back to indexBrian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize | Lex Fridman Podcast #257
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The following is a conversation with Brian Keating,
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experimental physicist at USCSD
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and author of Losing the Nobel Prize
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and Into the Impossible.
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Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name
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called Into the Impossible.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, here's my conversation with Brian Keating.
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As an experimental physicist,
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what do you think is the most amazing
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or maybe the coolest measurement device
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you've ever worked with or humans have ever built?
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Maybe for now, let's exclude the background imaging
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of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.
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Yeah, I'm slightly biased
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towards that particular instrument.
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Talk about that in a little bit.
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But certainly the telescope, to me,
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is a lever that has literally moved the Earth
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throughout history.
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So the OG telescope?
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The OG telescope, yeah.
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The one invented not by Galileo, as most people think,
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but by this guy Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands.
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And it was kind of interesting
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because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s,
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there was the beginning of movable type.
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And so people, for the first time in history,
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had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight.
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So looking at a printed word now,
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we just take it for granted, 12 point font, whatever,
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and that's what the eye charts are based on.
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They're just fixed height.
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But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight
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if you didn't have perfect vision.
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And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision
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or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type.
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And at that time, people realized,
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hey, wait, I can't read this.
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My priest or my friend over here, he can read it,
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And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands
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saw that they could take this kind of glass material
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and hold it up and maybe put another piece
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of glass material and it would make it clearer.
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And what was so interesting is that nobody thought
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to take that exact same device, two lenses,
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and go like, hmm, let me go like this
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and look at that bright thing in the sky over there,
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So Galileo didn't invent it,
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but he did something kind of amazing.
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He improved on it by a factor of 10.
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So he 10X'd it, which is almost as good
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as going from zero to one, as going from one to 10.
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And when he did that, he really transformed
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both how we look at the universe and think about it,
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but also who we are as a species,
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because we're using tools not to get food faster
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or to preserve our legacy for future generations,
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but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
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Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans
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weren't able to see the stars,
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maybe there was some kind of makeup of the atmosphere,
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which for the early humans made it impossible
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to see the stars, that we would never develop
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human civilization, or at least raising the question
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of how important is it to look up to the sky
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and wonder what's out there, as opposed to,
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maybe this is an over romanticized notion,
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but like looking at the ground,
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it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival,
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not being eaten by a bear slash lion.
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If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder
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what is my place in the universe?
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You think that's modern humans romanticizing?
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It's a little romantic, because they also took the same.
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They took the same two lenses and they looked inward.
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They looked at bacteria, they looked at hairs,
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and in other words, they made the microscope,
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and we're still doing that.
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And so to have a telescope, it serves a dual purpose.
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It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in,
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but it's also looking back in time.
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In other words, you didn't see a microscope,
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you don't think, oh, I'm seeing this thing
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as it was one nanosecond ago,
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light travels one foot per nanosecond.
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I'm seeing it, no, you don't think about it like that.
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But when you see something that's happening on Jupiter,
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the moon, Andromeda galaxy, you're seeing things
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back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti Plains.
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And for that, I think that took then the knowledge
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of relativity and time travel and so forth.
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It took that before we could really say,
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oh, we really unlocked some cheat codes in the human brain.
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So I think that might be a little too much,
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but nevertheless, I mean,
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what's better than having a time machine?
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We can look back in time,
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we see things as they were, not as they are.
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And that allows us to do many things,
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including speculate about that.
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But one of the coolest things,
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I don't know if you're familiar with,
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so I'm a radio astronomer.
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I don't actually look through telescopes very often,
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except on rare occasions when I take one out
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to show the kids, but a radio telescope
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is even more sort of visceral.
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I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it,
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you're like, all right, it looks cool,
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it's kind of weird shaped thing,
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looks like it belongs in sci fi,
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it's gonna blast the Death Star or whatever.
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But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope
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at a distant object,
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if that object fills up what's called the beam,
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which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope,
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it's called its beam.
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If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor,
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just a simple absorbing piece of material
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at the focus of the radio telescope,
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that resistor will come to the exact same temperature
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as the object that's looking at, which is pretty amazing.
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It means you're actually remotely measuring,
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you're taking the temperature of Jupiter
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or whatever in effect.
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And so it's allowing you to basically teleport
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and there's no other science
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that you can really do that, right?
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If you're an archeologist, you can't,
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let me get into my time machine
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and go back and see what was Lucy really like,
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it's not possible.
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So the same thing happens,
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this is where I've learned about this
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from March of the Penguins,
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when the penguins huddled together,
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the body temperature arrives to the same place.
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So you're doing this remotely,
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the March of the Penguins, but remote.
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We do it from Antarctica too,
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so there are some penguins around when we do it.
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You mentioned time machine,
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I think in your book, Losing the Nobel Prize,
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you talk about time machines.
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So let me ask you the question of,
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take us back in time,
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what happened at the beginning of our universe?
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Ah, okay, usually people preface this
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by saying I have a simple question.
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So what happened before the universe began, what happened?
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Brian Keating teaching me about comedy.
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I have a simple question for you, let's take two.
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I have a simple question,
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what happened at the beginning of our universe?
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So when we think about what happened,
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it's more correct, it's more logical,
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it's more practical to go back in time starting from today.
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So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today,
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that's some day, right?
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I mean, you could translate into some day, right?
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So on that day, something happened.
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Earlier than the moment exactly now,
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let's say we're talking around one o clock.
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So at some point during that day,
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the universe started to become a fusion reactor.
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It started to fuse light elements and isotopes
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into heavier elements and isotopes
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of those heavier elements.
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After that period of time,
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going forward back closer to today,
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less 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier,
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or later rather coming towards us today,
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we know more and more about what the universe was like.
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And in fact, all the hydrogen,
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it's a very good approximation in the water molecules
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in this bottle, almost all of them were produced
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during that first 20 minute period.
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So I would say, the actual fusion and production
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of the lightest elements on the periodic table
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occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show,
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The Big Bang Theory.
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You know, most of those light elements besides hydrogen
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aren't really used in your encounter, right?
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You don't encounter helium that often,
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unless you go to a lot of birthday parties
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You don't need lithium, hopefully, you know,
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but other than that,
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those are the kinds of things
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that were produced during that moment.
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The question became, how did the heavier things
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like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later.
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And I brought some samples for us to discuss
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and how those came from a very different type of process
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called a different type of fusion reactor
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and a different type of process explosion as well
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called a supernova.
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However, if you go back beyond those first three minutes,
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we really have to say almost nothing
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because we are not capable.
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In other words, going backwards
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from the first three minutes,
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as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book,
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we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over.
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In other words, we can't speculate on what happened
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three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen
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was formed in our universe.
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We just don't know enough about that epoch.
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There are many people, most people,
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most practicing card carrying cosmologists
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believe the universe began in what's called the singularity.
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And we can certainly talk about that.
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However, singularity is so far removed
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from anything we can ever hope to prove,
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hope to confront or hope to observe with evidence.
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And really only occurs in two instantiations,
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the big bang and the core of a black hole,
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neither of which is observable.
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And so for that reason,
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there are now flourishing alternatives that say,
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you can actually for the first time ask the question
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that day, Tuesday in the first moments of our universe,
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there was a Tuesday a week before that,
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24 hours times seven days before that.
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That has a perfectly well understood meaning
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in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent
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of cosmologists working today.
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When I was in grad school over 25 years ago,
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no one really considered anything besides that big bang
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that there was a singularity.
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And people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know.
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But they would say some future incarnation
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of some experiment will tell us the answer.
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But now there are people that are saying
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there is an alternative to the big bang.
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And it's not really fringe science
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as it once was 50, 80 years ago when these models...
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By the way, the first cosmology in history
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was not a singular universe.
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The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra
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and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium BC.
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And in that, they talked about cyclical universes.
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So I always joke, that guy Akhenaten's court,
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he'd have a pretty high H index right about now
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because people have been using that cyclical model
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from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis
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and right up until this very moment.
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Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives
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to the big bang theory?
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So there are many alternatives starting with...
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So the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding
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singular origin of the universe, that stands in contrast
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to these other models in which time does not have
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a beginning and many of them feature cycles,
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at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles,
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called by Sir Roger Penrose.
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And they all have things in common, these alternatives,
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as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis,
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which is inflation.
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Inflation can be thought of as this spark
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that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood.
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So it's an earlier condition,
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but it's still not an initial condition.
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In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock
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or a pendulum swinging back and forth.
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You look away for a second, you come into the room,
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pendulum swinging back and forth.
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Alex, tell me, where did it start?
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How many cycles is it gonna make before the era?
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You can't answer that question
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without knowing the initial conditions.
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In a very simple system, like a one dimensional,
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simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum,
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think about understanding the whole universe
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without understanding the initial conditions.
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It's a tremendous lacuna, a gap that we have as scientists
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that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology,
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determine the quantitative physical properties
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of the universe prior to what's called
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the inflationary epoch.
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So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch,
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we can't, because you can infer things about the pendulum
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before you show up to the room in our current epoch,
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Yeah, so if you look at it right now,
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but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating?
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So that depends on how much energy it got initially.
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And you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance,
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you had infrared camera,
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you could see it's getting hotter maybe,
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and you could do some calculations.
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But to know the two things in physics
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to solve a partial differential equation
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are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions.
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Boundary conditions, we're here on earth,
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it has gravitational field, it's not gonna excurs,
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or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum.
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It's not, it has simple properties.
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So, but this is like, in other words,
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you can't tell me when did the solar system start orbiting
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in the way that it does now.
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In other words, when did the moon acquire
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the exact angular momentum that it has now?
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Now, that's a pretty pedestrian example.
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But what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch
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purports and is successful at providing
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a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved
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after inflation took place and ended,
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but it says nothing about how it itself took place.
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And that's really what you're asking me.
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I mean, you don't really, look,
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what you care about like big bang nucleosynthesis
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and the elements got made and these fusion reactors
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and the whole universe was a fusion reactor,
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but like, don't you really care about what happened
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at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time?
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And the problem is we can't really answer that
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in the context of the big bang.
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We can answer that in the context of these alternatives.
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So you asked me about some of the alternatives.
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So one is Aon theory,
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the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose.
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Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s
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until the discovery of the primary component
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of my research field,
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the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB,
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the three Kelvin all pervasive signal
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that astronomers detected in 1965.
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That kind of spelled the death knell in some sense
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to what was called the quasi steady state universe.
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And then there was another model
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that kind of came out of that.
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You hear the word quasi, so it's not steady state.
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Steady state means always existed.
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That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble
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showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe.
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And most scientists believed in that for millennia basically.
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The universe was eternal, static, unchanging.
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They couldn't believe that after Hubble.
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So they had to append onto it,
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concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady,
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it was quasi steady.
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So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen
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every century in a given volume of space.
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And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant.
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But because it was producing more and more every century,
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as centuries pile up and the volume piles up,
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the universe could expand.
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And so that's how they developed it.
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And it doesn't match observational evidence.
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But that is an alternative.
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By the way, did Einstein think
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the steady state universe is infinite or finite?
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I would assume that he thought it was infinite
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because there was really,
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if something had a no beginning in time,
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then it would be very unlikely we're in the center of it
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or it's bounded or it has, in that case, a finite edge to it.
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I wonder what he thought about infinity
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because that's such an uncomfortable.
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Yeah, it's a silly joke.
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I'm sure you're familiar with this silly joke, right?
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The silly joke was that there are only two things
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that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
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and I'm not sure about the universe.
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Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke
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is a good example of the joke.
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Okay, so, all right, sorry.
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You were saying about quasi.
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All the alternatives.
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All the alternatives in the quasi steady state.
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And the most kind of promising,
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although I hate to say that,
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people say, well, that's your favorite alternative, right?
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This is not investment advice.
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Inflation is not transitory.
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It is quasi permanent.
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So, a very prominent.
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Sorry to interrupt.
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We're talking about cosmic inflation,
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so calm down, cryptocurrency folks.
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Although the first Nobel Prize,
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and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics
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was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind.
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So, most people don't know
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that inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.
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It's a good topic to work on if you won a Nobel Prize.
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Doesn't matter the field.
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Exactly, it's time translation invariant.
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So, when we look at the alternative
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that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies,
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these have serious virtues, according to some.
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One of the virtues to me, just as a human,
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I'm just speaking as a human,
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one of the founders of the new version
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of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology
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is Paul Steinhardt.
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He's the Einstein Professor of Natural Sciences
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at Princeton University.
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You may have heard of it.
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And he was one of the originators
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of what was called new inflation.
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In other words, he was one of the founding fathers
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of inflation, who now not only has no belief
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or support for inflation,
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he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious,
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dangerous, malevolent, not to science,
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not just to cosmology, but to society.
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So, here's a man who created a theory
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that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists,
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It's not a huge universe,
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but there are more podcasters than cosmologists.
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But this man created this theory with collaborators.
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And now he's like, I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity.
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You're like a deadbeat dad.
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Now you're saying like, inflation is bogus.
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But he doesn't just attack.
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See, this is what's very important
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about approaching things as an experimentalist.
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You got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful.
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And I think that's a huge service.
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An experimentalist has to say no.
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He or she has to be confident to say like,
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I don't care if I prove you right
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or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever.
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We have to be like exterminators.
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And nobody likes the exterminator
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until they need one, right?
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Or the garbage collectors, right?
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But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded
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by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry
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and the simplicity of some idea.
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Like inflation is a beautiful idea,
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but it also has consequences.
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And what Paul claims,
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I don't agree with him fully on this point,
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is that those consequences are dangerous
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because they lead to things like the multiverse,
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which is outside the purview of science.
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And in that sense, I can see support for what he does,
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but none of that detracts from my respect for a man.
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You know, imagine like, you know,
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Elon comes up with this like really great idea,
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you know, space, and then he's like,
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oh, actually it's not gonna work.
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But like, here's this better idea.
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And he's like, SpaceX is not gonna work,
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but he's now creating an alternative to it.
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It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done.
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Doesn't mean he's right.
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Doesn't mean I'm gonna like have more
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and more attention paid to it because he's my friend
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or because I respect the idea
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or I respect the man and his colleague,
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Anna Aegis, who works really hard with him.
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But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it.
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And what it does most foremost is that it removes
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the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology.
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So it takes away 50% of the motivation
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for a theory of quantum gravity.
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You've talked a lot about quantum gravity.
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You talk to people, eminent people on the show.
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Always latent in those conversations
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is sort of the teleological expectation
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that there is a theory of everything.
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There is a theory of quantum gravity.
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But there's no law that says
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we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.
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So that kind of implicit expectation
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has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory.
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So in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core?
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So okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts
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on society from believing in cosmic inflation.
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So one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation,
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according to its other two patriarchs,
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considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT
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and Andrei Linde at Stanford,
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although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas,
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along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe
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has to eventually get into a quantum state,
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has to exist in this Hilbert space,
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and the Hilbert space has certain features,
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and those features are quantum mechanical,
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endowed with quantum mechanical properties.
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And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off.
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So inflation can get started,
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but then it's like one of, you know, SpaceX rockets.
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It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right?
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It continues the thrusting.
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You need another mechanism to douse the flames
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of the inflationary expansion,
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which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere,
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it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times,
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including now, spawning an ever increasing set of universes.
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Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish,
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and this is known as the multiverse paradigm.
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It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence,
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not only of inflationary cosmology,
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but more and more, we're seeing it
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in string theory as well.
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So that, you know, sometimes two, you know,
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branches coming to the same conclusion
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is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.
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So one of the negative consequences
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is it creates phenomena that we can't,
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that are outside the reach of experimental science,
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or is it that the multiverse somehow
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has a philosophical negative effect on humanity?
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maybe it makes life seem more meaningless?
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Is that where he's getting at a little bit,
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or is it not reaching that far?
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Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive.
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The answer is a little of both,
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because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain
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this fine tuning problem,
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that we find ourselves in a universe
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that's particularly facund, that has features,
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you know, consistent with our existence,
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and how could we be otherwise?
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You know, this sort of weak anthropic principle.
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On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything,
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literally everything, can be said to predict nothing.
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Like if I say, Lex, you know, you've been working out,
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you look like, you know, yeah, you haven't,
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yeah, that's great.
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You look like you're, you know,
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about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.
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Like, all right, yeah, you're right,
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but that's horribly imprecise.
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So what good is that?
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That's meaningless.
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You don't contribute any what's called surprise,
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or reduction in entropy,
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or reduction of your ignorance about the system,
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or you know exactly how much you weigh.
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So me telling you that tells you nothing.
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In this case, it's basically saying
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that we're living in a universe
link |
because the overwhelming odds of our existence
link |
dictate that we would exist.
link |
There has to be at least one place that we exist.
link |
But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity.
link |
So humans, and I'm sure you know this
link |
from your work with AI and ML and everything else,
link |
that humans, as far as we know,
link |
really are the only entities capable
link |
of contemplating infinity,
link |
but we do so very imperfectly, right?
link |
So if I say to you, like, what's bigger,
link |
the number of, you know, water molecules in this thing,
link |
or the number of real numbers?
link |
Or if I say, what's bigger,
link |
the number of real numbers or rational numbers?
link |
They're all different classifications
link |
of the amount of infinities that there could be.
link |
Infinity to the infinity power.
link |
You know, when you have kids someday,
link |
they'll tell you, I love you, infinity.
link |
You have to come back, I love you, infinity plus one, right?
link |
So, but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity.
link |
Let me illustrate that.
link |
They say in the singularity,
link |
the universe had an infinite temperature, right?
link |
So let me ask you a question.
link |
Is there anything that you can contemplate
link |
in the, you know, Einstein's little quip aside,
link |
that's infinite, like a physical property,
link |
density, pressure, temperature, energy, that's infinite.
link |
And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it.
link |
But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one?
link |
You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids.
link |
How does it go from like to half of infinity?
link |
Because that's still infinity.
link |
How did it cool down?
link |
How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied?
link |
So now it's only infinity over two,
link |
in terms of pascals.
link |
Less infinite to more infinite.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it's,
link |
that's one of the biggest troubling things to me
link |
about infinity is you can't truly hold it inside our minds.
link |
It's a mathematical construct that doesn't,
link |
it feels like intuition fails.
link |
But nevertheless, we use it nonchalantly
link |
and then use, like physicists,
link |
they're incredible intuition machines.
link |
And then they'll play with this infinity
link |
as if they can play with it on the level of intuition
link |
as opposed to on the level of math.
link |
You know, yeah, maybe it's something cyclical
link |
you can imagine in infinity,
link |
just going around the same,
link |
kind of like a Mobius strip situation.
link |
But then the question then arises,
link |
how do you make it more or less infinite?
link |
Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.
link |
And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right?
link |
It's either some placeholder for infinity
link |
or it's one divided by a very,
link |
the smallest possible real number
link |
that you can represent in the memory.
link |
Well, that's basically my undergraduate study
link |
in computer science is how to represent
link |
a floating point in a computer.
link |
I think I took 17 courses on this topic.
link |
It was very useful.
link |
I came to the right place.
link |
But in terms of what a physicist will mean,
link |
and you're right, I mean, physicists will blithely,
link |
nonchalantly subtract infinity, renormalization,
link |
and do things to get finite answers.
link |
And it's miraculous.
link |
But at a certain point, you have to ask,
link |
well, what are the consequences for the real world?
link |
So one of them, you ask, what's the problem?
link |
Does it make us more meaningless?
link |
They purport, many of the people that support it,
link |
like Andrei Linde.
link |
In fact, Andrei Linde says, you have a bias.
link |
You, Lex, me, Brian.
link |
You have a bias that you believe in a universe.
link |
But shouldn't you believe in a multiverse?
link |
What evidence do you have that there's not a multiverse?
link |
So he turns it around.
link |
Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen,
link |
then there's no predictive power within the theory.
link |
Because you can always say, well,
link |
this value of the inflationary field
link |
did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy
link |
for us to detect it with BICEP or Simon's Observatory
link |
But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen.
link |
It's logically 100% correct.
link |
But it's like kind of chewing Wonder Bread.
link |
Apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but you know.
link |
Wonderbread slash lex.com.
link |
Type in code Klebb, right?
link |
That's my favorite Russian word is like,
link |
would you like a piece of Klebb?
link |
By the way, even that word, Klebb,
link |
which means bread in Russian, as you say it,
link |
like you're jokingly saying it now,
link |
it made me hungry because it made
link |
me remember how much I loved bread
link |
when I was in the Soviet Union.
link |
When you were hungry, that was the things you dreamed about.
link |
You know, what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists
link |
contributed to so much of what we understand today.
link |
And they were completely in hiding.
link |
There was no Google.
link |
They couldn't look up on Scholar.
link |
They had to wait for journals to get
link |
approved by the Communist Party to get approved.
link |
And only then, if they weren't a member of some class,
link |
I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists,
link |
you had a passport that said Jew on your passport.
link |
And Zeldovich, the famous Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich,
link |
he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnareff.
link |
And he had to, only because he was like at a Nobel level
link |
and was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program,
link |
could he even get his Jewish student, he was Jewish too,
link |
but only by virtue of his standing
link |
of his intellectual accomplishments,
link |
would they give him the dispensation
link |
to let his student travel to Georgia or something.
link |
And it makes what we complain about,
link |
and I complain about academia.
link |
And it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about?
link |
We have no idea of how good it is
link |
and that they were able to create things like inflation,
link |
completely isolated from the West.
link |
I mean, some of these people didn't
link |
meet people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead.
link |
And they just learned this thing through smuggled in.
link |
It's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology.
link |
There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard,
link |
probably because they were working the,
link |
they could pass off as, well, we're doing stuff
link |
for the atomic bomb program as well, which they were.
link |
At the same time, there is interesting incentives
link |
in the Soviet system that,
link |
maybe we can take this tangent for a brief moment,
link |
that because there's a dictatorship, authoritarian regime
link |
throughout the history of the 20th century
link |
for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized.
link |
And because the state prioritized it
link |
through the propaganda machines and the news and so on,
link |
it actually was really cool to be a scientist.
link |
Like you were highly valued in society.
link |
Maybe that's a better way to say it.
link |
And I would say, you're saying like, we have it easy now.
link |
In that sense, it was kind of beneficial
link |
to be a scientist in that society
link |
because you were seen as a hero, as there's famous.
link |
Yes, the most famous hero of the Soviet Republic.
link |
And that, you know, there's positives to that.
link |
I mean, I'm not saying I would take the negatives
link |
or the positives, but it is interesting to see a world
link |
in which science was highly prized.
link |
In the capitalist system, or maybe not capitalist,
link |
let's just say the American system,
link |
the celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses,
link |
maybe business leaders, musicians.
link |
And, you know, the people we elect are sort of lawyers
link |
and lawyers, so it's interesting to think of a world
link |
where science was highly prized,
link |
but they had to do that science within the constraints
link |
of always having big brother watching.
link |
Yeah, the same in Germany.
link |
Germany had, you know, highly prized science.
link |
I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases
link |
is Fritz Haber who invented the Haber Bosch process
link |
that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet?
link |
You look, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast
link |
every day and you do that.
link |
You know, I said chleb and you got, it's a little drool,
link |
but he says I'm lifting and I look slim.
link |
I'm gonna clip this out and put it on Tinder.
link |
I think that's a website.
link |
You gotta swipe left or right for that, I don't know.
link |
But when you think about like, you know, what he did
link |
and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy
link |
and we eat from every day, he was a German nationalist,
link |
first and foremost, even though he was a Jew.
link |
And he personally went to witness the application
link |
of ammonia, chlorine gas applied during trench warfare
link |
in 1916 in battles in Brussels and whatever.
link |
And he was, they had a whole conjure of Nobel laureates
link |
in chemistry and physics, you know,
link |
that would go and witness these atrocities.
link |
But that was also, they were almost putting science
link |
above, I don't wanna say human dignity,
link |
but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed.
link |
And actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz
link |
because of the chemical that he invented also
link |
And so it's just unbelievable.
link |
So I feel like that does have resonance today
link |
in this worship of science, you know,
link |
and listen to science and follow the science,
link |
which is more like scientism.
link |
And there is still a danger.
link |
You know, I always say, just cause you're an atheist
link |
doesn't mean you don't have a religion.
link |
You know, just because you, you know,
link |
in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel prize.
link |
It's kind of like a kosher idol.
link |
It's something that you can worship, you know,
link |
it doesn't do any harm.
link |
And we want those people that are so significant
link |
in their intellectual accomplishments.
link |
Cause there is a core of America
link |
and the Western world in general
link |
that does worship and really look at science predominantly
link |
cause it gives us technology,
link |
but there's something really cool about that.
link |
And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point
link |
between looking to science for wisdom,
link |
which I don't think it has, they're two different words,
link |
but also recognizing how much good and transformative power
link |
maybe our only hope comes from science.
link |
You opened so many doors
link |
cause you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book.
link |
So there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science
link |
and to the Nobel prize.
link |
It's fascinating to explore and we will.
link |
And we still haven't finished the discussion
link |
of the beginning of the universe, which we'll return to.
link |
But now since you opened the book, wow,
link |
pun unintended of losing the Nobel prize,
link |
can you tell me the story of BICEP,
link |
the background imaging
link |
of cosmic extragalactic polarization experiment,
link |
BICEP one and BICEP two,
link |
and then maybe you can talk about BICEP three,
link |
but the thing that you cover in your book,
link |
the human story of it, what happened?
link |
Yeah, that book is in contradistinction of the second book.
link |
That's like a memoir.
link |
It's really a description of what it's like to feel,
link |
what it feels like to be a scientist
link |
and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty,
link |
imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book
link |
in more detail, but to really feel like
link |
you're doing something and it's all you think about.
link |
It is all consuming.
link |
And it's something I couldn't have done now
link |
cause I have too many other,
link |
wonderful, delightful demands of my time.
link |
But to go back to that moment
link |
when I was first captivated by the night sky
link |
who has a 12 year old, 13 year old,
link |
and really mixed together throughout my scientific story
link |
has always been wanting to approach
link |
the greatest mystery of all,
link |
which I think is the existence or non existence of God.
link |
So I call myself a practicing agnostic.
link |
In other words, I do things that religious people do
link |
and I don't do things that atheist people do.
link |
And I once had this conversation,
link |
with my first podcast guest actually,
link |
I shouldn't say, oh, I was just having a conversation
link |
with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest.
link |
I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of comments about that.
link |
In case people don't know, Brian Keating is the host
link |
of Into the Impossible podcast,
link |
where he's talked to some of the greatest scientists
link |
in history of science, physicists,
link |
especially in the history of science.
link |
So when I talked to Freeman, I said,
link |
Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too.
link |
Can you tell me something like what do you do on Saturday,
link |
on Sundays, do you go to church?
link |
He's like, no, I don't go to church.
link |
And I'm like, well, imagine there was
link |
like an intelligent alien and he was looking down
link |
or she, I don't know, thing was looking down
link |
and it saw Freeman and on Sundays,
link |
like a group of people go to church,
link |
but Freeman doesn't go to church.
link |
And then there's another group of people
link |
that don't go to church and those are called atheists,
link |
but Freeman calls himself an agnostic,
link |
but he does the things that the Richard Dawkins,
link |
he doesn't go to the same church
link |
that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to, right?
link |
So I said, how would you distinguish yourself
link |
So I'm a behaviorist.
link |
I believe you can change your mentality.
link |
You can influence your mind,
link |
view your bodily physical actions.
link |
So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope.
link |
I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church,
link |
which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid
link |
who grew up in New York.
link |
Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not.
link |
But I was just fascinated by these, these.
link |
Can we get into it for a second?
link |
Okay, yeah, all right, let's go.
link |
All right, let's go there.
link |
Let's go to a baby Brian or young.
link |
The new sitcom on CBS.
link |
Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents.
link |
My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
link |
He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician.
link |
And my mother was an eminent mom
link |
and a brilliant English major, et cetera.
link |
And they raised it, but they were secular.
link |
They, you know, we'd go to, I always joke,
link |
we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year,
link |
on Christmas and Easter.
link |
No, no, we would go, yeah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah,
link |
right, that's the typical two day a year Jews.
link |
And you know, we'd have, we'd have matzahs
link |
once a year on Palm Passover.
link |
And that was about it.
link |
And for years, I was like that
link |
until my parents got divorced.
link |
My mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man
link |
by the name of Ray Keating.
link |
My father's name is James X.
link |
So when she remarried Ray Keating,
link |
I was immediately adopted.
link |
I'm actually adopted into the Keating family.
link |
And he had nine brothers and sisters
link |
and just warm and gregarious.
link |
They, you know, did Christmas and Easter.
link |
It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had.
link |
And I do things with great gusto.
link |
Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way.
link |
So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity,
link |
in this case, Catholicism.
link |
So I was baptized, confirmed,
link |
and I said, I want to go all the way.
link |
I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.
link |
And you're going to be the best altar boy there ever was.
link |
I had like serious skills.
link |
You passed that collection basket.
link |
I could push people and get them to 2x their contributions.
link |
But in this case, I was 13.
link |
I don't know if you remember when you were 13.
link |
But if you extrapolate the next level up,
link |
it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor.
link |
The next level up from confirmation, altar boy,
link |
And I don't know if you're aware of this,
link |
but priests are not entitled to have relations with women.
link |
And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future casting
link |
what life's going to be like for myself
link |
if I continue on my path, I found that maybe I...
link |
The math is not up.
link |
There was a serious gap in that future.
link |
And instead, when I should have been preparing
link |
for my Bar Mitzvah, as most Jewish boys would be,
link |
a 12, 13 year old boy, I actually got a telescope
link |
and became infatuated with all the things
link |
you could see with it.
link |
It wasn't bigger than that one over there
link |
that your hedgehog's looking through.
link |
Is that a hedgehog?
link |
It's a hedgehog in the fog.
link |
I should mention, and we'll go one by one, these things,
link |
you've given me some incredible gifts.
link |
Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope
link |
that puts some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look.
link |
Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist.
link |
Why experimentalist versus an engineer?
link |
Because you assembled this telescope,
link |
you gave it a mount, and you connected it to a very powerful...
link |
Yeah, but there's no experiment going on.
link |
It's just engineering for show.
link |
It's very shallow.
link |
Experiment is taking it to the next level
link |
and actually achieving something.
link |
Here, I just built a thing for show.
link |
Well, that's always a joke.
link |
People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist.
link |
I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes.
link |
Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things,
link |
It's not actually doing the stroking
link |
of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic
link |
versus the bouncing cosmological monitor.
link |
Just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things.
link |
Right, yeah, it's not like having dancing dogs
link |
and whatever, right?
link |
Yes, this telescope.
link |
What's the story of this little telescope?
link |
This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways,
link |
a symbol of what got me into...
link |
What brought me all the blessings I have in my life
link |
came from a telescope.
link |
And I always advise parents or even people for themselves.
link |
You right here, wherever we are,
link |
a biggest city on earth, Manhattan,
link |
where I was growing up as a 12 year old
link |
outside of Manhattan.
link |
You can see the exact same craters on the moon,
link |
the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter,
link |
the same phases of the...
link |
You can see the Andromeda galaxy,
link |
Lex, two and a half million light years away from earth.
link |
You can do that with that little thing over there.
link |
One that's a little more expensive.
link |
Get one that has a mount and you could attach now
link |
What the hell is that?
link |
I wouldn't have known what that was in 1994.
link |
And with that, you can do something that no other science
link |
to my knowledge can really replicate,
link |
maybe biology in some sense,
link |
but you can experience the physical sensation
link |
that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope
link |
like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it.
link |
Or that Saturn had ears as he called it.
link |
Or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth
link |
and made of this heavenly substance,
link |
the quintessence substance, right?
link |
So where else can you be viscerally connected
link |
with the first person to ever make that discovery?
link |
Try doing that with the Higgs boson.
link |
Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity,
link |
call up Harry Cliffe and say, I want to replicate.
link |
He didn't feel anything.
link |
None of them felt anything.
link |
It took years to go, you can't do it.
link |
But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
It's almost like maybe there's another one like that
link |
Like when you build a bonfire, can you actually get it?
link |
See, if you use a lighter, I think if you actually
link |
by rubbing sticks together or however you do it
link |
without any of the modern tools,
link |
that's probably what that's like.
link |
And then you get to experience the magic of it,
link |
of what like early humans homo sapiens felt.
link |
You feel what Aug felt when he did it that first time.
link |
By the way, is this a gift?
link |
This is a gift, of course.
link |
You need a little bit of a swag upgrade,
link |
so I got you some gifts.
link |
Yeah, this is a, I'm pulling a Putin,
link |
like ask if this is a gift,
link |
making it very uncomfortable for you to say.
link |
This is actually my childhood telescope here, you know.
link |
But now I'm keeping it.
link |
So looking through this telescope.
link |
Was when your love for science was first born.
link |
Because not only was I doing that,
link |
I was replicating what Galileo did,
link |
but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself
link |
to Galileo, Galileo, okay,
link |
if there's any confusion out there.
link |
But I did replicate exactly what he did,
link |
and I was like, holy crap, this is weird.
link |
Let me write it down.
link |
So it had another effect, which all good scientists,
link |
budding scientists should do, and all parents should do,
link |
get your kid a book, a little notebook,
link |
tape a pencil to it.
link |
Write down what you see, what you hypothesize,
link |
what you think it's gonna be.
link |
Not like in the high school, you know,
link |
like hypothesis, thesis, but just like,
link |
wow, how did I feel?
link |
Better yet, astronomy is a visual science.
link |
Sketch what you see.
link |
The Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades Seven Sisters.
link |
You can see them anywhere on Earth.
link |
And when you do that, again,
link |
you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain,
link |
as I understand it,
link |
and you're connecting them through your fingertips.
link |
You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips.
link |
In your connection between what you see,
link |
what you observe, and what you write down.
link |
Then you do research, right?
link |
The goal of science is not to just replicate
link |
what other people did, is do something new.
link |
And that's why we call it research,
link |
and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia.
link |
And in so doing, you start to train a kid
link |
at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks.
link |
It's unbelievable.
link |
And now we can do even better,
link |
because you can share it on Instagram or whatever,
link |
and you can, by doing so, have an entree
link |
into the world of what does it really mean
link |
to be a scientist, and do so viscerally.
link |
You know, I often say, I was taught this
link |
by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade,
link |
that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into.
link |
Let me pour in some facts and intellects,
link |
and you know, it's not like machine learning
link |
that you're just showing like billions of cats,
link |
or you know, you're not like forcing it in,
link |
you're bringing it out.
link |
It means to pour out of, in Latin, educare.
link |
And what more could a teacher want
link |
than to have something, the kid is just like gushing.
link |
No, you're not gonna see like.
link |
To inspire the kid.
link |
Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.
link |
Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins, she's watching, yeah.
link |
Me, she doesn't care for it, but you.
link |
We take those we love for granted.
link |
This is in Manhattan.
link |
This is in Westchester County, New York.
link |
So okay, but then that's where the dream is born.
link |
But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist.
link |
So going to university, graduate school,
link |
postdoc, all the way to where you are today.
link |
What's that, what are some notable moments in that journey?
link |
So I call that the academic hunger games.
link |
Because it's like you're competing against
link |
like these people who are just getting smarter all the time
link |
as you're getting smarter all the time.
link |
They wanna get into a fewer and fewer number of slots.
link |
Like there's fewer slots to get into college
link |
than in high school.
link |
There's fewer slots in graduate school.
link |
There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc.
link |
And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number.
link |
We just did a faculty search at UC San Diego,
link |
400 applicants for one position.
link |
It's almost getting impossible.
link |
Like I almost can't conceive of doing
link |
what these new brilliant young people applying
link |
to become an assistant professor at a state university
link |
that they're doing.
link |
It takes so much courage to do that.
link |
So I went from this kid in New York,
link |
thinking I would never be a professional astronomer.
link |
A, because I didn't know any, I'd never seen any.
link |
I didn't even know that they existed.
link |
And I thought, who the hell's gonna pay me
link |
to look at the stars?
link |
Like, won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?
link |
Like, it's just not something I could conceive
link |
of getting paid to do.
link |
Even if I had the brilliance to do it,
link |
which I didn't feel I did.
link |
And then I went to graduate school.
link |
And during graduate school, I had this kind of
link |
on again, off again relationship with my father.
link |
And I knew that he was a mathematician.
link |
He had left and gotten remarried himself
link |
and moved across the country.
link |
I didn't see him for 15 years.
link |
And in that time, I learned a lot about him.
link |
And I learned that he had gotten very interested
link |
not in pure mathematics,
link |
which he had been a number theorist
link |
and contributed seminal work on the offending equations,
link |
which play a role in Turing's work that you may have seen.
link |
But anyway, he had become interested,
link |
turned completely away from that into the foundations
link |
of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics.
link |
And by that time I was at Brown University
link |
and I was thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter
link |
physicist or experimentalist.
link |
I never thought I'd be a theorist and I'm not a theorist.
link |
So it was pretty prescient.
link |
But it always appealed to me,
link |
why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old?
link |
We often forget about those primitive things about us
link |
are probably the most sustainable, durable
link |
and resilient attributes of our character.
link |
So with my own kids,
link |
what are they interested in now when they're young?
link |
And it doesn't mean that's what they're gonna do.
link |
Some of them wanna play Fortnite,
link |
like professional Fortnite play, which there are,
link |
but the odds of that is less
link |
than the odds of being a professor.
link |
Can I ask you, is your father still with us?
link |
Just in a small tangent.
link |
Do you think about him?
link |
Does his mathematical journey reverberate
link |
through who you are?
link |
Oh yeah, absolutely.
link |
I mean, it did in very many ways
link |
and he's been gone for a long time now.
link |
Thinking back to that time with him,
link |
he must've instilled some capacity for me
link |
to only wanna spend my time,
link |
which is a limited quantity.
link |
I don't think it's the most limited quantity.
link |
Maybe we'll talk about that later,
link |
but to go into only the most challenging,
link |
interesting things with the limited time that we have
link |
while we're alive.
link |
And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics.
link |
For me, it was the foundations of the universe
link |
and how did it come to be?
link |
And I felt like, well, people have been trying
link |
since Einstein to outdo Einstein,
link |
really have made great progress
link |
in the foundations of quantum mechanics,
link |
but this is an exciting time.
link |
The COBE satellite had just released its data
link |
that the universe had this anisotropy pattern.
link |
Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God
link |
And so it seemed like this is a good golden age
link |
for what I'm gonna do and what I'm most interested in.
link |
But always throughout that, I wanted to understand,
link |
I didn't wanna be a wrench monkey,
link |
no offense to people that just do experiment.
link |
And no offense to monkeys.
link |
No offense to monkeys, that's right.
link |
This little guy, sorry, man.
link |
But thinking back to what animates me,
link |
it's not doing the engineering
link |
as much as it is getting the data,
link |
but there's a lot of steps.
link |
I wanna be the guy understanding
link |
what made the universe produce the signal that we saw.
link |
So I always joke with my theorist friends,
link |
call me a closeted theorist.
link |
Like I wanna be, you know what they call
link |
a guy who hangs out with musicians, a drummer.
link |
So I wanna be like that for physics,
link |
for theoretical physics.
link |
I wanna be like the guy doesn't do new theory,
link |
but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.
link |
I love that formulation of a theorist
link |
is understanding the source of the signal you're getting.
link |
Like signal is primary.
link |
Like the thing you measure is primary
link |
and theory is just the search of explaining
link |
how that signal originated, but it's all about the signal.
link |
I mean, I see the same search for the human mind
link |
and like neuroscience in that same kind of way.
link |
It's ultimately about the signal,
link |
but you kind of hope to understand
link |
how that signal originated.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
That's such a beautiful way to explain experimental physics
link |
because it ultimately at the end of the day
link |
is all about the signal.
link |
Yeah, and maybe those two things,
link |
the neuroscience and the cosmos,
link |
not getting too romantic, but yeah,
link |
maybe they're linked in some fundamental way,
link |
some fundamental cosmic consciousness,
link |
We're gonna get to that.
link |
No, we definitely have to get back to that.
link |
But getting back to, yeah, so my origins.
link |
So I always say like, and I wanna try this on you.
link |
You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions,
link |
but I'm gonna ask you some questions.
link |
What's the most important day on the calendar?
link |
Don't tell me the date, but to you,
link |
what's the most important day to you every year?
link |
Do I have to answer or do I have to think about it?
link |
Like, you don't have to tell me the exact date
link |
It could be like your mistress's birthday or whatever, but.
link |
I have so many I lose track, even though I'm single.
link |
How does that even make sense?
link |
So a day, like a month and a day, yeah.
link |
I mean, for me, it would be December 31st.
link |
Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.
link |
Some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth.
link |
They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right?
link |
January means the portal between,
link |
the God was the portal between the beginning and the end.
link |
So you're looking back, maybe because you're Russian,
link |
like the death side, the light side,
link |
looking forward into January, the beginning, right?
link |
So everybody's most important day is usually some beginning
link |
or something significant.
link |
For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all.
link |
It's like, when did the universe get born,
link |
And I didn't think there, again, I didn't,
link |
I just, there was some mental obstruction
link |
that I didn't realize that I could get past
link |
because I didn't think like anybody does it.
link |
Like I knew astronomers knew these answers,
link |
like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion
link |
Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old.
link |
It's incredible the five digit, you know,
link |
per significant five.
link |
What is it again? 13.872 billion years.
link |
So is there a lot of plus or minus on that?
link |
Is it, what are the error bars on that?
link |
So for me, I'm 50.
link |
So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me
link |
and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.
link |
It's a half a percent, percent level accuracy.
link |
There's a confidence behind that?
link |
Oh yeah. I mean, there's a significance.
link |
Yeah. No, it's extremely well measured.
link |
I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have.
link |
In contrast to, again, 25 years ago,
link |
we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion
link |
or 20 billion years old,
link |
but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be
link |
as they are about 12 billion years old
link |
or in the universe that were 12 billion.
link |
So that would be like you being older than your father.
link |
It was embarrassing.
link |
Can we actually take a tangent on a tangent,
link |
on a tangent, on a tangent?
link |
How old is the universe?
link |
Can you dig in onto this number?
link |
How do we know currently with those,
link |
I guess you said four or five significant digits?
link |
So we can come about it from two different ways.
link |
One, basically they rely on the most important number
link |
in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant.
link |
The Hubble constant is this weird number
link |
that has the following units.
link |
It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec.
link |
So it's a speed per distance,
link |
which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed.
link |
And what is the speed you're measuring?
link |
Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy
link |
at many megaparsecs away.
link |
So a galaxy at one megaparsec away,
link |
this isn't actually strictly true
link |
because of local gravitational effects.
link |
But if you go out, say one megaparsec away,
link |
I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers
link |
per second away from you.
link |
And every galaxy, except for the local,
link |
very most local group surrounding us,
link |
maybe a half a dozen galaxies,
link |
out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies.
link |
So 12 out of that number are moving towards us,
link |
the rest are moving away from us.
link |
So that number, if you invert it,
link |
if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other,
link |
all those galaxies, now they're really far apart,
link |
we know how fast they're moving away.
link |
It's a very simple algebra problem to solve.
link |
When were they touching?
link |
That's where you get that number from.
link |
So there's the local 12 and then the rest.
link |
Ignore the 12, yeah.
link |
And then ignore the 12 and then look at the others
link |
and yeah, then solve the algebra problem.
link |
How does the stuff in the beginning,
link |
the mystery of that beginning epoch
link |
change this calculation of?
link |
Very little, because actually we understand
link |
how there's some other ingredients that go into it,
link |
namely how much dark energy there is in the universe,
link |
how much dark matter there is in the universe,
link |
how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera there are,
link |
and how much ordinary matter,
link |
like we're made up of neutrons, protons, croutons.
link |
Okay, so let me, morons.
link |
It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older.
link |
How does that make sense?
link |
Oh, oh, yeah, so you're talking about the fact
link |
that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe
link |
that's located at a distance that is farther
link |
than the speed of light times the age of the universe.
link |
Naively you would say that,
link |
so you're right, if the universe were static,
link |
if the universe came into existence,
link |
and you can conceive of this,
link |
the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe,
link |
so the universe just started off,
link |
those galaxies were, they could be moving
link |
towards us, away from us, who knows,
link |
that you could say I can see a galaxy
link |
that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years
link |
times the speed of light, that would be true.
link |
But the fact that the light is expanding
link |
along with the expansion of the universe,
link |
so imagine there was some very distant past,
link |
we were near a galaxy, it's gonna produce some light,
link |
and that galaxy's going to be moving away from us,
link |
the light's gonna be getting more and more red shifted
link |
as it's called, and it's gonna be moving
link |
farther and farther away from us as time goes on,
link |
there'll be some acceleration
link |
as we get into the era of dark energy.
link |
The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance,
link |
if you will, from which, which represents all the events
link |
that we could have received information from.
link |
We can't currently communicate with that galaxy.
link |
It sent us some light, and now it's moving away,
link |
and it sent us some light, and because the space
link |
is also dragging the photons with it, if you like,
link |
the photons are participating
link |
in the expansion of the universe,
link |
that's why they're red shifting,
link |
that we can see things out to where the universe
link |
first began expanding, not just when it began existing.
link |
And because the universe has been expanding
link |
for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing down yet,
link |
which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise,
link |
that we can see things approximately three times
link |
the age of the universe away from us.
link |
So we can see, it's called the age of the universe,
link |
15 billion years, just to make the math simple.
link |
We see things at 45 billion light years distance
link |
in that direction, and we see things at 45 billion
link |
light years in that direction,
link |
just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away.
link |
So that means we see things that themselves
link |
are 90 billion light years away from each other.
link |
That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe.
link |
Is there another universe beyond that?
link |
So in conjecture, there's not only one,
link |
there's an infinite number of them.
link |
How are you emotionally okay with the fact
link |
that our universe is expanding?
link |
It's gonna be like Annie Hall, like with Alvy Singer.
link |
I grew up in the Soviet Union.
link |
We watched propaganda films.
link |
I realized that you did, yes.
link |
So there's a famous... Annie Hall, is that some kind of...
link |
It's a comedy, it's a propaganda movie with Woody Allen.
link |
Certainly canceled, but nevertheless,
link |
back when he was not canceled yet,
link |
he made a movie called Annie Hall,
link |
in which as a self depiction, he's like a Larry David
link |
before Larry David was Larry David,
link |
neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew.
link |
He's in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother
link |
he's not doing his homework anymore.
link |
He refuses to do his homework.
link |
Goes, because the universe is expanding
link |
and it keeps on expanding.
link |
Everything will rip apart
link |
and then we'll never have anything in contact
link |
and everything is meaningless.
link |
I assume these are some of the topics we're gonna get to.
link |
And she goes, what are you talking about?
link |
We're in Brooklyn.
link |
Brooklyn is not expanding.
link |
And that's true, Brooklyn is not expanding.
link |
The solar system is not expanding.
link |
Often times they get asked,
link |
what is the universe expanding into?
link |
That's one of my favorite questions.
link |
What is it expanding into?
link |
And I say, it's actually an easy question
link |
if you think about it.
link |
You've seen your friend Elon, he goes out into space,
link |
he's got a rocket, right?
link |
What's outside of the rocket?
link |
If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle,
link |
take the cap off it, go outside the rocket,
link |
sip in some Tang, screw on the cover of it,
link |
That's just semantics, I guess, yeah.
link |
No, it's definitely not empty.
link |
So you step outside the rocket.
link |
Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space,
link |
the quote unquote vacuum of space.
link |
And there's no more liquid in it.
link |
There's no more liquid in it.
link |
No, it's just a container.
link |
One cubic centimeter, let's make it simple.
link |
One cubic centimeter of a box
link |
and you take it out into space,
link |
outside of a Falcon, whatever, right?
link |
What's inside that box?
link |
There's actually, I'm gonna say,
link |
this is gonna set your friends up.
link |
There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements
link |
that we call the cosmic microwave background
link |
inside that box at any second.
link |
Okay, all right, hold on a second.
link |
What, 420, I've heard of that number before.
link |
It used to be 69, but then they changed it.
link |
Wow, physics works in mysterious ways.
link |
In a millimeter box, it's 69.
link |
What are we talking about here?
link |
What's inside, what's in the box?
link |
I'm gonna get, that's right.
link |
Let's think outside the box.
link |
No, we're thinking inside the box.
link |
So if you have, every cubic centimeter
link |
of our observable universe is suffused with heat
link |
left over from the Big Bang, dark matter particles.
link |
There's a little ordinary matter in the universe.
link |
And every cubic centimeter,
link |
there's some probability to find a proton,
link |
a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera.
link |
There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos
link |
inside of that cubic centimeter.
link |
Now just imagine how many cubic centimeters
link |
are in the universe, it's enormous.
link |
That's why there's enormous numbers of particles
link |
in our universe, it's a very rich universe.
link |
But now let's zoom in on that box.
link |
So now inside that box, there might be one,
link |
let's say there might be one ordinary matter,
link |
like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton.
link |
There might be a couple hundred neutrinos
link |
and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420.
link |
What's between those guys?
link |
What's between the protons and the neutrinos
link |
Like just zoom into a cubic micron now.
link |
Like imagine 420 things inside a box this big.
link |
It's actually pretty empty.
link |
Like they're just zipping around in there, right?
link |
So between them, there's a lot of empty space.
link |
And this is outside the kind of physics based models
link |
of fields and all those kinds of things,
link |
just like asking the question of like,
link |
what is this emptiness?
link |
What's the particle content in the universe
link |
in every cubic centimeter of the universe?
link |
Outside of the 420.
link |
So you have the 420, they have some mass.
link |
Well, they have energy, they don't have mass.
link |
Photons don't have mass.
link |
That's why they don't bring suitcases.
link |
You know, that's true, right?
link |
Photons never bring suitcases with them
link |
because they're traveling light.
link |
See, I don't even get to laugh at you.
link |
That's corny dad jokes.
link |
Okay, you'll appreciate some.
link |
No, this is pretty good.
link |
I'm laughing on the insides.
link |
What's in the box?
link |
What's between the photons?
link |
That's what space is.
link |
That's what the universe is expanding into.
link |
Okay, so that's the notebook
link |
on which the photons are written.
link |
But still, thank you.
link |
Still, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable
link |
that if the universe is expanding,
link |
that this thing is expanding, the canvas is expanding.
link |
It's very strange.
link |
Because like if we were just sitting there still,
link |
I guess if we're in Brooklyn, nothing's expanding.
link |
So our cognition, our intuition about the world
link |
is based on this local fact
link |
that we don't get to experience this kind of expansion.
link |
Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray.
link |
But you know that gravity is the weakest
link |
of the so called four fundamental forces.
link |
And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness.
link |
Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled
link |
towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous rate of speed
link |
because of its massive counter gravitational force
link |
to the force we exert on it.
link |
So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak.
link |
And because of that, we can think about these effects
link |
of expansion as the relationship between the,
link |
as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right?
link |
Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship
link |
between those points, how far they are from each other.
link |
And those can change, those point distances can change
link |
over time because of the force of gravity.
link |
So it's weak and what we experience as gravity
link |
is the changing of those trajectories
link |
from being rectilinear to curvilinear.
link |
That's what we experience as gravity.
link |
You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish
link |
about bowling ball and a trampoline.
link |
That's almost right because it's actually,
link |
you have to visualize that now in four dimensions,
link |
like wrapping a trampoline at every point
link |
around the object, including on the sides,
link |
and it becomes very hard to visualize.
link |
So a lot of people use that.
link |
It's also a fraught analogy because you're using gravity,
link |
like the notion of gravity pulling something down
link |
to explain the notion of gravity.
link |
So it's a little overburdening, the analogy.
link |
But okay, so you mentioned Barry Barish
link |
wrote the forward to your book.
link |
How do gravitational waves fit into all of this?
link |
How do they, on the emotional level,
link |
how do they make you feel that they're just
link |
moving space time?
link |
Yeah, so gravitational waves were,
link |
the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery
link |
the first time, it was discovered twice,
link |
indirectly by two men named Halcyon Taylor,
link |
and that was given my first year of graduate school.
link |
The day I entered graduate school almost,
link |
they announced these two guys won it,
link |
and the guy who won it did the work
link |
that would later win him the Nobel Prize
link |
when he was my age.
link |
Is this in the 40s?
link |
This was, no, this is 19.
link |
Yeah, that was good, that was good.
link |
I got it, I got it.
link |
You know, to a cosmologist, age means nothing.
link |
And to a tennis player.
link |
Gravitational waves do fit in
link |
because what we're trying to do now
link |
is use the properties of gravitational waves,
link |
the analogous properties that they have to photons,
link |
that they travel at the speed of light,
link |
that they go through everything,
link |
they can go through everything,
link |
and that they're directly detectable.
link |
We're using them to try to confirm
link |
if or if not inflation occurred.
link |
So did inflation, the spark that ignited
link |
the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe
link |
and the initial expansion of the universe,
link |
did that take place?
link |
There's only one way that cosmologists believe
link |
we could ever see that.
link |
Through the imprint
link |
of these primordial gravitational waves,
link |
not these old newcomers that Barry studies,
link |
the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us,
link |
a billion years ago,
link |
but we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago
link |
during the inflationary epoch.
link |
However, those, we cannot build a LIGO
link |
and put it at the Big Bang.
link |
So if you want to measure,
link |
let's say you have the old time firecracker,
link |
let's say there's a firecracker,
link |
and you want to see if it went off
link |
in the building next door to you,
link |
So you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it.
link |
And what we're trying to do is hear
link |
the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang,
link |
not by using a camera or even an interferometer
link |
like Barry used and his colleagues,
link |
but instead using the CMB, the light,
link |
the primordial ancient fossils of the universe,
link |
the oldest light in the universe.
link |
We're gonna use that as a film, quote unquote,
link |
onto which gravitational waves get exposed.
link |
And hope you can, so what are the challenges there
link |
to get enough accuracy for the exposure?
link |
So the signal, as I said,
link |
so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter,
link |
and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe.
link |
However, what we're looking for
link |
is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is.
link |
We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is.
link |
We're looking for what its polarization is.
link |
And we'll go, let me just ask,
link |
are you serious about the per cubic millimeter,
link |
420 is the number?
link |
Yes, cubic centimeter, 420 is the number.
link |
I wonder if Elon knows this,
link |
and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.
link |
Okay, yeah, that's true.
link |
Oh, okay, funding security, excellent.
link |
So I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak,
link |
of triumph that you described in losing the Nobel Prize.
link |
So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.
link |
Can you describe what bicep one and bicep two are,
link |
bicep three, perhaps, the instruments
link |
that can detect this kind of polarization?
link |
What are the challenges, the origin story, the whole thing?
link |
Yeah, so well, the origin story goes back again
link |
to like a father son rivalry, it really does.
link |
My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera,
link |
but he never won a Nobel Prize.
link |
And some parents in America, they compete with their kids.
link |
Oh, I was a football player in high school, I'll show you.
link |
And whatever, wrestling, whatever.
link |
And some of us could be healthy too.
link |
But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy.
link |
Like we would compete and he was much more
link |
of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist.
link |
So we had both different ideas
link |
in what was worth prioritizing our time.
link |
But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize.
link |
And I knew I could kind of outdo him.
link |
So I feel pretty venal and kind of minuscule
link |
kind of character wise saying that.
link |
The only reason you could outdo him
link |
is because the Fields Medal is given every four years.
link |
And only if you're under 40, which he was.
link |
So he's working under much more limited conditions.
link |
That's right, so even if I had, which spoiler alert,
link |
the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn't do it.
link |
But I wanted to do something big
link |
and I wanted to do something that would really
link |
just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery
link |
for the ages, as in fact it was
link |
when we made the premature announcement
link |
that we had been successful.
link |
So you were from the beginning reaching for the big questions.
link |
That's all I cared about.
link |
As an experimenter you were swinging for the fences.
link |
That's all I wanted to do.
link |
I felt like if it's not, if it's worth spending
link |
perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist,
link |
it better be damn well better be interesting to me
link |
to carry me through, to give me the,
link |
I always say passion is great when people say,
link |
oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough.
link |
Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket,
link |
but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.
link |
So then you swung for the fences with Bicep One.
link |
So Bicep One was born out of
link |
kind of interesting circumstances.
link |
So I had gone to Stanford University for a postdoc,
link |
so an academic hunger games.
link |
Stanford? Stanford University.
link |
Yeah, it's this small little school.
link |
It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts
link |
that you're affiliated with.
link |
But as I went there, I was working
link |
for a new assistant professor.
link |
She had gotten there only a year before I got there,
link |
and she had her own priorities,
link |
the things that she wanted to do.
link |
But I kept thinking in my spare time
link |
that I wanted to do something completely different.
link |
She was studying galaxies at high redshift,
link |
and I wanted to study the origin of the universe
link |
using this type of technology.
link |
And I realized, courtesy of a good friend of mine
link |
who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Haminkowski,
link |
that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope.
link |
We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope.
link |
We needed a tiny refracting telescope,
link |
no bigger than my head, less than a foot across.
link |
And that telescope would have the same power
link |
as a Hubble telescope, size telescope could have,
link |
because the signals that we're looking for
link |
are enormous in wavelength on the sky.
link |
They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky.
link |
And if we could measure that,
link |
it would be proof, effectively,
link |
as close as you get to proof,
link |
there could be things that mimic it,
link |
but that we discovered the inflationary epoch.
link |
Inflation being the signal originally conceived
link |
by Alan Guth to explain why the universe
link |
had the large scale features that it does,
link |
namely that it has so called flat geometry.
link |
So there's no way to make a triangle in space
link |
in our universe that has three interior angles
link |
that do not sum to 180 degrees.
link |
You can do that with spacecraft,
link |
you can do that with stars,
link |
you can do that with laser beams,
link |
you can do that with three different galaxies.
link |
All those galaxies, no matter how far you go,
link |
have this geometry, it's remarkable.
link |
But it's also unstable, it's very unlikely,
link |
it's very seemingly finely tuned.
link |
And that was one of the motivations that Guth had
link |
to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979
link |
when he was a postdoc also at Stanford, Slack.
link |
And he was trying to get a permanent job,
link |
I was trying to like make my name for myself.
link |
And so I realized I could do this,
link |
but I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford
link |
to do a job for her.
link |
And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you.
link |
And then one day she couldn't take it anymore
link |
because I was like sketching notebooks
link |
and planning these experiments.
link |
And I just, I wasn't, no, I actually.
link |
Big ideas in your mind, you're planning big experiments.
link |
And that was difficult to work with on a small scale
link |
for like a postdoc type of situation
link |
where you have to publish basic papers,
link |
deliver on some basic deadlines for a project,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
And support your advisors, paying, she was paying me.
link |
And so one day I came in and it actually involved
link |
another friend of mine, an astronomer named Jill Tarter,
link |
one of the pioneers in the SETI science business
link |
of detecting extraterrestrials,
link |
which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens,
link |
so I'm sure we won't get into aliens.
link |
But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like,
link |
I really wanna meet her, can you introduce me?
link |
And she said, no, in fact, you're fired, my boss.
link |
So I was like, this is possibly the best thing
link |
that could ever happen to me.
link |
I didn't know where it would lead or what would happen to it,
link |
but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university
link |
turned out to be the path, I mean, literally,
link |
that brings me here today, in that because of that,
link |
I ended up working for another person in Caltech,
link |
which is in Pasadena, and she, my original boss,
link |
Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor,
link |
a man by the name of Andrew Lang.
link |
And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know,
link |
like he's like Steve Jobs or Elon, charismatic,
link |
handsome, persuasive, idea man,
link |
not the guy always in the lobby and doing everything,
link |
but understood where things are going decades from now.
link |
And he had been involved in an experiment
link |
that actually measured the universe was flat,
link |
very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment
link |
done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators.
link |
So the shape of the universe is flat.
link |
The geometry of the universe is flat.
link |
How did he do that experiment?
link |
So he used the cosmic microwave background.
link |
And so what I said is you have to look for triangles
link |
So you can measure triangles on earth.
link |
You can actually, it's hard to show that the earth is curved,
link |
but you can show the earth is curved using triangles,
link |
mountain tops, et cetera,
link |
if you have an accurate enough protractor.
link |
God, you're like auto canceling.
link |
My ratings are gonna go up, man.
link |
This is gonna be great.
link |
Take out the cake.
link |
If you want actual science, go listen to Brian.
link |
If you want all of these conspiracy theories
link |
or AKA the truth about flat earth, listen to him.
link |
So what he used was the following triangle.
link |
There are proto galaxy sized objects in the CMB.
link |
The cosmic microwave background has these patches.
link |
And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter
link |
of one of these blobs of primordial plasma,
link |
the soup that constitutes the early universe,
link |
which is hydrogen.
link |
It's very simple material.
link |
Understand hydrogen electrons and radiation, very simple.
link |
Plasma physicists, son, understand it.
link |
The diameter is one base of the triangle.
link |
And then the distance to the earth is the other two legs.
link |
So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech
link |
and then University of Rome and that's other group
link |
at Princeton, measured the angle,
link |
interior angle effectively very, very accurately
link |
and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.
link |
Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB?
link |
Can you know where they could trace them back location wise?
link |
You can know where they are, but more than that,
link |
there's so many of these patches.
link |
They're about one square degree on the sky.
link |
The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000
link |
square degrees in a sphere.
link |
So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches
link |
over which he could do these kinds of measurements
link |
to build up very good statistics.
link |
That's not exactly how they do it
link |
or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang,
link |
but they did measure very accurately
link |
the what was called the first Doppler peak
link |
or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.
link |
So the sphere has 44, approximately 44,000 square degrees.
link |
So to cover a sphere, that's a very kind of important
link |
data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere
link |
and you're looking out into the observable universe.
link |
So there's a lot of patches to work with.
link |
Yeah, and in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic
link |
decomposition of spheres and machine learning
link |
in the early 2000s still used today
link |
was created out of this field by data analysts
link |
using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles
link |
called heel picks is what it's called.
link |
And so just stitch all this stuff together
link |
and stitch it together very accurately.
link |
Yeah, get high statistical significance
link |
in order to reduce the statistical errors,
link |
very clean signal and a measurement device
link |
to reduce the systematic errors.
link |
Those are the two predominant sources of error
link |
in any measurement.
link |
Those that can be improved by more and more measurement,
link |
you take more and more measurements to this table,
link |
you'll get slightly better each time,
link |
but you only win as the number of the one
link |
over the square root of the number of measurements,
link |
but the square root of 44,000 is pretty big.
link |
So they were able to get a very accurate measurement.
link |
Again, it's not exactly how they did it.
link |
They also have to do a Fourier analysis,
link |
decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration windows.
link |
There's a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis,
link |
and then comparing that with cosmological parameters,
link |
very simple model, just six different numbers
link |
that go into a model that made a prediction.
link |
And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out.
link |
And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature,
link |
and that was called boomerang.
link |
So he had just come off of this.
link |
Now, let me remind you, who was the first person
link |
to measure the curvature of the earth?
link |
It's a guy named Aristophanes in the whatever,
link |
lived around Aristotle's time.
link |
His name is in the history books.
link |
So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like,
link |
he's like the next Aristophanes.
link |
I just wanted to work for this guy.
link |
He clearly had this brand.
link |
He was about 40 at the time, California
link |
Scientist of the Year.
link |
I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that.
link |
And I knew that he, so I went down to Caltech
link |
to give my job talk.
link |
And he said, I love it.
link |
And before I could even, before he finished the sentence,
link |
I said, I'll take it.
link |
It was too good to be true.
link |
And I started working there at Caltech,
link |
and slowly but surely, because Caltech's
link |
a rich private university, at that time
link |
run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore,
link |
he just wrote us a check.
link |
Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea.
link |
And so we started coming up with the idea for what I later
link |
named BICEP, background imaging cosmic extragalactic
link |
polarization, which is kind of ironic,
link |
because we ended up measuring galactic polarization.
link |
We'll get to that in a minute.
link |
But along the way, the idea was very simple.
link |
We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly
link |
make, which is a refracting telescope.
link |
Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes
link |
Only way forward is making things more complex, right?
link |
And when you make things complex in science,
link |
you introduce the possibility for systematic errors.
link |
And so we wanted to build the cleanest instrument.
link |
Turns out the cleanest instrument
link |
you can build in astronomy is a refracting telescope.
link |
We also had to, unlike that telescope or Galileo's,
link |
we had to use very sensitive detectors that
link |
were cooled less than 1 20th of the temperature
link |
of the cosmic background itself, which
link |
is the coolest temperature in the whole universe.
link |
So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees
link |
Kelvin above absolute zero.
link |
To do that, we needed to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber
link |
and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules
link |
and take it to a very, very special place called the South
link |
Pole Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch.
link |
There it is over there.
link |
So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.
link |
As somebody who was born in the Soviet Union,
link |
we obviously like to call it red.
link |
United States Antarctic Program, the National Science
link |
And the base is called the Amundsen Scott South Polar
link |
So it's a little known fact of geopolitics
link |
that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it.
link |
Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica.
link |
You can't use it for military purposes, for mining,
link |
et cetera, et cetera.
link |
But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago,
link |
Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole.
link |
Now, there's no land at the North Pole, right?
link |
So what did he do?
link |
He stuck it in the ocean underneath.
link |
But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica,
link |
which was first reached about 110 years ago,
link |
the first time in human history.
link |
Antarctica means the opposite of the bear.
link |
It means no bears there, basically opposite
link |
of where polar bears are.
link |
Arctic means polar bear.
link |
That's where in the Greek.
link |
I did not know that.
link |
So Antarctica means the opposite place of that.
link |
Humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole,
link |
which is kind of in the middle of the continent.
link |
We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry.
link |
It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas,
link |
and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile.
link |
Those are the two premier places on Earth.
link |
Of course, you'd like to go into space.
link |
There's no water in space.
link |
So it's not about cold.
link |
So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka,
link |
and you could put it in this cup.
link |
And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere
link |
After two minutes, three minutes, the water's boiling.
link |
You can't touch it.
link |
But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to.
link |
Because the mug is totally bone dry.
link |
But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules
link |
because water molecules resonate exactly
link |
at these microwave frequencies.
link |
So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them,
link |
traveling per cubic centimeter from the Big Bang itself
link |
to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's
link |
So you take it to a place with the fewest number
link |
of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area.
link |
And that happens to be either Chile
link |
or my other project, the Simons Observatory, is located.
link |
Or you take it to the South Pole.
link |
We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months
link |
of my life down there.
link |
And it's like being on Hoth.
link |
It's a completely otherworldly environment.
link |
Ice, planar, flat as a pancake.
link |
And the buildings are built up on stilts.
link |
They're built because the snow will otherwise cover them over.
link |
The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away.
link |
If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth,
link |
they yank them before you go down there.
link |
If you have any issues with your appendix,
link |
they'll cut it out of you before you go down there.
link |
The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away,
link |
about 600 miles away.
link |
The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one
link |
of them operating on himself, taking out his own appendix
link |
in the middle of winter by himself.
link |
So harsh conditions.
link |
Science in the harshest of conditions.
link |
On Earth, at least.
link |
And we go to those great lengths because it's
link |
a pristine environment to observe these precious photons.
link |
And we built this telescope.
link |
And it weighs tens of thousands of pounds.
link |
And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot.
link |
I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended.
link |
We have a guy who spends a year of his life down there,
link |
a girl who spends a year of their life down there.
link |
They're called winter overs.
link |
They arrive in sometimes as early as November.
link |
And they don't leave until the following December.
link |
And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000.
link |
You just have to work for one night of your life.
link |
But it's a long night.
link |
And what BICEP is, and I couldn't
link |
bring my polarized sunglasses here,
link |
so I brought these actual polarizers here.
link |
So if you take this and put it in front of your telescope
link |
there, you have now made a polarimeter.
link |
You have made a polarization sensitive telescope.
link |
Now, you may not be able to immediately know
link |
how you would use such a thing.
link |
But one way to think about it, now take this guy
link |
and look at a light, look at a light source.
link |
Put one up to your eye.
link |
And now put the other one in front of it anywhere.
link |
And now rotate them.
link |
What happens to the light source?
link |
Becomes brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.
link |
Yeah, so it's called a quadrupolar pattern, right?
link |
So it's repeating.
link |
It goes bright, dim, bright, dim.
link |
It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical
link |
And that's because of the property of the photon.
link |
The photon is a spin one field.
link |
But the polarization of light is the axis
link |
at which its electric field is oscillating.
link |
Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down.
link |
And so therefore, vertical polarization
link |
is the same as negative vertical polarization.
link |
And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times
link |
for every one physical rotation.
link |
This is like a spin two object.
link |
So now if you put that in front of the telescope,
link |
you can do one of two things.
link |
Now you're polarizing all the light that's
link |
going in because you have one of the polarizers.
link |
And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one.
link |
You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization.
link |
Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here.
link |
There's a crystal.
link |
It's called calcite.
link |
This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman.
link |
This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes
link |
there and tell me what does it look like?
link |
There's a, like I could see everything twice.
link |
It's a double image.
link |
It's a double image.
link |
That is a special crystal that has two different indices
link |
So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink,
link |
And it splits into two different directions.
link |
And it could split even more if I made the crystal give you
link |
my more expensive crystal.
link |
But that's all I have.
link |
What is the crystal with this kind of property called?
link |
It's called calcite.
link |
It's called birefringent crystal.
link |
Refringent means refracting.
link |
So this is a special type of material
link |
that separates light based on its polarization.
link |
It's a pretty clean bi signal.
link |
I'm seeing two very cleanly.
link |
It's very crisp, right.
link |
So that's yours to keep with every time you host me.
link |
Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand.
link |
Put it on top of the crystal, and kind of move it back
link |
This is incredible.
link |
As you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other.
link |
So it's one of the refractions to the other.
link |
So that is now you are analyzing the polarization.
link |
You're confirming the light comes out of the crystal.
link |
Two different types of polarization.
link |
And effectively, what we do is we have those two things,
link |
But working in the microwave, so that's
link |
where the cosmic photons are brightest,
link |
in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum.
link |
And we're coupling that to a refracting telescope.
link |
But your eyes are refracting telescopes.
link |
So you are a polarimeter right now.
link |
The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization.
link |
But otherwise, it mainly detects its intensity of light
link |
That's what we call color and intensity, brightness.
link |
So you're devising an instrument that's
link |
very precisely measuring that polarization.
link |
And doing so in the microwave region with detectors
link |
not made of biological human retina cells,
link |
but of superconductors and things called bolometers.
link |
And this has to be done at temperatures
link |
close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions
link |
one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.
link |
So why is it that this kind of device
link |
could win a Nobel Prize?
link |
So when the CMB was discovered, it
link |
was discovered serendipitously.
link |
There were two radio astronomers working at the time
link |
at Bell Laboratories.
link |
Now, why would Bell Laboratories be
link |
employing radio astronomers?
link |
Bell Laboratories was kind of like Apple,
link |
or it was like a think tank, or it was Google.
link |
Let's say it was like Google.
link |
Google has Google X. It has this thing and that thing, right?
link |
So they were working there.
link |
But imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers.
link |
They were actively recruiting them.
link |
Why would they do that?
link |
Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s,
link |
was the first commercial satellite
link |
launch for communication.
link |
And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone
link |
part of AT&T, the early telephone company,
link |
later invent the first cell phone the year I was born.
link |
And they would take that, 1946, and they
link |
would take that telescope technology
link |
that radio astronomers had developed,
link |
and they would use that to see if they
link |
could improve the signal to noise of the satellites
link |
that they were seeing.
link |
And they found they couldn't.
link |
They found that they could not improve the signal to noise
link |
ratio of the first telecommunication satellite.
link |
It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem.
link |
They were bouncing signals from the West Coast
link |
up to the satellite, bouncing it down,
link |
landing it in New Jersey, of all places,
link |
in northern New Jersey, Holmdell, New Jersey.
link |
And these radio astronomers couldn't get rid of the signal.
link |
So they said, well, New Jersey's not far from New York.
link |
Let's see if the signal's coming from New York.
link |
No, not coming from New York.
link |
Let's see if it changes with the year.
link |
Maybe it's coming from the galaxy,
link |
which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.
link |
So in not being able to reduce the signal
link |
or increase the signal to noise ratio, the noise was not good.
link |
They knew the signal was right.
link |
They couldn't get rid of the noise.
link |
And there was excess noise over the model that
link |
had not only been predicted by them,
link |
but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy
link |
by the name of Edward Ohm.
link |
He measured the same signal, found
link |
that there was this hiss of static, of radio static
link |
that he could not get rid of, that had
link |
a value of about 3 Kelvin.
link |
So you can translate.
link |
Remember I said, if you take a radio telescope
link |
and you point it at an object that's hot,
link |
the radio telescope's detector will
link |
get to the same temperature as the object.
link |
It's a principle of radio thermodynamics.
link |
So it's a really interesting thing.
link |
It's a thermometer.
link |
You can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth.
link |
And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal
link |
not by its intensity, but by its temperature.
link |
So he found, this guy Edward Ohm, oh, there's
link |
this 3 Kelvin signal.
link |
I can't get rid of it.
link |
It must be I did my error analysis wrong.
link |
And I would give him an F if he was one of my first year
link |
But he's just attributed to lack of understanding.
link |
These other guys, Penzias and Wilson,
link |
who are also radio astronomers, they said, no,
link |
let's build another experiment, put that inside
link |
of our telescope, and do what's called calibration.
link |
Inject a known source of signal every second that
link |
has a temperature of about 4 Kelvin,
link |
because the signal they're trying to get rid of
link |
is about 3 Kelvin.
link |
And you want to have it as close as possible
link |
to the pernicious signal as possible.
link |
They did that once a second.
link |
So they got billions of measurements,
link |
millions of measurements over the course
link |
of several months, years, and even,
link |
by the end of, you know, millions of measurements
link |
And they found they couldn't get rid of it either,
link |
but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelvin.
link |
So how does having a 4 Kelvin source,
link |
how does the calibration work, just out of curiosity?
link |
It could be larger.
link |
Imagine like you're trying to calibrate the microphone.
link |
Like you could do it with like a really loud sound,
link |
but the gain would start to compress.
link |
So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector
link |
in every experiment that I've ever worked on.
link |
And they only have a linear region over a very small region.
link |
And you want to keep it as linear as possible.
link |
That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of it,
link |
you're trying to compare like a voice,
link |
and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine,
link |
it's not going to be as easy on the amplifiers
link |
as getting a slightly loud gong or something, you know.
link |
So the idea of the noise is present in both?
link |
There's noise present in both.
link |
And you measure, what they did is
link |
they made a separate measurement just
link |
of the calibration system, which they measured
link |
exactly very well.
link |
4 Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium.
link |
That's a temperature that's not going to change.
link |
And it's certainly not going to change
link |
over a time scale of one second.
link |
And so they could compare unknown signal,
link |
known signal, unknown signal, known signal,
link |
like a scale, like a balance.
link |
So another way to think about it is like this.
link |
You've seen these Libra kind of balances,
link |
where you put two weights in a pan, right?
link |
What happens if you put like a one ounce weight on one side
link |
and a 20 kilogram weight in the other?
link |
You don't get any measurement, right?
link |
You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight.
link |
That's why they use 4 Kelvin.
link |
Got it, but just to linger on the fact
link |
that there's a romantic element to the fact
link |
that you're arriving at the same temperature.
link |
That's kind of fascinating.
link |
And you measuring stuff in terms of,
link |
you're measuring signal in terms of temperature
link |
So you get to, I mean, there's something
link |
about temperature that's intimate.
link |
Yeah, especially since, you know, all life
link |
is basically, you know, conversion of energy
link |
and trying to control entropy,
link |
which is then related to thermodynamics
link |
exactly in that way.
link |
And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science
link |
because they weren't looking for the signal.
link |
They found it accidentally,
link |
these two scientists, Penzias and Wilson.
link |
And I like to think that those kinds of discoveries
link |
are the purest in science.
link |
Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said,
link |
like the most important reaction as a scientist is not,
link |
Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it.
link |
No, he said, no, he said like, that's weird.
link |
Like that's a much better reaction
link |
or that's freaking cool.
link |
Like that's a scientist, not like, oh, I found one.
link |
Because if you find what you're gonna find,
link |
that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias,
link |
which is deadly inside, you know,
link |
as close to deadly as possible.
link |
So how does that take us to something
link |
that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?
link |
So Penzias and Wilson weren't looking for a signal.
link |
They ended up discovering the heat leftover
link |
from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera.
link |
And that was a serendipitous discovery.
link |
They won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
link |
It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology.
link |
My reasoning is, what if you could explain
link |
not only how the elements got formed,
link |
but how the whole universe got formed
link |
and kill off every other model of science.
link |
So if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know,
link |
worth his or her salt had told me and Andrew Lang
link |
and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize,
link |
if you could do it.
link |
Because it was really explaining, again,
link |
the stakes of this science is different
link |
than like super fluidity, plasma physics.
link |
When you talk about the origin of the universe,
link |
it ties into everything.
link |
It ties into philosophy, theology.
link |
You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct,
link |
that the Bible can't be correct.
link |
In other words, where the Bible is correct now
link |
isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it.
link |
I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously.
link |
But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning.
link |
What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular?
link |
It would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten
link |
and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament,
link |
if you will, narrative.
link |
So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher.
link |
And again, it's not an offense, because we need plasma physics.
link |
We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics.
link |
We literally use every branch of physics, thermodynamics,
link |
superconductivity, quantum mechanics,
link |
all that goes into our understanding
link |
of the instrument.
link |
And even further, if you want to understand the theory that
link |
predicts the signal that we purport to measure.
link |
So I rationalize that if Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel
link |
Prize for this, if Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel
link |
Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves,
link |
this is decades before LIGO, by me detecting
link |
gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe
link |
began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions
link |
for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which
link |
won the Nobel Prize in 1983.
link |
These are like five Nobel Prizes potentially.
link |
For that reason, it seemed as close
link |
as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk,
link |
to outdo what my father did, to do really this impossible.
link |
And at that time, Lex, again, it sounds weird.
link |
Because people are like, oh, you still want the Nobel Prize.
link |
You're still like greedy.
link |
And look, you wrote another book about it.
link |
And I always joke.
link |
I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite,
link |
just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature.
link |
And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.
link |
Oh, wait, well, we'll get to your current feelings
link |
on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on.
link |
So there's this ambition.
link |
Let's say this device, this kind of signal
link |
could unlock many of the mysteries
link |
about the early universe.
link |
And so there's excitement there.
link |
So let's take it then further.
link |
I mean, there's a human story here of a bit of heartbreak.
link |
Not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize,
link |
if the Nobel Prize was given,
link |
you were excluded from the list of three
link |
that would get the Nobel Prize.
link |
So why were you excluded?
link |
Maybe that's a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.
link |
Yeah, so Bicep 2, like iPhones,
link |
or I know you're an Android fanboy,
link |
but every year, they get a little bit better.
link |
They get more megapixels.
link |
They get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever, OK?
link |
We upgraded our detectors as well.
link |
The initial detectors were based on what
link |
are called semiconductors.
link |
They have certain properties that
link |
make them very difficult to replicate at scale.
link |
And we wanted to make them into superconductors, which
link |
had a virtue that you could then mass produce them.
link |
Why superconductors?
link |
Well, again, we're measuring heat.
link |
So one thing about a superconductor
link |
is that it transitions from some finite resistance
link |
to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature
link |
That means you can use that very short span dependency
link |
as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer.
link |
And so my brilliant colleagues around the world,
link |
in this case, Jamie Bok, and nowadays, Suzanne Staggs
link |
at Princeton, they are just exquisitely
link |
making these sensors, tens of thousands of them.
link |
The initial Bicep 1 instrument, of course,
link |
we just call the Bicep, that only had 98 detectors.
link |
Simon's Observatory is going to have 100 times more just
link |
in one of our four telescopes.
link |
We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating
link |
full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero
link |
in the Atacama Desert.
link |
But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did,
link |
we upgraded and made Bicep 2.
link |
In January 2010, we had just installed
link |
in the exact same location at the South Pole,
link |
in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark
link |
Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating to this very day,
link |
we installed a new receiver on the same platform as before.
link |
It had very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum,
link |
everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors.
link |
So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade.
link |
And it had certain other features
link |
that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor of 5.
link |
And then we started observing with that.
link |
And we knew we'd have years to go,
link |
and maybe we'd never see anything.
link |
Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations
link |
in the fabric of space time produced
link |
close to the origin of the universe as we could ever
link |
So I was playing a role in that.
link |
Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea
link |
that I had had for BICEP along with Andrew Lang.
link |
And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley,
link |
and I got a call from Andrew Lang's,
link |
or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor,
link |
Paul Richards at UC Berkeley.
link |
And he said that Andrew was dead.
link |
He had taken his life by suicide.
link |
And this is a man, and I had already lost my father
link |
at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure
link |
He would give me advice on marriage,
link |
on how I should be with my kids, and what
link |
was the most important way to move
link |
through the academic ladder.
link |
Again, he was predinaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize.
link |
Everyone always thought he would win it.
link |
If he were alive, he still could win it.
link |
In fact, his wife, or his ex wife,
link |
won it, Frances Arnold, in 2018.
link |
And it was this power couple, and it destroyed me
link |
for a long time, because he was just this magical person.
link |
I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life,
link |
even these aspects of raising kids and being married
link |
And to do it in that way, it felt like, again,
link |
he's got kids, and I feel terrible for them, obviously.
link |
But it did feel like a betrayal.
link |
I mean, I'm just being honest with you.
link |
It felt like, why the f did you not reach out?
link |
I thought we were close, and I couldn't.
link |
I told him everything, and I felt
link |
like he had told me everything.
link |
And now he was gone.
link |
And then, inevitably, we had to keep running the instrument.
link |
I mean, there's millions of dollars invested,
link |
careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard.
link |
And then here we were.
link |
And who's going to take over the lead?
link |
He was the lead of the project at Caltech.
link |
And then it turned out that the other collaborators,
link |
with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups
link |
and downs with as well, they had decided
link |
to form a collaboration in which I was no longer
link |
the principal investigator.
link |
I was no longer one of the co principal investigators,
link |
as I was on Bicep 1.
link |
So I continued on Bicep 1 as the co leader of it,
link |
but not on Bicep 2.
link |
And obviously, that was pretty painful.
link |
This is all happening at the same time
link |
as you lose this father figure.
link |
Now there's this one betrayal in a way,
link |
and then there's another, or something
link |
that feels like a betrayal.
link |
Yeah, and he had been the only one
link |
looking out for my interest in the new experiment.
link |
I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego,
link |
and there were other postdocs in the mix,
link |
all of whom had come there to work with him
link |
to get the approbation that would then lead
link |
to their careers taking off, as it did for mine.
link |
And so there was a competition.
link |
Science is not free from egos and competition
link |
and desires, rightfully or wrongfully,
link |
for credit and attribution.
link |
Was he the source of strength and confidence
link |
for you as a scientist, as a man?
link |
I mean, we're kind of alone in this world.
link |
When you take on difficult things,
link |
we often kind of grasp at a few folks
link |
that give us strength.
link |
Was he basically your only source of strength
link |
in this whole journey, like primarily
link |
in terms of this close knit?
link |
As a scientist, there were really two.
link |
There was one, this Russian cosmologist,
link |
Alexander Polnareff, who thankfully is very much alive.
link |
He was at Queen Mary University.
link |
He was kind of a theoretical, cosmological father to me.
link |
And then Andrew was this counterpoint
link |
that was teaching me, you need to have a brand as a scientist.
link |
Every scientist has a brand.
link |
And some of them don't protect it.
link |
Some of them don't burnish it.
link |
But some of the skills about being a scientist
link |
we don't teach our students involve,
link |
how do you cultivate a scientific persona?
link |
And he was the exemplar for that,
link |
in addition to being the avuncular father figure type
link |
character that really was the person I would talk to.
link |
I had issues with when I had issues with my own students.
link |
And he would tell me how those were.
link |
And he would tell me his misgivings about people
link |
that he worked with or things in his personal life.
link |
And it was devastating.
link |
But again, who the hell am I?
link |
His kid's lost father.
link |
So I feel guilty talking about it in that sense,
link |
but it's just a reality.
link |
Well, there is something that's not often talked about
link |
is people who collaborate on scientific efforts.
link |
I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't wanna compare,
link |
but sometimes when the collaborations are truly great,
link |
it sounds similar as when veterans talk about
link |
their time serving together.
link |
There's a bond that's formed.
link |
So like comparing family and this kind of thing is,
link |
you know, it's not productive,
link |
but the depth of the bond is nevertheless real
link |
because you're taking on something,
link |
you're taking on the impossible.
link |
You're trying to achieve something,
link |
sort of like there's this darkness,
link |
this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by,
link |
which is what the human condition is.
link |
And you are like grasping at hope
link |
through the tools of science.
link |
And you're doing that together
link |
with like a confidence you probably should not have,
link |
but you're boldly pushing through.
link |
And then for him to take his own life,
link |
can I ask you about this kind of moment that combined,
link |
I don't wanna say betrayal,
link |
but perhaps the feeling of betrayal
link |
that Bicep 2 kind of goes on without you,
link |
even though you're part of it,
link |
you're not part of the leadership group.
link |
Can you describe those low points?
link |
Was there a depression?
link |
Or was there a crumbling of confidence?
link |
Yeah, I mean, it was so wrapped up
link |
with my identity as a person.
link |
You know, like there's only a few different ways
link |
to have identity unless you're unhealthy psychologically.
link |
One of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist
link |
and that sometimes is their primary identity.
link |
Now I've got other husband and father,
link |
but at that time that was my identity.
link |
So to have that kind of taken away,
link |
you know what, it reminded me of being kind of adopted
link |
in a sense like the one who created me
link |
or that I had played a role in my life,
link |
that he abandoned me in the sense,
link |
it felt like these people are abandoning me.
link |
And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy
link |
that you use is like in the war,
link |
they're all working for common good.
link |
It's not like I want to get the most kills.
link |
I compare it more to like a band,
link |
like think about the Beatles and what they did.
link |
And then they ripped apart because of egos, credit,
link |
they had solo careers,
link |
they had relations with their intimates and so forth.
link |
And there it's not only for the common good,
link |
there is more of a zero sum aspect.
link |
Like I would say, science is an infinite game.
link |
You can't win science.
link |
You never get to the, oh, we won science.
link |
And even the Nobel prize, they don't feel like,
link |
They feel like a lot of times they're imposters
link |
However, science is made up of a lot of finite games
link |
where there is only one winner for tenure.
link |
There is only three winners
link |
or only three winners for the Nobel prize.
link |
And because of that, I think it's heterodox
link |
and it's very confusing, especially there's no guide.
link |
I never got a guide how to be a professor,
link |
how to teach, how to lead a research group,
link |
how to deal with the death of an advisor,
link |
how to deal with an unruly graduate student or two.
link |
So we're all like reinventing it,
link |
which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it.
link |
Cause the academic system that I am a part of
link |
and you are a part of is a thousand years old.
link |
Dates back to Bologna, Northern Italy, 1088 or so.
link |
First universities were established.
link |
And very little has changed.
link |
There's some guy or gal scratching a rock
link |
on another piece of rock and lecturing in front.
link |
And there's only one better aspect nowadays
link |
is that back then the students could go on strike
link |
if they didn't like the professor
link |
and then he or she wouldn't get paid.
link |
Probably mostly it was he's back then.
link |
Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced
link |
by tenure, so okay.
link |
But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug
link |
getting pulled out from underneath me
link |
because he was like my consigliore.
link |
He was a guy I sought counsel and counseled me
link |
And I felt like there is no one
link |
who's gonna honor the agreements that we had.
link |
And he was a very soulful person.
link |
He was so much better at being a scientist
link |
than I could ever be.
link |
And just a loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt.
link |
And I thought, oh, it's so sad
link |
cause he could have won the Nobel Prize.
link |
I don't think like that anymore.
link |
First I think about his kids.
link |
Felt at first now there goes my chance
link |
at winning a Nobel Prize.
link |
And hence the title of the book was like,
link |
I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize.
link |
It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize
link |
that have to be done away with.
link |
It's a double entendre.
link |
Like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize
link |
to help science out.
link |
We can talk about that a different time.
link |
But in the context of like now thinking back on it,
link |
that was such a minuscule part of it.
link |
Because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize
link |
or I did win the, or any of us did.
link |
Would that have changed anything?
link |
Would that have brought anything back?
link |
It's so, we say it's like vanity, it's futility.
link |
And I just, for me, the Nobel Prize is like,
link |
I don't wanna say it's like insignificant,
link |
because obviously it has a lot of power
link |
and it has influence.
link |
And I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show.
link |
I'm gonna name drop, okay?
link |
He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery
link |
when he goes on a talk show.
link |
So you see him going on Colbert Report.
link |
You think, oh, they just have a banter.
link |
He's just naturally gifted.
link |
No, he said, no, no, no.
link |
You say that, you're undermining what he does.
link |
What he does is he goes back.
link |
He watches the last month of Colbert Reports
link |
or whatever it's called, late show.
link |
And he says, how long does Steven pause between questions?
link |
How long in the news cycle does he go back?
link |
What topics has he talked about with people similar to me?
link |
So I took Neil and I did that for you.
link |
And I look back, how many times has Lex
link |
mentioned the words Nobel and prize?
link |
And I put it into Google Ngram and out came
link |
exactly the same number of times as show episodes
link |
as of this moment.
link |
So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it is so strange as a symbol
link |
that kind of unites this whole scientific journey, right?
link |
It's so, it's both sad and beautiful
link |
that a little prize, a little award, a medal,
link |
a little plaque, they'll be most likely forgotten
link |
by history completely, some silly list.
link |
It's somehow a catalyst for greatness.
link |
It resulted in you doing your life's work, the dream of it.
link |
Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize?
link |
I can't necessarily counterfactually state
link |
that that would have happened.
link |
So no, it definitely has a place.
link |
And for me, it is valuable to think about it.
link |
But the level of obsession that academics have about it
link |
is really, I think it is almost on balance
link |
becoming unhealthy.
link |
And again, I have no, I make no truck
link |
with the winners of the Nobel Prize.
link |
Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show.
link |
And to think about the one rule,
link |
so by the way, right after the denouement of the story,
link |
which I'll get to in a bit,
link |
how our dreams went down to dust and ashes,
link |
I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
link |
to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.
link |
So like the one that I theoretically
link |
could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually,
link |
they asked me to nominate.
link |
Now imagine if I ask you, Lex,
link |
you say, Brian, instead of me inviting myself on the show,
link |
if you say, Brian, would you like to come
link |
on the Lex Friedman podcast?
link |
I say, you know what, Lex?
link |
You know that guy Rogan?
link |
I think you might know him.
link |
Can you introduce him to me?
link |
Like, do you imagine how that would feel?
link |
Like you'd be like, ah, you know.
link |
So I was asked to nominate the winners.
link |
And the one rule that they say,
link |
of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated,
link |
there's only one rule that they maintained.
link |
In other words, he said one person can win it
link |
for something they discovered in the preceding year
link |
that had the greatest benefit to mankind,
link |
made the world better, right?
link |
None of that was mentioned in the letter.
link |
It said many people can win it, worked on long ago.
link |
They didn't mention anything in the letter to me,
link |
signed by the Secretary General.
link |
Nothing about benefiting mankind.
link |
They said, just one thing, can't nominate yourself.
link |
So none of these guys nominated themselves.
link |
Actually, little known fact,
link |
they sent that exact letter just to you.
link |
That rule was created just for you.
link |
That's called the Keating Correlate, yes, exactly.
link |
Just to like. Good for them.
link |
I mean, in this particular case, of course,
link |
there's some weird technicality or whatever,
link |
but in this particular case,
link |
it's kind of a powerful reminder.
link |
That the Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind
link |
in their stories behind all of that.
link |
Yeah, I mean, here's a good example.
link |
Again, this is my friend, Barry Barash.
link |
He's become like a mentor and a friend.
link |
He wrote the foreword to my book, Into the Impossible.
link |
He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died,
link |
and he admits it, and he said it.
link |
And actually, it's funny with him
link |
because I've heard you talk very rhapsodically
link |
and lovingly and romantically about,
link |
with Harry Kliff and a wonderful podcast with him,
link |
by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is
link |
and how in that we were about to build
link |
the superconducting supercollider right here in Texas,
link |
and it didn't get built and it got canceled by Congress.
link |
And I say to Barry,
link |
that was the best thing that ever happened to you.
link |
And he's like, what the hell are you talking about?
link |
I'm like, if that didn't get canceled,
link |
first of all, even though it did get canceled,
link |
the Europeans went on to build it themselves,
link |
saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars,
link |
and we wouldn't have learned anything
link |
really substantially new as proven by the fact
link |
that as you and Harry talked about,
link |
nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note
link |
has come out, and actually, he's had a recent paper,
link |
but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators
link |
on LHCb experiment that I'm gonna be talking with him about.
link |
But the bottom line is it was really built
link |
to detect the Higgs.
link |
So the SSC, for twice as much money,
link |
would have sucked up Barry's career.
link |
He would have been working on that, maybe not.
link |
And then he would never have worked on LIGO,
link |
and then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize, right?
link |
So you look at counterfactual history.
link |
That's not actually a big stretch, right?
link |
If the SSC had still gone on, he would have worked on it,
link |
because he was one of the primary leaders
link |
of that experiment.
link |
Second thing, imagine the following thing had happened.
link |
They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015,
link |
they detected unequivocal evidence
link |
for the in spiral collision of two massive black holes,
link |
each about 30 times the mass of the sun,
link |
leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar
link |
So one solar mass worth of matter
link |
got massed, got converted to pure gravitational energy.
link |
No light was seen by them.
link |
This particular date, September 14, 2015,
link |
that explosion, because of the miracle of time travel
link |
that telescopes afford us, that actually took place
link |
1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away.
link |
They actually don't know which galaxy it took place in.
link |
Still, then they never will.
link |
If that collision between these two things, which
link |
have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million
link |
years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier,
link |
Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize.
link |
Because it's hilarious to think that there's one
link |
human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant things
link |
A billion, 200 million years ago.
link |
And if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30 days,
link |
because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize
link |
to be announced, they announced the findings in February.
link |
But you have to nominate the winners in January.
link |
So I could have nominated them up until January 30.
link |
But they didn't announce anything,
link |
and there were just rumors.
link |
But the reason that he wouldn't have won it,
link |
because there was another guy who was still alive,
link |
considered to be the founder and father of the three fathers,
link |
Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne, who did win it,
link |
and this third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Drever,
link |
who passed away again.
link |
He was alive in 2016.
link |
He died in the middle of 2017.
link |
And then he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
link |
And here we are, several billion of hairless apes
link |
that strangely wear clothing, celebrated three other clothed
link |
hairless apes with a medal, with one particular element.
link |
And then they made speeches in a particular language
link |
that evolved in a...
link |
Bend down to get those medals in front of another guy
link |
who wears even fancier clothes, who is the king of Sweden.
link |
And then they got some free food afterwards.
link |
They get some reindeer meat, that's right.
link |
Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example,
link |
what happened to you in terms of BICEP2?
link |
I want to kind of speak at a high level
link |
about a particular thing I observed.
link |
So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast.
link |
I just listened to the podcast.
link |
I'm a huge fan of podcasts in general.
link |
And it also coincided with my entry into grad school
link |
and this whole journey of academia.
link |
So grad school, getting my PhD, then going to MIT,
link |
and then Google, and then just looking at this whole world
link |
What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world
link |
is that he celebrates others, like he promotes them.
link |
He gets like genuinely, and I now know this
link |
from just being a friend privately,
link |
he genuinely gets excited by the success of others.
link |
And the contrast of that to how folks in academia
link |
often behave was always really disappointing to me
link |
because the natural, just on a basic human level,
link |
there is an excitement, but the nature of that excitement
link |
is more like I'm happy for my friend,
link |
but I'm really jealous and I want to even outdo them.
link |
I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better.
link |
So that's even for friends.
link |
So there's not a genuine, pure excitement for others.
link |
And then to couple that with just you now
link |
as a host of a popular podcast and all this feeling,
link |
which is like there's not even a willingness
link |
to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others.
link |
People in academia are often best equipped technically
link |
in terms of language to celebrate others.
link |
They understand the beauty, like the full richness
link |
of why the cool idea is as cool as it is.
link |
And they're in the best position to celebrate it.
link |
And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others,
link |
they might end up on the cover of Nature or whatever,
link |
They turn it into zero sum game.
link |
The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me
link |
and many others is that it doesn't have to be that way.
link |
And forget money and all those kinds of things.
link |
I think there's a narrative told that academics are this way
link |
because there's a limited amount of money.
link |
And so they're fighting for this.
link |
I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way.
link |
I think you can have a limited amount of money.
link |
The battle for money happens in the space of proposal.
link |
There's networking, there's private stuff.
link |
Public celebration of others and just actually
link |
just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart
link |
is not have to do anything with money.
link |
It has to do with you having a big ego
link |
and not humbling yourself to the beauty of the journey
link |
that we're all on.
link |
And there's folks like Joe Rogan who in a comedian circles
link |
is also rare, but he inspired all these other comedians
link |
to realize, you know what?
link |
It's great to celebrate each other.
link |
We're promoting each other and therefore the pie grows.
link |
Cause everybody else gets excited about this whole thing
link |
and the pie grows.
link |
Right now the scientists by fighting,
link |
like by not celebrating each other,
link |
are not growing the pie.
link |
And now because of that sort of science becomes
link |
less and less popular.
link |
It's a flywheel and exactly.
link |
No, and I want to point out two things.
link |
One is that I remember you went on Joe's show
link |
maybe a couple of years ago and then he gave you a watch.
link |
He gave you like a Rolex, right?
link |
And I tweeted to you and I think it's Omega, sorry.
link |
The watch that went to the moon,
link |
which we will get to in a bit.
link |
I don't think he could give you what I gave you though,
link |
And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.
link |
And by the way, I also wanted to mention,
link |
because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset.
link |
And you should definitely go on Joe Rogan.
link |
And we had this conversation with him.
link |
Cause I was like, when I was moving to Austin
link |
and had a conversation like, don't you think it's weird?
link |
Like if we have the same guests at the same time
link |
or whatever, he's like, fuck that.
link |
I want you to be more successful than me.
link |
I want, he truly wants everybody like,
link |
especially people close to him to be more successful.
link |
Like there's not even a thought like.
link |
But you know why he does.
link |
And this is what I tweeted to you.
link |
And one of the few things I think you have retweeted
link |
I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody.
link |
And today I wanted that to be me.
link |
No, but the point is he sees in you that same,
link |
grandiosity, that same genuine spirit graciousness.
link |
And I think that's true.
link |
And you do do something very rare.
link |
I don't want to turn this into too much of a love fest,
link |
but I do want to say even back to Andrew,
link |
who I've almost been hagiographic about,
link |
just treating him like a saint.
link |
He said to me the same thing.
link |
And in a moment of peak said like,
link |
Like I have to train these guys and women that work for me
link |
so that they can be better than me,
link |
so that they can go out and compete with me
link |
for the same limited amount of funding from the Fing NSL.
link |
That wasn't his, that wasn't who he was.
link |
That was just an expression,
link |
like I'm doing something which is fundamentally,
link |
but you know what, when you have kids,
link |
hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday.
link |
Cause I think, and I hope we can get to talk
link |
about that later, but part of investment
link |
and part of doing something when you have a kid,
link |
like you can get married.
link |
You can marry someone cause she's rich or he's rich,
link |
or you can marry someone cause they're good looking
link |
or he's good looking.
link |
You can marry for all these different reasons
link |
that are ultimately selfish.
link |
There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish.
link |
Nobody says like, oh, you know what?
link |
I really want this thing that's three feet tall,
link |
that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor,
link |
that wakes me up all hours of the night,
link |
that interferes with my love life.
link |
Nobody says that cause it doesn't benefit you
link |
for months and months.
link |
A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me
link |
and does a lot of my solo videos,
link |
he's having his first kid, he's like, what do I do?
link |
Cause it always gets stupid, I'll catch up on sleep now.
link |
Like, yeah, I'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bank.
link |
Like I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right?
link |
You can't do that, that's stupid.
link |
What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby,
link |
let the mother relax.
link |
Like, in other words, do the things,
link |
and this really relates back to what Aristotle once said.
link |
Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids
link |
more than kids love parents?
link |
As much as you love your dad and your mom,
link |
they still love you more.
link |
And because you love that what you sacrifice for.
link |
I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs.
link |
Some with severe, one of my uncles on the Keating side
link |
had a severe, what they called mental retardation,
link |
now it's probably has a different name.
link |
That, out of the nine other brothers and sisters,
link |
he was their favorite.
link |
Because they had to sacrifice so much for him.
link |
And I think of that, you know, in the small case,
link |
like Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever,
link |
you're gonna mentor someone else.
link |
You love that what you sacrifice for.
link |
Sacrifice is reduction of entropy,
link |
it's storing and investing, and you wanna protect that.
link |
And you know, that to me really speaks to this.
link |
So yeah, I don't hold it against.
link |
But it is true, like scientists are, you know,
link |
when they're described again, they're often said
link |
to be like children, right?
link |
You've heard this description.
link |
They're inquisitive, they're curious, they're passionate.
link |
And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others.
link |
They're jealous, they're petty, they're selfish,
link |
they won't share their ball and they'll go home.
link |
There's no such thing as a single edge sword.
link |
I wish there were, you know,
link |
because we need some more of that
link |
because you gotta dull it up.
link |
But in this case, he, you know,
link |
I think when you have this kind of investment in science,
link |
it's gonna be natural.
link |
But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know,
link |
feed the flames of competition.
link |
You know, I'm like really venerate.
link |
If you go to the homepage of the NSF
link |
or the Department of Energy
link |
or the recently released National Academy of Sciences
link |
future of science for the astronomical sciences
link |
for the next 25 years or more,
link |
they talk about how many Nobel prizes
link |
these different science things could win.
link |
Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB,
link |
B mode polarization, the nice, you know,
link |
that's figure two in this thing.
link |
And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids,
link |
like to young people?
link |
Like that's what you should be doing
link |
so that you win this small, as you said,
link |
this prize given out by one hairless ape
link |
to another wearing a fancier costume using reindeer.
link |
Especially in the case of Nobel prize,
link |
it's only currently given to three people.
link |
At most, which was never one of his stipulate.
link |
He actually said one, he could only give it to one person.
link |
So they change it.
link |
Why did they change it?
link |
I talk about, I speculate.
link |
By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11
link |
about the Nobel prize and it's a fact.
link |
But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting,
link |
like I'm speaking, actually this coming up in December
link |
is that the Nobel prize is given out
link |
on the day of Alfred Nobel's death.
link |
There's a lot of, and they bring in flowers,
link |
not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum,
link |
which is in San Romino in Italy.
link |
It's a lot of like death fascination.
link |
Denial of death features heavily in the Nobel prize
link |
because it's like, what outlives a person?
link |
Well, science can outlive a person.
link |
My father has a theorem named after him.
link |
It's still engraved in many places around the world.
link |
You or I, we can go to different places around the world.
link |
People know who we are based on our publications.
link |
We engrave things, we want to store things,
link |
we want to compress things.
link |
And I think there's something beautiful about that,
link |
but there is a notion of denial of death.
link |
Like there is a notion of what will outlast me,
link |
especially if you're among the many 90 something percent
link |
of members of the National Academy
link |
don't believe in an active faith and a creator and a God.
link |
And science can substitute for that,
link |
but it's not ultimately as fulfilling.
link |
I just, I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way
link |
even practicing, but not believing in a religion
link |
can fulfill a person.
link |
So, which is interesting
link |
because you do bring up Ernest Becker
link |
and the denial of death in losing the Nobel prize book.
link |
And there is a sense in which that's probably in part
link |
at the core of this, especially later dream
link |
of the Nobel prize or a prize of recognition.
link |
I've interacted with a few or a large number of scientists
link |
that are getting up in age.
link |
And there is the feeling of real pride of happiness in them
link |
from winning awards and getting certain recognitions.
link |
And I probably at the core of that is a kind of a mortality
link |
or a kind of desire for mortality.
link |
And that was always off putting to me as opposed to,
link |
I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it's off putting,
link |
but it just, rather than celebrating the pure joy
link |
of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us,
link |
just the actual exploration of the mysterious for its own sake.
link |
Well, that's what I said, it's like a scientist should,
link |
okay, you have to be careful and not have any physical,
link |
it has to be platonic,
link |
but you can think of scientists and mentor.
link |
I have a chart in the book and in my plaque
link |
made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students.
link |
She's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron.
link |
And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations.
link |
So here I am, 17 levels down, there's a guy,
link |
Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz,
link |
1596 he was born and I'm in this chain.
link |
And I don't know if you know this,
link |
but in the Russian language,
link |
the word scientist means someone who was taught.
link |
I'll say it very simply, one who was taught, right?
link |
So it probably means a guy was taught, right?
link |
No, uchony, no, no, no, it's a person.
link |
Uchony, no, no, no, it's literally someone who was taught.
link |
Someone who was taught, right.
link |
So what does that mean?
link |
To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning.
link |
One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist
link |
because you have to learn from somebody else.
link |
Two, you have to be a teacher, you have to pay it forward.
link |
If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist
link |
in the truest sense.
link |
And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach
link |
and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale.
link |
I'm influencing more than 24 kids I might have
link |
in my graduate class or undergraduate class,
link |
and potentially could reach thousands of people
link |
around the world and make them into scientists themselves.
link |
Because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial.
link |
There is no competition.
link |
There is no zero sum fixed mindset versus growth mindset
link |
because it is an infinite game.
link |
Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings