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

The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USCISD and author of Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible. Plus he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called into the Impossible. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Brian Keating. As an experimental physicist, what do you think is the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device you've ever worked with or humans have ever built? Maybe for now, let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic extra galactic polarization instruments.

Yeah, I'm slightly biased towards that particular.

Instrument, but talk about that in a little bit.

Yeah, but certainly the telescope to me is a lever that has literally moved the Earth throughout history.

So the OG telescope.

The OG telescope, yeah, the one invented not by Galileo, as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lippershay in, in the Netherlands. And, you know, it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type. And so people, for the first time in history, had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight. So looking at a printed word now we just take it for granted, 12 point font, whatever. And that's what the eye charts are based on. They're just fixed height. But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have perfect vision. And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type. And at that time, people realized, hey, wait, I can't read this. My priest or my friend over here, he can read it. She can read it. I can't read it. What's going on? And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer. And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, you know, two lenses, and go like, let me go like this, and look at that bright thing in the sky over there. Until Galileo. So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of 10. So he 10x'd it, which is almost as good as going from 0 to 1, as going from, you know, 1 to 10. And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a, as a species, because we're using tools not to get food faster or to, you know, preserve, you know, our legacy for the, for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.

Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able to see the star, maybe there was some, some kind of make above the atmosphere, which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars, that we would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there, as opposed to maybe this is an over romanticized notion, but looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival, not being eaten by a bear, lion. If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder what is my place in the universe? You think that's modern humans romanticizing Romantic.

Because they also took this, right? They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at, you know, hairs. And in other words, they made the microscope. And we're still doing that. And so, you know, to have a telescope is, it serves a dual purpose. It's, it's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time. In other words, you see a microscope, you don't think, oh, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know, one nanosecond ago. Light travels one foot per nanosecond. I'm seeing it. No, you don't think about it like that. But when you see something that's happening, you know, on Jupiter, the moon, Andromeda galaxy, you're seeing things, you know, back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti plains. And for that I think that took then the knowledge of, you know, relativity and time travel and so forth. It took that before we could really say, oh, we, we really unlock some cheat codes in the human brain. So I, I think that might be a little too much. But, but nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine? You know, it's like we can look back in time. We see things as they were, not as they are. And that allows us to do many things including speculate about that. But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with someone, radio astronomer. I don't actually look through telescopes very often except, you know, on rare occasions when I, when I take one out to show the kids. But, but a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral. I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it. You're like, all right, it looks cool. It's kind of weird shaped thing, looks like it belongs in sci fi. It's going to blast, you know, the Death Star or whatever. But when you, when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object, if that object fills up, what's called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope, is called its beam. If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor, just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that's looking at, which is pretty amazing. It means you're actually remotely measuring, you're taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever, in effect, and so it's allowing you to basically teleport. And there's no other science that you can really do that, right. If you're an archaeologist. Let me get into my, you know, my time machine and go back and see what was Lucy really like. You know, it's not possible.

So the same thing happens. This is where I've learned about this from March of the Penguins. When the penguins huddle together, they, you know, the body temperature arrives to the same place. So you're doing this remotely. The March of the Penguins, but remote.

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

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

Ah, okay. Usually people preface this by saying, I have a simple question. So you know, you know what happened before the universe began? What happened?

Brian Keating, teaching me about comedy. I have a simple question for you. Let's take two. I have a simple question. What happened at the beginning of our universe? There you go.

All right, good. So when we think about what, what happened, it's more correct, it's more logical, it's more practical to go back in time starting from today. So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today, that's some day, right? I mean, you could translate into some day, right? So on that day, something happened earlier than, than you know, than the, the moment. Exactly. Now let's say we're talking around 1 o'. Clock. So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor. It started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements. After that period of time, you know, going forward, back closer to today, less, you know, 10 minutes earlier. 10 minutes earlier or later rather, coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like. And in fact, all the hydrogen, you know, it's a very good approximation in the water molecules in this bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period. So I would say, you know, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show the Big Bang Theory.

Well done, sir.

You know, most of those light elements besides hydrogen aren't really used in your, you know, and you're encountered. Right, we don't encounter helium that often. Unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pil, a blimp, you don't need lithium, hopefully, you know, but, but other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment. The question became how did the heavier things like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later. And I brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor, and a different type of process explosion as well, called a supernova. However, if you go back to the beyond those first three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable. In other words, going backwards from the first three minutes, as famous Steven Weinberg titled his book, we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over. In other words, we can't speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe. We just don't know enough about that epoch. There are many people, most people, most practicing card carrying cosmologists believe the universe began in what's called the singularity. And we can certainly talk about that. However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe with evidence, and really only occurs in two instantiations, the Big Bang and the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable. And so for that reason there are now flourishing alternatives that say you can actually for the first time ask the question that day, Tuesday, in the first moments of our universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that, 24 hours times seven days before that. That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today. When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one really considered anything besides that Big Bang, that there was a singularity. And people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know. But they would say some future incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer. But now there are people that are saying there is an alternative to the Big Bang and it's not really fringe science as it once was 50, 80 years ago, when these models, by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe. The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten Ra and the temples of Egypt in the third millennium bc. And in that they talked about cyclical universes. So I always joke, you know, that guy, Akhenaten's court, you know, he'd have a pretty high H index right about now because people have been using that cyclical model from Penrose to Paul Steinhardt and Aegis. And right up until this very moment.

Can you maybe explore the possible alternatives to the Big Bang theory?

So there are many alternatives, starting with, so the singularity, quantum cosmologically demanding singularity, origin of the universe. That stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning. Many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles called by Sir Roger Penrose. And they all have things in common, these alternatives, as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation. Inflation is sort of can be thought of as this spark that ignites the hot Big Bang that I said we understood. So it's an earlier condition, but it's still not an initial condition in physics. Imagine I show you a grandfather clock or a pendulum swinging back and forth. You look away for a second, you know, you come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth. Alex, tell me, where did it start? How many cycles is it going to make before the error? You can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions. In a very simple system, like a one dimensional, simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum, think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions. It's a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists that we may not be able to, in the inflationary cosmology, determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.

So you're saying for the pendulum in that epoch, we can't because you can infer things about the pendulum before you show up to the room in our current epoch, Correct?

Right, yeah. So if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating? So that depends on how much energy it got initially, and you can measure Its dissipation, its air resistance. You had infrared camera, you can see it's getting hotter maybe. And you could do some calculations. But to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions. Boundary conditions, we're here on Earth has gravitational field. It's not going to excurse or you know, make excursions, you know, wildly beyond the length of the pendulum. It's not, you know, it has simple properties. So, but this is like, in other words, you can't tell me, you know, when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now? In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now? Now that's a pretty pedestrian example, but what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended. But it says nothing about how it itself took place. And that's really what you're asking me. I mean, you don't really look, you care about like Big Bang, nucleosynthesis and the elements got made and these fusion reactors and the whole universe was a fusion reactor. But like, don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time? And the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the Big Bang. We can't answer that in the context of these alternatives. So you asked me about some of the alternatives. So one is aeon theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose. Another one that's, that's was, was really popular in the 60s and 70s until the discovery of the primary component of my research field, the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB, the 3 Kelvin, all pervasive signal that astronomers detected in 1965, that kind of spelled the death knell in some sense to the, what was called the quasi steady state universe. And and then there was another, a model that kind of came out of that. You hear the word quasi. So it's not steady state. Steady state means always existed. That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe. And most scientists believed in that for, you know, millennia. Basically the universe was eternal, static, unchanging. They couldn't believe that after Hubble. So they had a penned onto it concatenate this, this new feature, that it wasn't steady, it was quasi steady. So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in Volume of space and that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant. But because it was producing more and more every century, as centuries pile up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand. And so that's how they develop slowly, very slowly. And it doesn't match observational evidence. So that. But that is an alternative.

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

He. I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know, if something had a no beginning in time, then it would be very unlikely. We're in like the center of it, or it's bounded, or it has in that case a finite edge to it.

I wonder what he thought about infinity, because that's such an uncomfortable joke.

Is this silly joke. I'm sure you're familiar with his silly joke, right? His silly joke was that there are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe, so.

Well, me saying I'm not aware of the joke is a good example of the joke. It's very meta. Okay, so. All right, sorry, you were saying about quasi. All the alternatives in the quasi steady.

State and the most kind of prominent, promising. Although I hate to say that, you know, people say, like, what's your favorite, you know, alternative? Right.

This is not investment advice.

Inflation is not transitory. It is quasi permanent. So a very prominent.

Sorry to interrupt. We're talking about cosmic inflation. So calm down cryptocurrency folks.

That's right. Although the first Nobel Prize and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind. So most people don't know that inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.

It's a good topic to work on if you want a Nobel Prize. Doesn't matter the field.

Exactly. It's time translation invariant. So when we look at the alternative, that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, these have serious virtues according to some. One of the virtues, to me just as a human, I'm just speaking, you know, as a human. One of the founders of the new version of the, of the cyclic cosmology called, called the bouncing cosmology, is Paul Steinh. He's the Einstein professor of Natural Sciences at Princeton University, you may have heard of it. And he was one of the originators of what was called new inflation. In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation, who now not only has no belief or support for inflation, he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous, Malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society. So here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world, or universe, of cosmologists, such as it is. It's not a huge universe, but they're more podcasters than cosmologists. Some do both. But. But this, this man created this, this theory with collaborators, and now he's like, I joke. I'm like, paul, you're denying paternity. Like you're, you're like a deadbeat dad. Now you're saying, like, inflation is, is bogus. And, but he doesn't just attack. See, this is what's very important about approaching things. As an experimentalist, you got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful. And I think that's a huge service. An experimentalist has to say no. He or she has to be confident to say, like, I don't care if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever. We have to be like exterminators. And nobody likes the exterminator until they need one.

Right?

Or the garbage collectors. Right. But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea. Like, inflation is a beautiful idea, but it also has consequences. And what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science. And in that sense, I can see support for what he does. But none of that detracts from my respect for a man. You know, imagine like, you know, Elon comes up with this, like, really great idea, you know, space, and then he's like, oh, actually, it's not like it's not going to work. And, you know, but like, here's this better idea, and he's like, SpaceX is not going to work, but he's now creating an alternative to it. It's. It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done. Doesn't mean he's right. Doesn't mean I'm going to, like, have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea or I respect the man and his colleague Anna Aegis, who works really hard with him. But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it. And what, what it, it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology. So it takes away 50% of the motivation for A theory of quantum gravity. You've talked a lot about quantum gravity. You talk to people, eminent people on the show. Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything. There is a theory of quantum gravity, but there's, there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.

So that that kind of implicit expectation has to do ultimately with the inflationary theory. So in cosmic inflation, so is that at the core? So, okay, maybe you can speak to what is the negative impacts on society from believing in cosmic inflation.

So, you know, one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation according to its other two patriarchs, you know, considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state. It has to exist in this Hilbert space. And the Hilbert space has certain features. And those features are quantum mechanical, endowed with quantum mechanical properties. And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off. So inflation can get started. But then it's, it's like one of, you know, SpaceX rockets. It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster. Right. It continues the thrusting and you need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion. Which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now spawning an ever increasing set of universes. Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish. And this is known as the multiverse paradigm. It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more we're seeing it in string theory as well. So that, you know, sometimes two, you know, branches coming to the same conclusion is, you know, taken as evidence for its reality.

So one of the negative consequences is it creates phenomena that we can't that are outside the reach of experimental science.

Yeah.

Or is it that the multiverse somehow has a philosophical negative effect on humanity? Like it makes us maybe makes life seem more meaningless. Is that, is that, is that where he's getting at a little bit, or is it not reaching that far?

Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive. The answer is a little both, because in one sense it's meant kind of to explain this fine tuning problem that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly fasund. It has features consistent with our existence. And how could we be otherwise, you know, the sort of weak anthropic principle, on the other hand, a theory that predicts everything, literally everything can be said to predict nothing. Like, if I say, lex, you know, you've been working out, you look like, you know. Yeah, you have been. Yeah, it's great. You look like you're, you know, about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms. Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's horribly imprecise. So what good is that? That's meaningless. I don't contribute any. What's called surprise or reduction in entropy or reduction of your ignorance about the system or you know, exactly how much you weigh. So me telling you that tells you nothing. In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist. There has to be at least one place that we exist. But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity. So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and ML and everything else, that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right? So if I say to you, like, what's bigger, the number of, you know, water molecules in this thing or the number of real numbers? Or if I say, what's bigger, the number of real numbers or rational numbers. There are all different classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be infinity to the infinity power. You know, when you have kids someday, they'll tell you, I love you, infinity. You have to come back, I love you infinity plus one. Right? So. But the human brain can't really contemplate infinity. Let me illustrate that. They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature. Right? So let me ask you a question. Is there anything that you can contemplate in the observed. You know, Einstein's little quip aside, that's infinite. Like a physical property. Density, pressure, temperature, energy, that's infinite. And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it. But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one? You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids. How does it go from, like, to half of infinity? Because that's still infinity. How did it cool down? How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied? So now it's only infinity over two in terms of past life.

Less infinite, more infinite. Yeah, that's one of the biggest troubling things to me about infinity is you can't truly hold it inside our minds. It's a mathematical construct. It doesn't it feels like intuition fails, but nevertheless we use it nonchalantly and then use. Like physicists, they're incredible intuition machines. And then they'll play with this infinity as if they can play with it on the level of intuition as opposed to on the level of math, you know. Yeah, maybe something cyclical. You can imagine infinity just going around the same kind of like a Mobius strip situation. But then the question then arises, how do you make it more or less infinite? Yeah, all of that intuition fails completely.

And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer? Right? It's either some placeholder for infinity or it's one divided by a very. The smallest possible real number that you can represent in the memory.

Well, that's basically my undergraduate study in computer science is how to represent a floating point in a computer. I think I took 17 courses on this topic. It was very useful.

So I came to the right place. But in terms of what a physicist will mean, you're right. I mean, physicists will blithely nonchalantly subtract infinity, you know, renormalization, and do things to get finite answers. And it's, it's, it's miraculous. But, you know, at a certain point you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world? So one of them, you ask, you know what, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless? They purport many of the people that support it, like Andre Linde. In fact, Andre Linde says, you have a bias. You Lex, me, Brian, you have a bias that you believe in a universe, but shouldn't you believe in a multiverse? What evidence do you have that there's not? So he turns it around, whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen, then there's no predictive power within the theory because you can always say, well, this value of the inflationary field did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy for us to detect it with BICEP or Simon's Observatory, whatever. But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen. And that's logically 100% correct. But it's like, it's like kind of chewing, you know, Wonder, Wonder Bread. You know, apologize if they're one of your sponsors, but, you know, Wonder Bread,/flex.com, type in code KLEB. Right. Clip. It's my favorite Russian word. It's like, would you like a piece of.

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

What's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today. And they were completely in hiding. There was no Google they couldn't look up on Scholar. They had nothing. They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved. And only then if they weren't a member of some class, I'm sure, you know, like Jewish scientists. You had a passport. I said Jew on your passport.

Yeah.

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

At the same time, there is interesting incentives in the Soviet system that maybe you can take this tangent for a brief moment. That because there's a dictatorship, authoritarian regime. Throughout the, the history of the 20th century for the Soviet Union, science was prioritized. And because the state prioritized it through the propaganda machines of the news and so on, it actually was really cool to be a scientist. Like you were highly valued in society. Maybe that's a better way to say it. And I, I would say you're saying like, we have it easy now. In that sense, it was kind of beneficial to be a scientist in that society because you were seen as a hero as there's, there's, yeah, there's stoneless hero of the Soviet Republic and that, you know, there's positives to that. I mean, I'm not saying I would take the negatives or the positives, but it is interesting to see a world in which science was highly prized in a capitalist system. Or maybe not capitalist, let's just say the American system. The celebrities are the athletes, the actors and actresses, maybe business leaders, musicians, and the people we elect are sort of lawyers and lawyers. So. So it's interesting to think of a world where science was highly prized, but they had to do that science within the constraints of always having Big brother watching.

It's, yeah, the same in Germany. Germany had, you know, highly prized. I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases is Fritz Haber, who invented the, you know, Haber Bosch process that allowed us to, I don't know. Have you eaten yet? You look, it looks, I mean, I know you fast, intermittent fast every day and you do that, you know, I said club and you got. It's a little drool.

But he says, I'm lifting and I look slim. This amazing. I'm going to clip this out and put it on Tinder. I think that's a website.

You got swipe left or right for that. I don't know. But when you think about like, you know, what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day. He was a German nationalist first and foremost, even though he was a Jew and he personally went to witness the application of ammonia chlorine gas applied during trench warfare in 1916 in battles in Brussels and whatever. And he was, they had a whole conjure of Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, you know, that would go and witness these atrocities. But that was also, they were, they were almost putting science above, I don't want to say human dignity, but, but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented, also called Zyklon B. And so it's just, it's just unbelievable. So I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of science, you know, and listen to science and follow the science, which is more like scientism. And there is still a danger. You know, I always say, just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion. You know, just because you, you, you know, in my case, in, in my books, I, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize. It's kind of like a kosher idol. It's something that you can worship. You know, it doesn't do any harm. And, and we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments because there is a core of America and the Western world in general that does worship and, and really look at science predominantly because it gives us technology. But there's something really cool about that. And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point between, between looking to science for wisdom, which I don't think it has. They're two different words. But, but also recognizing how much good and transformative power maybe our only hope.

Comes from science, you open so many doors because you also bring up our Ernest Becker in that book. So there, there's a lot of elements of religiosity to science and to the Nobel Prize. It's fascinating to explore and we will. And we still haven't finished the discussion of the beginning of the, of the universe, which we'll return to. But now since you open the book. Wow, pun unintended of losing the Nobel Prize. Can you tell me the story of BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, BICEP1 and BICEP2. And then maybe you can talk about BICEP3. But the thing that you cover in your book, the human story of it, what happened. Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And I miss him.

Name drop.

Name drop. Yes. I'm sure there's going to be plenty.

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

So when I talked to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you're. You call yourself an agnostic too. Can you tell me something? Like what, what do you do on Saturday, on Sundays, do you go to church? He's like, no, I don't go to church. And I'm like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien and he was looking down or she, it Z, I don't know. Thing was looking down and I saw Freeman. And on Sundays, like a group of people go to church, but Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church, and those are called atheists. But Freeman calls himself an agnostic. But he does the things that the, like Richard Dawkins, he doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to. Right. So I said, how would you distinguish yourself if not practice? So I'm a behaviorist. I believe you can change your mentality, you can, you can influence your mind, view your bodily, physical actions. So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope. I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church. It was kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York. Maybe we'll get into that, maybe not. But I was just fascinated by these.

Can we get into it for a second?

Okay.

Yeah.

All right, let's go.

All right, let's go there. All right, let's go to Baby Brian or Young Brian.

Young, the new sitcom on cbs, Young Brian, born to two Jewish parents. My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook. He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician, and my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant English major, et cetera. And they raised it, but they were secular. They, they, you know, we'd go to, I always drop. We'd go to, we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year on, on Christmas and Easter. No, no, we would go, yeah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, right? That's the typical two day year Jews. And you know, we'd have, we'd have matzahs once a year in Palm Pass or. And that was about it. And for years I was like that until my parents got divorced. My mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating. My father's name is James Axe. So when she remarried Ray Keating. I was immediately adopted, I'm actually adopted into the Keating family. And he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious. They, you know, did Christmas and Easter. It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had. And I do things with great gusto. Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way. So to me that meant really learning about Christianity, in this case Catholicism. So I was baptized, confirmed, and I said, I want to go all the way. I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

And you're going to be the best altar boy there ever was.

I had like serious skills. You passed that collection basket. I could push people and get them to two extra contributions. But in this case I was 13. I don't know if you remember, you know, when you were 13, but if you extrapolate the next level up, you know, it's like you go graduate student, postdoc professor. The next level up from, you know, confirmation altar boy is priest. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but priests are not entitled to have relations with, with women. And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future casting what life's going to be like for myself if I continue on my path. I found it. Maybe I.

The math is net up.

That's right. There was a serious gap in, in that future. In that future. And instead when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah, you know, as most Jewish boys would be a 12, 13 year old boy, I actually got a telescope and, and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it. It wasn't bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog's looking through. Is that hedgehog?

It's a, it's a hedgehog. Hedgehog in the fog, I should mention. And we'll go one by one these things. You've given me some incredible gifts. Maybe this is a good place to ask about the telescope that put some clamps on and let the hedgehogs look and using.

Now you're officially an experimental astrophysicist, by the way.

Why experimentalist versus an engineer?

Because you assembled this telescope, you gave it a mount and you connected it to a very.

Yeah, but there's no experiment going on. It's just engineering for show. It's very shallow. Experimenter is taking it to the next level and actually achieving something here. I just built a thing for show.

Well, that's always a joke. People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist. I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of Universes, actually most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things, you know, it's not actually doing the stroking of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model.

And just like most of robotics is just using Velcro for things, right?

Yeah. It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever. Right. So, telescope.

Yes. This telescope. What's the story of this little telescope?

This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways a symbol of what got me into, you know, what brought me all the blessings I have in my life came from a telescope. And I always advise parents or even people for themselves. You right here, wherever we are. Biggest city on earth. Manhattan, where I was growing up as a 12 year old. Outside of Manhattan, you can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, likes 2 1/2 million light years away from Earth. You can do that with that little thing over there. One that's a little more expensive. Get one that has a mount and, and you can attach now your smartphone. What the hell is that? I wouldn't have known what that was in 1984. And with that you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate. Maybe biology in some sense, but you can experience the physical sensation that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it. Or that Saturn had ears, as he called it. Or that the moon was not crystalline, polished smooth and made of this heavenly substance. The quintessence substance. Right. So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person ever make that discovery? Try doing that with the Higgs boson. You know, get yourself an LHC and smash together, you know, high luminosity, you know, call up Harry Cliff and say, you know, I want to replicate. How did you feel? He didn't feel anything. None of them felt anything. It took years to come out. You can't do it. But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.

That's fascinating. It's almost like maybe, maybe there's another one. Like that is fire.

Yes.

Like when you build a bonfire, like can you actually get it? See, if you use a lighter is, I think if you actually by rubbing sticks together or however you do it without any of the modern tools, that's probably what that's like.

Yeah.

And then you get to experience the magic of it of what, like early humans, Homo sapiens.

Yeah. Feel what OG felt When he did.

It that first time, by the way. Is this a gift?

This is a gift. Of course. You need a little bit of a swag upgrade, so I got you.

Yeah, this is a. I'm pulling a putin, like, asked if this is a gift, making it very uncomfortable for you. Not really.

This is actually my childhood telescope here.

You know, but now I'm keeping it. That's all right. So looking through this telescope was when your love for science was first born.

Changed my life because not only was I doing that, I was replicating what Galileo did, but I was, and I'm 100, not comparing myself to Galileo. Galileo, okay, if there's any confusion out there, but I did replicate exactly what he did. And I was like, holy crap, this is weird. Let me write it down. So it had another effect, which all good scientists, budding scientists should do and all parents should do. Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it, write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it's going to be. Not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel? Better yet. Astronomy is a visual science Sketch. What you see. The Lagoon Nebula, the Pleiades, seven sisters. You can see them anywhere on Earth. And when you do that again, you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain, as I understand it, and you're connecting them through your fingertips. You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down. Then you do research, Right? The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, is do something new. And that's why we call it research. And not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia. And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks. It's unbelievable. And now he can do even better because you got share it on Instagram or whatever. And you can, by doing so, have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist and do so viscerally. You know, I, I often say I was taught this by my. My English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins in ninth grade, that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into. Let me pour in some facts. Intellects. And, you know, it's not like machine learning. You're showing like billions of cats or, you know, you're not like forcing it in, you're bringing it out. Out. It means to pour out of. In Latin, educare. And what more could a teacher Want than to have something that the kid is, like, gushing. No, you're not gonna see.

Like, to inspire the kid. Yes, inspire.

Yeah.

Shout out to Mrs. Tompkins.

Yeah, Mrs. Tompkins. She's watching. Yeah, she's a big fan. Me, she doesn't care for. But you.

Yeah. Excellent. We take those we love for granted. This is in Manhattan.

This is in Westchester County, New York.

Yeah, got it. So, okay, so, but then that's where the dream is born.

Yeah.

But then there is the pragmatic journey of a scientist. So going to university, graduate school, postdoc, and all the way to where you are today. What's. What's, what's that? What are some notable moments in that journey?

So I call that the academic Hunger Games, you know, because it's like you're. You're competing against, like, these people, you know, who are just getting smarter all the time, as you're getting smarter all the time. They want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots. Like, there's fewer slots to get into college than not in high school. There's fewer slots in graduate school. There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc. And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number. You know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego. 400 applicants for one position. It's almost getting impossible. Like, I almost can't conceive of doing what these new brilliant young people applying to become a assistant professor at a state university that they're doing. It takes so much courage to do that. So I went from, you know, this kid in New York thinking I would never be a professional astronomer, a. Because I didn't know any. I'd never seen any. I didn't even know that they existed. And I thought, who the hell's going to pay me to look at the stars? Like, well, they pay me to be like an ice cream taster. Like, it's just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do even if I had the brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did. And then I went to graduate school and. And during graduate school, I had this kind of on again, off again relationship with my father. And I knew that he was a mathematician. He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country. I didn't see him for 15 years. And in that time, I learned a lot about him. And I learned that he had gotten very interested not in pure mathematics, which he had been a number theorist and contributed seminal work on the Fantine equations, which play a role In Turing's work, you may have seen Scene. But anyway, he had become interested, turned completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics. And by that time I was at Brown University and I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter physicist or experimentalist. I never thought I'd be a theorist and I'm not a theorist, so it was pretty prescient and. But it always appealed to me, like, why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old? Like, we often forget about, like those, you know, primitive things about us are probably the most sustainable, durable and resilient attributes of our character. So with my own kids, I look like, what are they interested now when they're young? And it doesn't mean that's what they're going to do. I mean, some of them want to play Fortnite, like professional Fortnite play, which there are. But the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.

Can I ask you, is your father still with us?

No.

Just on a small tangent.

Yeah.

Do you miss him? Do you think about him? Does his mathematical journey reverberate through who you are?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it did in very many ways. And he's been gone for a long time now. Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity. I don't think it's the most limited quantity. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But to go into only the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that we have while we're alive. And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics. For me it was the foundations of the universe and how did it come to be? And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein, really have made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics. But this is an exciting time. The COBE satellite had just released its data that the universe had this anisotropy pattern. Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God and so forth. And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm going to do and what I'm most interested in, but always throughout the house that I wanted to understand. I didn't want to be a wrench monkey. No offense to people that just do.

Experiment and no offense to monkeys.

No offense to monkeys. That's right. This little guy. Sorry, man, but thinking back to what animates me, it's not doing the engineering as much as it is getting the data. But there's a lot of steps. I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw. So I always joke with my theorist friends, you know, call me a closeted theorist. You know, like, I want to be, you know, what they call a guy who hangs out with me? Musicians. A drummer. So I want to be like that for physics, Right. For theoretical physics. I want to be like, the guy doesn't do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.

I love that formulation of a theorist is understanding the source of the signal you're getting. Like, signal is primary. Like, the. The thing you measure is primary. And theory is just the search of explaining how that signal originated. But it's all about the signal. I mean, I see the same search for the human mind and, like, neuroscience in that same kind of way. It's ultimately about the signal. But you kind of hope to understand how that signal originated. That's fascinating. That's. That's such a beautiful way to. To explain experimental physics, because it. It ultimately, at the end of the day, is all about the signal. Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe those two things, the. The neuroscience and the cosmos. Not getting too romantic, but. Yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way, Some fundamental conscious cosmic consciousness. But we're gonna get to that. Yeah, yeah. No, we definitely have to. But getting back to. Yeah, so my origins. So I always say, like. And I want to try this on you. You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm ask you some questions. What's the most important day on the calendar? Don't tell me the date. But what to you. What is your. What's the most important day to you every year?

Do I have to answer or do I have to think about.

No, no answer. Like, you don't tell me the exact date of the count. It could be, like, your mistress's, you know, birthday or whatever.

But I have so many, I lose track, even though I'm single. How does that even make sense?

I know.

Okay, I'm sorry. So I. A day? Like. Like. Like a month and a day? Yeah. I mean, for me would be December 31st.

Yeah. So I was going to say New Year's Eve. New Year's Day, some people say birthday, anniversary, kid's birth. They're usually signifying beginnings and ends. Right. January means the portal between the. God was the portal between the beginning and the end. So you're looking back maybe because you're Russian, like the death side the light side. Looking forward into January, the beginning. Right. So everybody's most important day is usually some beginning or something significant. For me, it was studying. The most significant thing of all is like, when did the universe get born? As I said before, and I didn't think there again, I didn't. I just. There was some mental obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get past because I didn't think, like anybody does it. Like, I knew astronomers knew these answers. Like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion years old. Now we know it's 13.5, 13.872 billion years old. It's incredible, the five digit, you know, per significant.

What is it again?

13 point, 13.872 billion years. 872 million.

So is there a lot of plus or minus on that? Is it. What are the error bars on that?

For me, I'm 50, so it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old I am.

Yeah.

Half a percent percent level accuracy.

There's a confidence behind that?

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a significance.

Yeah.

No, it's extremely well measured. I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have. In contrast to, again, 25 years ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old. But there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be, as they are, about 12 billion years old or in the universe that were 12 billion. So that would be like you being older than your father. It was embarrassing.

Can we actually take a tangent? On a tangent, on a tangent, on a tangent? How old is the universe? Can you dig in onto this number? How do we know currently with those, I guess you said five, four or five significant digits.

So we can come about it from two different ways. One, basically, they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units. It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed. And what is the speed you're measuring? Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away. So a Galaxy at 1 megaparsec, this isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects. But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away, it would say that that galaxy is moving 72 km per second away from you. And every Galaxy, except for the local, very most local group surrounding us. Maybe a half a dozen galaxies out of 52. Sorry, sorry. Out of 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies. So 12, 12 out of that number are moving towards us, the rest are moving away from us. So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other? All those galaxies now, they're really far apart. We know how fast they're moving away. It's a very simple algebra problem to solve. When were they touching? That's where you get that number from.

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

Ignore the 12.

Yep, and then ignore the 12 and then look at the others and. Yeah, then solve the algebra problem. How does the stuff in the beginning, the mystery of that beginning epoch change this calculation of very little, because actually.

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

Okay, so let me. It appears that the universe is bigger than it is older. How does that make sense?

Oh, oh, yeah. So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe. Naively, you would say that the. So you're right. If the universe were static, if the universe came into existence, and you can conceive of this, the universe came into a Big Bang in a fixed universe. So the universe just started off. Those galaxies were, you know, they could be moving towards us, away from us. Who knows that? You could say, I can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years, times the speed of light. That would be true. But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe. So imagine there was some very distant past, we were near a galaxy, it's going to produce some light, and that galaxy is going to be moving away from us. The light's going to be getting more and more red, shifted, as it's called. It's going to be moving farther and farther away from us as time goes on, There'll be some acceleration. As we get into the era of dark energy, the light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will, from which represents all the events that we could have received information from. We can't currently communicate with. With that galaxy. It sent us some light and now it's moving away and it sent us some light. And because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like. The photons are being participating in the expansion of the universe. That's why they're red shifting that we can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing. And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years with no sign of slowing down yet, which is a huge surprise. Serendipity as surprise that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us. So we can see, let's call the age of the universe 15 billion years. Just to make the math simple, we see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction. And we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction, Just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away. So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We don't know. Some conjecture. There's not only one, there's an infinite number of them.

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

So like it's gonna be like Annie hall, like with Alvy Singer.

I grew up in the Soviet Union. We watched propaganda.

I realized that. You did? Yes.

So there's a famous kind of.

What is the propagandist movie with Woody Allen? Certainly canceled, but. But nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet, he made a movie called Annie hall in which as a. It's a self depiction. He's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David. Neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore. He refuses to do his homework. His mother says, why? Because the universe is expanding and it keeps on expanding. Everything will rip apart and we'll never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless. I assume these are some of the topics we're gon to. And she goes, what are you talking about? We're in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. And that's true. Brooklyn is not expanding. The solar system is not expanding. Oftentimes I get asked what is the universe expanding into? That's one of my favorite questions. What is it expanding into? And I say it's actually an easy question. If you think about it. You've seen your friend Elon. He goes out in space. He's got a rocket, right? What's outside of the rocket? If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, it go outside the rocket, you know, sipping some tang, screw on the COVID of it. What's in there? Is it empty?

That's just semantics, I guess. Yeah.

No, it's definitely not empty.

So you step outside the rocket.

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

And there's no more liquid in it.

There's no more liquid in it. No, it's just a container. One cubic centimeter. Let's make it simple. One cubic centimeter of box, and you take it out into space outside the Falcon, whatever. Right? Yeah. What's inside that box? It's not empty. There's actually, I'm going to say this is going to set your friends. There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave background inside that box at any second.

Okay. All right, hold on a second. What? 420. That's. I've heard of that number before. All right, let's.

It used to be 69, but then they changed. Wow.

Physics works in mysterious ways.

In the millimeter box is 69.

What. What are we talking about here? What, what's in. What's. What's in the box?

I'm going to get. That's right. Let's think outside the box. Now. We're thinking inside the box. So if you have. Every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the Big Bang. Dark matter particles. There's a little ordinary matter in the universe. And every cubic centimeter there's some probability to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera. There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter. Now just imagine how many c centimeters there are in the universe. It's enormous. That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe. It's a very rich universe. But now let's zoom in on that box. So now inside that box, there might be, you know, one. Let's. Let's say there might be one ordinary matter like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton. There might be a couple. Some. Couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be a couple hundred photons. As I said, 420. What's between those guys? What's between the protons? And the neutrinos and the photons like just zoom into a cubic micron. Now like imagine 420 things inside a box this big. It's actually pretty empty. Like they're zipping around in there. Right. So between them there's a lot of empty space.

And this is outside the kind of physics based models of fields and all those kinds of things. Just like, just asking the question of like what is this empty ness?

What is this particle content in the universe? In every cubic centimeter of the universe.

Outside of the 420. So you have the 420 or 20. They have some, you know, they have some mass.

Oh, they have energy.

They don't matter.

Photons, energy. That's why they don't bring suitcases. You know that's true. Right. Photons never bring suitcases with you with them because they're traveling light. See, I don't even get a laugh at you. That's corny dad jokes. Okay. You'll appreciate something.

No, this is pretty good. It's just I'm laughing on the insides. What's in the box? What's the 420, what's between the photons.

That's what space is. That's what the universe is expanding into.

Okay, that's. So that's, that's the notebook.

Yeah.

On which the photons are written. This.

That's beautiful.

But still. Thank you.

Still.

I, I understand this, but it's still uncomfortable that, that if the, the universe is expanding, that this thing is expanding, the, the canvas is expanding. It's very strange because if we were just sitting there still, I guess if we're in Brooklyn, nothing's expanding. So our cognition, our intuition about the world is based on this local fact that we don't get to experience this kind of expansion.

Yeah. And that intuition leads us astray. But you know that gravity is the weakest of the so called four fundamental forces. And yet it has the longest range. Pervasiveness. Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda galaxy at some enormous, enormous rate of speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it. So gravity is enormously long range but incredibly weak. And because of that we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the, as you said, the. Note the, the grid lines on the notebook. Right. Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points. Points, how far they are from each other. And those can change. Those point distances can change over time because of the force of Gravity. So it's weak. And. And what we experience as gravity is the changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear. That's what we experience as gravity. You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barish about bowling ball and a trampoline. And that's almost right, because it's actually, you have to visualize that now in four dimensions, like wrapping a trampoline at every point around object, including on the sides. And, you know, it becomes very hard to visualize. So a lot of people use that. It's also fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity. So it's a little overburdening the analogy, but.

Okay, so you mentioned Barry Bearish wrote the forward to your book.

Yeah.

How do gravitational waves fit into all this? How do they. On the emotional level? How do they make you feel that they're just. Just moving space time?

Yeah. So gravitational waves were the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time. You know, it's this. This. It was discovered twice, indirectly, by two men named Halson Taylor. And that was given my first year of graduate school. The day I entered graduate school almost, they. They announced these two guys won it. And the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age.

Is this in the 40s?

This was. No, this is. That was a joke.

Yeah.

That was good. That was good.

Thank you.

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

And to a tennis player, not on Tinder.

That's right.

All right, sorry.

Gravitational waves do fit in, because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel at the speed of light, that they go through everything. They can go through everything, and that they're directly detectable. We're using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred. So did inflation, the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe. And the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place? There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that. Through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves. Not these old newcomers that Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us. Us, a billion years ago. But we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch. However, those we cannot build a ligo and put it at the Big Bang. So if you want to measure, let's say you have a. The old time firecracker. Let's say there's a firecracker and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you. You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it. And what we're trying to do is hear the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used and his colleagues, but instead using the cmb, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe. We're going to use that as a film, quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves.

Get exposed and hope you can. So what are the challenges there to get enough accuracy to, to for the exposure?

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

And we'll go there. Let me just ask, are you serious about the per cubic millimeter? 4, 20 is the number. Centimeter cubic centimeter. 420 is the number. I wonder if Elon knows this and if he doesn't, he will truly enjoy this.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay, funding secured. Excellent. So, I mean, this takes us to this story of heartbreak, of triumph of that you described in losing the Nobel Prize. So describe what polarization is that you mentioned.

Yeah.

Can you describe what BICEP1 and BICEP2 are? BICEP3, perhaps the instruments that can detect this kind of polarization. What are the challenges? The, the origin story, the whole thing.

Yeah. So. Well, the origin story goes back again to like a father son rivalry. It really does, is my father won all these prizes, awards, etc, but he never won a Nobel Prize. And you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids, you know, oh, I was a football player in high school, I'll show you. And whatever, wrestling, whatever. And some of us could be healthy too, but with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy. Like we would compete. And you know, he was much more of a pure mathematician and I was an experimental physicist. So we had both different ideas and what was worth prioritizing our time But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize, and I knew I could kind of outdo him. So I feel pretty venal and kind of, you know, minuscule, kind of character.

Wise, saying that the only reason you could outdo him is because the Fields model is given every four years and.

Only if you're under 40, which he was.

So he's working under much more limited conditions.

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

You were from the beginning, reaching for the big questions.

That's all I can.

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

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

So then you swung for the fences with BICEP one. What is this?

So BICEP one was born out of kind of interesting circumstances. So I had gone to a Stanford University for a postdoc. So an academic hunger games.

Stanford.

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

No big ideas in your mind. You're planning big experiments, and that was difficult to work with on a small scale for like a postdoc type of situation. Yeah, we have to, you know, publish basic papers, deliver on some basic deadlines for a project, all those kinds of things.

Support your advisors. Paying. She was paying. And so one day I came in and actually involved another friend of mine, astronomer named Jill Tarter, one of the pioneers in the SETI science business of detecting extraterrestrials, which I assume you never like to talk about aliens, so I'm sure we won't get into aliens. But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like, I really want to meet her. Can you introduce me? And she said, no. In fact, you're fired. My. My boss. So I was like, like, this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me. I didn't know where it would lead or what would happen to it. But getting fired from this ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path. I mean literally it brings me here today in that because of that I ended up working for another person in Caltech which is in Pasadena. And she, my original boss, Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor, a man by the name of Andrew La Flying. And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know, like it's like any Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive idea man, not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything, but understood the where things are going decades from now. And he had been involved in an experiment that actually measured the universe was flat, very close to flat, along with a preceding experiment done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators.

So the shape of the universe is flat. Flat.

The geometry of the universe is flat.

How did he do that experiment?

So he used the cosmic microwave background. And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe. So you can measure triangles on Earth. You can actually it's hard to show that the earth is curved, but you can show the earth is curved using triangles, mountaintops, etc if you have an accurate enough protractor.

Allegedly. Yeah, yeah.

God, you, you're like auto canceling. This is great. My ratings are going to go up, man. This is going to be great. Take out the.

If you want actual science, go listen to Brian. If you want all of these conspiracy theories or AKA the truth about flat Earth, listen to me.

So what he used was the following triangle. There are proto galaxy sized objects in the cmb. The cosmic microwave background has these patches. And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of primordial plasma. The soup that constitutes the early universe. It's just hydrogen. It's very simple material, understand hydrogen, electrons and radiation, very simple plasma. Physicists sun understand it. The diameter is one base of the triangle and then the distance of the Earth is the other two legs. So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech and University of Rome and that's other group at Princeton measured the angle, interior angle effectively very very accurately and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.

Can you localize accurately the patches in the CMB? Can you can you know like where they could like trace them back?

Location wise you can know where they are. But more than that, there's so many of these patches, they're about 1 square degree on the sky. The sky you may know a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere. So. So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build a very good statistics. That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it in this experiment called Boomerang, but they did measure very accurately the. What was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.

That's fast. So the sphere has 44. Approximately 44,000 square degrees to cover a sphere. That's a very kind of important data collection thing when you're sitting on a sphere and you're looking out into the. Yeah, into the observable universe. So there's a lot of. There's a lot of patches to work with.

Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning in the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analysts using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles called heel, heel, heel picks is what it's called.

And so just stitch all this stuff together and that's. And stitch it together very accurately.

Yeah. Get high statistical significance in order to reduce these statistical errors. Very clean signal and a measurement device to reduce the systematic errors. Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement. Those that can be improved by more and more measurement. You know, you take more and more measurements of this table, you'll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the number of the one over the square root of the number of measurements. But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big. So they were able to get a very accurate measurement. Again, it's not exactly how they did it. They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that, do a power spectrum filtration windows. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Image analysis and then comparing that with cosmological parameters. Very simple model, just six different numbers that go into a model that made a prediction. And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out. And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature. And that was called boomerang. So he had just come off of this, this. Now let me remind you who is the first person, you know, to measure the curvature of the Earth? It's a guy named Aristophanes in the, you know, whatever lived around Aristotle's time. His name is in the history book. So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like, he's like the next Aristotle Aristophan. Like, I just wanted to work for this guy, you know, he was clearly had this brand. He was about 40 at the time, California Scientist of the Year. I, I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that, that, and I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk and he said, you know, I love it, you got a job. And before I could even, you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take it, you know, like it was too good to be true. And I started working there at Caltech. And slowly but surely, because Caltech's a rich private university at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore, he just wrote us a check. Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea. And so we started coming with the idea for what I later named BICEP back Background imaging, Cosmic Extra Galactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization. We'll get to that in a minute. But along the way, the idea was very simple. We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope, your eyes. You have two refracting telescopes in your head. Only way, you know, forward is making things more complex, right? And when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic errors. And so we want to build the cleanest instrument. Turns out the cleanest instrument you can build in astronomy is a refracting telescope. Telescope. We also had to, unlike that telescope or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors that were cooled less than 1/20 of the temperature of the cosmic background itself, which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe. So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole, Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch. There it is over there. So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.

Bright? Oh, yeah, somebody was born in the Soviet Union. We obviously like to call it Red. United States Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation.

And the base is called the Amundsen Sky Got South Polar Station. So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it. Now there is a treaty in Antarctica. You can't use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't Know if you know. But about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole. There's no land at the North Pole, Right. So what did he do? He stuck it on the ocean underneath. But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica Arctica, which was first reached about 110 years ago. The first time in human history. Antarctica means the opposite of the bear. It means like no bears there. Basically opposite of where polar bears are. Arctic is, means polar bear. That's where in Crete.

I did not know that. Yeah.

So Antarctic means the opposite place of that. So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the middle of the continent. We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry. It turns out the Sahara Desert, desert, San Diego, Texas. There's no place like the South Pole or Chile. Those are the two premier places on Earth. Of course, you'd like to go into space. There's no water in space.

So it's not about cold, it's about dry.

Exactly. So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka and you could put it in this cup, right? And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up. After two minutes, the water's three minutes, the water's boiling. You can't touch it. Take it from me. Don't touch it. But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to. Right. Why? Because the mug is totally bone dry. But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies. So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them traveling per cubic centimeter from the Big Bang itself, to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's atmosphere. So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per per square centimeter of surface area. And that happens to be either Chile or my other project, the Simons Observatory is located. Or you take it to the South Pole. We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there. And it's like being on Hoth, you know, it's like it's a completely otherworldly environment. Ice, planar, flat as a pancake you like. And. And the buildings are built up on stilts. They're built up because the snow will otherwise cover them over. The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away. If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there. If you have any issues with your appendix, they'll cut it out of you before you go down there. The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away, about 600 miles away. The doctors there. There's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself, taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.

So harsh conditions, science, in the harshest of conditions on earth at least.

And we go to those great lengths because it's a pristine environment to observe these precious photons. And we built this telescope and it weighs, you know, tens of thousands of pounds. And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot. I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended. It needed that. We have a guy who spends a year of his life down there, a girl who spends a year of their life down there. They're called winter overs. They arrive in sometimes as early as November, and they don't leave until the following December. And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000. You just have to work for one night of your life, that's all. It's a long night and what bicep is. And I couldn't bring my polarized sunglasses here, so I brought these actual polarizers here. So if you take this and put in front of your telescope there, you have now made a polarimeter, you've made a polarization sensitive telescope. Now, you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way to think about it now take this guy and look at a light. Look at a light source. Put one up to your eye. And now put the other one in front of it anywhere. And now rotate them. What happens to the light source becomes.

Brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer.

Yeah. So that's called a quadrupolar pattern. Right. So it's repeating. It goes bright, dim, bright, dim. It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation.

Wow.

And that's because of the property of the photon. The photon is a spin one field. But the polarization of light is, it's the axis at which its electric field is oscillating. Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down. And so therefore, vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization. And so you get the same pattern as you rotate, rotate two times for every one physical rotation, just like a spin, a spin two object. So now if you put that in front of the telescope, you can do one of two things. Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers. And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one. You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization. Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here. There's a crystal. It's called calcite. This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman. This crystal, put it on top of top of your printed notes there and tell me, what does it look like?

There's like, I could see everything twice.

It's a double image.

It's a double image.

That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction. So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out and it splits into two different directions. And it could split even more if I made the crystal give you my more expensive crystal. But that's all I have.

What is the crystal with this kind of property called?

It's called calcite. This is crystal. Crystal is called birefringent crystal. Bi means 2. Refringent means refracting. So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.

Pretty clean buy signal. Yeah, it's cleanly two. I'm seeing two very cleanly.

It's very crisp. Right. So that's yours to keep with every time you host me. Now, take the polarizer underneath your left hand, put it on top of the crisp crystal, and kind of move it back and forth. What's happening?

Wow, this is incredible. You can switch as you rotate, you switch from one signal to the other. So one of the refractions to the other. Whoa.

So that is. Now you are analyzing the polarization. You are confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization. And effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the microwave. So our detector, that's where the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum. And we're coupling that to a refracting telescope, but your eyes are refracting telescopes, so you are a polarimeter. Right. Now, the human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color. That's what we call color and intensity brightness.

So you're devising an instrument that's very precisely measuring that polarization.

Exactly. And doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human eyes, retina cells, but of superconductors and things called barometers. And this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.

So why is it that this kind of device could win a Nobel Prize.

So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously, there were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories. Now why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers? Bell Laboratories was kind of like, like Apple or, you know, it was like a think tank or, you know, it was Google. Let's say it was like Google. Google has like Google X, it has this thing and that thing, right? So they were working there. But imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers like they were actively recruiting. Why would they do that?

That.

Well, it turns out that was the beginning. In the 1960s was the first commercial satellite launch for communication. And so, so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T and the telephone, early telephone company later invent the first cell phone the year I was born. And they would take that, 1946, and they would take that telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed and they would use that, that to see if they could improve the signal to noise of the satellites that they were seeing. And they found they couldn't. They found that they could not improve the signal noise ratio of the first telecommunications satellite. It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem. And they were bouncing signals from, you know, from the west coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing it in New Jersey, of all places, in northern New Jersey, Homeville, New Jersey. And these radar storms couldn't get rid of the signal. So they said, well, New Jersey's not far from New York. Let's see if the signal is coming from New York. Nope, not coming from New York. Let's see if it changes with the year. Maybe it's coming from the Galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930. Something.

So in the not being able to reduce the signal or increase the signal to noise ratio, the noise was.

They knew the signal was right. They couldn't get rid of the noise. And there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, them, but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ohm. He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static, of radio static that he could not get rid of, that had a value of about 3 Kelvin. So you can translate. Remember I said if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot, the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object. It's a principle of radiothermodynamics. So it's a really interesting thing. It's a thermometer. You can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth. It's amazing. They were. And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity but by its temperature. So he found this guy, Edward Ohm, oh, there's this three Kelvin signal. I can't get rid of it. It must be, I did my error analysis wrong and I would give him an F if he was one of my, you know, first year students, but he's just attributed to lack of understanding. These other guys, Penzias and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said no, let's build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration. Inject a known source of signal every second that has a temperature of about 4 Kelvin. Because the signal that they were trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin. And you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible. They did that once a second. So they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements over the course of several months, years, and even by the end, millions of measurements for sure. And they found they couldn't get rid of it either. But they measured it was exactly 2.7265, you know, degrees Kelvin.

So how does having a four Kelvin source, how does the calibration work?

Is that it could be, it could be larger. Imagine like you're trying to calibrate the microphone. Like you could do it with like a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress. So there are amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that I've ever worked on and they only have a linear region over a very small region region and you want to keep it as linear as possible. That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of, you're trying to compare like a voice and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine. It's not as, it's not going to be as, as easy on the, on the amplifiers as getting, you know, a slightly gong or something, you know.

So the idea of the noise is present in both.

There's noise present in both. And you get, you measure. What they did is they made a separate measurement just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well. 4 Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium. That's a temperature that's not going to change and it's certainly not going to change over the time scale of one second. And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal, unknown signal, known signal Like a scale, like a balance. So another way to think about it is like this. You've seen these Libra kind of balances where you put two weights in a pan. Right. What happens if you put like a 1 ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight? You don't get any measurement.

Right.

You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight. That's why they use 4 kelvin.

Got it. But just to linger on the fact that there's a romantic element to the fact that you're arriving at the same temperature, that's kind of fascinating. And you're measuring stuff in terms of, you're measuring signal in terms of temperature at the source.

Yeah.

So you get to. I mean, there's something about temperature that's intimate. Yeah, it's cool.

Yeah. Especially since, you know, all life is basically, you know, conversion of energy and trying to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics. Exactly. In that way. And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't looking for the signal, they found it accidentally. These two scientists, Penzias and Wilson, and I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science. Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like, the most important reaction as a scientist is not eureka, which means in Greek, as you know, I have found it. No, he said, no, he said, like, that's weird. Like that's a much better reaction. Or that's freaking cool. Like, that's a science scientist. Not like, oh, I found one because.

Surprise. Yeah, yeah.

Because if you find what you're going to find, that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias, which is deadly, and so, you know, as close to deadly as possible.

So how does that take us to something that's potentially worthy of a Nobel Prize?

Ah, so Penzance and Wilson weren't looking for a signal. They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen. It's. Etc. And that was a serendipitous discovery. They won the Nobel Prize in 1978. It was the first one ever awarded in cosmology. My reasoning is, what if you could explain not only how the elements got formed, but how the whole universe got formed and kill off every other model of science. So if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt had told me and Andrew Lang and, and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize. If you could do, do it. Because it was really explaining again, the stakes of this science is different than like super fluidity, plasma physics. When you talk about the origin of the universe, it ties into everything. It ties into philosophy, theology. You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct, that the Bible can't be correct. In other words, the Bible is correct now, isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it. I'm not. I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously, but the Bible speaks of a singular beginning. What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular? It was. It would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative. So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher. And again, it's not an offense because we need plasma physics. We need, we need every type of physics, except maybe biophysics. Like, we literally use every branch of physics and thermodynamics, superconductivity, quantum mechanics, all that goes into our understanding of the instrument and even further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we purport to measure. So I real, I rationalize that if Pensies and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before ligo by me detecting gravitational waves, indirectly detecting how the universe began detecting the origin of the input, initial conditions for the big Bang, nucleosynthesis, which won the Nobel Prize in 1983. These are like five Nobel Prizes, you know, potentially, for that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk to outdo what my father did to do, you know, really this impossible. And at that time, Lex, you know, again, I'm, you know, it sounds weird because people are like, oh, you wouldn't, you know, you, you don't really. You still want the Nobel Prize. You're still like, reading and look, you wrote another book. But, and I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in Literature, you know, and if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite. But wait, well, we'll get to your.

Current feelings on the Nobel Prize in terms of hypocrite and so on. But so there's this ambition, let's say this device, this kind of signal could unlock many of the mysteries about the early universe. And so there's excitement there, there. So let's take it then further. I mean, there's a human story Here of a bit of heartbreak. Not only was this possibly worth a Nobel Prize, if the Nobel Prize was given, you were excluded from the list of three that would get the Nobel Prize. So why were you excluded? Maybe that's a place to tell the story of Bicep 2.

Yeah. So Bicep 2, like you know, iPhones, or I know you're an Android fanboy, but you know, every year they get a little bit better. They get more mega pay pixels, they get more optics, xxx, zoom, whatever. Okay, right. We upgraded our detectors as well. The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors. They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale. And we wanted to make them into. Into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them. Why superconductors? Well, again, we're measuring heat. So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range. That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer. And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case Jamie Bach and nowadays Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, they are just exquisitely making these sensors, tens of thousands of them. The initial BICEP1 instrument, of course, we just call it BICEP that only had 98 detectors. Simon's observatory is going to have 100 times more. Just in one of our four telescopes, we're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero in the Atacama Desert. We'll get there. But in the case of the getting Back to what Bicep did, we upgraded made Bicep 2. In January 2010 10, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory DSL still operating to this very day. We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before. Has very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum, everything except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors. Detectors. So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade. And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful but than just a naive factor of five. And then we started observing with that and we knew we'd have years to go and maybe we'd never see anything again. We're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of spacetime produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to. So I was playing a role in that obviously it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for about BICEP with, along with Andrew Lang. And In January of 2010, we were. I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley and I got a call from Andrew Lang's or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor, Paul Richards at UC Berkeley, and he said that Andrew is dead. He had taken his life by suicide. And this is a man. And I had already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure to me. Andrew. He would give me. Me advice on marriage, on like, how I should be with my kids and. And you know, what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder again. He was preternaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize. Everyone always thought he would win it. Still, you know, if he were alive, he still could win it. In fact, his wife or his ex wife won it. Frances Arnold in 2018. And, you know, it's a power couple. And it destroyed me for a long time time because, you know, he was. He was just this magical person. I mean, I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like, you know, these, these aspects of, of raising kids and being married without him. And to do it in that way, it felt like, again, I'm not, you know, he's got kids and I feel terrible for, for them, obviously, but it did feel like a betrayal. I mean, I'm just being honest with you. It felt like, why the f. Did you not reach out? You know, I thought we were close and I couldn't, you know, I told him everything and I felt like he had told me everything and now he was gone. And then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument. I mean, there's millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard. And then here we were and like, who's going to take over the lead? He was the lead of the project at Caltech. And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well, well, they had, you know, decided to form a collaboration in which I was no longer the principal investigator. I was no longer one of the co. Principal investigators as I was on BICEP1. So I continue on BICEP1 as the co leader of it, but not on BICEP2. And you know, obviously that was pretty painful.

This is all happening at the same time as you. As you lose this father figure, now there's this Kind of this one betrayal in this, in a way, and then there's another or something that feels like a betrayal.

Yeah. And he had, you know, kind of been the one, the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment. I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego and there were other postdocs in the mix, all of whom had come there to work with him to get the, you know, the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off, as it did for mine. And, you know, so there was a competition. I mean, science is not free from egos and, and competition and desires, rightfully or wrongfully, for credit and attribution.

Was he the source of strength and confidence for you as a scientist, as a man? I mean, we're kind of alone in this world. When you take on difficult things, we often kind of grasp at a few folks that give us strength. We'll see. You're basically your only source of strength in this whole journey. Journey primarily in terms of this close.

Knit as a scientist. There were really two. There was one, this Russian cosmologist, Alexander Polnarev, who thankfully is very much alive. It was at Queen Mary University, now he's retired. He was kind of a theoretical cosmological father to me. And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me, you need to have a brand as a scientist. Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it, some of them don't burnish it. But some of the skills about being a scientist we don't teach our students involve how do you cultivate a scientific Persona. And he was the exemplar for that. In addition to being the avuncular father figure type character that really was the person I would talk to. I had issues with, when I had issues with my own students. And he would tell me how those were and he would tell me his misgivings about people that he worked with or things in his pocket, personal life. And it was, it was, it was devastating. But again, like, who the hell am I? I'm not his kid. You know, he, his kids lost father. You know, it's so. I feel guilty talking about it in that sense, but it's just a reality, you know.

Well, there is something that's not often talked about is people who collaborate on scientific efforts. I mean, that's, I don't, again, don't want to compare. But you know, it's, it's sometimes when the collaborations are truly grand, great. It sounds similar as when veterans talk about their time serving together. There's there's a bond that's formed. So like comparing family and this kind of thing is, you know, it. It is not productive, but the depth of the bond is. Is nevertheless real because you're taking on something. You're taking on the impossible possible. You're trying to achieve something sort of like there's this darkness, this fog of mystery that we're all surrounded by, which is what the human condition is. And you are like grasping at hope through the tools of science. And you're doing that together with like a confidence you probably should not have, but you're boldly pushing through. And then for him to, to take his own life. Can I ask you about this kind of moment that combined, I don't want to say betrayal, but perhaps the feeling of betrayal, that bicep two kind of goes on without you. Even though you're part of it, you're not part of the leadership group. Can you describe those low points? Was there depression? Was there a crumbling of confidence?

Yeah, I mean it was, it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person, you know, like there's only a few different ways to have identity. And you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically, one of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist and that sometimes is their primary identity. Now I've got other, you know, I'm a husband and father, but. But, you know, at that time that was my identity. So to have that kind of taken away, it, you know what it reminded me of being, you know, kind of adopted in a sense. Like my, like the one who created me or that I had played, you know, played a role in my life, that he abandoned me in the sense it felt like these people are abandoning me. And the only thing I correct about the analogy that you use is like in Millet, in the war, they're all working, you know, for common good. It's not like I want to be and get the most kills or I compare it more to like a band like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did. And then they like, you know, they ripped apart because of egos credit. They had solo careers, they had, you know, relations of their intimates and so forth. And. And there it's not only for the common good. There is more of a zero sum aspect. Like I always say, science is not. Science is an infinite game. You can't win science. You never get to the, oh, we won science. And even the Nobel Prize. They don't feel like, oh, we're done. They feel like a Lot of times they're imposters even to that. That day. However, science is made up of a lot of, lot of lot of finite games where there is only one winner for tenure, there is only three winner. Are only three winners for the Nobel Prize. And because of that, I think it's heterodox and it's very confusing. Especially there's no guide. I never got a guide how to be a professor, how to teach, how to lead a research group, how to deal with the death of an advisor, how to deal with an unreally graduate student or two, you know, so we're all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it, because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old. Dates back to bologna, northern Italy, 1088 or so first universities were established and, you know, very little has changed. There's some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece of rock and, you know, lecturing in front. And there's only one better aspect nowadays is that back then, then the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor and then he or she wouldn't get paid. Probably mostly it was he's back then. Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced by 10 years. Okay, but no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me because, you know, here's the. He was like my consigliere. He was a guy I, you know, sought counsel and counseled me. And he's dead. And I felt like there is no one who's going to honor, honor the agreements that we had. And he was a very soulful person. He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be. And just the loss for the cosmos, it just really hurt. And you know, I thought, oh, like, you know, it's so sad because he could have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think like that anymore. First I think about his kids. Felt at first. Now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel Prize. And hence the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize Prize. It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with. It's a double entendre. Like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science out. We can talk about that a different time, but in the context of like now thinking back on it, that was such a minuscule part of it because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize, or I did win the. Or, you know, any of us did. Would that have changed anything? Would that brought anything back? It's so, you know, we say it's like vanity. It's futility. And. And. And I just, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize is like. It's. I don't want to say it's, like, insignificant, because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence. And, you know, I went back, I had Neil DeGrasse Tyson on my show. I'm gonna name drop, okay? And he prepares. He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show. So you see him going on Colbert Report, you think, oh, they just have a banter. He's just naturally gifted. No, he said, no, no, no. You say that you're. You're undermining what he does. What he does. He goes back, he watches the last month of Colbert Reports or whatever it's called, Late show, and he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions? How long in the news cycle does he go back? What topics has he talked about with people similar to me? So I took Neil and I did that for you. And I look back. How many times has Lex mentioned the words Nobel and prize? And I put it into Google engram and out camera game. Exactly the same number of times as show notes, show episodes as of this moment. So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.

Yeah. I mean, it is so strange as a symbol that kind of unites this whole scientific journey. Right. Like, it's so. It's both sad and beautiful that a little prize, like a little award, a metal. A little plaque. They'll be most likely forgotten by history completely. Some silly list. It's somehow a catalyst for greatness. It. It resulted in you doing your life's work.

Yeah.

The dream of it.

Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize? You know, I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened. So. No, it definitely happened. Has a place. And for me, you know, it is valuable to think about it. But the level of obsession that that academics have about it is really. I think it is almost unbalanced, becoming unhealthy. And again, I have no. I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel. Obviously. I've, you know, Now I've had 11 on the show, and to think about, you know, like, the one rule. So, by the way, right after the denouement of the story, which I'll get to in a bit, you know, how Our dreams went down to dust and ashes. I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. So, like the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016. Actually, they asked me to nominate. Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say, brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on the show, if you say, brian, would you like to come on the Lex Friedman podcast? I say, you know what, Lex? You know that guy Rogan? I think you might. Can you introduce him to me? You imagine how that would feel, like you'd be like half that. You know, I'm humiliating. So I was asked to nominate the winners. And the one rule that they say, of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they maintained. In other words, he said, one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to mankind, made the world better. Right. None of that was mentioned in the letter. It said, many people can win it for work done long ago. They didn't mention anything in the letter to me, signed by the Secretary General, nothing about benefiting mankind. They said just one thing. Can't nominate yourself. So none of these guys nominated themselves.

Actually, little known fact, they sent that exact letter just to you. That rule was created just for you.

That's called the Keating Correlate. Yes, exactly.

Just to, like, for them, rub it in. That's. I mean, it's. In this particular case, of course, there's like some weird technicality or whatever, but in this particular case, that's kind of a powerful reminder.

Yeah.

The Nobel Prize leaves a lot of people behind.

Yeah.

In that there's stories behind all of that.

Yeah. I mean, here's a good example again, this is my friend Barry Bar. She's become like a mentor and a friend. He wrote the foreword to this, my book, into the Impossible. He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died. And he admits it and he said it. And actually, it's funny with him because I've heard you talk very rhapsodically and loving and romantically with Harry Cliff, and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is and how in that we were about to build this superconducting super collider right here in Texas, this. And it didn't get built, and it got canceled by Congress. And I say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you. And he's like, what the hell are you talking about? I'M like, if that didn't get canceled, first of all, the, even though it did get canceled, the Europeans went on to build it themselves, saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars and we didn't, we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new, as proven by the fact that as you and Harry talked about, nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out. And actually he's had a recent paper, but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators on LHCP experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about. But the bottom line is it was really built to detect the hicks. So the SSC for twice as much money would have sucked up Barry's career and he would have been working on that, maybe not. And then he would never have worked on ligo, and then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize. Right? So you look at counterfactual history, that's not actually a big stretch, right? If the SSE had still gone on, he would have worked that because he was one of the primary leaders of, of that experiment. Second thing, if. Imagine the following thing had happened. They won the Nobel prize because in September 2015 they detected unequivocal evidence for the inspiral collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind. So one solar mass worth of matter got mass got converted to pure gravitational energy energy. No light was seen by them. This particular date, September 15th, September 14th, 2015. Okay, that explosion, because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, they actually don't know which galaxy it took place in still, then they never will. Okay, that if that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other other for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize because it's hilarious to.

Think that there's one human that won the Nobel Prize because two giant things.

Collided a billion 200 million years ago. And if it had happened eight, you know, 18 days, 20 day 30, because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize to be announced. They announced, announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the winners in January. So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything and there were just rumors and so they. He didn't, he. But the reason that he wouldn't have won it because there was another guy who was still alive, considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers. Ray Weiss, who did win it. Kip Thorne, who did win it. And the third gentleman at Caltech named Ron Drever, who passed away again. He was alive in 2016. He died in the middle of 2017. And then he wasn't. And word the Nobel Prize.

And here we are. Several billion of hairless apes that strangely wear clothing celebrated three other clothed hairless apes with a metal. With one particular element. And then they made speeches in a particular language that evolved in bent down.

To get those medals in front of another guy who wears even fancier clothes laws who is the king of Sweden. And.

And then they got some free food afterwards.

Get some reindeer meat. That's right.

Okay, excellent. Since you mentioned Joe Rogan in that little example, what happened to you in terms of bicep too? I want to kind of speak at a high level about a particular thing I observed. So I was a fan of Joe Rogan since he started the podcast. Just listening to the podcast. I'm a huge fan of podcast podcasts in general, and it also coincided with my entry into grad school and this whole journey of academia. So grad school, getting my PhD and going to MIT and then Google and then just looking at this whole world of research. What I really loved about how Joe Rogan approaches the world is that he celebrates others. Like, he promotes them. He gets like genuinely. And I now know this, this from just being a friend privately. He genuinely gets excited by the success of others. And the contrast of that to how folks in academia often behave was always really disappointing to me because the natural. Just on a basic human level, there is an excitement, but the nature of that excitement is more like. Like, I'm happy for my friend, but I'm really jealous. And I want to even outdo them. I want to celebrate them, but I want to do even better. So even that's even for friends.

Yeah.

So there's not a genuine pure excitement for others. And then couple that with just the. You now, as a. As a host of a popular podcast, know this feeling, which is like, there's not even a willingness to celebrate publicly the awesomeness of others. People in academia are often best equipped technically, in terms of language, to celebrate others. They understand the beauty, like the full richness of why the cool idea is as cool as it is, and they're in the best position to celebrate it. And yet there's a feeling that if I celebrate others, they might end up on the COVID of Nature, whatever, whatever, and not me. They turn it into a zero sum game. The reason why I think Rogan has been an inspiration to me and many others is that it doesn't have to be that way. And forget money and all those kinds of things. I think there's a narrative told that academics are this way because there's a limited amount of money, and so they're fighting for this.

I don't.

I don't think that's the reason it's happening this way. I think you can have limited amount of money. The battle for money happens in the space of proposal. There's networking, there's private stuff, public celebration of others. And actually just how you feel in the privacy of your own heart is not have to do anything with money. It has to do with you having a big ego, not humbling yourself, yourself to the beauty of the journey that we're all on. And there's folks like Joe Rogan, who, in the comedian circles is also rare, but he inspired all these other comedians to realize, you know what? It's great to celebrate each other. We're promoting each other, and therefore the pie grows.

Yeah.

Because everybody else gets excited about this whole thing, and the pie grows. Right now, the scientists, by fighting, like, by not celebrating each other, are not growing the pieces. And now because of that sort of size, becomes less and less popular.

Flywheel and. Exactly. No. And I want to point out two things. One is that I remember you went on Joe's show maybe a couple of years ago, and then he gave you a watch. He gave you, like, a Rolex, right? Yeah. And I tweeted to you, and I think it's Omega. Omega. Sorry. Okay, fine. The watch that went to the moon, which we will get to in a bit. I don't think he could give you what I gave you, though, by the way. And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.

And by the way, I also wanted to mention, because when you said Joe Rogan, I would not be upset and you should definitely go on. Joe Rogan and I, we had this conversation with him.

Yeah.

Because I was like, when I was so moving to Austin and had a conversation, like, don't you think it's weird, like, if we have the same guests the same time or whatever? He's like, fuck that. I want you to be more successful than me. I want.

He.

He truly wants everybody, like, especially people close to him, to be more successful. Like, there's not even a thought, like.

But you know why he does. And this is what I tweeted to you and one of the few things I think you have retweeted that I sent you, I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody. And today I wanted that to be me. No, no, Joe's Omega. No, but, but the point is, he sees in you that same, you know, grandiosity, that same genuine spirit, graciousness. And I think that's true. I mean, you do do something very rare, I don't think turn us into too much of a love fest. But I do want to say, even back to Andrew, you know, who I've almost been hagiographic about, you know, just treating him like a saint, he said to me the same thing in a moment of peak. Said like, God damn it. Like, I have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me, so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the effing nsf. You know, that wasn't his. That wasn't who he was. Was. That was just an expression like, I am doing something which is fundamentally. But you know what? When you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday. Because I think, and I hope we can get to talk about that later. But part of investment and part of doing something with when you have a kid, like, you can get married, you can marry someone because she's rich or he's rich, or you can marry someone because they're good looking or he's good looking. You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish. There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish. Nobody says, like, oh, you know what? I really want this thing that's three feet tall, that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor, that wakes me up all hours of the night, that interferes with my love life. Nobody says that because it doesn't benefit you. For months and months, a friend of mine who actually does the videos for me and does a lot of my solo videos, he's having his first kid. He's like, what do I do? Because he always gets stupid advice. Oh, catch up on sleep now I'm going to store sleep in my sleep bank. I don't think Huberman and you talked about that. You can't do that. That's stupid. What you can do, give the kid a bath, feed the baby, let the mother relax. Like, in other words, do the things. And, and this really relates back to what Aristotle once. Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids more Than kids love parents as much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more. And because you love that which you sacrifice for, Here's a proof. I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs. Some, some with severe. My one of my uncles, the Keating side, had severe, what they called mental retardation. Now it's probably has a different name that out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite because they had to sacrifice so much for him. And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever, you're going to mentor someone you love. That which you sacrifice for sacrifice is reduction of entropy. It's storing and investing. And you want to protect that. And you know that that to me really speaks to this. So you know, I don't hold it against. But it is true. Like scientists are, you know, when they're described again, they're often said to be like children, right? You've heard this description. They're inquisitive, they're curious, they're passionate, they love that. And I'm like, yeah. And they don't play well with others. They're jealous, they're petty, they're selfish, they won't share their ball and they'll go home. There's no such thing as a single edged sword. I wish there were, you know, because we need some more of that because you got to doll it up. But in this case, he, you know, I think when you have this kind of investment in science, it's going to be natural. But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know, feed the flames of competition. You know, like really, if you go to the homepage of the NSF or the Department of Energy or the recently released National Academy of Sciences future of science for the astronomical sciences for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel prizes these different science things could win. Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB B mode polarization, the nice that, you know, that's figure two in this thing. And I'm like, what message does that send to kids, like to young people, people like that's what you should be doing so that you win the small, as you said, this prize given out by one hairless ape to another wearing a fancier costume, eating ranger.

In the case of Nobel Prize, it's only currently given to three people at most.

Which was never one of his stipula, he actually said one. You can only give it to one person. So they change it why do they change it? I talk about speculating the book, by the way. The book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel Prize and it's its effect. But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking, speaking actually this coming up in December, is that as the, the Nobel Prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's death, there's a lot of, and, and, and they bring in flowers not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum, which is in San Marino in Italy. It's a lot of like, death fascination. You know, denial of death features heavily in the Nobel Prize because it's like what outlives a person while science can outlive a person. My father has a theorem named after him. It's still engraved in many places around the world. You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our publications. We engrave things, we want to store things, we want to compress things. And I think there's something beautiful about that. But there is a notion of denial of death, like there is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you're among the many 90 something percent of members of the National Academy don't believe in an active faith in a Creator and a God. And science can substitute for that. But it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing but not believing in a religion can fulfill a person.

Which is interesting because you do bring up Ernest Becker and the denial of death in losing the Nobel Prize book. And there is a sense in which that's probably in part at the core of this especially later dream of the Nobel Prize or a prize or recognition. I've interacted with a few or a large number of scientists that are getting up in age and there is the feeling of real pride, of happiness in them from winning awards and getting certain recognitions. And probably at the core of that is a kind of immortality or a kind of desire for immortality. And that was always off putting to me, as opposed to, I mean, I know it sounds weird to say it's off putting, but it just, rather than celebrating the pure joy of solving the puzzles of the mysteries all around us, just the actual, actual, the actual exploration of the mysterious for its own sake. For its own sake. Yeah.

Well, that's why I said, you know, it's like a scientist should, okay, you have to be careful and not have any, you know, physical, it has to be platonic. But you can think of, of scientists and mentor. I have a chart in the book and in my. A plaque made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students. She's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Baron. And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations. So here I am, 17, you know, levels down. There's a guy, Leibniz. Not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz. 1596, he was born. And I'm in this chain. And I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist means someone who was taught. I'll say it very simply, one who was taught. Right. So it probably means a guy was taught. Right.

No, I can't just be. No, no, it's so, it's. It's literally someone who's taught.

Someone who was taught.

Right. Yeah.

So what does that mean to me? It has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist because you have to learn from somebody else. Two, you have to be a teacher. You have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist in the truest sense. And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than the, you know, 24 kids I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class and potentially could reach thousands of people around the world and make them into scientists themselves, because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition. There is no zero sum fixed mindset versus growth mindset, because it is an infinite game. Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or pre World War I Germany or Imperial Japan. Science celebration celebrated. And we're just making like a nation of scientists. And like, we're not doing it to become multi billionaires or necessarily, you know, for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we had that, you know, sometimes I'm flying, you know, home at night. Like when you fly into la, you literally. It's very rare. You can see like the number 10 million. Like, it's very hard to like, visualize things. You see a brick wall, you ask how many bricks are there? It might be a thousand, two thousand, ten million lights. There's ten million souls. And you can see they're discreet. They're not like the Milky Way all blending together.

Each loss in their own busy lives. Excited, fall in love, afraid of losing their job. All that by the way, people should know that you're a pilot. So you literally mean fly.

Yeah, sometimes they get to do it.

You get to look at the. The. The eye of God perspective on these 10 million, on these millions of.

They're like constellations, but upside down, like the city. It's like a constellation. Hopefully I'll stay, keep the plane the right way up. But when you think about that, like, imagine they're all working together, and imagine, like, you always talk about love, but, like, you don't know. You don't know that they're not worthy of love. Like, so you're looking down on them, and it's just amazing because you think, like, what an amazing creation is man and humans and what can we do? It's. It's phenomenal. It's so exciting. And then I get to do it. You know, it's a job. I say, don't tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free. You know, I love what I do. And. But to think about, like, oh, if my student succeeds, then I'm not. No, it's. It's. It. It is unfortunate that you have experienced it. I've certainly experienced it, and I think there are ways around it. I think it is. It is a vexing problem because people want to, you know, it's very tempting to keep your own kind of, you know, garden fertilized. You know, one thing that's interesting is, like, you know, people are like, why are you doing this thing? And podcasts, and you're supposed to be a, you know, serious scientist leading this huge project and collaborators. And I'm like, well, most of what I do, as I said before, it's. Yeah, for you, it's Velcro. For me, it's like, you know, what is the deal with the. With the safety standards on the truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that allow the concrete truck to. It has nothing to do with the big bang, inflation, the multiverse. God's existence has nothing to do with that. Right? So those are people I say I have to talk to, the people that come on the show. Those are people I want to talk to. And that's super fun. I mean, it's. It's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using. I have some unfair advantages. Right. I'm at a top university. We have people that's affiliated with the Arthur C. Clarke foundation, brilliant scientists coming through. But I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't allow them to teach at scale because they're better teachers than I am.

Let me ask you, interesting, maybe difficult question. Have you ever considered talking on your podcast with the people who would get the Nobel Prize for Bicep 2 if it turned out to be detecting what it is?

Yeah, I mean, I'm still. I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on to. So I should. We should say, like, why we didn't win the Nobel Prize. And then what happened with the group that is now leading it completely, that I'm completely divorced from. In a. In a secular sense. We're friends, you know, we. We see each other, you know, we send each other emails and stuff like. Like that.

I'd love to get their sense of, like, what the. The natural heartbreak built into the whole process of the Nobel Prize. What. What their sense is. I would love to hear an honest, real conversation. I understand your friends.

Yeah, yeah.

There's some hard truth that even friends talk.

Happy? I wrote the book. I mean, I remember one of them, you know, was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? And I mean, a lot of people tell me not to write the book. They said, it's going to give, you know, too much attention to the Nobel Prize. Gonna look like sour grape grapes again. I say, you can prove I have sour grapes or not. Just give me the next prize. No.

So you would. If you get a Nobel Prize for Literature, you would turn it down.

I don't know. It's funny because Sabina Hassenfelder, who is. Who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation, and she's shooing for the Nobel Peace Prize, right? She's so gracious and so she has that. That German, you know, just. Just gentle genteelness.

She's a little too nice for my taste, I would say.

I wish she could really say what she thinks and not. And be snarky on occasion. So she wrote a review of my book when it came out three or four years ago, and she. She said, well, you know, Brian Keating, like, she said, well, it's, you know, it's a good. It's interesting. He talks a lot about cosmology, but, you know, he. They can do whatever the hell they want. And he, you know, presumably has this, you know, problems with it, but it's none of his business, basically. It's a private. And. And at the end, she said, but, you know, if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer and he. Who knows, he could win the Nobel Prize in Life, literature, something I said. And then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny. But anyway, no. So getting back to the guys that we were, you know, kind of collaborate on mes or frenemies, and we're still, look, you know, we don't wish each other active ill. I've visited them. They're welcome to visit me. They have visited me. The thing I have to say is that I just wonder about introspection. Like, for me, literally, I don't. I don't care about the Nobel Prize other than what it can do. Do to, you know, benefit science. But I no longer. I did. But by the way, I did seriously care about how it benefit Brian Keating early on in my career. I'm just totally honest. I don't. I'm not proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now I would hope that people would say, like, okay, the guy is like, you know, it's not. He's obsessed with it. My next book is not about this. It's about something completely different. And, you know, I. I do feel like people lack introspection a lot of times in science. Like, we don't think about why we're doing what we're doing, doing. And I think it comes down to curiosity. One thing about Joe, and again, I've. I've only listened to, like, I have to confess, you know, you're like my father. Now I'm confessing my sins to you, Father Le. Father Friedman. I haven't listened to, like that many of your episodes start to finish. Okay. With our friend, a mutual friend, Eric. I've listened to a bunch recent ones. Einstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein. That's what it is.

I get. I get them with the brother, the.

Brothers Karamazov, the brothers Wines, and a few others. I haven't ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode, but from what I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion. There are a lot of podcasts who have passion. Like, I've been on their show. He has curiosity. He's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it, until he understands it, until he gets it viscerally. And I respect that because, as I say in this more recent book, passion's like, kind of like the, the dopamine hit that gets you started. Like, oh, I'm going to be great. Maybe I could win a Nobel Prize. Like, that's not going to sustain you. The sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity. And what I want to do is convert, you know, as many things as possible to cure to things that I can then. Because actually I've had on, you know, people that, that discuss addiction. And there is an addictive quality to, you know, doing, doing podcasts or whatever, but there's an addictive quality being assigned scientist. And you get to do things that are very specialized in specialized locations with special people paid for by other people who have no freaking idea what you do. I mean, imagine you worked in some, like, some job and you know, Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things. Like when he was, he was one said, like he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it yourself. Then the day he won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him, what'd you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn't be worth it. Nobel Prize. So let's, let's leave aside his inherent contradictions. But, but in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it. But, but you know, what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it. So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way to, to nucleate that. I don't know. Actually, I don't know if it's, if it's like, can you, can you turn someone into us? I used to ask this question all the time, like, can you make someone creative? Like, can you teach someone to be creative? I don't know. Can you teach someone to be curious? I don't know. I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious. Just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altucher, he said it once. He did. They did a study. Kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh. Adults five or six. Five or six. No, I'm trying to get you to laugh, but you're not going. But anyway, no, it's true. So somewhere you lose 30, you know, to 50%.

I'm not into retained, but that's because I'm an adult. No, and then I do remember there's some, some distribution on those studies with the happier adult smile a little more, but still the kids blow them out of the water.

Russia. So can you. Is it. Or should. In other words, should we invest our energy in getting the half life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity for kids, or should we try to reset the, the dopamine hit and then, you know, I don't Know, it's. It's an open question.

Well, I think it goes to David Foster Wallace. The key to life is to be on board. Horrible. I think. I think you could train this kind of thing, which is in every single situation. So, like, which I think is at the. At the core, at least this correlated with curiosity is in every situation, try to find the exciting, the fascinating. Like in every situation, you sitting at the, I don't know, waiting for something at a DMV or something like that. Find something that excites you, like a thing thought. Like, watch people or start to think about, well, I wonder how many people have to go to the DMV every day. And then it's tried to go into the. The pothead mode of thinking, like, wow, isn't this weird that there's a bunch of people that having to get a stamp of approval from the government to drive their cars, and then there's millions of cars driving every day.

How can I do this better? Maybe there's some blockchain and they could like VIN transfer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that is a good.

And then every situation, I think if you rigorously, like, just practice that at a young age, I think you can learn to do that. Because, like, sometimes people, like, ask me for advice and like to do this thing or that thing is. I think you at the core really have to have this muscle of finding the awesomeness in everything. Because if you're able to find the awesomeness in everything, like, whatever journey you take, whatever weird that you take through life is going to be productive. It's going to end up in a. In a. In a great place. So, like, that muscle is at the core of it. And I guess curiosity is central to that. But you didn't win the Nobel Prize. The team of bicep that led the BICEP two didn't win the Nobel Prize because of some space dust.

Dust. That's right. Kick Schmutz.

Which one is the moon? Which one is.

That One's the dust. The space dust?

Yeah. What are we looking at? So why. Why is space dust the. The villain of this whole story?

Well, it's funny, you know, I wrote these books, and I don't know about you, but when you get all these books, I'm sure you get books. People send you books. They always come in these dust jackets. Right. I was always like, what the hell is a dust jack? Like, how much dust is raining down at any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This room is Russian tidiness. But in a normal household, how much Dust is raining down. It's not really. Until I wrote a book and I realized I'm writing a story about the origin of the universe, the prologue to the cosmos. And dust is going to cover this story. It's actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between the cosmological and the astrophysical. So what does that mean? So astrophysics is, broadly speaking, the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena. Cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution, composition of the universe as a whole. But it's not really concerned with stars, galaxies, and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant, the density of the universe, the neutrino content, et cetera, et cetera. So we tend have a tendency to kind of look a little bit. You know, they're like, not all astronomers and astrophysicists are equal. They're all equal, but some are more equal than others. So we have kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein. We're not using, like, you know, Boltzmann. We're thinking of the biggest possible pictures. In so doing, you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people, you know, would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal, we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe, luckily only at 3 degrees Kelvin, approximately. We're using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way. And then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a. In a microwave format, to detect the characteristic twofold symmetry pattern of underrotation. That's the technical way that we undergo it. I mean, there's a lot more to it. But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal. First of all, when you look at the signal signal, the signal, if inflation took place, big if. But if it took place, the signal would be about 1 or 2 parts per billion of the CMB temperature itself. So a few nanokelvin, the CMB is a few kelvin, the signal from these B modes would be a few nanokelvin. It's astonishing to think Penzen Wilson, 1965 measured something that's a billion times times brighter. And that was what, 60 years ago, let's call it 60 years ago, since they discovered it. Moore's Law. You're more expert than that. Let's call it every two years. So you're talking about like two to the 30th power doubling or something like that at that. So let's call it 2 to the 20th or something like that. So that's like only 2 to the 10th is A, as a, as a, as a thousand, right? Correct my math, I'm wrong. To the 20th is a million.

Right.

Two to the 30th is a billion. So we're outpacing Moore's law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos. And they don't have to deal with, you know, on the semiconductor fabric factory in Santa Clara, California, they have to deal with like, you know, meteorites and astronauts and things like coming into the laboratory. It's a clean room, it's pristine. They can control everything about it, right? We can't control the cosmos. And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmooze. Months of failed planets, asteroids, meteoroids, things that didn't coalesce to make either the Earth, the moon, the planet Jupiter or its moons, or get sucked into them and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera. The rest of it is falling. And it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God, chicxulub sized you know, impact or you know, progenitors that will take out all life on Earth. But there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grass brains and then there's a fair number of intermediate sized particles. It turns out this little guy here is, is the end product of a collapsing star that explodes and what's called a supernova, type 2 supernova. So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei. Protons into and, and neutrons into helium nuclei. And then from there it can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, oxygen all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel. Iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier. So the star forms, you know, goes inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun. I don't know. Did you know that's why it's called helium? Yeah, they went there at night and.

Oh, well done.

They went there at night. No. Helium means Helios is the God of the sun. It was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope, like 150 years ago, it wasn't discovered like when oxygen and you know, iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent comer to the pure activity.

The helium came after oxygen.

Oh no, first. First hydrogen forms into helium. So that's the first thing that formed.

Now in terms of discoveries.

Oh yeah, after oxygen. Yeah. I think Priestly and yeah, and others. The Dalton discovered it in the 1700s. No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and called Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. So. But when it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat. In other words, there's heat left over from fusing. As you know, the son of a plasma physicist, you fuse to hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy, plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future and always will be. No, no, hopefully it'll come much sooner than that. In so doing trying to make iron, it takes more energy, doesn't give off enough energy, star collapses, explodes. And what does it spray out into the, you know, cosmic interstellar medium? It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff. Luckily for us, because some of that coalesced and made the core of the Earth onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the Earth formed. And some of that made its way to the crust. The iron made its way to the crust. Some of that your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin molecules. And hemoglobin has iron particles in it. It's quite amazing substance. Without it, you know, we wouldn't have our red blood, we wouldn't exist as we are.

Is this a very long, complicated mom joke?

I've done enough dad jokes. My quota is up. So I'm taking this, this object, you know, seriously. Obviously there's not all of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact, forming planets is very inefficient. And so there's a lot of schmutz left over, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules like iron is used in compass needles, right. They're magnetized and magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for. As if the compass needles get all aligned. That's like the polarization of, of the dust grain. It's like that filter. Polarizing filter. That means light polarized like this will get absorbed and light Polarized, like this will go through. So it's absorbing, it's making 100 polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light source. And that's what happened and what we ended up claiming we on, on March 17th, and I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this. At the Harvard center for Astrophysics, there was an announcement. There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience. And the Bicep 2 team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it. In fact, in the announcement, the first person they mentioned, besides, you know, thank you all for being here, is me and my team at UC San Diego. Although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference because that Harvard complicated. Yes, exactly. It's a little school up there in the Cambridge area. And so they ended up making this announcement that we discovered the aftershocks of inflation. Inflation. We detected the gravitational waves shaking up the cmb. And on that day past Lex Friedman podcast, back when it was called artificial intelligence, Max Tegmark said, goodbye universe, hello multiverse, and hello Nobel Prize. So he saw that as confirmatory evidence not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves, but of the multiverse. Goodbye universe, hello multiverse.

Multiverse is a natural consequence, consequence sequence of inflation.

Yes, according to its prominent, you know, supporters.

Yeah, yeah. And of course, leave the poetry to Max, which he does masterfully. Okay, so that the excitement was there. I mean, maybe the initial heartbreak for you is there too. That's, that's some of the darker moments you're going through. But broadly, for the space of science, there's excitement there, huge excitement.

And, and I often note that this is a problem in what I call, you know, the science media complex, because oftentimes you'll see things like past guests are seeger Venus life, you know, exists. And that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right, with the work that she's doing, or her colleagues are doing, or Clara, who's on your show as well. And that will be on front page. New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego, Union Tribune. It'll be above the fold, make headlines around the world. And then, then six months, 12 months later, as the case for us, retraction page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know, and underneath the personal. So we have a problem in science that the, you know, if it, if it, if it explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment. This happened with the earlier discovery of so called Martian life. Discovered in Antarctica, which was announced after peer review. We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made the announcement. We had a press conference. And there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee who's unethical. We thought we had done everything right, but that's confirmation bias.

There's like levels to this.

Yeah, there were many levels and there were people, you know me warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical. But the audience, the, the, the public never knows this. Yeah, I think it's. So I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of, you know, doling out large amounts of science funding that when you, you should keep kind of an option. In other words, you should have money for publicity. It's fine. Have money for your press conference, but hold in reserve in a bond to be used. Hopefully never. But if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction if it should occur.

So you would like to see. Because that's a big part of transparency is the, Is the. To me, in the space of science, at least that's as beautiful because it reveals the. It's like it's. It tells a great story. There's a. There's an excitement. There's humanity there. So there's a climax of the triumph. But there's also a climax to the. Like the disappointment at the end because that also eventually leads to triumph again. That sets up. That's the drama that sets up the triumph. Like with Andrew Wiles from me, from Osmond.

Last.

From Os theorem. I guess it's not last name. Whatever the. Is like the, the ups and downs of that. The roller coaster. The whole thing should be document.

That's science. That is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists, often from minorities or women back. That you have to be Einstein. Like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly. No, he wasn't. He was. He wasn't bad at math. That was all. That's all nonsense. But he said that he. You know what he said? He attributed his success to Lex. He said, I never asked my dad what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't, because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20 years later as a 26 year old in, in the patent office, obviously in Switzerland. And in so doing by delaying, when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid. And I want to be Einstein. Like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like, this guy wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible, inevitable, like Curly. No, he wasn't, he wasn't bad at math. That's all nonsense. But he said that he, you know, when he said he attributed his success to Lex, he said, I never asked my dad what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day. Which by the way, you know, he would create 20 years later as a 26 year old in, in the patent office, obviously in Switzerland. And in so doing by delaying omniscient, you know, being. I think that really does a disservice. Jim Gates said. You know, he's like, Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist. When he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid. And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible.

Ineffable, you've launched the Assayer project.

Omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a disservice. Jim Gates said. You know, he's like, Einstein wasn't always Einstein, Einstein. And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist.

You've launched the Assayer project.