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

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. 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.

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

Yes.

... particular instrument, but, uh-

We'll talk about that in a little bit.

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

So the OG telescope?

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.