back to index

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


small model | large model

link |
00:00:00.000
The following is a conversation with Brian Keating,
link |
00:00:02.520
experimental physicist at USCSD
link |
00:00:05.160
and author of Losing the Nobel Prize
link |
00:00:07.760
and Into the Impossible.
link |
00:00:10.280
Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name
link |
00:00:13.680
called Into the Impossible.
link |
00:00:16.880
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
link |
00:00:18.880
To support it, please check out our sponsors
link |
00:00:21.020
in the description.
link |
00:00:22.160
And now, here's my conversation with Brian Keating.
link |
00:00:27.320
As an experimental physicist,
link |
00:00:29.560
what do you think is the most amazing
link |
00:00:31.360
or maybe the coolest measurement device
link |
00:00:34.660
you've ever worked with or humans have ever built?
link |
00:00:37.880
Maybe for now, let's exclude the background imaging
link |
00:00:41.560
of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.
link |
00:00:45.240
Yeah, I'm slightly biased
link |
00:00:46.320
towards that particular instrument.
link |
00:00:48.000
Talk about that in a little bit.
link |
00:00:49.640
But certainly the telescope, to me,
link |
00:00:51.560
is a lever that has literally moved the Earth
link |
00:00:55.800
throughout history.
link |
00:00:56.720
So the OG telescope?
link |
00:00:58.000
The OG telescope, yeah.
link |
00:00:59.060
The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think,
link |
00:01:02.040
but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.
link |
00:01:05.900
And it was kind of interesting
link |
00:01:07.680
because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s,
link |
00:01:12.400
there was the beginning of movable type.
link |
00:01:14.400
And so people, for the first time in history,
link |
00:01:17.200
had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.
link |
00:01:21.040
So looking at a printed word now,
link |
00:01:22.480
we just take it for granted, 12 point font, whatever,
link |
00:01:24.920
and that's what the eye charts are based on.
link |
00:01:26.400
They're just fixed height.
link |
00:01:27.240
But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight
link |
00:01:30.240
if you didn't have perfect vision.
link |
00:01:32.720
And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision
link |
00:01:35.040
or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type.
link |
00:01:39.000
And at that time, people realized,
link |
00:01:40.360
hey, wait, I can't read this.
link |
00:01:41.680
My priest or my friend over here, he can read it,
link |
00:01:43.800
she can read it.
link |
00:01:44.680
I can't read it.
link |
00:01:45.520
What's going on?
link |
00:01:46.420
And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands
link |
00:01:50.680
saw that they could take this kind of glass material
link |
00:01:53.320
and hold it up and maybe put another piece
link |
00:01:55.200
of glass material and it would make it clearer.
link |
00:01:57.560
And what was so interesting is that nobody thought
link |
00:01:59.560
to take that exact same device, two lenses,
link |
00:02:02.640
and go like, hmm, let me go like this
link |
00:02:04.680
and look at that bright thing in the sky over there,
link |
00:02:07.180
until Galileo.
link |
00:02:08.440
So Galileo didn't invent it,
link |
00:02:10.180
but he did something kind of amazing.
link |
00:02:12.480
He improved on it by a factor of 10.
link |
00:02:14.800
So he 10X'd it, which is almost as good
link |
00:02:17.040
as going from zero to one, as going from one to 10.
link |
00:02:20.340
And when he did that, he really transformed
link |
00:02:24.880
both how we look at the universe and think about it,
link |
00:02:28.480
but also who we are as a species,
link |
00:02:30.600
because we're using tools not to get food faster
link |
00:02:34.240
or to preserve our legacy for future generations,
link |
00:02:39.800
but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
link |
00:02:43.700
Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans
link |
00:02:46.540
weren't able to see the stars,
link |
00:02:47.720
maybe there was some kind of makeup of the atmosphere,
link |
00:02:52.000
which for the early humans made it impossible
link |
00:02:54.640
to see the stars, that we would never develop
link |
00:02:56.960
human civilization, or at least raising the question
link |
00:02:59.400
of how important is it to look up to the sky
link |
00:03:02.120
and wonder what's out there, as opposed to,
link |
00:03:05.680
maybe this is an over romanticized notion,
link |
00:03:07.960
but like looking at the ground,
link |
00:03:09.680
it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival,
link |
00:03:12.760
not being eaten by a bear slash lion.
link |
00:03:15.360
If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder
link |
00:03:17.360
what is my place in the universe?
link |
00:03:18.680
You think that's modern humans romanticizing?
link |
00:03:21.640
It's a little romantic, because they also took the same.
link |
00:03:25.720
They took the same two lenses and they looked inward.
link |
00:03:28.040
They looked at bacteria, they looked at hairs,
link |
00:03:30.280
and in other words, they made the microscope,
link |
00:03:32.280
and we're still doing that.
link |
00:03:33.680
And so to have a telescope, it serves a dual purpose.
link |
00:03:37.840
It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in,
link |
00:03:41.840
but it's also looking back in time.
link |
00:03:43.440
In other words, you didn't see a microscope,
link |
00:03:44.680
you don't think, oh, I'm seeing this thing
link |
00:03:46.020
as it was one nanosecond ago,
link |
00:03:47.780
light travels one foot per nanosecond.
link |
00:03:49.960
I'm seeing it, no, you don't think about it like that.
link |
00:03:51.860
But when you see something that's happening on Jupiter,
link |
00:03:54.320
the moon, Andromeda galaxy, you're seeing things
link |
00:03:56.800
back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti Plains.
link |
00:04:00.040
And for that, I think that took then the knowledge
link |
00:04:03.360
of relativity and time travel and so forth.
link |
00:04:06.840
It took that before we could really say,
link |
00:04:08.840
oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain.
link |
00:04:12.200
So I think that might be a little too much,
link |
00:04:14.120
but nevertheless, I mean,
link |
00:04:15.800
what's better than having a time machine?
link |
00:04:18.160
We can look back in time,
link |
00:04:19.260
we see things as they were, not as they are.
link |
00:04:21.640
And that allows us to do many things,
link |
00:04:23.200
including speculate about that.
link |
00:04:24.680
But one of the coolest things,
link |
00:04:25.740
I don't know if you're familiar with,
link |
00:04:26.580
so I'm a radio astronomer.
link |
00:04:27.920
I don't actually look through telescopes very often,
link |
00:04:30.280
except on rare occasions when I take one out
link |
00:04:33.960
to show the kids, but a radio telescope
link |
00:04:37.800
is even more sort of visceral.
link |
00:04:39.800
I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it,
link |
00:04:41.240
you're like, all right, it looks cool,
link |
00:04:42.240
it's kind of weird shaped thing,
link |
00:04:43.760
looks like it belongs in sci fi,
link |
00:04:45.040
it's gonna blast the Death Star or whatever.
link |
00:04:48.120
But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope
link |
00:04:52.080
at a distant object,
link |
00:04:53.560
if that object fills up what's called the beam,
link |
00:04:55.960
which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope,
link |
00:04:59.420
it's called its beam.
link |
00:05:00.560
If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor,
link |
00:05:03.600
just a simple absorbing piece of material
link |
00:05:05.800
at the focus of the radio telescope,
link |
00:05:07.760
that resistor will come to the exact same temperature
link |
00:05:11.200
as the object that's looking at, which is pretty amazing.
link |
00:05:13.960
It means you're actually remotely measuring,
link |
00:05:16.160
you're taking the temperature of Jupiter
link |
00:05:17.960
or whatever in effect.
link |
00:05:20.160
And so it's allowing you to basically teleport
link |
00:05:23.600
and there's no other science
link |
00:05:24.880
that you can really do that, right?
link |
00:05:26.040
If you're an archeologist, you can't,
link |
00:05:27.320
let me get into my time machine
link |
00:05:29.720
and go back and see what was Lucy really like,
link |
00:05:32.240
it's not possible.
link |
00:05:33.080
So the same thing happens,
link |
00:05:34.840
this is where I've learned about this
link |
00:05:36.240
from March of the Penguins,
link |
00:05:37.320
when the penguins huddled together,
link |
00:05:40.720
the body temperature arrives to the same place.
link |
00:05:43.280
So you're doing this remotely,
link |
00:05:45.320
the March of the Penguins, but remote.
link |
00:05:46.880
We do it from Antarctica too,
link |
00:05:48.160
so there are some penguins around when we do it.
link |
00:05:50.480
Okay, excellent.
link |
00:05:51.440
You mentioned time machine,
link |
00:05:53.480
I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize,
link |
00:05:57.080
you talk about time machines.
link |
00:05:59.680
So let me ask you the question of,
link |
00:06:03.080
take us back in time,
link |
00:06:04.520
what happened at the beginning of our universe?
link |
00:06:07.480
Ah, okay, usually people preface this
link |
00:06:09.880
by saying I have a simple question.
link |
00:06:11.200
So what happened before the universe began, what happened?
link |
00:06:15.200
Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.
link |
00:06:18.400
I have a simple question for you, let's take two.
link |
00:06:20.960
I have a simple question,
link |
00:06:22.080
what happened at the beginning of our universe?
link |
00:06:23.800
There you go.
link |
00:06:24.640
All right, good.
link |
00:06:25.480
So when we think about what happened,
link |
00:06:28.160
it's more correct, it's more logical,
link |
00:06:30.560
it's more practical to go back in time starting from today.
link |
00:06:34.640
So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today,
link |
00:06:40.480
that's some day, right?
link |
00:06:41.640
I mean, you could translate into some day, right?
link |
00:06:43.360
So on that day, something happened.
link |
00:06:45.640
Earlier than the moment exactly now,
link |
00:06:49.120
let's say we're talking around one o clock.
link |
00:06:52.160
So at some point during that day,
link |
00:06:54.480
the universe started to become a fusion reactor.
link |
00:06:57.200
It started to fuse light elements and isotopes
link |
00:07:00.120
into heavier elements and isotopes
link |
00:07:01.680
of those heavier elements.
link |
00:07:03.520
After that period of time,
link |
00:07:05.080
going forward back closer to today,
link |
00:07:06.600
less 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier,
link |
00:07:09.680
or later rather coming towards us today,
link |
00:07:11.960
we know more and more about what the universe was like.
link |
00:07:14.400
And in fact, all the hydrogen,
link |
00:07:16.520
it's a very good approximation in the water molecules
link |
00:07:19.080
in this bottle, almost all of them were produced
link |
00:07:21.400
during that first 20 minute period.
link |
00:07:23.680
So I would say, the actual fusion and production
link |
00:07:27.800
of the lightest elements on the periodic table
link |
00:07:30.560
occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show,
link |
00:07:33.360
The Big Bang Theory.
link |
00:07:34.400
Well done, sir.
link |
00:07:35.240
You know, most of those light elements besides hydrogen
link |
00:07:39.200
aren't really used in your encounter, right?
link |
00:07:41.680
You don't encounter helium that often,
link |
00:07:43.680
unless you go to a lot of birthday parties
link |
00:07:45.320
or pilot a blimp.
link |
00:07:47.160
You don't need lithium, hopefully, you know,
link |
00:07:49.360
but other than that,
link |
00:07:50.240
those are the kinds of things
link |
00:07:51.080
that were produced during that moment.
link |
00:07:52.280
The question became, how did the heavier things
link |
00:07:54.280
like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.
link |
00:07:56.760
And I brought some samples for us to discuss
link |
00:07:59.720
and how those came from a very different type of process
link |
00:08:02.240
called a different type of fusion reactor
link |
00:08:04.600
and a different type of process explosion as well
link |
00:08:07.120
called a supernova.
link |
00:08:08.520
However, if you go back beyond those first three minutes,
link |
00:08:11.480
we really have to say almost nothing
link |
00:08:13.880
because we are not capable.
link |
00:08:15.880
In other words, going backwards
link |
00:08:17.440
from the first three minutes,
link |
00:08:18.840
as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book,
link |
00:08:21.840
we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over.
link |
00:08:25.160
In other words, we can't speculate on what happened
link |
00:08:28.280
three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen
link |
00:08:30.920
was formed in our universe.
link |
00:08:32.360
We just don't know enough about that epoch.
link |
00:08:34.720
There are many people, most people,
link |
00:08:36.280
most practicing card carrying cosmologists
link |
00:08:38.800
believe the universe began in what's called the singularity.
link |
00:08:41.400
And we can certainly talk about that.
link |
00:08:44.000
However, singularity is so far removed
link |
00:08:46.480
from anything we can ever hope to prove,
link |
00:08:49.160
hope to confront or hope to observe with evidence.
link |
00:08:51.960
And really only occurs in two instantiations,
link |
00:08:54.920
the big bang and the core of a black hole,
link |
00:08:57.000
neither of which is observable.
link |
00:08:58.640
And so for that reason,
link |
00:09:00.160
there are now flourishing alternatives that say,
link |
00:09:02.880
you can actually for the first time ask the question
link |
00:09:05.280
that day, Tuesday in the first moments of our universe,
link |
00:09:10.280
there was a Tuesday a week before that,
link |
00:09:12.800
24 hours times seven days before that.
link |
00:09:15.960
That has a perfectly well understood meaning
link |
00:09:19.360
in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent
link |
00:09:23.640
of cosmologists working today.
link |
00:09:25.440
When I was in grad school over 25 years ago,
link |
00:09:28.080
no one really considered anything besides that big bang
link |
00:09:30.600
that there was a singularity.
link |
00:09:32.440
And people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know.
link |
00:09:36.320
But they would say some future incarnation
link |
00:09:38.760
of some experiment will tell us the answer.
link |
00:09:40.800
But now there are people that are saying
link |
00:09:42.880
there is an alternative to the big bang.
link |
00:09:45.360
And it's not really fringe science
link |
00:09:46.960
as it once was 50, 80 years ago when these models...
link |
00:09:50.880
By the way, the first cosmology in history
link |
00:09:53.760
was not a singular universe.
link |
00:09:55.720
The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra
link |
00:09:59.280
and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.
link |
00:10:03.720
And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.
link |
00:10:06.200
So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten's court,
link |
00:10:09.200
he'd have a pretty high H index right about now
link |
00:10:11.560
because people have been using that cyclical model
link |
00:10:14.360
from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis
link |
00:10:17.760
and right up until this very moment.
link |
00:10:20.880
Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives
link |
00:10:25.120
to the big bang theory?
link |
00:10:27.400
So there are many alternatives starting with...
link |
00:10:29.880
So the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding
link |
00:10:33.640
singular origin of the universe, that stands in contrast
link |
00:10:37.560
to these other models in which time does not have
link |
00:10:40.160
a beginning and many of them feature cycles,
link |
00:10:44.040
at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles,
link |
00:10:47.600
called by Sir Roger Penrose.
link |
00:10:48.880
And they all have things in common, these alternatives,
link |
00:10:51.920
as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis,
link |
00:10:55.080
which is inflation.
link |
00:10:56.200
Inflation can be thought of as this spark
link |
00:11:00.120
that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood.
link |
00:11:03.000
So it's an earlier condition,
link |
00:11:04.600
but it's still not an initial condition.
link |
00:11:06.560
In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock
link |
00:11:09.640
or a pendulum swinging back and forth.
link |
00:11:11.440
You look away for a second, you come into the room,
link |
00:11:14.360
pendulum swinging back and forth.
link |
00:11:15.440
Alex, tell me, where did it start?
link |
00:11:17.360
How many cycles is it gonna make before the era?
link |
00:11:19.560
You can't answer that question
link |
00:11:20.800
without knowing the initial conditions.
link |
00:11:22.760
In a very simple system, like a one dimensional,
link |
00:11:25.080
simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum,
link |
00:11:27.240
think about understanding the whole universe
link |
00:11:29.160
without understanding the initial conditions.
link |
00:11:31.320
It's a tremendous lacuna, a gap that we have as scientists
link |
00:11:34.920
that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology,
link |
00:11:39.280
determine the quantitative physical properties
link |
00:11:42.040
of the universe prior to what's called
link |
00:11:43.800
the inflationary epoch.
link |
00:11:45.120
So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch,
link |
00:11:47.520
we can't, because you can infer things about the pendulum
link |
00:11:50.960
before you show up to the room in our current epoch,
link |
00:11:54.320
correct? Right.
link |
00:11:55.160
Yeah, so if you look at it right now,
link |
00:11:56.680
but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?
link |
00:11:58.560
So that depends on how much energy it got initially.
link |
00:12:00.920
And you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance,
link |
00:12:03.000
you had infrared camera,
link |
00:12:03.840
you could see it's getting hotter maybe,
link |
00:12:05.400
and you could do some calculations.
link |
00:12:07.120
But to know the two things in physics
link |
00:12:09.200
to solve a partial differential equation
link |
00:12:10.840
are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.
link |
00:12:12.920
Boundary conditions, we're here on earth,
link |
00:12:14.000
it has gravitational field, it's not gonna excurs,
link |
00:12:16.320
or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.
link |
00:12:19.320
It's not, it has simple properties.
link |
00:12:22.960
So, but this is like, in other words,
link |
00:12:25.200
you can't tell me when did the solar system start orbiting
link |
00:12:28.680
in the way that it does now.
link |
00:12:29.960
In other words, when did the moon acquire
link |
00:12:31.400
the exact angular momentum that it has now?
link |
00:12:34.720
Now, that's a pretty pedestrian example.
link |
00:12:36.320
But what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch
link |
00:12:40.040
purports and is successful at providing
link |
00:12:43.080
a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved
link |
00:12:46.200
after inflation took place and ended,
link |
00:12:48.520
but it says nothing about how it itself took place.
link |
00:12:52.040
And that's really what you're asking me.
link |
00:12:53.680
I mean, you don't really, look,
link |
00:12:55.240
what you care about like big bang nucleosynthesis
link |
00:12:57.800
and the elements got made and these fusion reactors
link |
00:13:00.120
and the whole universe was a fusion reactor,
link |
00:13:02.040
but like, don't you really care about what happened
link |
00:13:04.760
at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?
link |
00:13:08.440
And the problem is we can't really answer that
link |
00:13:11.160
in the context of the big bang.
link |
00:13:12.960
We can answer that in the context of these alternatives.
link |
00:13:15.760
So you asked me about some of the alternatives.
link |
00:13:16.960
So one is Aon theory,
link |
00:13:18.120
the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose.
link |
00:13:21.040
Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s
link |
00:13:25.320
until the discovery of the primary component
link |
00:13:28.080
of my research field,
link |
00:13:29.000
the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB,
link |
00:13:31.360
the three Kelvin all pervasive signal
link |
00:13:33.200
that astronomers detected in 1965.
link |
00:13:36.360
That kind of spelled the death knell in some sense
link |
00:13:39.240
to what was called the quasi steady state universe.
link |
00:13:43.560
And then there was another model
link |
00:13:47.640
that kind of came out of that.
link |
00:13:49.200
You hear the word quasi, so it's not steady state.
link |
00:13:51.720
Steady state means always existed.
link |
00:13:53.200
That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble
link |
00:13:55.680
showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.
link |
00:13:58.960
And most scientists believed in that for millennia basically.
link |
00:14:02.480
The universe was eternal, static, unchanging.
link |
00:14:05.560
They couldn't believe that after Hubble.
link |
00:14:07.040
So they had to append onto it,
link |
00:14:09.480
concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady,
link |
00:14:12.920
it was quasi steady.
link |
00:14:14.400
So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen
link |
00:14:16.840
every century in a given volume of space.
link |
00:14:19.640
And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant.
link |
00:14:22.880
But because it was producing more and more every century,
link |
00:14:25.080
as centuries pile up and the volume piles up,
link |
00:14:27.000
the universe could expand.
link |
00:14:28.320
And so that's how they developed it.
link |
00:14:29.760
That's slowly.
link |
00:14:30.600
Very slowly.
link |
00:14:31.440
And it doesn't match observational evidence.
link |
00:14:33.440
But that is an alternative.
link |
00:14:35.160
By the way, did Einstein think
link |
00:14:36.200
the steady state universe is infinite or finite?
link |
00:14:39.360
Do you know?
link |
00:14:41.320
I would assume that he thought it was infinite
link |
00:14:43.440
because there was really,
link |
00:14:45.320
if something had a no beginning in time,
link |
00:14:48.240
then it would be very unlikely we're in the center of it
link |
00:14:50.680
or it's bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.
link |
00:14:54.000
I wonder what he thought about infinity
link |
00:14:56.000
because that's such an uncomfortable.
link |
00:14:57.280
Yeah, it's a silly joke.
link |
00:14:58.520
I'm sure you're familiar with this silly joke, right?
link |
00:15:00.720
The silly joke was that there are only two things
link |
00:15:02.880
that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
link |
00:15:06.600
and I'm not sure about the universe.
link |
00:15:08.560
Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke
link |
00:15:10.880
is a good example of the joke.
link |
00:15:12.800
It's very meta.
link |
00:15:14.080
Okay, so, all right, sorry.
link |
00:15:16.520
You were saying about quasi.
link |
00:15:17.840
All the alternatives.
link |
00:15:18.680
All the alternatives in the quasi steady state.
link |
00:15:20.920
And the most kind of promising,
link |
00:15:22.800
although I hate to say that,
link |
00:15:24.320
people say, well, that's your favorite alternative, right?
link |
00:15:27.120
This is not investment advice.
link |
00:15:29.480
Inflation is not transitory.
link |
00:15:31.880
It is quasi permanent.
link |
00:15:34.440
So, a very prominent.
link |
00:15:35.760
Sorry to interrupt.
link |
00:15:36.600
We're talking about cosmic inflation,
link |
00:15:38.200
so calm down, cryptocurrency folks.
link |
00:15:40.280
That's right.
link |
00:15:41.120
Although the first Nobel Prize,
link |
00:15:43.080
and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics
link |
00:15:45.160
was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
link |
00:15:48.360
So, most people don't know
link |
00:15:49.200
that inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.
link |
00:15:50.520
It's a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.
link |
00:15:54.160
Doesn't matter the field.
link |
00:15:55.080
Exactly, it's time translation invariant.
link |
00:15:57.320
So, when we look at the alternative
link |
00:15:59.920
that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,
link |
00:16:03.080
these have serious virtues, according to some.
link |
00:16:07.840
One of the virtues to me, just as a human,
link |
00:16:10.040
I'm just speaking as a human,
link |
00:16:12.880
one of the founders of the new version
link |
00:16:15.640
of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology
link |
00:16:21.320
is Paul Steinhardt.
link |
00:16:22.520
He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences
link |
00:16:24.760
at Princeton University.
link |
00:16:25.760
You may have heard of it.
link |
00:16:27.000
And he was one of the originators
link |
00:16:29.560
of what was called new inflation.
link |
00:16:32.280
In other words, he was one of the founding fathers
link |
00:16:34.400
of inflation, who now not only has no belief
link |
00:16:38.560
or support for inflation,
link |
00:16:40.000
he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious,
link |
00:16:45.000
dangerous, malevolent, not to science,
link |
00:16:48.040
not just to cosmology, but to society.
link |
00:16:50.840
So, here's a man who created a theory
link |
00:16:53.320
that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists,
link |
00:16:56.200
such as it is.
link |
00:16:57.040
It's not a huge universe,
link |
00:16:57.920
but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.
link |
00:17:00.840
Some do both.
link |
00:17:01.680
But this man created this theory with collaborators.
link |
00:17:06.760
And now he's like, I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity.
link |
00:17:10.520
You're like a deadbeat dad.
link |
00:17:11.960
Now you're saying like, inflation is bogus.
link |
00:17:14.960
But he doesn't just attack.
link |
00:17:17.360
See, this is what's very important
link |
00:17:18.680
about approaching things as an experimentalist.
link |
00:17:21.560
You got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful.
link |
00:17:23.560
And I think that's a huge service.
link |
00:17:25.200
An experimentalist has to say no.
link |
00:17:27.800
He or she has to be confident to say like,
link |
00:17:30.440
I don't care if I prove you right
link |
00:17:32.840
or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.
link |
00:17:35.320
We have to be like exterminators.
link |
00:17:37.120
And nobody likes the exterminator
link |
00:17:38.640
until they need one, right?
link |
00:17:39.560
Or the garbage collectors, right?
link |
00:17:41.400
But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded
link |
00:17:45.760
by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry
link |
00:17:48.840
and the simplicity of some idea.
link |
00:17:50.120
Like inflation is a beautiful idea,
link |
00:17:52.440
but it also has consequences.
link |
00:17:54.000
And what Paul claims,
link |
00:17:55.000
I don't agree with him fully on this point,
link |
00:17:57.320
is that those consequences are dangerous
link |
00:17:59.160
because they lead to things like the multiverse,
link |
00:18:01.400
which is outside the purview of science.
link |
00:18:03.720
And in that sense, I can see support for what he does,
link |
00:18:07.240
but none of that detracts from my respect for a man.
link |
00:18:09.840
You know, imagine like, you know,
link |
00:18:11.800
Elon comes up with this like really great idea,
link |
00:18:14.440
you know, space, and then he's like,
link |
00:18:15.520
oh, actually it's not gonna work.
link |
00:18:18.160
But like, here's this better idea.
link |
00:18:19.400
And he's like, SpaceX is not gonna work,
link |
00:18:21.040
but he's now creating an alternative to it.
link |
00:18:23.280
It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done.
link |
00:18:25.920
Doesn't mean he's right.
link |
00:18:27.080
Doesn't mean I'm gonna like have more
link |
00:18:29.240
and more attention paid to it because he's my friend
link |
00:18:32.000
or because I respect the idea
link |
00:18:33.360
or I respect the man and his colleague,
link |
00:18:35.960
Anna Aegis, who works really hard with him.
link |
00:18:38.440
But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.
link |
00:18:41.560
And what it does most foremost is that it removes
link |
00:18:45.640
the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
link |
00:18:49.280
So it takes away 50% of the motivation
link |
00:18:52.160
for a theory of quantum gravity.
link |
00:18:54.320
You've talked a lot about quantum gravity.
link |
00:18:56.600
You talk to people, eminent people on the show.
link |
00:18:58.880
Always latent in those conversations
link |
00:19:00.960
is sort of the teleological expectation
link |
00:19:03.640
that there is a theory of everything.
link |
00:19:06.160
There is a theory of quantum gravity.
link |
00:19:08.760
But there's no law that says
link |
00:19:10.560
we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.
link |
00:19:12.800
So that kind of implicit expectation
link |
00:19:16.280
has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory.
link |
00:19:19.480
So in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?
link |
00:19:23.360
So okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts
link |
00:19:28.000
on society from believing in cosmic inflation.
link |
00:19:33.000
So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,
link |
00:19:37.280
according to its other two patriarchs,
link |
00:19:39.720
considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT
link |
00:19:41.800
and Andrei Linde at Stanford,
link |
00:19:44.080
although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas,
link |
00:19:48.080
along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe
link |
00:19:51.200
has to eventually get into a quantum state,
link |
00:19:55.160
has to exist in this Hilbert space,
link |
00:19:57.040
and the Hilbert space has certain features,
link |
00:19:58.840
and those features are quantum mechanical,
link |
00:20:00.320
endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
link |
00:20:02.920
And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
link |
00:20:07.400
So inflation can get started,
link |
00:20:09.120
but then it's like one of, you know, SpaceX rockets.
link |
00:20:11.960
It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?
link |
00:20:14.400
It continues the thrusting.
link |
00:20:16.240
You need another mechanism to douse the flames
link |
00:20:19.040
of the inflationary expansion,
link |
00:20:21.240
which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere,
link |
00:20:24.200
it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times,
link |
00:20:27.640
including now, spawning an ever increasing set of universes.
link |
00:20:32.440
Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish,
link |
00:20:35.920
and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.
link |
00:20:38.800
It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence,
link |
00:20:41.000
not only of inflationary cosmology,
link |
00:20:43.480
but more and more, we're seeing it
link |
00:20:44.560
in string theory as well.
link |
00:20:45.560
So that, you know, sometimes two, you know,
link |
00:20:48.200
branches coming to the same conclusion
link |
00:20:49.600
is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.
link |
00:20:52.320
So one of the negative consequences
link |
00:20:54.240
is it creates phenomena that we can't,
link |
00:20:57.600
that are outside the reach of experimental science,
link |
00:21:01.680
or is it that the multiverse somehow
link |
00:21:04.120
has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?
link |
00:21:07.520
Like it makes us,
link |
00:21:10.880
maybe it makes life seem more meaningless?
link |
00:21:13.200
Is that where he's getting at a little bit,
link |
00:21:15.960
or is it not reaching that far?
link |
00:21:18.080
Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive.
link |
00:21:21.920
The answer is a little of both,
link |
00:21:23.000
because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain
link |
00:21:26.600
this fine tuning problem,
link |
00:21:28.160
that we find ourselves in a universe
link |
00:21:29.880
that's particularly facund, that has features,
link |
00:21:32.720
you know, consistent with our existence,
link |
00:21:34.800
and how could we be otherwise?
link |
00:21:36.240
You know, this sort of weak anthropic principle.
link |
00:21:39.000
On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,
link |
00:21:42.520
literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
link |
00:21:46.000
Like if I say, Lex, you know, you've been working out,
link |
00:21:48.320
you look like, you know, yeah, you haven't,
link |
00:21:50.360
yeah, that's great.
link |
00:21:51.200
You look like you're, you know,
link |
00:21:52.160
about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.
link |
00:21:54.840
Like, all right, yeah, you're right,
link |
00:21:56.520
but that's horribly imprecise.
link |
00:21:57.840
So what good is that?
link |
00:21:58.960
That's meaningless.
link |
00:21:59.780
You don't contribute any what's called surprise,
link |
00:22:01.640
or reduction in entropy,
link |
00:22:03.160
or reduction of your ignorance about the system,
link |
00:22:06.160
or you know exactly how much you weigh.
link |
00:22:08.360
So me telling you that tells you nothing.
link |
00:22:10.300
In this case, it's basically saying
link |
00:22:11.920
that we're living in a universe
link |
00:22:13.220
because the overwhelming odds of our existence
link |
00:22:17.160
dictate that we would exist.
link |
00:22:18.960
There has to be at least one place that we exist.
link |
00:22:20.720
But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity.
link |
00:22:24.120
So humans, and I'm sure you know this
link |
00:22:26.640
from your work with AI and ML and everything else,
link |
00:22:30.880
that humans, as far as we know,
link |
00:22:33.600
really are the only entities capable
link |
00:22:36.160
of contemplating infinity,
link |
00:22:38.360
but we do so very imperfectly, right?
link |
00:22:40.680
So if I say to you, like, what's bigger,
link |
00:22:42.320
the number of, you know, water molecules in this thing,
link |
00:22:45.220
or the number of real numbers?
link |
00:22:46.760
Or if I say, what's bigger,
link |
00:22:47.580
the number of real numbers or rational numbers?
link |
00:22:49.280
They're all different classifications
link |
00:22:50.800
of the amount of infinities that there could be.
link |
00:22:53.240
Infinity to the infinity power.
link |
00:22:54.600
You know, when you have kids someday,
link |
00:22:55.500
they'll tell you, I love you, infinity.
link |
00:22:56.960
You have to come back, I love you, infinity plus one, right?
link |
00:22:59.400
So, but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity.
link |
00:23:03.360
Let me illustrate that.
link |
00:23:05.160
They say in the singularity,
link |
00:23:06.840
the universe had an infinite temperature, right?
link |
00:23:10.720
So let me ask you a question.
link |
00:23:12.480
Is there anything that you can contemplate
link |
00:23:14.480
in the, you know, Einstein's little quip aside,
link |
00:23:17.680
that's infinite, like a physical property,
link |
00:23:20.200
density, pressure, temperature, energy, that's infinite.
link |
00:23:24.880
And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it.
link |
00:23:27.520
But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?
link |
00:23:30.600
You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.
link |
00:23:32.920
How does it go from like to half of infinity?
link |
00:23:34.560
Because that's still infinity.
link |
00:23:35.700
How did it cool down?
link |
00:23:36.920
How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?
link |
00:23:39.460
So now it's only infinity over two,
link |
00:23:41.600
in terms of pascals.
link |
00:23:42.440
Less infinite to more infinite.
link |
00:23:44.600
Yeah, I mean, it's,
link |
00:23:46.400
that's one of the biggest troubling things to me
link |
00:23:49.680
about infinity is you can't truly hold it inside our minds.
link |
00:23:53.800
It's a mathematical construct that doesn't,
link |
00:23:55.800
it feels like intuition fails.
link |
00:23:57.840
But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly
link |
00:23:59.960
and then use, like physicists,
link |
00:24:02.720
they're incredible intuition machines.
link |
00:24:05.440
And then they'll play with this infinity
link |
00:24:06.960
as if they can play with it on the level of intuition
link |
00:24:10.300
as opposed to on the level of math.
link |
00:24:12.320
You know, yeah, maybe it's something cyclical
link |
00:24:14.100
you can imagine in infinity,
link |
00:24:15.320
just going around the same,
link |
00:24:18.580
kind of like a Mobius strip situation.
link |
00:24:20.540
But then the question then arises,
link |
00:24:23.780
how do you make it more or less infinite?
link |
00:24:26.500
Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.
link |
00:24:28.940
And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?
link |
00:24:31.320
It's either some placeholder for infinity
link |
00:24:33.400
or it's one divided by a very,
link |
00:24:34.780
the smallest possible real number
link |
00:24:38.260
that you can represent in the memory.
link |
00:24:39.700
Well, that's basically my undergraduate study
link |
00:24:42.500
in computer science is how to represent
link |
00:24:44.260
a floating point in a computer.
link |
00:24:45.860
I think I took 17 courses on this topic.
link |
00:24:47.940
It was very useful.
link |
00:24:49.060
I came to the right place.
link |
00:24:49.980
But in terms of what a physicist will mean,
link |
00:24:53.580
and you're right, I mean, physicists will blithely,
link |
00:24:55.700
nonchalantly subtract infinity, renormalization,
link |
00:24:58.900
and do things to get finite answers.
link |
00:25:01.220
And it's miraculous.
link |
00:25:03.020
But at a certain point, you have to ask,
link |
00:25:05.460
well, what are the consequences for the real world?
link |
00:25:07.420
So one of them, you ask, what's the problem?
link |
00:25:10.260
Does it make us more meaningless?
link |
00:25:11.800
They purport, many of the people that support it,
link |
00:25:14.060
like Andrei Linde.
link |
00:25:15.260
In fact, Andrei Linde says, you have a bias.
link |
00:25:18.100
You, Lex, me, Brian.
link |
00:25:19.780
You have a bias that you believe in a universe.
link |
00:25:22.980
But shouldn't you believe in a multiverse?
link |
00:25:25.980
What evidence do you have that there's not a multiverse?
link |
00:25:28.620
So he turns it around.
link |
00:25:30.100
Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen,
link |
00:25:33.500
then there's no predictive power within the theory.
link |
00:25:35.940
Because you can always say, well,
link |
00:25:37.300
this value of the inflationary field
link |
00:25:39.140
did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy
link |
00:25:43.500
for us to detect it with BICEP or Simon's Observatory
link |
00:25:45.700
or whatever.
link |
00:25:46.420
But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen.
link |
00:25:48.540
It's logically 100% correct.
link |
00:25:50.700
But it's like kind of chewing Wonder Bread.
link |
00:25:55.580
Apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but you know.
link |
00:25:59.100
Wonderbread slash lex.com.
link |
00:26:01.740
Type in code Klebb, right?
link |
00:26:03.620
Klebb.
link |
00:26:04.300
That's my favorite Russian word is like,
link |
00:26:06.020
would you like a piece of Klebb?
link |
00:26:07.660
By the way, even that word, Klebb,
link |
00:26:10.940
which means bread in Russian, as you say it,
link |
00:26:13.660
like you're jokingly saying it now,
link |
00:26:15.920
it made me hungry because it made
link |
00:26:17.500
me remember how much I loved bread
link |
00:26:19.340
when I was in the Soviet Union.
link |
00:26:20.660
When you were hungry, that was the things you dreamed about.
link |
00:26:24.380
I don't know.
link |
00:26:24.940
You know, what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists
link |
00:26:28.380
contributed to so much of what we understand today.
link |
00:26:31.860
And they were completely in hiding.
link |
00:26:33.360
There was no Google.
link |
00:26:34.220
They couldn't look up on Scholar.
link |
00:26:35.660
They had nothing.
link |
00:26:36.280
They had to wait for journals to get
link |
00:26:37.820
approved by the Communist Party to get approved.
link |
00:26:40.580
And only then, if they weren't a member of some class,
link |
00:26:43.060
I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists,
link |
00:26:44.940
you had a passport that said Jew on your passport.
link |
00:26:48.260
And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich,
link |
00:26:52.700
he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnareff.
link |
00:26:56.300
And he had to, only because he was like at a Nobel level
link |
00:27:00.460
and was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program,
link |
00:27:03.660
could he even get his Jewish student, he was Jewish too,
link |
00:27:06.900
but only by virtue of his standing
link |
00:27:09.420
of his intellectual accomplishments,
link |
00:27:11.100
would they give him the dispensation
link |
00:27:12.740
to let his student travel to Georgia or something.
link |
00:27:16.100
And it makes what we complain about,
link |
00:27:17.860
and I complain about academia.
link |
00:27:19.460
And it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about?
link |
00:27:21.980
We have no idea of how good it is
link |
00:27:24.140
and that they were able to create things like inflation,
link |
00:27:26.620
completely isolated from the West.
link |
00:27:28.100
I mean, some of these people didn't
link |
00:27:29.540
meet people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead.
link |
00:27:33.300
And they just learned this thing through smuggled in.
link |
00:27:36.900
It's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
link |
00:27:39.300
There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard,
link |
00:27:41.780
probably because they were working the,
link |
00:27:43.380
they could pass off as, well, we're doing stuff
link |
00:27:45.500
for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.
link |
00:27:47.980
At the same time, there is interesting incentives
link |
00:27:52.300
in the Soviet system that,
link |
00:27:54.060
maybe we can take this tangent for a brief moment,
link |
00:27:57.780
that because there's a dictatorship, authoritarian regime
link |
00:28:01.700
throughout the history of the 20th century
link |
00:28:03.780
for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.
link |
00:28:07.780
And because the state prioritized it
link |
00:28:10.820
through the propaganda machines and the news and so on,
link |
00:28:13.540
it actually was really cool to be a scientist.
link |
00:28:16.180
Like you were highly valued in society.
link |
00:28:18.020
Maybe that's a better way to say it.
link |
00:28:19.860
And I would say, you're saying like, we have it easy now.
link |
00:28:23.540
In that sense, it was kind of beneficial
link |
00:28:27.660
to be a scientist in that society
link |
00:28:29.140
because you were seen as a hero, as there's famous.
link |
00:28:31.980
Yes, the most famous hero of the Soviet Republic.
link |
00:28:34.140
And that, you know, there's positives to that.
link |
00:28:37.100
I mean, I'm not saying I would take the negatives
link |
00:28:40.300
or the positives, but it is interesting to see a world
link |
00:28:43.780
in which science was highly prized.
link |
00:28:46.140
In the capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist,
link |
00:28:49.540
let's just say the American system,
link |
00:28:51.580
the celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses,
link |
00:28:57.980
maybe business leaders, musicians.
link |
00:29:02.380
And, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers
link |
00:29:05.620
and lawyers, so it's interesting to think of a world
link |
00:29:12.300
where science was highly prized,
link |
00:29:13.940
but they had to do that science within the constraints
link |
00:29:18.220
of always having big brother watching.
link |
00:29:21.020
Yeah, the same in Germany.
link |
00:29:22.260
Germany had, you know, highly prized science.
link |
00:29:24.020
I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases
link |
00:29:26.540
is Fritz Haber who invented the Haber Bosch process
link |
00:29:29.780
that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet?
link |
00:29:31.780
You look, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast
link |
00:29:34.580
every day and you do that.
link |
00:29:36.020
You know, I said chleb and you got, it's a little drool,
link |
00:29:38.460
but he says I'm lifting and I look slim.
link |
00:29:41.420
This is amazing.
link |
00:29:42.660
I'm gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder.
link |
00:29:44.540
I think that's a website.
link |
00:29:45.420
You gotta swipe left or right for that, I don't know.
link |
00:29:48.380
But when you think about like, you know, what he did
link |
00:29:51.140
and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy
link |
00:29:53.500
and we eat from every day, he was a German nationalist,
link |
00:29:58.140
first and foremost, even though he was a Jew.
link |
00:30:00.100
And he personally went to witness the application
link |
00:30:02.300
of ammonia, chlorine gas applied during trench warfare
link |
00:30:05.260
in 1916 in battles in Brussels and whatever.
link |
00:30:08.540
And he was, they had a whole conjure of Nobel laureates
link |
00:30:10.900
in chemistry and physics, you know,
link |
00:30:12.780
that would go and witness these atrocities.
link |
00:30:14.460
But that was also, they were almost putting science
link |
00:30:17.620
above, I don't wanna say human dignity,
link |
00:30:19.780
but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed.
link |
00:30:23.660
And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz
link |
00:30:27.500
because of the chemical that he invented also
link |
00:30:30.020
called Zyklon B.
link |
00:30:31.540
And so it's just unbelievable.
link |
00:30:33.020
So I feel like that does have resonance today
link |
00:30:36.100
in this worship of science, you know,
link |
00:30:38.700
and listen to science and follow the science,
link |
00:30:41.340
which is more like scientism.
link |
00:30:43.740
And there is still a danger.
link |
00:30:45.180
You know, I always say, just cause you're an atheist
link |
00:30:47.980
doesn't mean you don't have a religion.
link |
00:30:49.700
You know, just because you, you know,
link |
00:30:51.620
in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel prize.
link |
00:30:54.700
It's kind of like a kosher idol.
link |
00:30:56.660
It's something that you can worship, you know,
link |
00:30:58.460
it doesn't do any harm.
link |
00:30:59.460
And we want those people that are so significant
link |
00:31:02.420
in their intellectual accomplishments.
link |
00:31:03.740
Cause there is a core of America
link |
00:31:06.100
and the Western world in general
link |
00:31:07.380
that does worship and really look at science predominantly
link |
00:31:10.580
cause it gives us technology,
link |
00:31:13.220
but there's something really cool about that.
link |
00:31:14.860
And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point
link |
00:31:17.380
between looking to science for wisdom,
link |
00:31:20.780
which I don't think it has, they're two different words,
link |
00:31:23.580
but also recognizing how much good and transformative power
link |
00:31:27.060
maybe our only hope comes from science.
link |
00:31:30.380
You opened so many doors
link |
00:31:32.660
cause you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book.
link |
00:31:38.820
So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science
link |
00:31:43.260
and to the Nobel prize.
link |
00:31:44.500
It's fascinating to explore and we will.
link |
00:31:48.260
And we still haven't finished the discussion
link |
00:31:50.140
of the beginning of the universe, which we'll return to.
link |
00:31:54.100
But now since you opened the book, wow,
link |
00:31:57.860
pun unintended of losing the Nobel prize,
link |
00:32:01.420
can you tell me the story of BICEP,
link |
00:32:04.420
the background imaging
link |
00:32:05.660
of cosmic extragalactic polarization experiment,
link |
00:32:09.180
BICEP one and BICEP two,
link |
00:32:11.420
and then maybe you can talk about BICEP three,
link |
00:32:13.180
but the thing that you cover in your book,
link |
00:32:16.340
the human story of it, what happened?
link |
00:32:18.740
Yeah, that book is in contradistinction of the second book.
link |
00:32:21.700
That's like a memoir.
link |
00:32:22.740
It's really a description of what it's like to feel,
link |
00:32:26.580
what it feels like to be a scientist
link |
00:32:28.820
and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty,
link |
00:32:32.180
imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book
link |
00:32:35.220
in more detail, but to really feel like
link |
00:32:38.260
you're doing something and it's all you think about.
link |
00:32:41.500
It is all consuming.
link |
00:32:43.540
And it's something I couldn't have done now
link |
00:32:45.500
cause I have too many other,
link |
00:32:47.300
wonderful, delightful demands of my time.
link |
00:32:50.060
But to go back to that moment
link |
00:32:51.660
when I was first captivated by the night sky
link |
00:32:53.940
who has a 12 year old, 13 year old,
link |
00:32:56.100
and really mixed together throughout my scientific story
link |
00:32:59.740
has always been wanting to approach
link |
00:33:01.740
the greatest mystery of all,
link |
00:33:02.980
which I think is the existence or non existence of God.
link |
00:33:05.940
So I call myself a practicing agnostic.
link |
00:33:08.900
In other words, I do things that religious people do
link |
00:33:12.580
and I don't do things that atheist people do.
link |
00:33:16.060
And I once had this conversation,
link |
00:33:18.020
with my first podcast guest actually,
link |
00:33:19.300
I shouldn't say, oh, I was just having a conversation
link |
00:33:21.500
with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.
link |
00:33:24.180
And I miss him.
link |
00:33:25.020
Name drop.
link |
00:33:25.840
Name drop, yes.
link |
00:33:27.300
I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of comments about that.
link |
00:33:30.020
In case people don't know, Brian Keating is the host
link |
00:33:33.260
of Into the Impossible podcast,
link |
00:33:34.860
where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists
link |
00:33:38.700
in history of science, physicists,
link |
00:33:41.180
especially in the history of science.
link |
00:33:43.300
So when I talked to Freeman, I said,
link |
00:33:45.180
Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too.
link |
00:33:47.660
Can you tell me something like what do you do on Saturday,
link |
00:33:50.060
on Sundays, do you go to church?
link |
00:33:51.900
He's like, no, I don't go to church.
link |
00:33:53.620
And I'm like, well, imagine there was
link |
00:33:55.380
like an intelligent alien and he was looking down
link |
00:33:58.100
or she, I don't know, thing was looking down
link |
00:34:01.500
and it saw Freeman and on Sundays,
link |
00:34:03.420
like a group of people go to church,
link |
00:34:05.260
but Freeman doesn't go to church.
link |
00:34:06.600
And then there's another group of people
link |
00:34:07.660
that don't go to church and those are called atheists,
link |
00:34:10.220
but Freeman calls himself an agnostic,
link |
00:34:12.180
but he does the things that the Richard Dawkins,
link |
00:34:14.100
he doesn't go to the same church
link |
00:34:15.940
that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to, right?
link |
00:34:18.260
So I said, how would you distinguish yourself
link |
00:34:19.900
if not practice?
link |
00:34:20.820
So I'm a behaviorist.
link |
00:34:22.180
I believe you can change your mentality.
link |
00:34:23.780
You can influence your mind,
link |
00:34:26.060
view your bodily physical actions.
link |
00:34:28.460
So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope.
link |
00:34:30.500
I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church,
link |
00:34:32.580
which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid
link |
00:34:34.460
who grew up in New York.
link |
00:34:35.280
Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not.
link |
00:34:36.860
But I was just fascinated by these, these.
link |
00:34:41.180
Can we get into it for a second?
link |
00:34:42.900
Okay, yeah, all right, let's go.
link |
00:34:45.140
All right, let's go there.
link |
00:34:46.580
All right.
link |
00:34:47.420
Let's go to a baby Brian or young.
link |
00:34:49.660
Young Brian.
link |
00:34:51.100
The new sitcom on CBS.
link |
00:34:53.100
Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents.
link |
00:34:55.780
My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
link |
00:34:58.100
He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.
link |
00:35:00.460
And my mother was an eminent mom
link |
00:35:02.140
and a brilliant English major, et cetera.
link |
00:35:06.600
And they raised it, but they were secular.
link |
00:35:08.100
They, you know, we'd go to, I always joke,
link |
00:35:09.600
we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year,
link |
00:35:12.780
on Christmas and Easter.
link |
00:35:14.100
No, no, we would go, yeah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah,
link |
00:35:16.700
right, that's the typical two day a year Jews.
link |
00:35:19.460
And you know, we'd have, we'd have matzahs
link |
00:35:21.580
once a year on Palm Passover.
link |
00:35:23.320
And that was about it.
link |
00:35:24.380
And for years, I was like that
link |
00:35:26.380
until my parents got divorced.
link |
00:35:28.120
My mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man
link |
00:35:31.100
by the name of Ray Keating.
link |
00:35:32.360
My father's name is James X.
link |
00:35:34.380
So when she remarried Ray Keating,
link |
00:35:37.780
I was immediately adopted.
link |
00:35:39.920
I'm actually adopted into the Keating family.
link |
00:35:42.380
And he had nine brothers and sisters
link |
00:35:44.740
and just warm and gregarious.
link |
00:35:46.380
They, you know, did Christmas and Easter.
link |
00:35:49.460
It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had.
link |
00:35:51.460
And I do things with great gusto.
link |
00:35:53.980
Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way.
link |
00:35:55.900
So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity,
link |
00:35:59.320
in this case, Catholicism.
link |
00:36:00.300
So I was baptized, confirmed,
link |
00:36:02.300
and I said, I want to go all the way.
link |
00:36:04.900
I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.
link |
00:36:07.460
And you're going to be the best altar boy there ever was.
link |
00:36:10.460
I had like serious skills.
link |
00:36:11.940
You passed that collection basket.
link |
00:36:13.380
I could push people and get them to 2x their contributions.
link |
00:36:17.660
But in this case, I was 13.
link |
00:36:20.540
I don't know if you remember when you were 13.
link |
00:36:23.360
But if you extrapolate the next level up,
link |
00:36:25.740
it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.
link |
00:36:28.220
The next level up from confirmation, altar boy,
link |
00:36:31.300
is priest.
link |
00:36:32.240
And I don't know if you're aware of this,
link |
00:36:33.860
but priests are not entitled to have relations with women.
link |
00:36:37.540
And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future casting
link |
00:36:40.780
what life's going to be like for myself
link |
00:36:42.660
if I continue on my path, I found that maybe I...
link |
00:36:46.580
The math is not up.
link |
00:36:48.220
That's right.
link |
00:36:49.140
There was a serious gap in that future.
link |
00:36:54.360
And instead, when I should have been preparing
link |
00:36:56.380
for my Bar Mitzvah, as most Jewish boys would be,
link |
00:36:58.660
a 12, 13 year old boy, I actually got a telescope
link |
00:37:01.540
and became infatuated with all the things
link |
00:37:04.160
you could see with it.
link |
00:37:05.000
It wasn't bigger than that one over there
link |
00:37:06.300
that your hedgehog's looking through.
link |
00:37:08.300
Is that a hedgehog?
link |
00:37:10.040
It's a hedgehog in the fog.
link |
00:37:13.100
I should mention, and we'll go one by one, these things,
link |
00:37:16.380
you've given me some incredible gifts.
link |
00:37:18.220
Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope
link |
00:37:21.660
that puts some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look.
link |
00:37:24.700
And using...
link |
00:37:25.640
Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist.
link |
00:37:27.820
Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
link |
00:37:30.100
Because you assembled this telescope,
link |
00:37:31.540
you gave it a mount, and you connected it to a very powerful...
link |
00:37:35.220
Yeah, but there's no experiment going on.
link |
00:37:36.540
It's just engineering for show.
link |
00:37:38.340
It's very shallow.
link |
00:37:39.420
Experiment is taking it to the next level
link |
00:37:41.580
and actually achieving something.
link |
00:37:42.960
Here, I just built a thing for show.
link |
00:37:44.980
Well, that's always a joke.
link |
00:37:45.820
People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist.
link |
00:37:47.580
I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
link |
00:37:49.860
Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things,
link |
00:37:52.140
soldering things.
link |
00:37:53.140
It's not actually doing the stroking
link |
00:37:55.420
of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic
link |
00:37:57.980
versus the bouncing cosmological monitor.
link |
00:38:00.220
Just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.
link |
00:38:04.060
Right, yeah, it's not like having dancing dogs
link |
00:38:06.380
and whatever, right?
link |
00:38:07.580
So telescope.
link |
00:38:08.420
Yes, this telescope.
link |
00:38:09.860
What's the story of this little telescope?
link |
00:38:11.340
This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways,
link |
00:38:14.580
a symbol of what got me into...
link |
00:38:18.500
What brought me all the blessings I have in my life
link |
00:38:21.140
came from a telescope.
link |
00:38:22.340
And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.
link |
00:38:26.480
You right here, wherever we are,
link |
00:38:28.740
a biggest city on earth, Manhattan,
link |
00:38:30.220
where I was growing up as a 12 year old
link |
00:38:31.700
outside of Manhattan.
link |
00:38:33.380
You can see the exact same craters on the moon,
link |
00:38:35.600
the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter,
link |
00:38:38.780
the same phases of the...
link |
00:38:40.260
You can see the Andromeda galaxy,
link |
00:38:42.500
Lex, two and a half million light years away from earth.
link |
00:38:45.700
You can do that with that little thing over there.
link |
00:38:47.700
One that's a little more expensive.
link |
00:38:48.740
Get one that has a mount and you could attach now
link |
00:38:51.220
your smartphone.
link |
00:38:52.260
What the hell is that?
link |
00:38:53.080
I wouldn't have known what that was in 1994.
link |
00:38:55.540
And with that, you can do something that no other science
link |
00:38:58.900
to my knowledge can really replicate,
link |
00:39:00.820
maybe biology in some sense,
link |
00:39:02.360
but you can experience the physical sensation
link |
00:39:06.700
that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope
link |
00:39:10.180
like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it.
link |
00:39:12.980
Or that Saturn had ears as he called it.
link |
00:39:15.540
Or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth
link |
00:39:18.100
and made of this heavenly substance,
link |
00:39:20.520
the quintessence substance, right?
link |
00:39:22.700
So where else can you be viscerally connected
link |
00:39:26.040
with the first person to ever make that discovery?
link |
00:39:27.680
Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
link |
00:39:29.540
Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity,
link |
00:39:33.580
call up Harry Cliffe and say, I want to replicate.
link |
00:39:36.140
How did you feel?
link |
00:39:36.980
He didn't feel anything.
link |
00:39:38.180
None of them felt anything.
link |
00:39:39.240
It took years to go, you can't do it.
link |
00:39:42.060
But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
link |
00:39:44.420
That's fascinating.
link |
00:39:45.420
It's almost like maybe there's another one like that
link |
00:39:49.180
is fire.
link |
00:39:50.180
Like when you build a bonfire, can you actually get it?
link |
00:39:53.620
See, if you use a lighter, I think if you actually
link |
00:39:56.860
by rubbing sticks together or however you do it
link |
00:39:58.900
without any of the modern tools,
link |
00:40:00.860
that's probably what that's like.
link |
00:40:02.340
And then you get to experience the magic of it,
link |
00:40:04.860
of what like early humans homo sapiens felt.
link |
00:40:07.620
You feel what Aug felt when he did it that first time.
link |
00:40:10.480
By the way, is this a gift?
link |
00:40:11.940
This is a gift, of course.
link |
00:40:13.060
You need a little bit of a swag upgrade,
link |
00:40:15.100
so I got you some gifts.
link |
00:40:16.180
Yeah, this is a, I'm pulling a Putin,
link |
00:40:18.860
like ask if this is a gift,
link |
00:40:21.180
making it very uncomfortable for you to say.
link |
00:40:24.280
Not really.
link |
00:40:25.120
This is actually my childhood telescope here, you know.
link |
00:40:28.020
But now I'm keeping it.
link |
00:40:29.380
That's right.
link |
00:40:30.420
So looking through this telescope.
link |
00:40:32.100
Was when your love for science was first born.
link |
00:40:34.660
Changed my life.
link |
00:40:35.500
Because not only was I doing that,
link |
00:40:37.300
I was replicating what Galileo did,
link |
00:40:39.380
but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself
link |
00:40:42.520
to Galileo, Galileo, okay,
link |
00:40:43.660
if there's any confusion out there.
link |
00:40:45.140
But I did replicate exactly what he did,
link |
00:40:47.260
and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.
link |
00:40:48.740
Let me write it down.
link |
00:40:50.180
So it had another effect, which all good scientists,
link |
00:40:52.500
budding scientists should do, and all parents should do,
link |
00:40:55.100
get your kid a book, a little notebook,
link |
00:40:57.040
tape a pencil to it.
link |
00:40:58.480
Write down what you see, what you hypothesize,
link |
00:41:00.980
what you think it's gonna be.
link |
00:41:01.980
Not like in the high school, you know,
link |
00:41:03.760
like hypothesis, thesis, but just like,
link |
00:41:06.420
wow, how did I feel?
link |
00:41:07.900
Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.
link |
00:41:10.180
Sketch what you see.
link |
00:41:11.660
The Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades Seven Sisters.
link |
00:41:14.820
You can see them anywhere on Earth.
link |
00:41:16.900
And when you do that, again,
link |
00:41:18.380
you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain,
link |
00:41:20.940
as I understand it,
link |
00:41:22.140
and you're connecting them through your fingertips.
link |
00:41:24.660
You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips.
link |
00:41:27.020
In your connection between what you see,
link |
00:41:30.140
what you observe, and what you write down.
link |
00:41:31.860
Then you do research, right?
link |
00:41:34.680
The goal of science is not to just replicate
link |
00:41:36.380
what other people did, is do something new.
link |
00:41:38.620
And that's why we call it research,
link |
00:41:40.380
and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.
link |
00:41:42.980
And in so doing, you start to train a kid
link |
00:41:45.980
at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.
link |
00:41:48.780
It's unbelievable.
link |
00:41:49.620
And now we can do even better,
link |
00:41:50.700
because you can share it on Instagram or whatever,
link |
00:41:53.020
and you can, by doing so, have an entree
link |
00:41:56.060
into the world of what does it really mean
link |
00:41:57.700
to be a scientist, and do so viscerally.
link |
00:41:59.980
You know, I often say, I was taught this
link |
00:42:02.620
by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade,
link |
00:42:05.860
that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into.
link |
00:42:09.600
Let me pour in some facts and intellects,
link |
00:42:11.300
and you know, it's not like machine learning
link |
00:42:12.740
that you're just showing like billions of cats,
link |
00:42:14.660
or you know, you're not like forcing it in,
link |
00:42:16.540
you're bringing it out.
link |
00:42:17.580
It means to pour out of, in Latin, educare.
link |
00:42:20.220
And what more could a teacher want
link |
00:42:22.840
than to have something, the kid is just like gushing.
link |
00:42:25.060
No, you're not gonna see like.
link |
00:42:26.140
To inspire the kid.
link |
00:42:26.980
Yes.
link |
00:42:27.820
Inspire.
link |
00:42:28.640
Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.
link |
00:42:29.480
Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins, she's watching, yeah.
link |
00:42:31.380
She's a big fan.
link |
00:42:33.860
Me, she doesn't care for it, but you.
link |
00:42:35.140
Yeah, excellent.
link |
00:42:36.980
We take those we love for granted.
link |
00:42:39.620
This is in Manhattan.
link |
00:42:40.780
This is in Westchester County, New York.
link |
00:42:42.340
Okay, got it.
link |
00:42:43.380
So okay, but then that's where the dream is born.
link |
00:42:47.140
But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.
link |
00:42:51.620
So going to university, graduate school,
link |
00:42:55.180
postdoc, all the way to where you are today.
link |
00:42:58.280
What's that, what are some notable moments in that journey?
link |
00:43:03.220
So I call that the academic hunger games.
link |
00:43:05.780
Because it's like you're competing against
link |
00:43:07.740
like these people who are just getting smarter all the time
link |
00:43:11.500
as you're getting smarter all the time.
link |
00:43:13.340
They wanna get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
link |
00:43:16.380
Like there's fewer slots to get into college
link |
00:43:18.340
than in high school.
link |
00:43:19.420
There's fewer slots in graduate school.
link |
00:43:20.900
There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
link |
00:43:23.380
And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
link |
00:43:26.540
We just did a faculty search at UC San Diego,
link |
00:43:29.220
400 applicants for one position.
link |
00:43:31.300
It's almost getting impossible.
link |
00:43:32.680
Like I almost can't conceive of doing
link |
00:43:34.880
what these new brilliant young people applying
link |
00:43:37.100
to become an assistant professor at a state university
link |
00:43:39.660
that they're doing.
link |
00:43:40.740
It takes so much courage to do that.
link |
00:43:42.940
So I went from this kid in New York,
link |
00:43:45.700
thinking I would never be a professional astronomer.
link |
00:43:48.560
A, because I didn't know any, I'd never seen any.
link |
00:43:50.960
I didn't even know that they existed.
link |
00:43:52.580
And I thought, who the hell's gonna pay me
link |
00:43:53.980
to look at the stars?
link |
00:43:54.980
Like, won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?
link |
00:43:57.300
Like, it's just not something I could conceive
link |
00:43:59.300
of getting paid to do.
link |
00:44:00.140
Even if I had the brilliance to do it,
link |
00:44:01.620
which I didn't feel I did.
link |
00:44:03.820
And then I went to graduate school.
link |
00:44:05.820
And during graduate school, I had this kind of
link |
00:44:10.380
on again, off again relationship with my father.
link |
00:44:12.980
And I knew that he was a mathematician.
link |
00:44:14.500
He had left and gotten remarried himself
link |
00:44:16.460
and moved across the country.
link |
00:44:17.300
I didn't see him for 15 years.
link |
00:44:19.580
And in that time, I learned a lot about him.
link |
00:44:22.100
And I learned that he had gotten very interested
link |
00:44:23.980
not in pure mathematics,
link |
00:44:25.200
which he had been a number theorist
link |
00:44:26.620
and contributed seminal work on the offending equations,
link |
00:44:30.340
which play a role in Turing's work that you may have seen.
link |
00:44:33.140
But anyway, he had become interested,
link |
00:44:35.620
turned completely away from that into the foundations
link |
00:44:37.940
of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.
link |
00:44:40.100
And by that time I was at Brown University
link |
00:44:42.260
and I was thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter
link |
00:44:44.940
physicist or experimentalist.
link |
00:44:46.620
I never thought I'd be a theorist and I'm not a theorist.
link |
00:44:48.820
So it was pretty prescient.
link |
00:44:51.900
But it always appealed to me,
link |
00:44:53.340
why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old?
link |
00:44:56.140
We often forget about those primitive things about us
link |
00:45:00.100
are probably the most sustainable, durable
link |
00:45:01.940
and resilient attributes of our character.
link |
00:45:04.220
So with my own kids,
link |
00:45:05.540
what are they interested in now when they're young?
link |
00:45:07.300
And it doesn't mean that's what they're gonna do.
link |
00:45:09.020
Some of them wanna play Fortnite,
link |
00:45:10.620
like professional Fortnite play, which there are,
link |
00:45:13.060
but the odds of that is less
link |
00:45:14.980
than the odds of being a professor.
link |
00:45:16.060
Can I ask you, is your father still with us?
link |
00:45:19.340
No.
link |
00:45:21.580
Just in a small tangent.
link |
00:45:23.580
Yeah.
link |
00:45:24.500
Do you miss him?
link |
00:45:25.820
Do you think about him?
link |
00:45:27.260
Does his mathematical journey reverberate
link |
00:45:30.940
through who you are?
link |
00:45:32.100
Oh yeah, absolutely.
link |
00:45:33.220
I mean, it did in very many ways
link |
00:45:36.020
and he's been gone for a long time now.
link |
00:45:37.900
Thinking back to that time with him,
link |
00:45:40.660
he must've instilled some capacity for me
link |
00:45:43.860
to only wanna spend my time,
link |
00:45:45.820
which is a limited quantity.
link |
00:45:46.940
I don't think it's the most limited quantity.
link |
00:45:48.380
Maybe we'll talk about that later,
link |
00:45:49.580
but to go into only the most challenging,
link |
00:45:53.620
interesting things with the limited time that we have
link |
00:45:56.460
while we're alive.
link |
00:45:57.300
And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.
link |
00:45:59.740
For me, it was the foundations of the universe
link |
00:46:02.700
and how did it come to be?
link |
00:46:03.740
And I felt like, well, people have been trying
link |
00:46:05.500
since Einstein to outdo Einstein,
link |
00:46:07.260
really have made great progress
link |
00:46:08.980
in the foundations of quantum mechanics,
link |
00:46:10.860
but this is an exciting time.
link |
00:46:12.620
The COBE satellite had just released its data
link |
00:46:15.060
that the universe had this anisotropy pattern.
link |
00:46:17.500
Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God
link |
00:46:20.100
and so forth.
link |
00:46:21.660
And so it seemed like this is a good golden age
link |
00:46:23.700
for what I'm gonna do and what I'm most interested in.
link |
00:46:26.380
But always throughout that, I wanted to understand,
link |
00:46:29.220
I didn't wanna be a wrench monkey,
link |
00:46:30.460
no offense to people that just do experiment.
link |
00:46:33.100
And no offense to monkeys.
link |
00:46:34.260
No offense to monkeys, that's right.
link |
00:46:35.740
This little guy, sorry, man.
link |
00:46:37.780
But thinking back to what animates me,
link |
00:46:40.620
it's not doing the engineering
link |
00:46:41.980
as much as it is getting the data,
link |
00:46:44.380
but there's a lot of steps.
link |
00:46:45.380
I wanna be the guy understanding
link |
00:46:48.420
what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
link |
00:46:51.980
So I always joke with my theorist friends,
link |
00:46:54.260
call me a closeted theorist.
link |
00:46:56.340
Like I wanna be, you know what they call
link |
00:46:58.300
a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
link |
00:47:01.420
So I wanna be like that for physics,
link |
00:47:04.100
for theoretical physics.
link |
00:47:04.980
I wanna be like the guy doesn't do new theory,
link |
00:47:07.060
but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.
link |
00:47:09.260
I love that formulation of a theorist
link |
00:47:12.580
is understanding the source of the signal you're getting.
link |
00:47:17.380
Like signal is primary.
link |
00:47:19.060
Like the thing you measure is primary
link |
00:47:22.500
and theory is just the search of explaining
link |
00:47:28.260
how that signal originated, but it's all about the signal.
link |
00:47:31.860
I mean, I see the same search for the human mind
link |
00:47:34.260
and like neuroscience in that same kind of way.
link |
00:47:37.980
It's ultimately about the signal,
link |
00:47:39.900
but you kind of hope to understand
link |
00:47:42.500
how that signal originated.
link |
00:47:43.860
That's fascinating.
link |
00:47:45.140
That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics
link |
00:47:52.940
because it ultimately at the end of the day
link |
00:47:54.860
is all about the signal.
link |
00:47:57.420
Yeah.
link |
00:47:58.460
Yeah, and maybe those two things,
link |
00:48:00.180
the neuroscience and the cosmos,
link |
00:48:02.580
not getting too romantic, but yeah,
link |
00:48:04.700
maybe they're linked in some fundamental way,
link |
00:48:07.300
some fundamental cosmic consciousness,
link |
00:48:09.780
but.
link |
00:48:10.660
We're gonna get to that.
link |
00:48:11.500
Yeah, yeah.
link |
00:48:12.340
No, we definitely have to get back to that.
link |
00:48:14.500
But getting back to, yeah, so my origins.
link |
00:48:16.700
So I always say like, and I wanna try this on you.
link |
00:48:18.620
You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions,
link |
00:48:20.220
but I'm gonna ask you some questions.
link |
00:48:21.260
What's the most important day on the calendar?
link |
00:48:23.020
Don't tell me the date, but to you,
link |
00:48:24.540
what's the most important day to you every year?
link |
00:48:27.940
Do I have to answer or do I have to think about it?
link |
00:48:29.580
No, no, answer.
link |
00:48:30.500
Like, you don't have to tell me the exact date
link |
00:48:31.900
of the calendar.
link |
00:48:32.740
It could be like your mistress's birthday or whatever, but.
link |
00:48:35.380
I have so many I lose track, even though I'm single.
link |
00:48:39.140
How does that even make sense?
link |
00:48:40.380
I know.
link |
00:48:41.220
Okay, I'm sorry.
link |
00:48:42.140
So a day, like a month and a day, yeah.
link |
00:48:46.220
I mean, for me, it would be December 31st.
link |
00:48:49.540
Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.
link |
00:48:52.500
Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth.
link |
00:48:54.900
They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?
link |
00:48:58.220
January means the portal between,
link |
00:49:00.420
the God was the portal between the beginning and the end.
link |
00:49:02.700
So you're looking back, maybe because you're Russian,
link |
00:49:05.100
like the death side, the light side,
link |
00:49:06.900
looking forward into January, the beginning, right?
link |
00:49:10.220
So everybody's most important day is usually some beginning
link |
00:49:15.980
or something significant.
link |
00:49:17.260
For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all.
link |
00:49:19.260
It's like, when did the universe get born,
link |
00:49:20.620
as I said before?
link |
00:49:21.940
And I didn't think there, again, I didn't,
link |
00:49:24.940
I just, there was some mental obstruction
link |
00:49:27.180
that I didn't realize that I could get past
link |
00:49:30.540
because I didn't think like anybody does it.
link |
00:49:32.700
Like I knew astronomers knew these answers,
link |
00:49:34.820
like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion
link |
00:49:37.380
years old.
link |
00:49:38.220
Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old.
link |
00:49:41.740
It's incredible the five digit, you know,
link |
00:49:43.500
per significant five.
link |
00:49:44.620
What is it again? 13.872 billion years.
link |
00:49:48.940
872 million.
link |
00:49:50.860
So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
link |
00:49:52.900
Is it, what are the error bars on that?
link |
00:49:53.740
So for me, I'm 50.
link |
00:49:55.260
So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me
link |
00:49:57.340
and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.
link |
00:49:59.500
Yeah.
link |
00:50:00.340
It's a half a percent, percent level accuracy.
link |
00:50:02.460
There's a confidence behind that?
link |
00:50:04.020
Oh yeah. I mean, there's a significance.
link |
00:50:05.380
Yeah. No, it's extremely well measured.
link |
00:50:07.100
I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have.
link |
00:50:09.100
In contrast to, again, 25 years ago,
link |
00:50:12.300
we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion
link |
00:50:14.580
or 20 billion years old,
link |
00:50:16.020
but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be
link |
00:50:18.860
as they are about 12 billion years old
link |
00:50:21.100
or in the universe that were 12 billion.
link |
00:50:22.660
So that would be like you being older than your father.
link |
00:50:26.700
It was embarrassing.
link |
00:50:27.660
Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent,
link |
00:50:30.340
on a tangent, on a tangent?
link |
00:50:31.820
How old is the universe?
link |
00:50:33.420
Can you dig in onto this number?
link |
00:50:35.980
How do we know currently with those,
link |
00:50:38.540
I guess you said four or five significant digits?
link |
00:50:42.740
So we can come about it from two different ways.
link |
00:50:44.900
One, basically they rely on the most important number
link |
00:50:47.920
in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant.
link |
00:50:50.280
The Hubble constant is this weird number
link |
00:50:52.660
that has the following units.
link |
00:50:54.180
It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.
link |
00:50:58.300
So it's a speed per distance,
link |
00:51:00.340
which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed.
link |
00:51:02.860
And what is the speed you're measuring?
link |
00:51:04.300
Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy
link |
00:51:06.140
at many megaparsecs away.
link |
00:51:07.900
So a galaxy at one megaparsec away,
link |
00:51:09.580
this isn't actually strictly true
link |
00:51:10.860
because of local gravitational effects.
link |
00:51:12.940
But if you go out, say one megaparsec away,
link |
00:51:15.460
I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers
link |
00:51:17.820
per second away from you.
link |
00:51:19.140
And every galaxy, except for the local,
link |
00:51:21.620
very most local group surrounding us,
link |
00:51:23.480
maybe a half a dozen galaxies,
link |
00:51:25.220
out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies.
link |
00:51:30.220
So 12 out of that number are moving towards us,
link |
00:51:33.460
the rest are moving away from us.
link |
00:51:35.100
So that number, if you invert it,
link |
00:51:38.140
if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other,
link |
00:51:40.940
all those galaxies, now they're really far apart,
link |
00:51:43.460
we know how fast they're moving away.
link |
00:51:44.740
It's a very simple algebra problem to solve.
link |
00:51:46.700
When were they touching?
link |
00:51:47.820
That's where you get that number from.
link |
00:51:49.660
So there's the local 12 and then the rest.
link |
00:51:51.900
Ignore the 12, yeah.
link |
00:51:52.740
And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others
link |
00:51:54.860
and yeah, then solve the algebra problem.
link |
00:51:57.140
How does the stuff in the beginning,
link |
00:52:03.980
the mystery of that beginning epoch
link |
00:52:05.620
change this calculation of?
link |
00:52:07.420
Very little, because actually we understand
link |
00:52:10.820
how there's some other ingredients that go into it,
link |
00:52:12.820
namely how much dark energy there is in the universe,
link |
00:52:14.860
how much dark matter there is in the universe,
link |
00:52:16.420
how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera there are,
link |
00:52:19.940
and how much ordinary matter,
link |
00:52:21.280
like we're made up of neutrons, protons, croutons.
link |
00:52:24.660
Okay, so let me, morons.
link |
00:52:31.300
It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.
link |
00:52:37.500
How does that make sense?
link |
00:52:38.660
Oh, oh, yeah, so you're talking about the fact
link |
00:52:40.460
that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe
link |
00:52:43.900
that's located at a distance that is farther
link |
00:52:46.780
than the speed of light times the age of the universe.
link |
00:52:49.740
Naively you would say that,
link |
00:52:51.600
so you're right, if the universe were static,
link |
00:52:54.640
if the universe came into existence,
link |
00:52:56.220
and you can conceive of this,
link |
00:52:57.500
the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe,
link |
00:53:00.460
so the universe just started off,
link |
00:53:02.700
those galaxies were, they could be moving
link |
00:53:05.360
towards us, away from us, who knows,
link |
00:53:07.720
that you could say I can see a galaxy
link |
00:53:09.960
that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years
link |
00:53:13.740
times the speed of light, that would be true.
link |
00:53:15.900
But the fact that the light is expanding
link |
00:53:18.340
along with the expansion of the universe,
link |
00:53:20.440
so imagine there was some very distant past,
link |
00:53:23.140
we were near a galaxy, it's gonna produce some light,
link |
00:53:25.940
and that galaxy's going to be moving away from us,
link |
00:53:28.300
the light's gonna be getting more and more red shifted
link |
00:53:30.380
as it's called, and it's gonna be moving
link |
00:53:31.940
farther and farther away from us as time goes on,
link |
00:53:34.820
there'll be some acceleration
link |
00:53:35.900
as we get into the era of dark energy.
link |
00:53:38.700
The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance,
link |
00:53:41.640
if you will, from which, which represents all the events
link |
00:53:45.180
that we could have received information from.
link |
00:53:47.700
We can't currently communicate with that galaxy.
link |
00:53:50.900
It sent us some light, and now it's moving away,
link |
00:53:53.500
and it sent us some light, and because the space
link |
00:53:55.480
is also dragging the photons with it, if you like,
link |
00:53:57.860
the photons are participating
link |
00:53:59.820
in the expansion of the universe,
link |
00:54:01.100
that's why they're red shifting,
link |
00:54:02.520
that we can see things out to where the universe
link |
00:54:05.260
first began expanding, not just when it began existing.
link |
00:54:09.220
And because the universe has been expanding
link |
00:54:10.680
for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing down yet,
link |
00:54:14.100
which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise,
link |
00:54:18.060
that we can see things approximately three times
link |
00:54:20.300
the age of the universe away from us.
link |
00:54:22.140
So we can see, it's called the age of the universe,
link |
00:54:24.100
15 billion years, just to make the math simple.
link |
00:54:26.240
We see things at 45 billion light years distance
link |
00:54:29.640
in that direction, and we see things at 45 billion
link |
00:54:32.540
light years in that direction,
link |
00:54:34.260
just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.
link |
00:54:36.860
So that means we see things that themselves
link |
00:54:39.360
are 90 billion light years away from each other.
link |
00:54:42.560
That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe.
link |
00:54:45.360
Is there another universe beyond that?
link |
00:54:47.100
We don't know.
link |
00:54:47.920
So in conjecture, there's not only one,
link |
00:54:49.660
there's an infinite number of them.
link |
00:54:51.260
How are you emotionally okay with the fact
link |
00:54:54.300
that our universe is expanding?
link |
00:54:55.980
So like...
link |
00:54:56.820
It's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvy Singer.
link |
00:55:00.220
I grew up in the Soviet Union.
link |
00:55:02.540
We watched propaganda films.
link |
00:55:03.620
I realized that you did, yes.
link |
00:55:05.420
So there's a famous... Annie Hall, is that some kind of...
link |
00:55:07.860
What is the...
link |
00:55:08.680
It's a comedy, it's a propaganda movie with Woody Allen.
link |
00:55:12.940
Certainly canceled, but nevertheless,
link |
00:55:14.940
back when he was not canceled yet,
link |
00:55:17.660
he made a movie called Annie Hall,
link |
00:55:19.080
in which as a self depiction, he's like a Larry David
link |
00:55:21.820
before Larry David was Larry David,
link |
00:55:23.660
neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew.
link |
00:55:26.060
He's in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother
link |
00:55:28.780
he's not doing his homework anymore.
link |
00:55:29.940
He refuses to do his homework.
link |
00:55:31.340
Mother says, why?
link |
00:55:32.380
Goes, because the universe is expanding
link |
00:55:34.020
and it keeps on expanding.
link |
00:55:36.180
Everything will rip apart
link |
00:55:37.100
and then we'll never have anything in contact
link |
00:55:38.980
and everything is meaningless.
link |
00:55:40.460
I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to.
link |
00:55:43.860
And she goes, what are you talking about?
link |
00:55:45.620
We're in Brooklyn.
link |
00:55:46.780
Brooklyn is not expanding.
link |
00:55:49.100
And that's true, Brooklyn is not expanding.
link |
00:55:50.820
The solar system is not expanding.
link |
00:55:52.660
Often times they get asked,
link |
00:55:53.580
what is the universe expanding into?
link |
00:55:55.500
That's one of my favorite questions.
link |
00:55:57.340
What is it expanding into?
link |
00:55:59.020
And I say, it's actually an easy question
link |
00:56:00.940
if you think about it.
link |
00:56:02.340
You've seen your friend Elon, he goes out into space,
link |
00:56:04.780
he's got a rocket, right?
link |
00:56:05.900
What's outside of the rocket?
link |
00:56:07.840
If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle,
link |
00:56:10.120
take the cap off it, go outside the rocket,
link |
00:56:13.260
sip in some Tang, screw on the cover of it,
link |
00:56:16.060
what's in there?
link |
00:56:18.260
Is it empty?
link |
00:56:20.720
That's just semantics, I guess, yeah.
link |
00:56:24.780
No, it's definitely not empty.
link |
00:56:26.020
So you step outside the rocket.
link |
00:56:27.780
Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space,
link |
00:56:29.480
the quote unquote vacuum of space.
link |
00:56:30.320
And there's no more liquid in it.
link |
00:56:31.780
There's no more liquid in it.
link |
00:56:32.620
No, it's just a container.
link |
00:56:33.780
One cubic centimeter, let's make it simple.
link |
00:56:35.860
One cubic centimeter of a box
link |
00:56:38.200
and you take it out into space,
link |
00:56:39.400
outside of a Falcon, whatever, right?
link |
00:56:42.700
What's inside that box?
link |
00:56:44.020
It's not empty.
link |
00:56:45.100
There's actually, I'm gonna say,
link |
00:56:47.340
this is gonna set your friends up.
link |
00:56:48.460
There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements
link |
00:56:53.140
that we call the cosmic microwave background
link |
00:56:54.900
inside that box at any second.
link |
00:56:56.580
Okay, all right, hold on a second.
link |
00:56:58.460
What, 420, I've heard of that number before.
link |
00:57:03.340
All right, let's.
link |
00:57:04.160
It used to be 69, but then they changed it.
link |
00:57:06.780
Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
link |
00:57:09.260
In a millimeter box, it's 69.
link |
00:57:10.940
What are we talking about here?
link |
00:57:12.740
What's inside, what's in the box?
link |
00:57:16.460
I'm gonna get, that's right.
link |
00:57:18.020
Let's think outside the box.
link |
00:57:19.060
No, we're thinking inside the box.
link |
00:57:20.220
So if you have, every cubic centimeter
link |
00:57:22.380
of our observable universe is suffused with heat
link |
00:57:25.340
left over from the Big Bang, dark matter particles.
link |
00:57:28.520
There's a little ordinary matter in the universe.
link |
00:57:31.860
And every cubic centimeter,
link |
00:57:33.020
there's some probability to find a proton,
link |
00:57:34.700
a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.
link |
00:57:37.580
There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos
link |
00:57:39.660
inside of that cubic centimeter.
link |
00:57:41.320
Now just imagine how many cubic centimeters
link |
00:57:43.020
are in the universe, it's enormous.
link |
00:57:44.540
That's why there's enormous numbers of particles
link |
00:57:46.640
in our universe, it's a very rich universe.
link |
00:57:48.920
But now let's zoom in on that box.
link |
00:57:51.140
So now inside that box, there might be one,
link |
00:57:54.000
let's say there might be one ordinary matter,
link |
00:57:56.260
like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
link |
00:58:00.000
There might be a couple hundred neutrinos
link |
00:58:03.160
and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420.
link |
00:58:07.000
What's between those guys?
link |
00:58:08.520
What's between the protons and the neutrinos
link |
00:58:13.120
and the photons?
link |
00:58:14.120
Like just zoom into a cubic micron now.
link |
00:58:16.720
Like imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
link |
00:58:19.400
It's actually pretty empty.
link |
00:58:20.640
Like they're just zipping around in there, right?
link |
00:58:22.400
So between them, there's a lot of empty space.
link |
00:58:24.480
And this is outside the kind of physics based models
link |
00:58:27.960
of fields and all those kinds of things,
link |
00:58:29.560
just like asking the question of like,
link |
00:58:32.720
what is this emptiness?
link |
00:58:33.560
What's the particle content in the universe
link |
00:58:35.880
in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
link |
00:58:38.440
Outside of the 420.
link |
00:58:39.720
So you have the 420, they have some mass.
link |
00:58:44.480
Well, they have energy, they don't have mass.
link |
00:58:45.600
Photons don't have mass.
link |
00:58:47.320
That's why they don't bring suitcases.
link |
00:58:48.520
You know, that's true, right?
link |
00:58:50.080
Photons never bring suitcases with them
link |
00:58:53.040
because they're traveling light.
link |
00:58:55.200
See, I don't even get to laugh at you.
link |
00:58:56.960
That's corny dad jokes.
link |
00:58:58.340
Okay, you'll appreciate some.
link |
00:58:59.560
No, this is pretty good.
link |
00:59:01.520
I'm laughing on the insides.
link |
00:59:02.880
What's in the box?
link |
00:59:03.920
What's the 420?
link |
00:59:04.800
What's between the photons?
link |
00:59:07.440
That's what space is.
link |
00:59:08.480
That's what the universe is expanding into.
link |
00:59:10.400
Okay, so that's the notebook
link |
00:59:13.720
on which the photons are written.
link |
00:59:16.320
That's beautiful.
link |
00:59:17.160
But still, thank you.
link |
00:59:19.480
Still, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable
link |
00:59:24.440
that if the universe is expanding,
link |
00:59:27.720
that this thing is expanding, the canvas is expanding.
link |
00:59:31.540
It's very strange.
link |
00:59:33.280
Because like if we were just sitting there still,
link |
00:59:35.280
I guess if we're in Brooklyn, nothing's expanding.
link |
00:59:37.740
So our cognition, our intuition about the world
link |
00:59:41.920
is based on this local fact
link |
00:59:44.000
that we don't get to experience this kind of expansion.
link |
00:59:49.560
Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray.
link |
00:59:52.440
But you know that gravity is the weakest
link |
00:59:54.440
of the so called four fundamental forces.
link |
00:59:57.360
And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.
link |
01:00:00.040
Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled
link |
01:00:01.840
towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of speed
link |
01:00:05.360
because of its massive counter gravitational force
link |
01:00:07.840
to the force we exert on it.
link |
01:00:09.680
So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
link |
01:00:13.720
And because of that, we can think about these effects
link |
01:00:17.720
of expansion as the relationship between the,
link |
01:00:21.920
as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right?
link |
01:00:25.560
Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship
link |
01:00:29.720
between those points, how far they are from each other.
link |
01:00:33.160
And those can change, those point distances can change
link |
01:00:36.400
over time because of the force of gravity.
link |
01:00:39.160
So it's weak and what we experience as gravity
link |
01:00:43.040
is the changing of those trajectories
link |
01:00:46.600
from being rectilinear to curvilinear.
link |
01:00:48.900
That's what we experience as gravity.
link |
01:00:51.200
You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish
link |
01:00:53.440
about bowling ball and a trampoline.
link |
01:00:55.760
That's almost right because it's actually,
link |
01:00:57.880
you have to visualize that now in four dimensions,
link |
01:01:00.120
like wrapping a trampoline at every point
link |
01:01:02.120
around the object, including on the sides,
link |
01:01:04.400
and it becomes very hard to visualize.
link |
01:01:06.240
So a lot of people use that.
link |
01:01:08.080
It's also a fraught analogy because you're using gravity,
link |
01:01:11.100
like the notion of gravity pulling something down
link |
01:01:13.420
to explain the notion of gravity.
link |
01:01:15.160
So it's a little overburdening, the analogy.
link |
01:01:18.320
But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish
link |
01:01:20.020
wrote the forward to your book.
link |
01:01:22.400
How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
link |
01:01:24.800
How do they, on the emotional level,
link |
01:01:26.740
how do they make you feel that they're just
link |
01:01:28.800
moving space time?
link |
01:01:30.960
Yeah, so gravitational waves were,
link |
01:01:33.160
the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery
link |
01:01:35.560
the first time, it was discovered twice,
link |
01:01:39.140
indirectly by two men named Halcyon Taylor,
link |
01:01:43.900
and that was given my first year of graduate school.
link |
01:01:45.920
The day I entered graduate school almost,
link |
01:01:47.840
they announced these two guys won it,
link |
01:01:49.720
and the guy who won it did the work
link |
01:01:51.160
that would later win him the Nobel Prize
link |
01:01:52.720
when he was my age.
link |
01:01:53.560
Is this in the 40s?
link |
01:01:55.080
This was, no, this is 19.
link |
01:01:56.880
That was a joke.
link |
01:01:57.720
Yeah, that was good, that was good.
link |
01:01:59.120
I got it, I got it.
link |
01:01:59.940
You know, to a cosmologist, age means nothing.
link |
01:02:02.840
And to a tennis player.
link |
01:02:03.920
Not on Tinder.
link |
01:02:05.840
That's right.
link |
01:02:06.680
All right, sorry.
link |
01:02:07.640
Gravitational waves do fit in
link |
01:02:09.500
because what we're trying to do now
link |
01:02:12.080
is use the properties of gravitational waves,
link |
01:02:15.120
the analogous properties that they have to photons,
link |
01:02:18.260
that they travel at the speed of light,
link |
01:02:20.100
that they go through everything,
link |
01:02:21.180
they can go through everything,
link |
01:02:22.680
and that they're directly detectable.
link |
01:02:24.640
We're using them to try to confirm
link |
01:02:28.600
if or if not inflation occurred.
link |
01:02:32.000
So did inflation, the spark that ignited
link |
01:02:34.800
the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe
link |
01:02:37.200
and the initial expansion of the universe,
link |
01:02:39.520
did that take place?
link |
01:02:40.640
There's only one way that cosmologists believe
link |
01:02:43.240
we could ever see that.
link |
01:02:44.560
Through the imprint
link |
01:02:46.040
of these primordial gravitational waves,
link |
01:02:48.400
not these old newcomers that Barry studies,
link |
01:02:51.440
the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us,
link |
01:02:55.080
a billion years ago,
link |
01:02:56.720
but we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago
link |
01:02:59.560
during the inflationary epoch.
link |
01:03:02.000
However, those, we cannot build a LIGO
link |
01:03:05.520
and put it at the Big Bang.
link |
01:03:07.920
So if you want to measure,
link |
01:03:09.320
let's say you have the old time firecracker,
link |
01:03:12.520
let's say there's a firecracker,
link |
01:03:13.680
and you want to see if it went off
link |
01:03:15.240
in the building next door to you,
link |
01:03:16.840
you can't see it.
link |
01:03:18.040
So you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it.
link |
01:03:21.080
And what we're trying to do is hear
link |
01:03:22.960
the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang,
link |
01:03:25.720
not by using a camera or even an interferometer
link |
01:03:29.320
like Barry used and his colleagues,
link |
01:03:31.760
but instead using the CMB, the light,
link |
01:03:35.280
the primordial ancient fossils of the universe,
link |
01:03:37.840
the oldest light in the universe.
link |
01:03:39.600
We're gonna use that as a film, quote unquote,
link |
01:03:43.000
onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
link |
01:03:46.040
And hope you can, so what are the challenges there
link |
01:03:48.600
to get enough accuracy for the exposure?
link |
01:03:51.840
So the signal, as I said,
link |
01:03:53.960
so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter,
link |
01:03:56.840
and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.
link |
01:03:59.280
However, what we're looking for
link |
01:04:00.800
is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.
link |
01:04:04.840
We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.
link |
01:04:07.480
We're looking for what its polarization is.
link |
01:04:10.200
And we'll go, let me just ask,
link |
01:04:11.800
are you serious about the per cubic millimeter,
link |
01:04:13.960
420 is the number?
link |
01:04:15.040
Centimeter.
link |
01:04:15.880
Yes, cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
link |
01:04:20.240
I wonder if Elon knows this,
link |
01:04:21.560
and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.
link |
01:04:23.680
Okay, yeah, that's true.
link |
01:04:26.680
Oh, okay, funding security, excellent.
link |
01:04:30.280
So I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak,
link |
01:04:34.080
of triumph that you described in losing the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:04:38.360
So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
link |
01:04:42.360
Can you describe what bicep one and bicep two are,
link |
01:04:46.080
bicep three, perhaps, the instruments
link |
01:04:48.800
that can detect this kind of polarization?
link |
01:04:51.440
What are the challenges, the origin story, the whole thing?
link |
01:04:54.960
Yeah, so well, the origin story goes back again
link |
01:04:57.640
to like a father son rivalry, it really does.
link |
01:05:00.200
My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera,
link |
01:05:02.440
but he never won a Nobel Prize.
link |
01:05:04.200
And some parents in America, they compete with their kids.
link |
01:05:08.000
Oh, I was a football player in high school, I'll show you.
link |
01:05:10.120
And whatever, wrestling, whatever.
link |
01:05:11.640
And some of us could be healthy too.
link |
01:05:13.840
But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy.
link |
01:05:17.280
Like we would compete and he was much more
link |
01:05:20.560
of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist.
link |
01:05:23.080
So we had both different ideas
link |
01:05:25.080
in what was worth prioritizing our time.
link |
01:05:27.720
But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:05:30.040
And I knew I could kind of outdo him.
link |
01:05:32.240
So I feel pretty venal and kind of minuscule
link |
01:05:35.780
kind of character wise saying that.
link |
01:05:37.240
The only reason you could outdo him
link |
01:05:38.800
is because the Fields Medal is given every four years.
link |
01:05:41.760
And only if you're under 40, which he was.
link |
01:05:43.920
So he's working under much more limited conditions.
link |
01:05:47.640
That's right, so even if I had, which spoiler alert,
link |
01:05:50.800
the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn't do it.
link |
01:05:53.560
But I wanted to do something big
link |
01:05:54.920
and I wanted to do something that would really
link |
01:05:58.080
just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery
link |
01:06:01.080
for the ages, as in fact it was
link |
01:06:02.840
when we made the premature announcement
link |
01:06:04.380
that we had been successful.
link |
01:06:05.760
So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions.
link |
01:06:10.520
That's all I cared about.
link |
01:06:11.440
As an experimenter you were swinging for the fences.
link |
01:06:14.480
That's all I wanted to do.
link |
01:06:15.680
I felt like if it's not, if it's worth spending
link |
01:06:20.920
perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist,
link |
01:06:24.320
it better be damn well better be interesting to me
link |
01:06:26.600
to carry me through, to give me the,
link |
01:06:29.120
I always say passion is great when people say,
link |
01:06:31.480
oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough.
link |
01:06:33.720
Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket,
link |
01:06:35.880
but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.
link |
01:06:38.520
So then you swung for the fences with Bicep One.
link |
01:06:41.840
What is this?
link |
01:06:42.760
So Bicep One was born out of
link |
01:06:45.240
kind of interesting circumstances.
link |
01:06:46.520
So I had gone to Stanford University for a postdoc,
link |
01:06:49.880
so an academic hunger games.
link |
01:06:51.680
Stanford? Stanford University.
link |
01:06:54.480
Yeah, it's this small little school.
link |
01:06:56.240
It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts
link |
01:06:59.200
that you're affiliated with.
link |
01:07:00.660
But as I went there, I was working
link |
01:07:04.160
for a new assistant professor.
link |
01:07:05.760
She had gotten there only a year before I got there,
link |
01:07:08.960
and she had her own priorities,
link |
01:07:10.440
the things that she wanted to do.
link |
01:07:12.040
But I kept thinking in my spare time
link |
01:07:14.500
that I wanted to do something completely different.
link |
01:07:16.100
She was studying galaxies at high redshift,
link |
01:07:17.700
and I wanted to study the origin of the universe
link |
01:07:19.800
using this type of technology.
link |
01:07:22.200
And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine
link |
01:07:25.400
who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Haminkowski,
link |
01:07:28.320
that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope.
link |
01:07:30.580
We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope.
link |
01:07:33.000
We needed a tiny refracting telescope,
link |
01:07:35.280
no bigger than my head, less than a foot across.
link |
01:07:38.200
And that telescope would have the same power
link |
01:07:40.080
as a Hubble telescope, size telescope could have,
link |
01:07:43.120
because the signals that we're looking for
link |
01:07:44.560
are enormous in wavelength on the sky.
link |
01:07:46.800
They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky.
link |
01:07:50.340
And if we could measure that,
link |
01:07:52.240
it would be proof, effectively,
link |
01:07:53.520
as close as you get to proof,
link |
01:07:54.940
there could be things that mimic it,
link |
01:07:55.960
but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.
link |
01:07:58.900
Inflation being the signal originally conceived
link |
01:08:01.600
by Alan Guth to explain why the universe
link |
01:08:04.240
had the large scale features that it does,
link |
01:08:06.440
namely that it has so called flat geometry.
link |
01:08:09.040
So there's no way to make a triangle in space
link |
01:08:12.120
in our universe that has three interior angles
link |
01:08:15.340
that do not sum to 180 degrees.
link |
01:08:18.240
You can do that with spacecraft,
link |
01:08:19.600
you can do that with stars,
link |
01:08:20.600
you can do that with laser beams,
link |
01:08:21.600
you can do that with three different galaxies.
link |
01:08:23.600
All those galaxies, no matter how far you go,
link |
01:08:25.760
have this geometry, it's remarkable.
link |
01:08:27.840
But it's also unstable, it's very unlikely,
link |
01:08:30.880
it's very seemingly finely tuned.
link |
01:08:32.960
And that was one of the motivations that Guth had
link |
01:08:34.720
to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979
link |
01:08:39.160
when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, Slack.
link |
01:08:42.380
And he was trying to get a permanent job,
link |
01:08:44.400
I was trying to like make my name for myself.
link |
01:08:46.560
And so I realized I could do this,
link |
01:08:48.600
but I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford
link |
01:08:51.820
to do a job for her.
link |
01:08:53.080
And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.
link |
01:08:56.800
And then one day she couldn't take it anymore
link |
01:08:58.480
because I was like sketching notebooks
link |
01:09:00.000
and planning these experiments.
link |
01:09:01.300
And I just, I wasn't, no, I actually.
link |
01:09:03.120
Big ideas in your mind, you're planning big experiments.
link |
01:09:06.080
And that was difficult to work with on a small scale
link |
01:09:10.000
for like a postdoc type of situation
link |
01:09:12.320
where you have to publish basic papers,
link |
01:09:15.320
deliver on some basic deadlines for a project,
link |
01:09:17.800
all those kinds of things.
link |
01:09:18.640
And support your advisors, paying, she was paying me.
link |
01:09:21.120
And so one day I came in and it actually involved
link |
01:09:26.040
another friend of mine, an astronomer named Jill Tarter,
link |
01:09:28.800
one of the pioneers in the SETI science business
link |
01:09:31.760
of detecting extraterrestrials,
link |
01:09:33.480
which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens,
link |
01:09:35.900
so I'm sure we won't get into aliens.
link |
01:09:37.900
But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like,
link |
01:09:40.180
I really wanna meet her, can you introduce me?
link |
01:09:41.400
And she said, no, in fact, you're fired, my boss.
link |
01:09:45.240
So I was like, this is possibly the best thing
link |
01:09:48.920
that could ever happen to me.
link |
01:09:50.080
I didn't know where it would lead or what would happen to it,
link |
01:09:52.640
but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university
link |
01:09:56.320
turned out to be the path, I mean, literally,
link |
01:09:58.440
that brings me here today, in that because of that,
link |
01:10:02.560
I ended up working for another person in Caltech,
link |
01:10:05.800
which is in Pasadena, and she, my original boss,
link |
01:10:10.080
Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor,
link |
01:10:12.920
a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
link |
01:10:14.980
And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know,
link |
01:10:17.720
like he's like Steve Jobs or Elon, charismatic,
link |
01:10:23.640
handsome, persuasive, idea man,
link |
01:10:27.120
not the guy always in the lobby and doing everything,
link |
01:10:29.260
but understood where things are going decades from now.
link |
01:10:33.960
And he had been involved in an experiment
link |
01:10:35.200
that actually measured the universe was flat,
link |
01:10:37.840
very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment
link |
01:10:41.100
done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators.
link |
01:10:43.440
So the shape of the universe is flat.
link |
01:10:45.240
The geometry of the universe is flat.
link |
01:10:47.640
How did he do that experiment?
link |
01:10:49.400
So he used the cosmic microwave background.
link |
01:10:51.880
And so what I said is you have to look for triangles
link |
01:10:54.760
in the universe.
link |
01:10:55.600
So you can measure triangles on earth.
link |
01:10:56.920
You can actually, it's hard to show that the earth is curved,
link |
01:10:59.960
but you can show the earth is curved using triangles,
link |
01:11:02.000
mountain tops, et cetera,
link |
01:11:03.000
if you have an accurate enough protractor.
link |
01:11:04.840
Allegedly, yeah.
link |
01:11:05.760
Yeah.
link |
01:11:07.580
God, you're like auto canceling.
link |
01:11:09.700
This is great.
link |
01:11:11.120
My ratings are gonna go up, man.
link |
01:11:12.400
This is gonna be great.
link |
01:11:13.640
Take out the cake.
link |
01:11:14.480
If you want actual science, go listen to Brian.
link |
01:11:17.240
If you want all of these conspiracy theories
link |
01:11:19.720
or AKA the truth about flat earth, listen to him.
link |
01:11:23.720
So what he used was the following triangle.
link |
01:11:27.360
There are proto galaxy sized objects in the CMB.
link |
01:11:32.280
The cosmic microwave background has these patches.
link |
01:11:34.560
And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter
link |
01:11:37.840
of one of these blobs of primordial plasma,
link |
01:11:41.760
the soup that constitutes the early universe,
link |
01:11:43.880
which is hydrogen.
link |
01:11:44.720
It's very simple material.
link |
01:11:46.080
Understand hydrogen electrons and radiation, very simple.
link |
01:11:48.840
Plasma physicists, son, understand it.
link |
01:11:51.720
The diameter is one base of the triangle.
link |
01:11:54.680
And then the distance to the earth is the other two legs.
link |
01:11:57.340
So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech
link |
01:12:00.000
and then University of Rome and that's other group
link |
01:12:02.160
at Princeton, measured the angle,
link |
01:12:05.740
interior angle effectively very, very accurately
link |
01:12:08.680
and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.
link |
01:12:11.280
Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?
link |
01:12:15.080
Can you know where they could trace them back location wise?
link |
01:12:19.040
You can know where they are, but more than that,
link |
01:12:21.040
there's so many of these patches.
link |
01:12:22.520
They're about one square degree on the sky.
link |
01:12:25.680
The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000
link |
01:12:28.840
square degrees in a sphere.
link |
01:12:30.520
So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches
link |
01:12:33.960
over which he could do these kinds of measurements
link |
01:12:36.080
to build up very good statistics.
link |
01:12:37.680
That's not exactly how they do it
link |
01:12:39.280
or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang,
link |
01:12:41.560
but they did measure very accurately
link |
01:12:43.840
the what was called the first Doppler peak
link |
01:12:46.520
or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
link |
01:12:49.680
So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees.
link |
01:12:56.000
So to cover a sphere, that's a very kind of important
link |
01:12:59.760
data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere
link |
01:13:01.880
and you're looking out into the observable universe.
link |
01:13:04.800
So there's a lot of patches to work with.
link |
01:13:07.880
Yeah, and in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic
link |
01:13:11.140
decomposition of spheres and machine learning
link |
01:13:13.880
in the early 2000s still used today
link |
01:13:16.000
was created out of this field by data analysts
link |
01:13:18.360
using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles
link |
01:13:21.680
called heel picks is what it's called.
link |
01:13:24.600
And so just stitch all this stuff together
link |
01:13:26.360
and stitch it together very accurately.
link |
01:13:29.640
Yeah, get high statistical significance
link |
01:13:32.160
in order to reduce the statistical errors,
link |
01:13:34.960
very clean signal and a measurement device
link |
01:13:37.640
to reduce the systematic errors.
link |
01:13:39.280
Those are the two predominant sources of error
link |
01:13:41.480
in any measurement.
link |
01:13:42.640
Those that can be improved by more and more measurement,
link |
01:13:44.880
you take more and more measurements to this table,
link |
01:13:46.480
you'll get slightly better each time,
link |
01:13:48.240
but you only win as the number of the one
link |
01:13:51.040
over the square root of the number of measurements,
link |
01:13:53.240
but the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.
link |
01:13:55.560
So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.
link |
01:13:57.600
Again, it's not exactly how they did it.
link |
01:13:58.960
They also have to do a Fourier analysis,
link |
01:14:00.920
decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration windows.
link |
01:14:04.000
There's a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis,
link |
01:14:06.920
and then comparing that with cosmological parameters,
link |
01:14:09.760
very simple model, just six different numbers
link |
01:14:12.080
that go into a model that made a prediction.
link |
01:14:14.280
And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out.
link |
01:14:16.780
And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature,
link |
01:14:19.520
and that was called boomerang.
link |
01:14:20.960
So he had just come off of this.
link |
01:14:22.540
Now, let me remind you, who was the first person
link |
01:14:25.240
to measure the curvature of the earth?
link |
01:14:27.280
It's a guy named Aristophanes in the whatever,
link |
01:14:29.880
lived around Aristotle's time.
link |
01:14:31.960
His name is in the history books.
link |
01:14:33.080
So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like,
link |
01:14:35.160
he's like the next Aristophanes.
link |
01:14:38.040
I just wanted to work for this guy.
link |
01:14:39.960
He clearly had this brand.
link |
01:14:41.560
He was about 40 at the time, California
link |
01:14:43.920
Scientist of the Year.
link |
01:14:45.800
I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that.
link |
01:14:48.040
And I knew that he, so I went down to Caltech
link |
01:14:51.720
to give my job talk.
link |
01:14:53.120
And he said, I love it.
link |
01:14:54.860
You got a job.
link |
01:14:56.020
And before I could even, before he finished the sentence,
link |
01:14:58.480
I said, I'll take it.
link |
01:15:00.040
It was too good to be true.
link |
01:15:01.760
And I started working there at Caltech,
link |
01:15:03.680
and slowly but surely, because Caltech's
link |
01:15:05.880
a rich private university, at that time
link |
01:15:08.280
run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore,
link |
01:15:11.440
he just wrote us a check.
link |
01:15:12.520
Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea.
link |
01:15:15.560
And so we started coming up with the idea for what I later
link |
01:15:18.000
named BICEP, background imaging cosmic extragalactic
link |
01:15:21.620
polarization, which is kind of ironic,
link |
01:15:23.840
because we ended up measuring galactic polarization.
link |
01:15:26.200
We'll get to that in a minute.
link |
01:15:27.960
But along the way, the idea was very simple.
link |
01:15:30.300
We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly
link |
01:15:32.800
make, which is a refracting telescope.
link |
01:15:35.080
Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes
link |
01:15:37.160
in your head.
link |
01:15:38.520
Only way forward is making things more complex, right?
link |
01:15:41.440
And when you make things complex in science,
link |
01:15:43.280
you introduce the possibility for systematic errors.
link |
01:15:46.240
And so we wanted to build the cleanest instrument.
link |
01:15:48.320
Turns out the cleanest instrument
link |
01:15:49.400
you can build in astronomy is a refracting telescope.
link |
01:15:52.080
We also had to, unlike that telescope or Galileo's,
link |
01:15:55.240
we had to use very sensitive detectors that
link |
01:15:58.620
were cooled less than 1 20th of the temperature
link |
01:16:02.200
of the cosmic background itself, which
link |
01:16:04.600
is the coolest temperature in the whole universe.
link |
01:16:07.200
So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees
link |
01:16:10.080
Kelvin above absolute zero.
link |
01:16:12.320
To do that, we needed to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber
link |
01:16:14.880
and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules
link |
01:16:17.960
and take it to a very, very special place called the South
link |
01:16:21.020
Pole Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch.
link |
01:16:24.800
There it is over there.
link |
01:16:27.000
So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.
link |
01:16:30.360
Bright.
link |
01:16:30.840
Oh, yeah.
link |
01:16:31.680
As somebody who was born in the Soviet Union,
link |
01:16:34.080
we obviously like to call it red.
link |
01:16:35.560
United States Antarctic Program, the National Science
link |
01:16:40.480
Foundation.
link |
01:16:41.560
And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar
link |
01:16:44.360
Station.
link |
01:16:45.400
So it's a little known fact of geopolitics
link |
01:16:47.520
that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it.
link |
01:16:51.840
Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica.
link |
01:16:53.340
You can't use it for military purposes, for mining,
link |
01:16:56.160
et cetera, et cetera.
link |
01:16:57.280
But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago,
link |
01:16:59.400
Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole.
link |
01:17:01.720
Now, there's no land at the North Pole, right?
link |
01:17:04.320
So what did he do?
link |
01:17:05.040
He stuck it in the ocean underneath.
link |
01:17:07.800
But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica,
link |
01:17:10.920
which was first reached about 110 years ago,
link |
01:17:13.240
the first time in human history.
link |
01:17:15.440
Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
link |
01:17:18.200
It means no bears there, basically opposite
link |
01:17:20.680
of where polar bears are.
link |
01:17:21.720
Arctic means polar bear.
link |
01:17:23.200
That's where in the Greek.
link |
01:17:24.560
I did not know that.
link |
01:17:25.160
Fascinating.
link |
01:17:25.880
So Antarctica means the opposite place of that.
link |
01:17:27.880
Humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole,
link |
01:17:30.680
which is kind of in the middle of the continent.
link |
01:17:33.600
We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.
link |
01:17:37.360
It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas,
link |
01:17:40.680
and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile.
link |
01:17:43.800
Those are the two premier places on Earth.
link |
01:17:46.040
Of course, you'd like to go into space.
link |
01:17:47.700
There's no water in space.
link |
01:17:48.740
So it's not about cold.
link |
01:17:51.240
It's about dry.
link |
01:17:52.000
Exactly.
link |
01:17:52.960
So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka,
link |
01:17:57.760
and you could put it in this cup.
link |
01:17:59.360
And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere
link |
01:18:01.480
and heat it up.
link |
01:18:03.080
After two minutes, three minutes, the water's boiling.
link |
01:18:05.960
You can't touch it.
link |
01:18:06.700
Take it from me.
link |
01:18:07.240
Don't touch it.
link |
01:18:08.040
But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to.
link |
01:18:10.400
Why?
link |
01:18:10.900
Because the mug is totally bone dry.
link |
01:18:13.000
But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules
link |
01:18:15.480
because water molecules resonate exactly
link |
01:18:17.480
at these microwave frequencies.
link |
01:18:19.040
So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them,
link |
01:18:22.800
traveling per cubic centimeter from the Big Bang itself
link |
01:18:26.040
to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's
link |
01:18:28.040
atmosphere.
link |
01:18:28.800
So you take it to a place with the fewest number
link |
01:18:30.640
of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area.
link |
01:18:34.480
And that happens to be either Chile
link |
01:18:35.960
or my other project, the Simons Observatory, is located.
link |
01:18:38.520
Or you take it to the South Pole.
link |
01:18:40.720
We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months
link |
01:18:44.760
of my life down there.
link |
01:18:46.080
And it's like being on Hoth.
link |
01:18:49.480
It's a completely otherworldly environment.
link |
01:18:52.720
Ice, planar, flat as a pancake.
link |
01:18:55.960
And the buildings are built up on stilts.
link |
01:18:59.960
They're built because the snow will otherwise cover them over.
link |
01:19:03.400
The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
link |
01:19:06.840
If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth,
link |
01:19:08.960
they yank them before you go down there.
link |
01:19:11.200
If you have any issues with your appendix,
link |
01:19:12.960
they'll cut it out of you before you go down there.
link |
01:19:15.040
The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away,
link |
01:19:17.080
about 600 miles away.
link |
01:19:18.960
The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one
link |
01:19:20.960
of them operating on himself, taking out his own appendix
link |
01:19:24.540
in the middle of winter by himself.
link |
01:19:26.480
So harsh conditions.
link |
01:19:27.680
Science in the harshest of conditions.
link |
01:19:29.840
On Earth, at least.
link |
01:19:31.200
And we go to those great lengths because it's
link |
01:19:33.040
a pristine environment to observe these precious photons.
link |
01:19:36.520
And we built this telescope.
link |
01:19:38.200
And it weighs tens of thousands of pounds.
link |
01:19:40.720
And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot.
link |
01:19:44.680
I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended.
link |
01:19:48.440
We have a guy who spends a year of his life down there,
link |
01:19:50.920
a girl who spends a year of their life down there.
link |
01:19:53.040
They're called winter overs.
link |
01:19:54.360
They arrive in sometimes as early as November.
link |
01:19:56.920
And they don't leave until the following December.
link |
01:19:59.280
And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000.
link |
01:20:02.760
You just have to work for one night of your life.
link |
01:20:04.720
That's all.
link |
01:20:05.240
But it's a long night.
link |
01:20:08.020
And what BICEP is, and I couldn't
link |
01:20:10.660
bring my polarized sunglasses here,
link |
01:20:12.640
so I brought these actual polarizers here.
link |
01:20:14.560
So if you take this and put it in front of your telescope
link |
01:20:17.120
there, you have now made a polarimeter.
link |
01:20:21.240
You have made a polarization sensitive telescope.
link |
01:20:24.180
Now, you may not be able to immediately know
link |
01:20:26.400
how you would use such a thing.
link |
01:20:27.920
But one way to think about it, now take this guy
link |
01:20:30.460
and look at a light, look at a light source.
link |
01:20:33.760
Put one up to your eye.
link |
01:20:34.880
And now put the other one in front of it anywhere.
link |
01:20:37.960
And now rotate them.
link |
01:20:40.000
What happens to the light source?
link |
01:20:42.480
Becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
link |
01:20:45.520
Yeah, so it's called a quadrupolar pattern, right?
link |
01:20:48.200
So it's repeating.
link |
01:20:49.080
It goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
link |
01:20:51.800
It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical
link |
01:20:55.480
rotation.
link |
01:20:56.720
And that's because of the property of the photon.
link |
01:20:58.720
The photon is a spin one field.
link |
01:21:00.560
But the polarization of light is the axis
link |
01:21:04.880
at which its electric field is oscillating.
link |
01:21:07.320
Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down.
link |
01:21:10.560
And so therefore, vertical polarization
link |
01:21:12.160
is the same as negative vertical polarization.
link |
01:21:15.040
And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times
link |
01:21:17.600
for every one physical rotation.
link |
01:21:19.240
This is like a spin two object.
link |
01:21:22.800
So now if you put that in front of the telescope,
link |
01:21:26.320
you can do one of two things.
link |
01:21:27.560
Now you're polarizing all the light that's
link |
01:21:29.280
going in because you have one of the polarizers.
link |
01:21:31.680
And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.
link |
01:21:34.120
You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.
link |
01:21:37.120
Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.
link |
01:21:40.040
There's a crystal.
link |
01:21:40.840
It's called calcite.
link |
01:21:42.240
This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.
link |
01:21:44.840
This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes
link |
01:21:47.560
there and tell me what does it look like?
link |
01:21:50.840
There's a, like I could see everything twice.
link |
01:21:56.440
It's a double image.
link |
01:21:57.280
It's a double image.
link |
01:21:58.440
That is a special crystal that has two different indices
link |
01:22:01.080
of refraction.
link |
01:22:02.680
So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink,
link |
01:22:06.120
comes out.
link |
01:22:07.320
And it splits into two different directions.
link |
01:22:09.840
And it could split even more if I made the crystal give you
link |
01:22:12.560
my more expensive crystal.
link |
01:22:13.720
But that's all I have.
link |
01:22:14.360
What is the crystal with this kind of property called?
link |
01:22:16.240
It's called calcite.
link |
01:22:17.360
This is crystal.
link |
01:22:18.240
It's called birefringent crystal.
link |
01:22:20.000
Bi means two.
link |
01:22:21.160
Refringent means refracting.
link |
01:22:23.440
So this is a special type of material
link |
01:22:25.480
that separates light based on its polarization.
link |
01:22:28.040
It's a pretty clean bi signal.
link |
01:22:31.720
It's cleanly two.
link |
01:22:35.120
I'm seeing two very cleanly.
link |
01:22:36.760
It's very crisp, right.
link |
01:22:37.600
So that's yours to keep with every time you host me.
link |
01:22:40.000
Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand.
link |
01:22:43.720
Put it on top of the crystal, and kind of move it back
link |
01:22:47.480
and forth.
link |
01:22:48.000
What's happening?
link |
01:22:49.400
This is incredible.
link |
01:22:50.680
You can switch.
link |
01:22:51.560
As you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other.
link |
01:22:55.760
So it's one of the refractions to the other.
link |
01:22:58.680
Whoa.
link |
01:22:59.200
So that is now you are analyzing the polarization.
link |
01:23:02.920
You're confirming the light comes out of the crystal.
link |
01:23:05.200
Two different types of polarization.
link |
01:23:07.200
And effectively, what we do is we have those two things,
link |
01:23:11.080
if you like.
link |
01:23:12.040
But working in the microwave, so that's
link |
01:23:14.800
where the cosmic photons are brightest,
link |
01:23:16.720
in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum.
link |
01:23:19.920
And we're coupling that to a refracting telescope.
link |
01:23:22.000
But your eyes are refracting telescopes.
link |
01:23:23.720
So you are a polarimeter right now.
link |
01:23:25.520
The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization.
link |
01:23:29.160
But otherwise, it mainly detects its intensity of light
link |
01:23:31.840
and the color.
link |
01:23:32.440
That's what we call color and intensity, brightness.
link |
01:23:34.960
So you're devising an instrument that's
link |
01:23:37.160
very precisely measuring that polarization.
link |
01:23:38.840
Exactly.
link |
01:23:39.920
And doing so in the microwave region with detectors
link |
01:23:42.680
not made of biological human retina cells,
link |
01:23:46.080
but of superconductors and things called bolometers.
link |
01:23:49.840
And this has to be done at temperatures
link |
01:23:52.360
close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions
link |
01:23:55.120
one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.
link |
01:23:58.640
So why is it that this kind of device
link |
01:24:01.320
could win a Nobel Prize?
link |
01:24:03.160
So when the CMB was discovered, it
link |
01:24:05.920
was discovered serendipitously.
link |
01:24:07.360
There were two radio astronomers working at the time
link |
01:24:11.560
at Bell Laboratories.
link |
01:24:13.040
Now, why would Bell Laboratories be
link |
01:24:14.600
employing radio astronomers?
link |
01:24:16.120
Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple,
link |
01:24:19.560
or it was like a think tank, or it was Google.
link |
01:24:21.920
Let's say it was like Google.
link |
01:24:23.080
Google has Google X. It has this thing and that thing, right?
link |
01:24:26.760
So they were working there.
link |
01:24:28.680
But imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers.
link |
01:24:31.480
They were actively recruiting them.
link |
01:24:32.920
Why would they do that?
link |
01:24:33.920
Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s,
link |
01:24:36.480
was the first commercial satellite
link |
01:24:39.160
launch for communication.
link |
01:24:41.040
And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone
link |
01:24:44.400
part of AT&T, the early telephone company,
link |
01:24:47.280
later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
link |
01:24:50.520
And they would take that, 1946, and they
link |
01:24:53.200
would take that telescope technology
link |
01:24:56.000
that radio astronomers had developed,
link |
01:24:58.520
and they would use that to see if they
link |
01:25:00.560
could improve the signal to noise of the satellites
link |
01:25:02.680
that they were seeing.
link |
01:25:03.600
And they found they couldn't.
link |
01:25:05.040
They found that they could not improve the signal to noise
link |
01:25:07.360
ratio of the first telecommunication satellite.
link |
01:25:10.160
It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem.
link |
01:25:13.280
They were bouncing signals from the West Coast
link |
01:25:16.440
up to the satellite, bouncing it down,
link |
01:25:18.320
landing it in New Jersey, of all places,
link |
01:25:21.360
in northern New Jersey, Holmdell, New Jersey.
link |
01:25:25.160
And these radio astronomers couldn't get rid of the signal.
link |
01:25:27.480
So they said, well, New Jersey's not far from New York.
link |
01:25:30.200
Let's see if the signal's coming from New York.
link |
01:25:31.600
No, not coming from New York.
link |
01:25:33.040
Let's see if it changes with the year.
link |
01:25:34.280
Maybe it's coming from the galaxy,
link |
01:25:35.400
which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.
link |
01:25:38.680
So in not being able to reduce the signal
link |
01:25:41.480
or increase the signal to noise ratio, the noise was not good.
link |
01:25:45.120
They knew the signal was right.
link |
01:25:46.720
They couldn't get rid of the noise.
link |
01:25:48.120
And there was excess noise over the model that
link |
01:25:50.040
had not only been predicted by them,
link |
01:25:52.080
but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy
link |
01:25:54.080
by the name of Edward Ohm.
link |
01:25:55.760
He measured the same signal, found
link |
01:25:57.680
that there was this hiss of static, of radio static
link |
01:26:00.320
that he could not get rid of, that had
link |
01:26:02.000
a value of about 3 Kelvin.
link |
01:26:04.000
So you can translate.
link |
01:26:04.800
Remember I said, if you take a radio telescope
link |
01:26:07.520
and you point it at an object that's hot,
link |
01:26:10.560
the radio telescope's detector will
link |
01:26:12.040
get to the same temperature as the object.
link |
01:26:14.120
It's a principle of radio thermodynamics.
link |
01:26:16.120
So it's a really interesting thing.
link |
01:26:17.480
It's a thermometer.
link |
01:26:18.320
You can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth.
link |
01:26:20.320
It's amazing.
link |
01:26:21.520
And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal
link |
01:26:24.560
not by its intensity, but by its temperature.
link |
01:26:27.640
So he found, this guy Edward Ohm, oh, there's
link |
01:26:29.960
this 3 Kelvin signal.
link |
01:26:31.120
I can't get rid of it.
link |
01:26:32.280
It must be I did my error analysis wrong.
link |
01:26:35.000
And I would give him an F if he was one of my first year
link |
01:26:37.720
students.
link |
01:26:38.840
But he's just attributed to lack of understanding.
link |
01:26:41.560
These other guys, Penzias and Wilson,
link |
01:26:43.800
who are also radio astronomers, they said, no,
link |
01:26:46.320
let's build another experiment, put that inside
link |
01:26:49.280
of our telescope, and do what's called calibration.
link |
01:26:53.000
Inject a known source of signal every second that
link |
01:26:56.800
has a temperature of about 4 Kelvin,
link |
01:26:58.760
because the signal they're trying to get rid of
link |
01:27:00.300
is about 3 Kelvin.
link |
01:27:01.480
And you want to have it as close as possible
link |
01:27:02.920
to the pernicious signal as possible.
link |
01:27:04.840
They did that once a second.
link |
01:27:06.320
So they got billions of measurements,
link |
01:27:07.560
millions of measurements over the course
link |
01:27:08.840
of several months, years, and even,
link |
01:27:11.280
by the end of, you know, millions of measurements
link |
01:27:13.040
for sure.
link |
01:27:14.520
And they found they couldn't get rid of it either,
link |
01:27:16.320
but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
link |
01:27:20.400
So how does having a 4 Kelvin source,
link |
01:27:24.480
how does the calibration work, just out of curiosity?
link |
01:27:26.560
It could be larger.
link |
01:27:27.400
Imagine like you're trying to calibrate the microphone.
link |
01:27:29.120
Like you could do it with like a really loud sound,
link |
01:27:31.260
but the gain would start to compress.
link |
01:27:33.560
So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector
link |
01:27:36.000
in every experiment that I've ever worked on.
link |
01:27:38.640
And they only have a linear region over a very small region.
link |
01:27:41.400
And you want to keep it as linear as possible.
link |
01:27:43.360
That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of it,
link |
01:27:45.160
you're trying to compare like a voice,
link |
01:27:47.080
and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine,
link |
01:27:49.600
it's not going to be as easy on the amplifiers
link |
01:27:52.520
as getting a slightly loud gong or something, you know.
link |
01:27:55.960
So the idea of the noise is present in both?
link |
01:27:59.160
There's noise present in both.
link |
01:28:00.400
And you measure, what they did is
link |
01:28:02.320
they made a separate measurement just
link |
01:28:03.880
of the calibration system, which they measured
link |
01:28:06.200
exactly very well.
link |
01:28:07.160
4 Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
link |
01:28:09.320
That's a temperature that's not going to change.
link |
01:28:11.480
And it's certainly not going to change
link |
01:28:12.360
over a time scale of one second.
link |
01:28:14.160
And so they could compare unknown signal,
link |
01:28:16.080
known signal, unknown signal, known signal,
link |
01:28:17.760
like a scale, like a balance.
link |
01:28:18.960
So another way to think about it is like this.
link |
01:28:20.360
You've seen these Libra kind of balances,
link |
01:28:22.520
where you put two weights in a pan, right?
link |
01:28:24.400
What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side
link |
01:28:27.040
and a 20 kilogram weight in the other?
link |
01:28:28.440
You don't get any measurement, right?
link |
01:28:30.200
You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight.
link |
01:28:32.320
That's why they use 4 Kelvin.
link |
01:28:33.760
Got it, but just to linger on the fact
link |
01:28:36.400
that there's a romantic element to the fact
link |
01:28:38.240
that you're arriving at the same temperature.
link |
01:28:41.200
That's kind of fascinating.
link |
01:28:42.040
And you measuring stuff in terms of,
link |
01:28:43.640
you're measuring signal in terms of temperature
link |
01:28:45.640
at the source.
link |
01:28:46.840
Yeah.
link |
01:28:47.680
So you get to, I mean, there's something
link |
01:28:49.440
about temperature that's intimate.
link |
01:28:51.220
Yeah.
link |
01:28:52.060
It's cool.
link |
01:28:52.880
Yeah, especially since, you know, all life
link |
01:28:55.120
is basically, you know, conversion of energy
link |
01:28:57.560
and trying to control entropy,
link |
01:28:58.920
which is then related to thermodynamics
link |
01:29:01.160
exactly in that way.
link |
01:29:02.600
And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science
link |
01:29:06.680
because they weren't looking for the signal.
link |
01:29:08.640
They found it accidentally,
link |
01:29:10.180
these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson.
link |
01:29:12.720
And I like to think that those kinds of discoveries
link |
01:29:15.160
are the purest in science.
link |
01:29:16.540
Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said,
link |
01:29:19.080
like the most important reaction as a scientist is not,
link |
01:29:22.260
Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it.
link |
01:29:26.440
No, he said, no, he said like, that's weird.
link |
01:29:29.060
Like that's a much better reaction
link |
01:29:30.720
or that's freaking cool.
link |
01:29:31.880
Like that's a scientist, not like, oh, I found one.
link |
01:29:34.760
Because.
link |
01:29:35.580
Surprise.
link |
01:29:36.420
Yeah.
link |
01:29:37.240
Yeah.
link |
01:29:38.080
Because if you find what you're gonna find,
link |
01:29:38.920
that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias,
link |
01:29:43.000
which is deadly inside, you know,
link |
01:29:44.720
as close to deadly as possible.
link |
01:29:46.240
So how does that take us to something
link |
01:29:47.960
that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?
link |
01:29:51.120
So Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal.
link |
01:29:54.240
They ended up discovering the heat leftover
link |
01:29:56.500
from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera.
link |
01:30:01.640
And that was a serendipitous discovery.
link |
01:30:03.040
They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
link |
01:30:04.800
It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.
link |
01:30:07.640
My reasoning is, what if you could explain
link |
01:30:09.860
not only how the elements got formed,
link |
01:30:11.720
but how the whole universe got formed
link |
01:30:13.820
and kill off every other model of science.
link |
01:30:16.680
So if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know,
link |
01:30:19.760
worth his or her salt had told me and Andrew Lang
link |
01:30:23.440
and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize,
link |
01:30:26.480
if you could do it.
link |
01:30:27.820
Because it was really explaining, again,
link |
01:30:29.820
the stakes of this science is different
link |
01:30:31.600
than like super fluidity, plasma physics.
link |
01:30:33.900
When you talk about the origin of the universe,
link |
01:30:36.440
it ties into everything.
link |
01:30:37.880
It ties into philosophy, theology.
link |
01:30:41.860
You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct,
link |
01:30:45.480
that the Bible can't be correct.
link |
01:30:47.280
In other words, where the Bible is correct now
link |
01:30:49.360
isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it.
link |
01:30:52.120
I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.
link |
01:30:54.800
But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.
link |
01:30:57.820
What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular?
link |
01:31:00.600
It would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten
link |
01:31:03.480
and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament,
link |
01:31:07.120
if you will, narrative.
link |
01:31:08.720
So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.
link |
01:31:11.400
And again, it's not an offense, because we need plasma physics.
link |
01:31:14.140
We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics.
link |
01:31:17.560
We literally use every branch of physics, thermodynamics,
link |
01:31:20.320
superconductivity, quantum mechanics,
link |
01:31:22.200
all that goes into our understanding
link |
01:31:24.260
of the instrument.
link |
01:31:25.000
And even further, if you want to understand the theory that
link |
01:31:27.800
predicts the signal that we purport to measure.
link |
01:31:29.760
So I rationalize that if Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel
link |
01:31:34.040
Prize for this, if Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel
link |
01:31:37.220
Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves,
link |
01:31:39.760
this is decades before LIGO, by me detecting
link |
01:31:43.500
gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe
link |
01:31:46.880
began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions
link |
01:31:50.840
for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which
link |
01:31:52.720
won the Nobel Prize in 1983.
link |
01:31:55.080
These are like five Nobel Prizes potentially.
link |
01:31:57.920
For that reason, it seemed as close
link |
01:32:00.200
as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk,
link |
01:32:02.440
to outdo what my father did, to do really this impossible.
link |
01:32:06.160
And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird.
link |
01:32:10.720
Because people are like, oh, you still want the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:32:15.920
You're still like greedy.
link |
01:32:16.880
And look, you wrote another book about it.
link |
01:32:19.120
And I always joke.
link |
01:32:19.720
I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite,
link |
01:32:21.360
just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
link |
01:32:23.880
And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.
link |
01:32:26.560
Oh, wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings
link |
01:32:29.200
on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on.
link |
01:32:33.040
So there's this ambition.
link |
01:32:35.560
Let's say this device, this kind of signal
link |
01:32:38.880
could unlock many of the mysteries
link |
01:32:40.560
about the early universe.
link |
01:32:42.240
And so there's excitement there.
link |
01:32:44.240
So let's take it then further.
link |
01:32:47.040
I mean, there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak.
link |
01:32:50.240
Not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize,
link |
01:32:54.560
if the Nobel Prize was given,
link |
01:32:57.200
you were excluded from the list of three
link |
01:32:59.680
that would get the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:33:01.520
So why were you excluded?
link |
01:33:04.520
Maybe that's a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.
link |
01:33:07.600
Yeah, so Bicep 2, like iPhones,
link |
01:33:10.200
or I know you're an Android fanboy,
link |
01:33:12.040
but every year, they get a little bit better.
link |
01:33:14.480
They get more megapixels.
link |
01:33:15.680
They get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever, OK?
link |
01:33:19.680
We upgraded our detectors as well.
link |
01:33:21.520
The initial detectors were based on what
link |
01:33:23.560
are called semiconductors.
link |
01:33:24.880
They have certain properties that
link |
01:33:26.800
make them very difficult to replicate at scale.
link |
01:33:29.320
And we wanted to make them into superconductors, which
link |
01:33:32.120
had a virtue that you could then mass produce them.
link |
01:33:35.360
Why superconductors?
link |
01:33:36.680
Well, again, we're measuring heat.
link |
01:33:38.320
So one thing about a superconductor
link |
01:33:40.240
is that it transitions from some finite resistance
link |
01:33:43.360
to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature
link |
01:33:47.560
range.
link |
01:33:48.400
That means you can use that very short span dependency
link |
01:33:51.360
as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer.
link |
01:33:54.920
And so my brilliant colleagues around the world,
link |
01:33:56.960
in this case, Jamie Bok, and nowadays, Suzanne Staggs
link |
01:33:59.360
at Princeton, they are just exquisitely
link |
01:34:02.560
making these sensors, tens of thousands of them.
link |
01:34:05.840
The initial Bicep 1 instrument, of course,
link |
01:34:07.960
we just call the Bicep, that only had 98 detectors.
link |
01:34:12.240
Simon's Observatory is going to have 100 times more just
link |
01:34:15.880
in one of our four telescopes.
link |
01:34:17.800
We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating
link |
01:34:20.840
full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero
link |
01:34:24.520
in the Atacama Desert.
link |
01:34:25.600
We'll get there.
link |
01:34:26.440
But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did,
link |
01:34:30.200
we upgraded and made Bicep 2.
link |
01:34:32.600
In January 2010, we had just installed
link |
01:34:37.920
in the exact same location at the South Pole,
link |
01:34:42.320
in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark
link |
01:34:45.040
Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating to this very day,
link |
01:34:49.840
we installed a new receiver on the same platform as before.
link |
01:34:54.160
It had very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum,
link |
01:34:57.600
everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors.
link |
01:35:02.040
So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.
link |
01:35:05.440
And it had certain other features
link |
01:35:06.840
that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor of 5.
link |
01:35:11.040
And then we started observing with that.
link |
01:35:12.680
And we knew we'd have years to go,
link |
01:35:14.120
and maybe we'd never see anything.
link |
01:35:15.320
Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations
link |
01:35:17.560
in the fabric of space time produced
link |
01:35:19.200
close to the origin of the universe as we could ever
link |
01:35:21.720
get to.
link |
01:35:23.000
So I was playing a role in that.
link |
01:35:24.360
Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea
link |
01:35:28.200
that I had had for BICEP along with Andrew Lang.
link |
01:35:32.480
And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley,
link |
01:35:37.040
and I got a call from Andrew Lang's,
link |
01:35:39.120
or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor,
link |
01:35:41.760
Paul Richards at UC Berkeley.
link |
01:35:43.960
And he said that Andrew was dead.
link |
01:35:45.880
He had taken his life by suicide.
link |
01:35:48.920
And this is a man, and I had already lost my father
link |
01:35:51.520
at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure
link |
01:35:54.880
to me, Andrew.
link |
01:35:55.760
He would give me advice on marriage,
link |
01:35:58.600
on how I should be with my kids, and what
link |
01:36:02.140
was the most important way to move
link |
01:36:03.640
through the academic ladder.
link |
01:36:04.800
Again, he was predinaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:36:08.560
Everyone always thought he would win it.
link |
01:36:10.800
If he were alive, he still could win it.
link |
01:36:12.600
In fact, his wife, or his ex wife,
link |
01:36:14.280
won it, Frances Arnold, in 2018.
link |
01:36:17.760
And it was this power couple, and it destroyed me
link |
01:36:22.880
for a long time, because he was just this magical person.
link |
01:36:27.440
I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life,
link |
01:36:31.360
even these aspects of raising kids and being married
link |
01:36:35.280
without him.
link |
01:36:37.020
And to do it in that way, it felt like, again,
link |
01:36:40.880
he's got kids, and I feel terrible for them, obviously.
link |
01:36:44.160
But it did feel like a betrayal.
link |
01:36:45.480
I mean, I'm just being honest with you.
link |
01:36:47.160
It felt like, why the f did you not reach out?
link |
01:36:50.240
I thought we were close, and I couldn't.
link |
01:36:52.720
I told him everything, and I felt
link |
01:36:54.240
like he had told me everything.
link |
01:36:56.400
And now he was gone.
link |
01:36:57.480
And then, inevitably, we had to keep running the instrument.
link |
01:36:59.940
I mean, there's millions of dollars invested,
link |
01:37:01.900
careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard.
link |
01:37:05.720
And then here we were.
link |
01:37:06.640
And who's going to take over the lead?
link |
01:37:08.320
He was the lead of the project at Caltech.
link |
01:37:10.920
And then it turned out that the other collaborators,
link |
01:37:14.140
with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups
link |
01:37:16.640
and downs with as well, they had decided
link |
01:37:19.820
to form a collaboration in which I was no longer
link |
01:37:21.960
the principal investigator.
link |
01:37:23.480
I was no longer one of the co principal investigators,
link |
01:37:25.560
as I was on Bicep 1.
link |
01:37:26.920
So I continued on Bicep 1 as the co leader of it,
link |
01:37:29.560
but not on Bicep 2.
link |
01:37:31.040
And obviously, that was pretty painful.
link |
01:37:34.600
This is all happening at the same time
link |
01:37:36.280
as you lose this father figure.
link |
01:37:40.360
Now there's this one betrayal in a way,
link |
01:37:45.200
and then there's another, or something
link |
01:37:47.400
that feels like a betrayal.
link |
01:37:48.800
Yeah, and he had been the only one
link |
01:37:51.840
looking out for my interest in the new experiment.
link |
01:37:54.800
I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego,
link |
01:37:57.480
and there were other postdocs in the mix,
link |
01:37:59.200
all of whom had come there to work with him
link |
01:38:01.240
to get the approbation that would then lead
link |
01:38:03.740
to their careers taking off, as it did for mine.
link |
01:38:06.800
And so there was a competition.
link |
01:38:09.160
Science is not free from egos and competition
link |
01:38:13.320
and desires, rightfully or wrongfully,
link |
01:38:15.880
for credit and attribution.
link |
01:38:17.480
Was he the source of strength and confidence
link |
01:38:20.040
for you as a scientist, as a man?
link |
01:38:22.040
I mean, we're kind of alone in this world.
link |
01:38:26.280
When you take on difficult things,
link |
01:38:28.480
we often kind of grasp at a few folks
link |
01:38:31.760
that give us strength.
link |
01:38:33.280
Yeah.
link |
01:38:34.120
Was he basically your only source of strength
link |
01:38:37.320
in this whole journey, like primarily
link |
01:38:39.320
in terms of this close knit?
link |
01:38:41.840
As a scientist, there were really two.
link |
01:38:43.600
There was one, this Russian cosmologist,
link |
01:38:46.080
Alexander Polnareff, who thankfully is very much alive.
link |
01:38:48.520
He was at Queen Mary University.
link |
01:38:51.080
Now he's retired.
link |
01:38:52.560
He was kind of a theoretical, cosmological father to me.
link |
01:38:56.040
And then Andrew was this counterpoint
link |
01:38:58.760
that was teaching me, you need to have a brand as a scientist.
link |
01:39:02.600
Every scientist has a brand.
link |
01:39:04.040
And some of them don't protect it.
link |
01:39:05.640
Some of them don't burnish it.
link |
01:39:07.880
But some of the skills about being a scientist
link |
01:39:10.000
we don't teach our students involve,
link |
01:39:12.360
how do you cultivate a scientific persona?
link |
01:39:16.800
And he was the exemplar for that,
link |
01:39:18.760
in addition to being the avuncular father figure type
link |
01:39:22.520
character that really was the person I would talk to.
link |
01:39:26.480
I had issues with when I had issues with my own students.
link |
01:39:29.080
And he would tell me how those were.
link |
01:39:30.640
And he would tell me his misgivings about people
link |
01:39:34.480
that he worked with or things in his personal life.
link |
01:39:36.600
And it was devastating.
link |
01:39:39.160
But again, who the hell am I?
link |
01:39:40.680
I'm not his kid.
link |
01:39:42.280
His kid's lost father.
link |
01:39:44.440
So I feel guilty talking about it in that sense,
link |
01:39:46.760
but it's just a reality.
link |
01:39:48.480
Well, there is something that's not often talked about
link |
01:39:50.640
is people who collaborate on scientific efforts.
link |
01:39:55.040
I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't wanna compare,
link |
01:39:58.680
but sometimes when the collaborations are truly great,
link |
01:40:03.520
it sounds similar as when veterans talk about
link |
01:40:09.200
their time serving together.
link |
01:40:11.360
There's a bond that's formed.
link |
01:40:12.920
So like comparing family and this kind of thing is,
link |
01:40:15.960
you know, it's not productive,
link |
01:40:19.920
but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real
link |
01:40:25.760
because you're taking on something,
link |
01:40:28.200
you're taking on the impossible.
link |
01:40:30.760
You're trying to achieve something,
link |
01:40:32.520
sort of like there's this darkness,
link |
01:40:33.960
this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by,
link |
01:40:37.640
which is what the human condition is.
link |
01:40:40.480
And you are like grasping at hope
link |
01:40:42.880
through the tools of science.
link |
01:40:44.720
And you're doing that together
link |
01:40:46.480
with like a confidence you probably should not have,
link |
01:40:50.080
but you're boldly pushing through.
link |
01:40:51.520
And then for him to take his own life,
link |
01:40:57.640
can I ask you about this kind of moment that combined,
link |
01:41:02.880
I don't wanna say betrayal,
link |
01:41:03.920
but perhaps the feeling of betrayal
link |
01:41:05.920
that Bicep 2 kind of goes on without you,
link |
01:41:09.360
even though you're part of it,
link |
01:41:11.600
you're not part of the leadership group.
link |
01:41:15.640
Can you describe those low points?
link |
01:41:18.640
Was there a depression?
link |
01:41:19.840
Or was there a crumbling of confidence?
link |
01:41:23.000
Yeah, I mean, it was so wrapped up
link |
01:41:26.280
with my identity as a person.
link |
01:41:28.960
You know, like there's only a few different ways
link |
01:41:31.200
to have identity unless you're unhealthy psychologically.
link |
01:41:34.800
One of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist
link |
01:41:37.120
and that sometimes is their primary identity.
link |
01:41:39.160
Now I've got other husband and father,
link |
01:41:41.920
but at that time that was my identity.
link |
01:41:44.840
So to have that kind of taken away,
link |
01:41:48.440
you know what, it reminded me of being kind of adopted
link |
01:41:52.960
in a sense like the one who created me
link |
01:41:55.840
or that I had played a role in my life,
link |
01:41:58.360
that he abandoned me in the sense,
link |
01:42:00.800
it felt like these people are abandoning me.
link |
01:42:02.640
And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy
link |
01:42:04.320
that you use is like in the war,
link |
01:42:07.080
they're all working for common good.
link |
01:42:08.680
It's not like I want to get the most kills.
link |
01:42:11.640
I compare it more to like a band,
link |
01:42:13.400
like think about the Beatles and what they did.
link |
01:42:16.440
And then they ripped apart because of egos, credit,
link |
01:42:20.160
they had solo careers,
link |
01:42:21.240
they had relations with their intimates and so forth.
link |
01:42:25.360
And there it's not only for the common good,
link |
01:42:27.840
there is more of a zero sum aspect.
link |
01:42:30.200
Like I would say, science is an infinite game.
link |
01:42:33.960
You can't win science.
link |
01:42:35.840
You never get to the, oh, we won science.
link |
01:42:37.440
And even the Nobel prize, they don't feel like,
link |
01:42:38.920
oh, we're done.
link |
01:42:39.760
They feel like a lot of times they're imposters
link |
01:42:41.360
even to that day.
link |
01:42:43.000
However, science is made up of a lot of finite games
link |
01:42:47.920
where there is only one winner for tenure.
link |
01:42:50.000
There is only three winners
link |
01:42:51.280
or only three winners for the Nobel prize.
link |
01:42:53.880
And because of that, I think it's heterodox
link |
01:42:56.040
and it's very confusing, especially there's no guide.
link |
01:42:59.200
I never got a guide how to be a professor,
link |
01:43:00.800
how to teach, how to lead a research group,
link |
01:43:02.560
how to deal with the death of an advisor,
link |
01:43:05.040
how to deal with an unruly graduate student or two.
link |
01:43:08.520
So we're all like reinventing it,
link |
01:43:09.960
which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it.
link |
01:43:12.440
Cause the academic system that I am a part of
link |
01:43:14.360
and you are a part of is a thousand years old.
link |
01:43:16.880
Dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy, 1088 or so.
link |
01:43:21.720
First universities were established.
link |
01:43:24.240
And very little has changed.
link |
01:43:26.560
There's some guy or gal scratching a rock
link |
01:43:28.920
on another piece of rock and lecturing in front.
link |
01:43:31.960
And there's only one better aspect nowadays
link |
01:43:33.860
is that back then the students could go on strike
link |
01:43:36.920
if they didn't like the professor
link |
01:43:38.300
and then he or she wouldn't get paid.
link |
01:43:39.960
Probably mostly it was he's back then.
link |
01:43:42.200
Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced
link |
01:43:44.440
by tenure, so okay.
link |
01:43:47.200
But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug
link |
01:43:50.120
getting pulled out from underneath me
link |
01:43:52.120
because he was like my consigliore.
link |
01:43:55.440
He was a guy I sought counsel and counseled me
link |
01:43:59.060
and he's dead.
link |
01:44:00.800
And I felt like there is no one
link |
01:44:02.460
who's gonna honor the agreements that we had.
link |
01:44:05.560
And he was a very soulful person.
link |
01:44:07.160
He was so much better at being a scientist
link |
01:44:09.600
than I could ever be.
link |
01:44:11.440
And just a loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
link |
01:44:14.980
And I thought, oh, it's so sad
link |
01:44:17.800
cause he could have won the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:44:19.960
I don't think like that anymore.
link |
01:44:21.440
First I think about his kids.
link |
01:44:23.200
Felt at first now there goes my chance
link |
01:44:25.520
at winning a Nobel Prize.
link |
01:44:26.500
And hence the title of the book was like,
link |
01:44:28.840
I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:44:31.120
It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize
link |
01:44:33.000
that have to be done away with.
link |
01:44:34.200
It's a double entendre.
link |
01:44:35.240
Like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize
link |
01:44:37.480
to help science out.
link |
01:44:38.600
We can talk about that a different time.
link |
01:44:40.040
But in the context of like now thinking back on it,
link |
01:44:44.320
that was such a minuscule part of it.
link |
01:44:46.220
Because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize
link |
01:44:49.240
or I did win the, or any of us did.
link |
01:44:52.040
Would that have changed anything?
link |
01:44:53.280
Would that have brought anything back?
link |
01:44:55.140
It's so, we say it's like vanity, it's futility.
link |
01:44:58.800
And I just, for me, the Nobel Prize is like,
link |
01:45:04.120
I don't wanna say it's like insignificant,
link |
01:45:06.120
because obviously it has a lot of power
link |
01:45:07.680
and it has influence.
link |
01:45:08.680
And I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show.
link |
01:45:11.520
I'm gonna name drop, okay?
link |
01:45:13.040
And he prepares.
link |
01:45:14.880
He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery
link |
01:45:19.080
when he goes on a talk show.
link |
01:45:20.440
So you see him going on Colbert Report.
link |
01:45:22.880
You think, oh, they just have a banter.
link |
01:45:24.320
He's just naturally gifted.
link |
01:45:25.460
No, he said, no, no, no.
link |
01:45:27.120
You say that, you're undermining what he does.
link |
01:45:29.760
What he does is he goes back.
link |
01:45:31.280
He watches the last month of Colbert Reports
link |
01:45:33.680
or whatever it's called, late show.
link |
01:45:35.720
And he says, how long does Steven pause between questions?
link |
01:45:38.520
How long in the news cycle does he go back?
link |
01:45:41.240
What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?
link |
01:45:44.200
So I took Neil and I did that for you.
link |
01:45:46.600
And I look back, how many times has Lex
link |
01:45:48.240
mentioned the words Nobel and prize?
link |
01:45:50.200
And I put it into Google Ngram and out came
link |
01:45:53.440
exactly the same number of times as show episodes
link |
01:45:58.000
as of this moment.
link |
01:45:58.960
So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.
link |
01:46:01.680
Yeah, I mean, it is so strange as a symbol
link |
01:46:05.560
that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right?
link |
01:46:10.800
It's so, it's both sad and beautiful
link |
01:46:14.520
that a little prize, a little award, a medal,
link |
01:46:19.800
a little plaque, they'll be most likely forgotten
link |
01:46:21.960
by history completely, some silly list.
link |
01:46:27.720
It's somehow a catalyst for greatness.
link |
01:46:31.880
It resulted in you doing your life's work, the dream of it.
link |
01:46:37.040
Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
link |
01:46:39.720
I can't necessarily counterfactually state
link |
01:46:42.080
that that would have happened.
link |
01:46:43.480
So no, it definitely has a place.
link |
01:46:47.480
And for me, it is valuable to think about it.
link |
01:46:50.320
But the level of obsession that academics have about it
link |
01:46:54.840
is really, I think it is almost on balance
link |
01:46:58.520
becoming unhealthy.
link |
01:47:00.140
And again, I have no, I make no truck
link |
01:47:03.280
with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:47:04.840
Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show.
link |
01:47:08.200
And to think about the one rule,
link |
01:47:10.560
so by the way, right after the denouement of the story,
link |
01:47:13.740
which I'll get to in a bit,
link |
01:47:15.480
how our dreams went down to dust and ashes,
link |
01:47:18.280
I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
link |
01:47:21.460
to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
link |
01:47:25.420
So like the one that I theoretically
link |
01:47:27.380
could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually,
link |
01:47:31.460
they asked me to nominate.
link |
01:47:32.340
Now imagine if I ask you, Lex,
link |
01:47:33.660
you say, Brian, instead of me inviting myself on the show,
link |
01:47:37.100
if you say, Brian, would you like to come
link |
01:47:38.620
on the Lex Friedman podcast?
link |
01:47:40.060
I say, you know what, Lex?
link |
01:47:42.140
You know that guy Rogan?
link |
01:47:42.980
I think you might know him.
link |
01:47:44.120
Can you introduce him to me?
link |
01:47:46.020
Like, do you imagine how that would feel?
link |
01:47:47.740
Like you'd be like, ah, you know.
link |
01:47:50.020
So I was asked to nominate the winners.
link |
01:47:51.340
And the one rule that they say,
link |
01:47:53.420
of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated,
link |
01:47:55.860
there's only one rule that they maintained.
link |
01:47:57.760
In other words, he said one person can win it
link |
01:47:59.980
for something they discovered in the preceding year
link |
01:48:02.960
that had the greatest benefit to mankind,
link |
01:48:06.140
made the world better, right?
link |
01:48:07.900
None of that was mentioned in the letter.
link |
01:48:09.540
It said many people can win it, worked on long ago.
link |
01:48:12.380
They didn't mention anything in the letter to me,
link |
01:48:14.040
signed by the Secretary General.
link |
01:48:15.740
Nothing about benefiting mankind.
link |
01:48:16.980
They said, just one thing, can't nominate yourself.
link |
01:48:20.220
So none of these guys nominated themselves.
link |
01:48:22.180
Actually, little known fact,
link |
01:48:23.820
they sent that exact letter just to you.
link |
01:48:28.060
That rule was created just for you.
link |
01:48:29.940
That's called the Keating Correlate, yes, exactly.
link |
01:48:32.860
Just to like. Good for them.
link |
01:48:36.140
Rub it in.
link |
01:48:37.640
I mean, in this particular case, of course,
link |
01:48:39.980
there's some weird technicality or whatever,
link |
01:48:42.380
but in this particular case,
link |
01:48:43.700
it's kind of a powerful reminder.
link |
01:48:47.180
Yeah.
link |
01:48:48.020
That the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind
link |
01:48:51.360
in their stories behind all of that.
link |
01:48:54.360
Yeah, I mean, here's a good example.
link |
01:48:55.540
Again, this is my friend, Barry Barash.
link |
01:48:57.060
He's become like a mentor and a friend.
link |
01:49:00.220
He wrote the foreword to my book, Into the Impossible.
link |
01:49:03.060
He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died,
link |
01:49:07.060
and he admits it, and he said it.
link |
01:49:09.060
And actually, it's funny with him
link |
01:49:10.300
because I've heard you talk very rhapsodically
link |
01:49:13.500
and lovingly and romantically about,
link |
01:49:15.460
with Harry Kliff and a wonderful podcast with him,
link |
01:49:17.740
by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is
link |
01:49:21.220
and how in that we were about to build
link |
01:49:23.540
the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas,
link |
01:49:27.020
and it didn't get built and it got canceled by Congress.
link |
01:49:30.320
And I say to Barry,
link |
01:49:31.240
that was the best thing that ever happened to you.
link |
01:49:33.000
And he's like, what the hell are you talking about?
link |
01:49:34.300
I'm like, if that didn't get canceled,
link |
01:49:35.840
first of all, even though it did get canceled,
link |
01:49:39.420
the Europeans went on to build it themselves,
link |
01:49:41.860
saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars,
link |
01:49:44.300
and we wouldn't have learned anything
link |
01:49:46.100
really substantially new as proven by the fact
link |
01:49:48.660
that as you and Harry talked about,
link |
01:49:50.220
nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note
link |
01:49:52.780
has come out, and actually, he's had a recent paper,
link |
01:49:55.260
but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators
link |
01:49:57.660
on LHCb experiment that I'm gonna be talking with him about.
link |
01:50:00.500
But the bottom line is it was really built
link |
01:50:02.500
to detect the Higgs.
link |
01:50:03.340
So the SSC, for twice as much money,
link |
01:50:06.280
would have sucked up Barry's career.
link |
01:50:07.740
He would have been working on that, maybe not.
link |
01:50:09.780
And then he would never have worked on LIGO,
link |
01:50:11.980
and then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, right?
link |
01:50:14.020
So you look at counterfactual history.
link |
01:50:15.500
That's not actually a big stretch, right?
link |
01:50:17.000
If the SSC had still gone on, he would have worked on it,
link |
01:50:19.140
because he was one of the primary leaders
link |
01:50:20.540
of that experiment.
link |
01:50:21.900
Second thing, imagine the following thing had happened.
link |
01:50:26.300
They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015,
link |
01:50:30.480
they detected unequivocal evidence
link |
01:50:32.360
for the in spiral collision of two massive black holes,
link |
01:50:35.940
each about 30 times the mass of the sun,
link |
01:50:38.220
leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar
link |
01:50:42.420
masses behind.
link |
01:50:43.180
So one solar mass worth of matter
link |
01:50:45.780
got massed, got converted to pure gravitational energy.
link |
01:50:49.040
No light was seen by them.
link |
01:50:51.260
This particular date, September 14, 2015,
link |
01:50:57.060
that explosion, because of the miracle of time travel
link |
01:50:59.940
that telescopes afford us, that actually took place
link |
01:51:03.380
1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away.
link |
01:51:07.260
They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in.
link |
01:51:08.900
Still, then they never will.
link |
01:51:10.460
OK?
link |
01:51:11.740
If that collision between these two things, which
link |
01:51:13.780
have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million
link |
01:51:16.460
years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier,
link |
01:51:20.220
Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:51:22.700
Because it's hilarious to think that there's one
link |
01:51:25.740
human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant things
link |
01:51:29.780
collided.
link |
01:51:31.300
A billion, 200 million years ago.
link |
01:51:34.300
And if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30 days,
link |
01:51:37.340
because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize
link |
01:51:40.100
to be announced, they announced the findings in February.
link |
01:51:43.260
But you have to nominate the winners in January.
link |
01:51:45.340
So I could have nominated them up until January 30.
link |
01:51:48.060
But they didn't announce anything,
link |
01:51:49.860
and there were just rumors.
link |
01:51:53.020
But the reason that he wouldn't have won it,
link |
01:51:54.620
because there was another guy who was still alive,
link |
01:51:56.700
considered to be the founder and father of the three fathers,
link |
01:52:00.100
Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne, who did win it,
link |
01:52:02.460
and this third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Drever,
link |
01:52:05.180
who passed away again.
link |
01:52:07.060
He was alive in 2016.
link |
01:52:08.780
He died in the middle of 2017.
link |
01:52:10.140
And then he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
link |
01:52:12.660
And here we are, several billion of hairless apes
link |
01:52:16.580
that strangely wear clothing, celebrated three other clothed
link |
01:52:23.500
hairless apes with a medal, with one particular element.
link |
01:52:30.620
And then they made speeches in a particular language
link |
01:52:33.980
that evolved in a...
link |
01:52:35.180
Bend down to get those medals in front of another guy
link |
01:52:38.780
who wears even fancier clothes, who is the king of Sweden.
link |
01:52:43.140
And then they got some free food afterwards.
link |
01:52:44.860
They get some reindeer meat, that's right.
link |
01:52:47.020
Okay, excellent.
link |
01:52:49.860
Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example,
link |
01:52:53.060
what happened to you in terms of BICEP2?
link |
01:52:57.180
I want to kind of speak at a high level
link |
01:53:00.940
about a particular thing I observed.
link |
01:53:02.500
So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast.
link |
01:53:05.860
I just listened to the podcast.
link |
01:53:07.020
I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.
link |
01:53:09.540
And it also coincided with my entry into grad school
link |
01:53:15.580
and this whole journey of academia.
link |
01:53:17.580
So grad school, getting my PhD, then going to MIT,
link |
01:53:20.500
and then Google, and then just looking at this whole world
link |
01:53:23.900
of research.
link |
01:53:26.540
What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world
link |
01:53:33.660
is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them.
link |
01:53:37.340
He gets like genuinely, and I now know this
link |
01:53:39.860
from just being a friend privately,
link |
01:53:42.740
he genuinely gets excited by the success of others.
link |
01:53:47.740
And the contrast of that to how folks in academia
link |
01:53:53.140
often behave was always really disappointing to me
link |
01:53:56.660
because the natural, just on a basic human level,
link |
01:54:00.700
there is an excitement, but the nature of that excitement
link |
01:54:04.940
is more like I'm happy for my friend,
link |
01:54:08.620
but I'm really jealous and I want to even outdo them.
link |
01:54:11.380
I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better.
link |
01:54:13.940
So that's even for friends.
link |
01:54:15.980
So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others.
link |
01:54:21.140
And then to couple that with just you now
link |
01:54:24.980
as a host of a popular podcast and all this feeling,
link |
01:54:28.220
which is like there's not even a willingness
link |
01:54:31.180
to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.
link |
01:54:35.260
People in academia are often best equipped technically
link |
01:54:40.900
in terms of language to celebrate others.
link |
01:54:43.340
They understand the beauty, like the full richness
link |
01:54:48.060
of why the cool idea is as cool as it is.
link |
01:54:50.980
And they're in the best position to celebrate it.
link |
01:54:53.340
And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others,
link |
01:54:57.020
they might end up on the cover of Nature or whatever,
link |
01:54:59.900
and not me.
link |
01:55:01.740
They turn it into zero sum game.
link |
01:55:03.860
The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me
link |
01:55:08.500
and many others is that it doesn't have to be that way.
link |
01:55:12.060
And forget money and all those kinds of things.
link |
01:55:15.300
I think there's a narrative told that academics are this way
link |
01:55:20.300
because there's a limited amount of money.
link |
01:55:23.180
And so they're fighting for this.
link |
01:55:24.500
I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way.
link |
01:55:28.460
I think you can have a limited amount of money.
link |
01:55:32.860
The battle for money happens in the space of proposal.
link |
01:55:36.860
There's networking, there's private stuff.
link |
01:55:39.340
Public celebration of others and just actually
link |
01:55:42.780
just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart
link |
01:55:46.140
is not have to do anything with money.
link |
01:55:48.500
It has to do with you having a big ego
link |
01:55:51.940
and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey
link |
01:55:55.020
that we're all on.
link |
01:55:56.460
And there's folks like Joe Rogan who in a comedian circles
link |
01:56:00.540
is also rare, but he inspired all these other comedians
link |
01:56:03.900
to realize, you know what?
link |
01:56:05.540
It's great to celebrate each other.
link |
01:56:07.060
We're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows.
link |
01:56:10.300
Cause everybody else gets excited about this whole thing
link |
01:56:12.860
and the pie grows.
link |
01:56:14.060
Right now the scientists by fighting,
link |
01:56:16.420
like by not celebrating each other,
link |
01:56:18.620
are not growing the pie.
link |
01:56:19.980
And now because of that sort of science becomes
link |
01:56:23.180
less and less popular.
link |
01:56:24.020
It's a flywheel and exactly.
link |
01:56:25.620
No, and I want to point out two things.
link |
01:56:26.700
One is that I remember you went on Joe's show
link |
01:56:29.860
maybe a couple of years ago and then he gave you a watch.
link |
01:56:34.460
He gave you like a Rolex, right?
link |
01:56:36.220
And I tweeted to you and I think it's Omega, sorry.
link |
01:56:38.860
Okay, fine.
link |
01:56:40.300
The watch that went to the moon,
link |
01:56:42.420
which we will get to in a bit.
link |
01:56:44.620
I don't think he could give you what I gave you though,
link |
01:56:46.300
by the way.
link |
01:56:47.660
And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.
link |
01:56:50.540
And by the way, I also wanted to mention,
link |
01:56:52.300
because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset.
link |
01:56:55.180
And you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
link |
01:56:57.060
And we had this conversation with him.
link |
01:56:59.620
Cause I was like, when I was moving to Austin
link |
01:57:05.260
and had a conversation like, don't you think it's weird?
link |
01:57:07.300
Like if we have the same guests at the same time
link |
01:57:09.420
or whatever, he's like, fuck that.
link |
01:57:12.580
I want you to be more successful than me.
link |
01:57:14.580
I want, he truly wants everybody like,
link |
01:57:18.540
especially people close to him to be more successful.
link |
01:57:21.060
Like there's not even a thought like.
link |
01:57:23.180
But you know why he does.
link |
01:57:24.220
And this is what I tweeted to you.
link |
01:57:25.060
And one of the few things I think you have retweeted
link |
01:57:27.340
that I sent you.
link |
01:57:28.180
I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody.
link |
01:57:31.020
And today I wanted that to be me.
link |
01:57:32.540
No, no.
link |
01:57:35.580
Joe's Omega.
link |
01:57:36.420
No, but the point is he sees in you that same,
link |
01:57:40.220
grandiosity, that same genuine spirit graciousness.
link |
01:57:42.980
And I think that's true.
link |
01:57:43.820
And you do do something very rare.
link |
01:57:45.460
I don't want to turn this into too much of a love fest,
link |
01:57:47.260
but I do want to say even back to Andrew,
link |
01:57:49.980
who I've almost been hagiographic about,
link |
01:57:52.780
just treating him like a saint.
link |
01:57:54.220
He said to me the same thing.
link |
01:57:55.060
And in a moment of peak said like,
link |
01:57:57.980
God damn it.
link |
01:57:58.820
Like I have to train these guys and women that work for me
link |
01:58:02.460
so that they can be better than me,
link |
01:58:04.220
so that they can go out and compete with me
link |
01:58:06.320
for the same limited amount of funding from the Fing NSL.
link |
01:58:09.860
That wasn't his, that wasn't who he was.
link |
01:58:12.060
That was just an expression,
link |
01:58:14.060
like I'm doing something which is fundamentally,
link |
01:58:16.460
but you know what, when you have kids,
link |
01:58:18.960
hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday.
link |
01:58:20.900
Cause I think, and I hope we can get to talk
link |
01:58:22.660
about that later, but part of investment
link |
01:58:26.060
and part of doing something when you have a kid,
link |
01:58:28.580
like you can get married.
link |
01:58:30.420
You can marry someone cause she's rich or he's rich,
link |
01:58:33.020
or you can marry someone cause they're good looking
link |
01:58:35.100
or he's good looking.
link |
01:58:36.300
You can marry for all these different reasons
link |
01:58:37.940
that are ultimately selfish.
link |
01:58:39.980
There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish.
link |
01:58:41.860
Nobody says like, oh, you know what?
link |
01:58:43.140
I really want this thing that's three feet tall,
link |
01:58:44.960
that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor,
link |
01:58:47.060
that wakes me up all hours of the night,
link |
01:58:48.500
that interferes with my love life.
link |
01:58:50.040
Nobody says that cause it doesn't benefit you
link |
01:58:52.120
for months and months.
link |
01:58:53.060
A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me
link |
01:58:55.100
and does a lot of my solo videos,
link |
01:58:57.180
he's having his first kid, he's like, what do I do?
link |
01:58:59.300
Cause it always gets stupid, I'll catch up on sleep now.
link |
01:59:01.660
Like, yeah, I'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bank.
link |
01:59:04.340
Like I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right?
link |
01:59:06.700
You can't do that, that's stupid.
link |
01:59:08.080
What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby,
link |
01:59:10.840
let the mother relax.
link |
01:59:11.820
Like, in other words, do the things,
link |
01:59:14.060
and this really relates back to what Aristotle once said.
link |
01:59:16.380
Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids
link |
01:59:18.980
more than kids love parents?
link |
01:59:20.780
As much as you love your dad and your mom,
link |
01:59:22.760
they still love you more.
link |
01:59:24.580
And because you love that what you sacrifice for.
link |
01:59:27.140
Here's a proof.
link |
01:59:28.780
I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
link |
01:59:31.020
Some with severe, one of my uncles on the Keating side
link |
01:59:35.020
had a severe, what they called mental retardation,
link |
01:59:37.280
now it's probably has a different name.
link |
01:59:39.220
That, out of the nine other brothers and sisters,
link |
01:59:41.980
he was their favorite.
link |
01:59:43.580
Because they had to sacrifice so much for him.
link |
01:59:46.100
And I think of that, you know, in the small case,
link |
01:59:48.340
like Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever,
link |
01:59:50.340
you're gonna mentor someone else.
link |
01:59:51.260
You love that what you sacrifice for.
link |
01:59:53.620
Sacrifice is reduction of entropy,
link |
01:59:55.700
it's storing and investing, and you wanna protect that.
link |
01:59:58.740
And you know, that to me really speaks to this.
link |
02:00:01.460
So yeah, I don't hold it against.
link |
02:00:02.900
But it is true, like scientists are, you know,
link |
02:00:05.540
when they're described again, they're often said
link |
02:00:07.580
to be like children, right?
link |
02:00:08.420
You've heard this description.
link |
02:00:09.380
They're inquisitive, they're curious, they're passionate.
link |
02:00:11.580
They love that.
link |
02:00:12.420
And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others.
link |
02:00:13.540
They're jealous, they're petty, they're selfish,
link |
02:00:14.860
they won't share their ball and they'll go home.
link |
02:00:17.420
There's no such thing as a single edge sword.
link |
02:00:19.060
I wish there were, you know,
link |
02:00:20.780
because we need some more of that
link |
02:00:22.340
because you gotta dull it up.
link |
02:00:23.860
But in this case, he, you know,
link |
02:00:26.500
I think when you have this kind of investment in science,
link |
02:00:31.500
it's gonna be natural.
link |
02:00:32.900
But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know,
link |
02:00:34.580
feed the flames of competition.
link |
02:00:36.980
You know, I'm like really venerate.
link |
02:00:38.460
If you go to the homepage of the NSF
link |
02:00:40.340
or the Department of Energy
link |
02:00:41.740
or the recently released National Academy of Sciences
link |
02:00:44.620
future of science for the astronomical sciences
link |
02:00:47.980
for the next 25 years or more,
link |
02:00:50.380
they talk about how many Nobel prizes
link |
02:00:51.860
these different science things could win.
link |
02:00:53.580
Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB,
link |
02:00:56.500
B mode polarization, the nice, you know,
link |
02:00:58.980
that's figure two in this thing.
link |
02:01:01.300
And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids,
link |
02:01:03.140
like to young people?
link |
02:01:04.820
Like that's what you should be doing
link |
02:01:06.100
so that you win this small, as you said,
link |
02:01:07.380
this prize given out by one hairless ape
link |
02:01:09.140
to another wearing a fancier costume using reindeer.
link |
02:01:11.340
Especially in the case of Nobel prize,
link |
02:01:12.460
it's only currently given to three people.
link |
02:01:14.780
At most, which was never one of his stipulate.
link |
02:01:16.940
He actually said one, he could only give it to one person.
link |
02:01:19.300
So they change it.
link |
02:01:20.140
Why did they change it?
link |
02:01:20.980
I talk about, I speculate.
link |
02:01:22.180
By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11
link |
02:01:24.180
about the Nobel prize and it's a fact.
link |
02:01:26.900
But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting,
link |
02:01:28.940
like I'm speaking, actually this coming up in December
link |
02:01:32.420
is that the Nobel prize is given out
link |
02:01:34.500
on the day of Alfred Nobel's death.
link |
02:01:37.100
There's a lot of, and they bring in flowers,
link |
02:01:39.500
not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,
link |
02:01:42.060
which is in San Romino in Italy.
link |
02:01:46.780
It's a lot of like death fascination.
link |
02:01:48.700
Denial of death features heavily in the Nobel prize
link |
02:01:51.300
because it's like, what outlives a person?
link |
02:01:53.660
Well, science can outlive a person.
link |
02:01:55.220
My father has a theorem named after him.
link |
02:01:56.900
It's still engraved in many places around the world.
link |
02:02:00.700
You or I, we can go to different places around the world.
link |
02:02:02.620
People know who we are based on our publications.
link |
02:02:05.060
We engrave things, we want to store things,
link |
02:02:06.660
we want to compress things.
link |
02:02:08.220
And I think there's something beautiful about that,
link |
02:02:10.380
but there is a notion of denial of death.
link |
02:02:12.140
Like there is a notion of what will outlast me,
link |
02:02:14.780
especially if you're among the many 90 something percent
link |
02:02:17.860
of members of the National Academy
link |
02:02:19.140
don't believe in an active faith and a creator and a God.
link |
02:02:24.540
And science can substitute for that,
link |
02:02:27.620
but it's not ultimately as fulfilling.
link |
02:02:30.700
I just, I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way
link |
02:02:34.340
even practicing, but not believing in a religion
link |
02:02:37.420
can fulfill a person.
link |
02:02:39.260
So, which is interesting
link |
02:02:40.860
because you do bring up Ernest Becker
link |
02:02:42.500
and the denial of death in losing the Nobel prize book.
link |
02:02:46.660
And there is a sense in which that's probably in part
link |
02:02:50.780
at the core of this, especially later dream
link |
02:02:54.300
of the Nobel prize or a prize of recognition.
link |
02:02:57.100
I've interacted with a few or a large number of scientists
link |
02:03:02.140
that are getting up in age.
link |
02:03:04.500
And there is the feeling of real pride of happiness in them
link |
02:03:10.180
from winning awards and getting certain recognitions.
link |
02:03:15.180
And I probably at the core of that is a kind of a mortality
link |
02:03:18.500
or a kind of desire for mortality.
link |
02:03:23.500
And that was always off putting to me as opposed to,
link |
02:03:28.740
I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it's off putting,
link |
02:03:32.340
but it just, rather than celebrating the pure joy
link |
02:03:38.460
of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us,
link |
02:03:43.460
just the actual exploration of the mysterious for its own sake.
link |
02:03:52.460
Well, that's what I said, it's like a scientist should,
link |
02:03:55.940
okay, you have to be careful and not have any physical,
link |
02:03:58.860
it has to be platonic,
link |
02:03:59.700
but you can think of scientists and mentor.
link |
02:04:03.180
I have a chart in the book and in my plaque
link |
02:04:05.300
made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students.
link |
02:04:07.500
She's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron.
link |
02:04:10.620
And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations.
link |
02:04:13.980
So here I am, 17 levels down, there's a guy,
link |
02:04:17.340
Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz,
link |
02:04:19.620
1596 he was born and I'm in this chain.
link |
02:04:23.100
And I don't know if you know this,
link |
02:04:24.660
but in the Russian language,
link |
02:04:26.020
the word scientist means someone who was taught.
link |
02:04:28.980
I'll say it very simply, one who was taught, right?
link |
02:04:31.300
Uchony.
link |
02:04:32.140
Uchony.
link |
02:04:32.980
So it probably means a guy was taught, right?
link |
02:04:35.180
No, uchony, no, no, no, it's a person.
link |
02:04:39.180
Uchony, no, no, no, it's literally someone who was taught.
link |
02:04:42.500
Someone who was taught, right.
link |
02:04:43.900
So what does that mean?
link |
02:04:44.740
To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning.
link |
02:04:47.540
One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist
link |
02:04:50.780
because you have to learn from somebody else.
link |
02:04:52.620
Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward.
link |
02:04:55.180
If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist
link |
02:04:58.580
in the truest sense.
link |
02:05:00.180
And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach
link |
02:05:02.220
and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale.
link |
02:05:04.300
I'm influencing more than 24 kids I might have
link |
02:05:07.140
in my graduate class or undergraduate class,
link |
02:05:09.380
and potentially could reach thousands of people
link |
02:05:11.660
around the world and make them into scientists themselves.
link |
02:05:15.980
Because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial.
link |
02:05:19.060
There is no competition.
link |
02:05:20.420
There is no zero sum fixed mindset versus growth mindset
link |
02:05:24.940
because it is an infinite game.
link |
02:05:26.460
Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings