EVERY SPOKEN WORD
130 min read · 26,405 words- 0:00 – 2:08
Introduction
- CWChris Williamson
(wind blowing) Hi, friends. My guest this week is Professor Brian Keating and he almost won the Nobel Prize, and today we're going to find out just what it feels like to lose it. Uh, it's a really cool story. He set up the BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, and it looked like him and his colleagues had made a unique discovery, and there was a rollercoaster of what actually happened and some disputes about the data and what it showed. There's politics from the Nobel Prize Association, and I didn't understand what it was or how it works, how it's chosen, and what the processes and the heritage of this particular organization are, but we're gonna find all of that out today. It's a very interesting story, albeit at the expense of Professor Keating. Uh, but if you enjoy this episode, go back and check out the ones with Sabine Hossenfelder and Professor Adam Frank. They're both fantastic physicists, and they have a lot to add to this discussion about the politics of science. Obviously, if you love the episode, please share it. It makes me very happy, but for now let's welcome Professor Keating. Oh yeah, P.S., I've started to shorten down the intros to these podcasts because I respect your time and I found myself skipping through a lot of the introductions to podcasts that I listen to as well. In future, I'm going to endeavor to keep them around about one minute. I think this should be enough time to tell you about the guest and inform you of any upcoming announcements which are important, but if you feel like you need to know more, or less, if you want me to chop it down even further and just say, "Hi, friends," then let me know @chriswillex on all social media.
- NANarrator
(music)
- 2:08 – 6:02
Dr Brian Keating
- CWChris Williamson
Professor Brian Keating, how are you today?
- BKBrian Keating
I'm fantastic, Chris. Thanks for having me on.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. So, what are we gonna learn about today?
- BKBrian Keating
Well, you know, I kinda sought out your podcast, so I don't know how usual that is, but I heard my friend, uh, Mario Livio on your show about two months ago, a month and-a-half ago, and the interview that you did was, uh, was phenomenal, and of course he's such an engaging and erudite fellow that I felt like it would be a good opportunity for me to share some of the ideas that I've been thinking about in my work as a cosmologist. As I point out, I don't do hair and nails, but I- I am a cos-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Cosmetologist. (laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs) Though a lot of people think I- I do until they meet me. Nor do I tell horoscopes but, uh, but in- instead what I look for is really the earliest evidence for the beginning of the universe, and what I thought is so interesting about the perspective that colleagues such as myself can provide in contradistinction to those of, you know, these erudite, brilliant folks you've had on like Mario, um, is that I'm an experimentalist. So an experimentalist as a- as a cosmologist, it doesn't mean that we build universes. Uh, I've got a healthy ego, but not quite that healthy, um, and to think that I could actually build the universe, but instead we build telescopes that will allow us hopefully to reveal the earliest, uh, evidence for what's known as the Big Bang, and how we came to know what the universe is comprised of, uh, along the way may hopefully be revealed through the types of telescopes that myself and my colleagues built. Uh, and this is very different from those of the professions, you know, as practiced by, uh, your- your, you know, late countrymen and my distant late colleague, uh, Stephen Hawking or- or, uh, Sir Roger Penrose who recently visited me in San Diego and, uh, was part of our podcast that we run for the Arthur C. Clarke Center here in San Diego. And that was- uh, that is, you know, to study the universe from a purely theoretical point of view is absolutely necessary, and I always say, you know, some of my best friends are theoretical physicists. But- but in reality we- we have, uh, learned much more about the universe, uh, from people that build instruments, whether it be Galileo or Newton or, you know, people that- that, uh, are connected deeply to instrumentation because there are very few theories in the world. If you think about it there, philosophically, there can only be so many different descriptions of how the- the actual world works, many fewer than how possible worlds could work, and I'll give you one example and maybe we'll talk about that at greater length today. Uh, for- uh, for those in the audience who may have heard of something called the multiverse, uh, this is a very controversial subject within physics and even philosophy and it really revolves around the notion of whether our universe is alone, whether ours is the only universe both that exists now or may have ever existed or may- will ever exist in the distant future. And that's quite an astounding thing to think about. Uh, it's motivated in some sense from the thought of people like Copernicus and Galileo who showed the Earth as just but one of many planets in the solar system. Uh, now we know there's but one of... The Milky Way is but one of many galaxies in the universe. So perhaps it's- m- it's natural to think maybe we're just the- not just the only universe in what's called the multiverse. So these are the kind of things we study but- uh, but in- in contrast to many other, you know, kind of more popular, maybe much smarter, uh, bet- better speakers than I- my- than I am, but, uh, these- these folks that, uh, study things from a purely theoretical perspective. It's just a different perspective I thought it would be great for your audience to get a taste of.
- 6:02 – 9:45
Is the world of physics bipartisan
- BKBrian Keating
- CWChris Williamson
I- I couldn't agree more.How different is the ... Or how bipartisan is the world of physics when it comes to the experimentalists versus the theo- theoretical lists?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, the theoreticians, that's right. Um, it's-
- CWChris Williamson
Theoreticians, wow.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Nice.
- BKBrian Keating
It's kinda like, you know, Republicans and Democrats-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that really what it's like? (laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
... or Tor- Tories and Labour, we never talk to each o- ... No, it's much healthier than that.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
Uh, I would say, it's, it's like, uh, uh, it's, it's much less of a rivalry than any, you know, sports team.
- CWChris Williamson
Is it, is it like the offensive team and the defensive team of, um, American football?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. Except, you know, I wouldn't want to wager on, you know, the theoreticians I know to, to be very good footballers.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
But anyway, you'll, you'll edit that out, I'm sure. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I think that ... No, I think, I think Mario ... I, I wouldn't back going up against Mario Livio. He seems like he's probably got a bit of a-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... bit of a vicious streak to him-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... when he needs to get going.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. He's got a massive side, that's right.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
Um, indeed, yeah, there, there, uh, there, there is a, I would say, a healthy rivalry, as there should be. So it used to be, I don't know how it is in the UK, whether your football teams there ... Uh, but in America there used to be laws, uh, in ... Unofficial laws within sports teams for our ver- version of football, that if you were playing against, uh, uh, you know, an opposing team in, in American football, you weren't allowed to socialize with them the night before the game, like they were called ... Anti-fraternization laws. Like, well, that's not really very friendly, you know, that's not very gentlemanly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
But of course, you know, our version of football, yeah, we wear helmets and you guys in rugby and football don't do anything.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
We're kind of, uh, you know, different that way. But, um, but there was a rivalry and he wanted to stoke that competition and that, those juices because it was thought that competition would be, uh, compromised if they were too friendly. And, you know, I just co- you know, contrast that to the word fraternization means fraternal. I have three brothers of my own and I don't think we'd ever characterize our relationship, you know, as, as very, you know, friendly in a, in a, in a competition, even, even a physical one. So, um, so perhaps that's misnamed. But I think there should be a skepticism. You know, it's very easy to write, uh, papers and, and conjecture marvelous things like wormholes and extra dimensions and the multiverse and things like that. It's, it's, it's easy in some sense, of course, intellectually it's very challenging to actually be able to back that up. But it's, it's sort of you ... When there's no, um, when there's nothing, no skin in the game as Nicholas Taleb says, you know, there's nothing really ... They're, they're not gonna go out there and build the experiment to detect it. And that's very different than the way things used to be, right? Galileo would have an idea that falling masses, you know, uh, decelerate or accelerate towards the earth at the same rate regardless of their mass or composition and, uh, and he showed that and he built an apparatus, allegedly the Leaning Tower of Pisa, et cetera. But he did other things that we know are not apocryphal. Uh, Newton built telescopes and he built, uh, he built other apparatus. He was, of course, an alchemist and, um, you know, he was actually involved in the day-to-day events of the world. But, um ... And even Einstein had patents, which is quite amazing to think about and, um, and of, of course, you know, the great physicists of the 20th and 21st century, many of them, you know, had equal facility with experiment and theory. And I think that's the nature of a well-rounded Renaissance man or woman physicist that we should aspire to be, uh, capable of, of forays into both the purely abstruse theoretical domain and what it actually takes to have skin in the game to go out and measure it. And so-
- 9:45 – 13:57
The skys the limit
- BKBrian Keating
- CWChris Williamson
I get, I get that completely. Is it ... Um, it, it seems like the sky's the limit, really. Or actually, no, 'cause that's probably a poor term to use in your field of work, right?
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
But, um, the something is the limit, uh, for theoretical physicists, as you've said. They can, if they can postulate it and back it up with an existing theory, which again, can also be based on something which hasn't been shown to be true in experiment, but perhaps makes sense mathematically given the constants that we know about the universe, et cetera, et cetera, that they can say it and put it forward and downstream from that there's actually no real implications other than, oh, wow, you wrote a really cool theory about this particular thing. Let's run with it and see if anyone else fancies backing it up.
- BKBrian Keating
That's right. Yeah, exactly. So it's, uh, I kind of view, and this maybe your, your listeners and maybe you'll appreciate the analogy, it's kinda like I feel we as experimentalists are the bouncers in the nightclub of the universe. And that we actually are the ones that, that squash and keep things out and keep the field honest in a sense. And, and it can also happen to us, as I describe in my book. So my book, uh, is called Losing the Nobel Prize, and it's a story ... It's really kind of like, um, the dirty laundry or, or, or confidential, you know, kinda, uh, tell-all about what it's like to be a professional scientist in this current era. And that also means that sometimes you get swept up in sort of the pursuit of things that are non-scientific in nature, in that they may be related to benefiting your career or your pocketbook or what have you. Um, and this is a, a, a relatively new affliction. You know, I don't think, uh, very many people in the olden days were concerned as much about fame and, and fortune in science. And it's certainly true that, you know, Einstein didn't die a billionaire, right? I mean, he ... His, his ideas in some sense were responsible for a lot of the technology from GPS to the laser and he, you know, he made some money, but he wasn't born ... But if you look at how much he could have contributed intellectually versus monetarily, it's vastly outweighed. So I think that it's important. As I say in my book, you know, we can write a book about the multiverse or the wormhole or the black hole or ... But you can't really put it on the cover of the book, whereas the ... Every single book comes with a dust jacket, right? And-... and what does it do? It's what, kee- keep dust out. I mean, I always hated dust jackets and I always thought they were useless and they'd get in the way of the book. Um, but now I realize that they serve this vital purpose, which is to keep the dust out of the story, and the story in my case is intricately, uh, dependent on the role that dust in the cosmos this, in this case plays. And so I say to my friend, "You know, try getting a wormhole jacket on the cover-"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- BKBrian Keating
"... and I'll be very impressed."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) I get that. So losing the Nobel Prize, tell us where does the book begin? What's the story?
- BKBrian Keating
So it's really a, a three-part story. One part is a memoir of what it's like to be a cosmologist, to work with some of the biggest minds, intellects, and egos in the world at the cutting edge of astronomical discovery. In this case, we built a telescope that we put at the very bottom of the world at a location called the South Pole, which is the sort of central, uh, part of the Antarctic continent, reached for the second time, uh, in 1912 by one of your countrymen, Robert Falcon Scott. He famously arrived there, uh, just three weeks later than his Norwegian counterpart, Roald Amundsen. And that three-week delay ended up costing him and five of his, um, of his employees, if you will, their lives. And I draw some parallels between the quest to conquer Antarctica and the South Pole in particular, and the quest to be the first in science to make a discovery, to make a discovery that is as, um, as is important, as is foundational, and as is important career-wise to its discoverers as the finding of the South Pole was, or the landing on the moon in the 1960s was for America. Uh, so that's part one. What it's like to be a scientist at the bleeding edge of competition, uh, collaboration and, and in some cases controversy. The
- 13:57 – 14:24
Lowhanging fruit
- BKBrian Keating
second thing-
- CWChris Williamson
Is there not very- is there not very many, uh, bits of low-hanging fruit? You've said it's kind of like a winner take all competition here, and you know, if you want to be the first person to reach a pole in the world, you've only got two choices, right? (laughs) Like you, you're gonna, you, that's it. Once one's gone, there's only one left. And once that one's gone-
- BKBrian Keating
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... you're fucked.
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
So is it similarly, uh, is it, is it kind of, um, needles in a haystack, so to speak, in terms of finding like the big winners?
- 14:24 – 15:37
Ignorance and knowledge
- CWChris Williamson
- BKBrian Keating
Well, you know, there's a famous quote by, uh, John Archibald Wheeler who was, you know, Feynman, one of Feynman's advisors and, and so forth. Um, but, uh, that was, you know, our job is to expand the island of knowledge into the sea of ignorance, something to that effect. But when you make an island bigger, you're also making the coastline between, the border between ignorance and knowledge bigger and elongated as well. So I think that's sort of the job. There... It's harder and harder to find new frontiers. That's certainly true, but there's so many mysteries, there's so many things that are just staring us right in the face that we know nothing about, that some have decried the stagnation in cosmology and physics in particular. Uh, and really this glorification of the past is a symptom of the, of the relative backwater stagnation that's occurring within physics today. Uh, namely that there haven't been, according to, uh, a German, uh, physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, make a good guest someday for you as well-
- CWChris Williamson
I've already heard her on.
- BKBrian Keating
Oh, you have? Okay, great.
- CWChris Williamson
I've already heard her on, yeah. I was gonna ask-
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... whether or not you'd heard it, but yeah, we, uh, (laughs) we had a discussion I was gonna bring up, I was gonna m- mention some of that with you as well, so we'll get into that in a second. What, what was-
- BKBrian Keating
Great, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... what was the quote that you had from
- 15:37 – 16:48
The most exciting time in history
- CWChris Williamson
her?
- BKBrian Keating
Well, uh, no, it was really just a claim from her that there, there haven't been any developments in nearly 50 years that rival the developments of say, the preceding 50 years in physics. And that is, you know, and that is kind of depressing on one hand, but I note that she's a theoretician. She's not an experimentalist. And that's why I think it's, it's so exciting to be someone who can build, interact, and acquire data from these sentinels, whether they be located underground, in space, at the South Pole, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. And I think it's the most exciting time in history from that perspective. So I don't disagree with her that, you know, she may have chosen poorly in her field choice. Uh, uh, we have a friendly kind of, uh, rivalry. She's, she's-
- CWChris Williamson
She's awesome. I love Sabine.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, she's, she's, uh, she's a certain contrarian. Um, and so what I, what I really feel is that the, uh, it couldn't be more stark, the contrast and the kind of ebullience and excitement that I feel every day getting to do what I do, versus kind of the depression and-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
... and sullenness that I see from my theory- theoretical colleagues. So I'm always trying to convert them, you know-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
... get them out of there, get up to the-
- CWChris Williamson
Across the aisle.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, exactly. Get them on the other side of the team.
- CWChris Williamson
I love it.
- BKBrian Keating
So-
- CWChris Williamson
So what's, what's part two?
- 16:48 – 19:42
The biggest discovery of all time
- CWChris Williamson
- BKBrian Keating
Part two is really a story of how we came to know what we know about cosmology, so a history of the universe from the first telescope ever used in astronomy by Galileo, up through the BICEP2 telescope, which is a telescope that I, uh, conceived of and helped to build at the South Pole, Antarctica, that seemed to provide evidence for what was claimed to be the biggest discovery of all time the day we made the announcement, and certain to rack up numerous Nobel Prizes for those of us potentially who built the instrument, and certainly for the theoreticians who made the predictions. Uh, and how do they, you know, the inflationary universe that I described, how did that come to be and what are its implications? As I said, the multiverse is a natural extension, it's a consequence according to the founders of inflation. Without, uh, without the inflationary universe, you know, being true, there would be no multiverse. And, and only if there is inflation can there be a multiverse in many of these theories. Uh, so it's incredibly, uh, uh, high stakes for cosmology and for philosophy and all of physics that we get this right. And our experiment claimed evidence for this back in 2014, uh, to global headlines and fanfare, Nobel Prize whispers. Uh, we later had to retract that statement and that claim, and what that experience was like as a physicist and as a human being. I think, you know, when you interview these brilliant people-Um, I think the lay person is most interested in what are they like as, as a person. Like, you know, uh, what was Einstein like as a father? That's something that's always interested me. Like, what was, uh, you know, Feynman like as, as a friend? Those are more interesting. Like, I can learn the physics. The physics is sort of immutable. It's, it's like, you know, i- i- it's, it's, it's possible to learn the physics without knowing the, the personality behind it. But that's why these biographies of Einstein and, and Feynman keep coming out. It's like, how many biographies can you have? You know, it's like, did he have a secret double l- you know, clone somewhere? I don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
I think if, if anyone was gonna have a double or triple or quadruple life, it would be Richard Feynman.
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs) That's true.
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, the discussion I had with Mario Livio, I think as close as Mario Livio can have a man crush on someone, I think Richard Feynman just about might be it. What, what's super interesting you said there, t- talking as a perfect representative of the lay person when it comes to physics, um, I hadn't taken a massive interest in Isaac Newton until I found out about all of his very strange quirks and beliefs and how he used to love to go to hangings and he-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... kind of had a little bit of a sadistic side to him and he spent more than half his career trying to, um, prove a bunch of theological, uh, stuff to be true.
- BKBrian Keating
That's right. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And, you know, I- I'm like, "Oh, like, fuck gravity. Like, I wanna know about what..."
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
"I wanna know about, like, his weird quirks and all that."
- BKBrian Keating
Right. I mean-
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know? Like that, it humanizes
- 19:42 – 20:41
Einsteins greatest accomplishment
- CWChris Williamson
him.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You're totally right.
- BKBrian Keating
Did you, did you never hear what he claimed is his greatest accomplishment for the man who came up with calculus, the law of universal gravitation?
- CWChris Williamson
Lay it, lay it on us.
- BKBrian Keating
He, that he died a virgin.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, wow.
- BKBrian Keating
That, I remember hearing that he claimed this is greatest... 'cause it was, uh, as close as he could get to emulating Jesus Christ, and it shows you the esteem with which he held, uh... Now, I'm not for, you know, deconstructing just to tear somebody down, you know, like, "Oh, George Washington wasn't great 'cause he had slaves." No, um, that's... Although I do kind of deconstruct the Nobel institution in the book, and that's the third part of the book.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
Is, what does it mean? Because what, what ended up happening was, uh, I, I was, you know, we made this announcement, I'd kind of been edged out in a, in a dramatic series of events from the, you know, basically denied the paternity of the experiment that I helped to sire, and-
- CWChris Williamson
So let's just, let's just roll, roll back a tiny little bit. So, we've got-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... the BICEP2 telescope. Um-
- BKBrian Keating
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
Fi- first off, why is it called the BICEP telescope? Why is it a bicep at all?
- 20:41 – 26:35
Gravitational waves
- CWChris Williamson
- BKBrian Keating
So the, the inflationary universe predicts that if inflation took place, the universe would be suffused with what's known as gravitational waves. These are waves of the gravitational force field. So as they pass by a person, say, if that was, uh, possible to imagine, the person would gain and lose weight alternatively as the wave propagates by. So it changed the force in which gravity is pulling on you. Obviously, on Earth, it wouldn't make any big difference, but, but say far in interstellar space and, you know, potentially this broad experiment you could do. Now, you know that these gravitational waves were first detected directly f- uh, in 2015, resulting in the LIGO d- uh, experiment leadership, or at least three of the four people th- that did it, in winning the Nobel Prize, which is a problem that we can talk about. And then, uh, that was for the coalescence of two black holes of a mass each one about 30 times the mass of the sun. They came together and made a black hole that was slightly less massive than a black hole with the mass of 59 solar masses, say. So one entire mass was converted to gravitational energy. It couldn't be converted to light. These black holes, by, by virtue of their intense gravity, are black, and so they coalesced, they gave off, by Einstein's equation E equals mc², they converted one solar mass worth of mass, ma- uh, you know, their, their gravitational binding energy into pure gravitational wave energy. That, if you can imagine, all the mass in the universe, not just 30 mass black hole, 30 solar mass black holes, every black hole, every galaxy, every person, ev- every single pl- everything in the universe exploding forth, not just over the course of a second as these black holes coalesced, but over the course of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. How violent that process would be. That would create waves of gravitational energy. Those waves, uh, would travel at the speed of light and they would influence the oldest light that we know to exist in the universe, and that's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's a type of microwave energy, radio energy that comes to us in all directions. That, uh, energy would be twisted and, and curled in a certain way that I describe in the book with, uh, about 60 illustrations, uh, custom-made for the book, and that twisting, curling pattern was known as B-mode polarization or curl pattern polarization, and so when I made up the acronym BICEP, I wanted it to reflect that we're trying to muscle our way back to the beginning of time and get th- uh, the, the, the jump on these curls. So the bicep does the curling, uh, on your body.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah.
- BKBrian Keating
And so that's the origin of the name. So-
- CWChris Williamson
That's just s- that's such a good name. That's such a-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. If we look at my face.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a very clever way to do it and there's gym bros up and down the country that are applauding you for coming up with it as well.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. That's great.
- CWChris Williamson
So we've got, we've got the telescope. I'm gonna imagine it must have been an absolutely massive undertaking to be able to-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to come up with something like that and it's in the most inhospitable climate on the planet that is-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... the most remote with the least supplies and all the rest of it. So what was the process like of actually creating it?
- BKBrian Keating
So creating it, you know, I would say was less difficult than actually, you know, uh, like coming up with the idea was harder than actually building the thing 'cause you can have a great-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that... Sorry, sorry for interrupting. Is that a, um-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that a reflection of the theoretical versus experimental debate again doing things? (laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, exactly. So, so as s-
- CWChris Williamson
Very figurative, eh?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. It's very hard to convince other people what a great genius you are, you know? (laughs) So, but it turns out you need to in order to have the wherewithal, financial and the most valuable capital, human capital, in getting young people to believe in your ideas and to follow you literally to the ends of the earth as they did. Um, and then to actually build the instrument, you know, is a, is an engineering challenge, but it's not an insurmountable one. Now, I, I, I say so with a little bit of glibness, but in truth, I have to give credit to these hard, extremely hardworking people in the field like my students and my collaborators all around the world because this telescope...... was actually able to be cooled down to a temperature that's ten times lower than the temperature of interstellar space, which is just unfathomable. So a quarter of a degree above absolute zero. So if you could cool something down to absolute zero, all of its motion, all the chemicals, all the molecules would stop, completely stop dead. And perhaps, if there's no motion, there's no time, right? So time is really measured by the reckoning between successive events. Well, if nothing's moving, no time could elapse, and that's deeply connected with this theory of inflation. (smacks lips) So how do you go from non-universe to universe? You know, it's kind of a big mystery, right? It's, it's like going from non-life, like just chemicals, pouring chemicals together and getting something li- living. And so for me to go from non-experiment to experiment, although that's the zero to one moment in Peter Thiel's language, I know you like him, uh, you know, going to that, to that extreme is, uh, is, is very difficult. But it's not as hard as getting all the assets together, like a military campaign to the bottom of the world. So that took four or five years to do. Then by nature of the faintness of the signal, we had to observe for, for a total of, between the two experiments that I was a part of that made this announcement possible, six years of observations and then another four years of data analysis on supercomputers, uh, you know, just running non-stop, the biggest, most massive computers on Earth. And that, uh, and then 50 people working, you know, at some times, day and night around the clock to make this announcement that we had seen the spark that ignited the very Big Bang that we believe exists today.
- CWChris Williamson
So you saw... Or the six years of, uh, capture were done then, and further four years of processing, and at the end of that, what, what happened? 'Cause someone, someone at some point has come into the room and said something like-
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... "Professor Kating, I think we found it."
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like, the, the... That point must have occurred. Can you, can you talk us through
- 26:35 – 27:17
Eureka
- CWChris Williamson
that?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, so that's the, that's one of the ironies of the book and one of the things I think the book does a, a job, uh, a good job at, at attempting to describe is how human scientists are. So what you just described is, is the confirmation of a theory, right? You said, "Someone came and went, 'I think we found it.'" So that's like, "Eureka!" What does eureka mean when Archimedes would say it? Uh, "Eureka! I found it." So to find something means you were looking for something, right? Unless you're just like, "Oh, I saw something, like, that's weird." Uh, and that happens a lot in science too, and I argue in the book that's the purest form of scientific discovery when it's serendipitous. Like Jocelyn-
- CWChris Williamson
That was like the, uh, like the deep, deep fields image, right?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like there's this big blank space, we're just gonna point the thing at it and see
- 27:17 – 32:39
Jocelyn Bell
- CWChris Williamson
what happens.
- BKBrian Keating
Or, or closer to the... Yeah, or closer to where you are now, Jocelyn Bell, discovering pulsars for the first time, completely accidentally. She wasn't looking for pulsars. It just showed up in her data and she did the hard work to unravel it. And eventually a Nobel Prize was awarded, uh, uh, for her work, but not to her, to her male advisors, uh, as I point out in the book. But, uh, exactly. So there's serendipitous discoveries. Those are pure, those cannot be found, and they're also not susceptible to what's known as confirmation bias. If you have some idea about me or, you know, you're w- you're bouncing at a club or so, you have to have some notion about, you know, what's desirable or what you're, what you're looking for. But in science, we like to think that scientists are completely dispassionate, but what if there are non-scientific forces at work? Um, such as, you know, people like me who at the time was really obsessed with the Nobel Prize and winning it and, and, and being elevated to this very, very tiny pantheon of scientists who are household names. That, that was so enticing. It, it really dominated a lot of my early career, um, mental energy. And so when we... Yes, when we did discover the signal that I knew if correct, even when I came up with the idea for the experiment, would be the biggest, you know, home run or, uh, what do you call it, century, hitting a century, I don't know, um, in cricket. The, the idea of doing that was so intoxicating to both discover the purity of the scientific quest, but also being honest to win a Nobel Prize. When we did that, of course, then we just basically, you know, looked in as many places as we could to see if we were right or not. And, uh, it kept coming up that we were, and, uh, and... But, but the farther we went down, the more committed to the hypothesis con- confirmation we were as well. And then the ultimate revelation was done not, uh, in a peer-reviewed journal article as typically required as the gold standard of scientific discovery, but only since the late 1800s by the way. But nevertheless, that, that discovery was announced, you know, at a press conference held at Harvard University on March 17th, 2014, to, as I said, worldwide fanfare with Nobel laureates in the audience and, and other Nobel laureates speaking to those Nobel la- you know (laughs) , potential Nobel laureates speaking to those, uh, past Nobel laureates. And I wasn't at that event. And, um, and the, the feeling of, of, you know, creating something, being a part of something only to see sort of the control taken away from me, uh, that is a big element of the book. And furthermore, the, the, the quest that drives many scientists, you know, I say m- not all scientists suffer from the same malady that I did, but many of us do. Be, you know, y- just listening in, in the few podcasts that you've done with scientists and, and, and they're fantastic, you know, the word Nobel Prize comes up awful lot. And it's sort of a, a way, an, of subconsciously perhaps acknowledging this authority bias that human beings have, that we want to have experts to listen to. We wanna offload the responsibility of thinking for ourselves, just honestly. We wanna trust that Einstein knew better than us so he won the Nobel Prize and he came up with the photon and, and special relativity. So I'm gonna listen to him, um, about, uh, world government being the ideal situation. And, you know, I don't know how you feel about that, but, uh...
- CWChris Williamson
Well, people... I th- I think you, you are totally right. We sometimes afford, um, we afford particular intellectual thinkers, uh, an-... almost universal level of admiration, which, you know, Sir Isaac Newton, there we go, like fantastic. Like listen to him about physics, probably don't listen to him about what you should do with your Sunday afternoon. Like ...
- BKBrian Keating
Exactly. Mm-hmm, yep.
- CWChris Williamson
And, and-
- BKBrian Keating
It's called the halo effect, it's called the halo effect. People want to believe that there'll be people ... You know, so in America every four years, we get this list of, of Nobel laureates that say, you know, which Democrat you should vote. I've never seen them once say they should vote for a Republican. Now, you could say whatever you want about Republicans or Democrats, but you know, if it's scientific, there, there should have been at least one who would vote (laughs) you know ... Uh, you know, it's hard to believe this, that groupthink is so prevalent, but it is, and that's only-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, wow, it totally, totally is. Uh, th- this was the, the ... I'll give you the, um, 30-second synopsis to my podcast with Sabine, uh, for anyone who is listening. If you go back, Sabine Hossenfelder, um, The Beauty in Physics, I think it was called, the episode. And, um, the bottom line, the punchline of the whole thing was that I had discovered during the podcast that physicists were people too.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I always presumed that they were these input process output, robotic, um, kind of paragons of perfect intellectual-
- BKBrian Keating
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... pureness. And, and, and, and-
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And it turns out that it's just, it's just as political, if not more political than-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... y- y- so many, you know ... It made me feel like my job, which is manipulating social networks to get people to go to nightclubs, almost felt like relatively kind of noble. And then on the flip side, there's all of the, you gotta be in this right camp. You gotta be ... You can't be back-stabbing this person. Oh, you've, you've endeared yourself to this particular kind of theory. That means you can't be in this ... And I, I couldn't, I couldn't believe just how bipartisan and, and tri-partisan and (laughs) all the rest of it it was.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It blew me away.
- 32:39 – 35:26
Humans are human
- CWChris Williamson
- BKBrian Keating
It really is. And it's a way of just over-simplification, which is a natural human urge. And it just proves, yeah, that humans, uh, scientists are human. And I think the cliché, the trope that we're just walking Wikipedias is really nonsensical. And I do my best to, you know, display the humanity of the scientist by both making many, many mistakes every day-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
... you can ask my, my wife about that. Uh, but also, you know, having a, having a real clear-cut, you know, kind of image of what is, what is, uh, important about science. So if you look at science, the word science in Greek roughly translates into knowledge. Um, but that's very different than wisdom, as I always point out to my colleagues, you know. Just because you're a scientist, it has nothing to say whatsoever about your wisdom. I mean, uh, so one Nobel laureate, he was actually here at San- UC San Diego, where I am. He said, "If you think that Nobel laureates are so brilliant, you should see them in the morning of the event when they're trying to find where the eggs are served," you know. (laughs) It's just, which is, you know, another cliché, but at the same time, you know, again, I don't have problems with the, with the Nobel laureates who win. I have an issue with this, with the, with this process, with this establishment, which like what Sabine talks about. Uh, both of our books have a similarity in that we're taking on these sacred cows. And sacred cows are not always, you know, deserving of that stature. And I think in the case of the Nobel Prize, it's held in such high esteem that one should be careful about the outsized influence that it has on scientists certainly, but especially on non-scientists, members of the public, members of your audience. When they hear Nobel Prize, oh, they're just gonna stop thinking. Or t- or like, "I'll listen to what he..." And it's mostly men, by the way, which is already a tip-off that there's something rotten in Stockholm, right? I mean, you know, there is many... Anyone who thinks that women aren't as bright as men, you know, so why is it true that, that only, you know, 1% of all winners of the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry are women? Uh, there's something obviously at work that's systemic that needs to be changed, and yet the Nobel institution is incredibly ossified, uh, and, and really susceptible in my mind, uh, to a vast reformation that they're very unwilling to, to do. And-
- CWChris Williamson
Can, can you take us through the, what the Nobel Prize is 'cause, uh, you know, the, the term of the Nobel Prize, I know it, and again, I am Mr. Avatar for the lay, layperson, so ...
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... I know, I know that the Nobel Prize is given in a number of different categories. I know that it's maybe once every year or once every couple of years, and I know that lots of Jewish people win it. Like-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... those are, those are kind of ... That's the beginning and the end of my knowledge. I don't know-
- BKBrian Keating
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... why it exists. I don't know where it started. I don't know who looks after it. I don't know what the process is or whatever it is. So-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... give us, give us the Cliffnotes on what the-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... Nobel Prize is.
- 35:26 – 39:48
Alfred Nobel
- CWChris Williamson
- BKBrian Keating
So my book begins with the story of how Alfred Nobel's younger brother blew himself up, and it's kind of weird. Like, what does that have to do with cosmology? So Alfred Nobel was a, was a Swedish, actually Russian-Swedish im- uh, uh, inventor and entrepreneur who was the son of a, of a father who had invented, uh, some military applications for high explosives in the 1850s in, in Sweden. And had mainly, uh, been selling them to the, to the Russian Empire, uh, for their many wars that they were conducting in that time period. Uh, but the goal of having a stable form of nitroglycerin, which is very, very powerful explosive, but also very mercurial and explosive, that, uh, and dangerous. That was a goal of many, many inventors. That would be the killer app that could be used to safely do construction, uh, if it could be invented. So Alfred Nobel's younger brother ... So he was one of seven kids, I believe, Alfred, and, uh, three or four of them died before they were 22 years old, uh, mostly by, you know, natural causes. But in the case of his younger brother, he was experimenting with this compound, nitroglycerin, and he dropped a vial of it, and it blew up the laboratory in Stockholm where he was working. And the family laboratory killed, um, about four other people that were his lab assistants. And that really drove, um, uh, Immanuel Nobel, the, the Nobel brother's father insane. And he ended up giving control of the company to one of his other brothers. And, uh, one thing led to another, but Alfred went off on this quest, single-minded focus to find, uh, to find a safe version of nitroglycerin. And he invented it, and it made him perhaps one of the richest people of the world at that time, in today's dollars worth, you know, billions of dollars. Uh, and, and this company that still bears his name exists, which is, which is amazing. There are very few companies, you know, that are based on an invention, uh, by an inventor from the, from the 19th century that still have that name, that still ex- I mean, maybe ten of them around the world. In this case, um-... and made him incredibly wealthy, but it was still tied to the manufacture and sales of arms, uh, between, you know, different countries in Europe that were continually at war with one another. And then also dynamite and b- ballistite and all sorts of other military, cordite, explosives used to kill people. And one day, uh, about 20 years after he invented dynamite, Alfred was walking around the streets of Paris, France, and he came upon a headline and it said, "Alfred Nobel, The Merchant of Death, has dead." And, "The man who had killed more people in history than any other person has met his own just reward." They were kind of gleefully celebrating his death. And, uh, it was very shocking to him. It must have felt like a, you know, Ebenezer Scrooge or, you know, somebody like really celebrating their death. And it shocked him so much that he resolved to use his vast personal fortune after he died to endow a will which would give out prizes in five categories: literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and peace. And so peace kind of the one that little bit stands out. But all, all five of these awards, and they've since enlarged it to include economics about 80 years after he died, and they're given out annually. And what Alfred wanted, and he said explicitly in his will, which you can find on the Nobel commit, on the Nobel Prize website to this day, he said, "I want these prizes to go to, to the person," in the singular, "who created the most important or beneficial discovery or invention in the preceding year that has had the biggest benefit on mankind." So there are three stipulations. A single person would win it for an invention made last year and, uh, that had the greatest benefit on mankind. Now, unless you're a theoretical particle physicist, I don't know how much the Higgs boson improves your daily life or benefits your daily life. You know, if you, if you do, then, you know, please consult a psychiatrist. But because, (laughs) you know, it's really not that relevant to our daily lives, very important in the grand scheme of the universe, but it would g- it would exist whether we discovered it or not. Unlike, say, the X-ray, which was the subject of the first Nobel Prize in 1901, which has improved and bettered the lives of human beings. Uh, since its a-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that what got, is that what got the first Nobel Prize?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. So I talk about that and-
- CWChris Williamson
That's a pretty cool, pretty sort of big, uh, big impact, uh,
- 39:48 – 49:24
Losing the Nobel
- CWChris Williamson
discovery, right?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. Absolutely. And there have been other ones. And so, so I put in the book... Uh, because what happened was, as I said, Chris, I, I was, you know, created this experiment which was immediately, uh, claimed to be Nobel worthy the day of the announcement in 2014. Uh, I wasn't-
- CWChris Williamson
Which you, which you weren't there for.
- BKBrian Keating
Which, uh, what's that?
- CWChris Williamson
Which you weren't there for. You weren't there for the announcement.
- BKBrian Keating
I wasn't there for it. Yeah, so I talk about that at very, uh...
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. (laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
I'm very honest in the book about, you know, my, my foibles and faults in the whole, uh, affair. But, um, but in truth, you know, I think it ended up being that there were competitions and there were discussions and polls on the internet and papers published, you know, that really claimed that of all the, you know, kind of people on Earth, that I might have a decent shot, you know, better than one in, in five or something, of winning a Nobel Prize, which is pretty high. You know, 'cause, there's, you know, billions of people on Earth, right? And, and, uh, how often do you get to be in that very select group?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- BKBrian Keating
And then, uh, we- as I describe in the book, it was not to be. Obviously, the wi- the title would be different if I had won the Nobel Prize, not lost it, so the title Is Losing the Nobel Prize. But it has two different meanings. One of the meanings is how I personally lost it and lost out on this opportunity, although creating something Nobel worthy, and then having that slip away. I describe the emotions of that and the personal side of that, but also the cosmic side of it. What does it mean to talk about things like the multiverse and like the inflationary universe and the creation of, of the Big Bang? Uh, what does that mean in a world, in a universe that's polluted with contamination and with confirmation bias and with all these other foibles that human beings have? So that's one aspect of the title. But then if you can imagine this, uh, you know, so imagine, um, what is it? Uh, Prince Harry, you know, he and, and Princess Meghan, you know, they wanna come to a club and, and you're at that club and they're about to come into your club and you hooked it up. They are just so d- you're, you're just gonna love it, you're gonna take selfies with them. And then right before they get there, they say, "Uh, you know what? We're not gonna come to your club or any of your clubs. In fact, could you recommend a better club, uh, for us to go to? Better than any of the ones you're..." So what ended up happening was not only did I lose the Nobel Prize chance that I, uh, you know, best chance I would ever have, but that same year that I pre- potentially could have won it, I was asked by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize that, you know, I would have won had my experiment not been disconfirmed and our results retracted.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- BKBrian Keating
Our claim- our claim of discovery retracted. The experiment was correct. It still is correct, we still believe it's true, but the interpretation of what we saw has been changed radically from detecting the e- imprimatur of God, if you like, or of the Big Bang, of nature, uh, to the most h- humble substance in the universe, this cosmic dust that I describe, uh, at some length in the book.
- CWChris Williamson
I was gonna say, what's the specifics about... 'Cause you've gone from... You wa- you were there, you were at the finish line-
- BKBrian Keating
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, ready to go. But it seems like there's kind of two elements to this story. One of them is the potentially systemic, more political, the, uh, s- side that I, I wanna hear a little bit more about how the Nobel Prize i- is, uh, uh, adjudged and, and stuff like that. But the, obviously the sort of meat and veg of it is the fact that what you found was interpreted differently to what you originally thought. Is that correct? Can you take us through that?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. Yeah. So when we set out to measure the universe's earliest light in this curling, twisting pattern that gives BICEP its name, et cetera, the, the experiment was designed to see an effect. In other words, it was designed to see this leftover aftershock of the Big Bang via gravitational waves. And so it wasn't designed to necessarily rule out every other p-... a potential source of cosmic mimicry. So there could be sources that we didn't know about. Say, the Earth emits a type of signal that could be mistaken for it, so we design the experiment to block out the signal from the Earth because we had it located at the south pole on Earth. Now similarly, say, the atmosphere could do it, or there could be emission from sources that are not cosmological but they are in the, in the solar system or in the galaxy, and we knew about those sources and we did our best to eliminate them. But there was one source, uh, that we simply did not have enough information, and there was one group of astronomers that had this information. In fact, they were led from the European Space Agency. It was a satellite called the Planck Satellite, and they had measured the sky and they... we knew that they had information which could tell us if we had seen cosmic dust, which are particles, grains of carbon, nickel, iron, particles leftover from the... a previous explosion of, of a generation of stars called a supernova that may have existed... uh, that did exist in our galaxy prior to our solar system's existence and other solar systems' existence. And without such supernovae, we would probably not exist because the iron in your blood, the hemoglobin molecule that carries iron molecules, iron atoms, that was forged... those iron molecules were forged in the core of a supernova that exploded in our local stellar neighborhood 4.9 billion years ago. So you literally, as Carl Sagan used to say, you know, have stardust flowing through your blood, uh, very poetically, but it also flows through the galaxy. And because it's made of iron, just like the filings as, uh, Michael Faraday showed and, and others showed, they align themselves in magnetic fields. O- Our Milky Way galaxy has a magnetic field too, and it can produce the exact same curling, twisting pattern of microwaves as the Big Bang's inflationary epoch could. So that was, uh, the signal that we mistook, and the reason that we didn't have access to information which would've disconfirmed our claim earlier is because it was held by our competitors. (laughs) The Planck Satellite did not wanna share this information with us. We didn't know if they had detected it as well as we had and wanted to scoop us out of this discovery and potentially win their own Nobel Prize or they didn't have, uh, a good understanding yet of their own, uh, deficiencies, so forth, with their instrument, and it turned out to probably be a little of both. Uh, but there's this incredible competition that exists within science to get there, not only get there first, but to just obliterate the compet-... like, leave no doubt that you made this definitive measurement. We wanted that to be clear throughout the entire paper, press conference, everything we did, that there should be no doubt that what we discovered was what we claimed. And in the end, the results were correct, but we made a very exquisite measurement of the emission from dust particles in our, in our local galactic neighborhood. Uh, incredibly challenging, by the way, because the signals that we saw were just a few parts in a billion out of the temperature of the South Pole. It's just exquisite technology. I describe how exciting it is, this technology, and how it's progressing and will progress based on the lessons learned from BICEP2 to build a next generation of instrumentation, uh, such as the Simons Observatory, which is a big project that I am, uh, leader... leading here in San Diego around... based... uh, with institutions around the world. Literally 250 researchers on every continent, you know, currently on the... on the planet (laughs) , uh, which is amazing to think about. So, uh, the, the real discovery and, and its aftermath and how it affected me and the field personally, uh, is really tied up in this quest, at least personally for me, with the Nobel Prize. And I came to see it, in a sense, as almost a false idol, and I came to see the Nobel Prize, in a sense, as a religion, as a type of religion, ironically practiced by mostly secular scientists, right? 70% of our National Academy of Sciences declare themselves to be atheists. Not, not agnostic, but atheists. And, and yet, the- there... if you go to any website, you know, that supports science or any discovery where, you know, the, the... to upper echelons of authority need to be referenced, and even in Sabine's books, and she's not, you know, really beholden to the N-... but she, you know, constantly is interviewing Nobel laureates and talking about things that were rewarded with the Nobel Prize and saying, "Well, nothing's been awarded the Nobel Prize since..." You know, uh, uh, and theoretical physics shows you how, you know, how poor these predictions... Uh, as a scorecard, as a, as a talisman, as an icon, and I, and I make these parallels between a religion and the Nobel Prize, and I, I think, you know, they're, they're quite, you know... I think that they... Nobody really disputes it, which is kinda interesting to me. Uh, nobody disagrees with the reformation. So I, I present five ways to improve the Nobel Prize before it's too late, because I think if you have an institution that refuses to change its operating, you know, mode, that it's at risk of catastrophic, you know, kind of existential crisis. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, it loses, it loses its purity, right? Like, the whole point... Again, for me, as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about, the, the... one of the only things that I want the Nobel Prize to do is for it to go to the right person.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you know? So-
- BKBrian Keating
Or people.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
Right. Or people.
- CWChris Williamson
I wanna, I wanna get onto what the, uh, process for the Nobel Prize consists of, but just the, the final thing that I want to kind of round off the story for you personally was, um, how did you find out about the fact that there had been this particular change in how your, um, uh, how your discovery had been viewed, and then what was the next sort of... what were the next couple of days like? Uh, I, I'm fascinated to hear what that, what that means to someone who's pushed so hard to... and, and come so close.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- 49:24 – 50:02
A mixture of emotions
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, it was, it was a mixture of emotions. Uh, you know, at first obviously embarrassment, uh, a little personal sense of humiliation that, you know, I had kind of gone along with this result even though I had some doubts about it as we- we all had doubts. But, but certainly I had voiced a lot of doubts and, you know, a little bit of, uh, gratitude that, you know, I'd, I'd not been, you know, so publicly associated with the face of this detection because I had been kind of eliminated which, which I describe in the book and how this role ... I wasn't eliminated completely obviously, but, uh, but the way the announcement was made, I was, you know, prevented from being, uh, a part of it.
- 50:02 – 50:24
I was left at the altar
- BKBrian Keating
- CWChris Williamson
So bizarrely the thing, the thing that you felt a little bit, uh, maybe jilted at, you'd kind of been left at the altar so to speak when it came to the, the glory. But in a roundabout fashion that had also protected you from being the figurehead who, uh, upon whose shoulders most of the, um, the, uh, backlash had, had landed, I suppose.
- 50:24 – 55:19
No longer holds the idolatrous trance fiction
- CWChris Williamson
- BKBrian Keating
That's right, exactly right. And yeah, so you know, I just admit that, you know, how it felt. Uh, I wasn't, you know, glad. I wanted us to be right. I wanted us to be right even if I didn't win the Nobel Prize. But, you know, in the end, the dénouement of the story for me became a recognition that, as I said, ironically all these scientists are atheists but they worship this golden crucifix of an icon, the Nobel Prize, which literally has a graven image, you know, a picture of Alfred Nobel on it. And you bow down to it on the day he was, he died in, in December 10, you know, December 10th, 1896. That's what the day that they're awarded on his birthday. Uh, and, and for me, this, this kind of religion no longer holds the idolatrous transfixion that it had once before in that it, uh, it no longer really consumes my, my daily life in any way o- other than, you know, to think that the privilege of getting paid to do the research that I get to do and work with the genius people, students, and other scientists around the world that I get to work with, that is reward enough. And when we make the Nobel Prize this paragon of scientific excellence, we are kind of reducing ourselves, sorry to say, you know, to kind of like entertainers in the Hollywood Oscar-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it becomes like Pop Idol or X Factor, right?
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, and f- and for us I think, you know, scientists should be the most immune from that, right? Aren't we supposed to be hyper-rational and these paragons of intellectual honesty? But I think, you know, we're human beings and the problem is that, you know, I, I, as I often say ... I, I did an interview with Scott Eastwood who's, you know, Clint Eastwood's son. A very famous podcaster here in the, in the States. And you know, I was saying like, "Well, you don't really expect, you know, a, a movie studio, uh, doesn't really expect that all of its films are gonna win Academy Awards. I mean, some of them, you know, are gonna be like The Fast and The Furious and they're just not w-" And he's like, "I was in The Fast and The Furious."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
That was a, that was a highlight of my podcasting career. Um, but, but, you know, but he s- he agreed with me. You know, it's like the, the actors and actresses who go into Hollywood, they don't go into it saying, "Oh, I'm only a good actor if I win a Nobel Prize." But ... Or an Oscar rather.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
But the studios, you better believe they want most of their pictures to get ... That's why they have 10 different awards.
- CWChris Williamson
Golden Globe nomination and a this, that and the other.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
Palme d'Or, right. All these things, Sundance, and they're all about giving each other awards and the no- there is no second, there is no Golden Globes or SAG comparison, you know, second runner-up for the Nobel Pr- There's just nothing like that. So, it puts the Nobel Prize under great scrutiny and holds it up to this level of, of really austere ... of, of, of being, you know, just the augustness of winning it. Uh, I think that it, that it does a detriment- has a detrimental effect on scientists. But to the extent it's gonna survive, I wanted to preserve the purity of it by making certain reformations. I talk about, as I say, five of the ways that you could do it.
- CWChris Williamson
What are those?
- BKBrian Keating
After I had been invited to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize and coming upon it, you know, as a scholar would. So, I received a letter a couple of weeks after we made, you know, the final nail in the coffin for our detection back in 2014. And I got a letter from the Royal Swedish Academy which said, you know, "Do not talk. Strictly confidential." (laughs) You know, so, uh, I guarantee it's the last time I'll be asked to nominate winners of the Nobel. But, but it said, you know, "Here's what you need to do. Look for the multiple winners, you know, who deserve the prize." It could be something done decades earlier and it could ... And it didn't mention anything about having a benefit on mankind. I said Alfred only said three things in his will. It has to go to one person in the preceding year who had the greatest benefit and here they are asking me to do nothing of what he asked me to do. And I felt like, well, that's kind of the, one of the worst things you could do is not, is not have, uh, respect for the wishes of a dead man. Right? A dead man has one chance, one will, and imagine, you know, you know you're gonna live, you know, 100 more years or whatever. But when you write your will some day and you say, "I want all the money to go to Oxfam or, or whatever." And they give it to like, you know, whatever. I don't even know what they would give it to.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- BKBrian Keating
Uh, but they give it ... Or you know, Greenpeace and they give it to Exxon Mobil or BP. You know, you'd be pretty pissed off. I mean, but what could you do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing 'cause you're dead. And, and so I felt like it's become, it's b- uh, it's incumbent upon scientists like me to advocate for change from within. And I don't have any, you know, illusion, delusion that they're gonna listen to me. Uh, but I felt the story was too important to ignore. And so far I've gotten great feedback from people around the world, scientists and laypeople, about what it's like to really aspire to this and, and to really make great, important discoveries. But not judge yourself on whether or not this, you know, three-inch diameter gold, you know, medallion like a rap star would wear, you know, goes
- 55:19 – 58:16
The humiliation came higher than the disappointment
- BKBrian Keating
around your neck. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I could see you, I could have seen you with that wrapped around your neck, which is a shame.
- BKBrian Keating
Aw.
- CWChris Williamson
But there's a, there's a couple of things, a couple of things I've been thinking about as you've been speaking there. One of them, the first thing that you said was that, um, the humiliation maybe came a little bit higher than the de- the disappointment. And, um, some listeners of the show will know that I came off a motorbike in Bali, uh, a couple of years ago.
- BKBrian Keating
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
And as I'm, I'm driv- driving along and I-... driving a 50 pence per day Balinese, uh, moped, which is my, that was my first error. The second error is not really being very good at riding a motorbike. And a truck pulls out in front of me, and, uh, I come off the bike anyway, and I'm wearing a tiny pair of swim shorts and a little vest, and, um, I just... It's me versus Balinese road, and it wins all day. Like, I've got-
- BKBrian Keating
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... kind of like second degree burns on half of my body, and m- most of the left-hand side of me is s- stuck in the Balinese tarmac, which is very coarse. It's perfect for removing skin.
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
It'd be a brilliant cheese grater. And, um, uh, the, the first thing that I felt... So I was r- riding with these two Aussie guys who I- I'd made friends with while I was out there. I was traveling on my own, I'd made friends with these two Aussie guys, and they kind of knew me, and I kind of knew them beforehand. But anyway, we... Relatively new friends. And I was in mortal danger. I'd just injured myself. Like, the forefront of my mind should have been my injury. And the first thing that I felt when I stood myself up and brushed bits of tarmac out of me was embarrassment. The, the... Ahead-
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... of, uh, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, like, forget the-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... fact about, like, uh, uh-
- BKBrian Keating
Busy at heart.
- CWChris Williamson
... worried about, "Am I injured? Or is this going to scar?" Or, uh, you know, "I have a... Is another car coming? Is there going to be another car behind me that hits me?" No, no, no. I wanted to stand up and think, "Oh, you twat."
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Like that's (laughs) the first thing-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... that I thought. And I, I, it's just so telling of the fact that we are, uh, uh, no matter how, as you say, these sort of paragons of, of beautiful intellectual truth and, and, and, um, uh, purity and all the rest of the stuff, it's born out of a flawed system, and that system is human. And the other thing is, that I think is, is really super interesting is this, the, the journey that it's allowed you to go on, which I think is a lot of, a lot of people will be able to draw a comparison with, which is kind of that, of discovering that the, the process of what you have created, that life is a process of becoming not being-
- BKBrian Keating
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... and that as you've gone along the way, you're now able to look back on it and say, "Well, you know, like, the fact that I was able to bring all of these people together." And, uh, in a very bizarre way, I wonder whether or not you would have the same level of nuanced and subtle appreciation for all of the different elements if it was overshadowed by a large award. I don't know-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... whether you'd be able to look back with the same degree of high fidelity, that granular, kind of, uh-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah,
- 58:16 – 1:06:08
Im a hypocrite
- BKBrian Keating
absolutely. No, I, I, I agree with you 100%. I mean, I always joke, you know, people say, "Oh, you're a hypocrite. You wouldn't turn a Nobel Prize down if you won it." I say, "Well, you want to see if I'm sincere, just get them to award me the Nobel Prize and then don't object to it."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- BKBrian Keating
But in all seriousness, you know, I feel like, um, yeah, it's almost a blessing because it's sort of like a liberation. You know, I don't know if you're married or whatever, but I always say, you know, when I met my wife, I, I got to stop, like, going on dates. Like, I never have to have a first date again, you know, hopefully. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I get that, yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
And it's just, it's very liberating-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- BKBrian Keating
... when you, when you free your mind of it. And so when I freed my mind of obsession about... I was told to get tenure or to get a high level of promotion at the University of California, I have to win a Nobel Prize. I've been told by many people that they're basically judged in their careers on their prospects of winning a Nobel Prize. To be liberated from that and say, like, "Well, why..." You know, that is, that is completely an asinine j- uh, metric by which to judge a human being. And I say in the book, you know, the journey is more important than the gilded destination. And, you know, we make fun of like, you know, I don't know if you... You, you know, whatever how biblical you want to get, but, you know, back in the Bible, it talks about the, the Israelites worshiping a golden calf, you know, this, this icon made of gold that they made themselves, uh, you know, a few weeks after witnessing God allegedly, you know, wipe out Egypt with all these plagues, right? And I thought, "Well, that's so silly." But, but in truth, you know, 3,000 years later, here we are doing the exact same thing. We worship a golden icon with a picture of Alfred Nobel, and that is part of the way that we value our self-worth. I think that that's a shame in a modern scientific society to feel that way. And so I, I feel like it's part of my, you know, one of the lessons learned and, and how to handle it's not just about, you know, losing a Nobel Prize, which, you know, probably all of your listeners can sympathize with, but how do you handle not winning, you know, top 50 podcasts or how do you handle not, not, you know, getting to, you know, be high school class president? These are all things that pe-... You know, you're far more likely not to get into your own personal promised land than, than, than to get in it. And that's okay, right? You're not going to get in to be Manchester United or Newca... What is your team? Newcastle-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, City.
- BKBrian Keating
... uh, the g- whatever. Um, so, you know, from my perspective, so how do you handle that? 'Cause that's the state. If you look at the probability distribution of what you're going to spend your life being, it's not being a Nobel Prize winner, it's not being, um-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) It's as Pareto as it comes, isn't it? It's-
- BKBrian Keating
Exactly, exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... one and done.
- BKBrian Keating
Exactly. So I hope that people, you know, will enjoy the, the, the journey and not fixate on the destination. Uh, let's hope the journey is a lot more successful than your Balinese motorcycle journey, though.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, (laughs) that would be nice. I think it's-
- BKBrian Keating
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... um, it's super, super interesting to speak to yourself, especially after having spoken to Sabine, and to hear just how folly some of the elements of science are. A- and, you know, the, the... Something that was super interesting that we kind of moved past was when you had the European Space Agency and they didn't supply you with the particular types of information that you needed that would have helped you further your research. And you think like... I think from my side, things like physics, especially when we're talking about making developments and learning about the universe, is the same as medicine-
- BKBrian Keating
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... in that the goal should be as wide and as vast progression, as expedited as is possible. But you... Well, that's not what happens. It becomes narrow and deep because there's certain information that will benefit one particular group and over another and et cetera, et cetera. And I- I don't know, I think-... removing ego from the situation i- is, it is going to be impossible, and you can't litigate for it. You, you know, you're not gonna be able to have someone come in and, and say, "Oh, you need to share your research with these people," or whatever, and a- as well, we can talk all we want and the, the listeners will be in the midst once we are broadcast, you'll be in the midst of some very mindful other guests that we've had. Rick Hanson and, and, and, uh, Corey Allen and all these meditation experts, you know, detach from the ego and all this sort of stuff. But -
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... on the flip side, like, (sighs) telling someone who's won something fantastic, like, "Yo, man, like, you shoulda never even gone for that in the first place. You should detach from your ego." You're like, "Well, no, fuck off. Like I worked really, really hard for this and I'm-"
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
"... the one that got it." And because that story's newsworthy and all the ones of the runners-up aren't-
- BKBrian Keating
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
... you inevitably, you inevitably end up with this asymmetry of glorification.
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah, but exactly who is going to advocate for reform, right? That the people that win it have a vested interest in it. You know, I note that there have been peacemakers who turned down the Nobel Peace Prize, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, yeah.
- BKBrian Keating
There have been-
- CWChris Williamson
I wanted, I wanted to ask that. What, what does the-
- BKBrian Keating
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... what does the peace, what do you make of Peace Prize? How does that work? What do you have to do?
Episode duration: 1:06:08
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode xi8MqEgVAgI
Get more out of YouTube videos.
High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.
Add to Chrome