Transcript
Are you looking for a way to reward your employees this Christmas? Ireland's Blue Book gift vouchers can be used in over 60 award winning country houses, historic hotels, and restaurants throughout Ireland. Give the gift of relaxation this festive season. For details and further information, visit Ireland's blue book dot com. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. What does it mean when something that you had as a goal all of your life since childhood just crushed? How do you deal with it? How do we bounce back when we don't achieve them? Such a great conversation with Brian Keating, super smart astrophysicist, came so close to winning the Nobel Prize, but wrote a book called losing the Nobel Prize, and he's trying to basically figure out how to see the big bang. It's a fascinating story, fascinating topic. Maybe soon, he'll win it, and then I could say I had a Nobel Prize winner on the podcast. But even without that, let's find out how to lose one. Here's Brian Keating. So happy to have on a super genius on the podcast. Maybe he'll disagree, maybe he won't. We'll find out. He's gonna explain the entire universe to us. Brian Keating, author of the book losing the Nobel Prize and also a professor of physics at, University of California in San Diego. Brian, welcome to the show. Yeah, James. It's, it's only taken me about 5 years to get on. Thank you so much. Actually, it took you 25 years of work trying to figure out how the universe works, and that's to the point where you hit the edge of our understanding of what the universe is to the point where you almost, I'm gonna say it, you maybe almost won the Nobel Prize or you could have. What does that mean, actually? Yeah. So the Nobel Prize, of course, is the, most famous may prize or award of any kind in history. I noted that recently. There was a petition signed by 77 Nobel Prize winners advocating, you know, that that the president do this or that with respect to some policy on COVID. And I was saying, you know, why not what what I think it's to, like, 76, and they said, no. It's not enough. We need we need one more. We need 77 Nobel Prize winners. And, you know, part of it's because it's it has such a, you know, a superlative quality to it. There's really nothing else that comes close to the Nobel Prize. So it's it's very much, at least it was for me, almost like an idol or something I pursued for much of my early career as a scientist. And to in order to win it, I knew I had to do something, that would be a spectacular breakthrough. They don't just give them away down, you know, at the local, supermarket. So you had to do something really spectacular discovery or an invention according to the the late great Alfred Nobel who left a will that became basically the most famous will in human history. And that will, you know, basically provided for prizes, monetary awards. But, really, it's the title that goes along with winning this award, the Nobel Prize. And one of them is given out every year in physics. And to make a discovery in physics or astronomy, as I happen to do, I knew that discovering exactly how the first moments of the universe's history unfolded would be worthy of such an accolade in addition to the pure scientific joy of doing the research itself. I knew that would be kinda coming along concomitantly with any such detection would be a Nobel Prize. And so Let let me ask you a question because there's lots of areas of physics, obviously. So one area is very academic, and there's, like, a boundary between theoretical and and experimental. And and you try to bridge that by saying, okay. There's this theory of how the big bang happened and what happened in the microseconds, nanoseconds afterwards. And and you built these telescopes to look at the cosmic background radiation to maybe see something no one else has seen about what happened in those first seconds. But, also, there are other areas of physics. Like, one can argue that, oh, any innovations in quantum computing might be worthy of a physics Nobel Prize or studies on nuclear fusion or maybe studies in quantum mechanics and string theory might be worthy of a Nobel Prize. It sort of seems like what's the flavor of the month or the flavor of the year that determines which what's exciting and what's not to whoever judges the Nobel Prize? Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So, you know, part of the conclusion, I always say, you know, spoiler alert, I did not win the Nobel Prize in case you could not tell that from the title of the book. But later, after basically my hopes went up literally in dust, I became requested to be a nominator of the Nobel Prize that, you know, arguably myself or my teammates could have won. So it's kinda like, you know, James, I'm I'm flattered to be on your podcast. It's not like I've been trying to get on for 5 years. But can you, you know, can you introduce me to Terry Gross? You know, I'd rather it became, like, yeah, a little bit humiliating that I was asked to nominate the winners of the prize I could have gotten. And in the instructions that I received, from the Nobel committee in Sweden was a set of criteria to use in order to determine if something was legitimately deserving of the Nobel Prize. And I'm a good academic scholar, so I went back to the original source material like they teach us as young scientists. And I saw what Alfred Nobel really wanted is to reward discoveries or inventions that had been made the preceding year. It actually says in his handwritten will, it says that the discovery shall be or the award shall be awarded for something discovered the preceding year. And I thought back, there's basically nothing that's ever been awarded a Nobel Prize. As you say, the flavor of the month, it's more like the flavor of the of the century or or something like that. You know, when by the time it takes for a discovery to be made and vetted and replicated, etcetera, it takes decades in some cases. In fact, in my podcast, I was yesterday talking to a Nobel Prize winner. He won the Nobel Prize in 2011, for the discovery that the universe is not only expanding, but its rate of expansion is accelerating. And he and I riffed on the fact that we always get these emails every day, almost, that we get an email and says, professor Keating, I've discovered that Einstein was wrong, and I can prove it. And if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with you. And I was laughing. You know? They never say that about you know, like you said, you know, some abstract thing about, you know, the laws of thermodynamics or something like that. It's always cosmology or some big huge discovery. And Adam Riess, who's the winner of the Nobel Prize, he's joking me. He's like, how do you think I got my Nobel Prize? I I answered one of those letters. So you're absolutely right. There is a sort of taste that goes into deciding who wins, but, some things are inarguable. I mean, the discovery that he made with his, with his team and and his collaborators, you know, really was one for the ages, that the universe has a history, that's very different from what its future is gonna look like. So you're right. It's a matter of taste, and all matters of taste are subjective. Right? So a lot of it comes down to other forces that tend to break the tie and who gets actually the award of society's most superlative honor. But I I guess, though, you know, even though I called it flavor of the month, you know, understanding how the universe began, starting with the big bang, what the universe looks like, what are the properties of this world that we live in, This is kind of an age old question. As you point out in the book, you know, it it all started off with, does everything revolve around the Earth? Then does everything revolve around the sun? Then is there only one galaxy versus multiple galaxies? And so on and so on until we kind of, you know, reach, like, our current understanding of of the universe, which we hope is much closer to being accurate. But we don't know really what distance we have to travel still to find out what's truly accurate. Yeah. I mean, I sort of feel like ever since I was a even though there's there's so many results that you talk about that happened in the past 10, 15 years, I sort of feel like ever since I was a kid, we kinda knew about the big bang. We kinda knew about that the static in between channels on the old, you know, TVs was really the, you know, cosmic background radiation that comes from the big bang. But just to briefly summarize and and not get too much in the weeds, what is the state of understanding of the universe right now? How did we Yeah. How did we get here, and where are we? So everything you said, you know, is is accurate. I agree with it, but it also has a sort of time translation symmetry to it in that as person, you know, James Altucher on the radio in 1920 or 1930 or whatever, could have been saying the exact same thing. I think we've evolved. We've had a great understanding. And and, really, the what what happens in science, and you probably notice in the book, scientists discover some phenomenon, and then they probe it a little bit. Then there's something they don't understand about it, and then they propose a new theory that explains the lacunae and deficiencies in the previous one. And then they find deficiencies in that and so on and so on and so on. So I know you're a big fan of science fiction and and, even Isaac Asimov. And he Isaac Asimov once said, you know, if you think the earth is a perfect sphere, you're wrong, but you're much less wrong than someone who thinks the earth is flat. In other words, you know, the earth is not a perfect sphere. So what we do is we refine models of our understanding. And since antiquity, people thought the greatest minds in human history up until 20th century, including Einstein, thought the universe was eternal, static, unchanging in a certain sense, so much so that Einstein in the 19, teens or so, about almost a 100 years ago exactly, proposed this term in his equations that really wrecked them in a certain sense by adding a term that counteracted the fact that the universe should be expanding. And he basically added a term that that stopped the expansion or contraction of the universe in order to do so, and this is called this vacuum energy or dark energy, which would later be discovered by my friend Adam Rees. So, for 1000 of years, people thought the universe was static and unchanging. Then an astronomer named Edwin Hubble in the 19 twenties discovered that, not only were other galaxies, harboring billions of stars like our own Milky Way galaxy, and Not only are there billions and billions of galaxies, but almost with the exception of about 5 or 10 galaxies, every single one of them is moving away from the Earth. And that's either a sign, you know, that we need to change our cosmic deodorant or there's something fundamental that we didn't understand about the universe, namely that as opposed to what you might think. Right? If you throw a ball up in the air, it comes down because of the attraction of the Earth's gravitational field. The matter in the universe is known to attract other matter gravitationally. And so the existence of matter, really implied to people, including all the brightest luminaries of science, that the universe should be contracting or static, but it couldn't be expanding. And yet couple of Yeah. Well, let me let me ask because and I know there's a lot to say, so so forgive my interruptions. Let's say the universe started with a big bang that exploded everything out. My assumption would be is that without something to slow it down, that everything would keep expanding. Like, the the big bang, in fact, the explosion is still continuing. That's right. But the big bang model only came about because of these observations that the universe was not only not static, but that it was expanding, that things were moving apart. In other words, for millennia, Aristotle to Einstein, everybody thought the universe was either static and infinitely old, or perhaps it was cyclic, which which we won't get into. But but, essentially, it wasn't. There was nobody who believed, even as late as Einstein in the 19 twenties, that the universe could be expanding. So the big bang, which is a pejorative term coined by an opponent of of this model that the universe is expanding, a man by the name of Fred Hoyle, he coined this term big bang as an insult. Apparently, it means some something dirty in British English. I'm not gonna get into it. I know it's a family show. But No. Believe me, it's not, but that's okay. Okay. Over over 21, you know, or admitted only. So in this case, this, astronomer and many astronomers thought that it was ridiculous, including Einstein. Einstein, when the model was first proposed that the universe was expanding by a Belgian, priest named Lemaitre, Lemaitre said, no. I think in according to Einstein's own equations, the universe should be expanding, not contracting and not static. And Einstein famously said to him, I think your, your your physics is atrocious. He was so vehemently opposed to it. But to give him his due, when Hubble showed him evidence that the universe was expanding, he quickly reversed course and later called, allegedly, this conjecture that the universe was static his biggest blunder. And, you know, it's too bad, as I say. He could have gone on to a good career than Einstein. Well, was that his, yeah, that's funny. Well, was that his biggest blunder, or was his, opposition to quantum mechanics his biggest blunder? Well, so, I mean, that's that's a matter that's, you know, as hotly debated as anything in physics, physicists circles. I think, you know, it wasn't really a blunder. Actually, I pointed out to Adam Riess, this Nobel laureate from 2011, who discovered the universe is not only, expanding, but its rate of change of its expansion is accelerating. In other words, things are getting more and more spread out faster and faster like somebody's holding down a a little accelerator pedal in each galaxy in the universe to move away from every other galaxy. So Adam and I were discussing that he actually, and I think that Einstein's greatest blunder was saying that his greatest blunder was this mistake because it actually turned out to be true. He was right. The old man was right. It is true that he had this notion that quantum mechanics is not complete, and we still don't understand the so called what he called spooky action at a distance. We don't fully understand it, but we know certain properties that he believed in. You know, he used to say god does not play dice and and many other quotables. Einstein is incredibly quotable, and very and very brilliant. But, you know, his it doesn't mean because of the way that science doesn't really have a pope or a high priesthood, besides maybe lomo laureates, but besides that, you know, that he was wrong. And he could admit when he was wrong, at least in the case of this cosmic constant that he proposed to fix a bug in his equations that later turned out to be a great feature. So so okay. So, you know, Hubble discovered that the galaxies are moving further apart, not just from Earth, but from each other. So it's like so correct me if I'm wrong. Every spot in the universe is essentially the center of the universe. Every spot can claim to be the center of the universe. Right? There is no center of the universe. Just like there's no center to the surface of the Earth. Right? There's a center to the spherical ball of the Earth, if you will, but there's no no one can say that they're the center of the surface of the Earth. Right? Does does that mean every part of the universe? Like, the cosmic background radiation, is that equally far from us in every part of it? Yeah. So it's actually very interesting. If you take the age of the universe, which we know with great specificity to to be about 13.798000000000 years, and you multiply that by the speed of light, naively, you would think that's, like, the maximum size the universe could be. But it turns out because of the expansion of the universe, the universe actually has a diameter, meaning that if you look straight ahead of you and you look straight behind you, those two regions of the universe, wherever your line of sight terminates on this cosmic microwave background, they're actually 90,000,000,000 light years separated, not 13,800,000,000 light years. And that's because the universe has been expanding. So imagine the surface of the sphere again. Imagine we go to the Earth, and we don't know it, but the Earth is expanding. So every every point, every city on Earth is getting farther apart from every other city. But to each observer, it looks like they're the center of the of the Earth's surface in a sense because everything's moving away from them. But in reality, there is no center, and everything, yes, is moving away from everything else, including the CMB. Does that mean the expansion is moving faster than the speed of light? It yeah. So the regions of the universe can expand faster than the speed of light. And this greatly troubled Alfie in, in Annie Hall, the young Woody Allen character, you know, when he said he wouldn't do his homework, because the universe is expanding. And his mother said, what does that have to do with anything? Brooklyn's not expanding. And so so first off, excuse the basics, but how can the universe be like, what's actually moving faster than the speed of light? So, so if you go into space have you ever thought about this? You go into space where the astronauts are, you know, the SpaceX guys are floating around, the NASA and Russia, and you go outside of the space station, and you have a little glass box. And you take that box, and you just enclose it. You open it up, and then you close it, screw on the lid. What's inside of that box? What would you say is inside of that box? Nothing. Not well, nothing. Yeah. Actually, there there's very little inside that box. It turns out there are photons. There are some neutrinos that get that you just happen to capture that are going through there because there's a a certain number per cubic centimeter throughout the entire universe of neutrinos. There may be a lot of dark matter that you can't see. So it's really not empty. That box is not empty. But but now go between. Let's say there's a dark matter particle and there's a neutrino and there's a photon, and maybe there there are some particles of the Earth's atmosphere too. And you go between those 2 those 3 objects or whatever. What's between those is nothing. It really is nothing. It's potential to be something, but it's actually nothing. That's what's expanding. In other words, the universe, we we don't like to talk about what the universe is expanding into because that's kind of like changing the metaphor from the surface of the ball to now the ball in your room. And so we talk about the the properties of what's called space time. So all we know is that the entire observable universe is expanding in the sense that every point in that in the universe that we can observe using light or waves of gravity or neutrinos or what have you, they're all moving away from each other. And what it means to be going faster than the speed of light is just that you can actually imagine physically expanding the beach ball or the Earth's surface faster than the speed of light. And what Einstein said is impossible is for communications to occur faster than the speed of light. So you can't communicate using the speed of light and and have a faster than the actual the constant we call c. You can't actually boost that by traveling to a higher speed. But there's nothing that says that space itself can't expand and even expand faster than the speed of light. I see. So light being kind of this basic form of communication, You know, that's how electricity works. That's how you could, you know, pulse light to to send off a signal to somebody. So so all communication or information kind of stops. You know, can't go faster than the speed of light, but other things can as long as they're not expected to communicate with each other. Right. Yeah. That's the information flow, if you will, is is is precluded from traveling faster than that speed. I mean, you can do things that go faster than the speed of light right now. So if you take, like, in your doorway, so you have a doorway there, and you take a piece of cardboard, just a square piece of cardboard, tilt it at an angle and just kinda slide the piece of cardboard left and right, the intersection between where the cardboard and the door meet travels at some speed up the surface of the door. Does this make any sense to you? I'm not sure. I'll show you on my screen if because you can see me. I can't see you. But, but imagine, like, this is the door and this is the cardboard. And as you move this left and right, the that little triangle where they meet is traveling up vertically at some speed. Right. Now imagine I move it like this. How fast is it moving? It's actually moving infinitely fast. So so you can do things that travel faster than the speed of light. You can transmit a signal to, to Venus and then turn the opposite direction, transmit a signal to, to Jupiter, and they can't be in touch, but you transmitted them instantaneously. So but they can't communicate faster than the speed of light. I see. But their their distance between each other is going faster. The the the rate of distance is is is going faster than the speed of light. So this is like in the is this related to also to the what you referred to earlier as the spooky action in quantum mechanics? So if you take the idea is if you take these 2 particles that are exactly alike, send them at the speed of light in opposite directions, and then you touch you you observe 1, it'll change the properties of the other. And that's that that change that well, that's a case where information is is going faster than the speed of light. Right? Right. So that's what that's sort of what troubled Einstein, but I can give you an example. So you just moved, you know, to Florida from New York City. Right? So imagine you had 2 pairs of of socks. 1 was blue, 2 blue socks, and 1 pair was 2 red socks. And then, you're packed in the dark, and you and you kinda did the laundry in the dark, and you put the pairs of socks together. You kinda ball them. As I usually do. As you usually do. You're rushing out the door. You pack, and you get down to Florida, and you've got one red and one blue sock. What do you know instantaneously is left in the dryer at New York City? A red and a blue sock. Yeah. But does that convey any information? Can you use that to signal or, you know, make a stock trade, you know, buy buy Bitcoin? You know? No. You it actually doesn't contain any information because, in in the same way that you can say that 2 particles have a certain properties, what we call momentum, and you can detect them at great distances. And when you measure 1, you instantly know what the other one's state is. But that doesn't mean that you can use that fact to communicate something to the original particle across the universe separated by more than the light travel time between those two locations. So information is what is conserved. And, yes, so to answer your question, it is related, but it's more that that example might highlight the problems with with with traveling or trying to transmit information faster than the speed of light. So we're we're trust me. We're narrowing in on the topic of your book, losing the Nobel Prize. I'm just setting the the basic scientific outline of this. So so one question I have is, you say the the outer fringes of this expansion, this the cosmic background radiation is 98,000,000,000 light years away, which is amazing considering, you know, the universe is 13,800,000,000 years old, but that this is sort of proof that we've been expanding at a faster rate than the speed of light. How do we know how do we measure that it's 98,000,000,000 light years away? Yeah. So that's a good question. So it's not 98,000,000,000 light years away from from us. The the maximum distance between two points in the universe or the diameter of the universe is about 90,000,000,000 light years, which is still much greater than the distance times, the time the age of the universe times the speed of light. So that would give you naively, let's call it, 14,000,000,000 years to keep the math simple. And so, actually, the the radius of the unobservable universe, about 45,000,000,000 years. So call that three times the actual age of the universe times the speed of light. So it's exactly like, when you observe that, you you can look in one region of the universe and you look in a direction, say, you look completely north along your horizon northern horizon. Your eyes are using a microwave telescope, not your eyes. And then you turn around, look south at another spot on this background radiation. Those two regions are 90,000,000,000 light years apart from one another, and yet they have almost exactly the same properties. It's as if there's a huge cosmic conspiracy that said, you know, when when James gets to be this age, at this time, you know, set your thermometer, for example, to read this exact value, 2.726 degrees above absolute 0. And and the other way and the other guy on the other side of the universe does the exact same thing. That's a pretty, you know, hard conspiracy to arrange, you know, one that has to be maintained for for literally 1000000000 of years and across 1000000000 of light years. So to avoid that, physicists came up with this idea called inflation. And inflation basically says that, actually, the universe is expanded much, much faster than we thought at very, very early times. You mentioned this in the first nanosecond. It's actually like a nano nano nano nano. It's actually a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. The hypothesis of inflation says that, no, the universe underwent this expansion at 10 to the minus 36th of a second that was going faster than the speed of light such that by the time we observe it 14000000000 years later, the universe will appear to be in perfect equilibrium in all these different directions that we look. So we we use these telescopes called microwave, microwave radiometers or microwave telescopes. They're kind of like satellite dishes, and we use those to measure the density, the temperature, different properties of the different regions in the universe, which by without the existence of this ultrarapid inflationary expansion could never look the way that they do, and yet they do. And so it's a lacunae in the big bang model. It's a it's a failing of the ordinary regular standard big bang model. But how can we like like, when we look at the sun Mhmm. We don't we we see the sun how it looked 8 minutes ago. Right? Because it takes 8 minutes for the sun's light to hit the Earth. So when I look outside right now and I see the sun, it's not actually what the sun looks like right now. Don't do that. I have to I'm an astronomer. I could get people in trouble. Do not that's not an astronomer. I don't like people to look at the sun. This is Jim. Wearing my sun my thick sunglasses, and but I'm seeing kind of I'm looking into the past. Yes. But if I look at the cosmic background radiation, which is, let's say, 40,000,000,000 light years away, 40,000,000,000 years ago, there was nothing. There was there was no big there was no universe. It was prior to the big bang. Yeah. But what am I actual why how can I see something 40,000,000,000 light years away if there was nothing 40,000,000,000 years ago? Well, so, again, it's it the age of the universe is is not changing. It's not bigger than than scientists think. In other words, the age of the universe, is the one quantity that we're gonna say we know, and we know it from many different aspects of astrophysics and other other aspects of science, which is this 13,800,000,000 year number. Now the question is, how can something get so far away? I mean, would that really be a question to you? Let's say I say, James, I've got this thing. It travels 10 times the speed of light, and so it's, I said I let I set it off a year ago, and now it's 10 light years away from you. You'd say, no. I don't know how you did that, but but assuming you could make something travel faster than the speed of light, there would be no, difference. But you wouldn't say, that thing is 10 years old. You would say it's 1 year old, but it's been traveling at 10 times the speed of light. Does that make sense? I guess so. So what you're saying is the the in this case, the information of of what happened 13,800,000,000 years ago happens to be 40,000,000,000 light years away. But because Exactly. It because that whatever it is, it whatever radiation it is, that's out there, it's coming back to us faster than the speed of light. I mean, at least its information is coming back to us faster than the speed of light. Not really. No. What what I'm saying is that this the the patch of matter, the region of the universe, that volume of matter, which is basically this primordial soup of of heat and protons and neutrons and crouton no. There are no croutons like that. But there are protons and neutrons, electrons, etcetera. That's what we call the primordial plasma or the primordial soup. Whatever launched that particular, beam of light that you're detecting now, that object is now moving away faster than the speed of light. But when it was when it emitted it, we were closer to it than we are now by this factor of, you know, whatever, 3 or so compared to the speed of light. So in other words, we were within what's called the horizon of that particular object or that region of space that emitted the light that you now see. Somebody shot a photo a laser beam at us, if you like, and we were close enough where we are now, but the person holding the laser pointer, he or she is now 40, 45,000,000,000 light years away from us. So how do we know that there's some things that aren't even further that Yes. You know, we don't have the ability to see So remember earlier, you were saying, like, we you know, Galileo, my hero, and Copernicus and others, showed that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. Then we saw the sun wasn't the center of the universe. Then we saw then we thought the galaxy was the center, but now it's not. And then we saw the, you know, the universe may not be the only universe. Even the observable universe may not be all that exists. In other words, there may be something 91,000,000,000 light years away from us that we just in a 1000000000 years or there could be something that's 90,000,000,000 plus 1 light year away from us, and we'll find out about that next year. This is speaking very loosely. So you're absolutely right. We don't know what lies beyond what's called the horizon. So the CMB, this light, is the oldest light in the universe. It turns out that came from a period of time when the universe is about 380000 years old. That's when hydrogen was formed out of protons and electrons. And that light, is not necessarily the farthest back we can detect. And that was the motivation to to build the spice up experiment, which I described in the book. That was to use waves of gravity to detect the properties of the earlier universe. So you can't go farther back using light than the CMB horizon because, basically, we're we're describing what's called a plasma, as I said before. So you're right. There could be something just beyond us that we just haven't seen, and that will be coming into view as time goes on, roughly proportional to this expansion factor times the age of the universe. Well, also, could it be the case that, you know, you you mentioned this radiation, this plasma soup started around 383,000 years after the big bang? Because that's when, I guess, subatomic particles were able to merge into themselves and form these protons, electrons that created this primordial soup. Could it be the case that there's some waves that occurred right at the big bang that don't really exist anymore, but and we haven't learned how to detect them, but they're the ones out there beyond the the cosmic radiation. Yeah. So it's exactly right. So the reason that we use this, the cosmic microwave background is because it acts as a very, very good thermometer. You ever see these CSI shows where the paramedics show up and they the first thing they do when they see an unfortunate soul who's no longer with us is they put a thermometer and they measure his temperature. Why do they do that? Do you know why they do that? Or they actually do this. Well, to see how long they've been dead. Yeah. So how do you how does that work? It works by the fact that they that the human body is mostly water, and water cools at a certain rate. So if the room and is not at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the body will get to a different temperature than the room according to a very, very accurately known equation in thermodynamics, that describes how water and body material cools off or warms up. So that means you can use the temperature as a clock. Right? You that would be a very weird clock, I have to say. But, it's theoretically possible. I keep a dead body around any every day just for the alarm. That's a new new time piece from Timex. Right? A Casio g shock gives it a different name meaning. In this case, we we use the temperature not of a body, but of hydrogen. We know very accurately. In my lab, I can take hydrogen atomic hydrogen gas, which is just a proton and electron, and I can ionize it by heating it up. Basically, just heat it up. Eventually, the proton and electron will break apart because there's too much energy to keep them bound together electrically, and they will kind of circulate in what's called a plasma. Turns out, plasmas are completely opaque. So you can't see through a plasma using radio waves or light. And and in fact, you know that because if you look at a mirror, you can't see through a mirror. And that's because the electrons in the silver, the aluminum in a mirror are very much like a plasma. So they don't allow you to see through into the next room what's behind the mirror because they basically absorb and emit exactly the photons or the light particles that would otherwise be used to peer into the other room, if you will. But if I found if I found waves, though, that were potentially thinner than light rays, I would be able like like, maybe x I don't know. Maybe x rays I could see beyond the mirror. It turns out you're you're I like the way you're thinking, but you can't use light of any so when I say light, I mean anything in what's called the electromagnetic spectrum going from radio waves all the way up to x rays and gamma rays. But that doesn't that's not the only type of radiation. There's another type of radiation called gravitational radiation. These are waves of gravity. You can almost think of about them like sound waves. So, again, going to your room, you go into your bathroom, you wanna know what Robin's doing on the other side of the wall. You've got this mirror. You can't see through it. But if she, like, lights off a firecracker or something, you can hear it. Right? That's using a different type of radiation, in that case, sound waves, to detect what happened farther away from you in space, which means earlier in time. Right? She would have had to, you know, clap her hands or set off a firecracker a couple of nanoseconds or milliseconds ago, and you will hear that even if you don't see it. And that's exactly what we set out to do with the bicep experiment. We knew we couldn't see. We couldn't use, higher frequency waves as you call them skinnier waves. Couldn't use ultraviolet light. We couldn't use, x rays or gamma rays, but we could potentially use waves of gravity to hear what the actual big bang sounded like in a certain sense. Again, this is a change in time of 380000 years, which out of 14000000000 years doesn't sound like that much, but a lot happened in those first trillions of seconds after the initial creation perhaps of the entire universe. And so, yeah, so so could like you said, it's it's sort of just a blip in time beyond the cosmic radiation where the gravitational waves that were emitted in the big bang, started coming out. Are it seems like it would be trivial to if you had a way to measure gravitational waves, which I don't know how you do that, but that's the whole point of your your quest, if you had a way to do that, isn't that just a small little notch to say, okay. Now we're just gonna go a little a tiny percentage beyond a fraction of a percent beyond the cosmic radiation and see what was going on? Yeah. So in in in big terms, this is exactly what we set out to do, except we now have Where's my Nobel Prize? That's coming. Well, I mean, now it's just we've been recording for 20 minutes, and I'm already up to speed, so to speak. I said I sent you one. No pun intended. I've got I've got one I've got one made of chocolate for you. I'll send it to you next time. So exactly. That's that's what we set out to do with this BICEP instrument. So BICEP was a radiation detector, but it was detecting looking for the signals of gravity imprinted on the microwave background light. So it's it's kinda strange to think about. Like, normally let's say you're trying to record an explosion. Like, we're thinking think very loosely of the big bang as a sort of explosion. It's not technically perfectly correct. But now imagine you're gonna use, you're gonna use all you have from your from your stockroom is a piece of film, photographic film. So you could do that by, in a couple different ways. Right? You could use the light from the explosion to detect the the the flash of the explosion itself and thereby prove that the that this big bang occurred. Or what about, you know, if you moved even closer, to the explosion, the film itself would blow up. Right? It's not a great way to to design an experiment. You might not get a get a second opportunity at it. But there's, what I'm pointing out, there's more than one way to get after this particular problem. What we realized is that we couldn't capture the light using, using, the technology that we have to to use electromagnetic radiation, but we could detect the explosive sound waves, if you will, by using the only tool that we have, which is the oldest light in the universe, which is the cosmic microwave background. We used the light from the explosion as a detector. And on that light were encoded patterns, we hoped, of early waves of gravity, which could only come about if the big bang unfolded during this process called inflation. Does does the gravity leave a mark? Any type of, gravitate. So right now, if you're, you know, if you're walking down I don't know where you are, but you're walking down the street in Florida and you shake your fist back and forth, you are generating waves of gravity. All you need to generate waves of gravity is a certain amount of matter, and you have to put that matter in a certain type of accelerated motion. And so the acceleration is going back and forth, and it's exactly how you create waves of light. You take an electric charge, and you shake it back and forth. And that's how, that's how electromagnetic antennas work, and that's how laser all sorts of things can can be thought of in this way. And so you need accelerating matter. You need the more matter, the better. The more explosive the acceleration, the better. And now you can see where I'm getting. The biggest, most explosive amount of, acceleration that ever took place was this period of inflation. And on also, to boot, all the matter in the universe, your whole body, whatever protons are in your body that were originally formed out of quarks and heat, that was all present in the early part of the big bang. All the black holes in the universe, all the galaxies, the sun, the materials that went into it, all the matter in the universe was there and accelerated over a time period of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So it had all the ingredients to make for a source of waves of gravity that we could detect, And that's what we set out to do from the bottom of the planet. So I I know how to detect a light wave, like, my eyes presumably, if my eyes can do it, I can make a machine that can do it. Correct. But how do I detect a gravitational wave? So, so the the detection of gravitational waves had not been accomplished as the prediction of Einstein's same theory that had within it the prediction of the big bang expansion of the universe that he overlooked and fought against for a little while. That same theory is called the theory of general relativity. That relativity theory, predicts, in addition to the expansion of the universe, it predicts that waves matter traveling in a certain way will create these waves of gravity. And it also, as I said earlier, the more matter and the more it accelerates, the more production of gravitational waves. Is there a constant like there is with the speed of light where Yep. This is the maximum speed that gravitational waves can travel? Yeah. And guess what it is. What's that? The speed of light. So now I'm confused again because how are we gonna how are we gonna go beyond? Oh, because, again, the expansion has moved things. We're we're gonna get a signal from 14,000,000,000 years ago Yes. But currently 91,000,000,000 years light years away. Essentially. Yes. Yeah. So we can go we can use sound to go that farther distance into the next room, which, again, isn't such a big deal in a house, but going that difference physicists, we don't think in terms of linear time. I don't say, you know, going to 1, 1 nanosecond from 1 nanosecond to one second, that's basically a second. No. I think of that as 9 orders of magnitude difference, and the physics of the universe is very different at 10 to the minus 9 seconds or 10 to the minus 20 seconds or 10 to the minus 30 6 seconds. So the physics depends on this exponent, the logarithm of the, of the, power that time is raised to. So you're absolutely right. We sought out the signal in the form of gravitational waves because photons' waves of light left us coming up short. We can't get back in time early enough using waves of light, but we could with waves of gravity. So you asked a question, how do you detect waves of gravity? And I was making the point. It took a 100 years, from Einstein's prediction in 1915 till LIGO, this laser interferometric gravitational wave Observatory led by, MIT and, Caltech and other institutions. They detected 2 massive black holes crashing together. So there's 2 massive, you know, objects of matter. These are, matter that we can't see, but they had the ma*s. Each one had the mass roughly of the sun times 30. So you have these 2 enormous black holes, 30 times the mass of the sun each. They they were coalescing together, rotating at half the speed of light or so in the last, milliseconds before they coalesced. It took that explosion it took that explosion to be powerful enough for the LIGO detectors to actually pick it up in September of 2015. And this was awarded with the Nobel Prize in in 2017, and I, you know, can talk a little bit about that. But but still, how do you know that that was gravitational waves versus light waves that it was picking up? Yeah. So it's a very good question. So what they actually, it wouldn't be light waves. It's totally insensitive to light waves, but it is very sensitive to vibrations. So what they did is they actually imagine a gravitational wave that's traveling. So it's a wave of gravity. What does it do? It actually changes your weight. So you would perceive it as traveling let's say it was traveling from, from Florida to California where I am right now, and you're standing on a scale in Florida. If a gravitational wave came from a direction along the line from San Diego to Florida, if you think about there's a black hole that explodes or coalesces with another black hole in that direction from San Diego to Florida, and you're standing on a scale, you will feel that tremor. You will feel your weight change. It'll get it'll get alternatively alternately lighter and heavier. So you look at the scale. Why am I getting so heavy? Except you're only going up by, you know, the atomic mass or, you know, it's a very tiny distortion of your or increase or decrease in your ma*s. And what physicists realize is that you could use that, the change in the weight of of an object or the change of position of the of objects, to use it as a type of very sensitive scale. So so so if, like, for instance, if this gravitational event happened right above me, then and I'm on a scale, then I might seem lighter on the scale because it's pulling me upwards Yeah. Potentially. And just like a wave, a half cycle later, now you'd feel heavier. So you'd and and that change would happen according to what's called the frequency or the period of the gravitational wave. That depends on the properties of the black holes. But, but, exactly, your weight would alternate periodically, and then my weight in San Diego would start going up or down, which would be convenient for me because I've been on a diet. But but, again, it's not going up or down that much. And so the fact and now I take the distance between Florida and and California, and I divide that by the speed of light. And if that's not exactly equal to the speed of light, then this we didn't detect a gravitational wave. You just, you know, ate too many, you know, pieces of sushi, and and I'm just you know, they're totally uncorrelated. But if they're correlated with the exact time period that the speed of light, separates the two locations, So these teams had to build 2 different identical detectors. It turned out one of them was in, Louisiana, and one of them was in Washington state. They both see the exact same patterns exactly as the theory of relativity predicted, a 100 years ago, And they saw that in the exact in in a certain direction with some degree of confidence. And for that, they won the Nobel Prize in physics, as I said, in 2017. And that's the way they built their detector. That's what's called a direct detector. So experimental physicists can do 2 different types of experiments. We can go and stick a thermometer in the surface of the sun, and that's very perilous, and not too many of my students wanna do that. Or we can use a a a type of technique called radiometry or or, you know, basically, like, putting a thermometer on earth and measuring it indirectly. Like, you just put your thermometer outside and and and some background that absorbs it. And then you but those are 2 different methods. Of the 2, it's, you know, better in a certain sense to measure the temperature directly, but indirectly does very well for something that's really far away, very dangerous, or happened long ago. And so what we were trying to do with bicep is detect something very, very long ago that we couldn't be an eyewitness to in a proper physical sense. So we had to make an indirect detection, Very different from LIGO, but, fundamentally, we're detecting the exact same types of objects. It's just the way that our detector was comprised of is very, very different from LIGO's direct detection. So so you you're basically you created this first telescope, bicep with the idea that and and telescope's a weird way to refer to it because you're not looking at something. You're detecting something. But you're basically you you're assuming, okay, beyond 383,000 light years beyond this, cosmic background radiation, the big bang is is is happening. And, and it's gonna look in some way similar to these black holes colliding. There's gonna be some event that that is similar to that that's gonna emanate these gravitational waves, and you're trying to detect that. So you have this theory Yep. That you're gonna be able to detect some sort of waves beyond the cosmic radiation and that it and you know roughly where to look, and you built the telescope to to aim there. Yeah. Yeah. So the telescope, again, it uses it doesn't use, as you said, it doesn't use light or you don't put your eye on it. You know, the last time I put my eye in a telescope, you know, for science was was probably a very long time. You were spying on the hotel across the street where you were saying? My well, my my my my neighbor's, you know, daughter when I was a 12 year old kid. Yeah. Whatever. But but in this case, you know, it's funny because I always say I spend more time on telecons than telescopes nowadays. But in this case, we built a telescope, and the telescope could detect waves of gravity imprinted on waves of light. If you had, if the if this process remember, we all agree that the big bang took place, but we didn't know exactly how it took place. And there was a theory called inflation that predicted if the universe accelerated faster than the speed of light for a very brief fraction of a of a trillionth of a second, then the universe will be suffused with these waves of gravity, which would live like light waves. So if you if light waves have an infinite life, they're kinda like ultimate, you know, fountains of youth. Light never dies. So you can shoot light in one direction. It will never ever stop propagating just because it runs out of energy. Light energy. Light lasts forever, and so do gravitational waves. So in particular, if this big bang unfurled with an inflationary component, if the universe expanded this superluminal faster than the speed of light, then, the universe will be suffused with these waves of gravity even at 380000 years after the big bang. So it would shake up that plasma that I talked about earlier, the protons and neutrons and electrons. It would make it vibrate or resonate in a certain way, and we could detect that resonant vibration because it would be making the protons over here lighter than the protons over there, and it would do that with a characteristic period. And we knew what we would see if inflation took place, but that's the key. We didn't know if inflation took place. You can think of inflation as kind of, the match that lit the fuse that caused the big bang. And so we we knew, as I said, you know, before, I kind of you know, I'd always wanted to win a Nobel Prize. And the discovery of the ex of the big bang itself in the so called cosmic microwave background radiation in the form of that, by Penzias and Wilson, that detection resulted in them winning a Nobel Prize. And I mentioned in 2011, my my friend and others, Adam Rees and others, detected that the big bang is actually accelerating. That expansion is accelerating. So all the more so with the actual detection of the first event in cosmic history to actually cause both of those events, if you will, or put them in motion, then that would certainly warrant a Nobel Prize. So exactly. Right. And just to be clear, the reason we could kind of theorize that the first with pretty much certainty that that something like a big bang happened is we just reverse all the equations. If everything's expanding, then at some point, if you were completely reversed it, everything was at one singular point. Yeah. If you think about to me. Yeah. If you think about the the movie that I described before, so imagine, like, you're in you're back in Manhattan and all these, you you hear all these ambulances, and you hear that doppler shift. You ever heard that doppler, like, it gets gets lower as it goes away and imagine if you heard all these ambulances in every direction you listened, and they were all being, wah, wah. It was getting lower and lower in frequency. What would you assume that you're that they're all moving away from you? And that, motion meant that they were previously where you were. In other words, they're moving away exactly from where you are now, so you're probably, you know, in a in a world of hurt because you're probably, like, at the scene of an accident or something. And so, moving, running the movie backwards, the implication was everything was touching. Essentially, all the matter in the universe was compressed perhaps into a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. And that's what, you know, really kind of perplexed people in the early part of 19, of 20th century in order to, you know, really correct that and and provide the impetus for what caused that explosion to start in the 1st place, physicists came up with this idea called inflation. And so okay. So you build bicep. You go down to south the the South Pole, Antarctica, because that's the clearest view into the universe. And what do you start to observe? So, yeah, so the the team that we, assembled at when I was at Caltech and and later here in San Diego, we built this microwave telescope that's not like some huge thing that you think would, you know, fit on a rocket or, you know, we have to blast into space. It actually we took it down to Antarctica to the South Pole because the South Pole is, it's basically an ideal platform if you have to be stuck on earth. You know, people say, why don't you go to space? And I say, why don't you give me a couple $1,000,000,000 because it costs that much to launch, you know, the material and get the data, and and it takes so much time to build a space mission. And the next best locations are one is in Chile where one of my projects is now, and that's at 17,000 feet above sea level. It turns out that the South Pole, the ice shelf, is built up over tens of 1000 of years to a height of about 9,000 feet above sea level. And why is that important? Well, you know from your microwave oven that if you put some liquid in in a ceramic cup in your microwave and turn it on for 10 minutes, you can come back and you can pick up the cup, but god help you if you touch the liquid because it'll be super boiling. It'll be super heated. And that goes to show that the that the the ceramic mug, is very dry. It has no water inside of its, you know, molecular structure, but the water is very wet. Right? So water absorbs microwaves. Why does that, why does what what is the reason that's important? Well, we would like to be in space because there's no water. Water is going to absorb a photon that's been traveling for 14000000000 years. I'd rather that not happen. Thank you very much. So we go to places that are as dry as possible, and that's why the South Pole you remember, like, you grew up in the East Coast, I think, too. And, you remember sometimes they say, oh, it's too cold to snow. You ever hear that excuse for why you couldn't get out of a school on a snow day? I have not, actually. I always took any excuse to get out of school, so maybe I ignored that. Yeah. I tried to use win the Nobel Prize. That's right. Skip skip school all the time. It's it's it's biased against you, I'm I'm afraid, my friend. So, so it turns out that that the colder temperatures also have another benefit and that it makes it the air less humid. So that's why Florida is is much more, you know, high temperature, even northern places in Florida than California or parts of Mexico, that are drier. So so humidity and temperature can go together, and you wanna go somewhere very cold to get rid of as much water in the atmosphere again so it doesn't absorb these 14,000,000,000 year old photons. You want them to Why not go into space? Again, it's very expensive. So it takes it takes about $20,000 to launch a pound of material into space. And my experiment cost, or the experiment bicep the first bicep experiment weighed about, you know, £12,000. So you're talking, you know, 10 times, 100 times the amount of money. And that's if you can get a shot on a rocket, and there's, you know, many, many people ahead of us. And this is back in 2,000 and and 4 when we first started the process of deploying into the South Pole. The South Pole is an amazing place. It really is, you know, very close to ideal for observing the microwave fluctuations from the big bang, And people have done it there for decades, and they do it both on on the ice itself, which as I said is, you know, it's above about a third of the water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. In Chile, we're above about half of it. So, you know, for a one hundredth of the cost to get, you know, 50% of the benefit, that's a pretty good, you know, alpha ratio, as you would say. Why can't you do it from anywhere and just take into account the you you calculate how much water is in the way from from vapor and, you know, adjust accordingly. Well, the, you know, the famous physicist Muhammad Ali said, you know, your your hands can't hit what your eyes can't see. So in our case, we can't measure the the the vibrations of gravitational wave energy if the photons never reach our telescope. So it'd be like, you know, it would be like looking through the fog with a normal telescope, optical telescope, and you wouldn't be able to see anything. And you're trying to look at some scene across the across the city or whatever. You just can't see it. It that light is being absorbed, so it never makes it to your detectors to correct for the effects of the of the fog or the water vapor. Okay. So you're in the south pole. You've got the tell bicep telescope working, and you turn it on, and you're starting to get the cosmic you're starting to see the cosmic background radiation and the the potential effects of gravitational waves on it. Yeah. So the team that we had had to be made up of a whole bunch of different, characters. So there had to be people that were very good at building the instrument, designing the instrument. You know, can my role was, you know, conceiving it and fielding aspects of it, going down to the South Pole. Then there's a whole, challenge of getting the data back to North America where we all were living and and working on the analysis. Some of that was done by what they call a sneaker net, you know, where you take a hard disk out of a computer and put it in a in in the military plane that we all take down there, chauffeured by the Air National Guard of of, New York State. And we take the data, and then we have to crunch it on supercomputers, and that takes years. So it takes it took several years just to get the data. In the meantime, we realized that the original version that, you know, I had co conceived and built, wasn't powerful enough to to really make a dent. It was the first telescope of its kind, but it wouldn't it would need an upgrade to get to get to the ultimate limits that we were capable of achieving, from this location. And it would need more detectors. It would need, more more, you know, sensitive detectors, and it would need multiple frequencies. So it had all these upgrades that we needed to make in order to make an inarguable detection. Did that disappoint you after all this time working on it that wasn't enough? Yeah. You gotta start from scratch. It sort of does. But you know what's funny about scientists? Because you're never done as a scientist, as I said, you know, you you propose a model. You see that it's good on some things, but has some flaws. Then you go and investigate the flaws. You find more flaws on top of the flaws on top of the flaws. It sort of has this, you know, guaranteed unemployment for scientists. It's, it gives you the series of targets and refinements to make that really is, is very interesting, and and and I think that's one of the benefits. So now I wasn't disappointed in that. You know, it's hard because the more you get your hopes up in science, the more likely you are to make mistakes and and and to do things out of a desire to have nature conform to what you think it should do. And so, you know, we tried to avoid that. I wasn't great at it, and I learned a lot from the first bicep experiment, and then we upgraded it and made something creatively called bicep 2. And that experiment is the one that eventually, we came out with the evidence that we claimed was the first evidence for this period of cosmic inflation. And that felt very, very spectacular on one hand. On the other hand, by that time, as I've described in the book, I had kind of been taken out of the leadership role of this experimental program that I had, you know, that I had conceived of as a young, you know, kind of hungry grad postdoc at Caltech, you know, in the early part of the 2000. And so that part, you know, was much more, you know, kinda traumatizing to me than not detecting the signal. It was you know, I never really expected it to work. And when it did, and then I wasn't as big, you know, a role in the discovery announcement, that that's what hurt. That's I think that was much more devastating to me than not actually detecting it the first time around. So so it reminds me there's, like, an entrepreneurial analogy, which is, you know, I forget the guy's name, and and this is part of the analogy, but there was a third guy other than Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who helped discover you know, or or who started the company Apple. That's right. And because he kind of gave up his, quote, unquote, leadership role, he lost his equity in everything they did, and then now that translates to money. In your case, it translated to, less academic or or, you know, excellence or or or, you know, less ranking in the hierarchy of academic excellence, which Yeah. That's right. Yeah. It was kind of a the Ronald Wayne is his name. Right? Yes. And, also, I make the comparison in the book between Eduardo Saverin, you know, at Facebook, who played this teacher role in the beginning, and then he was kinda forced out. And then he, you know, kinda sued Zuckerberg and and and, that whole thing. So describe describe what happened. Like, why did you get you know? Because people, I think, when they look at when they look at entrepreneurship, they could sort of see, oh, yeah. This is why someone's forced out because other people want more money or whatever. But in in it's kind of surprising that the similar things of course, ego happens everywhere, but, like, what happened in in this situation? In this situation so I had created this experiment, and a few things happened. One was, you know, the most tragic of all, which is that my postdoctoral adviser, Andrew Lang, world famous scientist, you know, perennial shortlist for the Nobel Prize, He took his own life in in 2010 right after in January 2010, right after we had all returned from, you know, constructing this secondary successor to bicep at the South Pole called bicep 2, which would eventually make this claim detection. And so he was kind of my, you know, he was a father figure to me. He was very I make no secrets about it. We were extremely close personally, and and professionally, and he really gave, gave me the the wings, the optimism to to go ahead and pursue this dream of building this experiment to go back to the beginning of time. And because he wasn't there by the time we made the announcement, we made the announcement that we had detected it years after deploying it, actually, on on Saint Patrick's Day of 2014, we made this announcement. And, the reason that I was given, for being no longer included in the leadership, cadre, was because I had also decided to start another experiment with a with a friend of mine. This experiment is called polar bear. And, the leaders of the bicep experiment that took over the leadership after Andrew Lang's, unfortunate passing, they decided that I was effectively competing with bicep. And, you know, of course, it made me very furious because I had sired this experiment as I saw it. And then Did you have arguments with people? Did you was it did this keep you up at night? Was this did you see a therapist about it? Like Yeah. Well, I did, but, you know, I'm married to her, so it was easier. That's good. Yeah. So in in in effect, when this when this all happened, it, it was it was brutal because I felt like you know, I had a complicated role relationship with my father, as I described in the book. And in fact, he was a great scientist, and I always wanted to kinda best him in a sense. Like, like kids sometimes wanna do. Their father is a great athlete and and, they're, you know, a baseball player. And, you know, you see him in the backyard, and they're, like, wrestling and fighting or whatever. We were kinda like that, but when it came to science. And I wanted to out outdo him, and I knew I could outdo him if I won the Nobel Prize. And that was part of the motivation that I had, I have to say, in all candor, was, you know, kind of I don't wanna say venal, but that was you know, it wasn't the highest angels of my nature to wanna do this specifically to kinda outdo my my my father. But that was part of it. Can I ask and you don't quite explain in the book, but it is kinda relevant? Why do you think, Andrew, your your mentor, why do you think he took his own life? You know, I I think about that all the time. So, such a devastating thing to me and to hundreds of people. This is a guy you look at him. He's like one of those guys, the the handsome guy from I mean, they're all probably handsome, but from Mad Men, you know, like, I think his name is Ham, John Ham. Yeah. He looked he was like that. He was like good looking scientist of the year in California in the whole state of California, member of the National Academy of Sciences at age, like, 40, had everything going, beautiful family, a wife who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize herself in chemistry, Francis Arnold. And I think he had he had he had some demons. I think, you know, he had I I remembered him, you know, going through different periods of being extremely high, and then being extremely low and and feeling like, you know, I would do anything to to get rid of the lows. I I did feel this fatherly attraction, you know, and and relationship to him, And I know that he did for me. I mean, he would give me marital advice, and and, it was very it was a very, very, you know, tender, loving relationship in the best possible sense in academia. And academia has this kind of structure, almost parental like structure. No one would really know. I mean, he did, apparently leave a note. I I don't under I've never seen it. I don't understand why he did it. There was a recent, suicide, in which, at least in reports in The New York Times, a scientist, I think his name is Weitzen, who lost the or in his mind, he had lost the Nobel Prize in Economics, for theories related to climate change. And, and this, at least his friends were saying and, his colleagues said that he thought he would win the 2018 Nobel Prize. It's actually not called the Nobel Prize in Economics, but whatever. It's called the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, but it was not to be. The prize went to 2 other scientists at NYU and Yale, and, he was very upset about it. And they you know, apparently, this this could have played a role. I mean, again, I no one ever knows why somebody goes to those links, but it is incredibly competitive. You said, like, well, people know in entrepreneurial situations, you know, who founded this and who founded that. And and maybe it's less so, like, you know, like this guy Wayne that we talked about a few minutes ago from Apple. You know, Ronald Wayne, you know, like, he didn't commit suicide. So, I mean, it's not like, you know, being led out of certain situations drives one to to to mental anguish. But I think academia is really not appreciated for how stressful it is. I mean, I one thing I wanna have you eventually on my podcast to talk about is the fact that you can't choose yourself in academia. It's it's basically like you have all these hurdles. You can't choose what undergraduate school you go to, what graduate school you go to. You can't choose what postdoc, what faculty like, you have to go up this ladder. Then do you get tenure? Then do you get into this academy? Do you get this award? Do you get this grant proposal from the National Science Fund? You can't choose yourself, and there's a lot of imposter syndrome and failure and rejection that takes place. And so someday, I'd love to talk to you about that and and how do you actually cope with such things. But there's all unbooked mental health issues in science. It's rampant in science. It it's interesting because, you know, in in academia, there's basically one hierarchy, and you only move up and down that hierarchy. So you're a grad student, you're a postdoc, you're an assistant professor, you're a tenured professor, and then you win awards and awards and awards. And at some point, if your goal is the Nobel Prize, the highest possible award, there's the issues of winning it, and then what do you do next? But let's say you don't win it. It's this extreme cortisol inducing rejection that just floods your system probably. Yeah. For 30 years, you've been you've been you've been powering yourself with dopamine that you think is gonna lead to to the Nobel Prize, and then all of that is stripped from you. You have to be able to diversify hierarchy some way, and you might not have the the capability, the muscle intact to do that. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I was gonna send this to you. I'll send it to you later. But one of the only explicit rules so I make the case in my book, that the Nobel Prize so it's kind of a double entendre. The title, it's like, how I lost the Nobel Prize essentially and, but also what aspects of the Nobel Prize we need to get rid of or get lost. And and one of them, you know, relates to these different restrictions on how many people can win it, how long ago can people win it if they're dead, if they died a day before, a month before, a year before the awards are given. But one of the rules the only rule that they seem to have not changed over time and imagine you rewrote a will and you found out that, you know, Robin's gonna change it or what you know, like, you wrote this will and, like, nobody listened to your will. What can you possibly do to rectify that? It's one of the greatest sins in in my religion, Judaism, you know, to not kind of respect the wishes of the dead because it's the only, like, mitzvah or good deed or whatever that you cannot repay. So it's purely selfless. But, But, anyway, the Nobel rules, the only thing that they're explicitly clear about is that, literally, you cannot choose yourself. So you can't nominate yourself? You cannot nominate yourself. It seems like also they they obey the rule of we you don't give it to a dead person. Yeah. They made that up in 1974. In fact, the people there were 2 people who won it. At least there's been at least 3 people who have won it posthumously, and 2 of them were Swedish. And, you know, that's relevant, I think, because the award is a Swedish, a Swedish award. And I'm not taking away that they deserved it. I actually think that they should give out Pashminas Awards. And in fact, not doing so, and and I've had this conversation with Nobel Prize winners, really rewrites the way that history looks back on the on the past of science. In other words, when this, so remember I told you these waves of gravity were detected by this LIGO experiment from these 2 black holes? Mhmm. Yeah. So that black hole crashed into the other black hole about a 1000000000 years ago. In other words, it crashed to get they they they collided 1,300,000,000 light years away from us. The signals traveled at the speed of light for a 1,300,000,000 years until they were detected on September 15th, 2015, September 14, 2015. And, that detection, if it had come in 10 days earlier and nothing about, the history of science or anything else changed differently, one other guy would have won the Nobel Prize, and one guy who won the Nobel Prize in 2017 wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize because they have this arbitrary rule that only 3 people can win a Nobel Prize. And, you know, I'm not saying that that played a role in my particular case. I do feel like, it was always very conscious. I mean, we discussed different prize winning papers and their titles that won the Nobel Prize when we came up with how we're going to make this announcement and who made the announcement at Harvard. And it was no accident that it was announced at Harvard. You know, Harvard's kind of perceived as, like, the gold standard for everything. And, you know, I think, you know, by design, this was meant and there were Nobel Prize winners in the audience when we made this announcement. But I think the Nobel Prize has this this property of, like Steve Jobs used to say, reality distortion. It kind of refracts reality and how science is done. And the sad thing is that even these Nobel Prize winners admit it and they agree to it. Every single one I've talked to, I always ask them, you know, what one thing would you change about it? And they always say, you know, a couple different things, but but they all seem to agree that it cannot it should not stay as it is, and yet none of them reject it. You know? None of them say, I'm gonna turn it down the way that, I I think that, Sartre rejected his, and many people have rejected Nobel prizes over the years, but known in physics. And isn't that interesting? So so so what happened then? So so BICEP 2 makes this discovery. Maybe describe just for in a few seconds the discovery, like, was it did they see the the big bang basically through their telescope? Yeah. We saw these waves of gravity imprinted on the cosmic microwave background light. And so much so that, you know, on the day that we announced it the day after, it was printed, like, above the fold in The New York Times, you know, that we had made this discovery, that we had found, you know, the powerful force that drove the big bang, that put the bang in the big bang, so to speak. Did you see gravitational waves that emanated from what probably was the instant the the the, you know, nano nano nano nano second of the big bang? That's right. So this period of inflation can only operate for a limited period of time. And what's interesting about inflation is that its properties are related to other phenomena in physics that we understand very well, things like the Higgs boson and so forth. But unlike the Higgs boson, we don't have any direct evidence for its existence, because it happened 13.8000000000 years ago. And there are some say who say it never happened. And the reason for that is that it makes predictions that to some people sound absolutely crazy, and these aren't like crackpots. These are some of the world's most eminent scientists who say that one of the predictions, if inflation was true so I didn't say what we did with with BICEP 2 is we saw this pattern in this ancient light from the, evolution of the big bang called the cosmic microwave background radiation. That's the heat left over from the big bang, from the fusion of those first radiation. That's the heat left over from the big bang, from the fusion of those first elements. We saw that was imprinted with this twisting, curling pattern of microwaves called, called b mode polarization or curl polarization. That's why I called the experiment bicep, by the way. It's an acronym, for the muscle that does curling, but that's another story. And that instrument detected this pattern, which matched exactly the predictions that this, earlier period called inflation predicted. So we saw these waves of gravity, which is kinda like the smoke from a smoking gun, and then that from that, we inferred that the gun went off. The problem is that according to some people, there wasn't just one gun. There's an infinite number of guns. In other words, there could be, unavoidably, what's called the multiverse. In other words, an infinite potentially infinite number of other universes if this so called inflationary model had been proven true. And and and nowadays, again, spoiler alert, not only did I not win the Nobel Prize, but none of us won the Nobel Prize. Not even the theorists who came up with this idea for inflation have won it, and likely they won't unless somebody makes a more convincing detection that is not undone by an interloping signal such as the one that we confronted. So so I I don't understand. So how is it interloping? Like, what what what could have happened instead of the big bang that would have created your signal? So the signal can be produced in a myriad of different ways. The signal is so faint. I described in the book, the microwave background itself is roughly about 3 degrees above absolute 0. So another way to say that is minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's incredibly, incredibly small signal, cold temperatures that you're trying to detect. You're trying to detect the absence of heat, and then riding on top of that is a signal about a billionth or a few tens of billions of that magnitude, so tens of nanokelvin. So we there are many things that can mimic that signal. One that we considered for a very long time was that there are processes in outer space that are not related to the formation of the universe that can produce this twisting, curling pattern of microwaves that we call this b mode polarization. One such source are particles of dust in the Milky Way galaxy that we are unavoidably forced to look through. We're riding on this galaxy, and it's not just like the the the Earth is just floating around in space and there's nothing around it. There's tons and tons of space junk out there, and it's not from the Earth. It's from the the demise of ancient stars, stars that lived in our galaxy in the local neighborhood where the sun is now, but lived 5 or 6000000000 years ago. They, like rock stars, live fast and they died young. And when they died, they spewed out all their guts. So they spilled it out like you do on the page. They spilled out all the material that was in their inner sanctum, their core, of the heart of these collapsing stars, exploding stars called supernovae. And those materials, some of them are in the form of iron and and carbon and silicon, and those would form the planets, including the earth, that we're formed up out of. And some of the other materials would go into the other planets, like methane and nitrogen and and so forth. But the process of forming a planet from a dead star that explodes is by far, completely inefficient. I mean, there's a lot of material left over, schmutz, that stuff that that floats around in space that causes meteorites and it causes, asteroids. That's all from the inefficiency of planetary formation. So the entire asteroid belt, you know, that that eventually makes the meteors and the meteorites that that that you have, those are really the debris, the leftover to treat us from a dead star. So on one hand, it's good because if that started to blow up and pollute the so the, you know, local solar neighborhood, we wouldn't be here talking about it. We literally have in our blood iron molecules, and the hemoglobin molecules in our blood comes from a distant supernova. That's why Carl Sagan at your alma mater, Cornell used to say that we are star stuff. We have this the star stuff flowing through our our veins that owes itself to the demise of an ancient star. So thank God on one hand or thank Zeus or whoever you like. But on the other hand, for cosmologists, we're also looking through a very dirty window. We look out into the cosmos. We're seeing tons of other stuff, literally, that we don't wanna see. And we knew about that. Unfortunately, we didn't have the capability to detect the cosmic signals and the dust signals with our experiment alone. So we had to rely on the kindness of strangers, and they being, you know, cautious scientists were unwilling to share their data, which would have helped us convince ourselves maybe not to go forward with the announcement. Instead, we ended up convincing ourselves that we could go ahead with it and that and hence led to this announcement and later essentially retracting the claim that we had made. We didn't make a blunder. You know? We didn't leave the lens cap on the telescope or put our thumb in the frame. We we made an interpretation, which was later found to not be substantiated by the detection that we made. But it still seems likely that your detection is the correct detection. Oh, the detection is is a 100% bulletproof that we detected this curling, twisting pattern of microwaves. However and that's why I say it's not a blunder. We didn't there have been detections where they say, we detected that neutrinos go faster than the speed of light. And then they literally found, no. That's because we didn't plug in a fiber optic cable tightly enough. Like, literally, that happened with an experiment called OPERA. No. Really? Because when I was a kid, I did think neutrinos went faster than the speed of light. No. They go through everything, basically. They go right through us right now. You know, trillions of them are going through the earth right now, unmolested. But but, no, it's it's actually, not the case that we made a mistake in observation. The observation we made was exquisite. And but but it was, we could not really rule out that dust was causing the majority of the signal that we claimed to be from cosmic inflation. And again, this was a huge, huge, you know, personal embarrassment for me because along with the claim discovery that we detected indirectly these waves of gravity, that we detected indirectly this inflationary process, came the prediction that our universe was accompanied by perhaps an infinite number of other universes. So the same day The New York Times printed this headline, you know, a newspaper in Boston and elsewhere, you know, they were printing things. Not only are they gonna win multiple Nobel prizes, but they also have now proved the existence of the multiverse. So so let me ask you about that. Is that because, you know, let's say, there there was a singularity that exploded in this big bang. Are you saying there could have been other neighboring singularities? And so your the the the gravity you're detecting could have come from multiple or maybe infinite number of big bangs that have that are beyond our ability to see, you know, to see them because they're so far away. Yeah. Exactly. So so, Brian Greene in the TED talk, he describes the inflationary process, very glowing terms, as kinda like rocket fuel. And if you remember from, like, the solid rocket boosters, like, it's very hard to shut off a rocket. Like, you can get it started, but it's very hard to turn off a solid rocket. I use the analogy in the book of, like, a petri dish. So if we're like a bacterium sitting in a inside of a culture of bacteria, once we discover that we are sitting in a petri dish, it's almost it's almost impossible for there not to be another member of our culture somewhere else in the petri dish. And in other words, you you can basically infer the likelihood of the, of another culture or in our case, another universe from the existence of the petri, the goo that's in the petri dish from you discovering that goo, that that agar, glue, gum, or whatever it's called. That substance, basically, we say in physics and especially in quantum mechanics, anything that's not forbidden is mandatory. In other words, there's some probability when you take my book and you're so sick of it, you throw it at the wall, there's some non vanishing probability that it goes right through the wall. And and, of course, this happens much more readily so with electrons. We do that all the time. In fact, you you know, some of the processes we use in the lab are based on this exact property, what's called quantum tunneling. So there's a probability for that to happen. And if you can't rule out the existence of other universes, once we discover this quantum field called inflation, we had to accept the possibility that it was not able to be shut off elsewhere in the universe. And to some, this was really good news because they said, this proves that you don't need God to create a universe. And then other people said, no, this proves God exists because only God could finally tune a universe in which a human being could come to exist. So on top of this was this freighted conversation, that really revolved around the ancient conceptions of, you know, where does mankind fit in in the hierarchy of consciousness, other life forms, and even the existence or lack thereof of god. So you don't get that. I'm not denigrating any of my colleagues who study, you know, magnetism and superconductivity or quantum computing. It's it's just that cosmology by its nature forces a person to look to the greatest heights and greatest depths of what it means to be a human being, and sometimes it raises a lot of, a lot of, arguments as well. Once again, I wanna recommend my good friend, Jordan Harbinger's podcast, The Jordan Harbinger Show. All the time, people say, hey. Other than your show, what other podcast would you recommend I listen to? And I just love listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. He's a good interviewer. I learn while I'm listening to his podcast. Jordan, thanks for coming on the show. Recently, you had on Bill Nye. He talked about denying science, you know, science deniers, and he also talked about radical curiosity. What's radical curiosity? Yeah. Radical curiosity, it it's actually not that radical if you're a kid. Right? It's it's looking at things with fresh eyes. And Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about this on the show as well, where a lot of times our assumptions as adults, assumptions that have actually done pretty well for us, you know, to get us through our lives, they inhibit curiosity. And and this is a good topic for you and your listeners as well because I know, you know, from hanging out, you and I are pretty curious probably more so than most adults are at our age, 40 plus, whatever, however old we are now. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're exposed to so many different things. Like, would you agree with that? I feel like you and I are always doing weird stuff. Therefore, we have different inputs than other people, and that's how you maintain radical curiosity. You kind of feed that curiosity in the first place instead of starving it with the typical 9 to 5 come home and watch TV kinda situation. I totally agree. I think, you know, basically, life is almost like this laboratory. Mhmm. And rather than spend the so called 10000 hours to get great at something, I love the idea of learning through experiments, which Bill Nye that's his whole message, really. It was a great podcast. It's episode 366 on The Jordan Harbinger Show. Find it where you find all your other podcasts. That's The Jordan Harbinger Show, and thanks, Jordan, for coming on. Thanks for having me on. So, you know, you were trying to detect these gravitational waves. Are there you know, to to use the way Donald Rumsfeld might describe it, are there unknown unknowns here? Like, could there be other waves that we don't maybe those waves only existed for a really short time, you know, during this inflationary period, and then they were just gone. Like, because because, like, what what's what's gravity made of? You know, there's there's you know, they use the word gravitons as particles that make up gravitational waves just like photons made up of, you know you know, light rays are are made up of photons. Is there something else? And maybe this is related to the whole dark matter, dark energy thing that things that we just don't understand that could be beyond the big bang or part of the big bang, and maybe a deeper understanding of that is what's limiting us now? Yeah. That's that's a very good question. So I'm gonna have to offer you, like, Alexis and, you know, a player to be named later to become a grad student again here. The, the notion I'll get thrown out as I usually do. So so the, the notion that what is detectable is kind of a filter. Right? So we we say that we detect such and such as evidence of an an underlying phenomenon. Well, that may be more of a sign of the limits of our capabilities. Right? It kinda puts a filter on. If I say I only have this type of CCD camera or telescope, that means that there's only certain phenomena that I can see with that object, and so I'll be blind or ignorant of other things. But, but there's a whole class of other experiments, one that Einstein, who came up with the word photon, by the way. So Einstein used to use these experiments. He was a theoretical physicist, but he used to say, let's do a Gedanken experiment, a thought experiment. And these led him to some of his greatest discoveries of, the constancy of the speed of light, eventually the, equivalence of gravitational, acceleration. So he would visualize things in his mind. And, theorists are very creative. My colleagues that work on I'm an experimental astrophysicist. My theoretical colleagues think of many other alternatives. It's basically how they spend their days because it takes so long for experiments to get their data. Even once they've gotten the data, they have to be confirmed. Sometimes they're refuted. And so the process of actually, the input on the, you know, kind of left side is so slow compared to the output that actually they they have to come up with theories and ideas to test even if, you know, no one's ever gonna test them. So, yes, to answer your question, there are many other alternatives that could explain or could produce signals that we can see, including detections of things like dark matter, but even more exotic than that, even detecting the presence of of extra dimensions. In other words, that the four dimensions of space and time, 3 space, one time, that's not all that there is. There might be as many as 10 dimensions or even more, in different abstract spaces, and physicists look at that as a way to possibly explain both phenomena that we do understand, such as, the existence of of gravity, as you mentioned, but also phenomena that we don't understand, such as the existence of dark energy and dark matter, about which we know basically next to nothing. And and that's, like, 97% of the universe. Right? Yeah. Dark matter plus dark energy. And we just know nothing about it. That's right. Yeah. I I There's not even, like, theories about it. There are theories. There are no. You can't you can't prevent a theorist from coming up with a theory. The question is, are they good theories? Are they so what makes a good theory, by the way? I I should say this. What is the test of an idea? Many people think it's whether or not not that you can detect it, but that you can prove it wrong. So this is a kind of a test that was devised by a philosopher, and a logician named Karl Popper in the in the 19 thirties or so. He wanted to prove that things like psychoanalysis and astrology were really bunk and that they were total nonsense. And to do that, he said that these sciences, let's just take astrology, quote, unquote sciences, aren't really representative of a true science because no matter what you find, you can always make it consistent with the evidence. So I'll give you an example. Once I went out with my, wife on a date, and we came upon a fortune teller. And, you know, she wanted to try it. I said, oh, whatever. And she said, you know, she asked me, she said, my my wife said, tell his horoscope. And so I and the and the fortune teller, whatever, she said to me, you know, what's your sign? And I said, I'm a Gemini. And she went through this elaborate thing and how we're gonna get married and how we're gonna do this and that. And, and then I said, you know what? I is Gemini born in September? Because that's when I'm she oh, no. That's a Virgo. But the same things are gonna happen to you. Like, it didn't change her prediction at all. And and so it's so flexible that you can't prove her wrong. You can't prove astrology wrong. Okay. She got it right, though. We got married. But but besides that, so the point is Maybe maybe your wife got married to you to prove that astral so you couldn't falsify what the astrologer was saying. Ultimate confirmation bias bias. I can't imagine she did that. You know, she so so in the in the case of of Karl Popper, he wanted to show that there were things about just like in mathematics or something called Godel's incompleteness theorem. He wanted to say, what are the limits of something that is science? And it's interesting. Ironically, what is used nowadays is whether or not you can prove something wrong, not if you can prove it right. And so a lot of scientists, what they'll do is they'll think about things that you could prove right, but they spend a little bit less time thinking about things that that can't be proven wrong. And I think that's you know, it's a matter of taste, you know, what you get into because it's very hard to get money and funding to do something to say that there's something you can't do. Right? It's much better to say, oh, there's this exotic particle on the surface of, one of Neptune's moons, and we're going to go look for it. But but, you know, that being the case, you know, despite that, I think what we do in science is really look for explanations, the things that are that are inconsistent with what we currently know. And that's been a guidepost for science for a long time, and and I think it's a healthy thing. So so now that you've kind of you know, this this was a 20 year adventure, the bicep, bicep 2, polar bear, gravitational waves. You know? What's you know? And then kind of, like, going up against right against the window of where the Nobel Prize was being handed out. What's next? Like, do you have a what's next? Or is it do you continue along the same path? Do you still hope for the Nobel Prize? Like, what's or how do you focus your work now? People say, you know, you're a hypocrite, Keating. Like, you would have accepted the Nobel Prize that they gave it to you. And I say, well, you know, if they offer it to me, then one way to see if I'm a a hypocrite is get them to offer it to me. And if I don't turn it down, I'm a hypocrite. Actually, what I came to see is that the Nobel Prize became somewhat of an idol to me. You know, it's literally a graven golden gilded object with a picture of Alfred Nobel that you must bow your head down in front of the king of Sweden on the day that Alfred Nobel died on December 10th every year to get it. It's it's a very, it's a very strange thing nowadays. And I realized, you know, the people that win it, I don't have any, any problems with them. They as I said, they can't choose themselves, so someone else chose them. But the academy that awards it, I think that they're essentially realized that they're a monopoly. And like all good monopolies, they wanna do nothing more than than defend their and protect their monopoly against all comers, foreign and domestic. And so, my book was pretty controversial. I did receive criticism from members of the Nobel Academy, including their general secretary, who took a took tried to take I mean, the task on, on a website called The Conversation. And, we went back and forth, and it came up came down to, you know, really their reluctance to change rules that were never intended by Alfred Nobel, in long ago in the past, and also to kind of do things that perpetuate a misreading of history of science. And I'm just speaking in my case. For example, there could give the Nobel Prize to more than 3 people, but they choose to maintain that. The Nobel Peace Prize can be given out to 100 of people, as has happened many times. And so there's nothing about the Nobel Prize in physics that could not, be modified, for example, to include teams of people. There were 50 people on my team. There were a 1000 people on the team that won it for gravitational wave discovery, the LIGO team, and yet only 3 people won it. And and one of them, was excluded, 4th person, because he had died, you know, as I said, you know, roughly if he had died, you know, 10 days later than he did in the certain south. If the waves had come in 10 days earlier, he would have won the Nobel Prize and the other guy wouldn't. So I think, you know, for me, I'm no longer guided by that. I I think well, I do have a new project that's called the Simons Observatory. I'm one of the, co leaders of this project. It's funded by the Simons Foundation in in, New York City. And this project is basically, building upon the lessons that we've learned from bicep 2, and the bicep team is also building upon the lessons that we learned. I'm no longer really a a a member in good standing with the bicep guys. They're not it's not like kick me out. It's just that now I'm leading and helping to lead a big experiment, that's that is truly a competitor to what they're doing. What what what's the experiment? So my experiment is called the Simons Observatory, and their new experiment is basically it's called bicep array. It's the 4th generation in the bicep line, and that's at the South Pole. The Simons Observatory is in Chile. And, you know, I was thinking, you know, an alternate title for my book was gonna be a farewell to arms. You know, basically, I'm no longer in bicep. But but in this book, you know, really, I talk about where we went right with bicep as much as where we went wrong and why and how the Nobel Prize affects and afflicts those. But for me right now, the mysteries that that we can solve are still there. It's kinda like, you know, when when people finish reading, choose yourself. Like, they're kinda envious of the, you know, of the person who didn't read it. Right? Because when you read a good book I'm not trying to kiss up too much. But, like, when you have or any great book, A Farewell to Arms, when you read that book, you wanna you there's a part of you that's like, it's a little depressing. Right? Because because you you'll never read it again for the first time. And for me, it's like we got them all again. Like, we can do it again. We can make the discovery and hopefully make it inarguably so by taking precautions, that we learned from bicep 2, to get rid of the dust and to measure the cosmic signals. And the bicep team is doing the exact same thing, so we're competing with one another. But the but the good thing about that competition is, like, we only if we both succeed will science really progress. And I honestly can say that, you know, people say, oh, well, you're just criticizing it. Like I said, you have sour grapes. You know, I always say, well, it's kinda like, can you not criticize president Trump if you're not the president or if you're not Hillary Clinton? Like, can you not can you only criticize something if you're a member of this very exclusive set? You know, there's more people that have that are on the space station in the last, you know, 15 years or so than have won than are living winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. It's it's incredibly small group of people. And So so so what what about here's here's an idea. So you can say, okay. I'm not gonna criticize it, but let's go back to, Alfred Nobel's will. And I'm gonna go back for each year and basically award, like, an an noble prize to all the people who actually follow I'm gonna follow exactly the rules laid out in his will and say, this is who would have won. These these are the 10 people who could have won the Nobel Prize that year because they had a discovery the year before. They were, you know, they had the this this this equality. You kinda go back and reconstruct, you know, the Nobel Prize from whenever it was, 1910 to now. Yeah. 1901 is when the first ones were awarded. Well, let me ask you a question. Imagine you did that with the Oscars or you did that with the Olympics or you know, it's it's, for subjective things, it's very difficult. Right? Because it's also a matter of taste. So there are things that, like, I call them Nobel Prize bloopers. You know? They gave it to a guy who invented a certain type of lighthouse, you know, amplifier signal processor, you know, back in 1912. And and and at that time, in 1912, Einstein had already come up with the theory of relativity and had not won the Nobel Prize and would not for another almost 10 years. Right. But that's why you can go and and offer 10 possibilities and say, look, these all follow the rules. I don't know what the Nobel Prize Committee would have done that year, but these were the most famous ones, and these are the ones most cited later on. But they all follow the exact rules as opposed to what the Nobel Committee does right now. Well, so that would be kinda like the strict interpretation. You know, it's kinda like the constitution. There are people that are like, the constitution's a living document, and there are people like, no. It's a strict constructionist. So I think you'd have that, a. I think, b, you get no support from the Nobel Prize Committee because what what incentive do they have? And And then And you'd have no support from them? Yeah. You wouldn't. You know, they they have monopoly, as I say. You know, maybe a benevolent monopoly. People like it. At best, people say it's kinda like a game. I like to stay up every night. It's like Christmas night. You know, I would like to hear when they're awarded on December 10th. But to other people, it's a little pernicious. You know, I had somebody tell me she read the book and she wished that her dad had read the book 10 years earlier because he basically said to her, you're never gonna win a Nobel Prize, and therefore, you're not gonna be a good scientist, because, you know, a good scientist win the Nobel Prize. So you should get out of, out of physics, and she did. And I I just think it's, you know, it has it has the opportunity, and that book is really written as an in an attempt to use the power of the Nobel Prize to kind of agitate for change before it's too late because I actually think that their days are numbered. If you do a Google, engram search and you search Pulitzer Prize and you search and you compare it to Nobel Prize, in the beginning of the of the 1900, the Pulitzer Prize was much more prestigious and appeared in many more search or, you know, book titles, etcetera. Now it's, you know, it's barely mentioned as as, you know, it's important. It's great, but it's nowhere near the prestige of the Nobel Prize. And I think, you know, one more they had a sex scandal that affected, you know, alleged sexual harassment in the Nobel Prize in literature that led to the cancellation of the prize in 2018 and deferment to 2019. And I think if they don't reform you know, it's kinda like Jeremiah in the in the in the, you know, books of, of the prophets. I'm not comparing myself. But but just, like, he was always warning against, like, if you don't do this, this is what's gonna happen. I guess that's a you know, a lot of history is like that, Cassandras. And I do feel like for their own good, it would be good for them to kind of, go back and see, as you say, yeah, what things could be could we have redone. And when I took this up with this, guy, who is, the secretary general of the Nobel Academy, who's basically one of the highest, most powerful people, he said, I disagree with you. What do you want us to do? Go back and and give Rosalind Franklin's family the money that she would have won for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA that went to Watson and Crick and and one of her collaborators. And I said, no. You're making it all about the money. The money is the least important do you know that there's actually a few different prizes that are worth 10 times what you get for winning the Nobel Prize? You know? Oh, I don't know. It's, yeah. There's something called the breakthrough prize. The breakthrough prize, if you win it, it's it's funded by Mark Zuckerberg and a whole bunch of Silicon Valley guy, Yuri Milner. And if you win it, you alone, you win $3,000,000. And the Nobel Prize, if you split it three ways, after taxes, you take home about 1 point, $150,000 in the US. You know, I asked my friend, Adam Reese, yesterday on my podcast, you know, what'd you do with the money? And he's like, I put some away, you know, for college tuition, but it you know, it's nice, but it's not that much money. And so nobody does it for the money. So the secretary general I was like, you're ascribing all these venal motives to people that wanna win it. Of course not. But instead, if you go to, like, the website of a physics department or the National Science Foundation, it will tell you how many Nobel Prize winners are on their staff. That's the coin of the realm, literally, and that's the prestige that the universities and institutions get. It's not even like my friend who won it or or the winners of it. They don't go some of them do go around with their actual Nobel Prize as I show in the book. But but other than that, basically, people are are are you know, they just go back to work and and continue on their work. But the institutions, they really wait. Publications get higher citations once you win a Nobel Prize. Collaborations rise and fall depending on if a Nobel Prize winner comes out of it. And it's of course, it's very exclusionary. It's been very exclusionary towards female scientists throughout the years. Only 3 women have won it over the 118 year history. But a lot of this is because we're giving that power to the Nobel Prize. We're saying this is the highest award in physics. In your language, they're the gatekeepers. They're the ones that choose to make the choices. Right. So so what I'm saying is, let's say you take the strict definition of the strict interpretation of what Alfred Nobel said, and you said, look. I'm just doing this because and I'm gonna do it each year, but here's what it looks like from 1901 to now. And then I'll do it each year ongoing, and I have a team with me that'll keep doing it past me. Yeah. And then who knows who knows if the story gets conferred on you that, okay, this is, you know, this is really the Nobel Prize as Alfred Nobel would have conceived of it. This is what what I'm doing. Yeah. And I'm not doing it out of anger to, to the Nobel Prize. I'm just doing this based on the instructions of in the will. I actually did that. I I started a website. It's now defunct. It was called losing the Nobel Prize dotorg, and it was kinda like a change dotorg. It was like you would submit petitions for people that deserved it and people that could still win it even according to their rather arbitrary rules, such as you have to be alive to win it. So, just about 2 months ago, a colleague of mine, passed away. Her name is Margaret Burbage, and she was a 100 years old. And she came up with, data that eventually went into the award for a Nobel Prize in 1982 for how stars produce heavy elements, like the matter that I discussed in the meteorites, etcetera, iron and so forth. She came up with the data and and helped with the the most famous paper in history in that in that branch of science. And, again, one of the authors of that paper did go on to win a Nobel Prize. He was a man named Willie Fowler. And so she was still alive, you know, when I wrote my book. And I was saying, like, we gotta nominate her. You gotta even by your abstract definition, she's she's eligible, and she never won it. Now she's dead, and she never will win it. So I did have that. I had a petition. You could you could upvote people. And, you know, it just became a matter of, you know, I only have so much time. I gotta help run this big experiment. I've got, you know, 16 graduate students who've gotten their PhD through me and my research and their research. And, you know, just it's a matter of time. I only have so much. And but, yeah, I'd be willing if people out there wanna wanna take on, one of James's 10 ideas of today, I'd be willing to pay the reinstatement fee for the for the domain. And and and it also seems like, you you know, again, this is a this is a better historical view of year by year looking at what accomplishments were done that year if you take the strict interpretation. Right? Because it's all has to be what was the biggest discovery of the year prior. So you you get a much more accurate view. Like, right now, when I look at the Nobel Prize winners, I don't really get a sense of the history of discovery. It's just more like, okay. Here's an interesting person I should research to understand what he did. But I don't really get a sense of the timeline of discovery, which it sounds like was a little bit of the intent of the Nobel Prize. And so, again, it might be interesting just from a historical perspective as well. Yeah. I think I think it is. You know, scholars do that. There are papers written to describe, you know, what was the influence of the place where a discovery was made. You know, certain institutions have many more Nobel Prizes coming into them. What's the influence on, you know, specific demographic information? You know, it's always talked about, oh, Jews win so many Nobel Prizes, etcetera. Now people study those types of things. The question is, you know, do I wanna give more prestige? Like, do you wanna have that as the ultimate point of comparison? And, you know, for me, personally, I I do feel like, you know, for me, I've moved on. I do think it's interesting, to to people. I do regret that it has a negative influence on people that they I mean, you can't meet someone. I don't know if you ever read this this, article by David Brooks, but he talks about, you know, when you die, there's 2 different types of ways that you'll be remembered. 1 is by what was on your CV or your resume, the virtues, of your resume, And the other one is what was your, you know, kind of ethical or moral, legacy. And and and and in terms of that, that's what's become much more interesting to me. So and my focus now is to do the one thing that Alfred Nobel did that's impossible to quantify. So he said 3 things, make it l make a person eligible to win his prize. One, the discovery must be made in the preceding year. It must be made by a single person, and it must have conferred the greatest benefit, to mankind. So that third thing is very subjective. What what constitutes discovery? Like, when we discovered nuclear fission, it led to the atomic bomb, but and it won a Nobel Prize for, the male discoverers of it, and, unfortunately. And, but it also agitates for good, you know, nuclear power or with green energy, whatever. I'm not gonna get into that. But the point is, what constitutes a greatest benefit to mankind? By the way, they changed his will on their website, the Nobel prizes. Now they changed it, and I don't know, for, you know, kind of gender equality, obviously, but, you know, they made it for all humankind. But it's not what he said. It's it's very frustrating, you know, for I I was imagining, you know, my older brother's lawyer, and, like, what would he say about it? Like, as a trust and estate lawyer going back over it. It wasn't you know, sometimes we give away awards for things that are 100 you know, 30 years ago were discovered. Sometimes groups of 3 people, not one person, and then some of them go to things like, the lobotomy, which, you know, affected terribly many, many mentally ill people in the 19 fifties sixties. Is that a great benefit to mankind? So I looked at it and I said, what have they done to this guy's legacy? And how would I be wanna be treated? But I realized, you know, again, life is short. And and what I wanted to do is take the one lesson that he did give away. Again, he had no wife. He had no children. He gave away all of his riches and money to this prize, but he also included this ethical will, which in Hebrew is called the zaba'ah. And I I always ask my guests in the podcast, you know, what would you put in your ethical will? I don't care about your monetary will. What wisdom, what what advice, what hard won lessons do you wanna communicate in perpetuity as your legacy? And so, you know, when you come on, hopefully, I'll ask you that question. But but Yeah. That's a that's a good question. That's a takeaway that I got from that. I also ask people what they would put on their monolith from 2,001. I know you're a big sci fi nerd like me. And so I say, if you had a 1000000000 year time capsule you were gonna put on the surface of an asteroid, what would you put inside that time capsule to last a 1000000000 years as a harbinger or signature of humankind's accomplishments or your own personal accomplishments? Don't answer now. I want you to come on. No. No. That that's an interesting question. I might have a a different answer than than one would expect. But here here's another question that I've always been wondering, which is, you know, you did you you talked about the divide between theoretical physics and experimental physics, but it seems like there's a third divide that's not really ever discussed for for maybe for obvious reasons. But, you know, you talked about Einstein's thought experiment. So he pictures a guy, I don't know, standing on the moon in the speed of light or a train going this at the speed of light. You're you're going at the speed of light, and you look at yourself in a mirror. What do you see? Right. Mhmm. Right. So so to come up with, basically he used that thought experiment to basically come up with the the the most astounding, you know, theories of physics, created modern physics. How much math actually do you have to know? Like, we always take physics, and it's, like, filled with math for the 1st 20 years that you're taking physics. Do you do you really have to can you be a physicist without studying physics Well in the traditional way? Yeah. So, you ever Like, I can just imagine, for instance, like, we could sit here talking, and I could say, well, could there be multiple big bangs that had other gravitational waves that hit so I could I also am allowed to do thought experiments if I want. Yeah. And but I just don't have the math to kind of, like, draw it out in a physics paper. Did you ever read that book or hear about that book, everything I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten? Yeah. Well, so Robert, Fulghum. Yeah. So I have another, sequel to that. Everything I needed to know, I learned about an advanced quantum general relativity, And I'm hoping you'll be my student. No. So, so it's exactly right. So you talk about idea sex, and and I think about this as experiment sex. An experiment is a type of idea. It's a proposal. And one thing that, you know, I noted, again, it's a topic I'd love to chat with you more about, but, you know, is sort of the math of combinatorics or permutations. So you probably know this, but, you know, if you have a set of of objects, say you have a set of fingers, you have 5 fingers, hopefully, on at least one hand, unless you grew up as, like, one of my kids, and and it's very dangerous. But but if you look at your hands, how many pairs of fingers can you make? And so you can just do it with your thumb, touch your index finger, touch your middle finger, touch your ring finger. You can count up how many pairs you have, and you go, and it's 4 plus 3 plus 2 plus 1. So what's that? That's 10. So that's 10 different permutations of 5 objects. So it's it's not but it doesn't scale as 2 times the number of of objects. It actually scales as the number of objects squared. That's how many pairs you can have. This is called network theory. This is, like, how Facebook operates in a certain sense. It's called combinatorics. It's actually called choosing, for mathematics, you'd like. It's called 5 choose 2. That's the symbol for permutations. In this case, the number of of pairs, which is really idea sex, right, or experiment sex, it grows x or it grows, geometrically, grows as a square quadratically of the number of objects or ideas that you have. So you're right. In a certain sense, what you wanna do is increase that n because the output, the number of ideas or choices that you can make grows as n squared. Now the question is, do you need to know, advanced calculus? And, do you need to know very yeah. To make a contribution as a theoretical physicist, you there's no way to do it without, being extremely well versed in mathematical operations and and, you know, what's called group theory and topology, analysis. And even nowadays, computers are doing experiments. And yet, some things you can think about these ideas. I mean, you came up with a couple different ideas that, you know, with a little bit of polish, I can show you what paper that goes to. Now that's the idea. That's the first part. The question is, you know, are ideas the the last step? Of course not. So the hard part is going from the idea, which is an essential. So the idea is the 0 to 1, you know, Peter Thiel's language, but then you have to do all the hard work of scaling that out. What are the implications? What are the foregrounds? What are the backgrounds? What are the what are the contaminating effects? How do we actually go about testing, you know, Altucher's theory of of, you know, multiple big bangs? But people do that. So it is keeping this kinda childlike, you know, in your TEDx talk, I think you you talked in San Diego and I did. And and you mentioned, you know, like, kids smile, you know, 5 times more than adults or something. Right? Didn't she say something like that? Yeah. Kids kids smile 5 times a day. Oh, no. Sorry. Kids smile 300 times a day, but or laugh 300 times a day, but adults only laugh 5 times a day on average. Sixty times more. So so the question is, you know, scientists are like children in good ways. We're very curious. We love puzzles. We love mysteries. We're also like children in another way. You know, we're selfish. We're jealous. We're spiteful. We don't play well with others. But keeping that creativity is the first element. Like, you can't get to be an adult without being a kid. Right? And so I think keeping that wonder and that idea muscle going, is important, but it's not the only step. And there are great examples. One of my heroes, is a guy named Michael Faraday who basically came up with all the electric motors and and and how we conceive of even the what's called the electric fields. He almost knew knew almost no math in the, in the 17, 1800 time period that he was living. His math was, not his strong suit, but his creativity was. And without it, we wouldn't have, you know, the incredible technology that we have today. But I think I think back then too, though, you can have an idea and mechanically put it together to test it without the math. So so now it's too it's too difficult to do It's too all all the things are difficult. Yeah. Well, I think I think that's that's true. And and even for experimentalists, I'm not denigrating what myself and my colleagues do, obviously. But, but experiments now cost, you know, the Simons Observatory is the better part of a $100,000,000 project. And, you know, to do this experiment to go back now this is gonna go back, you know, a trillionth of a trillionth of a second perhaps, but only if inflation took place. I mean, it could be that we're doing, that we come up with a with a null result. Like, that we actually don't see this. So, you know, when people ask me, and I do get these emails, you know, I could prove Einstein wrong. You know, I always ask the first thing I'm gonna ask them if I do respond to their their personal theory is, like, have you worked through all the previous work that's been done in this field? Because otherwise, they're just assume oh, the world has just started rotating when I was born, and I don't have to look into it'd be like, I'm a great artist, but I've never I've never, you know, studied Picasso or studied Seurat or or or or, you know, Monet. Like, you you don't have to be like them, but you have to understand what made them great. And great physics is like great art. Yeah. So I I agree with that. Like you know? And that happens in every industry. Let's say it's math or even even, like you say, art or writing. You know? There's always you're always standing on the shoulders of the generation before you. I'm just wondering, you know, there's the flip side, which is, like, you look at string theory, and sometimes I wonder, did these people just get so enraptured with the math that they got down this rabbit hole that is unfalsifiable as you put it? Yeah. So there's a woman, an author of a book, called Lost in Math. Her name is Sabine Hassenfelder. She lives in Germany. And she was on my podcast recently. And we talked about just this, which her thesis is that the obsession that physicists have for beauty and, is leading them astray. That's actually the subtitle of her book. And she explains what that is, for you know, it's a technical book. It's it's actually looking at things extremely. But, you know, it's it's a popular science book, so you could understand it for sure. But the the notion that physicists have become obsessed with, say, symmetry and and beauty, etcetera, you know, it's a natural thing. You ever see this like, they do an they do a, kind of an optical illusion or a test. They take, like, Brad Pitt, who's the 2nd most handsome man in the world after the 2 of us. Right? They take Brad Pitt. 3rd. The 3rd. Sorry. They cut his face in half. Right? And then they reflect the right side over to make it into the left side, and he looks absolutely grotesque. I mean, you would not wanna you know, I can say with confidence, you know, I'm I'm I'm perfectly comfortable saying he's extremely handsome. But when you see that reflection, symmetric Brad Pitt, you would think this this is grotesque. And and yet we claim that we find things of great symmetry very beautiful, like the platonic solids, the sphere, the trying you know, the the the tetrahedron, etcetera, that those are things that reputedly have great beauty. And, of course, you know, many scientists throughout history have tried to make artistic analogs in physics, including musical analogs. I have a friend, Stefan Alexander, who wrote a book called The Jazz of Physics in which he uses jazz to analogize the formation of structure in the universe. But you're right. There are in theoretical physics, they're so dependent on the experimental output, which itself takes so long to get. The feedback loop, this this this feedback cycle is very, very leaky or it takes very, very long to come to fruition. And so they're guided by these sort of fundamental principles, one of which is that a theory should be beautiful. Actually, Dirac, Paul Dirac, won the Nobel Prize in the thirties for essentially conjecturing antimatter. He, he used to say things like it's more important that your equations are beautiful than that they're correct, which is just astounding. I I say almost the opposite. Like, if they're not correct, if they don't agree with the experiment, they're useless. They they're just pure math, and there's nothing wrong with math. But, but, yes, there is sort of an there there's a wall at SUNY Stony Brook where my father, used to teach, and there's a wall in the Simon Center For Geometric Physics. And it has engraved in it the great equations of math and physics, And they're they're almost all beautiful in a sense to a physicist and to a mathematician. And I think that says something about what, you know, kind of prejudices that that human beings come to. And despite the stereotype, scientists are human beings. Well, you know, there's there's so many things to talk about. I I kinda wanna spend another few hours talking about all the different possible multiverses and dimensions, and I still need to understand space time curvature. Like, we gotta do another one of these. So you have to come back on the podcast and and continue the conversation, but but I I know we've we've spent a lot of time, and, I I I really appreciate the time you you've spent. It's so much fun. Well, I wanna have you on my show. I've got a list of stuff I wanna ask you, and, it'll be an honor to continue the conversation wherever it may be. Excellent. And cliffhanger that leads to your show, I still have to tell you the story of what happened at TEDx San Diego when you were speaking right before me, and then I had to go on, and I almost flipped out. Do you wanna tell it on my on my podcast? I'll I'll tell it on yours. I'll leave it at cliffhanger. Awesome. So well well, Brian Keating, you know, I don't know what to say. You're the that you're a master physicist. You were also author of this great book, losing the Nobel Prize, which was so, fascinating about the history of the Nobel Prize, plus the history of the theories of the big bang. It it's really a good history of physics, really, and and plus your experiences on the cutting edge of that. Great book to read. You you should consider also being a popular science writer. You could we gotta get you up there with with Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, and and Michio Kaku, who's also been on the podcast a couple times. Like, it's all all good stuff. I'm really fascinated. Yeah. I I I love those guys. The one difference between those, three amazing scientists is that they're all theoreticians. And I think my book is one of the first by an experimentalist, you know, who actually deals with getting the data. And I also want to make it a memoir. You know, it's really a story of what it feels like to come up short. We always, talk about the winners, but, you know, there's only, you know, one winner of a given sporting event or the promised land for a given individual, and you almost never repeat it. And so I I realized that most people spend their lives in the state of coming up short, but how do you deal with that in order to learn lessons of being humble without being humiliated for not winning? And so it's it's really a memoir. And, yeah, I'd be delighted I also host the Into the Impossible podcast, which is at the Arthur c Clark Center For Human Imagination here in UC San Diego. And, I'd love to have you on the Into the Impossible podcast. Excellent. Well, I'm I'm looking forward to it. We'll we'll arrange that. And, thank you so much for once again for for coming on. Thanks, James. Are you looking for a way to reward your employees this Christmas? Ireland's Blue Book gift vouchers can be used in over 60 award winning country houses, historic hotels, and restaurants throughout Ireland. 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