The guest
Brian Keating: Experimental physicist and cosmologist at UC San Diego, author of 'Losing the Nobel Prize' and host of the 'Into the Impossible' podcast. He led the BICEP1 telescope project hunting for evidence of cosmic inflation in the early universe.
What this episode covers
Brian Keating and Lex Fridman explore the origins of the universe, from the Big Bang and cosmic inflation to bouncing/cyclic alternative cosmologies. Keating explains how his BICEP telescopes at the South Pole searched for primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, and tells the personal story of how the BICEP2 'discovery' was undone by galactic dust, the suicide of his mentor Andrew Lange, and his exclusion from the project's leadership. The conversation ranges across the sociology of science, the corrosive obsession with the Nobel Prize, the value of celebrating others' success, and theories of everything from Eric Weinstein, Wolfram and string theory. It closes on the likelihood of alien life, the meaning of mortality, and Keating's 'practicing agnostic' search for God.
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Big reveals from this episode
- Keating tells the human story of BICEP and how the celebrated 2014 'discovery' of inflation's signature was later shown to be galactic dust.
- His mentor and father figure Andrew Lange died by suicide in January 2010, devastating Keating personally and professionally.
- After Lange's death the collaboration reformed BICEP2 with Keating no longer a principal investigator, which felt like a betrayal.
- The Royal Swedish Academy asked Keating to nominate the 2015 Nobel Prize winners for the very type of work he had hoped to win for.
- On March 17, 2014 the BICEP2 team announced detecting inflation's aftershocks, but it turned out to be dust from magnetized iron grains in our galaxy.
- Keating is extraordinarily pessimistic that technological alien life exists, estimating the odds against it are astronomically low.
- He argues discovering alien slime mold would change nothing because humanity already ignores life and suffering all around it.
- Keating reveals he once obsessively cared about winning the Nobel Prize for his own ego, calling it embarrassing in retrospect.
Worth remembering
- Galileo did not invent the telescope (Hans Lippershey did) but improved it tenfold, transforming how we see the universe.
- Almost all the hydrogen in a water bottle was produced in the universe's first ~20 minutes, shorter than an episode of The Big Bang Theory.
- The universe is measured to be 13.872 billion years old, accurate to about half a percent.
- Every cubic centimeter of the universe contains about 420 leftover photons from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background).
- Because space itself expands, we can see objects roughly three times the age of the universe away, giving a ~90 billion light-year observable diameter.
- BICEP detectors are cooled to about 0.1 Kelvin and observe from the South Pole because it is the driest place on Earth, not just the coldest.
- Barry Barish won the Nobel for LIGO partly because a black-hole collision 1.2 billion years ago arrived just before the nomination deadline.
- Fritz Haber invented life-giving fertilizer but also chlorine gas warfare; his work led to Zyklon B, which later killed his own relatives.
- Iron forged in dying stars and sprayed out by supernovae ended up in Earth's crust and in the hemoglobin of our blood.
- Helium was discovered in the Sun's spectrum about 150 years ago, hence its name from Helios, the Greek sun god.
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