Dr. Brian Keating: Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.720 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.920 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.400 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.720 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.800 | My guest today is Dr. Brian Keating.

00:00:18.400 | Dr. Brian Keating is a professor of cosmology

00:00:20.960 | at the University of California, San Diego.

00:00:24.320 | Today's discussion is perhaps the most zoomed out discussion

00:00:27.460 | that we've ever had on this podcast.

00:00:29.560 | What I mean by that is today we talk about

00:00:32.040 | the origins of the universe.

00:00:33.640 | We talk about the Earth's relationship to the sun

00:00:36.040 | and to the other planets.

00:00:37.640 | We talk a lot about optics,

00:00:39.880 | so not just the neuroscience of vision

00:00:42.600 | and our ability to see things up close and far away,

00:00:45.520 | but to see things very, very far away

00:00:48.000 | or very, very close up

00:00:50.240 | using telescopes or microscopes respectively.

00:00:53.880 | So today's discussion is a far-reaching one,

00:00:56.680 | literally and figuratively,

00:00:58.720 | and one that I know everyone will appreciate

00:01:00.800 | because it really will teach you

00:01:02.480 | how the scientific process is carried out.

00:01:04.760 | It will also help you understand

00:01:06.040 | that science is indeed a human endeavor

00:01:08.780 | and that much of what we understand about ourselves

00:01:10.960 | and about the world around us,

00:01:12.240 | and indeed the entire universe,

00:01:14.120 | is filtered through that humanness.

00:01:16.120 | But I want to be very clear

00:01:17.080 | that today's discussion is not abstract.

00:01:19.320 | You're going to learn a lot of concrete facts

00:01:21.720 | about the universe, about humanity,

00:01:23.980 | and about the process of discovery.

00:01:26.320 | In fact, much of what we talk about today

00:01:28.440 | is about the process of humans discovering things

00:01:31.240 | about themselves and about the world.

00:01:34.020 | Dr. Keating has an incredible perspective

00:01:36.200 | and approach to science,

00:01:37.820 | having built, for instance,

00:01:38.980 | giant telescopes down at the South Pole

00:01:41.360 | and having taken on many other truly ambitious builds

00:01:45.080 | in service to this thing we call discovery.

00:01:48.000 | Before we begin,

00:01:48.920 | I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:01:50.720 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:01:53.360 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:01:55.360 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:01:57.200 | about science and science-related tools

00:01:59.200 | to the general public.

00:02:00.520 | In keeping with that theme,

00:02:01.880 | this podcast episode does include sponsors.

00:02:04.760 | And now for my discussion with Dr. Brian Keating.

00:02:08.080 | Dr. Brian Keating, welcome.

00:02:10.820 | - Dr. Andrew Huberman,

00:02:12.040 | it's great to meet you in person finally.

00:02:13.560 | I thought you were a legend.

00:02:15.280 | - I exist in real life and you do as well,

00:02:17.960 | and I'm delighted that we're going to talk today

00:02:20.280 | because I have a longstanding adoration,

00:02:23.900 | there's no other appropriate word,

00:02:25.480 | for eyes, vision, optics,

00:02:28.800 | the stars, the moon, the sun.

00:02:30.640 | I mean, animals, humans,

00:02:32.880 | what's more interesting than how we got here

00:02:35.780 | and how we see things and what we see and why?

00:02:38.520 | - That's right.

00:02:39.360 | - You're a physicist, you're a cosmologist,

00:02:41.880 | not a cosmetologist.

00:02:43.320 | - That's right, I do do hair and makeup

00:02:44.840 | if you're interested.

00:02:45.680 | (laughing)

00:02:46.880 | - Please orient us in the galaxy.

00:02:49.880 | - So I get to study the entire universe basically,

00:02:55.040 | and it's not really such a stretch

00:02:57.760 | that cosmetology and cosmology share this prefix

00:03:01.000 | because the prefix cosmos

00:03:03.160 | is what relates those two words together

00:03:05.440 | that seem to be completely, you know,

00:03:07.280 | unrelated to each other, right?

00:03:09.120 | But it turns out the word cosmos in Greek,

00:03:11.200 | the etymology of it, is beautiful or appearance.

00:03:14.800 | So we have a beautiful appearance,

00:03:16.840 | you know, we look a certain way,

00:03:18.760 | we're attracted to certain things,

00:03:20.580 | but it kind of reflects the fact that the night sky

00:03:22.880 | is also beautiful, attractive,

00:03:25.200 | and evokes something viscerally in us.

00:03:27.380 | We humans are born with two refracting telescopes

00:03:31.760 | in our skulls, embedded in our skulls,

00:03:34.240 | and as you point out, you know,

00:03:35.480 | the retinas outside the cranial vault, right?

00:03:37.760 | I'll never forget you saying that.

00:03:40.000 | That means we have astronomical detection tools

00:03:43.200 | built into us.

00:03:44.240 | We don't have tools to detect the Higgs boson

00:03:47.000 | built into us or to look at a microscopic virus

00:03:50.280 | or something like that.

00:03:51.540 | So astronomy is not only the oldest of all sciences,

00:03:54.480 | it's the most visceral one, so connects us.

00:03:57.000 | And of the sciences, of that branch of science,

00:03:59.520 | of astronomical sciences,

00:04:01.600 | cosmology is really the most overarching.

00:04:04.280 | It really includes everything,

00:04:05.680 | all physical processes that were involved

00:04:07.760 | in the formation of matter, of energy,

00:04:10.320 | maybe of time itself.

00:04:12.240 | And it speaks to a universal urge, I think,

00:04:14.960 | to know what came before us.

00:04:16.480 | Like I always ask people, I'll ask you,

00:04:17.680 | I know what the answer is, probably,

00:04:19.440 | but what's your favorite day on the calendar?

00:04:22.180 | - Favorite day on the calendar?

00:04:23.020 | - Yeah.

00:04:24.740 | - I love New Year's Day.

00:04:26.020 | - New Year's Day, exactly.

00:04:27.300 | What is that?

00:04:28.140 | It's a beginning.

00:04:28.960 | It's a new, some people say their birthday,

00:04:31.180 | their kid's birthday, if they're smart,

00:04:32.980 | their anniversary, right?

00:04:33.940 | You know, you don't wanna get too out of control

00:04:36.060 | with the misses.

00:04:37.300 | What are those?

00:04:38.120 | Those are beginnings.

00:04:38.960 | What's the only event that no entity

00:04:42.160 | could even bear witness to?

00:04:43.780 | The origin of the universe.

00:04:45.660 | I think that speaks to something primal in human beings

00:04:47.980 | that are curious, at least.

00:04:49.420 | We wanna uncover the secrets of what existed,

00:04:51.980 | what came before us.

00:04:53.320 | And we don't have any way of seeing that currently.

00:04:56.940 | So we have to use the fossils that have made their way

00:05:00.140 | throughout all of cosmic time

00:05:02.180 | to understand what that was like

00:05:04.140 | at the very beginning of time.

00:05:05.820 | And perhaps, maybe, about the universe as it existed

00:05:10.420 | before time itself began.

00:05:12.380 | So to me, it's incredibly fascinating.

00:05:14.660 | It encompasses all of science in some sense.

00:05:16.740 | It even can include life on other planets,

00:05:19.780 | consciousness, the formation of the brain.

00:05:22.060 | And to me, I'm always interested in the biggest questions.

00:05:25.060 | And the biggest topics that evoke curiosity in me

00:05:28.200 | is how did it all get here?

00:05:29.460 | And so that's what cosmology allows us to do,

00:05:31.580 | apply the strict exacting laws of physics

00:05:34.940 | to a specific domain,

00:05:37.900 | which is the origin of everything in the universe.

00:05:40.020 | That's what makes it so fascinating.

00:05:42.140 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:08:32.760 | - Before we get to the origins of the universe

00:08:36.100 | and the organization of the planets relative to the sun

00:08:38.860 | and their spins, et cetera, you said something

00:08:43.500 | that at least to me feels intuitively so true,

00:08:47.560 | and I think it's very likely to be true for everybody,

00:08:50.340 | which is that there's something about looking up into space,

00:08:53.460 | especially at night when we see the stars

00:08:55.680 | and hopefully see the stars.

00:08:57.620 | We'll talk about light pollution a little bit later.

00:09:01.060 | When we see the stars that,

00:09:02.460 | yes, we know these things are far away.

00:09:07.340 | Yes, we know that they occupy a certain position in space.

00:09:12.340 | They have a diameter, et cetera.

00:09:15.180 | We might not know what that is just by looking at them.

00:09:16.980 | You probably do, but they also change our perception of time.

00:09:21.980 | And if I were to say one thing

00:09:24.940 | about the human brain especially is that,

00:09:27.560 | sure, it's got all these autonomic functions.

00:09:29.320 | It regulates heart rate, digestion, et cetera,

00:09:31.440 | sleep-wake cycles.

00:09:33.160 | It can remember, it can think.

00:09:35.980 | It can have states like rage or anger

00:09:37.980 | or happiness or delight.

00:09:39.360 | But what's remarkable about the human brain

00:09:42.740 | is that it can think into the past.

00:09:46.180 | It can be "present" and it can project into the future.

00:09:51.700 | And I'm sure other animals can do that,

00:09:53.460 | but we do this exquisitely well,

00:09:54.980 | and we make plans on the basis of this ability

00:09:56.980 | to contract or expand our notion of time.

00:10:00.460 | As a non-biologist, but somebody who I think appreciates

00:10:05.300 | and understands biology,

00:10:06.780 | why do you think it is that when we look up into the sky,

00:10:11.300 | even though most people might not realize

00:10:12.860 | that those stars probably aren't there

00:10:15.140 | and occupying the position that we think they are,

00:10:16.960 | some of them probably are, some of them aren't,

00:10:18.860 | they existed a long time ago, but without knowing that,

00:10:21.620 | why do you think that looking up at the stars

00:10:23.460 | gives us the sense of an expansion of time

00:10:26.940 | as opposed to just the expansion of space?

00:10:29.900 | - Well, first of all, we have to take ourselves back

00:10:31.980 | to deep prehistory.

00:10:33.260 | We know that ancients were looking at the constellations

00:10:38.260 | because they were seemingly either in control of

00:10:41.940 | or correlated with or perhaps causative of the seasons.

00:10:45.420 | And that was of divine importance,

00:10:47.820 | supreme importance for them, right?

00:10:49.620 | Their whole existence in early agrarian societies,

00:10:52.300 | hunting societies, gathering societies.

00:10:54.740 | So they had to know about time.

00:10:55.980 | So time, the essence of time, and that on large scale,

00:11:00.260 | for seasons, for holidays, for festivals,

00:11:02.580 | for propitiation of deities and so forth,

00:11:05.500 | they had to keep track of it.

00:11:06.900 | And that's why in the caves in Lascaux

00:11:08.500 | that date back to the 40,000 BCE,

00:11:12.300 | they depict constellations, Orion, the hunter,

00:11:14.900 | Taurus, the bull, all these different constellations,

00:11:17.140 | they depict them there.

00:11:18.260 | Now, partially that was because Netflix

00:11:20.780 | didn't exist back then, right?

00:11:21.780 | There was no TikTok.

00:11:22.860 | And so there wasn't much to do at night.

00:11:24.920 | And in fact, the more you were out at night,

00:11:26.660 | you probably increased your opportunity

00:11:28.540 | to be consumed by some predator, right?

00:11:30.580 | So you were more focused on being stationary, observing.

00:11:34.540 | And as I said, we can do astronomy,

00:11:36.460 | uniquely so amongst all the sciences,

00:11:38.240 | with just the equipment we're born with.

00:11:40.060 | You know, measurements with our eyes,

00:11:41.900 | with respect to landmarks, to calculate patterns.

00:11:44.840 | And humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns,

00:11:47.780 | sometimes too good.

00:11:48.700 | - So for instance, knowing that a certain swath of stars

00:11:51.220 | is present at one time of year and not another

00:11:53.500 | relative to say the contour of a mountain ridge.

00:11:57.180 | - Yes, and the repetition of it over,

00:12:00.580 | and it passed down through generations.

00:12:02.340 | Before there was written language, there was pictography.

00:12:04.860 | There was the cave paintings and so forth.

00:12:06.740 | There was oral language and that was it.

00:12:08.340 | For written language is only 10,000 years old

00:12:11.120 | or something like that.

00:12:12.220 | So to store information, that meant it was a continuity

00:12:15.300 | between generations.

00:12:16.340 | My great-great-great-great-grandfather's elders,

00:12:18.140 | whatever, taught me that when the moon

00:12:19.820 | is in this constellation, the sun is in this constellation,

00:12:22.780 | we all should plant or we should harvest

00:12:25.580 | in other times.

00:12:27.220 | And so it was, and we still do use the, you know,

00:12:30.460 | the rotation of the earth hasn't changed that much

00:12:33.500 | since this 40,000 year period, right?

00:12:35.460 | I mean, the axis in which it rotates,

00:12:37.180 | that's a different story, but the actual spin rate,

00:12:40.600 | the angular momentum of the earth

00:12:42.060 | has not depreciably changed that much.

00:12:44.180 | And so the positions of these objects

00:12:46.860 | were of such importance that the ancients would use them

00:12:51.460 | for all these purposes, but there were so few things

00:12:55.200 | that changed position that they actually had names for them.

00:12:58.440 | They're called planets.

00:12:59.700 | So planet in Greek, it's like the word plane,

00:13:02.540 | like airplane, it means something that moves or wanders.

00:13:05.220 | So when you name something, it means it's pretty different

00:13:07.740 | from the other things in which are not associated

00:13:09.860 | with that characteristic.

00:13:11.180 | So the planets, there were only five that they could,

00:13:13.180 | you know, see at that time up to Saturn.

00:13:15.620 | And they actually would associate those,

00:13:17.820 | not only with astronomical events,

00:13:20.140 | but events down on earth.

00:13:21.140 | That's what connected the earth.

00:13:22.480 | And so we have legacy of that in our calendar today.

00:13:25.980 | So Sunday, named after the sun.

00:13:27.900 | Monday, moon.

00:13:29.080 | Tuesday, and you go to the Latin languages.

00:13:30.860 | I think it's Mercury Day, which is Mercury Day.

00:13:34.300 | Vantra Day, Venus Day, so you go to the Romance languages.

00:13:37.620 | And then the only one that's not a Latin name

00:13:40.420 | is, of course, for Thor, the god Thor, Thursday.

00:13:44.320 | And then it comes back Saturn Day, Saturday.

00:13:46.780 | So they were all used as a clock.

00:13:49.360 | And people don't really grasp this.

00:13:51.380 | I mean, we have an Apple Watch, we have whatever.

00:13:53.980 | We didn't have a clock that was functional,

00:13:57.020 | that would work on all different time zones

00:13:59.020 | and all different conditions on the pitching deck of a ship

00:14:01.620 | till the 1700s, basically.

00:14:03.740 | It was a huge problem.

00:14:05.500 | And so measuring time became crucial for commerce,

00:14:08.300 | for human culture and civilization to arise,

00:14:11.420 | for education, and obviously for planting, harvesting,

00:14:14.600 | and so forth.

00:14:15.100 | So there was an obvious connection between the two.

00:14:17.860 | They believed, actually, that they were causative.

00:14:20.300 | That, actually, the position of the planet Jupiter

00:14:22.820 | determined something on the day of your birth,

00:14:24.900 | and the sun's relative position with respect to it

00:14:27.380 | determined something about your future and your prospects

00:14:31.260 | in life, and so forth.

00:14:32.420 | So when I'm not confused for a cosmetologist,

00:14:34.820 | because of my lovely hair and makeup,

00:14:37.020 | I'm usually asked, oh, you're an astronomer.

00:14:39.740 | I'm a Virgo.

00:14:40.740 | So what's going to happen to me?

00:14:42.700 | I'm like, I used to be, oh, OK, that's an astrologer.

00:14:45.780 | I'm not an astrologer.

00:14:46.740 | But now I kind of lean into it.

00:14:48.260 | I'm like, ooh, you're going to get a letter from the IRS

00:14:51.060 | next week.

00:14:51.560 | And that lump on your ass, that's--

00:14:53.060 | You mean you're playing games with them.

00:14:54.980 | Yeah.

00:14:55.480 | So you don't believe in astrology.

00:14:57.540 | There's no evidence for astrology.

00:14:58.940 | In fact, there's many, many random controlled trials,

00:15:02.740 | double-bund study, that showed not only is it--

00:15:05.300 | it's almost counter to the evidence.

00:15:07.980 | They say that a monkey can throw a dart at a stock chart

00:15:11.300 | and do better than most hedge fund managers,

00:15:13.740 | or something like that.

00:15:14.700 | Actually, astrologers are even worse.

00:15:16.900 | I don't even know a protozoa could throw a dart.

00:15:20.140 | It's almost anti-correlated with what reality is.

00:15:24.020 | So no, there's certainly no validity to that.

00:15:27.220 | And I had a provocative tweet, whatever, post recently.

00:15:32.300 | And it was about--

00:15:33.540 | there's actually-- we believe there are 12 zodiac signs.

00:15:37.400 | And that dates back to the Persians and the Babylonians,

00:15:39.860 | and how they divided up them.

00:15:41.060 | And it almost divides--

00:15:42.100 | they were fascinated with the number 60.

00:15:44.100 | So that was the base of their number system.

00:15:46.260 | Our number system is 10, because we have 10 figures.

00:15:47.980 | For some reason, they love base 60.

00:15:49.440 | I don't know why.

00:15:51.140 | And so they love things that divide evenly into it.

00:15:53.500 | 10 does, but anyway, hashtag fail for the Babylonians.

00:15:58.300 | But they divided it up into 12 zodiac signs.

00:16:02.060 | So we still use those.

00:16:03.220 | There is a problem, though.

00:16:04.700 | The zodiac that you're-- do you know what this is?

00:16:07.420 | Do you know what determines your zodiac sign?

00:16:09.460 | No.

00:16:09.960 | Oh, OK.

00:16:10.460 | So it's determined by the position of the sun.

00:16:14.260 | What constellation was the sun in on the day you were born?

00:16:17.100 | September 26.

00:16:19.260 | So that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo.

00:16:23.260 | Oh, no.

00:16:23.780 | You were a Libra?

00:16:24.600 | Libra.

00:16:25.100 | Libra, OK.

00:16:25.620 | You do know what you are, but you don't know why you are.

00:16:28.020 | So Libra means it's a constellation.

00:16:29.940 | There's 88 constellations that are accepted by astronomers.

00:16:33.460 | And one of them is Libra.

00:16:35.620 | And the path that the sun and the moon and all the planets

00:16:38.360 | travel in is called the zodiac.

00:16:40.020 | It's confined to a plane because the same proto-solar system

00:16:45.020 | disk from which we formed out of-- all the planets came out

00:16:48.860 | of a nebular cloud, a cloud of gas, dust, rocks, and so forth

00:16:52.980 | that came from a pre-existing star that exploded,

00:16:57.220 | creating what's called a supernova.

00:16:59.060 | The supernova provided the materials

00:17:01.060 | to make not only the Earth, but the entire solar system,

00:17:03.420 | including the sun.

00:17:04.580 | That happened about 5 billion years ago.

00:17:06.780 | And 4 billion years ago, the Earth

00:17:08.760 | formed out of that cloud.

00:17:10.720 | The spin of that disk, all things

00:17:13.220 | have a spin associated with them, like a figure skater.

00:17:16.460 | She's spinning around on her axis or whatever.

00:17:18.380 | She can have her arms out, brings them in.

00:17:20.340 | She spins faster.

00:17:21.220 | That's called conservation of angular momentum.

00:17:23.260 | Spin is a type of angular momentum.

00:17:25.140 | The whole disk is spinning in a plane.

00:17:26.880 | It's like this desk, this table that we're sitting at.

00:17:29.300 | If you're listening, you imagine a flat table.

00:17:31.700 | It's spinning.

00:17:32.340 | A circular disk is spinning with a certain direction.

00:17:35.260 | All the objects are moving in that same direction

00:17:37.740 | due to conservation of this term called angular momentum.

00:17:41.060 | The sun moves in that-- apparently

00:17:42.540 | moves in that position.

00:17:43.500 | Obviously, we're rotating around the sun,

00:17:45.200 | but it looks like the sun's coming around us.

00:17:47.180 | The moon is, Jupiter-- so on the day you were born,

00:17:49.820 | there's a constellation behind the sun from our perspective

00:17:53.180 | that was Libra on September 26.

00:17:55.860 | And that was the day that you were born.

00:17:57.660 | That determines the fact that you're a Libra.

00:17:59.500 | But there's a problem.

00:18:00.920 | In December, where we are now, the sun

00:18:03.380 | is actually in a different constellation.

00:18:05.060 | The one that doesn't exist according

00:18:06.560 | to the zodiac that was created something like 5,000 years ago.

00:18:10.860 | It's called Ophiuchus.

00:18:12.100 | So there's a certain segment of people

00:18:14.300 | born in a 17-day stretch in late November to early December

00:18:18.740 | that are actually Ophiuchans or Ophiuchuses or whatever.

00:18:22.900 | So that should obliterate astrology

00:18:25.700 | as any semblance of a science, because they didn't even

00:18:28.460 | know this constellation existed.

00:18:30.020 | And yet, something like 12% of all people

00:18:32.880 | share that constellation.

00:18:34.420 | So it's just complete nonsense.

00:18:36.020 | There's no validity to it.

00:18:37.180 | Twins that are born on the same day

00:18:38.900 | have radically different histories, past, futures.

00:18:41.980 | And there's no predictive power to it.

00:18:44.140 | And that's what science is about, right?

00:18:45.820 | We want to make a hypothesis, test it, iterate on it,

00:18:48.140 | and have confirmation of it.

00:18:49.380 | And there's zero, in fact, for astrology.

00:18:51.620 | In fact, if you'll permit me a kind of silly story,

00:18:54.780 | when I was dating my wife, who would become my wife

00:18:56.900 | in the beginning, she kind of thought it's fun.

00:19:00.660 | Maybe we'll go see someone who can tell our fortunes,

00:19:05.940 | if we belong together.

00:19:06.940 | So we went to an astrologer.

00:19:08.780 | And the astrologer asked me a bunch of questions.

00:19:11.340 | When were you born, obviously?

00:19:12.860 | And oh, no, she asked me, what's your sign?

00:19:15.260 | So I said, I'm a Gemini.

00:19:16.820 | And she said, OK, cool.

00:19:17.820 | And then she told me a bunch of things.

00:19:19.380 | And at the end, I said, I just want to double check.

00:19:21.580 | I was playing kind of a little bit of a jerk sometimes.

00:19:24.460 | So I said, I just want to confirm.

00:19:26.420 | Gemini is born in September.

00:19:28.060 | I'm born September 9th.

00:19:29.740 | She said, oh, no, no, that's a Virgo.

00:19:31.700 | But the same things are going to happen to you anyway.

00:19:33.980 | It didn't change her outcome.

00:19:35.700 | And so in the language of the philosophy of science,

00:19:38.660 | Karl Popper, others, it's unfalsifiable.

00:19:42.140 | And you cannot be proven right.

00:19:43.420 | It's so flexible.

00:19:44.820 | You're going to find challenges.

00:19:46.460 | The stock market is going to fluctuate.

00:19:48.700 | Political turmoil will reign during your--

00:19:50.780 | they're so flexible, it can accommodate any story.

00:19:53.540 | And that's a hallmark of non-science, or sometimes

00:19:56.340 | anti-scientific thinking.

00:19:58.200 | One thing that really strikes me is the fact

00:20:00.500 | that, at least just the way you describe it, the first clock,

00:20:05.100 | the first timekeeping approach or mechanism

00:20:08.820 | was to evaluate the position of things in the sky

00:20:11.100 | relative to celestial landmarks.

00:20:14.780 | So irrespective of when people are born in astrology,

00:20:18.620 | I could imagine a tribe of people, a group of people,

00:20:22.700 | who have charts because they've painted them

00:20:26.560 | onto some surface-- doesn't matter what the surface is--

00:20:29.400 | that, at some portion of the year,

00:20:32.900 | the stars are above this ridge.

00:20:35.360 | There are three bright stars above the ridge

00:20:38.180 | just to the left of the front of the village, so to speak.

00:20:41.440 | This is not an unreasonable thing to imagine.

00:20:44.160 | And that information is passed down

00:20:46.740 | in the form of when those three stars are

00:20:49.080 | about to disappear behind that ridge,

00:20:54.440 | days are getting shorter.

00:20:56.600 | Whereas when those three stars are re-emerging again

00:21:01.120 | elsewhere in the sky, days are getting longer.

00:21:06.040 | Forgive me, this will be a little bit of a long question.

00:21:08.240 | Sometimes the listeners get upset with me,

00:21:09.800 | but I think it'll frame it within the biology

00:21:11.680 | in a way that will be meaningful for us and for everyone.

00:21:15.800 | Other animals besides humans have this thing,

00:21:18.520 | a pineal gland that secretes melatonin.

00:21:20.680 | The duration of melatonin release

00:21:22.680 | is directly related to how much light there is.

00:21:25.960 | In other words, light suppresses melatonin.

00:21:27.840 | Therefore, in short days, aka long nights,

00:21:31.200 | you get a lot more melatonin released.

00:21:33.800 | In long days and short nights, you get less melatonin.

00:21:38.400 | So this is the intrinsic clock-keeping mechanism

00:21:40.640 | of all mammalian species and reptiles.

00:21:43.760 | Most people don't realize this,

00:21:44.820 | but reptiles often have either a thin skull,

00:21:48.840 | birds have a very thin skull,

00:21:50.040 | so that light can actually pass through the skull

00:21:52.320 | to the pineal.

00:21:53.260 | Some reptiles actually have pits in the top of their heads

00:21:57.760 | that light can pass directly in to the pineal.

00:22:00.680 | These are animals that, mind you,

00:22:01.720 | also have eyes for perceiving things,

00:22:04.420 | but this is the primordial,

00:22:06.800 | biologically primordial timekeeping device.

00:22:10.640 | And you imagine why this would be really important,

00:22:12.960 | and then I'll get back to why I think that

00:22:15.200 | because humans have a pineal

00:22:17.180 | that's embedded deep in the brain,

00:22:19.060 | light cannot, despite what some people think out there,

00:22:22.200 | I'm not gonna name names,

00:22:23.060 | but light cannot get through the skull to the pineal,

00:22:25.940 | nor is putting a light in your ear is gonna get there,

00:22:29.620 | or even in the roof of your mouth, very unlikely,

00:22:32.140 | maybe some distant stimulation

00:22:34.100 | of the neurons in your hypothalamus with long wavelength.

00:22:36.580 | But in any case,

00:22:37.780 | the pineal of humans is embedded deep in the skull,

00:22:40.300 | and so that information about

00:22:43.040 | how much light is in the environment

00:22:44.400 | has to be passed through the eyes,

00:22:45.580 | through a circuitous circuit to the,

00:22:47.640 | through a circuitous path to the pineal.

00:22:50.100 | But here's the thing, here's the conundrum.

00:22:52.240 | An animal or human born into an eight-hour day

00:22:56.380 | when days are getting longer

00:22:59.680 | has a very different future as an infant,

00:23:03.240 | as an infant or baby that's born into an eight-hour day

00:23:07.000 | when days are getting shorter,

00:23:08.640 | especially if you live closer to the poles,

00:23:10.940 | further from the equator.

00:23:12.100 | So think about this, you're a pregnant woman,

00:23:15.240 | or you're the husband of that pregnant woman,

00:23:17.060 | and you have a baby coming,

00:23:19.340 | and you need to know that days are getting longer or shorter

00:23:23.700 | and what that means for resources,

00:23:25.700 | because the probability of the survival of that child,

00:23:28.460 | and even the mother during and immediately after childbirth

00:23:32.660 | was strongly dictated by what resources were available,

00:23:36.280 | the strength of the immune system, et cetera.

00:23:38.420 | Animals solve this by light going directly into the pineal.

00:23:41.740 | I'm not one of those animals,

00:23:43.640 | so I don't know if they're conscious of this.

00:23:45.000 | Humans needed to solve this some other way.

00:23:47.520 | They needed to know whether or not

00:23:48.840 | days were getting longer or shorter.

00:23:51.120 | And so the question I have is,

00:23:53.680 | is the movement of the stars or planets

00:23:57.000 | detectable enough with these telescopes

00:24:00.280 | that we have in the front of our skull?

00:24:03.000 | Is it perceivable enough that one could know

00:24:05.560 | whether or not days were getting longer or shorter

00:24:07.680 | simply by looking up at the sky at night,

00:24:10.560 | or are the shifts imperceptible,

00:24:13.640 | and therefore you would need to create these charts?

00:24:16.200 | And now I think it's kind of obvious

00:24:18.040 | while I'm asking this question,

00:24:19.160 | because to me, this is the reason to chart time.

00:24:22.040 | And this is the reason it occurs to me

00:24:23.840 | why looking up at the sky at night

00:24:26.340 | is meaningful for tracking time.

00:24:28.040 | - Absolutely.

00:24:29.120 | And not only correlated with that,

00:24:31.560 | something even more perhaps basic is temperature, right?

00:24:34.160 | In the hemisphere that you're born in,

00:24:36.200 | you would expect that all,

00:24:37.760 | I'm born, as I said, September 9th.

00:24:39.680 | Turns out that's the statistically most common birth date

00:24:43.440 | of humans on Earth.

00:24:44.740 | And why is that?

00:24:45.580 | - People are busy during the winter holiday.

00:24:47.320 | - Exactly, right?

00:24:48.160 | So there's a correlation, right?

00:24:49.440 | - Yeah, they're at home and they're indoors.

00:24:50.400 | - They're at home.

00:24:51.320 | - And they're procreating.

00:24:52.440 | - And they're, right.

00:24:54.000 | Or another thing is what month you're born in,

00:24:57.240 | well, you go back nine months.

00:24:58.220 | So actually, capitalism's awesome, right?

00:25:02.640 | So it's so efficient.

00:25:04.000 | So when you go to CVS,

00:25:05.160 | and I've known this several times, thank God,

00:25:07.520 | 'cause my wife's been pregnant several times,

00:25:09.720 | and we have several kids.

00:25:12.280 | And when you go to CVS, it's actually pretty interesting,

00:25:15.440 | she goes there to buy a pregnancy test.

00:25:17.080 | Now, she's the kind of neurotic person that,

00:25:20.020 | she had to buy like five pregnancy tests for each kid.

00:25:22.520 | Okay, I don't know why, but that's what she did.

00:25:24.040 | So she's a--

00:25:24.860 | - She likes data.

00:25:25.700 | - She's got the gold card.

00:25:26.540 | - How do you, okay, everybody, statistics.

00:25:28.680 | How do you reduce variability?

00:25:30.820 | Increase sample size.

00:25:31.960 | Yes, unless it's a systematic error.

00:25:34.040 | And that's what I wanna talk to you about later

00:25:35.240 | when it comes to the eye and other things.

00:25:36.720 | You go to CVS, you buy a pregnancy test,

00:25:39.040 | and she's on their gold plan program,

00:25:40.960 | whatever, she got the gold card from CVS

00:25:43.320 | because she's on it so many times.

00:25:45.200 | But when you go there,

00:25:47.200 | they know you're getting a pregnancy test.

00:25:49.080 | So exactly nine months later,

00:25:50.880 | we start getting advertisements for Pampers,

00:25:53.720 | and for diapers, and for diaper creams,

00:25:55.840 | and wives and stuff.

00:25:56.680 | So they know this, they don't know.

00:25:57.500 | - They're hedging even without knowing

00:25:58.660 | the results of the test. - Yeah, exactly.

00:25:59.640 | What's the downside for them?

00:26:00.760 | - Well, she buys five tests.

00:26:02.000 | They're probably assuming something very different

00:26:04.200 | than if she bought one test.

00:26:05.400 | - Anyway, so the temperature, right?

00:26:07.360 | So if you're gestating during summertime versus wintertime,

00:26:10.720 | that obviously will have some kind of an effect.

00:26:12.720 | I mean, you can tell me a lot more than that,

00:26:14.400 | but more than that, you hinted at this,

00:26:16.360 | and I'm not gonna make you do any math surrounding pregnancy,

00:26:20.280 | but God forbid.

00:26:21.660 | (both laughing)

00:26:23.600 | - Hey, man. - I sympathize with you.

00:26:24.440 | - I put out the correction to that.

00:26:25.260 | - I defended you, I defended you.

00:26:26.100 | - I was talking fast.

00:26:27.760 | The irony of that one, I'll just say for the record,

00:26:29.680 | I'm just blushing, the irony of that one

00:26:32.040 | is that we've published numerous times

00:26:34.560 | from my lab cumulative probability,

00:26:36.760 | and I teach this stuff.

00:26:38.000 | So it's oftentimes when you're going fast,

00:26:40.000 | but that one I totally deserved.

00:26:41.480 | - I love it, I love it.

00:26:43.000 | - Whatever shades of red I might turn.

00:26:45.240 | - That's what a good scientist does.

00:26:46.280 | - Oh, man.

00:26:47.120 | - But they actually think

00:26:48.680 | that the first astronomers were women.

00:26:50.760 | Think about it, because they noticed this correlation.

00:26:53.480 | What's their monthly cycle?

00:26:54.440 | Their menstrual cycle is exactly 29 1/2 days,

00:26:57.520 | which is actually the lunar cycle

00:26:59.360 | down to almost a minute.

00:27:00.580 | It's insane, right, that they would have looked up

00:27:03.600 | and noticed this renewal and diminishing of the moon,

00:27:07.820 | and that there's actually evidence.

00:27:09.160 | Now, they weren't professional astronomers until,

00:27:11.320 | actually, the first professional female astronomer

00:27:13.200 | was until like the 1700s in England,

00:27:15.920 | where she was recognized for using telescopes and so forth.

00:27:18.160 | But no, they were very keen on that,

00:27:20.160 | and they were probably dialed into that

00:27:22.320 | and what that portended, as you alluded to,

00:27:24.840 | for the future of their child.

00:27:26.160 | I mean, this is a huge biological investment.

00:27:28.200 | Men don't have that.

00:27:29.760 | So actually, we are less symmetrical,

00:27:31.580 | you know this, than women, right?

00:27:32.740 | We have our testes are different lengths or whatever.

00:27:35.000 | I guess normal men, at least.

00:27:36.880 | But women are more symmetrical.

00:27:38.440 | But they're actually,

00:27:39.280 | they have an extra timekeeping device

00:27:41.240 | that men, we can't relate to that.

00:27:42.680 | - Their menstrual cycle.

00:27:43.520 | - Their menstrual cycle, yeah.

00:27:44.340 | - Yeah, and some women are keenly aware

00:27:45.320 | of the ovulation event.

00:27:46.480 | They will describe it as a feeling,

00:27:47.980 | as if it's breaking off and migrating within them.

00:27:50.840 | And I have every reason to believe them.

00:27:53.480 | Earlier, you asked, and I know this

00:27:55.480 | will get some people's ears pricked up,

00:27:58.160 | whether or not when a child is born,

00:28:00.680 | with respect to the seasonal cycle,

00:28:03.400 | it impacts that child.

00:28:05.240 | There are a lot of data around this.

00:28:07.400 | It depends on the environment in which one lives.

00:28:11.880 | So closer to the equator, it's a very different situation.

00:28:14.920 | - Equal days all day long.

00:28:15.760 | - Equal days all day long.

00:28:16.980 | There were some data,

00:28:17.920 | and I'd love to get an update on this.

00:28:19.200 | So somebody knows they can put in the comments

00:28:22.520 | that the schizophrenia was far more prevalent

00:28:26.840 | as you move away from the equator.

00:28:28.800 | And then there was a guy at Caltech,

00:28:30.200 | he has since passed, but had some interesting data

00:28:33.280 | about mothers who contracted influenza

00:28:36.280 | during a certain phase of the second trimester,

00:28:39.160 | heightened probability for schizophrenic offspring.

00:28:41.840 | But big, big caveat here, none of it was causal, of course.

00:28:46.840 | And then there are all sorts of interesting things

00:28:49.720 | about placental effects.

00:28:52.320 | And so it's a multivariable thing.

00:28:54.640 | And we know that because identical twins,

00:28:56.140 | even that share the same chorionic sac,

00:28:58.240 | one can be schizophrenic and the other, no,

00:29:00.440 | although there is a higher concordance

00:29:02.240 | than if, say, they're a dichorionic, two different sacs.

00:29:06.320 | But time of birth relative to the seasons,

00:29:09.480 | seasons correlating, of course,

00:29:10.680 | with abundance or lack of food,

00:29:12.720 | abundance or lack of various infectious diseases,

00:29:16.120 | influenza in particular, these things are relevant.

00:29:18.960 | - But we'd have to make a real big stretch

00:29:20.560 | to then include the effects of the planet Jupiter,

00:29:23.160 | which is the biggest planet,

00:29:24.240 | and is most of the mass of our solar system

00:29:26.980 | outside of the sun.

00:29:28.340 | Then it would be clear,

00:29:29.660 | and you could do this test with identical twins

00:29:32.660 | that are identical versus fraternal twins,

00:29:34.500 | twins that are raised with the same parent.

00:29:36.340 | You know, some are separated at birth

00:29:37.720 | and they turn out very much more similarly

00:29:40.540 | when they're identical twins.

00:29:41.780 | So it shows that genetics play more of a role

00:29:43.820 | than we like to think.

00:29:44.660 | - I mean, genes are powerful.

00:29:46.780 | - They are.

00:29:47.620 | - I realize this is a bit politically incorrect

00:29:50.780 | to say in certain venues,

00:29:52.300 | but genes are extremely powerful.

00:29:54.060 | - Yeah, why wouldn't they be, right?

00:29:55.480 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:29:56.320 | I mean, nurture matters as well,

00:29:57.800 | but genes are immensely powerful.

00:29:59.360 | - So, and I think that gives us hope.

00:30:00.800 | You know, people say, well, we should not be so haughty.

00:30:04.680 | We should not be so arrogant.

00:30:05.920 | You know, we have, what, 50% of the same chromosomes

00:30:09.960 | as a fruit fly.

00:30:10.800 | You know, like, who are you to be?

00:30:12.200 | And I say, I'll do you one better.

00:30:13.720 | Like, I think some bonobos have 98% similarity,

00:30:17.440 | but that should give us more, you know,

00:30:19.400 | sort of like treat ourselves and think of ourselves

00:30:22.480 | in a way that's more, you know, more elevated, I would say,

00:30:26.780 | 'cause we're not that.

00:30:27.860 | There's many species of chimpanzees and primates,

00:30:30.020 | and so there's only one human, you know, homo sapien,

00:30:32.980 | which, you know, a lot of people don't know.

00:30:34.580 | The word, you know, homo sapien,

00:30:36.220 | which is our species and our genes.

00:30:38.140 | Sapien doesn't mean, it doesn't mean knowledge, like science.

00:30:42.580 | Sciencia means knowledge.

00:30:44.860 | Sapience means wisdom.

00:30:46.980 | And I like to look at the etymology, I'm fascinated by it,

00:30:49.660 | but it kind of highlights what we should be doing

00:30:51.820 | and what is it that we are aware of.

00:30:53.960 | And I'm curious, have you ever encountered, like,

00:30:56.760 | why are we called, you know, humans that,

00:30:58.920 | like, the wise hominid?

00:31:00.680 | And it's because we're the only entity, organism,

00:31:03.200 | that knows it's gonna die.

00:31:04.880 | Yes, there's some elephants that, you know,

00:31:06.200 | before one dies and one will take care.

00:31:08.240 | It's not the same.

00:31:09.080 | It's like, you knew you were gonna die

00:31:10.240 | when you were a kid, very young.

00:31:12.440 | And it's that awareness of death

00:31:14.880 | and the awareness of how special we are,

00:31:17.600 | I think that's what invests life with a lot more meaning.

00:31:19.760 | I don't wanna get too philosophical.

00:31:20.840 | - It's time perception.

00:31:22.260 | - That's exactly what I was gonna say.

00:31:23.100 | - I mean, I'm an expert on happiness sitting here.

00:31:25.380 | And then Morgan Housel is an expert on the relationship

00:31:27.900 | between psychological happiness and money sitting here.

00:31:30.660 | And he described this cartoon,

00:31:32.460 | which inevitably makes me chuckle,

00:31:34.420 | of a guy and his dog sitting by a lake.

00:31:36.460 | And there's a bubble, you know,

00:31:38.260 | sort of bubbles coming out of the guy's head.

00:31:40.300 | And he's thinking about whatever his stock portfolio

00:31:42.980 | and things back home, et cetera.

00:31:44.100 | And out of the dog's head is just a mirror image

00:31:47.020 | of him sitting with his owner.

00:31:48.860 | The dogs are very present, but what that also means

00:31:51.160 | is that they are not able to perceive their own existence

00:31:54.760 | within time. - And modeling of time,

00:31:56.480 | as you said before.

00:31:57.520 | We can forecast, that's how we,

00:31:59.400 | we don't have the strongest muscles,

00:32:00.800 | the sharpest claws, the biggest teeth, right?

00:32:02.940 | What do we have?

00:32:03.780 | We have this frontal, prefrontal cortex

00:32:05.600 | that allows us to do what are called gedanken

00:32:08.680 | or thought experiments, Einstein said.

00:32:11.000 | To predict the future, to model the future,

00:32:12.960 | not really predict it, we can't do that.

00:32:14.920 | But we can model likely outcomes

00:32:16.840 | and we can simulate in our minds what those would be like.

00:32:19.580 | And we're so dependent on that skill

00:32:22.180 | that we sometimes confuse correlation for causation.

00:32:25.820 | And as you know, everyone who confuses correlation

00:32:28.260 | with causation ends up dying.

00:32:29.660 | So it's very dangerous to do that.

00:32:33.020 | But the point is, the notion

00:32:35.420 | of what's called confirmation bias

00:32:37.100 | is prevalent in every human being, scientist or not.

00:32:39.860 | And in fact, as scientists, you and I,

00:32:41.660 | we have to guard against that more than anybody

00:32:43.420 | 'cause nothing really feels better

00:32:45.440 | than like thinking of a hypothesis, modeling the future,

00:32:49.160 | and then feeling like you're right.

00:32:50.840 | And then you get celebrated and feted.

00:32:52.420 | Maybe you win a golden medallion

00:32:53.820 | with Alfred Nobel's image on it or whatever.

00:32:55.960 | Those kinds of things are very powerful.

00:32:57.520 | And those kinds of things are also very dangerous,

00:33:00.000 | which is why it appeals to so many more people

00:33:02.700 | to think that the celestial orbs play a role in our lives.

00:33:06.140 | It's almost like we've reverted to a paganistic existence

00:33:09.400 | where we wanna believe there's some force

00:33:11.880 | responsible for our fates, when maybe it's random.

00:33:14.960 | - I totally agree with you.

00:33:17.640 | I'll play devil's advocate for a moment,

00:33:19.360 | not for astrology per se, but for instance,

00:33:22.680 | there are many species that use magnetoreception.

00:33:26.200 | They can sense magnetic fields.

00:33:28.040 | I think turtles do this, some migrating birds do this,

00:33:30.480 | and pigeons.

00:33:31.440 | There's even some evidence that within the,

00:33:34.340 | I believe this is still true,

00:33:36.560 | that within the eye of the fly, the fruit fly,

00:33:40.200 | that there are some magnetoreceptors.

00:33:42.960 | So it turns out there are some humans

00:33:45.800 | that perform better than chance

00:33:47.440 | in a magnetoreception perceptual task.

00:33:50.400 | This is very surprising to me.

00:33:52.480 | It can be trained up somewhat,

00:33:54.680 | but I'm sure there are a number of people hearing this

00:33:56.900 | that they themselves feel

00:33:58.320 | that they can sense magnetic fields.

00:34:00.640 | There is a capacity to do that greater than chance

00:34:03.360 | in some individuals, it's a very weak capacity.

00:34:06.200 | So I think humans love the idea

00:34:08.360 | that there is something, skills,

00:34:12.000 | or qualities beyond our reflexive understanding

00:34:17.000 | that we all harbor, this idea that we have superpowers

00:34:20.920 | that we just need to tap into.

00:34:22.060 | - Sixth sense, right.

00:34:22.900 | - Sixth sense, or this person has a stroke

00:34:24.780 | and suddenly is speaking conversational French,

00:34:26.600 | and therefore, neuroplasticity, et cetera.

00:34:29.180 | - Or what's a proprioception,

00:34:30.860 | or our colleague, when you were at San Diego, Ramachandra.

00:34:35.860 | - Oh, Ramachandra.

00:34:36.920 | - Like the synesthesia, right?

00:34:38.800 | - Certainly, synesthesia exists.

00:34:40.160 | People who will hear a certain key on the piano

00:34:42.040 | and it immediately evokes the perception

00:34:45.440 | of a particular color, not just red,

00:34:48.200 | but a particular shade of red in a very consistent way.

00:34:50.520 | - Now, if that was useful for something,

00:34:52.200 | maybe it is useful, I mean, it might be.

00:34:54.160 | - Unusual cross-modal plasticity is what we would call it.

00:34:57.120 | - But so could that not be made into an argument?

00:35:00.360 | Well, that means that this is a general feature

00:35:02.780 | that we just don't know how to access,

00:35:03.960 | but maybe we could go to the gym

00:35:06.640 | and mental gym or do something to enhance that,

00:35:09.240 | like you said.

00:35:10.080 | I don't know, some people do that with infrared,

00:35:12.040 | near-infrared wavelengths that they do some kind of training

00:35:14.960 | and they claim they can see certain things.

00:35:17.400 | The question is, how useful is it?

00:35:18.940 | And then how predictive is it?

00:35:21.040 | And I don't think that we can make a case

00:35:23.520 | for the predictive elements of the position,

00:35:25.880 | as I said, of Mars and Mercury being in retrograde

00:35:29.040 | as it is now, like most people.

00:35:30.640 | But the thing that's shocking is that,

00:35:32.280 | look, there's a whole page in almost every newspaper

00:35:35.160 | except the excreble New York Times.

00:35:37.120 | No, I'm just kidding.

00:35:37.960 | The New York Times doesn't have--

00:35:39.400 | - Are they still around?

00:35:40.240 | - They don't. (laughs)

00:35:42.120 | It's very interesting.

00:35:43.120 | I'll tell you off the air a recent encounter I've had

00:35:46.960 | with the New York Times.

00:35:48.080 | But most newspapers have more,

00:35:50.760 | 10, hundreds of times more ink written

00:35:53.400 | about astrology than astronomy.

00:35:55.040 | I mean, it's barely, it'll barely be in there.

00:35:57.400 | And why is that?

00:35:58.240 | It's capitalistic society.

00:35:59.480 | So people crave this notion that there's some explanation

00:36:03.780 | for the random seeming events that occur in their lives.

00:36:06.080 | And that's an urge as ancient

00:36:08.140 | as human civilization itself.

00:36:10.220 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:37:47.260 | It speaks to what I think is one of the core functions

00:37:49.340 | of the human brain, which, you know,

00:37:51.700 | umbrellas everything we're talking about,

00:37:53.120 | which is the human brain is a prediction-making machine.

00:37:56.820 | And it wants to make predictions on the basis of things

00:37:58.980 | that feel reliable.

00:38:01.700 | And the ability for us to, well, confirmation bias,

00:38:05.420 | the ability for us to link A and T, as opposed to A, B, C,

00:38:09.820 | and work through things linearly

00:38:11.060 | and try and disprove our own hypotheses

00:38:13.740 | is much stronger than any desire

00:38:16.060 | to work through things systematically

00:38:17.780 | unless you're trained as a scientist.

00:38:19.060 | - Exactly, yep.

00:38:19.900 | - And so it's no surprise to me

00:38:21.800 | that people want to understand themselves

00:38:24.640 | and understand others in a way

00:38:26.400 | that feels at least semi-reliable

00:38:29.440 | and to do that in a way

00:38:30.280 | where they don't have to run a ton of experiments

00:38:32.100 | and hence astrology.

00:38:34.280 | I'd like to stay within this vein of thought,

00:38:37.600 | but you said something earlier

00:38:39.440 | that's been kind of nagging in the back of my brain.

00:38:43.480 | You said we have two refracting telescopes

00:38:45.960 | in the front of our skull.

00:38:47.880 | I will often remind people that your retinas

00:38:50.640 | that line the back of your eyes, like a pie crust,

00:38:53.020 | are part of your brain, your central nervous system

00:38:55.080 | that was literally squeezed out of your skull

00:38:57.800 | during the first trimester

00:38:59.420 | through a whole genetic program that's very beautiful.

00:39:01.900 | And this might freak you out, but think about it.

00:39:04.240 | This is the only portion of your brain

00:39:05.420 | that resides outside the cranial vault.

00:39:07.520 | Technically still in your skull,

00:39:08.580 | but outside the cranial vault

00:39:09.520 | gives humans an enormous capacity

00:39:12.180 | that they wouldn't have otherwise

00:39:13.320 | because what you can make judgments about space and time,

00:39:16.760 | space based on what's next to what,

00:39:18.480 | what's far from what,

00:39:19.600 | and time based on movement of things

00:39:21.560 | relative to stationary objects, et cetera,

00:39:24.440 | that we wouldn't otherwise be able to perform, right?

00:39:27.800 | You could sense odors at a distance, smoke, et cetera,

00:39:30.000 | but it's a whole other business

00:39:32.080 | to have these two telescopes.

00:39:33.240 | Could you explain what you mean

00:39:35.560 | by two refracting telescopes?

00:39:37.480 | Because I think that will set the stage nicely

00:39:39.160 | for some of our other discussion about optics.

00:39:41.840 | - Yeah, so I've been in love with telescopes

00:39:43.840 | since the age of about 12

00:39:45.800 | when I could first afford one to buy one of my own.

00:39:48.300 | And that really came out of the fact

00:39:50.400 | that I recognized the limitations of the human eye.

00:39:53.680 | It turned out I was 12 years old,

00:39:55.760 | woke up in the middle of the night one night,

00:39:57.180 | there was this incredibly bright light,

00:39:59.360 | brighter than these lights here,

00:40:00.540 | shining into my room.

00:40:02.080 | And I was like, I don't know,

00:40:03.920 | there's a street light outside and this is crazy.

00:40:06.040 | Let me look outside and see what it is.

00:40:07.580 | And it was the moon.

00:40:08.600 | And I had never seen it.

00:40:09.480 | It was near a moon set, which is near sunrise, full moon.

00:40:13.560 | And I looked at it and I kept staring at it.

00:40:15.360 | And there was a star next to it

00:40:17.120 | that kind of looked like a piece of the moon

00:40:19.120 | had broken off.

00:40:20.000 | It was that bright and that clear.

00:40:22.000 | And it's unusual to see these kinds of things together.

00:40:24.960 | They're actually known as syzygies,

00:40:26.720 | which is a great Scrabble word.

00:40:28.800 | If you're ever pressed for a win in Scrabble,

00:40:31.880 | use the word syzygy.

00:40:32.760 | I think it's like 80 points.

00:40:34.440 | And that just means a conjunction,

00:40:36.000 | an alignment of astronomical objects.

00:40:37.780 | I was like, what the hell is this?

00:40:38.620 | This is 1984, Andrew, you're younger than me,

00:40:41.640 | but Google did not exist for another 16 years.

00:40:44.340 | And I was kind of impatient.

00:40:45.680 | I wanted to know what this thing was.

00:40:47.560 | What is this thing?

00:40:48.400 | It's not moving.

00:40:49.220 | It's not flashing.

00:40:50.060 | It's not a drone.

00:40:50.880 | It's not Southwest Airlines, right?

00:40:53.560 | So I'm looking at it.

00:40:54.400 | It's not moving.

00:40:55.220 | And day after day, it was like that.

00:40:56.920 | And I was like, how am I gonna find this out?

00:40:58.800 | Imagine, we're so blessed that we have the internet

00:41:01.680 | and we have these LLMs.

00:41:03.800 | It's so easy now to be a scientist or do research

00:41:06.560 | and anybody can do research.

00:41:07.600 | Science is for everybody, right?

00:41:08.680 | You always highlight that fact.

00:41:10.840 | So I realized the only way to find out about it

00:41:12.400 | was to wait for the New York Times

00:41:14.100 | to get delivered on Sunday

00:41:15.260 | 'cause they did have a section back then

00:41:16.660 | that they don't have now called Cosmos.

00:41:19.660 | And in it, it depicted what the night sky looked like

00:41:22.160 | that night, which is a Sunday.

00:41:23.560 | And that was like three or four days

00:41:24.600 | after I had this observation,

00:41:27.040 | which I was incredibly observant.

00:41:29.600 | And I looked at it and it was the moon.

00:41:31.320 | It showed the moon and it showed Jupiter.

00:41:33.840 | I was like, what?

00:41:34.920 | You can see a planet with your naked eye?

00:41:37.440 | This was around the time Voyager

00:41:39.120 | was going behind the planets on the grand tour

00:41:40.920 | of the solar system, never been done before.

00:41:42.920 | I was like, I thought you needed a spaceship.

00:41:45.280 | And I realized that was my first bit

00:41:47.120 | of astronomical research.

00:41:48.680 | And I looked up, I had a hypothesis.

00:41:50.240 | What is it?

00:41:51.080 | I was wrong.

00:41:51.900 | I thought it was a star.

00:41:52.740 | It was a planet.

00:41:53.580 | I was like, this is insane.

00:41:54.480 | Imagine what I could see if I had a telescope,

00:41:57.160 | but I couldn't afford a telescope.

00:41:58.640 | We were pretty modest means back then.

00:42:00.360 | I had a job working in a delicatessen down the street.

00:42:02.920 | And I do that once a week.

00:42:04.480 | And then I got a grant from a three-letter agency,

00:42:07.880 | which is the beginning of many, many scientist careers.

00:42:10.980 | I got a grant from the MOM agency, my mother.

00:42:14.480 | She supplemented my $2 an hour salary

00:42:16.860 | at the Venice Delicatessen in Dobbs Ferry.

00:42:19.360 | And I ended up getting a telescope for $75.

00:42:23.240 | And I cherish this thing.

00:42:25.120 | And then I was like, oh, let me look at these things

00:42:28.440 | in the sky.

00:42:29.480 | And it's pretty amazing.

00:42:30.480 | I don't know if you know the history of telescopes,

00:42:32.560 | but the first ones were invented because of the glass that

00:42:37.280 | was present to make eyeglasses.

00:42:39.360 | So telescopes came from eyeglasses.

00:42:41.240 | Where was the best glasses?

00:42:42.440 | Where were the best glasses made?

00:42:43.440 | In the Netherlands.

00:42:44.280 | So actually, the telescope and the microscope

00:42:46.160 | were both invented in Holland.

00:42:48.320 | And the guy who invented the telescope

00:42:50.960 | is very interesting because it would be like he

00:42:53.720 | made the telescope, but he never thought to look at the night

00:42:57.440 | sky with it.

00:42:58.360 | He only used it as a spyglass to look at objects on the horizon

00:43:02.000 | or in a city or whatever.

00:43:03.440 | He never went like this, looked up at 45.

00:43:06.320 | That required Galileo.

00:43:07.920 | So he was my absolute hero of all science.

00:43:10.440 | We'll talk about him later, maybe.

00:43:12.080 | Galileo was the first person to ever look up

00:43:14.400 | with this telescope.

00:43:15.920 | And spot objects in the solar system,

00:43:18.200 | in the universe, that had never been seen before

00:43:20.600 | with a scientific tool.

00:43:22.440 | So everybody had to use their eyes, back to Tycho Brahe,

00:43:25.000 | Kepler, Copernicus, they had to use their eyes,

00:43:27.120 | which are telescopes.

00:43:28.040 | I'll get back to that.

00:43:28.960 | Don't worry.

00:43:30.000 | I know you afford me the podcaster's predilection

00:43:33.240 | of going off on long tangents, but I think this is good.

00:43:36.600 | Galileo then said, well, I'm going to take this telescope

00:43:39.280 | and look at these objects that are otherwise look like stars.

00:43:42.400 | And in fact, were called, basically,

00:43:44.080 | wanderers, because they're the only things that moved.

00:43:46.400 | First looked at the moon.

00:43:47.720 | Now take yourself back to 1609, when he was first

00:43:50.880 | looking at these objects.

00:43:52.600 | 1609, there were no clocks.

00:43:54.400 | There were no scientific tools of any real virtue.

00:43:57.680 | He, in fact, would invent many of these things.

00:43:59.640 | There were simple things like a magnetic compass, a slide rule,

00:44:02.560 | which none in your main demographic

00:44:04.680 | will know what a slide rule is, but that's OK.

00:44:07.040 | Very simple tools.

00:44:09.080 | They would use tubes and whatnot.

00:44:10.640 | But Galileo looked at the moon.

00:44:12.480 | And the hypothesis was, everything in the universe

00:44:14.880 | is orbiting around the Earth.

00:44:17.080 | The Earth is the most perfect place in the universe,

00:44:19.480 | because God puts the things that are most important close

00:44:22.480 | to him in the center of the universe.

00:44:24.280 | God is the center of the universe.

00:44:25.800 | The Catholic Church held this.

00:44:27.280 | And everything would go around the Earth.

00:44:29.000 | And in fact, I'm not going to challenge you,

00:44:31.260 | because I think you'll defeat me in this.

00:44:34.520 | But in your audience, there are probably very many educated--

00:44:37.800 | I call them .edu people.

00:44:39.380 | There's many, many educated people.

00:44:41.220 | I find that even with my brilliant students at UCSD,

00:44:44.760 | they can't prove that the Earth is not

00:44:47.600 | the center of the solar system.

00:44:49.640 | In other words, I'll say on my astronomy 101 quiz,

00:44:52.400 | I'll say, prove that the Earth is not

00:44:55.440 | the center of the solar system, which was the whole universe

00:44:58.040 | back then, right?

00:44:59.040 | And I would say it's about 75%, 80% will not get it right.

00:45:03.040 | In fact, I can say to most people,

00:45:04.680 | prove the Earth is not flat.

00:45:05.960 | I claim the Earth is flat.

00:45:07.080 | Prove me wrong.

00:45:08.160 | Most people can't prove it.

00:45:09.520 | They don't know how the proof is constructed.

00:45:11.100 | I don't expect them to go and replicate what Aristarchus

00:45:14.200 | did 2,000 years ago.

00:45:15.780 | But this is knowledge we've had for, as I said, 2,000 years.

00:45:18.600 | The knowledge that the Earth goes around the sun

00:45:20.880 | and not the other way around is only about 400 years old.

00:45:23.960 | But I would say 99%--

00:45:25.840 | I know for a fact--

00:45:27.480 | I went to Italy, actually, 10 years ago.

00:45:30.520 | It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory

00:45:32.640 | of general relativity.

00:45:34.060 | And we had a ceremony to honor the first person who

00:45:37.160 | ever came up with a theory of relativity, which

00:45:39.120 | is also Galileo.

00:45:40.360 | Galileo had the first notion that relative motion

00:45:42.540 | is indistinguishable.

00:45:43.840 | That if you and I are on a bike and I'm stationary,

00:45:46.360 | you can't tell if you're moving.

00:45:47.680 | I can't tell if I'm stationary.

00:45:49.180 | That's called relativity of motion.

00:45:51.640 | Motion is not absolute.

00:45:53.120 | Einstein would later enhance that, put on steroids,

00:45:56.000 | and then come up with all sorts of cool stuff

00:45:57.880 | that we can get into.

00:45:59.880 | But this notion that you could do observations,

00:46:02.320 | that you could use a scientific tool coupled with a hypothesis

00:46:06.340 | and then iterate on those hypotheses

00:46:08.360 | to make both the instrument better and your hypothesis

00:46:10.960 | better, and then expose that to scientific peer review, which

00:46:13.800 | was not what we have today, that was done by Galileo.

00:46:16.440 | He was the first person to use the scientific method.

00:46:19.040 | What did he use it with?

00:46:20.040 | A telescope.

00:46:20.640 | So a telescope that he used was a refracting telescope.

00:46:23.960 | Lenses like eyeglasses, two of them,

00:46:26.200 | one put at the far end called the objective.

00:46:28.280 | It's closer to the object.

00:46:29.720 | The other one, the eyepiece, close to your eye.

00:46:31.900 | And he was able to magnify things about three to 10 times

00:46:35.180 | pretty easily.

00:46:36.040 | Can you explain refraction for people that--

00:46:38.200 | Yeah, so light travels at the fastest speed of any entity.

00:46:43.240 | Photons travel at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second,

00:46:47.720 | except when they go into a medium.

00:46:49.400 | That's what they travel in the vacuum of space,

00:46:51.880 | or in a vacuum in my laboratory, or whatever.

00:46:53.960 | But when they go into a medium that's

00:46:56.200 | transparent or translucent, they slow down.

00:46:59.720 | You can think of it as the light waves themselves.

00:47:01.960 | Imagine light waves as rows of soldiers marching together.

00:47:06.120 | And then imagine that they're walking an angle to the beach

00:47:09.240 | here in Los Angeles.

00:47:11.000 | They're marching at an angle.

00:47:12.200 | The ones that encounter the water first,

00:47:13.840 | they start to slow down.

00:47:14.960 | The other ones keep moving at a fast speed.

00:47:16.720 | And then the whole beam of light,

00:47:18.160 | the whole beam of soldiers gets bent.

00:47:20.320 | That process is called refraction.

00:47:22.240 | We can do it-- well, this yerba mate is so delicious,

00:47:24.440 | we can't do it because it's got a little bit of a cut to it.

00:47:26.940 | Similar to, for instance, if you go and look at a fountain,

00:47:30.960 | and you see a coin.

00:47:32.240 | And you decide, you're going to be that mischievous kid,

00:47:35.000 | and you're going to grab that coin.

00:47:35.960 | So you can throw it back in, like in any--

00:47:38.280 | you can recycle the wish.

00:47:40.480 | And you reach down to grab it, and you

00:47:42.200 | miss, because where you see it is not where it actually is.

00:47:45.200 | Yes.

00:47:45.700 | Put a pencil in a clear glass of water,

00:47:47.440 | same phenomenon will happen.

00:47:48.920 | That's refraction.

00:47:50.120 | It's the bending of light by what's

00:47:51.680 | called a dielectric, or just a medium that's

00:47:53.840 | transparent or translucent.

00:47:55.520 | And you can do that in a way that you

00:47:57.720 | shape the wave of light coming in that will be magnified.

00:48:01.520 | And that's, in fact, what a telescope does.

00:48:03.320 | "Tele" means distance, "scope" means viewer.

00:48:06.360 | So a telescope really means distance viewer.

00:48:08.800 | A microscope means small thing viewer.

00:48:10.800 | And so this was kind of revolutionary

00:48:12.760 | to use it for scientific purposes.

00:48:14.280 | Galileo did other things.

00:48:15.360 | We just take these for granted.

00:48:16.360 | We've got all these cool cameras here.

00:48:18.040 | These are all refracting telescopes.

00:48:19.560 | You can see the lens in one.

00:48:20.920 | You can see that it's on a tripod.

00:48:22.340 | Galileo invented the tripod.

00:48:23.720 | We take these things for granted,

00:48:25.160 | but people didn't realize that.

00:48:26.080 | What a stud.

00:48:26.880 | Yeah.

00:48:27.400 | I want to get a list of all the things that Galileo did.

00:48:29.800 | I'm going to pause you for one second.

00:48:31.600 | And please earmark where you're at,

00:48:33.960 | because I have a number of questions

00:48:35.880 | that I just can't resist asking.

00:48:37.840 | First of all, if it's too lengthy an answer,

00:48:40.320 | feel free to say pass.

00:48:41.920 | But why was the best glass in Holland?

00:48:45.720 | What is it about the Dutch and good glass?

00:48:47.920 | I think that they were extremely, as they are now--

00:48:50.760 | I have great colleagues that are from the Netherlands--

00:48:53.560 | they were obsessed with high quality, as Germans are.

00:48:57.720 | They were very similar to Germans,

00:49:00.040 | into very precise instrumentation

00:49:02.000 | and high quality.

00:49:03.680 | It's interesting to note that glasses were only really

00:49:08.240 | invented, in some sense, because of the fact

00:49:11.460 | that there was an existing standard

00:49:14.080 | for human visual acuity.

00:49:16.600 | So we all know we go to the eye doctor.

00:49:18.240 | You mean eyeglasses.

00:49:18.840 | Eyeglasses, yeah.

00:49:19.800 | So we know today that when you go to the eye doctor,

00:49:22.320 | there's an eye chart.

00:49:23.920 | It's called the Snellen chart.

00:49:25.640 | When you go to the DMV, you use the same thing.

00:49:28.160 | Numbers and letters of different sizes that,

00:49:29.840 | at a given distance, if you can read all of them,

00:49:32.960 | then you have whatever, high acuity.

00:49:34.920 | Let's just say high acuity vision.

00:49:36.040 | We won't get into it yet.

00:49:38.580 | And if you can only read three lines down

00:49:41.000 | and then you're essentially blind to the rest,

00:49:43.920 | then you have less than average vision.

00:49:46.560 | And in the state of California,

00:49:48.440 | they'll still give you a driver's license.

00:49:49.980 | There are many people, by the way,

00:49:51.360 | there are many people driving in the United States,

00:49:53.440 | by the way, who qualify as legally blind.

00:49:56.280 | But because when you drive,

00:49:57.680 | you mainly use your peripheral vision,

00:49:59.680 | they are granted a driver's license.

00:50:01.640 | This should terrify everybody.

00:50:03.280 | But all those eye charts, every DMV here,

00:50:06.160 | has the exact same signs for the E at the top, okay?

00:50:08.880 | It's a calibration standard.

00:50:10.520 | How could they do that 400 years ago?

00:50:12.480 | We're talking 430 years ago.

00:50:14.240 | It turns out there was one and only one standard

00:50:16.920 | that was acceptable across all of Western Europe.

00:50:19.200 | It was the Gutenberg Bible.

00:50:21.200 | The Gutenberg Bible was set in print by Gutenberg,

00:50:24.520 | and it had a fixed size of all the characters.

00:50:27.520 | So what they would do is at a couple of feet,

00:50:29.240 | they put the Gutenberg Bible in front of people.

00:50:31.640 | It's amazing to think about it

00:50:32.600 | 'cause there's only like 10 copies

00:50:34.040 | of the Gutenberg Bible still left.

00:50:35.520 | They're all in vaults,

00:50:36.360 | they're all worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:50:37.880 | You can't buy them even if you're, you know, Elon.

00:50:40.920 | When you look at it, you would be able to tell

00:50:43.420 | that you could not see at one foot,

00:50:45.880 | I could not see what Andrew could see at one foot.

00:50:47.920 | So you knew that there was something

00:50:49.840 | diminishing my visual acuity,

00:50:51.800 | whether who knows what it was,

00:50:53.520 | but they knew that they could then correct that lens

00:50:55.640 | to be as good as 20/20 or, you know,

00:50:57.480 | get up to your standard for me.

00:50:58.960 | And that was the way that they would judge

00:51:01.880 | how good your eyes were.

00:51:03.400 | And so they then would correct that with lenses.

00:51:05.640 | And I always point out how ironic it is

00:51:07.560 | because later on, Galileo would take those two lenses,

00:51:10.220 | instead of putting one on each eye,

00:51:11.600 | he'd put one in front of the other one

00:51:13.200 | and then use that to construct a telescope.

00:51:15.160 | But he didn't actually invent the telescope,

00:51:17.200 | but he perfected the telescope.

00:51:19.120 | So just like Apple didn't invent the smartphone,

00:51:21.380 | they perfected it.

00:51:22.220 | Just like Facebook didn't invent social networking,

00:51:24.400 | they perfected it, right?

00:51:25.560 | So it's usually the second mouse gets the cheese,

00:51:28.080 | they like to say.

00:51:28.920 | He was the ultimate second mouse.

00:51:30.160 | He would always improve things and make them so much better

00:51:32.560 | that he would obliterate his competition.

00:51:34.440 | - Galileo. - Galileo.

00:51:35.440 | - But it was Copernicus, if I'm not mistaken,

00:51:38.080 | that was the first to say that the earth revolves

00:51:41.920 | around the sun while rotating on its axis.

00:51:43.840 | - That's right, yeah.

00:51:44.680 | - And tilts, which gives us the equinox.

00:51:46.320 | - Correct, yes.

00:51:47.240 | - Okay, so Galileo corrected Copernicus about the math,

00:51:51.000 | but it was Copernicus that gave us

00:51:53.660 | the first trusted statement that the earth

00:51:57.740 | and the other planets rotate around the sun.

00:51:59.300 | - Yeah, I would say he gave the hypothesis.

00:52:01.620 | He wasn't wrong.

00:52:02.940 | Galileo didn't correct him.

00:52:04.580 | Galileo brought evidence to the table.

00:52:06.180 | He brought hard scientific observation.

00:52:07.660 | - So who was this Copernicus guy?

00:52:08.740 | Was he just sort of like a iconoclast?

00:52:11.380 | He was like, "Hey, how about we're not the center

00:52:13.100 | "of the universe, it's the sun that's the center of universe?"

00:52:15.020 | - Well, so what was the milieu of the time

00:52:16.700 | was that the earth was the center of the universe,

00:52:19.820 | which was, our solar system effectively

00:52:21.380 | was the whole universe.

00:52:22.240 | They didn't know about stars and galaxies, certainly.

00:52:24.060 | We can get into that later.

00:52:25.700 | But there was what's known as the Ptolemaic concept

00:52:28.940 | of the organization of the cosmos.

00:52:30.340 | So the earliest cosmological models were that

00:52:33.260 | the sun is the center, the earth is the center

00:52:35.440 | of the universe, and everything goes around it.

00:52:37.860 | However, these were not dopes.

00:52:40.220 | They knew that there were problems with that model.

00:52:42.060 | There are certain aspects of the orbits of planets.

00:52:45.780 | For example, I mentioned Mercury's retrograde,

00:52:48.300 | and what does retrograde mean?

00:52:50.300 | We don't have to get into it, but there are anomalies

00:52:52.300 | that the planets will undergo at different times

00:52:54.500 | of the year due to the fact that the earth is,

00:52:57.420 | and we know now, rotating, revolving around the sun,

00:53:00.580 | and rotating on its axis, but the main effect

00:53:02.480 | is its revolution around the sun.

00:53:03.940 | And the other planets are, too, in the same plane,

00:53:07.060 | the zodiac plane, what's called the ecliptic

00:53:09.220 | due to the angular momentum of the proto-solar system.

00:53:12.060 | And sometimes the earth goes faster than, say, Jupiter,

00:53:14.280 | so originally it'll be out in front, if you will,

00:53:16.700 | of the planet, you know, forward center of motion,

00:53:18.500 | as you like to say, and then it'll be behind it later on.

00:53:20.860 | And so it looks like Jupiter is making

00:53:22.660 | like this weird S-curve, and they couldn't explain that

00:53:25.540 | if the earth is the center of the solar system,

00:53:27.460 | except that they added on what are called epicycles.

00:53:30.440 | They added on extra little orbits of the planets

00:53:33.300 | in order to account for that motion

00:53:34.860 | that sometimes it appears, yes, we're moving bulk motion,

00:53:37.560 | but then sometimes it goes in the opposite direction

00:53:39.340 | when we're going in the same direction.

00:53:40.940 | - So smart.

00:53:41.780 | - Yeah, they were very smart.

00:53:42.600 | - And they must have known by modeling this stuff

00:53:44.980 | on earth, between objects on earth.

00:53:47.020 | - 100%.

00:53:47.860 | - And that raises, for me anyway,

00:53:50.460 | an important psychological question.

00:53:52.060 | So you've got these Dutch folks with great glass,

00:53:57.060 | they're using that great glass to correct vision.

00:54:00.140 | - I should say, sorry, Andrew,

00:54:01.620 | the reason that they had good glass

00:54:02.780 | is they were some of the foremost explorers, right?

00:54:07.300 | A lot of the early trade, and they were,

00:54:09.940 | what did exploration give them?

00:54:11.260 | Access to trade.

00:54:12.480 | So they could get the finest silicon and glass,

00:54:14.880 | and they could make it themselves.

00:54:16.420 | That's their economics.

00:54:17.740 | Again, capitalism always wins, right?

00:54:19.620 | This is a lesson that we shouldn't forget.

00:54:21.500 | Their commerce, their economies allowed them to do trade

00:54:25.300 | and acquire the best, highest quality materials.

00:54:28.180 | Then that was used to make the best scientific equipment.

00:54:31.140 | And it's just curious, it'd be like,

00:54:33.060 | if they built these scientific tools,

00:54:35.420 | but they didn't use them for science.

00:54:36.620 | So imagine building the Large Hadron Collider,

00:54:39.420 | or SLAC, or something like that.

00:54:41.740 | And then not using it, just using it to measure-

00:54:44.960 | - I think SLAC is sitting empty, right?

00:54:46.760 | - It basically is.

00:54:47.600 | But it wasn't originally, that's the point.

00:54:48.840 | - Right, it was used for something.

00:54:50.400 | So what I'm curious about is,

00:54:52.640 | why do you think it is that some humans get some technology,

00:54:57.640 | in this case, glass,

00:54:59.440 | and they want to look at things that are very close up?

00:55:03.080 | I like microscopes a lot.

00:55:04.680 | Right now, I don't have my wet lab.

00:55:07.560 | We're still involved in some clinical trials.

00:55:09.360 | But I love microscopes,

00:55:10.880 | and I loved customizing my microscopes.

00:55:13.000 | I didn't like them, I don't like a plug and play.

00:55:16.240 | I like them sort of the same way that people like hot rods.

00:55:18.960 | I didn't like motorized stages.

00:55:20.260 | I like manual stages, this kind of thing.

00:55:21.860 | Nowadays, you need motorized stages, et cetera.

00:55:23.920 | But what was I gonna invest my money into?

00:55:26.040 | It was higher numerical aperture.

00:55:27.720 | - Yes.

00:55:28.560 | - Basically, you're able to see things better.

00:55:30.520 | - Deeper, yeah.

00:55:31.640 | - Exactly, see smaller things better.

00:55:34.200 | That's what numerical aperture will do for you.

00:55:37.340 | So, it's like putting more horsepower into a car,

00:55:40.980 | as opposed to paying more attention to the paint job.

00:55:44.820 | - People do it with their cameras.

00:55:45.940 | - Sure.

00:55:46.780 | - They geek out.

00:55:47.600 | - Right, everyone's got their thing.

00:55:49.380 | Humans have this glass,

00:55:51.660 | and they have the option to look at smaller

00:55:53.180 | and smaller things, or to resolve their vision.

00:55:55.820 | Why do you think it is that a subset of humans?

00:55:58.400 | 'Cause I think it's a special subset of humans.

00:56:00.860 | Instead, I'm like, I wanna look at things really far away.

00:56:05.220 | You know, and you're one of these humans.

00:56:06.940 | I mean, I delight in the stars.

00:56:08.340 | I delight in the moon.

00:56:09.160 | I have some questions about,

00:56:10.620 | that I think most people have who appreciate sunsets

00:56:12.780 | and moonsets and things like that.

00:56:14.500 | But why do you think it is that it tends

00:56:18.060 | to be a small subset of people

00:56:21.360 | who don't just wanna appreciate the night sky,

00:56:23.300 | but wanna figure this stuff out that is so far away?

00:56:27.080 | I'll be honest, it never occurred to me.

00:56:29.920 | I'm curious about things deep under the ocean.

00:56:31.780 | - Yeah.

00:56:32.620 | - I am very interested in fish and aquatic life.

00:56:36.540 | But I like terrestrial things,

00:56:38.620 | arboreal things, things in trees.

00:56:40.260 | And I think most people orient

00:56:43.700 | to the stuff that's more of this planet.

00:56:47.300 | - Yeah.

00:56:48.140 | - But what do you think it is?

00:56:48.980 | I realize you're not a psychologist

00:56:50.300 | and there's probably no DSM-whatever,

00:56:52.500 | six diagnosis specific for this.

00:56:54.140 | - I check 'em all off, yeah.

00:56:55.100 | - But I'll just ask you, for you,

00:56:57.100 | was it a desire to better understand life here on Earth,

00:57:00.780 | or was it a desire to kind of leave life here on Earth?

00:57:04.260 | - I think it's a latter.

00:57:05.180 | I mean, my childhood was pretty tumultuous.

00:57:08.380 | I think you and I have a lot of things in common,

00:57:10.220 | both fathers, scientist and physics and math in my case.

00:57:15.180 | Very hard driving, very hard to live up

00:57:17.080 | to their shadows that they cast, for example,

00:57:20.820 | at least in my case.

00:57:21.820 | And you seem to have just a beautiful relationship

00:57:26.420 | with your dad now, but I'm sure it wasn't always like that.

00:57:28.420 | In fact, you talked about that.

00:57:29.380 | - We did a lot of repair work,

00:57:30.540 | and I'm very grateful for where we're at.

00:57:31.940 | And I encourage anyone, son, daughter, mother, father,

00:57:34.900 | whatever relationship, that the repair work,

00:57:37.020 | to the extent that it's possible, is absolutely worth it.

00:57:39.500 | - Yeah, and that episode, how they texted you,

00:57:42.060 | is a real gift, not only for all of us

00:57:44.780 | who got to witness it, but also for grandchildren,

00:57:48.380 | him, his legacy and so forth,

00:57:50.700 | and even your dad's wife and your mom.

00:57:54.780 | But the point is, yes, it transported me.

00:57:57.740 | I was living through, after the divorce of my parents,

00:58:00.820 | I lived with my stepfather, who had adopted us,

00:58:03.540 | changed our names, moved to different,

00:58:05.180 | we were changing schools every couple of years.

00:58:07.780 | And that discovery of the moon next to Jupiter,

00:58:12.660 | it was sort of like solving a puzzle.

00:58:14.900 | And there's a famous saying by Albert Michelson,

00:58:17.580 | who was the first Nobel Prize winner in American history.

00:58:21.020 | - For what?

00:58:21.940 | - Physics, sorry.

00:58:22.780 | Michelson morally, he proved, in some sense,

00:58:25.580 | that the Earth is not moving through the ether,

00:58:28.260 | that was hypothesized by luminaries beforehand.

00:58:31.700 | But the point was, when a child solves a puzzle,

00:58:35.740 | like, you would think, well, like an adult,

00:58:38.420 | you solve a Rubik's Cube, okay, I did it once,

00:58:40.220 | I don't have to do it again.

00:58:41.260 | But my son, he'll keep doing it.

00:58:42.900 | I'll keep showing off, can I get a faster video game?

00:58:45.520 | Same thing, once you solve the video,

00:58:46.820 | you don't just throw it out and stop doing it.

00:58:49.300 | You get a taste of that thrill of discovery.

00:58:52.420 | Yes, it's diminished, and yes, we become inured to it

00:58:55.540 | as we get older and a little bit more,

00:58:58.020 | there's just things we have to take care of in life,

00:59:00.420 | and especially as a professor scientist,

00:59:02.620 | you can't marvel over the same things you did

00:59:05.100 | when you first did these experiments.

00:59:06.800 | But as an experiment, you get transported,

00:59:09.300 | and you get to encounter something

00:59:12.340 | that you feel like no one has ever done before.

00:59:14.820 | For example, when I got my first telescope that night,

00:59:18.100 | a couple of months after discovering this,

00:59:20.400 | I looked through it and I saw the same features on the moon,

00:59:23.660 | and I have a 3D-printed moon that my son made to show you,

00:59:27.960 | and it has all the craters represented on it, so cool.

00:59:30.560 | And I saw the exact same craters on the moon

00:59:33.040 | that Galileo saw, and then I looked at Jupiter,

00:59:36.320 | and when you look at Jupiter,

00:59:38.020 | you not only see these beautiful atmospheric bands on it,

00:59:41.520 | and I brought you a telescope

00:59:42.560 | as your end-of-the-year holiday gift.

00:59:45.240 | It's yours to keep, no money down.

00:59:48.000 | - Thank you.

00:59:48.840 | - Keating brand telescope. - Thanks for the gift.

00:59:50.800 | - And I looked at Jupiter, and when you look at Jupiter,

00:59:54.080 | as I hope you'll do tonight or with your crew later on,

00:59:57.120 | you will see not only the planet,

00:59:59.080 | not only its little atmospheric stripes,

01:00:00.840 | maybe even the great red spot, which is amazing,

01:00:02.740 | three times bigger than the Earth.

01:00:03.760 | You can see it from Earth with this little telescope,

01:00:05.680 | I got you, but you see four little stars,

01:00:08.700 | and they're four stars that are to the left, to the right.

01:00:10.960 | They're in a plane with the midpoint

01:00:12.960 | of these equatorial storms that are brewing on Jupiter.

01:00:15.840 | We know that they've been going on for at least 400 years

01:00:17.800 | 'cause Galileo saw them, so that sets a limit,

01:00:20.200 | a minimum-- - Storms, when you say storms,

01:00:22.360 | what do these storms consist of?

01:00:23.200 | - Hurricanes, they're enormous hurricanes on the planet,

01:00:25.360 | and the equatorial bands, like the Tropic of Cancer

01:00:27.480 | and the Tropic of Capricorn.

01:00:28.720 | - So there's plenty of water up there that's raining down?

01:00:30.600 | - No, it's not water at all.

01:00:31.720 | It's methane, ammonia, but it's a fluid,

01:00:34.480 | so it behaves like a fluid doesn't,

01:00:36.280 | so you have these swirling whirls,

01:00:38.200 | and the colors will amaze you.

01:00:39.880 | You'll see colors on an astronomical object.

01:00:42.400 | It's gonna blow your mind, and not only is it gonna blow

01:00:45.280 | your mind 'cause you're doing it,

01:00:46.360 | you're gonna feel unique in all of science.

01:00:49.660 | You will feel what Galileo felt.

01:00:52.880 | You won't know that he felt it before you.

01:00:55.160 | A billion people have seen it since then

01:00:56.880 | because for you, it's new, and for you,

01:00:59.360 | you're viscerally connected to the maestro, to Galileo,

01:01:02.320 | and what he did, and there's no other branch of science

01:01:04.280 | that's like that.

01:01:05.160 | You can't look at the Higgs boson.

01:01:07.720 | First of all, no one person did it.

01:01:09.080 | It's a team of 3,700 people that discovered the Higgs boson,

01:01:12.340 | and seven people predicted the Higgs boson.

01:01:14.360 | Higgs is just one of 'em.

01:01:15.560 | One of my professors at Brown was another one,

01:01:17.400 | Jerry Gralnick, he passed away, unfortunately,

01:01:19.400 | never won the Nobel Prize, but the point is,

01:01:21.720 | you can't know what that felt like.

01:01:23.440 | You can't know what it felt like

01:01:24.600 | to discover gravitational waves

01:01:26.520 | 'cause thousands of people did it recently in 2015,

01:01:30.220 | but the question of visceral connection

01:01:33.320 | to the first discoverer of that phenomena,

01:01:35.760 | it's unique to astronomy.

01:01:36.840 | I don't know of another branch of science

01:01:39.080 | where you can have that, and best of all,

01:01:40.560 | from here in the center of L.A.,

01:01:42.240 | you can see the same craters.

01:01:43.920 | You can see these four Galilean,

01:01:45.520 | they're called the Galilean moons of Jupiter,

01:01:47.760 | and we're sending spacecraft there now

01:01:49.640 | to see if they have life on it.

01:01:51.080 | It's incredible, Andrew.

01:01:52.000 | There's nothing else like that in all of science.

01:01:54.320 | For $50 to $60, I have a list on my website,

01:01:56.880 | briankeating.com, I have a telescope buyer's guide

01:01:59.280 | that I send to people.

01:02:00.400 | I don't make any money from it,

01:02:01.400 | it's just I love to share science with the public,

01:02:03.160 | just like you, but in my case, it's astronomy,

01:02:05.240 | and for $50 or $75, you can have this experience

01:02:08.360 | that Galileo had.

01:02:09.360 | It's an awesome feeling,

01:02:11.320 | and I think that's what kept me going.

01:02:12.800 | It distracted me from the pains of the life

01:02:15.720 | that I had at that time, and just struggling

01:02:18.240 | as most pre-teens and teenagers did.

01:02:21.140 | You know, but to answer your question

01:02:22.980 | that you asked 20 minutes ago,

01:02:24.700 | it was really to transport, teleport,

01:02:27.340 | exactly the opposite of the telescope.

01:02:29.100 | I really felt like I was transported

01:02:30.700 | to these other worlds, and that I could understand them

01:02:33.700 | with simple math and simple tools.

01:02:35.700 | Night after night, they were reliable companions

01:02:37.900 | and that people loved to see it.

01:02:39.420 | You'll see Saturn, hopefully, with it.

01:02:41.580 | You can't help but feel, this is, you know, amazing.

01:02:45.340 | It's thrilling, and it allows you to do science

01:02:49.060 | with your eyes, connected to your mind.

01:02:51.460 | It's incredible.

01:02:52.880 | - So it sounds to me like you were,

01:02:54.700 | thank you for sharing that, by the way.

01:02:56.060 | It sounds like you were able to connect

01:02:58.380 | to places distant in space, obviously,

01:03:02.980 | and time, Galileo.

01:03:04.680 | That's beautiful.

01:03:06.820 | I don't think the same experience occurs

01:03:08.920 | when one looks down the microscope,

01:03:10.300 | and it's true that the greatest neurobiologist

01:03:13.380 | of all time, by a long shot,

01:03:17.300 | was Ramon y Cajal, right?

01:03:18.980 | Supernatural levels of ability to understand

01:03:21.620 | what turned out to be the correct function

01:03:22.900 | of the nervous system, just from anatomical specimens.

01:03:25.980 | But when I look down the microscope,

01:03:27.460 | and I see even a Cajal-Retzius cell,

01:03:30.420 | there's a cell named after him,

01:03:33.240 | you don't really feel a connection to him in the same way,

01:03:37.380 | although the neurons are beautiful,

01:03:39.060 | but it's not the same, the way that you described.

01:03:42.300 | - What's great about science, in general,

01:03:44.100 | is that the best science is apolitical.

01:03:47.300 | But I always say, look, there's no such thing as like,

01:03:49.980 | oh, well, that constellation is a democratic constellation.

01:03:52.780 | Oh, see that asteroid?

01:03:54.060 | That's a, no, it is a safe space.

01:03:56.620 | I think we do need safe spaces,

01:03:58.300 | and that best science is a safe space,

01:04:00.360 | not meaning it never interacts with politics,

01:04:02.700 | 'cause of course it does, but for those moments,

01:04:05.420 | we, as humans, and you know this better than I do,

01:04:08.340 | we need recovery.

01:04:10.340 | You can't just work out,

01:04:11.460 | you don't work out seven days a week.

01:04:12.820 | You work out six days a week, or whatever.

01:04:14.220 | It's still more than, six more than I work out.

01:04:16.500 | But the point is, we need to recover

01:04:19.440 | as much as we need to pay attention to the activity.

01:04:22.420 | We need to recover, pay attention to that too.

01:04:24.720 | And so the question is, where can we recover

01:04:28.780 | from social media, from politics, from economic stress?

01:04:33.100 | I think science is an ideal vehicle for it.

01:04:35.460 | It should be apolitical.

01:04:37.080 | We shouldn't be always concerned with politics,

01:04:40.940 | or what's happening on social media.

01:04:42.220 | And I'm guilty of this too.

01:04:43.220 | I'm certainly spending way too much time on screens.

01:04:46.140 | But the point being, science can be that.

01:04:48.500 | And astronomy in particular, like I said,

01:04:50.620 | it's apolitical, it is safe to let your mind run

01:04:53.420 | to what you used to do when you were on a dorm

01:04:55.780 | with your bros at 3 a.m., just BSing, right?

01:04:58.840 | We don't get a chance to do that

01:05:00.020 | when you're thinking about mortgage payments,

01:05:01.400 | and who's taking the kids tomorrow,

01:05:03.320 | and all these different quotidian things.

01:05:05.380 | I say, we need to get back to that more than ever, I feel.

01:05:09.760 | - Pondering the origins of life,

01:05:11.300 | and connecting to people who existed

01:05:13.620 | thousands of years before us.

01:05:15.340 | Do you think that Galileo, Copernicus,

01:05:18.080 | and others were doing the exact same thing?

01:05:22.820 | That there was a bit of an escapism to it,

01:05:25.800 | healthy escapism, as opposed to trying to solve

01:05:29.500 | the position of the planets and understand ourselves

01:05:33.520 | for some other reason?

01:05:35.740 | - Definitely, yeah.

01:05:36.580 | I mean, Galileo in particular is sort of this tragic figure.

01:05:39.380 | In some ways, he had the first notions

01:05:43.220 | and application of the scientific method,

01:05:44.740 | as I said, using an apparatus to confirm a hypothesis,

01:05:47.340 | iterating on that.

01:05:48.420 | So I said, when he saw the moon,

01:05:49.740 | he saw these craters, and valleys, and rifts,

01:05:51.940 | and lava fields that you'll see tonight.

01:05:53.620 | Again, people, you can buy a telescope on Amazon, $50,

01:05:56.820 | and you'll see these same things that he saw,

01:05:58.380 | and you can connect it to your iPhone

01:06:00.180 | and post it on Instagram if you want.

01:06:02.020 | And I hope you'll do that.

01:06:02.880 | That's your only homework assignment.

01:06:04.300 | The only one I'm gonna assign to you as a professor.

01:06:06.500 | So I want you to take a picture of the craters on the moon.

01:06:09.540 | But the point is, you'll see the exact same things.

01:06:11.380 | From New York City, you can see them.

01:06:12.700 | From the middle of London, it doesn't matter where you are.

01:06:15.060 | If you have a clear sky and the moon is out,

01:06:16.380 | you'll see the same thing.

01:06:17.400 | But when you look at Jupiter, you'll see these four dots.

01:06:20.140 | And here's where Galileo just had this otherworldly intellect

01:06:22.880 | that when I saw those, I was like, oh, cool,

01:06:24.780 | it's next to some stars.

01:06:25.740 | Until I realized, I had to do more research,

01:06:28.260 | that those are actually the moons of Jupiter.

01:06:30.100 | So in one night, tonight, you can quadruple

01:06:33.060 | the number of moons you've ever seen in your life.

01:06:35.100 | And some of those moons are almost the size of our moon.

01:06:37.660 | Our moon is unusually large.

01:06:39.720 | And those moons, sometimes they'll cast shadows

01:06:41.980 | on the planet, so there'll be an eclipse.

01:06:43.900 | You'll witness an eclipse on Jupiter, on another planet,

01:06:47.300 | with this $50 instrument, or whatever, okay?

01:06:50.680 | When he was observing these things,

01:06:52.300 | he would do things that were not only psychological,

01:06:56.060 | and they were therapeutic for him in his later years,

01:06:58.540 | I'll explain that in a minute, he ended up going blind.

01:07:01.060 | And so, losing the sight, the recollections that he had.

01:07:05.180 | And he lost his daughter, who was a nun,

01:07:07.460 | because she was illegitimate, as most of,

01:07:09.660 | I think all of his kids, except maybe one, his oldest one.

01:07:12.620 | He had mistresses, he was married, divorced, basically,

01:07:15.920 | and he was Catholic in Italy, primordial Italy, basically.

01:07:20.380 | It didn't exist as a country, but he was in Tuscany.

01:07:22.780 | And he had a lot of challenges, he was almost always broke.

01:07:26.060 | Even when he invented his version of the telescope,

01:07:28.740 | again, he didn't invent the telescope,

01:07:30.320 | but he made it so much better.

01:07:31.860 | 10x'd it, 20x'd it, you know, zero to one,

01:07:34.620 | and it was incredible what he did with it.

01:07:37.140 | He realized, this is great and all,

01:07:39.060 | for me to discover these cool things,

01:07:41.300 | and learn about the universe, he was deeply religious, too.

01:07:44.380 | But I gotta make money, I gotta pay for my house,

01:07:46.700 | he had like, imagine like, your students at Stanford

01:07:49.740 | are living with you, because that's the only way

01:07:52.060 | you can afford to pay rent in your, I mean,

01:07:54.100 | and you're cooking meals for them.

01:07:55.540 | And they're like, slobs, right?

01:07:57.240 | I mean, like, I was a slob in college, right?

01:08:00.080 | So the point is, he had bills to pay,

01:08:02.060 | and he was a businessman.

01:08:03.460 | He realized, well, look, if I start making these telescopes,

01:08:07.420 | everybody will see the things that I'm seeing.

01:08:09.300 | I won't have any monopolistic advantage over, you know,

01:08:12.380 | Kepler, who is his friend, but also his competitor.

01:08:15.620 | They were really vying for who is the best astronomer

01:08:19.540 | of all time, Kepler in Germany,

01:08:20.880 | and obviously Galileo in Italy, well, become Italy.

01:08:23.780 | And he realized Kepler was purely theoretical.

01:08:26.940 | He had great math chops, he came up with functions

01:08:29.900 | for the orbits of planets before Isaac Newton proved

01:08:32.480 | that they came from calculus and universal gravitation,

01:08:35.760 | incredible scientist.

01:08:36.880 | But if he gave that, it was like giving, you know,

01:08:39.240 | a free particle accelerator to your arch competitors, right?

01:08:42.140 | He didn't do that.

01:08:42.980 | He said, no, I'm not gonna make these telescopes,

01:08:45.280 | but I'm gonna sell them only to the government,

01:08:50.000 | and they're gonna pay me

01:08:51.040 | because these are great military devices.

01:08:54.320 | And you know, we don't think of them now,

01:08:56.020 | but with it, he went, he's so brilliant.

01:08:58.160 | He was so charming and charismatic.

01:08:59.680 | He said, I'm not only gonna sell you these things.

01:09:02.260 | First, he went to the Senate in Venice,

01:09:04.680 | the Venetian Senate, the Doge, the original Doge.

01:09:07.200 | We think Doge is a coin or some department

01:09:09.120 | that Elon's gonna head.

01:09:10.440 | No, no, the Doge was like the chief of the government

01:09:13.480 | back in the Venetians,

01:09:14.520 | which was one of the most wealthy countries

01:09:16.180 | in all of Europe.

01:09:17.280 | It was separate from Tuscany and separate from Rome.

01:09:20.160 | And he went there and he said, you are a maritime,

01:09:24.240 | have you ever been to Venice?

01:09:25.720 | It's beautiful, right?

01:09:26.560 | So he said, look, come with me.

01:09:28.160 | I'm gonna take you up into the Piazza San Marco,

01:09:30.480 | go up to the tower, and we're gonna look out

01:09:32.800 | and we're gonna see there's a ship out there,

01:09:34.720 | but you can't see it with your naked eye.

01:09:36.520 | But if I give you the telescope,

01:09:37.960 | you can see it three days earlier

01:09:40.240 | before it comes into your harbor.

01:09:41.960 | That's like you have an F-35, you know, stealth fighter,

01:09:45.960 | and you sell the rights to turn off the stealth part of it

01:09:49.560 | to your adversary, and it's incredibly valuable.

01:09:51.600 | - It's a time portal.

01:09:52.720 | - Yes.

01:09:53.540 | - You know, you can tell I'm keep harping on this theme

01:09:55.000 | of, you know, the ability to see things

01:09:56.400 | in greater distance.

01:09:57.240 | - That's right.

01:09:58.360 | - At higher and higher resolution gives you

01:10:00.320 | - That's right.

01:10:01.160 | - A window into time.

01:10:02.640 | - Exactly, and we speak of that now.

01:10:03.960 | - That has enormous advantage.

01:10:06.460 | - Exactly.

01:10:07.300 | - There, because of, you know, the trajectory of the ship.

01:10:09.440 | - Yeah.

01:10:10.280 | - You actually are getting a sort of crystal ball

01:10:12.320 | into what's gonna happen later.

01:10:14.000 | - Predicting the future, as you said, yeah.

01:10:14.840 | - Whereas looking at position of the stars,

01:10:18.120 | some anticipation of what's gonna happen

01:10:20.200 | based on historical charts of the stars.

01:10:21.720 | - Exactly, and we even speak of that now,

01:10:23.480 | and come to think of it, as you're saying it, light years.

01:10:26.600 | What is a light year?

01:10:27.600 | It's a measurement of distance, but it's in terms of time.

01:10:30.060 | So it's exactly what, consonant with what you're saying.

01:10:32.120 | We are always gonna have this combination,

01:10:35.600 | this interrelation, this, you know, competition

01:10:38.160 | between things in space and things in time.

01:10:40.040 | And he realized with this tube that he could see

01:10:42.400 | the great distances that also afforded him

01:10:44.720 | this extra advantage when it came to predicting the future,

01:10:47.160 | as you said.

01:10:48.400 | - If we could do a top contour survey

01:10:51.760 | of the greats of astronomy, where would it start?

01:10:56.760 | Starting with people who got it wrong,

01:10:59.600 | and then correct each other.

01:11:01.320 | Like, if we were gonna do a fast sprint through these,

01:11:05.600 | where would we start?

01:11:06.720 | - Well, you'd have to start with like, you know,

01:11:08.480 | Gog or whatever, you know, the first cavemen and women,

01:11:11.240 | you know, as I said, the 40--

01:11:12.440 | - Charting stars on the wall of the cave.

01:11:13.640 | - Exactly, we don't know who they are.

01:11:14.920 | - Telling their youngsters, like, okay, you know,

01:11:17.880 | because those stars are there relative to that ridge,

01:11:20.560 | or that, et cetera.

01:11:22.320 | Days are getting longer, days are getting shorter.

01:11:24.100 | - That's right.

01:11:24.940 | - Ergo hunt now, ergo collect stuff to hunker down.

01:11:29.940 | Maybe even don't reproduce now.

01:11:34.400 | Maybe even behavioral restraint.

01:11:36.840 | - 100%.

01:11:37.680 | - Maybe reproduce now.

01:11:38.560 | - Yeah, it's gonna be much more, you know,

01:11:40.560 | optimal time for that, exactly.

01:11:41.840 | So tens of thousands, pre-antiquity, you would say.

01:11:45.260 | Then the, I would say, fast forward, you know,

01:11:47.800 | to the maybe Egyptian epoch, you know, 5,000 BCE,

01:11:51.480 | so to speak, when they had a, also a very zodiological

01:11:56.160 | and astrological conception of these objects.

01:11:58.900 | But, and yet they would build things, you know,

01:12:01.080 | in relation to the positions of stars and constellations.

01:12:04.120 | - Sundial emerges.

01:12:05.240 | - Sundial, obelisks, you know,

01:12:07.320 | things that were used, primitive things.

01:12:09.080 | Stonehenge also, I think it's like 20,000 years ago.

01:12:11.740 | They believe it's related to some astronomical observations.

01:12:15.740 | They're not entirely certain about that.

01:12:17.560 | - We have to double click on Stonehenge.

01:12:19.880 | How do you think it got there?

01:12:22.080 | - You know, it's one of those great mysteries that's,

01:12:25.360 | I think it's less controversial,

01:12:26.960 | Stonehenge than the pyramids.

01:12:28.000 | The pyramids seem to be like almost, you know,

01:12:30.400 | they lead people into thinking about aliens

01:12:32.520 | and all sorts of stuff.

01:12:33.440 | - But what do you think of, is it, I mean,

01:12:35.600 | given their mass, given their location,

01:12:38.620 | given what we knew about populations then,

01:12:40.440 | and given what we know about the strength of people

01:12:42.320 | and the tools they had at the time,

01:12:44.560 | is it reasonable to assume that people built these things?

01:12:46.700 | - I mean, certainly, I mean, you'd have to convince me

01:12:49.240 | that people didn't build them,

01:12:50.760 | but exactly how they built it is a great question.

01:12:54.000 | I mean, so for example, I mentioned this

01:12:55.840 | when I was on Joe Rogan's show.

01:12:57.880 | I said, you know, if you measure the bases of the pyramids,

01:13:01.180 | it turns out that their ratio of a cubit,

01:13:03.880 | which is actually cubits, not quantum bits,

01:13:06.620 | like you and your dad talked about,

01:13:07.920 | but cubits is the length of the pharaoh's forearm.

01:13:10.960 | It's basically a foot and a half, roughly.

01:13:12.720 | So back then, if you were like the president,

01:13:15.340 | you were also the metric standard for all of civilization.

01:13:18.640 | - Wild.

01:13:19.480 | - And it makes us--

01:13:20.320 | - Sort of like models on Instagram, right?

01:13:22.940 | Everyone's trying to attain these.

01:13:24.600 | What's the standard?

01:13:25.640 | - That's right, exactly.

01:13:26.480 | - What's the standard?

01:13:27.320 | - Yeah, that's right.

01:13:28.140 | - Wild, so the pharaoh's forearm,

01:13:28.980 | and is this about carrying items?

01:13:31.600 | - Yeah, well, it was just for length or like a foot.

01:13:33.920 | We talk about a foot, it was a pharaoh's foot.

01:13:35.520 | Yeah, that's where we get those from, right?

01:13:36.880 | So there was only kind of one rough standard

01:13:39.560 | for calibration, which is incredibly important

01:13:41.720 | for removing systematic effects in science in general.

01:13:44.760 | So you had a calibration standard.

01:13:46.280 | Now we have like a bar of platinum.

01:13:48.280 | We've defined the second in terms of oscillations

01:13:51.680 | of a certain atom called cesium

01:13:53.880 | and how many times it oscillates per second.

01:13:56.280 | - Sure, a degree, right?

01:13:57.400 | Yeah, a calorie, right?

01:13:59.080 | - So now we want to define those

01:14:00.720 | in terms of physical quantities, not in terms of people.

01:14:03.720 | And so doing that has been a great advance

01:14:06.760 | forward in science, and we've only recently

01:14:09.080 | gotten rid of what are called artifacts.

01:14:10.800 | So it used to be there was a rod that was one meter long,

01:14:13.520 | and the meter was originally defined as 69,000,

01:14:17.020 | I forget, of the distance from the North Pole to Paris.

01:14:21.000 | But that obviously depends on assuming

01:14:22.760 | the earth is a perfect sphere, which it's not, right?

01:14:24.880 | - It's kind of chubby around the middle, right?

01:14:26.160 | - Yeah, that's right.

01:14:27.000 | Bulges because it's an oblate sphere, right, exactly.

01:14:30.160 | And so all these things that were relics,

01:14:32.520 | we want to get rid of them and tie them

01:14:33.880 | to fundamental properties of, say, a quantum system

01:14:36.440 | that's very pure and we can isolate it.

01:14:38.440 | We don't want to use a pharaoh's foot either,

01:14:40.920 | so we have to come up with a length standard.

01:14:42.780 | So now we use the speed of light times the second,

01:14:44.920 | and we can define things in those terms.

01:14:46.880 | But back then, yeah, so they didn't know that.

01:14:48.600 | But I told Joe, as I said, if you measure the base

01:14:51.320 | of all the great pyramids at Giza,

01:14:53.960 | they're all multiples of a cubit

01:14:57.080 | times so many numbers of the number pi.

01:15:00.400 | So like, but pi wasn't known to them.

01:15:02.960 | You know, pi wasn't known to be irrational to the Greeks,

01:15:06.320 | and Euclid proved that it was irrational,

01:15:08.820 | and that, you know, it didn't come from a computational,

01:15:11.880 | it couldn't easily be obtained from,

01:15:14.240 | it had an infinite number of digits, right?

01:15:16.560 | So how did these Egyptians know that?

01:15:18.240 | An alien told them, no.

01:15:19.880 | The way they did it is they laid it out,

01:15:21.480 | they used a surveyor's tool.

01:15:23.080 | One of the surveyor's tool is a stick with a wheel on it.

01:15:25.720 | So the wheel's a circle, so you've got so many multiples,

01:15:27.480 | they just count it, and that's how,

01:15:28.840 | so we confuse a lot of things.

01:15:30.360 | - So they stumbled into pi.

01:15:31.440 | - Exactly, right, they walked all over.

01:15:34.000 | So you don't have to always posit

01:15:35.600 | supernatural explanations for things.

01:15:37.680 | The answer is simply, we don't know,

01:15:39.480 | I certainly don't know how Stonehenge was built,

01:15:41.080 | nor do I know how the pyramids were built,

01:15:43.360 | but it's not, you would have to convince me

01:15:45.320 | that it was built by some other means

01:15:46.880 | other than people and the tools that were available to them.

01:15:49.440 | - Yeah, likewise, I'm not convinced

01:15:51.840 | it came from extraterrestrial sources.

01:15:53.040 | - Yes, I don't remember how we got on this, but timekeeping.

01:15:56.760 | - So we were marching through,

01:15:58.880 | so we have our ancient ancestors,

01:16:01.960 | and then at what point do we get to

01:16:04.360 | Copernicus and Galileo?

01:16:06.860 | - Then it was, yeah, then it was Copernicus who had ideas,

01:16:09.780 | but couldn't prove them, he had no data

01:16:11.720 | to substantiate the Copernican

01:16:13.360 | or sun-centered model of the universe,

01:16:15.320 | which is also, by the way,

01:16:17.960 | almost everything in science is wrong, right?

01:16:20.120 | Copernicus is wrong.

01:16:21.480 | The sun is not the center of the solar system, right?

01:16:24.520 | The center of our solar system is inside the sun

01:16:27.220 | because the planets orbit around it,

01:16:28.840 | and they orbit around an elliptical pattern,

01:16:31.200 | which has two foci.

01:16:32.600 | So he believed the orbits were all circles.

01:16:34.880 | So he's wrong, but he's more right than Aristotle,

01:16:37.040 | so that's how science progresses, right?

01:16:38.740 | Newton was right about gravity until he was wrong

01:16:41.240 | when Einstein proved him wrong, right?

01:16:42.860 | So then you come up to, after him,

01:16:45.280 | Kepler discovered the laws of the elliptical motion

01:16:48.760 | of planets and their patterns that we still use.

01:16:51.720 | We discovered an exoplanet, my colleague David Kipping,

01:16:54.200 | I wanna introduce you to, he's discovered exomoons.

01:16:57.680 | These are moons around other planets,

01:16:59.680 | some of which are in the habitable zone of their host star,

01:17:02.520 | and some of them have sun-like stars

01:17:04.480 | and are Earth-sized planets, it's incredible.

01:17:06.760 | There could be, as I said,

01:17:08.080 | a link between life evolving on Earth

01:17:10.080 | due to the moon on our planet.

01:17:12.280 | So too, on an exoplanet, it could require an exomoon,

01:17:15.440 | which he's discovered, or thinks he has,

01:17:16.800 | he's actually very cautious and hasn't said it explicitly.

01:17:19.680 | So Kepler's laws underpin all those discoveries,

01:17:21.780 | even to this day, 400 years later.

01:17:23.680 | Then Galileo, immediately afterwards with the telescope,

01:17:26.480 | phases of Venus that only occur

01:17:29.000 | if the Earth is not the center of the solar system.

01:17:31.420 | The rings of Saturn, he had notions about those.

01:17:35.200 | He accidentally discovered the planet Neptune.

01:17:38.020 | It's amazing.

01:17:38.880 | And then he, of course, the moons of Jupiter falsified

01:17:42.960 | the notion that the Earth is the center of the solar system

01:17:45.360 | because these moons are going around Jupiter,

01:17:46.960 | not around the Earth.

01:17:47.800 | So that's completely torpedoed the notion

01:17:51.440 | of the true nature of the Aristotelian

01:17:54.320 | or Ptolemaic Earth-centered cosmology.

01:17:57.320 | Then soon after that, astronomers measured things

01:18:00.320 | like the speed of light using eclipses of the moons

01:18:03.720 | of Jupiter, they measured distances to Saturn,

01:18:06.600 | they mapped out the solar system,

01:18:08.540 | and then from there, using parallax,

01:18:10.580 | you can kind of gauge the triangulation

01:18:12.900 | and using trigonometry measure the structure of our galaxy.

01:18:16.460 | William Herschel and his sister, Caroline Herschel,

01:18:19.620 | was the first female astronomer, first female scientist.

01:18:22.740 | She was the first person to use the scientific method

01:18:25.100 | and become a fellow of the Royal Society in Great Britain.

01:18:28.720 | And then later off after that,

01:18:31.520 | we come to the era of the last kind of,

01:18:34.780 | the big developments in technology

01:18:36.440 | were photographic plates after that,

01:18:38.380 | spectrographs, dispersion of light

01:18:41.020 | onto photographic material.

01:18:42.880 | You could preserve it in memory,

01:18:44.180 | you didn't use sketches like Galileo did.

01:18:46.580 | And then up until Hubble,

01:18:47.880 | when Hubble discovered two major things,

01:18:49.860 | which was one was that the Milky Way was a galaxy,

01:18:52.620 | it wasn't the entire universe,

01:18:53.940 | there were other galaxies, island universes

01:18:56.000 | of billions of stars.

01:18:57.580 | And then he discovered the expansion of the universe

01:18:59.420 | with help from an astronomer

01:19:01.340 | who doesn't get a lot of attention.

01:19:02.420 | A lot of the women in astronomy got really short shrift.

01:19:06.220 | People discovered how fusion works in the sun,

01:19:08.780 | women, Carol Gaspatchian at Harvard,

01:19:13.060 | and then Henrietta Leavitt,

01:19:14.620 | who measured this relationship between the size

01:19:17.620 | and brightness of objects called Cepheid variables

01:19:20.100 | that Hubble then used to make his law

01:19:22.500 | that proved that the universe is expanding.

01:19:24.780 | And then after that, people like Penzias and Wilson

01:19:26.700 | discovering the microwave and radio astronomy,

01:19:29.300 | Robert Jansky, all the way up until,

01:19:31.900 | my colleagues today, some of whom I've interviewed,

01:19:34.460 | Adam Rees and Brian Schmidt and Barry Barish,

01:19:38.740 | who wrote the foreword to my second book,

01:19:41.660 | detecting gravitational waves,

01:19:42.980 | the accelerating expansion of the universe

01:19:44.900 | due to dark energy,

01:19:46.380 | first Nobel Prize in astronomy in 2011,

01:19:49.380 | followed up 2017 discovery of gravitational waves

01:19:53.420 | from in-spiraling black holes.

01:19:55.220 | There's so many and there's so many,

01:19:58.460 | I've been blessed to know many of them

01:19:59.720 | and to have them as my academic pedigree.

01:20:03.900 | I'd like to take a quick break

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01:23:09.840 | Maybe you can help me here.

01:23:11.440 | I've never heard a description

01:23:13.440 | of the origin of life in the universe

01:23:17.000 | that made a lot more sense to me.

01:23:18.860 | Past, there were a bunch of big explosions,

01:23:21.440 | a bunch of the elements and stuff that you needed

01:23:24.880 | came together, and then at some point there was water,

01:23:28.540 | and at some point there were critters that moved,

01:23:30.960 | and then multicellular organisms.

01:23:32.360 | Like, what am I missing here?

01:23:34.120 | I mean, I'm a man of science and I love science,

01:23:37.160 | but why can't, I can grasp it when it's told to me,

01:23:41.280 | but why is it that it's so hard?

01:23:45.000 | Maybe I'm just not smart enough to comprehend this idea

01:23:47.880 | that a star exploded, dot, dot, dot, and here we are.

01:23:52.880 | - I think it's obvious

01:23:54.320 | why you have this particular affliction,

01:23:56.360 | and that's because you're used to doing experiment.

01:23:58.880 | You're a scientist.

01:23:59.720 | Your core identity, one of your core identities

01:24:01.880 | is a scientist, right?

01:24:02.800 | And you think of things scientifically.

01:24:04.340 | And as I said before, the scientific method,

01:24:06.160 | as we practice it, is based on hypothesis,

01:24:09.320 | observation, experimentation, iteration, right?

01:24:12.560 | Well, think about this.

01:24:14.040 | If I study, if I have a hypothesis

01:24:16.080 | that certain people can detect sunspots, right?

01:24:21.080 | So I want to have a control group,

01:24:23.800 | and I want to have a variable, right?

01:24:25.680 | So I want to be able to contrast

01:24:27.080 | and see if it's statistically significant, right?

01:24:29.160 | And I don't want to p-hack, right?

01:24:30.560 | So what do I have to do then?

01:24:32.360 | Well, I have to control the number of sunspots.

01:24:34.880 | Okay, sorry, I'm not, you know,

01:24:36.440 | you used to say you weren't around at the creation,

01:24:38.880 | you know, at the design meeting for human beings.

01:24:40.440 | - I wasn't consulted at the design phase.

01:24:42.480 | - By the way, when Brian says p-hacking,

01:24:44.560 | p-hacking is people tinkering with the numbers

01:24:47.120 | or the experiment or the hypothesis

01:24:49.040 | after the data are in,

01:24:50.200 | in order to try and establish statistical significance,

01:24:53.380 | which, and by the way, p-hacking is not just, not good.

01:24:57.680 | It's bad.

01:24:58.520 | It's cheating of a whole, it's not making up data,

01:25:01.540 | but it's tweaking the experimental design

01:25:04.440 | in hopes that you'll get something where you probably didn't.

01:25:07.560 | It's not good.

01:25:08.400 | You don't want to do it, don't do it.

01:25:09.560 | - Your colleague at Stanford, Uido Mbenz,

01:25:11.220 | won the Nobel prize in economics in 2021.

01:25:15.560 | And he's done a tremendous amount of work in this,

01:25:17.560 | and, you know, confounding variables, p-hacking.

01:25:20.640 | Where do these things manifest themselves in physics?

01:25:22.840 | Well, high temperature superconductors.

01:25:25.200 | This goes back to the late 80s.

01:25:26.240 | I remember graduating from high school.

01:25:28.080 | There was a discovery of room temperature,

01:25:29.560 | what's called cold fusion.

01:25:31.120 | That was one thing that would create also limitless energy,

01:25:33.720 | too cheap to meter from just using hydrogen

01:25:36.280 | and from seawater and palladium and platinum.

01:25:40.440 | That turned out to be bogus.

01:25:41.720 | And it turned out to be the data were manipulated

01:25:44.160 | in such a way that we would say,

01:25:46.240 | probably fall into the realm of p-hacking,

01:25:47.980 | which may not have been maliciously intended,

01:25:50.440 | but the goal, the output of it is certainly,

01:25:53.240 | you know, a driving incentive that influences people

01:25:55.620 | to do things that are unethical.

01:25:58.000 | And that happens at all levels.

01:25:59.840 | And we saw it, I saw it in my own experiment,

01:26:02.720 | not necessarily accusing my colleagues of being unethical.

01:26:05.680 | We were searching and we still are searching

01:26:08.200 | for what caused the big bang.

01:26:09.740 | We're gonna get back to your question of how this comes.

01:26:11.760 | 'Cause I think I can help.

01:26:12.600 | - But that plate's still spinning in the background.

01:26:14.480 | - Yeah, it's still spinning. - Like a planet.

01:26:15.320 | - It's spinning like our solar system, right?

01:26:18.280 | But the quarry was so big.

01:26:21.640 | To unravel what caused the big bang to bang?

01:26:24.680 | What ignited the spark that became our universe?

01:26:27.800 | It's at least, it was called when we announced

01:26:29.840 | the discovery at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day, 2014.

01:26:34.840 | World News covered front page everywhere, New York Times,

01:26:38.600 | CNN, every single outlet covered it.

01:26:40.480 | It was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

01:26:42.820 | Not only did it explain how our universe

01:26:45.380 | came into existence, it also predicted the existence

01:26:48.180 | of other universes in what's called the multiverse,

01:26:51.380 | which we've heard about maybe in quantum computing.

01:26:53.700 | - Most people have heard of it on the Joe Rogan podcast.

01:26:55.260 | - Yeah, exactly right, that's right.

01:26:56.980 | Among many things that we hear about only on that show.

01:26:59.500 | So the point is, it was a quarry for the ages.

01:27:03.580 | And I knew that because that's why

01:27:04.980 | I invented the experiment, right?

01:27:06.500 | I told you, my father and I, you know,

01:27:08.260 | we never really had the rapprochement

01:27:09.860 | that you and your father seem to have had, and that's great.

01:27:12.660 | We always had kind of a difficult relationship.

01:27:14.540 | As I said, he abandoned me and my book,

01:27:16.360 | I write about this rather.

01:27:18.020 | He abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin,

01:27:19.540 | at, I was seven, he was 10, and he just left us.

01:27:22.740 | And because of that, he didn't end up, you know,

01:27:25.140 | paying child support for me or my brother

01:27:27.260 | and alimony to my mother.

01:27:28.780 | And so my stepfather adopted us,

01:27:30.620 | and my last name was originally not Keating,

01:27:32.620 | it was Axe, A-X.

01:27:34.500 | And so when we were adopted, I never saw him.

01:27:36.500 | I didn't see him for 15 years.

01:27:37.520 | But I knew one thing, he was a brilliant scientist,

01:27:41.020 | and he was actually the youngest,

01:27:42.980 | he was not only a tenured professor,

01:27:44.780 | he was full professor with like a chair

01:27:46.780 | at Cornell at age 26.

01:27:49.060 | So you and I got our professorship like our 30s or whatever.

01:27:51.660 | - I was 40 when I got tenure.

01:27:53.020 | - Yeah, I mean, it's like a much,

01:27:54.940 | he was 26, 27, I was in math, it was a little different.

01:27:57.660 | But I knew he won, basically,

01:27:59.820 | there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics.

01:28:01.460 | There's the Fields Medal,

01:28:02.300 | which is kind of equivalent at some level,

01:28:04.340 | but almost nobody knows about it.

01:28:05.860 | It's only given every five years.

01:28:07.420 | You have to be under 40, whatever.

01:28:08.620 | He never won that, but he won like the prize

01:28:10.260 | just beneath that, if you will, called the Cole Prize.

01:28:13.500 | And remarkable scientist,

01:28:15.180 | got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics.

01:28:18.420 | And I knew one thing, he never won the Nobel Prize.

01:28:21.260 | So as some kids might compete with their father,

01:28:23.580 | who's a captain of the high school football team,

01:28:25.620 | and they wanna be the captain of the college,

01:28:27.620 | very competitive, boys can be competitive

01:28:29.180 | with their dads, right?

01:28:30.020 | You know that.

01:28:30.840 | And I wanted to compete with him,

01:28:32.660 | but he wasn't an athlete, I wasn't an athlete.

01:28:34.460 | I can compete with him and do what he could not do,

01:28:37.000 | which was win a Nobel Prize.

01:28:38.380 | And I was estranged from him.

01:28:39.380 | And I was like, I'm gonna win a Nobel Prize

01:28:41.340 | and I'll show him, you know,

01:28:42.580 | and he'll regret that he abandoned me

01:28:44.680 | and gave me up for adoption.

01:28:45.700 | This is my thought process.

01:28:46.940 | I'm not saying it's like the most elevated way to be,

01:28:49.220 | but that's the way I thought of it.

01:28:50.380 | So I said, I have to invent something, discover something

01:28:53.340 | that's worthy of a Nobel Prize.

01:28:54.540 | That's all I have to do, quote unquote.

01:28:56.060 | How hard can it be?

01:28:56.880 | There's been hundreds of Nobel Prizes given out.

01:28:59.060 | These people-- - That's the way

01:28:59.900 | you thought about it? - I was at Stanford

01:29:01.140 | and you're surrounded by Nobel, you know what it's like.

01:29:03.180 | I was a postdoc at Stanford for a short time.

01:29:05.860 | We can get into that.

01:29:06.780 | And the point was I was obsessed with discovering

01:29:10.300 | or inventing an experiment that could take us back

01:29:12.700 | to the primordial universe before what we call the Big Bang.

01:29:16.300 | The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space.

01:29:19.620 | It's the origin of the first elements

01:29:22.460 | in the periodic table of the elements.

01:29:24.520 | We still don't know what caused that event to occur.

01:29:27.340 | And I realized that if we discovered

01:29:29.120 | what caused that event to occur,

01:29:31.180 | which is hypothesized to be a phenomenon called inflation,

01:29:35.760 | which was co-created by at least three scientists,

01:29:38.920 | but two of whom were at Stanford,

01:29:40.460 | associate with Stanford, Alan Guth, who's now at MIT.

01:29:43.220 | He was a postdoc at Slack, and Andre Linde,

01:29:45.180 | who's a renowned professor at Stanford to this day.

01:29:49.220 | So they predicted that there was this mysterious substance

01:29:52.180 | called a quantum field, and that the fluctuations

01:29:55.140 | in this quantum field existing

01:29:57.820 | in the four-dimensional infinite space,

01:30:00.540 | the random fluctuations of a quantum field,

01:30:02.660 | what's called vacuum energy, is unstable.

01:30:05.160 | You can't have what's called vacuum or negative energy

01:30:07.620 | and have it just sit there permanently.

01:30:09.180 | It eventually inexorably must fluctuate,

01:30:12.140 | and the fluctuations can actually spawn

01:30:14.900 | an expansion of that four-dimensional space locally.

01:30:18.620 | And that occurred at a specific time.

01:30:20.100 | - When you say four-dimensional space,

01:30:21.380 | can you tell us the axes of that space?

01:30:23.020 | - So you can think of it

01:30:23.860 | as just ordinary three-dimensional space,

01:30:25.860 | but imagine X, Y, and Z extend to infinity

01:30:28.420 | in all directions.

01:30:29.780 | And we're sitting at our local,

01:30:32.060 | what we perceive as the center of our universe.

01:30:34.420 | It's just our observable universe.

01:30:36.100 | We can look out 90 billion light years in any direction,

01:30:40.100 | which is longer than the age of the universe

01:30:41.920 | times the speed of light.

01:30:43.900 | That's because the universe has been expanding.

01:30:45.500 | In addition to having existed for 14 billion years,

01:30:48.480 | it's been expanding for an additional power

01:30:51.420 | of three times that.

01:30:52.420 | And then imagine time.

01:30:54.360 | So time is a fourth component,

01:30:55.860 | and we have to weave those together

01:30:57.300 | in order to understand how objects behave

01:30:59.460 | in this landscape of what we call the cosmos.

01:31:02.860 | But it wasn't limited to just our,

01:31:04.660 | what we now see as our universe.

01:31:06.460 | We have a horizon,

01:31:07.300 | just like if you go off to the Pacific Ocean here

01:31:10.040 | away from land, you see a horizon.

01:31:12.860 | It's a circular horizon in all directions.

01:31:15.380 | So we live on a three-dimensional planet, right?

01:31:17.660 | The horizon is two-dimensional.

01:31:18.980 | It's one-dimensional, circle,

01:31:21.320 | that we can see any ship that's above the horizon,

01:31:23.460 | we can see visible light coming from it, right?

01:31:26.200 | But we can perceive that there are things

01:31:28.700 | on the other side of the planet that we can't see,

01:31:30.980 | and we have to learn about those through indirect methods.

01:31:33.380 | We can talk about that a different time.

01:31:35.280 | So there's a horizon on a three-dimensional surface,

01:31:37.660 | that's a one-dimensional surface.

01:31:38.920 | In four dimensions, it's a two-dimensional surface.

01:31:41.900 | So you kind of lose two dimensions.

01:31:43.860 | And that means it's a sphere.

01:31:45.540 | It looks like, our universe looks like a sphere

01:31:47.220 | centered on us.

01:31:48.340 | We look in all directions, we see constellations,

01:31:50.660 | we see galaxies, we see clusters of galaxies.

01:31:53.100 | If you go far enough back, you see this primordial heat

01:31:56.900 | that's left over from the formation of the elements.

01:31:59.500 | That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation.

01:32:01.780 | That's what I study.

01:32:02.880 | It's properties.

01:32:04.020 | And what it reveals is the oldest light in the universe,

01:32:06.620 | the oldest possible light.

01:32:07.900 | It was once visible, you could see it if you existed,

01:32:10.860 | but nobody existed back then.

01:32:12.900 | And it originates from the formation of the lightest

01:32:15.380 | elements and the lightest atoms on the periodic table.

01:32:18.300 | So you could look back, and if you could see this,

01:32:20.700 | you would see a pattern imprinted on that light

01:32:23.760 | called gravitational radiation, or waves of gravity.

01:32:26.940 | And that would be evidence of something

01:32:28.380 | beyond the visible horizon.

01:32:30.940 | And that would actually originate

01:32:32.180 | from this inflationary epoch, if it occurred.

01:32:35.080 | So I had the idea to build the first telescope,

01:32:37.940 | a refracting telescope of all things,

01:32:39.740 | just a little telescope with lenses,

01:32:41.480 | but lenses that are transparent to microwaves

01:32:43.500 | and focus microwaves.

01:32:44.860 | But I realized I could build that telescope,

01:32:46.680 | and if we were successful, I didn't think

01:32:48.220 | we wasn't guaranteed to be successful,

01:32:50.460 | but it was a big enough scientific quest

01:32:53.820 | that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize

01:32:55.700 | if we were correct.

01:32:56.520 | In fact, you know, spoiler alert,

01:32:58.700 | my first book is called "Losing the Nobel Prize"

01:33:00.460 | because we had to retract the discovery

01:33:02.220 | that we made at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day, 2014,

01:33:05.900 | 10 years ago.

01:33:06.780 | - So you had a paper that essentially led you

01:33:10.180 | to the realistic possibility

01:33:12.420 | that you might win the Nobel Prize.

01:33:13.860 | - Yeah.

01:33:14.700 | - And then you had to retract it.

01:33:17.000 | Do you recall your emotional state or state of mind

01:33:19.880 | when you realized that you were wrong?

01:33:21.180 | - Very clear.

01:33:22.020 | And that's how it relates to this p-hacking

01:33:23.420 | and everything else.

01:33:25.100 | We actually didn't have this paper peer-reviewed.

01:33:28.440 | We were so concerned that a competitor,

01:33:31.280 | which is a spacecraft, a billion-dollar spacecraft,

01:33:33.960 | we were just a $10 million experiment,

01:33:36.200 | a little telescope at the South Pole, Antarctica,

01:33:38.320 | where I've been a couple times,

01:33:40.000 | and that instrument bested a scientific telescope

01:33:43.520 | led by 1,000 people, costing a billion dollars,

01:33:46.320 | led out of multiple countries in America and Europe.

01:33:49.420 | And we were terrified, as many scientists are,

01:33:52.080 | that we're gonna get scooped.

01:33:53.000 | In fact, the original discovery

01:33:55.400 | of the cosmic microwave background was made by accident.

01:33:58.560 | The discovery of this three-Kelvin heat source

01:34:01.120 | that's coming to us in all directions,

01:34:02.560 | i.e. it's a background,

01:34:03.880 | was made by accident at Bell Laboratories,

01:34:06.500 | and Bell Labs accidentally discovered it

01:34:08.880 | because they were looking

01:34:10.200 | at the very first communication satellites.

01:34:12.000 | You know, AT&T, Bell Labs of communications.

01:34:13.760 | - So they stumbled on it.

01:34:14.640 | - They accidentally said, "I'm looking at the satellite

01:34:16.920 | "that should have a certain amount of background hiss,

01:34:19.440 | "noise, whatever that was expected,

01:34:21.060 | "but I'm getting hundreds of times that amount.

01:34:23.440 | "And where could that be coming from?"

01:34:24.860 | They did very excruciating, very high-precision measurements

01:34:28.340 | and they found they couldn't identify

01:34:30.260 | a single terrestrial source or a cosmic source

01:34:33.340 | of any other sort except for the fact

01:34:35.460 | that if the universe began essentially with a Big Bang,

01:34:37.820 | they didn't call it that back then,

01:34:39.440 | that there would be a pervasive heat left over

01:34:41.500 | that would be exactly this temperature,

01:34:43.020 | three degrees above absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin.

01:34:46.460 | So I knew if they won a Nobel Prize,

01:34:48.100 | certainly I'd win a Nobel Prize

01:34:49.340 | for discovering why that effect happened, right?

01:34:51.300 | It's like you discover, you know, some amino acid

01:34:54.200 | and then you discover, well, it's produced by DNA.

01:34:56.180 | Well, certainly, you know, if the amino acid

01:34:58.260 | won the Nobel Prize, certainly DNA would win

01:35:00.780 | the Nobel Prize, right?

01:35:01.620 | - Well, Hans Kornberg, Arthur Kornberg,

01:35:03.660 | RNA, Sun, you know, structure of RNA.

01:35:07.860 | So you published a paper that wasn't peer-reviewed

01:35:10.300 | because you were worried about getting scooped.

01:35:12.820 | But scooped is when someone else beats you

01:35:14.220 | to publication, folks, and gets credit for the discovery.

01:35:17.940 | It's a whole discussion that we could have some other time

01:35:20.500 | if we just wanna riff on the process of science.

01:35:23.660 | But so you published the paper.

01:35:26.060 | - We didn't publish it.

01:35:26.900 | We submitted it to the archive.

01:35:28.780 | We had a press conference

01:35:30.260 | at Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences,

01:35:33.580 | and it was televised.

01:35:35.180 | And in the audience were Nobel laureates and reporters,

01:35:38.180 | but the discovery that, you know,

01:35:39.980 | it was clear that we would have won it.

01:35:41.700 | However, at that time, I had been removed

01:35:45.020 | from the leadership of the experiment that I created.

01:35:47.500 | So I created the predecessor experiment.

01:35:49.460 | You know, it's like iPhones.

01:35:50.300 | You build one, then you upgrade it,

01:35:51.540 | you build a better camera, blah, blah, blah.

01:35:52.980 | So the first one I invented

01:35:54.140 | when I was a postdoc at Stanford, it was called BICEP,

01:35:56.860 | and it stood for Background Imager

01:35:58.420 | of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.

01:36:00.660 | And it's also kind of a play on words

01:36:02.380 | because the pattern of microwave polarization,

01:36:05.620 | which we can talk about, was a twisting, curling pattern.

01:36:10.140 | So I made the pun, like curl like you do bicep,

01:36:12.380 | the muscle behind curls.

01:36:13.860 | Anyway, it's not that funny.

01:36:15.020 | And they ended up trying to change the acronym,

01:36:17.660 | which pissed me off.

01:36:18.820 | But anyway, the tragic thing

01:36:22.380 | is that we built this experiment,

01:36:24.460 | we upgraded this experiment.

01:36:25.900 | It was very hard to get money to build it.

01:36:28.340 | I got money from David Baltimore,

01:36:29.900 | who's the president of Caltech.

01:36:31.420 | I should say, I was at Stanford.

01:36:33.140 | - I should say about David Baltimore,

01:36:34.460 | just 'cause people might wanna go to,

01:36:36.980 | former president of Caltech, maybe still?

01:36:38.860 | - Rockefeller, no, he's not.

01:36:39.900 | - Former president of the Rockefeller,

01:36:41.180 | that's an interesting story.

01:36:43.340 | If you wanna look it up, look it up, as they say.

01:36:46.260 | Scientists are human.

01:36:47.820 | He landed at Caltech.

01:36:50.460 | So they funded you to do this?

01:36:51.820 | - He gave me a special grant,

01:36:54.580 | just a presidential, it was called Caltech President's Fund.

01:36:56.980 | He gave it to me and my postdoc advisor, Andrew Lang,

01:36:59.700 | who's an incredible scientist.

01:37:01.100 | He was married to Frances Arnold,

01:37:03.140 | who won the Nobel Prize in 2018 in chemistry,

01:37:06.660 | renowned scientist as well.

01:37:08.660 | And they were just a power couple.

01:37:10.020 | And he invited me to give a talk and I gave a job talk.

01:37:13.320 | He hired me on the spot.

01:37:14.340 | I couldn't help myself from saying yes

01:37:16.540 | before he finished this.

01:37:17.380 | I was miserable at Stanford, by the way.

01:37:18.580 | It was 1999, 2000, dot-com boom.

01:37:21.620 | I was making $32,000 a year, living on Alma Street.

01:37:24.820 | The Caltrains were running every 17 minutes.

01:37:26.820 | I know because I was awake from 5 a.m.

01:37:29.180 | I couldn't sleep more than four or five hours.

01:37:31.540 | And I just said yes, moved down to Caltech.

01:37:34.180 | And because of that, I convinced him

01:37:36.440 | and my colleague, Jamie Bach, who's currently a professor,

01:37:39.140 | to build this telescope

01:37:40.500 | and put it at the South Pole in Antarctica.

01:37:42.960 | And that was the only place we could do it.

01:37:44.580 | And the only university that would fund it

01:37:47.060 | was this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund.

01:37:50.300 | So these confluence of events.

01:37:51.780 | And by the way, then, because I got this job

01:37:53.860 | and because I built this telescope with my colleagues,

01:37:56.060 | I got the job at UCSD,

01:37:57.140 | which then enabled me to meet my wife.

01:37:58.660 | - So let me, incredible story.

01:38:00.620 | You moved down to Caltech, which is in Pasadena.

01:38:04.180 | Amazing place.

01:38:05.380 | And then you get the money.

01:38:06.900 | How much was this telescope?

01:38:07.740 | - The initial one was a million dollars

01:38:09.140 | to build the first version.

01:38:10.320 | - That's quite a gift for a postdoc, a million bucks.

01:38:14.160 | You decide the South Pole will be the place to do it.

01:38:16.320 | We can talk about why that is.

01:38:17.920 | And then you make this discovery,

01:38:19.040 | which turns out to be false.

01:38:21.360 | But it sounds like you have good feelings

01:38:24.660 | about the experience nonetheless.

01:38:26.420 | - So because I was recognized

01:38:28.960 | and this experiment got a lot of attention

01:38:30.560 | because it was really the first one ever designed

01:38:33.240 | to look for the spark that ignited the whole Big Bang.

01:38:36.080 | So it became just the cause celebra

01:38:38.680 | of the cosmology field.

01:38:40.380 | - And are you thinking at this point,

01:38:41.860 | forgive me for playing therapist here,

01:38:43.520 | I'm not one, I'm not pretending to.

01:38:45.380 | - No, it's fine.

01:38:46.220 | - Were you thinking at this point,

01:38:47.340 | okay, this challenge that I think not all,

01:38:50.500 | but a lot of sons have with their fathers,

01:38:52.740 | not necessarily to best them,

01:38:54.060 | but one evaluates themselves relative

01:38:57.980 | to like their family lineage.

01:38:59.940 | Sometimes it's a grandfather.

01:39:01.780 | This thing of having some internal friction

01:39:05.140 | in order to live up to something.

01:39:07.100 | Sounds like that was driving you.

01:39:08.220 | Look at Tiger Woods, another Stanford guy.

01:39:10.480 | Same story, but father, hard pushing, driving.

01:39:14.080 | And then what does he do after he is a PGA champion?

01:39:16.880 | He wants to like become a Navy SEAL or something.

01:39:19.240 | - He was hanging out with a lot of SEAL team members.

01:39:20.080 | - It wasn't enough for him.

01:39:22.040 | So sorry, I interrupted your question.

01:39:23.440 | - So at the point where you made this discovery,

01:39:25.240 | were you feeling like, all right, check that box.

01:39:27.740 | - What was kind of revelatory to me

01:39:31.360 | is that sometimes you start a quest

01:39:33.440 | or you start a journey and the fuel that gets you going,

01:39:37.880 | it's no longer serves you when you get there.

01:39:40.000 | My brother always says baggage has handles

01:39:42.240 | so you can put it down.

01:39:43.280 | - Nice.

01:39:44.120 | - So that like journey from initiating it,

01:39:47.000 | the experiment to best my dad, to show him up,

01:39:50.980 | to make him regret that he abandoned me and my brother.

01:39:54.000 | I mean, I always said, I could see how he could abandon me.

01:39:56.600 | I was only seven, I'm kind of boring.

01:39:58.440 | He used to joke, I only care about kids

01:39:59.880 | once they learn calculus.

01:40:01.440 | He was a funny--

01:40:02.840 | - What a cruel thing to say.

01:40:04.240 | - He would say it in jest and it is true.

01:40:06.720 | We did reunite and we did have a reproach moment

01:40:09.080 | but it was after inventing this experiment,

01:40:10.640 | after I arrived at Caltech, it was.

01:40:13.240 | I mean, he was this kind of intellect

01:40:14.840 | and it was so lovely to see you and your dad.

01:40:17.980 | My wish for you is to have kind of an experience,

01:40:21.440 | maybe similar, maybe not, but when you do have kids,

01:40:24.480 | and please God, you will, you get a do-over.

01:40:28.760 | You get to kind of correct the mistakes

01:40:32.400 | or the ways that you, and you'll never get it right.

01:40:35.040 | One of my friends is a psychiatrist.

01:40:36.060 | He says, your job as a parent is to only pass on

01:40:38.400 | half of your neuroticism to your kids.

01:40:40.520 | If every generation does that,

01:40:41.780 | you'll eventually be a perfect species.

01:40:43.760 | But I felt that passion and so forth to kind of best him.

01:40:48.760 | And then when we reunited and it no longer,

01:40:53.840 | as I said, it no longer served me.

01:40:56.500 | But the trajectory that I had launched this experiment on

01:40:59.100 | continued unabated.

01:41:00.560 | And so that had this inertia, this momentum

01:41:03.080 | that couldn't be stopped.

01:41:03.920 | In fact, so many people wanted a part of it

01:41:06.300 | and so much pressure was surrounding it

01:41:08.200 | that I think partially that led to me

01:41:10.920 | actually being kind of kicked out

01:41:12.960 | of the leadership of the experiment.

01:41:14.920 | And that was precipitated by a truly tragic event.

01:41:17.760 | So I told you my advisor, Sarah Church,

01:41:21.280 | set up a job interview for me with her advisor

01:41:25.960 | when she was a postdoc at Caltech named Andrew Lang.

01:41:29.360 | Andrew was like, at that time I was estranged from my dad.

01:41:32.480 | He was like a father figure.

01:41:33.920 | He was like, you ever see the TV show "Mad Men"

01:41:37.560 | like Don Draper, he's just like handsome, good looking.

01:41:40.880 | Everyone thought he was gonna win a Nobel Prize.

01:41:42.680 | He was stolen from Berkeley.

01:41:43.920 | They spent tons of money to recruit him from Berkeley

01:41:46.400 | to come to Caltech.

01:41:47.480 | His wife was a power couple, Frances Arnold.

01:41:50.680 | Again, she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.

01:41:53.220 | And he just had the world at his fingertips,

01:41:55.820 | charming, funny.

01:41:57.300 | And he would say things like,

01:41:59.560 | "Brian, this is so unrealistic that we have to do it."

01:42:02.120 | Like he was a kid, he loved to play and he loved,

01:42:05.480 | he's the one who inspired me in this way

01:42:09.000 | of just never stopping.

01:42:11.720 | Like that passionate curiosity

01:42:13.760 | and the reward that you get.

01:42:15.200 | I always say, you know, when you solve a problem,

01:42:17.640 | your reward is a harder problem.

01:42:19.360 | Like that's, but that, if you're a scientist,

01:42:21.240 | that feels good.

01:42:22.200 | 'Cause it's like, I always say,

01:42:23.960 | and I think it's one of your colleagues,

01:42:25.160 | I'm not sure, so much good stuff going on up there,

01:42:27.680 | but there's this concept of finite games

01:42:30.000 | and infinite games, right?

01:42:31.360 | So I always say, science is an infinite game.

01:42:33.880 | You can't win science.

01:42:35.400 | It goes on forever.

01:42:36.720 | No one masters all of whatever science is.

01:42:39.280 | You can debate even what it is,

01:42:40.600 | but it's composed of an infinite number of finite games.

01:42:43.920 | Getting into college, getting into graduate school,

01:42:46.040 | getting a postdoc, getting a tenure track position.

01:42:48.440 | Those are all finite games, right?

01:42:49.960 | And the ultimate, what's the ultimate finite game?

01:42:52.280 | A Nobel Prize.

01:42:53.360 | 'Cause only three people can win it each year.

01:42:55.320 | There's only 200 people have ever won it.

01:42:57.440 | You know, there's more people in the NBA

01:42:59.080 | than have won it in physics, right?

01:43:00.760 | So this is a very exclusive club,

01:43:02.800 | and if, you know, if you win it,

01:43:04.080 | somebody else isn't gonna win it, right?

01:43:05.880 | Odds are.

01:43:06.920 | And this pressure to kind of get to that level

01:43:10.200 | should never exceed the passion

01:43:13.040 | that drove you to become a scientist in the first place.

01:43:15.680 | And so I was obsessed with that.

01:43:17.880 | And what Andrew Lang showed me

01:43:19.520 | is that science is its own reward.

01:43:22.400 | And the pleasure of finding things out,

01:43:24.600 | as, you know, Feynman would say, is its reward.

01:43:27.360 | Science is its own reward,

01:43:28.600 | and that's characteristic of these infinite games.

01:43:30.600 | You just wanna keep playing them.

01:43:32.040 | And the tragic thing is that,

01:43:35.120 | and I'm emotional thinking about this,

01:43:37.200 | when Andrew was at the peak of his life,

01:43:40.240 | he chose to take it.

01:43:42.800 | He took his own life.

01:43:43.800 | - He killed himself.

01:43:44.720 | - He killed himself.

01:43:45.880 | Ironically, tragically, he used helium,

01:43:49.280 | which is, you know, central to the formation of the universe

01:43:53.000 | and the creation of our universe

01:43:54.560 | is reliant in large part on helium, the abundance of,

01:43:57.640 | and he asphyxiated himself in a cheap, dirty, sleazy motel.

01:44:01.920 | Actually, I had stayed at in Pasadena

01:44:03.720 | when I was visiting him for my initial job talk.

01:44:06.400 | - Do you mind if we go into this a bit?

01:44:08.800 | I realize it's a painful memory, and I feel it.

01:44:11.760 | Not to shift the focus, but ironically,

01:44:15.600 | all three of my academic advisors dead.

01:44:17.360 | First one shot himself in a bathtub

01:44:20.400 | two weeks after we celebrated something for him.

01:44:22.880 | Just like, you know, suicide is such a peculiar thing.

01:44:27.120 | He did it for very different reasons,

01:44:28.360 | different stage of life.

01:44:29.360 | Let's get back to Lange.

01:44:31.060 | How old was he?

01:44:33.000 | - He was 41, I think.

01:44:34.320 | - So he's young.

01:44:35.840 | - Had three kids, three sons.

01:44:38.920 | - Wife still alive?

01:44:39.840 | - Yeah, Frances still, you know, a renowned professor.

01:44:42.080 | - Was she shocked?

01:44:43.740 | - They were separated.

01:44:44.680 | They had gotten estranged,

01:44:46.040 | and they weren't living together.

01:44:49.080 | It was interesting.

01:44:50.400 | He was always very close.

01:44:51.520 | She had two children, I think, from a previous marriage,

01:44:53.700 | or one child from a previous marriage,

01:44:55.520 | and he was like a father to that son as well,

01:44:58.520 | like a biological father, whatever that means.

01:45:00.800 | Kids were so dedicated to him.

01:45:03.320 | And look, don't cry for me.

01:45:04.800 | I mean, it's still emotional,

01:45:07.640 | 'cause he meant so much to me as a mentor,

01:45:09.440 | as a friend, as an advisor, as a father figure, basically,

01:45:14.400 | but he had real kids, and he had adopted kids.

01:45:17.400 | - It was tragic for everyone.

01:45:19.160 | Suicide is such a peculiar thing

01:45:21.240 | because it, in some sense, it can, quote-unquote,

01:45:25.480 | make sense for, if somebody we know is very depressed,

01:45:28.240 | or they have a terminal illness, you know,

01:45:30.400 | and, but it sounds like it came as a bit of a surprise.

01:45:34.600 | Do you think that sometimes there's this close relationship

01:45:38.520 | between genius and, let's just say, not mentally healthy,

01:45:43.520 | that, you know, even what you mentioned before,

01:45:48.180 | you know, like we have to try this experiment.

01:45:50.960 | I mean, there's a bit of a recklessness to that

01:45:52.800 | when you're dealing with millions and millions of dollars

01:45:54.920 | in postdoc careers, and, you know, there's a,

01:45:57.800 | I mean, the delight of a fun experiment

01:45:59.920 | and an adventurous experiment,

01:46:01.260 | maybe as a project where you kind of wade into it

01:46:04.160 | a little bit to see,

01:46:05.000 | but that's very different than, like, we have to do this.

01:46:07.160 | I mean, there's a risk-taking element there

01:46:09.060 | that supersedes kind of my notions

01:46:11.640 | of what an advisor's job is,

01:46:13.920 | which is to make sure that people progress

01:46:15.600 | toward, sure, discovery,

01:46:18.040 | but also, like, you want some,

01:46:20.540 | one of the most important thing to mentoring scientists

01:46:22.280 | is that they have some sense that there is a future for them

01:46:25.040 | and you can't guarantee it,

01:46:26.060 | but you'd like to, like a parent would for a child.

01:46:28.320 | You want to give them some sense

01:46:29.800 | that, like, the sun's gonna come up tomorrow.

01:46:31.200 | - That's right.

01:46:32.040 | - Like, we're not gonna implode or explode here.

01:46:34.160 | - And he was a pragmatist.

01:46:35.880 | He would give me advice, life advice, you know,

01:46:38.040 | and again, I was estranged from my father.

01:46:39.640 | He was playing this role,

01:46:41.040 | and he was just so, he was charming,

01:46:43.640 | and he was handsome, charismatic.

01:46:45.960 | He had just discovered, you know,

01:46:47.560 | came off this discovery of proving that the universe

01:46:51.200 | has a flat spatial geometry,

01:46:54.200 | which just means that any triangle

01:46:56.320 | that you make in the universe,

01:46:57.200 | whether it's three planets, three stars, three galaxies,

01:47:00.080 | three patches of the cosmic microwave background radiation,

01:47:03.360 | always the interior angles add up to 180 degrees,

01:47:06.700 | as they do on a flat table here,

01:47:08.560 | as they did for Euclid,

01:47:09.940 | and that had astonishing implications

01:47:11.680 | for how the universe might've begun.

01:47:13.040 | - And it's still true.

01:47:14.000 | - And this is still true.

01:47:15.080 | It's more true than ever.

01:47:16.040 | - So do you think that perhaps, I mean, who knows,

01:47:19.340 | perhaps he committed suicide because he was at a peak?

01:47:23.640 | You know, one of the things that people talk about

01:47:25.780 | is the peak and trough of dopamine.

01:47:28.480 | You mentioned infinite games.

01:47:29.780 | You know, I've said many times before

01:47:31.920 | that it's very important

01:47:34.000 | that you not get fast, large amplitude increases in dopamine

01:47:37.000 | that are not preceded by effort.

01:47:39.160 | You know, methamphetamine will give you a large amplitude,

01:47:42.160 | you know, a fast increase in dopamine,

01:47:44.520 | but there's zero effort involved except to procure it,

01:47:48.000 | and it sinks you into a post-dopaminergic peak,

01:47:52.000 | trough afterwards,

01:47:53.880 | that will have you hanging on for the will to live.

01:47:58.880 | So what comes up goes down,

01:48:02.160 | and it often goes down further than it went up

01:48:03.900 | when we're talking about dopamine.

01:48:04.920 | Playing an infinite game is great

01:48:06.120 | because it's in the motivation for answers.

01:48:10.200 | - It sounds like he like hit a peak,

01:48:12.660 | and you wonder if maybe he was like,

01:48:15.000 | "Okay, now I'm gonna check out now.

01:48:16.160 | "It's gonna be hard to keep doing this."

01:48:17.960 | - I don't think it's explicable.

01:48:19.040 | I don't think, I mean,

01:48:20.560 | the human brain is the most complicated thing,

01:48:22.400 | and you know, the human brains can even contemplate, right?

01:48:24.960 | It's the solipsistic in a sense,

01:48:26.760 | but I couldn't really wade into it.

01:48:29.600 | I mean, I know details of his personal life,

01:48:31.280 | and yes, divorce and separation and so forth,

01:48:34.000 | but I don't think that's it,

01:48:37.340 | just because the highs of the new quest

01:48:40.320 | and like the dopamine hadn't really come in from Bicep,

01:48:43.840 | and it wouldn't come in for four more years

01:48:45.760 | after his death in 2010.

01:48:47.160 | - So you got to continue the project.

01:48:48.440 | - We got to continue the project,

01:48:49.520 | but because he was removed,

01:48:50.960 | and he was kind of my, you know, consigliere,

01:48:52.960 | or you know, whatever, I was to him.

01:48:54.520 | I forget how the relationship goes.

01:48:56.140 | I'm not as conversant with the mafia as I should be,

01:48:58.360 | but with Andrew, with his death,

01:49:01.320 | one of the, you know, trivial in comparison consequences

01:49:04.200 | was that the main patron and backer of me in my career,

01:49:08.140 | who had, you know, helped me get my job at UCSD,

01:49:10.420 | had helped me get, you know,

01:49:11.620 | this presidential career grant,

01:49:13.500 | which I received from President Bush,

01:49:15.140 | and all these incredible accomplishments,

01:49:17.060 | and just been my sounding board on experiments,

01:49:19.100 | and kept me going and helped me

01:49:20.940 | when I had troubles with my graduate students,

01:49:23.300 | and he would talk to my, I mean, it's unheard of, right?

01:49:26.220 | The compassion that this man had,

01:49:27.900 | and if he had only reached out to me, you know,

01:49:30.700 | I'm sure he had better friends than me,

01:49:31.980 | but like, I would have gotten up in a second, you know?

01:49:35.040 | I went to the motel where he took his life

01:49:37.560 | when I was writing my book just to put me back in,

01:49:39.800 | like, try, how could I comprehend it?

01:49:41.760 | I couldn't, I just cried.

01:49:43.040 | I sat in front of the hotel and I cried,

01:49:44.520 | but no, I don't think we can understand it,

01:49:46.920 | but the eventual high wouldn't come,

01:49:49.400 | and then a much more crashing low

01:49:51.340 | after we essentially had to retract it,

01:49:53.160 | and we're disconfirmed, as they say.

01:49:55.280 | - So you continued with the project?

01:49:57.240 | - Yeah, I was at UCSD, and I'd left Caltech.

01:49:59.880 | - You get your job, you got this telescope

01:50:01.640 | down at the South Pole.

01:50:03.220 | How do you get to the South Pole?

01:50:04.380 | You fly to Chile, and then you ride a bicycle down?

01:50:07.060 | - It's like, you know, I never had the physique

01:50:08.860 | to get into the military, although I wanted to at one point

01:50:11.900 | to be a pilot, actually.

01:50:12.880 | I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy

01:50:14.580 | like my stepfather did, but I didn't have the physique.

01:50:17.900 | I didn't have the HLP diet back then,

01:50:20.300 | but the point was you go on a military, it's a whole way,

01:50:23.460 | and you do it in seven days, eight days, if you're lucky.

01:50:27.300 | Sometimes it can take three weeks

01:50:28.420 | due to the weather down there.

01:50:29.300 | It's the most violent weather, most winds, turbulence,

01:50:32.780 | everything, you know, hostile, but it's a cakewalk

01:50:35.220 | compared to the Explorer, Shackleton,

01:50:37.800 | or Scott, and of course, Amundsen.

01:50:40.500 | So the quest to get to the South Pole first,

01:50:43.320 | which is South Pole, I should say,

01:50:44.480 | for people that aren't familiar,

01:50:45.880 | Antarctica's the seventh continent,

01:50:47.400 | so the last one to be discovered.

01:50:48.860 | It was only really discovered, it was thought to be there

01:50:51.480 | because it was thought that to balance the continents

01:50:54.240 | in the northern hemisphere,

01:50:55.080 | you needed a massive counterweight in the southern.

01:50:57.240 | It's so stupid, but anyway, it wasn't discovered

01:50:59.300 | until 1900s, really, that they truly existed,

01:51:02.460 | and then it wasn't explored until 10 or 12 years later,

01:51:05.140 | and the quest to get to the South Pole,

01:51:06.780 | it was the last unexplored, you know,

01:51:08.940 | non-Fildon part of the map of the Earth,

01:51:11.540 | so the quest to get there was like going to the moon,

01:51:14.340 | and in fact, it exactly parallels the moon

01:51:16.180 | in that once it was reached for the first time,

01:51:18.220 | nobody cared to go back again, you know,

01:51:19.740 | for many, many years,

01:51:20.580 | and we're only going back to the moon now,

01:51:22.060 | 60 years later, 50 years later,

01:51:23.980 | after the Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions, right?

01:51:27.620 | So getting there and setting that bar, right,

01:51:30.500 | and making that accomplishment,

01:51:32.440 | sometimes that's the extent of it,

01:51:34.180 | like when you have the dopamine hit

01:51:35.500 | of being the first to get somewhere.

01:51:37.380 | Scott was a British scientist and explorer,

01:51:40.780 | and Amundsen was just an explorer.

01:51:42.700 | Amundsen, Roald Amundsen,

01:51:43.780 | he tried to get to the North Pole first, he lost.

01:51:46.340 | Somebody else beat him, and he said,

01:51:48.140 | "Well, I'm gonna keep going with this skis

01:51:49.900 | "and sled dog team that I have,"

01:51:51.580 | and he literally went to the South Pole, 180 degrees around.

01:51:54.780 | So the poles are the two end points

01:51:56.820 | of the Earth's axis of rotation.

01:51:58.220 | There's a North Pole, there's no land there,

01:52:00.540 | there's no continent there, there's ice there,

01:52:02.420 | and Santa is there, exactly, right?

01:52:04.980 | And then the South Pole's a continent.

01:52:06.500 | If you go, I brought a piece of it here that I collected,

01:52:09.260 | probably illegally from Antarctica,

01:52:10.740 | I'll show it to you later.

01:52:12.540 | It's just rocks, right?

01:52:13.460 | So if you drill under the ice in Antarctica,

01:52:15.140 | you come to a continent,

01:52:16.260 | and that's the difference between the North and South Poles.

01:52:18.820 | But the South Pole is 700 nautical miles

01:52:21.180 | from the coast of Antarctica.

01:52:22.340 | The closest point of approach in the 1900s

01:52:24.940 | was you take a ship from New Zealand,

01:52:27.140 | you sail due South, there's no other way to go,

01:52:29.260 | and you come to the continental shelf,

01:52:31.020 | the coastline's called McMurdo Station,

01:52:33.060 | which was just, you know,

01:52:34.180 | basically there's some sea lions there and that's it,

01:52:36.100 | and orcas and penguins and nothing else at that time.

01:52:39.180 | Now there's a whole research station.

01:52:41.380 | And then they got on skis and skied up 9,000 feet

01:52:45.340 | from sea level to 9,000 feet

01:52:47.100 | where the polar plateau flattens out,

01:52:49.020 | and they got to the South Pole,

01:52:50.260 | and Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott.

01:52:53.260 | And Scott was this British, you know, naturalist,

01:52:55.940 | like a Darwin, but also he was a scientist plus an explorer.

01:52:58.820 | So he wanted to collect samples,

01:53:00.620 | and he found flora and fauna, there's not much,

01:53:02.700 | rocks, meteorites, he actually discovered meteorites

01:53:04.980 | in Antarctica, incredible scientist.

01:53:07.500 | But because he was a scientist, it cost him his life.

01:53:11.020 | Because he was carrying all this scientific equipment

01:53:14.940 | and scientific samples, and he had to ski up them,

01:53:17.540 | like he would find it, and he's like,

01:53:18.740 | "I'm not coming back the same way that you got there

01:53:20.340 | "'cause of the wind patterns and stuff."

01:53:21.780 | So he knew he'd never come back,

01:53:22.740 | so he couldn't leave it there.

01:53:23.580 | So he had to carry extra food, fuel,

01:53:26.340 | and men dedicated to it.

01:53:27.940 | Oh, and by the way, the Norwegian team,

01:53:30.500 | Amundsen was Norwegian, and they used sled dogs

01:53:33.980 | for two reasons.

01:53:34.820 | One, they conserved calories, they provided propulsion,

01:53:38.500 | and then they provided a tasty snack

01:53:40.180 | once you got to the South Pole.

01:53:41.620 | 'Cause once you get to the South Pole,

01:53:42.540 | you can ski downhill 9,000 feet, you know,

01:53:44.460 | to sea level, basically.

01:53:45.980 | And so they ate, British would refuse to do that.

01:53:48.660 | So they knew they couldn't eat their dogs,

01:53:50.420 | and they had dogs, but they wouldn't eat them.

01:53:52.220 | So they were the sled dogs.

01:53:53.780 | And when they got to the South Pole,

01:53:55.580 | they came within three or four kilometers,

01:53:57.660 | and it's totally flat, like this table.

01:53:59.740 | The South Pole looks like this.

01:54:00.700 | Go out in the middle of the ocean, freeze it,

01:54:03.180 | paint it white, and that's what it looks like.

01:54:05.420 | It's white, 100, you know, 360 degrees around, okay?

01:54:09.220 | It's the most boring place on Earth, literally,

01:54:11.420 | and I've been there.

01:54:12.980 | He got within, so you can see things really far away.

01:54:15.420 | He got there, he got within three kilometers,

01:54:17.900 | and he saw something on the horizon.

01:54:19.260 | He's like, oh, you know, bleep, right?

01:54:22.140 | And it was a Norwegian flag.

01:54:24.140 | Now, can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of,

01:54:27.860 | you know, the Eagle, and he lands on a Soviet flag?

01:54:30.980 | I mean, it would be like the most crushing,

01:54:32.980 | it was the most, I think, the most depressing moment

01:54:35.340 | in human history, to come so far.

01:54:37.260 | And he actually said, they said,

01:54:38.100 | "Great God, this is a horrible place,

01:54:41.660 | "and all the more so for having reached it

01:54:44.140 | "without the benefit of priority."

01:54:46.940 | So the king and queen, they were depending on him

01:54:49.540 | to make the first, you know, for, you know,

01:54:51.940 | king and country, right, seeing the Norwegian flag.

01:54:55.460 | So what did he do?

01:54:56.300 | He was a good scientist, he said,

01:54:57.260 | "Maybe they made a mistake.

01:54:58.100 | "Maybe they're off by 10 feet."

01:54:59.300 | I can say, no, no, they were right.

01:55:00.740 | The Norwegians got there first.

01:55:02.540 | And because he got there three weeks later,

01:55:04.020 | in the middle of January, by the time he turned around,

01:55:06.780 | the winds had died down, they were no longer at his back.

01:55:09.260 | He was skiing, he had no food.

01:55:11.020 | He died about three weeks later,

01:55:13.300 | or three months later, in March.

01:55:15.060 | So his body was later recovered,

01:55:17.100 | and it was, you know, it wasn't reported back to England

01:55:19.420 | for another six months.

01:55:21.220 | So they gave their lives for science, for discovery,

01:55:23.700 | and to come up short to be second,

01:55:25.340 | it must have been the most crushing defeat in history.

01:55:27.860 | But it happens to be the best place

01:55:29.020 | to do astronomy in the world.

01:55:30.380 | - And you get there by flying to Santiago, Chile?

01:55:33.580 | - No, first you go to Christchurch, New Zealand.

01:55:36.900 | You go to Auckland, LAX, Auckland,

01:55:39.260 | Auckland to Christchurch.

01:55:40.580 | And then the U.S. has a charter

01:55:43.420 | with the New Zealand Air Force,

01:55:45.220 | and we give them C-130 cargo planes,

01:55:47.260 | or we have our own C-17 cargo planes, the jet-powered ones.

01:55:50.660 | Unfortunately, I got the C-130s, which is a four-prop plane.

01:55:54.580 | And I was on a plane that had the entire winter,

01:55:59.580 | summer supply, sorry,

01:56:01.180 | the entire winter supply of bananas on this cargo plane,

01:56:04.980 | which is as big as room, the cargo hold,

01:56:07.500 | you know, 12 by 12 times 50 feet long.

01:56:10.660 | And it was filled with bananas.

01:56:12.260 | And at first you're like, "Oh, cool, this is great."

01:56:14.060 | 'Til you realize there's no bathroom on the plane.

01:56:15.940 | There's just literally a five-gallon bucket

01:56:18.560 | and a shower curtain.

01:56:20.100 | There are no windows on it,

01:56:20.980 | 'cause why do paratroopers need windows, you know?

01:56:24.100 | And then there's enormous crates of bananas.

01:56:26.620 | There's 12 tons of bananas.

01:56:28.260 | I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that.

01:56:31.620 | I know I'm missing potassium or whatever.

01:56:33.620 | But the point is, you land on the coast,

01:56:35.340 | and then if you're lucky, you take a flight the next day,

01:56:38.140 | and it's a ski plane.

01:56:39.340 | It's the only plane that the U.S. does not export.

01:56:42.540 | In other words, we export the F-35, other,

01:56:45.180 | this is a strategic asset that we will not export.

01:56:46.860 | - So it's hard to get to.

01:56:47.740 | - It's very difficult.

01:56:48.960 | - So why South Pole?

01:56:51.380 | - Yeah.

01:56:52.220 | - And does this take us into the realm of light pollution?

01:56:55.380 | - Yeah.

01:56:56.220 | - Right, I mean, when I look up at the starry night

01:56:58.820 | here in Los Angeles,

01:56:59.780 | even though I'm tucked sort of back

01:57:01.540 | towards the Eastern Hills.

01:57:02.740 | - Yeah.

01:57:03.860 | - I don't live at the coast.

01:57:05.820 | I can see some pretty impressive stars.

01:57:07.860 | Not as impressive as when,

01:57:10.320 | I highly recommend people get up

01:57:11.940 | to the Yosemite High Country in the month of August.

01:57:14.540 | You can catch some great meteor showers.

01:57:16.660 | It's an amazing place to begin with.

01:57:18.620 | You have the meteor showers,

01:57:19.740 | and you're transported to another place.

01:57:21.860 | - Yeah.

01:57:23.100 | - And there's a lot of light pollution from cities.

01:57:26.300 | - Yeah.

01:57:27.140 | - And it travels very, very far.

01:57:28.140 | So I'm guessing you're down the South Pole

01:57:29.860 | because there's less light pollution.

01:57:31.460 | - You're right, a slight deviation from that

01:57:34.380 | is it's not light that we're looking for.

01:57:36.660 | We're not looking for optical light.

01:57:38.140 | We're looking for heat.

01:57:39.380 | So it's heat pollution.

01:57:40.780 | You're exactly right.

01:57:41.620 | We're looking to avoid heat pollution.

01:57:43.920 | So we wanna be somewhere cold.

01:57:45.580 | We wanna be somewhere that's far away from,

01:57:47.700 | you know, man-made sources of RF interference

01:57:49.940 | and microwave interference and communications, obviously.

01:57:52.840 | But the South Pole has a couple of other properties.

01:57:55.100 | One, the sun is below the horizon,

01:57:56.820 | and the sun is 5,500 Kelvin.

01:58:00.360 | And we're looking for something

01:58:01.300 | that's a fraction of a Kelvin,

01:58:03.380 | maybe a few milli or nano Kelvin at most.

01:58:06.080 | So it's billions of times that we wanna avoid.

01:58:08.900 | Even the Earth itself is still 300,

01:58:10.980 | almost 300 Kelvin down there.

01:58:12.220 | Yeah, the freezing is 273.

01:58:15.540 | So it does have that property.

01:58:17.580 | But the best part about it,

01:58:18.580 | it's above a lot of the Earth's atmosphere

01:58:20.180 | 'cause it's at 9,000 feet above sea level.

01:58:22.780 | And it's so cold.

01:58:23.660 | You don't know this 'cause you're a California baby,

01:58:25.260 | but on the East Coast, when I would grow up,

01:58:28.060 | some days, the bane of my existence

01:58:30.240 | would be you'd listen on the radio,

01:58:32.520 | and they'd announce school closures

01:58:34.880 | due to snowfall in the winter.

01:58:36.560 | And sometimes they'd say, oh, you're out of luck

01:58:38.500 | because it's too cold to snow.

01:58:40.240 | Sometimes the air temperature cannot saturate

01:58:42.920 | and form precipitation.

01:58:44.400 | And the South Pole is like that.

01:58:45.880 | It's so cold that if you took this glass,

01:58:48.080 | I'm holding a glass here,

01:58:49.380 | and it was empty on the table here,

01:58:51.440 | and I extend this glass up to outer space,

01:58:54.160 | the amount of water,

01:58:55.360 | if I took all the water in the atmosphere,

01:58:56.960 | the humidity in the atmosphere above the South Pole,

01:59:00.080 | and condensed it into a liquid,

01:59:02.080 | it would be 0.3 of a millimeter.

01:59:05.800 | Here in Los Angeles, it's about an inch

01:59:07.440 | or 25 millimeters or more.

01:59:10.080 | And so you'd like to not go there.

01:59:11.480 | Now, why is that important?

01:59:12.840 | Well, water absorbs microwaves,

01:59:15.480 | and that's how your microwave oven works.

01:59:17.800 | It heats up the water molecules.

01:59:18.960 | They start to vibrate and jumble.

01:59:20.360 | That causes friction.

01:59:21.240 | They heat up, and eventually they'll boil, right?

01:59:22.980 | So that's why sometimes you can overheat liquid

01:59:26.600 | in a microwave.

01:59:27.420 | You can't tell, but it's super hot,

01:59:28.560 | and actually it can be dangerous.

01:59:30.280 | But in this case, we don't want a photon

01:59:32.960 | coming from the Big Bang, perhaps,

01:59:34.840 | or before the Big Bang with the spark that ignited it.

01:59:37.780 | We don't want that to travel for 14 billion years, nearly,

01:59:41.400 | and then get absorbed in a water molecule

01:59:43.080 | above the Earth's surface.

01:59:44.360 | So the best place to go is space.

01:59:46.560 | But space, even with SpaceX,

01:59:48.480 | I haven't done any scientific experiments,

01:59:49.800 | but it's about maybe a factor of 1,000

01:59:53.120 | to a million times more expensive.

01:59:55.000 | So the same satellite that we were worried

01:59:56.840 | was gonna scoop us was exactly 100,

01:59:59.080 | or almost 200 times more expensive

02:00:01.000 | than our experiment at the South Pole.

02:00:02.440 | - Yeah, I was gonna ask you about this.

02:00:03.480 | A million dollars given to a postdoc.

02:00:05.840 | - That was a first tranche of funding.

02:00:07.560 | We ended up getting about 10 million.

02:00:08.800 | - 10 million.

02:00:09.640 | I mean, even $10 million is a lot of money by any standard,

02:00:13.080 | but probably, to my mind,

02:00:15.480 | doesn't seem like enough money

02:00:16.520 | to build a high-powered telescope at the South Pole,

02:00:21.440 | bring people there, have the infrastructure.

02:00:23.240 | I mean, it's not like you're rolling this thing out

02:00:24.880 | onto the ice and just pointing at the sky.

02:00:27.520 | I mean, you need-- - Oh, it's true.

02:00:29.640 | - I mean, I guess you could use the bucket

02:00:31.040 | from the plane as a bathroom,

02:00:32.440 | but you need a number of things.

02:00:33.720 | So you probably need hundreds of millions of dollars

02:00:37.400 | to build a facility down at the South Pole.

02:00:40.000 | - But those are all funded by you and your listeners

02:00:43.080 | and so are the taxpayers.

02:00:44.240 | So the National Science Foundation operates,

02:00:47.240 | those C-130s are part

02:00:48.720 | of the National Science Foundation's fleet.

02:00:50.360 | We don't pay a dime for them.

02:00:52.000 | If I wanna build a computer network system down there,

02:00:54.800 | we don't pay a dime for it.

02:00:56.360 | It's actually a point of contention

02:00:57.800 | because now I'm no longer with that experiment.

02:00:59.800 | I've recused myself from it for many years,

02:01:02.840 | not because of the incident

02:01:04.000 | where we were basically later disconfirmed our results.

02:01:08.480 | - Right, so you let the result out.

02:01:09.680 | You do this news conference.

02:01:10.960 | I wanna make sure that-- - I didn't do

02:01:11.800 | the news conference.

02:01:12.620 | I was not invited. - Okay, so there's

02:01:13.460 | a big press conference. - Yes.

02:01:14.280 | - Big press conference. - That's right.

02:01:15.120 | - It turns, and fast forward some years,

02:01:18.560 | it turns out this was not correct.

02:01:20.240 | - Some months, yeah. - Some months.

02:01:21.080 | - Only a few months. - Not correct.

02:01:22.120 | Well, better to be corrected quickly

02:01:23.520 | than collect your Nobel Prize

02:01:25.480 | and have to give it back or something, right?

02:01:27.620 | I have to say, and the pursuit of prizes

02:01:30.760 | is a complicated thing.

02:01:32.080 | - Yeah. - I was always discouraged

02:01:33.320 | from pursuing prizes. - Really?

02:01:34.760 | - All my advisors.

02:01:35.600 | - Oh, you're healthier than I am.

02:01:36.420 | - Well, my graduate advisor was very pure

02:01:38.340 | in the sense that she just liked doing experiments.

02:01:40.360 | I remember she was very, very smart, very smart.

02:01:43.600 | - This Barbara. - Barbara Chapman.

02:01:45.600 | I mean, and it's not just her pedigree

02:01:48.560 | that is evidence of that, but since pedigree

02:01:50.880 | is something most people can at least understand

02:01:53.320 | internally and externally.

02:01:54.480 | I mean, she went to Harvard as an undergraduate,

02:01:57.520 | then she was at UCSF and Caltech.

02:01:59.440 | And she actually had a project

02:02:01.960 | sending zebrafish up into space.

02:02:04.100 | Looking at, yeah, looking at development

02:02:06.680 | of vestibular system in the absence of gravity.

02:02:08.600 | - Gravity, wow.

02:02:09.440 | - And then fixing these specimens and bringing them back.

02:02:12.260 | Also did a lot of great work back on earth.

02:02:14.760 | But she wasn't somebody who was ambitious

02:02:16.560 | for ambition's sake.

02:02:17.560 | And then my postdoc advisor was exceedingly ambitious,

02:02:20.520 | but he also discouraged prizes and the pursuit of prizes.

02:02:24.440 | - That's the right way to be.

02:02:25.480 | - Yeah, I think that it's sort of like going into football

02:02:28.840 | to get a Superbowl ring.

02:02:30.440 | These things do represent the pinnacle,

02:02:32.640 | but it's dangerous to be chasing that like singular carrot

02:02:37.080 | because you can miss the, you miss the journey.

02:02:39.200 | - Look, I'm not proud of that.

02:02:40.360 | I'm not proud that I had such a base being on,

02:02:43.120 | you know, kind of pursuit.

02:02:44.160 | I think it was, as I said,

02:02:45.520 | compounded by psychological factors, you know.

02:02:48.080 | - But did you have fun doing the work?

02:02:49.520 | - Oh, I loved it, yeah.

02:02:50.400 | I mean, getting to do what I do now,

02:02:52.840 | and now it's even more exciting in a sense

02:02:55.200 | 'cause the project, you know.

02:02:56.320 | And by the way, it's not like we made a blunder

02:02:58.480 | and like, you know, Rob hopefully took the lens cap

02:03:00.720 | off the camera.

02:03:01.560 | We didn't make a blunder like that.

02:03:02.720 | And there've been many, many blunders

02:03:04.520 | and actually led to much worse retractions.

02:03:07.320 | Our results are stronger than ever.

02:03:09.040 | I should say, are the BICEP team's results.

02:03:11.200 | I've left the team, as I said.

02:03:12.800 | But their results are still the very best

02:03:15.000 | by almost an order of magnitude.

02:03:16.920 | We hope with the Simons Observatory that I'm, you know,

02:03:19.680 | co-leading with colleagues at Princeton and Penn

02:03:22.560 | and other places that we can actually supersede them,

02:03:26.000 | but we haven't yet.

02:03:27.400 | And so what we saw, I should be very clear.

02:03:30.240 | We didn't make a blunder.

02:03:31.080 | We didn't see like, put our thumb in front of the viewfinder.

02:03:33.440 | You know, we didn't make something stupid.

02:03:34.840 | We mistook a signal produced by another astrophysical source

02:03:39.840 | as representative of this curling pattern of microwaves

02:03:45.320 | for which BICEP was named.

02:03:47.280 | That would be indicative, if confirmed,

02:03:49.760 | of the inflationary origin of the universe,

02:03:52.320 | which by the way, would be concomitant

02:03:54.760 | with the existence of the multiverse.

02:03:56.640 | So the stakes are really high.

02:03:57.840 | That means the incentives to make sure you detect that

02:04:00.000 | are really high too and not get scooped,

02:04:02.400 | as happened many, many times.

02:04:03.900 | My advisor was scooped.

02:04:04.920 | He never won the Nobel Prize, my advisor's advisor.

02:04:06.880 | He never won the Nobel Prize.

02:04:08.480 | These accidentally discovered,

02:04:09.780 | serendipitously discovered astronomers,

02:04:11.760 | Penzias and Wilson, they did win the Nobel Prize.

02:04:14.680 | So there is a pressure on scientists to get there first,

02:04:18.080 | like Falcon, Scott, Robert Scott,

02:04:19.880 | getting to the South Pole first.

02:04:21.240 | There is a benefit to priority.

02:04:22.680 | It's just a fact of life and science is no different.

02:04:25.880 | We teach undergraduates about seven

02:04:28.840 | or eight different experiments.

02:04:29.960 | All of them won the Nobel Prize

02:04:31.280 | at some point in physics history.

02:04:33.200 | Doesn't mean they're ain't gonna win a Nobel Prize.

02:04:34.800 | No, why?

02:04:35.640 | 'Cause they didn't get there first.

02:04:37.040 | So getting there first, for better or for worse,

02:04:39.720 | is the sign of the greatest accomplishments,

02:04:42.400 | the sine qua non of accomplishment,

02:04:44.880 | is that that does lead to Nobel Prizes.

02:04:46.800 | - Now, the goal is always, I have a motto,

02:04:48.960 | which is, you know, go as fast as you carefully can.

02:04:52.880 | But it sounds like you were wrong for the right reasons,

02:04:56.340 | meaning no one made up data.

02:04:58.800 | There was a confound that you weren't aware of.

02:05:00.840 | You became aware of it.

02:05:01.680 | - Yeah, I should say what we saw.

02:05:03.160 | What we mistook as the imprimatur

02:05:05.320 | of this origin spark of the universe

02:05:07.880 | was the humblest substance in the universe, namely dust.

02:05:11.280 | So when a star explodes, it produces,

02:05:14.440 | after its lifetime has expired,

02:05:16.440 | it fuses lighter elements into heavier elements.

02:05:19.160 | Eventually, it gets to produce iron.

02:05:21.800 | And iron is the element for which,

02:05:25.040 | once it's fused together from, I think it's silicon

02:05:27.480 | or two nuclei before it, it produces too little energy

02:05:32.480 | to keep the star buoyant and expanded.

02:05:36.040 | And so the star immediately starts to collapse.

02:05:39.240 | When that collapse occurs,

02:05:40.760 | it blasts out into the interstellar medium

02:05:43.520 | that surrounds it, all the byproducts,

02:05:46.000 | the silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and the iron.

02:05:49.040 | And it blasts it out into the universe surrounding it.

02:05:52.360 | And that happens enough times in our galaxy

02:05:54.880 | that the galaxy is actually a pretty polluted place.

02:05:57.640 | It's smoggy, it's dusty, it's dirty.

02:05:59.560 | And the dust is actually little microscopic meteorites.

02:06:03.160 | So on my website, briankeating.com,

02:06:05.680 | I give away, actually I have a special link,

02:06:07.760 | briankeating.com/huberman.

02:06:10.360 | I will give away actual meteorites

02:06:13.000 | that come from your ancestral homeland of Argentina.

02:06:15.320 | And you'll see when you get them, they're highly magnetic.

02:06:18.720 | They're very dense, and I give you the material,

02:06:21.520 | the composition of these meteorites and the assay.

02:06:23.400 | We do x-ray crystallography on them, it's really cool.

02:06:25.800 | The actual composition of them is determined

02:06:30.000 | by this last event that a star does before it dies,

02:06:33.040 | which is to produce iron.

02:06:34.480 | So we did discover a microwave signal

02:06:37.120 | from the galaxy, not from the Big Bang,

02:06:40.760 | not from the cosmos,

02:06:42.320 | but from particular and unique to our galaxy,

02:06:45.440 | which is that when a star explodes,

02:06:46.840 | it produces this material, mostly made of iron,

02:06:49.200 | these micrometeorites that I talked about,

02:06:51.180 | put on my website for your listeners.

02:06:53.440 | And these micrometeorites are also going to act

02:06:57.300 | like little compass needles.

02:06:58.820 | They're highly magnetically susceptible.

02:07:01.280 | So the Milky Way, everything in the universe

02:07:03.200 | has a magnetic field.

02:07:04.040 | You have a magnetic field, birds have it,

02:07:06.560 | even bacteria can have it,

02:07:08.920 | and our planet obviously has it,

02:07:10.600 | and the galaxy has it.

02:07:12.360 | What happens when you put a compass in a magnetic field?

02:07:14.960 | Those needles get aligned with the magnetic field.

02:07:18.200 | That then produces a type of polarization.

02:07:21.240 | Now, polarization is the least familiar.

02:07:23.580 | Light has three characteristics.

02:07:25.220 | It's intensity, it's color or spectrum,

02:07:27.700 | and it's polarization.

02:07:28.880 | Almost nobody knows what polarization is,

02:07:31.360 | but it's really the essence of what makes light a wave.

02:07:35.480 | If you think about an ocean wave,

02:07:36.640 | the ocean wave is going up and down, undulating up and down,

02:07:39.680 | and the undulation, the direction perpendicular

02:07:42.120 | to the sea surface is sort of its polarization.

02:07:44.680 | Happens to be that water waves are actually polarized

02:07:46.680 | longitudinally, but forget that.

02:07:48.120 | Or if you and I, separated by a meter and a half,

02:07:50.280 | two meters, we have a rope between us.

02:07:52.560 | If we oscillate that rope up and down

02:07:55.000 | at a certain frequency, the frequency will be the spectrum,

02:07:57.200 | the color of the light.

02:07:58.520 | How hard we do that would be the intensity of the light,

02:08:01.400 | and the plane that we're oscillating,

02:08:02.840 | the jump rope or whatever,

02:08:04.040 | that's the plane of polarization.

02:08:06.200 | These little needles of cosmic dust

02:08:08.420 | from the exploded innards of a star

02:08:11.320 | that died in our galaxy many years ago,

02:08:14.420 | and many, many billions of these stars,

02:08:16.760 | they produce these particles of dust.

02:08:19.040 | So we saw that pattern instead of seeing the birth pangs

02:08:23.480 | of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe.

02:08:25.680 | - I'd like to take a quick break

02:08:27.800 | and thank one of our sponsors, Roka.

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02:08:47.680 | These red lens glasses are meant to be worn in the evening

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02:08:51.640 | They filter out short wavelength light

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02:08:55.780 | the sorts of LED lights that are most commonly used

02:08:58.240 | as overhead and frankly, lamp lighting nowadays.

02:09:01.160 | I want to emphasize Roka red lens glasses

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02:09:05.420 | They're not designed to be worn during the day

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02:09:10.320 | They're designed to prevent the full range of wavelengths

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02:09:15.260 | and that can alter your sleep.

02:09:16.920 | So by wearing Roka red lens glasses,

02:09:19.360 | they help you calm down

02:09:20.960 | and they improve your transition to sleep.

02:09:23.160 | Most nights I stay up until about 10 p.m. or even midnight,

02:09:26.200 | and I wake up between five and 7 a.m.

02:09:27.880 | depending on when I went to sleep.

02:09:29.760 | Now I put my Roka red lens glasses on

02:09:31.800 | as soon as it gets dark outside,

02:09:33.680 | and I've noticed a much easier transition to sleep,

02:09:36.360 | which makes sense based on everything we know

02:09:38.120 | about how filtering out short wavelength of light

02:09:40.480 | can allow your brain to function correctly.

02:09:42.760 | Roka red lens glasses also look cool, frankly.

02:09:45.360 | You can wear them out to dinner or to concerts

02:09:47.360 | or out with friends.

02:09:48.240 | So it turns out it is indeed possible

02:09:49.980 | to support your biology, to be scientific about it,

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02:10:08.560 | - So I wanna talk about what you're working on now.

02:10:10.520 | Before I do that, right, mini segue,

02:10:14.740 | there are a number of questions that I have,

02:10:17.520 | some of which I sort of know the answers to,

02:10:20.240 | most of which I don't know the answers to,

02:10:22.080 | but I think a lot of people either wonder about,

02:10:24.800 | or if they don't, they can quickly enrich

02:10:29.560 | their experience of daily life

02:10:31.820 | if we were to get answers on the following.

02:10:34.240 | So I'm thinking about this, not rapid fire Q&A,

02:10:36.520 | but maybe like one to three minute answers

02:10:38.880 | about the following.

02:10:40.160 | For instance, why does the moon look so much bigger

02:10:43.920 | when it's near the horizon as opposed to overhead?

02:10:48.240 | - Yeah, my son asked me that two days ago.

02:10:49.840 | - So that's a fun one.

02:10:51.340 | So let's go first with that.

02:10:53.000 | Sometimes the moon is huge, sometimes the moon is small,

02:10:56.520 | and I'm not talking about when it's full versus a sliver.

02:10:59.960 | Tell us why.

02:11:00.800 | - So the moon is always a half a degree wide,

02:11:03.640 | same exact apparent angular diameter as the sun,

02:11:06.740 | which is unique among the 290 moons in our solar system.

02:11:10.280 | Only our moon has the same apparent diameter

02:11:12.880 | as seen from its planet as the sun does,

02:11:16.100 | meaning we're the only planet

02:11:17.360 | that can have a total solar eclipse,

02:11:19.320 | an exact total solar eclipse

02:11:20.720 | like we had a couple of months ago in Austin, Texas

02:11:23.000 | and elsewhere, be that as it may.

02:11:25.320 | The moon doesn't change its size.

02:11:27.720 | - I would hope not.

02:11:28.560 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:11:29.380 | - That would freak me out.

02:11:30.220 | - Yeah, the moon is about 60 times the Earth's radius

02:11:34.920 | from the Earth.

02:11:36.200 | It's 250,000 miles away,

02:11:38.180 | which is about one and a half light seconds away.

02:11:41.240 | And it is about the size of the continental US in diameter,

02:11:46.240 | so, or a little bit less.

02:11:48.100 | So the moon's size doesn't change,

02:11:51.040 | but when the human eye has something to compare it to,

02:11:53.800 | the brain has a reference point to compare it to.

02:11:56.960 | And because it's so big,

02:11:58.000 | if there's something in front of it, a 747,

02:12:00.640 | a person, a large building even,

02:12:05.040 | when you were, if the moon is behind that object,

02:12:07.560 | because it's so far away,

02:12:09.280 | moving even the Earth's entire radius

02:12:11.480 | doesn't change the moon's apparent angular diameter.

02:12:13.680 | It's the same in Peking as it is here,

02:12:15.520 | Beijing as it is in Los Angeles, right?

02:12:17.800 | So that means a very small,

02:12:19.140 | a very large change in the distance in the Earth

02:12:21.280 | would change the building size dramatically,

02:12:23.400 | could reduce it to zero, basically.

02:12:25.280 | But when you compare it to something

02:12:26.520 | that ends close on the horizon,

02:12:27.720 | your brain has something visually to compare it to.

02:12:29.660 | When it's overhead, at Zenith or whatever,

02:12:31.880 | it doesn't have anything to compare it to,

02:12:33.620 | so you're just looking at it.

02:12:34.620 | But you can always measure it,

02:12:35.680 | and you can prove to yourself it's always the same size.

02:12:37.900 | It's about the size of your pinky fingernail

02:12:39.820 | held at arm's length, same size as the sun.

02:12:42.500 | And interestingly enough, it's the same--

02:12:43.340 | - You said one degree.

02:12:44.700 | - It's half a degree.

02:12:45.540 | - Half a degree. - Half a degree, yeah.

02:12:46.380 | - Oh, that's why you said pinky.

02:12:47.280 | So folks, most people probably aren't familiar

02:12:49.400 | with thinking in degrees.

02:12:50.300 | If you wanna understand a degree,

02:12:52.420 | put your right or left, doesn't matter,

02:12:55.300 | arm out in front of you.

02:12:57.160 | Raise your thumb like a thumbs up.

02:12:59.160 | So the width of your thumb at arm's length

02:13:03.360 | is approximately one degree.

02:13:05.040 | That's why you say for your pinky,

02:13:06.000 | it's about half a degree. - That's right.

02:13:07.480 | - I should also say, and this is an opportunity

02:13:08.960 | to give a fun little lesson in visual acuity.

02:13:12.220 | If I were to draw 30 black lines spaced from one another

02:13:16.240 | with just the light color of your nail in between them,

02:13:20.600 | we'd say there were 60 lines,

02:13:22.320 | black nail, black, alternating.

02:13:25.060 | Your acuity for 20/20 vision

02:13:27.600 | is approximately 60 cycles per degree.

02:13:30.240 | - Yes.

02:13:31.120 | - A hawk, any kind of raptor,

02:13:33.480 | is about 120 cycles per degree,

02:13:35.840 | which is why they can sit up on a lamppost

02:13:37.600 | and actually see the rustling of the grass below

02:13:41.600 | and probably make out some of the individual furs

02:13:45.420 | on the head of a rodent.

02:13:46.720 | - Wow.

02:13:47.560 | - But you can't.

02:13:48.400 | So what do I mean by 60 cycles per degree?

02:13:50.960 | If I were to draw 40 black lines,

02:13:55.740 | so now you have 80 total of black

02:13:57.720 | and then the color of the nail black,

02:13:58.720 | then the color of the nail.

02:13:59.560 | So you would see that as, believe it or not,

02:14:02.000 | as solid black.

02:14:03.120 | - Right.

02:14:03.960 | - It's, you don't have, it's beyond your acuity threshold.

02:14:07.360 | - Right.

02:14:08.200 | - When you say one degree, so this is important.

02:14:10.280 | So when the moon is quote unquote giant at the horizon,

02:14:13.400 | put out your pinky, it covers the moon.

02:14:15.460 | - You can eclipse the moon, right?

02:14:16.300 | - You can eclipse the moon.

02:14:17.180 | When the moon is overhead,

02:14:18.860 | you can eclipse the moon with your pinky.

02:14:20.340 | And most people are probably thinking,

02:14:21.420 | "No way, that can't be true."

02:14:22.660 | But it's absolutely true.

02:14:23.780 | - Fun fact, which is bigger,

02:14:25.420 | the width of a rainbow or the width of the moon?

02:14:28.500 | And is a rainbow wider than a half a degree?

02:14:33.020 | You ever seen a rainbow you can visualize?

02:14:34.220 | - I mean, in the sky, it seems as.

02:14:36.600 | - I'm not talking about the arc,

02:14:37.620 | the band thickness from red to blue.

02:14:39.380 | - Right.

02:14:40.220 | - Or from red.

02:14:41.040 | - Voyagee biv.

02:14:41.880 | - Voyagee biv, yeah.

02:14:42.700 | It's bigger.

02:14:44.100 | - Gosh, intuitively, I wanna say it's thicker,

02:14:46.340 | but now you're gonna tell me that it can't be

02:14:48.580 | because it's, this is like the Pink Floyd album, right?

02:14:51.800 | This is literally just the polar.

02:14:53.700 | - Dark side of the moon.

02:14:54.540 | - The dark side of the moon.

02:14:56.380 | The rainbow coming through

02:14:57.340 | when you take light and pass it through a prism.

02:14:59.140 | - Yeah.

02:15:00.500 | - I'm gonna say it's one degree.

02:15:02.820 | - So the rainbow's bigger?

02:15:04.860 | - No.

02:15:05.700 | - The moon's bigger.

02:15:06.520 | - It seems like roughly the same size,

02:15:08.340 | but when I think of a rainbow,

02:15:09.860 | I just think of like the large.

02:15:10.700 | - No, you're right.

02:15:11.520 | It's the same size.

02:15:12.360 | - It's the same size of the sun.

02:15:13.200 | - Okay, so it's a trick question

02:15:14.040 | and I didn't actually get it right.

02:15:14.860 | - Exactly, that's right.

02:15:15.700 | - Thank you very much.

02:15:16.520 | - There you go.

02:15:17.360 | Professor passes the test.

02:15:18.860 | - For once.

02:15:19.700 | - Yeah.

02:15:20.520 | - Okay, next question.

02:15:23.620 | People obsess over this.

02:15:24.940 | I have my theories.

02:15:26.020 | I think it's still debated.

02:15:27.820 | When you watch a sunset,

02:15:29.080 | you get that beautiful long wavelength,

02:15:31.980 | short wavelength contrast that I blab about incessantly

02:15:34.980 | on the podcast and social media

02:15:36.380 | because that's what's setting your circadian clock.

02:15:38.380 | It's that orange, red tones

02:15:41.240 | and the blue tones of the sky.

02:15:43.380 | But right as the sun goes down across the horizon,

02:15:46.580 | especially over the ocean,

02:15:48.580 | there is the phenomenon known as the green flash.

02:15:51.280 | - Yes.

02:15:52.120 | - What is the basis for the green flash?

02:15:53.660 | - Well, I'll tell you something really cool.

02:15:54.820 | If you go to the South Pole,

02:15:56.100 | which is oversubscribed by a factor of 10 to one,

02:15:59.220 | you believe 10 times as many people

02:16:00.660 | want to spend their nine months of their year minimum

02:16:04.500 | at the South Pole,

02:16:05.540 | then we have room for to actually do work

02:16:07.580 | at the South Pole.

02:16:08.420 | - Which means 10 people total.

02:16:09.940 | - No, there's 45 people there.

02:16:11.180 | - I'm just kidding.

02:16:12.020 | I'm just kidding.

02:16:12.840 | - And they're all listening to you half the time.

02:16:14.740 | So when you wanna go there,

02:16:17.020 | when you go there,

02:16:18.300 | they actually don't know where the sun is gonna set.

02:16:20.380 | Remember, the sun only rises and sets once a year, right?

02:16:23.460 | So it's one day and one night per year, six months long.

02:16:26.260 | Where the sun sets is unknown.

02:16:29.140 | And actually the days preceding it,

02:16:30.980 | the sun is making a big circle around your head.

02:16:32.820 | I've seen this with the moon.

02:16:34.240 | So the sun and the moon,

02:16:35.220 | they just make a circle

02:16:36.500 | and slowly after reaching their apex

02:16:38.260 | on the first day of summer,

02:16:39.300 | which is December 21st for them down there,

02:16:41.620 | upside down,

02:16:42.540 | eventually it crosses the horizon on March 21st,

02:16:45.940 | around March 21st.

02:16:46.820 | That's the first day of fall

02:16:48.180 | or when they start getting ready for winter.

02:16:50.500 | They don't know where it's gonna go down.

02:16:51.980 | We think of it always going to the West,

02:16:53.520 | but where's West at the South Pole?

02:16:55.420 | Every direction you look is North, okay?

02:16:57.980 | So when this occurs,

02:16:59.720 | the actual phenomenon that you mentioned,

02:17:01.580 | the green flash can last for days or can last for hours.

02:17:04.580 | So if you really are an aficionado of Huberman protocols

02:17:07.820 | and you want to see the green flash,

02:17:09.220 | apply to be down there.

02:17:10.060 | But the bad news is you're stuck there

02:17:11.980 | for nine more months, okay?

02:17:13.740 | So yes, it's a real phenomenon.

02:17:15.340 | Not only can you take pictures of it,

02:17:17.020 | but you can see it with your eye.

02:17:19.940 | The only correction I would say

02:17:21.080 | is you pretty much need to have a perfectly clear day.

02:17:24.020 | You can't have any clouds on the horizon

02:17:26.540 | and it's best seen over the ocean.

02:17:27.980 | So we're blessed here.

02:17:29.100 | - But for those of us that don't end up at the South Pole,

02:17:31.900 | - Yeah. - God willing,

02:17:33.780 | send me pictures.

02:17:34.620 | - A lot of podcasts.

02:17:35.620 | - I don't like environments that cold.

02:17:37.060 | - They really kill it there.

02:17:38.280 | - But if I watch the sunset over the Pacific

02:17:41.980 | or I see the green flash sometimes,

02:17:46.380 | what's the basis of that?

02:17:47.820 | - Yeah.

02:17:48.660 | So the Earth's atmosphere is actually a,

02:17:52.260 | it's layered, okay?

02:17:54.260 | But it's actually simpler to think about

02:17:56.000 | the Earth as being flat.

02:17:56.960 | Now there's no, hopefully there's no flurfers out there

02:17:59.380 | thinking that Brian Keating is advocating the flat Earth.

02:18:02.320 | But imagine this table, we're looking at a table.

02:18:04.540 | Imagine there's a slab of translucent glass on it.

02:18:07.740 | And we're sitting at the, on the table,

02:18:09.620 | underneath the slab of glass, pretty thick glass, right?

02:18:12.020 | And you're looking straight up.

02:18:13.780 | You look through a minimum amount of the glass, right?

02:18:16.620 | Straight up would be zenith at your local horizon.

02:18:19.640 | Every direction you're looking is your horizon.

02:18:21.900 | You see off the edge of this flat Earth in this analogy.

02:18:26.180 | When you look at a slight angle,

02:18:27.500 | you're going through more path length of the substrate,

02:18:30.540 | of the substance. - More glass.

02:18:31.540 | - More glass.

02:18:32.420 | Finally, if you did have this thing extending to infinity,

02:18:35.340 | you'd be looking through an infinite amount of atmosphere

02:18:38.120 | or glass when you're tangent to the horizon,

02:18:41.020 | when you're going parallel to the Earth's surface

02:18:42.620 | in this flat Earth analogy.

02:18:43.980 | The Earth's atmosphere is not only made of oxygen,

02:18:48.020 | it actually has a lot of particulates.

02:18:50.060 | And it's because of those particulates,

02:18:52.300 | a lot of them come from dust,

02:18:53.780 | and a lot of them come from volcanoes,

02:18:57.100 | and a large amount now comes from human-made sources,

02:19:00.420 | pollution and so forth.

02:19:01.760 | The more optical depth,

02:19:03.380 | the more path length that you look through,

02:19:05.360 | the more scattering of the sun's light occurs.

02:19:09.100 | When scattering occurs,

02:19:10.500 | the longer wavelength light more easily penetrates

02:19:13.740 | through dust, smog particles, even glass, okay?

02:19:17.280 | So that goes through easier.

02:19:18.900 | And the short wavelengths,

02:19:20.280 | comparable to the intermolecular spacing of the smog,

02:19:23.620 | the dust, the gas in the atmosphere, the oxygen,

02:19:26.600 | scatters much more efficiently.

02:19:28.460 | And so that gets scattered out of the beam of light

02:19:31.280 | from the sun.

02:19:32.140 | The sun's light, though,

02:19:33.860 | actually peaks slightly in the green.

02:19:35.820 | We don't actually notice this because our eyes are,

02:19:38.020 | and we're used to thinking of it as very yellow.

02:19:40.860 | It happens, and the reason for this can be,

02:19:43.060 | you know, substantiated by night vision glasses.

02:19:46.060 | What color is the light coming in?

02:19:48.060 | It's green, right?

02:19:49.100 | They amplify versions of these things.

02:19:50.860 | Why?

02:19:51.700 | Because your eye's very sensitive to green light.

02:19:52.860 | It's even more sensitive to green light

02:19:54.400 | than the yellow light.

02:19:55.540 | So, and that's because the sun,

02:19:57.220 | which is what we've evolved to adapt to,

02:19:59.500 | being most sensitive to sunlight,

02:20:00.800 | is more greenish than yellow.

02:20:02.520 | - So there's more power at the wavelength,

02:20:05.560 | like somewhere between like 450 and 550 nanometers.

02:20:08.760 | - Exactly, 100% right.

02:20:10.040 | So at that green flash, at that moment of green flash,

02:20:14.060 | you're seeing two things.

02:20:15.260 | One is the sensitivity of the human eyes,

02:20:17.120 | it's slightly maximized to that.

02:20:19.080 | But that doesn't explain why photographs see it as well.

02:20:21.760 | And the other reason is that most of the yellow light

02:20:24.200 | and the sunlight is getting scattered away,

02:20:26.160 | and so you're mainly seeing that green light.

02:20:27.880 | But you're only seeing it at the point of maximum scattering,

02:20:31.800 | which occurs exactly when the sun crosses the horizon.

02:20:35.040 | - Because of the interaction

02:20:36.000 | with all that atmospheric dust.

02:20:37.520 | - Exactly, yep.

02:20:38.460 | - That's wild, because for the longest time,

02:20:41.240 | I had a biological explanation for this

02:20:43.400 | that I think was based on a paper that was published,

02:20:46.720 | maybe in "Nature," but don't quote me on that.

02:20:50.180 | - Just because it's published in "Nature"

02:20:51.440 | doesn't mean it's wrong.

02:20:52.640 | - I've got friends with a few "Nature" editors still,

02:20:57.120 | in a great journal.

02:20:58.400 | Look, we could do a whole episode

02:21:01.040 | about "Nature," "Nature," "Science," and "Cell."

02:21:02.800 | But the explanation that was getting kicked around

02:21:06.200 | for a while was a biological explanation,

02:21:08.640 | which is that our ability to perceive reds and greens

02:21:12.680 | and blues and yellows is based on our trichromacy,

02:21:16.200 | the presence of these three different photoreceptors,

02:21:18.240 | short, medium, and long wavelength,

02:21:19.560 | or blue, green, red, so to speak,

02:21:22.320 | that absorb short, medium, or long-wavelength light.

02:21:25.640 | And then the comparison, there's this opponency,

02:21:28.580 | whereby our ability to see red is really contingent

02:21:33.040 | on our ability to perceive green.

02:21:35.240 | And so, like for someone who's red, green, colorblind,

02:21:38.280 | one in 80 males, for instance,

02:21:39.560 | they still see stuff out in the world that's red,

02:21:42.200 | but they see it as more orange-ish or brown.

02:21:44.480 | Dogs, the same way.

02:21:46.320 | They're not colorblind.

02:21:47.840 | True monochromats that don't see color are very rare.

02:21:51.680 | That is one form, I think it's called achromatops, yeah.

02:21:55.520 | Don't quote me on that either.

02:21:57.080 | But in any case, the idea was that

02:22:00.360 | if you're looking at something

02:22:01.400 | that's very enriched in long wavelengths,

02:22:03.920 | like orange, red, and you stare at it for long enough,

02:22:06.280 | have you ever done that like American flag

02:22:08.560 | visual-optical illusion where you stare at it,

02:22:10.760 | then you look away from it and you see the opposite colors.

02:22:14.720 | And so, one biological explanation

02:22:16.760 | is that the sun is setting,

02:22:18.480 | and you're looking at this orange-red thing.

02:22:20.320 | When the sun is low in the sky,

02:22:21.520 | you can actually look at it without distressing your eyes,

02:22:25.280 | right, as opposed to overhead

02:22:28.160 | when you should never stare at the sun.

02:22:29.600 | And then the moment that that reddish-orange disappears,

02:22:33.200 | the biological explanation is that

02:22:35.280 | there's a kind of perception of a green flash

02:22:38.160 | because of the opponent seeing the switch to the other,

02:22:41.080 | let's just say, wavelength channel, so to speak.

02:22:43.520 | - I don't think that's in disagreement.

02:22:44.800 | I think that might explain the amplification that we see,

02:22:47.480 | but then it doesn't explain why you'd see it

02:22:49.280 | in a photographic emulsion, right?

02:22:50.760 | There's nothing biological about it.

02:22:52.120 | - I like your explanation better

02:22:53.400 | because it's explained by real physics,

02:22:57.040 | and the biology of color-opponency is also physics,

02:23:00.160 | but not as well worked out.

02:23:03.980 | Okay, cool.

02:23:04.980 | Earlier, we were talking about the perceived relationship

02:23:09.640 | between the menstrual cycle, which is not always 28 days,

02:23:12.840 | but is on average 28 days, and the lunar cycle.

02:23:16.680 | Is there any evidence that, well, it'd be amazing

02:23:19.880 | if one influenced the other in the other direction,

02:23:22.180 | that the menstrual cycles were influencing the lunar cycle,

02:23:24.160 | but is there any evidence for a true relationship

02:23:29.160 | between the lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle

02:23:35.160 | that's been documented?

02:23:36.360 | - I don't know.

02:23:37.520 | It's interesting, the sun also produces tides

02:23:39.800 | and produces gravitational effect,

02:23:42.160 | but the dominant effect on Earth,

02:23:44.400 | due to that 28-day, 29-day cycle of the moon,

02:23:47.080 | is its effect on the Earth's oceans,

02:23:48.640 | which produces four tides a day, too high and too low.

02:23:52.160 | And actually, Galileo incorrectly used that phenomenon

02:23:55.760 | as a way to buttress his argument

02:23:57.560 | that the Earth went around the sun.

02:23:58.800 | He basically, if you're listening,

02:24:00.320 | I'm taking my glass of Martina.

02:24:01.920 | - Yerba Mate. - Yerba Mate, yeah.

02:24:03.600 | So he said that when the Earth is spinning,

02:24:06.400 | it rotates once per day,

02:24:08.220 | but it's also revolving around the sun,

02:24:10.340 | so these combined motions make this sloshing of the liquid.

02:24:12.820 | You see that?

02:24:13.660 | And he claimed that is what caused the tides on the Earth,

02:24:16.680 | when in fact, that's completely wrong.

02:24:18.120 | It's amazing, Andrew, when you think about

02:24:19.400 | how brilliant a scientist can be,

02:24:21.640 | and it's almost like the proportion of their blunder

02:24:24.560 | is proportionate to how brilliant they are.

02:24:26.360 | - Well, because it also correlates

02:24:27.800 | with the height of the problems they're chasing.

02:24:31.480 | - Exactly.

02:24:32.800 | - You were saying that Galileo got certain things wrong,

02:24:36.240 | but got a number of things right.

02:24:37.400 | - That's right, Einstein, too, Newton, too.

02:24:38.880 | - Being wrong for the right reasons

02:24:40.480 | is actually very important in science.

02:24:43.160 | And by the right reasons, I mean that nobody's p-hacking,

02:24:46.480 | p-value hacking, or fudging data,

02:24:48.280 | that they're not tossing data.

02:24:49.880 | They're really trying to solve problems.

02:24:52.120 | It's almost like in sports,

02:24:53.900 | a great competitor wants great competitors.

02:24:56.840 | But I mean, why would somebody want to cheat

02:25:00.360 | into a different weight class,

02:25:01.360 | knock somebody out, and consider themselves

02:25:03.020 | the world champion at that weight class?

02:25:04.720 | It's just silly, and in science,

02:25:07.640 | to not try and seek the truth is anti-science.

02:25:10.880 | Certainly it happens, but okay,

02:25:12.520 | so no clear evidence that the lunar cycle

02:25:15.160 | influences the menstrual cycle.

02:25:16.680 | - I would expect that it would influence other animals.

02:25:18.960 | I don't know what the menstrual cycles are,

02:25:20.880 | deer or whatever, who knows?

02:25:22.440 | Or any animal that has an egg that--

02:25:25.440 | - Well, a lot of animals have not a menstrual cycle,

02:25:27.160 | but an estrous cycle.

02:25:28.140 | So a lot of rodents will have a four-day cycle.

02:25:32.200 | So it clearly doesn't map to the lunar cycle.

02:25:35.400 | But you hear a lot about these things,

02:25:38.720 | and humans are amazing at drawing correlations.

02:25:41.200 | Again, we're a prediction-making machine.

02:25:42.880 | We're a storytelling machine, and--

02:25:45.040 | - And in the past, by the way,

02:25:46.200 | the moon was a lot closer than,

02:25:47.760 | not a lot, but it was closer.

02:25:48.920 | The moon moves about the width of your,

02:25:51.080 | again, back to your fingers now.

02:25:52.660 | So the moon moves away by the width

02:25:54.800 | of about your thumb's fingernail every year.

02:25:57.500 | - Moves further away.

02:25:58.340 | - A centimeter away from the Earth,

02:25:59.680 | because there's a gravitational competition

02:26:01.800 | between the gravitational force of the moon,

02:26:03.840 | and the Earth's oceans provide a source of friction.

02:26:07.040 | So over the years, it's getting farther and farther away,

02:26:09.280 | such that it eventually won't be able

02:26:11.200 | to have total solar eclipses.

02:26:12.700 | It'll be, it's called an annular eclipse,

02:26:14.480 | where it doesn't obscure it completely.

02:26:15.920 | Anyway, so in the past, this is the only way to say,

02:26:18.080 | millions of years ago,

02:26:19.080 | when the first hominids were evolving,

02:26:21.080 | the moon was much, much closer.

02:26:22.440 | Millions of times of the Earth's fingernails

02:26:25.240 | eventually start to add up.

02:26:27.000 | And certainly, when the first life formed on the Earth,

02:26:29.360 | it was only, it was probably 30 times closer

02:26:32.280 | than it is now, so yeah.

02:26:34.000 | So short answer, I don't know.

02:26:36.040 | - Where are some of the best places

02:26:38.000 | in the Northern Hemisphere,

02:26:40.280 | and please don't say the North Pole,

02:26:43.760 | where people can go see spectacular nighttime stuff.

02:26:48.760 | So I think of Yosemite High Country in August

02:26:52.720 | for the meteor shower.

02:26:54.360 | Certainly not at the level that you're accustomed

02:26:56.760 | to looking at things, but with the naked eye,

02:26:58.480 | you're gonna be, assuming that it's not cloudy,

02:27:01.080 | you're going to be treated to a light show

02:27:04.440 | that is, in my experience,

02:27:06.120 | beyond anything I've ever, just extraordinary.

02:27:10.160 | - On my, the special website that I made,

02:27:12.500 | briankeating.com/huberman,

02:27:14.360 | I list the four major meteor showers,

02:27:16.820 | one in each season, that people can watch

02:27:18.880 | with your naked eye.

02:27:19.720 | In fact, it's bad to use a telescope.

02:27:21.240 | You don't want a telescope.

02:27:22.480 | - 'Cause it juts through the field of view.

02:27:23.920 | - Yeah, exactly.

02:27:24.760 | You want the whole field of view,

02:27:25.760 | and humans have an amazing, as you know,

02:27:27.640 | a huge field of 190 degrees or something like that.

02:27:30.160 | You know, just not as big as an owl, but quite big.

02:27:33.240 | And you want to take that in,

02:27:34.280 | 'cause you're looking for motion,

02:27:35.720 | you're looking for intensity.

02:27:36.640 | Sometimes you can see colors,

02:27:37.800 | and I list what elements contribute

02:27:39.880 | to the colors of different meteorites

02:27:41.280 | on this website that I have.

02:27:43.900 | But yes, anywhere that's more than, say,

02:27:47.340 | 20, 30, 40 miles away from a major city is fine.

02:27:51.400 | Even in San Diego, there's two dark sky communities.

02:27:55.260 | One is called Julian, California,

02:27:56.980 | and the other one's the Anza-Borrego Desert,

02:27:59.020 | and it's called Borrego Springs.

02:28:00.460 | These are areas where they forbid upward-shining light,

02:28:03.980 | so the only light can be downward-facing.

02:28:06.300 | It also has to have very narrow spectral bands on it,

02:28:09.120 | so like sodium vapor, you know, very high,

02:28:11.420 | so that you can filter it out,

02:28:13.140 | basically with certain very inexpensive optical filters.

02:28:16.460 | But, you know, like I said, almost anywhere.

02:28:18.740 | But the good thing to know is that if you get a telescope,

02:28:21.420 | again, you can see 90% of what's gonna be fascinating to you

02:28:24.980 | as a layperson with a telescope that costs $50.

02:28:28.740 | You can see all the craters,

02:28:29.740 | you can see mountains on the moon.

02:28:30.980 | And again, these mountains were not just like cool things.

02:28:34.460 | They destroyed, they falsified

02:28:37.140 | the scientific paradigm, quote-unquote,

02:28:39.440 | which was that the moon

02:28:40.280 | was perfectly crystalline and spherical.

02:28:43.440 | Galileo showed, no, not only does it have mountains,

02:28:45.760 | I can measure the height of those mountains.

02:28:48.120 | I can measure the planes of lava flows,

02:28:51.280 | and eventually they came up with theories

02:28:53.840 | that it doesn't have tectonic motion,

02:28:55.680 | it doesn't have an iron core.

02:28:57.200 | I mean, it's amazing.

02:28:58.040 | You can see all these things with the small telescope,

02:29:01.680 | like the one I have for you,

02:29:03.400 | but you don't need like the Hubble telescope or Mount Will--

02:29:06.360 | you don't need any of that.

02:29:07.480 | You can see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter.

02:29:10.280 | You can even, on a dark sky without a telescope,

02:29:13.500 | see an object that's outside of our galaxy.

02:29:16.320 | It's called the Andromeda Galaxy.

02:29:18.280 | That's very important in the history of astronomy.

02:29:19.800 | In 1929, 1923 rather, on Mount Wilson, not far from here,

02:29:24.380 | Edwin Hubble realized that that was not part

02:29:27.340 | of the Milky Way galaxy.

02:29:28.500 | It was way too far away to be located within the Milky Way.

02:29:32.160 | It was about 20 times the radius of the Milky Way.

02:29:34.740 | And that revolutionized all of our conceptions

02:29:38.900 | of where the universe is located, is it centered on us,

02:29:41.560 | are we the most important thing?

02:29:42.520 | No.

02:29:43.360 | He showed that you can see that on most fall nights

02:29:46.220 | in the constellation Andromeda, with your naked eye.

02:29:48.160 | It's six times wider than the full moon.

02:29:50.080 | It's incredible.

02:29:51.080 | - When I look at many of the constellations,

02:29:54.480 | I don't see how our ancient predecessors

02:29:59.240 | got to the description of a bear or whatever.

02:30:02.640 | Is that because they saw more stars than I did,

02:30:05.220 | or is that because they had a wilder imagination,

02:30:07.820 | or were taking psychedelics or something like that?

02:30:09.680 | - 20 centuries before TikTok, so I cut them some slack.

02:30:13.420 | There are a couple that look similar to what they're,

02:30:15.620 | you know, Orion.

02:30:16.460 | - But it depends on how you connect the dots.

02:30:18.020 | - Yes.

02:30:18.860 | - The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper are kind of like,

02:30:20.780 | okay, you get that.

02:30:22.160 | - Those aren't constellations.

02:30:23.220 | - Those aren't constellations.

02:30:24.060 | - I have to be, I have to put on my very, very precise.

02:30:27.340 | - Why are they not constellations?

02:30:28.420 | - So they're portions of a constellation.

02:30:31.580 | So they're called asterisms.

02:30:33.960 | So an asterism is a collection of stars

02:30:36.680 | that's associated with each other,

02:30:37.960 | but it's not the full composition of a constellation.

02:30:41.120 | So the constellation is actually called Ursa Major.

02:30:43.080 | The Big Dipper's in the tail and the hindquarters

02:30:46.040 | of Ursa Major, which is the great bear.

02:30:48.520 | The Little Dipper is the asterism of seven stars

02:30:51.400 | that make up, there's 80-something stars

02:30:53.440 | that make up the little bear,

02:30:54.520 | which actually doesn't look like a bear.

02:30:56.280 | Ursa Major kind of does look like

02:30:57.680 | the California Republic flag that we have.

02:31:00.680 | But yes, the asterism, I always ask for people to leave.

02:31:04.780 | You can't, they're not making new constellations.

02:31:07.140 | There's only 88 constellations

02:31:08.500 | over the whole four-pi spherical dome of the sky.

02:31:12.500 | But you can leave your own asterism on the podcast.

02:31:15.140 | You can leave five stars on your podcast and mine.

02:31:17.860 | So you can't have a constellation,

02:31:19.300 | but you can have an asterism.

02:31:20.700 | - Love it.

02:31:22.180 | Did you catch Halley's Comet when it came by,

02:31:24.960 | when you were a few years older than I was?

02:31:27.540 | - I was 14, it was right after I got my first telescope.

02:31:29.980 | - It comes through every 70-something years.

02:31:32.320 | - Yeah, you're gonna make it to the next one, 76 years.

02:31:33.920 | Yeah, that's right.

02:31:34.760 | - I'm right?

02:31:35.580 | - Yeah, that's very good, yeah.

02:31:36.420 | - I remember 70-something, all right, but.

02:31:38.500 | - It's not like the best constellation,

02:31:39.820 | it's not like the best comet in history

02:31:41.600 | and there's better ones.

02:31:42.780 | - Yeah, I remember going out to see it.

02:31:44.140 | It was a part of a group that went camping

02:31:45.780 | and it looked like a smear of light.

02:31:47.700 | It's hard to know, did I really see it

02:31:49.340 | or did I not, in any case.

02:31:51.500 | - Your dad, you probably.

02:31:52.580 | - The only other comet that came to mind,

02:31:56.080 | oh, it was the San Diego thing.

02:31:58.660 | It was the Hale-Bopp where there was a group

02:32:01.300 | that committed mass suicide.

02:32:03.080 | Yeah, these were people that had castrated themselves,

02:32:05.500 | had been eating a sub-caloric,

02:32:08.260 | sub-maintenance caloric diet to live forever

02:32:10.420 | and then decide to wear Converse and kill themselves.

02:32:13.460 | What do you think, oh, let's not go dark there.

02:32:16.500 | What do you think is the relationship

02:32:18.180 | between comets and these wild human behaviors?

02:32:22.460 | - It's so interesting you mentioned that.

02:32:23.900 | - And lunacy, for that matter, like full moon and lunacy.

02:32:26.580 | - Lunacy, right, crime statistics.

02:32:28.860 | So look at these words, disaster, catastrophe.

02:32:32.620 | They asked, and both of those mean star.

02:32:35.320 | They used to believe that stars, comets, eclipses,

02:32:38.380 | those things were influencing events on Earth

02:32:41.780 | caused by these celestial forces for not propitiating them,

02:32:44.940 | making the gods happy or whatever.

02:32:46.660 | And in fact, Columbus owes his life,

02:32:49.260 | he was almost killed in Jamaica.

02:32:51.340 | And I think it was 1498, a couple of years after discovering,

02:32:55.100 | yeah, he's still exploring.

02:32:56.660 | And he failed to ingratiate himself

02:32:59.780 | with the local native inhabitants of Jamaica

02:33:02.660 | or wherever he was, and they were gonna kill him.

02:33:05.680 | And he luckily had on for navigation.

02:33:08.780 | Astronomy and navigation have always been intimately related

02:33:11.900 | because, first of all, if you know where Polaris is,

02:33:15.180 | which is not the brightest star,

02:33:16.680 | it's in the Little Dipper, it's the pole star,

02:33:18.660 | it's the north star, you've heard of it,

02:33:20.200 | true north, north star.

02:33:21.460 | It's actually very close to being,

02:33:23.820 | if you go to the North Pole and look straight up,

02:33:25.860 | it's very close to being directly above you.

02:33:28.260 | - And does it always mark true north?

02:33:29.700 | - In any human timescale it does,

02:33:31.600 | over thousands, tens of thousands of years it changes,

02:33:34.180 | but right now, for the next couple thousand years,

02:33:36.540 | so don't worry, you'll still be accurate,

02:33:39.320 | that is within a half a degree or so.

02:33:40.820 | - What do your brain thinks of these timescales?

02:33:42.900 | As long as you're talking for the next thousand years,

02:33:45.880 | you're good.

02:33:46.720 | - Well, I say it like this,

02:33:47.540 | the universe could end in a heat death

02:33:49.020 | and a big rip or whatever,

02:33:50.180 | but that's not for a trillion years,

02:33:51.700 | so everybody keep paying your taxes.

02:33:54.660 | So you could use it for navigation,

02:33:55.980 | so you could know your latitude,

02:33:57.620 | but measuring longitude was very difficult

02:33:59.980 | because you couldn't actually,

02:34:01.540 | to know longitude you need to measure time

02:34:03.860 | relative to where Greenwich Mean Time is,

02:34:06.340 | that's how Greenwich became so important

02:34:08.540 | and that's why London had this huge economy.

02:34:10.460 | Again, these things are always related,

02:34:12.260 | capitalism and even how we measure latitude and longitude

02:34:15.060 | comes from the fact that London and Thames River,

02:34:17.500 | 90% of the world's commerce

02:34:18.820 | flowed through there at one point or another,

02:34:20.300 | it's incredible.

02:34:21.240 | So anyway, latitude and longitude is very important.

02:34:23.820 | The people started to know that,

02:34:25.980 | yeah, these events would occur

02:34:27.660 | and including this event with Columbus

02:34:29.660 | and he brought along with him on his voyage an astronomer.

02:34:33.140 | And this astronomer knew that in two days time

02:34:37.700 | from when these natives had captured

02:34:40.540 | some of Columbus's crew,

02:34:42.020 | that there was gonna be a total solar eclipse

02:34:44.020 | and it was gonna go through Jamaica.

02:34:45.540 | And he told Columbus and Columbus said to the inhabitants,

02:34:48.420 | "If you don't give our people back,

02:34:50.180 | "our God is gonna obscure and kill your God, the sun God."

02:34:53.960 | They're like, "F you," you know, whatever.

02:34:55.640 | And then it happened and they totally believed

02:34:58.040 | that they were in control of these celestial events,

02:35:01.080 | we better give the people back

02:35:02.080 | and Columbus got the hell out of there.

02:35:03.680 | So it's an amazing story.

02:35:05.040 | But yes, comets have always been a--

02:35:07.280 | - So Columbus actually used the sun

02:35:11.320 | as manipulative barter to-- - That's right, threat.

02:35:14.600 | - As a threat. - Military, yeah,

02:35:15.840 | he used it for military coercion.

02:35:18.740 | - An important book for anyone to read

02:35:20.660 | who's interested in basically why we're still here,

02:35:23.500 | in my opinion, is the book "Longitude."

02:35:26.700 | - Yes, I'm interviewing-- - By Dava Sobel.

02:35:28.420 | - I'm interviewing her tomorrow.

02:35:29.260 | - This is an incredible book,

02:35:31.220 | doesn't require any science or technical background

02:35:34.180 | to read and appreciate about the development

02:35:37.140 | of the first reliable timekeeping devices

02:35:39.660 | for navigating at sea, even on overcast nights.

02:35:45.520 | And finding longitude, it's a spectacular read.

02:35:50.320 | - It is. - And changed the way

02:35:52.200 | that I think about human evolution

02:35:54.960 | and technology development generally.

02:35:56.800 | - There's a direct connection, I'm sorry to interrupt,

02:35:58.480 | but there's a connection between that and the Nobel Prize.

02:36:00.660 | So there was something called the Longitude Prize

02:36:02.200 | in the 1700s to develop a clock that could be used

02:36:05.200 | in the naval situations on boats.

02:36:07.600 | You couldn't use a grandfather clock

02:36:08.920 | as the pendulum-- - The boat's rocking.

02:36:10.200 | - Acceleration, so they had to find something

02:36:12.440 | and this guy, Thompson or somebody--

02:36:14.220 | - It's Harrison. - Harrison, yeah.

02:36:15.300 | So he invented this mechanical clock,

02:36:17.340 | which predecessors of our modern wind-up clocks.

02:36:20.140 | Obviously, we use cesium and atomic clocks.

02:36:22.760 | But that prize for 10,000 pounds or whatever it was,

02:36:27.000 | was an early predecessor of the Nobel Prize.

02:36:29.660 | - I've been waiting this whole conversation

02:36:31.180 | to talk to you about adaptive optics.

02:36:33.940 | Let me give just a little bit of backdrop

02:36:35.860 | for how I'm approaching this.

02:36:37.340 | In the field of neuroscience,

02:36:40.740 | there's, as with any field of biology,

02:36:43.200 | a desire to see smaller and smaller things

02:36:45.920 | at higher and higher resolution.

02:36:47.720 | And there've been all sorts of incredible discoveries

02:36:49.640 | in microscopy, like two-photon microscopy,

02:36:52.160 | one-photon microscopy, electron microscopy.

02:36:54.520 | You see things down to the tiny, tiny nanometer size.

02:36:57.760 | Some years ago, a group out of University of Rochester

02:37:02.320 | developed adaptive optics.

02:37:04.800 | I think it was David Williams's group,

02:37:06.280 | which is borrowed from astronomy.

02:37:07.880 | And my very top contour understanding of this

02:37:10.700 | is that you're using the presence of noise

02:37:16.260 | in the environment, essentially,

02:37:17.940 | as part of the microscope to get a better image.

02:37:20.420 | And this was used in the field of ophthalmology

02:37:23.660 | to look into the back of the eye.

02:37:25.220 | This incredible three-cell layer-thick pie crust

02:37:28.060 | that lines the back of our eyes,

02:37:29.300 | that it gives us all of our visual perception,

02:37:31.340 | not alone, but allows for all of our visual perception.

02:37:34.580 | As I mentioned before, the eye has a lens,

02:37:36.900 | there's vitreous, there's all sorts of opportunity

02:37:38.860 | for light scatter.

02:37:40.340 | And then within the eye itself,

02:37:42.540 | you've got these multiple layers you have to go through

02:37:44.900 | before you can see the photoreceptors.

02:37:46.840 | But using adaptive optics, you can take all that noise,

02:37:49.360 | all that stuff between the microscope

02:37:51.660 | and what you want to see way, way back in the eye,

02:37:55.500 | and use that, in air quotes here, noise,

02:37:58.940 | and make it part of the microscope, so to speak.

02:38:01.860 | And without going into further detail there,

02:38:06.380 | I was always told that adaptive optics

02:38:08.140 | was borrowed from your field, astronomy,

02:38:12.320 | where people use the presence of atmosphere dust

02:38:15.420 | of these stuff in the way,

02:38:17.740 | and made it part of the lens, if you will,

02:38:20.620 | to be able to see things at higher resolution,

02:38:22.940 | which I just think is so incredible.

02:38:24.280 | It's like saying the barrier becomes the portal

02:38:28.620 | through which you can see even more

02:38:30.780 | than had you had a clear path.

02:38:32.300 | - The obstacle is the way.

02:38:33.140 | Let's shout out to Ryan. - The obstacle is the way.

02:38:33.960 | All right, shout out to Ryan. - Let's shout out to Ryan.

02:38:35.020 | - Ryan Holliday, yeah, never met him,

02:38:36.620 | but I like that book very much.

02:38:37.860 | Okay, so what is adaptive optics for astronomers?

02:38:42.860 | - Okay, so we live in an atmosphere,

02:38:45.620 | a planet with an atmosphere, thank God.

02:38:47.020 | We wouldn't be here having this conversation, right?

02:38:49.780 | And that atmosphere is a dirty window.

02:38:52.020 | It's like literally looking through the windshield

02:38:54.920 | of your car, and it's cloudy and dusty and contaminated.

02:38:58.420 | We live in its presence.

02:39:01.540 | And the best astronomical telescopes

02:39:03.720 | are the ones that are launched above the atmosphere,

02:39:05.580 | out of the atmosphere.

02:39:06.420 | Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler,

02:39:08.140 | and now the James Webb Telescope.

02:39:09.640 | Again, those are multi-billion dollar telescopes,

02:39:12.140 | the James Webb to build it.

02:39:13.760 | And by the way, one lesson to leave you with

02:39:16.140 | and maybe your audience with as well

02:39:17.700 | is whenever you hear a scientific instrument's cost,

02:39:20.860 | always in your mind, at least double it.

02:39:23.300 | Andrew Lang, my late great mentor,

02:39:24.660 | used to say multiply by pi.

02:39:26.380 | Because A, you're not taking into account the fact

02:39:29.340 | that you don't build, say, a destroyer

02:39:31.620 | or an aircraft carrier to build it.

02:39:33.500 | You build it to use it.

02:39:34.820 | And it's about 10% of the construction cost

02:39:38.780 | to operate an instrument, a battleship,

02:39:40.940 | a telescope, whatever.

02:39:42.260 | It's a rule of thumb that project managers love to use.

02:39:44.620 | So that means in 10 years, it's gonna double the price.

02:39:46.420 | And we hope that Hubble and Webb,

02:39:48.460 | and Hubble's already lasted 40 years on it.

02:39:50.820 | So it'll last a long time.

02:39:51.660 | So whenever you hear this, but it's incredibly expensive.

02:39:53.960 | One kilogram used to cost like $10,000 to bring to orbit.

02:39:57.140 | And Elon keeps talking about how cheap it's gonna be,

02:39:59.760 | but he has yet to launch a scientific instrument.

02:40:01.700 | I talked to him for 10 minutes on my podcast once,

02:40:04.220 | and I tried to get him to shut off these.

02:40:06.980 | Starlinks are amazing.

02:40:08.260 | I have one in my house.

02:40:09.780 | But they have the property

02:40:11.260 | that they go through astronomical images,

02:40:13.500 | and they leave a satellite trail behind them,

02:40:15.920 | which can be, you're taking a picture of a deep star,

02:40:20.260 | a deep galaxy or whatever,

02:40:22.400 | and you see these streaks going through it.

02:40:23.900 | It ruins the image, and you have to wait until they're gone.

02:40:26.140 | But at least in optical astronomy,

02:40:27.780 | you can physically, literally paint those satellites black,

02:40:30.740 | and they will no longer reflect,

02:40:32.260 | and so they won't obscure the image whatsoever.

02:40:34.140 | - So you're saying that the Starlink satellites

02:40:35.900 | are gonna make your job more difficult.

02:40:38.540 | - They definitely are,

02:40:39.760 | because while you can paint an optical satellite black

02:40:43.700 | and make it black, we're looking for heat.

02:40:46.140 | There's no way to stealth confuse or block out heat.

02:40:50.260 | Sorry, that's a law of thermodynamics.

02:40:52.260 | Anything that's above absolute zero

02:40:53.700 | will always give off heat.

02:40:55.180 | And worst of all, the signals that he uses

02:40:58.420 | are in the exact microwave spectral range

02:41:00.860 | that we use to look at the CMB,

02:41:02.340 | the cosmic microwave background.

02:41:03.540 | - So what's his response to this?

02:41:04.780 | - I told him that--

02:41:06.140 | - Having internet everywhere is more important.

02:41:08.060 | - No, he said he would look into it.

02:41:10.380 | Nine months ago, Elon, I know you like the show,

02:41:12.900 | so please do reach out to me,

02:41:14.180 | but this would be just turning it off

02:41:15.560 | when it's over our telescope, basically.

02:41:17.060 | That's what I, and the South Pole.

02:41:18.660 | So it's not a big deal.

02:41:19.500 | - So you have a specific request.

02:41:20.620 | - There's no one at the,

02:41:21.460 | it's not like he's getting millions of dollars

02:41:22.900 | in ad revenue from people at the South Pole.

02:41:24.700 | They don't use 'em.

02:41:26.020 | So anyway, I'm asking Elon, it's a small ask.

02:41:28.940 | But anyway, so we wanna be above the atmosphere,

02:41:31.880 | but it's millions, maybe billions of dollars

02:41:33.940 | to do that for a telescope like we're using,

02:41:35.500 | or for an optical telescope here on Earth.

02:41:38.700 | So scientists became very convinced

02:41:41.180 | that there has to be a way

02:41:42.740 | to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere.

02:41:44.660 | Now, what is the main effect of the atmosphere?

02:41:46.980 | Well, you learned it when you were a kid.

02:41:48.780 | Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.

02:41:51.620 | What is that twinkling?

02:41:52.740 | It's called scintillation.

02:41:54.380 | Scintillation is the property of a point source,

02:41:57.180 | which is a star is so far away,

02:41:58.840 | even though they're enormous,

02:41:59.900 | they still only subtend a zero-dimensional,

02:42:02.940 | almost zero-dimensional dot of light on the sky.

02:42:06.020 | When it goes through the atmosphere,

02:42:07.980 | the atmosphere has macroscopic turbulence features.

02:42:10.860 | The atmosphere is a fluid.

02:42:12.280 | There's turbulence, there's roiling columns,

02:42:14.060 | there's cells of the atmosphere.

02:42:15.380 | And if you've ever looked at a star,

02:42:16.780 | they jitter, they, looks like they're moving around.

02:42:19.820 | And that's the combination of the atmospheric cells,

02:42:22.940 | each column of air that has slightly more density

02:42:25.900 | will refract light slightly different angles.

02:42:29.100 | Remember we talked about light when it goes through a lens,

02:42:31.460 | it refracts, it bends.

02:42:32.660 | - So should we be thinking about the light from stars

02:42:34.860 | kind of like a jagged line coming towards our eye?

02:42:37.340 | - It's coming through, it's getting deflected slightly,

02:42:39.380 | and it's moving,

02:42:40.220 | and it's landing on different retinal cells.

02:42:41.940 | And we're perceiving that as this motion,

02:42:43.740 | or in a CCD array, it's also landing on different pixels.

02:42:46.820 | So you can't get away from it by using technology.

02:42:50.220 | It's still an effect,

02:42:51.460 | it's caused by these atmospheric turbulent cells.

02:42:53.940 | And by the way, you can tell and you can identify a planet

02:42:56.980 | by the fact that it does not scintillate,

02:42:59.180 | it does not twinkle, twinkle.

02:43:00.860 | So Jupiter's visible tonight,

02:43:02.220 | I hope you'll see it with the telescope,

02:43:03.500 | we can see it after we're done recording.

02:43:05.780 | We'll keep going, we're about halfway done, I figure.

02:43:07.940 | We'll go outside, we'll look at it,

02:43:09.020 | and you'll see it's not, it's stationary.

02:43:10.940 | And I actually used that on the night

02:43:12.740 | I kissed my wife for the first time.

02:43:14.020 | But I'm not gonna talk about that.

02:43:15.660 | When you look at the planet,

02:43:17.100 | you can identify them by their lack of scintillation.

02:43:19.940 | It's a way to identify if it's a plane, a star, or a planet.

02:43:24.100 | So astronomers, including a colleague of mine

02:43:26.660 | in UC system, Claire Max, and other people,

02:43:28.900 | realized in the 1960s and '70s

02:43:31.300 | that if they had a fake star,

02:43:34.980 | it's actually called either a guide star

02:43:37.220 | or an artificial star,

02:43:38.980 | I'll explain how they make that in a minute,

02:43:40.540 | then if they knew the exact properties of that guide star,

02:43:43.620 | then they could measure just the guide star

02:43:45.420 | through the same optics of the telescope,

02:43:47.460 | and then they would broadcast,

02:43:48.700 | they would take the light from that artificial star

02:43:51.460 | onto a flexible, deformable mirror.

02:43:53.780 | So the mirror could actually wobble and wiggle,

02:43:56.780 | and it would do so in an exactly compensatory way

02:44:00.580 | to nullify the atmospheric turbulence.

02:44:03.220 | So it's basically what light does

02:44:05.180 | when it goes through a cell of the atmosphere.

02:44:07.740 | It traverses a slightly longer path difference,

02:44:10.060 | so they would shorten the path difference of the mirror.

02:44:12.540 | They make it a little bit closer

02:44:13.700 | in the direction of that cell,

02:44:14.900 | and other places they'd make it farther away,

02:44:16.900 | and vice versa.

02:44:18.020 | They compensate for it,

02:44:19.780 | and this was done by a combination of two technologies.

02:44:22.380 | One was the deformable mirror

02:44:24.460 | that could flex 100 times per second,

02:44:27.420 | and the other was making these artificial stars.

02:44:30.700 | So how do they make an artificial star?

02:44:32.180 | They shoot a laser into the troposphere.

02:44:35.100 | That laser illuminates--

02:44:36.620 | - What's the troposphere?

02:44:37.660 | - Troposphere is a layer of the atmosphere.

02:44:39.780 | I used to know all the different layers, but--

02:44:41.300 | - That's okay.

02:44:42.140 | - Okay, ionosphere is the farthest away.

02:44:43.540 | - So some layer of the atmosphere.

02:44:44.500 | - Yeah, it's 40, 30, 40 kilometers above the Earth.

02:44:47.140 | It's not quite in space.

02:44:48.380 | Far enough away that the laser beam is still collimated.

02:44:51.340 | It makes a nice beam, and it can illuminate,

02:44:53.100 | and then cause this sodium ions to fluoresce, basically.

02:44:57.460 | So they start to get really stimulated.

02:44:58.820 | It looks just like a star.

02:45:00.380 | They know exactly how they produced it.

02:45:02.020 | They know exactly what phase and wavelength

02:45:04.460 | to correct in the mirror,

02:45:05.540 | and then they say it's almost as good as going into space.

02:45:08.220 | It corrects exactly the compensation

02:45:10.380 | of the Earth's atmosphere

02:45:12.140 | with the combination of this deformable mirror,

02:45:13.940 | and it was actually used by my colleague,

02:45:15.300 | Andrea Ghez, here at UCLA,

02:45:17.500 | to measure the properties of stars

02:45:20.100 | orbiting around the black hole

02:45:21.660 | at the center of the Milky Way,

02:45:23.260 | and test Einstein's theory of relativity.

02:45:25.460 | Without this and the twin 10-meter diameter

02:45:28.060 | Keck telescopes in Hawaii,

02:45:29.500 | she never would have won that Nobel Prize.

02:45:31.260 | So it's amazing technology, but it was classified.

02:45:34.500 | It was so useful to astronomers,

02:45:38.280 | but it wasn't as useful as to the military.

02:45:40.180 | Remember, I said Galileo used his telescope

02:45:42.460 | to sell it to the military of Venice.

02:45:45.020 | It was immediately classified by the US military,

02:45:48.420 | because if you think about a spy satellite,

02:45:50.540 | what's it doing?

02:45:51.380 | Well, it's staring down to Earth,

02:45:52.980 | and it's looking at whatever on Earth.

02:45:55.660 | It's also going through the atmosphere.

02:45:56.980 | It's gonna have the same problems.

02:45:58.400 | So they wanted to use that

02:45:59.540 | and have this technological advantage over the Soviets,

02:46:01.740 | probably in the 1970s and '80s.

02:46:03.540 | So they classified it.

02:46:04.500 | They didn't let many...

02:46:05.740 | Astronomers could build things.

02:46:07.060 | They could deliver the finished product,

02:46:08.900 | but they couldn't patent it.

02:46:10.220 | They couldn't use it.

02:46:11.060 | So Claire Max, as I said, she could have been super rich.

02:46:14.220 | But it's interesting, 'cause now they're using it,

02:46:16.620 | so it's bad enough to look from Earth to space.

02:46:20.500 | But as I said, if you imagine the Earth

02:46:22.380 | as having a slab of an atmosphere,

02:46:24.540 | imagine a sniper.

02:46:25.620 | The sniper's trying to make a kill shot.

02:46:27.620 | Jocko's out there trying to hit something

02:46:29.420 | five kilometers, three kilometers away or whatever.

02:46:31.900 | There's a lot of atmosphere in the way.

02:46:33.780 | And if you're looking through an optical sight,

02:46:35.980 | that will also happen.

02:46:36.800 | So now they're actually using this optical compensation

02:46:41.080 | and sniper scopes are using this technology,

02:46:43.240 | adaptive optics.

02:46:44.600 | So it's another way that astronomy has

02:46:46.360 | influenced military developments as well.

02:46:49.360 | - Very interesting.

02:46:50.200 | I don't wanna go too far down this rabbit hole,

02:46:53.160 | but I'm aware that there are some technologies now

02:46:56.560 | to use lasers to extract sound waves in a similar way.

02:47:01.440 | So there are technologies that exist

02:47:03.360 | where you can shine a laser at, say, a window on a building

02:47:05.800 | from very far away and actually hear

02:47:07.000 | the conversation inside the room

02:47:09.120 | by way of the sound waves hitting that window.

02:47:11.840 | The conversion of sound waves to optical

02:47:14.440 | and then from optical back to sound on your computer

02:47:17.520 | allows that.

02:47:18.360 | Also, there was a technology that was publicized

02:47:20.920 | a few years back, developed at least in part at Stanford,

02:47:24.080 | the ability to see around corners

02:47:26.480 | by shining lasers at the most visible location

02:47:29.480 | closest to what you wanna see,

02:47:31.240 | and then capturing reflections and sound waves

02:47:34.260 | at that location and essentially being able

02:47:36.120 | to reconstruct images around corners,

02:47:38.640 | see how many objects are there.

02:47:39.800 | So pretty wild stuff.

02:47:41.520 | You can imagine the military and spy implications,

02:47:43.920 | but also just, but perhaps just as interesting,

02:47:48.880 | the ability to, for instance, map the positions

02:47:52.840 | and movements of critters in the deep ocean

02:47:55.440 | without actually having to quote-unquote see them.

02:47:57.920 | You could hear them.

02:47:59.480 | I had a really interesting experience a few summers back

02:48:01.440 | of going to somebody's pool.

02:48:02.520 | It was an impressive pool,

02:48:03.560 | but the most impressive thing about it

02:48:04.820 | was that you could hear music perfectly well underwater

02:48:08.620 | using adaptive acoustics.

02:48:11.880 | - And listening to your episode with Goggins.

02:48:13.360 | - No, it was wild.

02:48:14.200 | You could dive, you'd listen to something above water,

02:48:15.880 | dive below water and still hear it

02:48:18.300 | as if it were playing in the headphones.

02:48:20.400 | Maybe not quite as well as in headphones,

02:48:22.120 | but, and if you sloshed around in the water,

02:48:24.100 | there'd be a little perturbation,

02:48:25.280 | but it's pretty spectacular.

02:48:26.480 | It wasn't my pool, unfortunately.

02:48:27.920 | I have one big question that I think everybody

02:48:32.720 | would like the answer to,

02:48:34.040 | which is to what extent do you think

02:48:36.360 | there's life outside earth or not on earth?

02:48:41.360 | And when people hear this, they think aliens,

02:48:45.060 | but like an insect-like creature,

02:48:48.480 | single or small multi-cell organism on another planet,

02:48:51.440 | that itself would be a spectacular find.

02:48:54.440 | I mean, beyond spectacular,

02:48:57.480 | is there any evidence that that does exist?

02:49:01.120 | Is there any reason to think that it couldn't exist?

02:49:04.280 | And if it does, would it have to be

02:49:06.200 | in a different galaxy altogether?

02:49:09.240 | What's the going belief among those

02:49:12.760 | who are like real scientists who don't believe

02:49:15.800 | that there's whatever, just real scientists,

02:49:18.560 | like what's the thought?

02:49:20.000 | Like a centipede on Mars?

02:49:21.960 | Like I don't think too many people

02:49:24.320 | would be totally surprised, but that'd be pretty wild.

02:49:29.520 | - Well, yeah, I'm kind of an outlier,

02:49:31.240 | so just everyone should look to the actual experts

02:49:34.720 | in this field, but I have some rigorous

02:49:36.960 | kind of logical arguments that I believe

02:49:39.440 | the probability of life, I would never say it's zero,

02:49:42.320 | but I think it's very low,

02:49:43.440 | and I think I can substantiate that,

02:49:45.440 | and the best part is I can't be falsified right now.

02:49:47.880 | There's zero evidence that there's life

02:49:49.840 | anywhere else in the universe, period,

02:49:51.440 | full stop, end of sentence.

02:49:52.800 | There's no evidence, conclusive evidence.

02:49:54.640 | In fact-- - Lots of drones

02:49:55.480 | over in New Jersey right now,

02:49:56.800 | not no evidence of life.

02:49:58.280 | - I knew we'd get into drones.

02:49:59.780 | So the argument that it would somehow,

02:50:04.160 | first of all, transform our understanding

02:50:06.920 | of human place is inarguable to me.

02:50:09.160 | I believe that's true, although in this movie "Contact,"

02:50:13.440 | it's a really wonderful movie.

02:50:14.920 | It's not cheesy science fiction.

02:50:16.160 | It was the first to use a wormhole

02:50:17.720 | and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances,

02:50:19.680 | but in that movie, there's a scene

02:50:21.840 | where President Bill Clinton is talking

02:50:24.840 | about the discovery that this fictitious character made,

02:50:28.000 | but he's actually talking about a meteorite

02:50:30.260 | that was discovered in Antarctica,

02:50:32.280 | and they just clipped that,

02:50:33.640 | and the meteorite was believed to have microbial life,

02:50:37.320 | and that meteorite's origin was inarguably from Mars, okay?

02:50:41.480 | So the reasoning was, this is 1997,

02:50:44.000 | that there was a meteorite found in Antarctica

02:50:46.800 | where it's easy to find meteorites.

02:50:48.080 | - Is it in the movie or in real life?

02:50:49.320 | - It's in real life.

02:50:50.160 | In 1997, a scientist announced the discovery

02:50:52.320 | of a meteorite from Antarctica.

02:50:53.800 | It's called Allen Land Hill's meteorite,

02:50:56.120 | and it had what they claimed

02:50:57.960 | were evidence of microbial life

02:50:59.720 | and even respiration byproducts

02:51:01.920 | of these microbial life forms, okay?

02:51:03.920 | It was such a big deal that within minutes,

02:51:06.640 | Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn

02:51:09.320 | where he goes, "This rock speaks to us

02:51:11.320 | "from across the generations, and if confirmed,

02:51:13.900 | "will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding

02:51:17.080 | "of the universe around us," okay?

02:51:18.760 | Now, the movie clips that clip to make it seem

02:51:20.840 | like Ellie, the fictitious character,

02:51:22.460 | discovered SETI, extraterrestrial technology,

02:51:26.940 | not a microbe, but in the public's mind,

02:51:30.500 | that actual scientific discovery was never falsified.

02:51:35.500 | It was certainly never confirmed.

02:51:36.820 | No one's ever come back to say that was correct

02:51:38.860 | and that we did find microbial evidence

02:51:40.960 | of microbial life on Mars.

02:51:42.480 | Now, how did that meteorite get there?

02:51:43.980 | Well, some asteroids hit the moon.

02:51:48.020 | That's why it has craters on it.

02:51:49.420 | It hits the Earth.

02:51:50.780 | That's why we have Meteor Crater, Arizona,

02:51:52.900 | Winslow, Arizona, Yucatan, Chicxulub,

02:51:55.540 | where the dinosaur's doom was sealed

02:51:57.660 | by the giant impactor 66 million years ago.

02:52:00.660 | Those impacts occur on every planet,

02:52:03.260 | every moon in our solar system.

02:52:05.240 | So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars

02:52:08.700 | probably millions of years ago,

02:52:10.100 | ejected material, low gravity on Mars, low atmosphere,

02:52:13.820 | and that material has been orbiting around

02:52:16.220 | and eventually made its way and hit the Earth, okay?

02:52:18.860 | So matter from Mars landed on the Earth.

02:52:21.460 | Does that make sense?

02:52:22.460 | That's how I gave you, I have a lunar meteorite

02:52:24.940 | that I'm giving to you, again,

02:52:26.180 | as a token of my appreciation for all you do.

02:52:29.160 | That came the same way.

02:52:30.220 | Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar,

02:52:32.580 | it's called breccia, it's the crust of the moon,

02:52:34.780 | eventually made its way, landed in Northwest Africa,

02:52:37.220 | and I bought a slice of it from a, I got a dealer,

02:52:39.580 | you know, I got a meteorite dealer,

02:52:41.420 | and I got that for you, okay?

02:52:43.640 | So what's the lesson?

02:52:44.860 | Material gets exchanged from planet to planet.

02:52:47.780 | Now, I ask the following question.

02:52:49.780 | If that happened on Mars to the Earth,

02:52:52.020 | the moon to the Earth,

02:52:53.100 | so too has material from the Earth been ejected.

02:52:56.900 | Since life emerged 3.7 billion years ago,

02:53:01.220 | there's literally millions of tons of Earth

02:53:03.980 | that's floating around in space.

02:53:05.460 | Some of that will have landed on Mars.

02:53:07.040 | So someday we'll get there, we'll find some piece of it.

02:53:09.700 | Now, could some of it have a tardigrade on it?

02:53:12.020 | Could some of it have a protozoan on it?

02:53:14.220 | Obviously it could.

02:53:16.060 | - Maybe some interesting microbes.

02:53:18.580 | - Yeah, it could.

02:53:19.420 | - Maybe some ancient microbes that are no longer extant.

02:53:22.820 | - Yeah, it could.

02:53:23.660 | It could have, what's an adaptogen?

02:53:25.200 | I have no idea.

02:53:26.040 | - An adaptogen?

02:53:26.860 | - You talk about adaptogens.

02:53:27.700 | - Adaptogens are, it's a broad term used to describe

02:53:30.900 | any compound that allows you

02:53:34.220 | to modulate the stress response.

02:53:36.700 | So maybe increase your stress threshold

02:53:38.780 | or recover from stress more quickly.

02:53:41.100 | It's sort of like saying stimulant.

02:53:43.140 | - Okay, it's not biological necessarily.

02:53:44.980 | - No, it's a broad category.

02:53:46.900 | I mean, I think some people will say

02:53:49.060 | like certain non-hallucinogenic mushroom strains

02:53:52.320 | are adaptogens.

02:53:53.160 | I mean, the ability to buffer the stress response.

02:53:55.600 | - Interesting.

02:53:56.700 | - I mean, things like rhodiola

02:53:58.540 | have been described as adaptogens

02:54:00.180 | and these work through neurotransmitter systems.

02:54:02.180 | So broadly speaking, they allow you to perceive effort

02:54:06.380 | as less effortful, this kind of thing.

02:54:08.300 | - Okay, so one theory of the formation of life on Earth,

02:54:11.020 | you asked me about that earlier,

02:54:12.180 | the origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery.

02:54:13.980 | How did life get here?

02:54:15.100 | One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people.

02:54:18.180 | It sounds dirty, but it's not, it's called panspermia.

02:54:21.100 | Just means that genetic material has been transferred

02:54:23.540 | from another astronomical object landed here on Earth.

02:54:27.220 | So the converse reaction occurs as well.

02:54:30.860 | But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars.

02:54:33.700 | So if I told you, we've discovered a planet

02:54:36.500 | and there's another planet right next to it

02:54:38.300 | and it has almost the same conditions.

02:54:39.840 | It's in the so-called Goldilocks zone

02:54:41.500 | where the temperature is just right to have liquid water,

02:54:43.380 | which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year

02:54:45.180 | in certain places on Mars.

02:54:46.580 | It had flowing water on it, we know for sure.

02:54:48.540 | Mars had flowing water on it.

02:54:49.980 | We know for sure that material from the Earth got there

02:54:52.220 | when Earth had life on it.

02:54:53.860 | So the absence of life on Mars is a data point.

02:54:56.740 | It's not probative or provative, it's positive rather,

02:55:00.140 | that life couldn't exist on Mars.

02:55:01.780 | We haven't searched all of Mars.

02:55:03.460 | But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it.

02:55:05.980 | So people are fond of saying, as I told you earlier,

02:55:08.960 | there's about 10 to the 24th planets

02:55:11.460 | probably in our observable universe.

02:55:13.500 | Going back to the Big Bang,

02:55:14.960 | going out to the farthest reaches of the universe.

02:55:16.860 | But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy,

02:55:19.220 | there's probably literally hundreds of billions of planets

02:55:23.420 | in our galaxy alone.

02:55:25.100 | And when you look at that, people like to say,

02:55:28.380 | as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life,

02:55:30.160 | it's an awful waste of space, right?

02:55:32.060 | Why is there so much space and there's no life?

02:55:34.020 | It seems incomprehensible.

02:55:35.260 | But nature, I love when atheist scientists will say,

02:55:39.140 | you propose God exists and that's the God of the gaps

02:55:41.940 | to explain things that you don't understand.

02:55:43.500 | But when science advances, we'll have an explanation

02:55:45.840 | for why thunder occurs.

02:55:47.380 | It's not because of Thor, right?

02:55:49.020 | We get rid of gods as we learn more,

02:55:50.780 | and so the gaps shrink smaller and smaller.

02:55:53.300 | But they'll say the same argument about life in the air.

02:55:55.420 | They'll say, well, there's gotta be life

02:55:56.780 | 'cause there's so much room there.

02:55:58.000 | But as I told you, I've been to Antarctica twice.

02:56:00.260 | The only life forms I saw there, okay, were people.

02:56:03.960 | I saw a few penguins in the distance

02:56:06.460 | and a couple of dead sea lions.

02:56:08.360 | There's no trees, there's no flora at all

02:56:10.860 | in the entire continent.

02:56:11.820 | It's incredibly barren, and yet, Andrew,

02:56:14.960 | it makes up 8% of the land mass of the Earth.

02:56:19.460 | And you would think, well, it's just proportional

02:56:21.380 | to the amount of area, i.e. the number of stars.

02:56:23.380 | There should be 8% of the life on Earth.

02:56:25.140 | There should be a billion people there or whatever,

02:56:27.220 | you know, 600 million people.

02:56:28.700 | No, there's nothing there

02:56:29.980 | except for scientists that go there.

02:56:31.500 | So the odds of life, you know,

02:56:34.660 | you can't construct probability from possibility.

02:56:38.060 | That, and many, many other arguments that I could give you,

02:56:40.620 | the improbability of life, how hard it is to create life.

02:56:44.260 | And, you know, if you just sprinkled,

02:56:45.900 | imagine you had a koala cannon, okay?

02:56:48.020 | People at PETA are gonna get mad.

02:56:49.300 | Imagine if you just go to Mars and spray it with koala.

02:56:51.980 | It's obviously not gonna, like, start life, right?

02:56:52.820 | - Well, I think PETA would probably be okay

02:56:54.840 | with you populating an area with koalas.

02:56:58.820 | A cannon to take out koalas, they would probably protest.

02:57:01.580 | - That's right, they would not like that.

02:57:02.900 | So yeah, so, you know, possibility is not probability.

02:57:07.300 | The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous.

02:57:11.740 | We have yet to reproduce, you know,

02:57:13.480 | to make a functional cell in the laboratory.

02:57:15.340 | Not that that's a requirement

02:57:16.560 | to prove that life could exist elsewhere.

02:57:18.420 | I'm just saying it's very hard.

02:57:19.820 | Our history of life, we have an N of one.

02:57:21.980 | It's very difficult to speculate on.

02:57:24.180 | And if we're alone, if life is abundant,

02:57:26.900 | as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago,

02:57:30.300 | if life is abundant and the galaxy is old, where are they?

02:57:34.380 | Where are the aliens?

02:57:35.700 | There should have been plenty of time,

02:57:36.840 | not only for them to evolve and be superior to us

02:57:39.580 | in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy,

02:57:42.700 | not even of the cosmos, our galaxy, where are they?

02:57:45.180 | Where are they?

02:57:46.020 | They've known about us for 80 years

02:57:47.300 | 'cause we've been broadcasting radio waves

02:57:48.740 | for the last 85 years.

02:57:50.300 | - Do you know this theory about the gut microbiota?

02:57:52.840 | You know, our guts, our skin, our eyes, our nose,

02:57:56.500 | but certainly our entire digestive tract,

02:57:59.780 | the whole way down from our lips, out the other end,

02:58:03.980 | are populated with these little microbiota

02:58:05.820 | that influence everything from fatty acid production,

02:58:07.920 | neurotransmitter production, et cetera.

02:58:09.320 | - It's more than human cells.

02:58:10.520 | - Yeah, oh yeah, and it's powerful for modulating

02:58:13.120 | all sorts of biological processes.

02:58:14.920 | And every time we interact, shake hands,

02:58:17.480 | if people kiss, if you interact with dirt,

02:58:20.760 | if you interact with a pet, the microbiome changes.

02:58:23.880 | It's an inner reflection of all your outer behaviors.

02:58:28.400 | - Like the internet, yeah.

02:58:29.640 | - Yeah, and then we're learning a lot about it.

02:58:31.240 | There's this one theory that I like

02:58:32.560 | that kind of turns life, as you and I know it,

02:58:36.140 | on its head, which is that humans and other species

02:58:39.620 | are just vehicles for the microbiome.

02:58:42.900 | And so you would take something like the desire

02:58:45.540 | to populate Mars or to land on the moon

02:58:50.540 | as just the microbiota, taking advantage

02:58:53.780 | of this weird old world primate species

02:58:56.020 | that we call homo sapiens that loves to develop technology,

02:58:59.500 | almost destroy itself, but then continues

02:59:01.680 | to evolve social media, et cetera.

02:59:04.760 | - Yeah, Kim Prae there.

02:59:05.600 | - Warn each other about declining birth rates.

02:59:07.560 | And then just to, basically, the microbiota have what,

02:59:11.520 | you know, a sort of quote-unquote consciousness,

02:59:13.640 | not a brain, but a consciousness of their own,

02:59:15.400 | which is like all species, to make more of itself

02:59:18.160 | and to go further and further out and populate.

02:59:20.280 | It's hard to punch holes in the logic of this model,

02:59:23.880 | but it certainly diminishes our conscious experience.

02:59:28.160 | - We could go on forever about this trail.

02:59:31.020 | I'll just kind of put a kind of a cliffhanger out there.

02:59:33.700 | It'd be wonderful sometime to sit down with you

02:59:35.860 | and discuss the possibility of,

02:59:37.580 | rather than thinking about life elsewhere in the galaxy,

02:59:41.420 | given what we know about physics and engineering,

02:59:45.820 | astronomy, et cetera, would it be possible

02:59:48.540 | to build a planet at the appropriate distance from the sun

02:59:51.560 | that we could spawn life by bringing things there,

02:59:54.080 | as opposed to trying to take it, you know,

02:59:55.780 | figure out how to do it at a distance

02:59:57.920 | that it might not be amenable to life.

02:59:59.980 | You know, maybe creating a garden planet,

03:00:03.100 | maybe we don't put humans there right away,

03:00:05.500 | but trying to create a garden that could thrive

03:00:07.580 | at some appropriate distance from the sun

03:00:11.100 | and seeing what nutrients could be grown there.

03:00:13.980 | You know, so you could have robots man this planet,

03:00:16.700 | but you'd have to somehow aggregate stuff in space

03:00:19.860 | to build this planet or launch this planet up

03:00:22.140 | that it would collect things.

03:00:23.420 | I mean, that to me feels like a fun experiment

03:00:25.980 | and a lot less risky than going up to other planets.

03:00:29.480 | - Yeah, I was blessed as my first guest

03:00:31.880 | on the "Into the Impossible" podcast,

03:00:33.200 | that Freeman Dyson, you mentioned your dad,

03:00:35.200 | your dad mentioned him.

03:00:36.720 | One of the greatest intellects of the last 100 years,

03:00:39.160 | great physicist, and he had these ideas

03:00:40.680 | for these Dyson spheres, which would be energy harvesting.

03:00:44.120 | So the first, you know, ingredient that you need

03:00:46.600 | to construct the Huberman Planet Habitable Zone

03:00:50.960 | is to have energy, is harvest as much energy as possible

03:00:54.560 | from a star.

03:00:55.440 | So he basically conjectured a megastructure,

03:00:59.140 | an alien megastructure that could be observable

03:01:01.860 | by astronomers could detect these objects

03:01:04.700 | and some claim that we have,

03:01:06.480 | but those have always been refuted.

03:01:08.380 | And it would be basically surrounding a star,

03:01:10.700 | capturing every photon worth of energy that came out of it

03:01:13.380 | and then converting that to mechanical energy.

03:01:15.460 | And then yes, and then once you have infinite energy,

03:01:17.560 | you can actually do fusion.

03:01:18.980 | You can make up whatever molecules you want.

03:01:20.940 | You could make up, you know, print 3D printing

03:01:23.100 | at the quark level on up basically.

03:01:25.600 | And so that was his, you know, conjecture

03:01:27.800 | of how super advanced aliens would behave.

03:01:30.520 | But again, we have no evidence for it, but it's fun.

03:01:33.080 | It's certainly fun to have the science fiction,

03:01:34.880 | you know, kind of, you know, a lot of interesting science,

03:01:37.680 | you know, originates from ideas and creativity

03:01:40.040 | that originates from science fiction.

03:01:41.760 | So yeah, it'd be a lot of fun.

03:01:43.080 | - You and I could talk about the stars, the planets,

03:01:46.360 | optics, animals, life here on earth infinitely.

03:01:52.320 | This is what happens, folks, when two real nerds

03:01:56.160 | get together and wanna learn from one another.

03:01:58.840 | And I hope you delighted in this at least half as much

03:02:02.600 | as I did, those of you listening.

03:02:05.760 | I mean, you occupy an incredible place.

03:02:08.380 | And I mean that, you know, like your intellectual place

03:02:10.920 | since you were a child is a remarkable place

03:02:13.400 | that most people, I think, don't occupy,

03:02:19.440 | not because they don't have the training,

03:02:20.700 | but because they just haven't put their mind

03:02:22.960 | on there on these questions.

03:02:24.640 | And I think one thing that is so clear

03:02:26.480 | is that through your podcast, your books,

03:02:28.000 | and certainly through the discussion today,

03:02:30.720 | you've placed us in the position of scientist

03:02:35.160 | to be able to ponder these really big questions

03:02:38.280 | about really big, really distant things.

03:02:40.200 | This is not typically the way that my brain functions.

03:02:43.120 | I think most people are more focused on things

03:02:46.160 | proximal to them and here on earth.

03:02:49.520 | But I'm so grateful that you did.

03:02:52.140 | And I'm so grateful that you continue to educate.

03:02:55.860 | We didn't even get to talk about,

03:02:57.460 | but I'll just mention that you've been

03:02:58.500 | a absolutely spectacular proponent

03:03:02.180 | for popular science education and the importance of that.

03:03:06.460 | I've been very inspired by you and your work.

03:03:08.580 | - Thank you.

03:03:09.420 | - Very inspired by your story.

03:03:11.500 | Sure, because of some similarities

03:03:13.140 | and, you know, fathers and sons

03:03:14.220 | and the tribulations, et cetera, different,

03:03:16.260 | but some overlap there.

03:03:17.900 | But also just because of the way that you approach life.

03:03:20.440 | And it's very clear to me that as a person

03:03:23.120 | who's focused on things very, very far away,

03:03:25.000 | where apparently there's no observable life yet.

03:03:28.680 | - Not yet.

03:03:29.520 | - That you're also very grounded in this thing

03:03:33.400 | that we call daily life and the delight

03:03:35.480 | of exploration and asking questions.

03:03:38.440 | And if ever there was a call to arms

03:03:42.120 | for people to get outside and look at the stars,

03:03:44.240 | perhaps through a telescope or perhaps

03:03:45.960 | through the telescopes on the front of their skull.

03:03:49.020 | Certainly to do that and to think about

03:03:50.900 | some of what was discussed today,

03:03:52.180 | because I'm certainly enchanted

03:03:54.420 | and I know those listening and watching are as well.

03:03:57.440 | So thank you for everything you do.

03:04:00.420 | Keep doing it, come back, let's keep talking.

03:04:03.380 | We didn't talk about God and the universe

03:04:05.640 | and the origins of life, but we'll do that before long.

03:04:09.700 | And Brian Keating, thanks for being you.

03:04:12.180 | I appreciate you.

03:04:13.340 | - Thanks, Andrew.

03:04:14.180 | You've been a big inspiration to me too.

03:04:15.620 | And use your language.

03:04:17.540 | Thank you for your interest in science.

03:04:19.140 | It's really done so much for the world

03:04:21.020 | and you give it all for free.

03:04:22.620 | And it's truly an inspiration.

03:04:24.740 | And it's really fun to talk to somebody

03:04:26.820 | who's at the level that you're at

03:04:28.660 | and so many different things and still has that.

03:04:31.540 | As scientists, we get inured,

03:04:32.860 | we get kind of used to things.

03:04:34.500 | Oh, there's a rainbow, there's a meteor, whatever.

03:04:36.720 | But you still have that passion.

03:04:38.000 | You have that passion, that curiosity.

03:04:39.580 | And I think that's what makes a true scientist.

03:04:41.380 | And the function of education

03:04:43.340 | seems to beat that out of kids.

03:04:44.620 | But really to have that in the domain

03:04:47.920 | and the expertise that you have is a real inspiration.

03:04:50.100 | And I think it's a huge service to society.

03:04:51.820 | So I wanna thank you too.

03:04:53.300 | - Thank you.

03:04:54.140 | Well, it's a labor of love mixed with an affliction.

03:04:56.180 | So we'll keep going.

03:04:57.620 | Right back at you.

03:04:58.620 | Thanks, Brian.

03:04:59.460 | - Thanks, Andrew.

03:05:00.280 | - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

03:05:02.060 | with Dr. Brian Keating.

03:05:03.460 | I hope you found it to be as informative

03:05:05.420 | and indeed fascinating as I did.

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03:06:09.220 | For those of you that haven't heard,

03:06:10.340 | I have a new book coming out.

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03:06:13.160 | It's entitled "Protocols,

03:06:14.580 | an Operating Manual for the Human Body."

03:06:16.700 | This is a book that I've been working on

03:06:17.900 | for more than five years,

03:06:19.020 | and that's based on more than 30 years

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03:06:36.360 | The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

03:06:40.260 | There you can find links to various vendors.

03:06:42.620 | You can pick the one that you like best.

03:06:44.400 | Again, the book is called "Protocols,

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03:07:24.300 | Thank you once again for joining me

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03:07:32.420 | (upbeat music)

03:07:35.000 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Brian Keating: Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life

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