh, that's just semantics, I guess. Uh, y- y- y- yeah?

   25. BKBrian Keating56:24

       No, it's definitely not empty.

   26. LFLex Fridman56:25

       Uh, so you step outside the rocket?

   27. BKBrian Keating56:27

       Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space. The quote unquote vacuum of space.

   28. LFLex Fridman56:30

       And there's no more liquid in it.

   29. BKBrian Keating56:31

       There's no more liquid in it, no. It's just a, just a container, one cubic centimeter.

   30. LFLex Fridman56:34

       Okay.
8. 1:01:18 – 1:04:30

   Gravitational waves

   1. BKBrian Keating1:01:18

      Mm-hmm.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:01:18

      But, okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish, who wrote the forward to your book.

   3. BKBrian Keating1:01:21

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:01:22

      Uh, h- how do gravitational waves fit into all this? How, how do they emo- on the emotional level-

   5. BKBrian Keating1:01:26

      Oh.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:01:26

      ... how do they make you feel that they're just, uh, moving spacetime?

   7. BKBrian Keating1:01:31

      (laughs) Yeah. So gravitational waves were, the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time, you know, it was dis- dis- it was discovered twice. Uh-... indirectly by two, uh, men, uh, named Hulse and Taylor, and that was given my first year of graduate school. The day I entered graduate school almost, they, they announced these two guys won it and the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:01:53

      Is this in the '40s?

   9. BKBrian Keating1:01:54

      Uh, this was... No. (laughs) This was in the 19-

   10. LFLex Fridman1:01:56

       That was a joke.

   11. BKBrian Keating1:01:57

       Yeah. That was good.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:01:58

       All right.

   13. BKBrian Keating1:01:58

       That was good.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:01:58

       Thank you.

   15. BKBrian Keating1:01:59

       I got it. I got it. You know, to a cosmologist, age, it means nothing.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:02:02

       Right.

   17. BKBrian Keating1:02:02

       Um, and to a tennis player.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:02:03

       Not on Tinder.

   19. BKBrian Keating1:02:05

       (laughs) That's right.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:02:06

       All right. S-

   21. BKBrian Keating1:02:06

       Um...

   22. LFLex Fridman1:02:07

       Sorry.

   23. BKBrian Keating1:02:07

       Gravitational waves do fit in, uh, because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel at the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything, and that they're directly detectable. We're using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:02:31

       Mm-hmm.

   25. BKBrian Keating1:02:32

       So, did inflation, the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place? There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that, through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old, you know, newcomers that G- Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years, uh, away from us, uh, a billion years ago. Uh, but we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch. However, those we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the Big Bang. So, if you want to measure... Let's say you have a, um, the old time, um, uh, firecracker. Let's say there's a firecracker and you wanted to see if it went off in the building next door to you. You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it. And what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang, not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used, and his colleagues, but instead using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe. We're gonna use that as a "film," quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves get exposed.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:03:46

       And hope you can, uh... So what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy to- to- for the exposure?

   27. BKBrian Keating1:03:51

       So, the- the signal, as I said, is, um... So there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter, and there's a lot of pho- cubic centimeters in the universe. However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is. We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is. We're looking for what its polarization is.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:04:10

       And we'll g- go there.

   29. BKBrian Keating1:04:11

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:04:11

       Let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter 420 is the number?
9. 1:04:30 – 1:29:45

   BICEP

   1. LFLex Fridman1:04:30

      so, I mean, this takes us to this story...

   2. BKBrian Keating1:04:33

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:04:33

      ... of heartbreak, of triumph, of, uh, that you described in Losing the Nobel Prize. So describe what, uh, polarization is that you mentioned.

   4. BKBrian Keating1:04:42

      Yeah.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:04:42

      Can you describe what BICEP1 and BICEP2 are? BICEP3, perhaps? The instruments that, uh, can detect this kind of polarization.

   6. BKBrian Keating1:04:51

      Yeah.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:04:51

      What are the challenges? The- the origin story, the whole thing.

   8. BKBrian Keating1:04:55

      Yeah. So, well, the origin story goes back again to like a father-son rivalry. It really does. So my father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera but he never won a Nobel Prize. And, you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids, you know. "Oh, I was a football player in high school. I'll show you."

   9. LFLex Fridman1:05:10

      Right.

   10. BKBrian Keating1:05:10

       And then whatever, wrestling, whatever, and some of this could be healthy too. Um, but, um, with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy. (laughs) Like, we would compete and- and, you know, he was much more of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist, so we had both different ideas on what was pr- worth prioritizing our time. Uh, but I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize and I knew I could kind of outdo him, so I- I feel pretty venal and- and kind of, you know, miniscule kind of character-wise saying that.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:05:36

       Well, the only reason you could outdo him is because the Fields Medal is given every four years.

   12. BKBrian Keating1:05:41

       And only if you're under 40...

   13. LFLex Fridman1:05:43

       Yeah.

   14. BKBrian Keating1:05:43

       ... which he wasn't. No.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:05:43

       So he's working under much more limited conditions.

   16. BKBrian Keating1:05:47

       (laughs) That's right. So e- even if I had, which, you know, spoiler alert, the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn't do it. Um, but I wanted to do something big and I wanted to do something, uh, that would really just unequivocally be realized as a discovery for the ages, as in fact it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful

   17. LFLex Fridman1:06:05

       So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions.

   18. BKBrian Keating1:06:09

       Yeah. That's all I cared about.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:06:10

       So as an experimenter, you were swinging for the fences?

   20. BKBrian Keating1:06:14

       That's all I wanted to do. I felt like, uh, if it's not, you know, if it's- if it's worth spending, you know, perhaps the rest of my life on as a sci- as a scientist, it better be damn well better be interesting to me to carry me through, to give me the, you know, the... You know, I always say passion is great when people say, "Oh, follow your passion," but it's not enough. Passion is like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.

   21. LFLex Fridman1:06:38

       So then you swung for the fences with BICEP1.

   22. BKBrian Keating1:06:41

       Yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:06:41

       What is this?

   24. BKBrian Keating1:06:42

       So BICEP1 was born out of, um, kind of interesting circumstances. So I had gone to, uh, Stanford University for a postdoc, so an academic Hunger Games.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:06:51

       Stanford?

   26. BKBrian Keating1:06:52

       Stanford University. Yeah. It's this, uh, small little school. It's- it's- it's not like that technical college in, uh, Massachusetts that you're affiliated with.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:07:00

       Yeah.

   28. BKBrian Keating1:07:00

       Um, but, um, as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor. She had gotten there, uh, only a year before I got there and she had her own priorities that things that she wanted to do. But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different. She was studying galaxies at high redshift, and I wanted to study the origin of the universe using this- this type of technology. And, uh, I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine at- who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Haminkowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope. We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope. We needed a tiny refracting telescope, no bigger than my head, you know, less than a foot across. And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, sized telescope could have, because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky. They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky. And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively, as close as you get to proof, there could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.Inflation being the signal originally conceived of by Alan Guth to explain why the universe had the large-scale features that it does, namely that it has so-called flat geometry. So there's no, there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees. You can do that with spacecraft, you can do that with stars, you can do that with laser beams, you can do that with three different galaxies. All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry. It's remarkable, but it's also unstable. It's, uh, very unlikely. It's very seemingly finely tuned, and that was one of the motivations that Guth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation in 1979 when he was a post-doc also at Stanford, SLAC. And, uh, he was trying to get a permanent job. I was trying to, like, make my name for myself, and, uh, so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this, this professor at Stanford to do a job for her. And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you. And then one day, she couldn't take it anymore 'cause I was, like, sketching notebooks and planning these experiments, and I just... I wasn't... No, I- I-

   29. LFLex Fridman1:09:02

       So you had big ideas in your mind, you were planning big experiments-

   30. BKBrian Keating1:09:05

       Yeah.

Episode duration: 3:59:41