A Brief History of Astronomy | Dr. Brian Keating & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | - If we could do a top contour survey

00:00:05.720 | of the greats of astronomy, where would it start?

00:00:11.200 | Starting with people who got it wrong and then correct each other.

00:00:15.720 | If we were going to do a fast sprint through these, where would we start?

00:00:20.520 | - Well, you'd have to start with like Gog or whatever,

00:00:23.600 | you know, the first cavemen and women, you know, as I said, the 40,000-

00:00:26.200 | - Charting stars on the wall of the cave.

00:00:27.920 | - Exactly.

00:00:28.920 | We don't know who they are.

00:00:29.920 | The ancestors, like, okay, you know, because those stars are there relative

00:00:33.720 | to that ridge or et cetera, days are getting longer, days are getting shorter.

00:00:38.120 | - That's right.

00:00:39.120 | - Ergo hunt now, ergo collect stuff to hunker down.

00:00:44.460 | Maybe even don't reproduce now.

00:00:48.520 | Maybe even behavioral restraint.

00:00:50.040 | - 100%.

00:00:51.040 | - Maybe reproduce now.

00:00:52.520 | - Yeah.

00:00:53.520 | - Yeah.

00:00:54.520 | - It's going to be much more, you know, optimal time for that.

00:00:55.520 | - Right, right.

00:00:56.520 | - Exactly.

00:00:57.520 | So tens of thousands, pre-antiquity, you would say.

00:00:59.400 | Then the, I would say fast forward, you know, to the maybe Egyptian epoch,

00:01:04.080 | you know, 5,000 BCE, so to speak, when they had a, also a very zodiological

00:01:09.940 | and astrological conception of these objects, but, and yet they would build

00:01:14.120 | things, you know, in relation to the positions of stars and constellations.

00:01:18.160 | - Sundial emerges.

00:01:19.160 | - Sundial, obelisks, you know, things that were used, primitive things.

00:01:23.320 | Stonehenge also, I think it's like 20,000 years ago.

00:01:25.720 | They believe it's related to some astronomical observations.

00:01:29.720 | They're not entirely certain about that.

00:01:31.560 | - We have to double-click on Stonehenge.

00:01:33.960 | How do you think it got there?

00:01:36.300 | - You know, it's one of those great mysteries that's, I think it's less

00:01:40.040 | controversial Stonehenge than the pyramids.

00:01:41.920 | The pyramids seem to be like almost, you know, they lead people into thinking

00:01:45.660 | about aliens and all sorts of stuff.

00:01:47.120 | - But what do you think of, is it, I mean, given their mass, given their location,

00:01:52.680 | given what we knew about populations then, and given what we know about the

00:01:55.720 | strength of people and the tools they had at the time, is it reasonable to assume

00:01:59.480 | that people built these things?

00:02:00.720 | - I mean, certainly, I mean, you'd have to convince me that people didn't build

00:02:04.520 | them, but exactly how they built it is a great question.

00:02:07.760 | I mean, so for example, I mentioned this when I was on Joe Rogan's show.

00:02:11.720 | I said, you know, if you measure the bases of the pyramids, it turns out that

00:02:16.000 | they're a ratio of a cubit, which is actually cubits, not quantum bits like

00:02:20.720 | you and your dad talked about, but cubits is the length of the pharaoh's forearm.

00:02:24.800 | It's basically a foot and a half, roughly.

00:02:26.640 | So back then, if you were like the president, you were also the metric

00:02:30.600 | standard for all of civilization.

00:02:32.480 | - Wild.

00:02:32.980 | - And it makes...

00:02:34.080 | - Sort of like models on Instagram, right?

00:02:36.800 | Everyone's trying to attain these.

00:02:38.480 | What's the standard?

00:02:39.520 | - That's right, exactly, right?

00:02:40.160 | - What's the standard?

00:02:41.280 | Wild.

00:02:41.600 | So the pharaoh's forearm, and is this about carrying items?

00:02:45.400 | - Yeah, well, it was just for length or like a foot.

00:02:47.800 | We talk about a foot, it was a pharaoh's foot.

00:02:49.440 | Yeah, that's where we get those from, right?

00:02:50.800 | So there was only kind of one rough standard for calibration, which is

00:02:54.640 | incredibly important for removing systematic effects in science in general.

00:02:58.680 | So you had a calibration standard.

00:03:00.160 | Now we have like a bar of platinum.

00:03:02.200 | We've defined, you know, the second in terms of oscillations of a certain atom

00:03:07.040 | called cesium and how many times it oscillates per second.

00:03:10.160 | - Sure, a degree, right?

00:03:11.320 | Yeah, a calorie, right?

00:03:12.960 | - So now we want to define those in terms of physical quantities,

00:03:16.240 | not in terms of people.

00:03:17.920 | And so doing that has been a great advance forward in science.

00:03:21.440 | And we've only recently gotten rid of what are called artifacts.

00:03:24.720 | So it used to be there was a rod that was one meter long.

00:03:27.480 | And the meter was originally defined as 69,000, I forget,

00:03:31.760 | of the distance from the North Pole to Paris.

00:03:34.920 | But that obviously depends on assuming the earth is a perfect sphere,

00:03:37.800 | which it's not, right?

00:03:38.720 | - It's kind of chubby around the middle, right?

00:03:40.040 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:03:40.560 | It bulges because it's an oblate sphere, right, exactly.

00:03:44.080 | And so all these things that were relics, we want to get rid of them and

00:03:47.440 | tie them to fundamental properties of, say, a quantum system that's very pure

00:03:51.120 | and we can isolate it.

00:03:52.360 | We don't want to use a pharaoh's foot either.

00:03:54.800 | So we have to come up with a link standard.

00:03:56.720 | So now we use the speed of light times the second and we can define things

00:03:59.880 | in those terms.

00:04:00.800 | But back then, yeah, so they didn't know that.

00:04:02.480 | But I told Joe, as I said, if you measure the base of all the great

00:04:06.360 | pyramids at Giza, they're all multiples of a cubit times so

00:04:11.480 | many numbers of the number pi.

00:04:14.360 | So, like, but pi wasn't known to them.

00:04:16.920 | You know, pi wasn't known to be rational to Greeks and Euclid proved that it was

00:04:21.880 | irrational and that, you know, it didn't come from a computational,

00:04:25.800 | it couldn't easily be obtained from...it had infinite number of digits, right?

00:04:30.480 | So how did these Egyptians know that?

00:04:32.120 | An alien told them, "No."

00:04:33.800 | The way they did it is they laid it out, they used a surveyor's tool.

00:04:37.000 | One of the surveyor's tool is a stick with a wheel on it.

00:04:39.640 | So the wheel is a circle, so you got so many multiples, they just count it

00:04:41.960 | and that's how...so we confuse a lot of things.

00:04:44.280 | Stumbled into pi.

00:04:45.320 | Exactly, right?

00:04:46.280 | They walked all over it.

00:04:47.800 | So you don't have to always posit supernatural explanations for things.

00:04:51.480 | The answer is simply, we don't know, I certainly don't know how Stonehenge was

00:04:54.680 | built nor do I know how the pyramids were built, but it's not...you would have to

00:04:58.440 | convince me that it was built by some other means other than people and the

00:05:01.720 | tools that were available to them.

00:05:03.240 | Yeah, likewise.

00:05:04.600 | I'm not convinced it came from extraterrestrial sources.

00:05:06.840 | Yes, I don't remember how we got on this, but timekeeping, yeah.

00:05:10.520 | So we were marching through, so we have our ancient ancestors, and then at what

00:05:17.000 | point do we get to Copernicus and Galileo?

00:05:20.600 | Then it was, yeah, then it was Copernicus who had ideas but couldn't prove them,

00:05:24.360 | he had no data to substantiate the Copernican or sun-centered model of the

00:05:28.680 | universe, which is also...

00:05:30.280 | By the way, almost everything in science is wrong, right?

00:05:33.880 | Copernicus is wrong.

00:05:35.240 | The sun is not the center of the solar system, right?

00:05:38.360 | The center of our solar system is inside the sun because the planets orbit around

00:05:42.440 | it and they orbit around an elliptical pattern, which has two foci.

00:05:46.360 | So he believed the orbits were all circles.

00:05:48.600 | So he's wrong, but he's more right than Aristotle.

00:05:50.760 | So that's how science progresses, right?

00:05:52.520 | Newton was right about gravity until he was wrong when Einstein proved him wrong,

00:05:56.040 | right?

00:05:56.680 | So then you come up to, after him, Kepler discovered the laws of the elliptical

00:06:02.200 | motion of planets and their patterns that we still use.

00:06:05.400 | When you discover an exoplanet, my colleague David Kipping, I want to

00:06:08.200 | introduce you to, he's discovered exomoons.

00:06:11.480 | These are moons around other planets, some of which are in the habitable zone of

00:06:15.480 | their host star, and some of them have sun-like stars and are Earth-sized

00:06:19.160 | planets.

00:06:19.640 | It's incredible.

00:06:20.520 | There could be, as I said, a link between life evolving on Earth due to the moon

00:06:24.680 | on our planet, so too on an exoplanet, it could require an exomoon, which he's

00:06:29.560 | discovered or thinks he has.

00:06:30.520 | He's actually very cautious and hasn't said it explicitly.

00:06:33.400 | So Kepler's laws underpin all those discoveries, even to this day, 400 years

00:06:36.760 | later.

00:06:37.400 | Then Galileo, immediately afterwards with the telescope, phases of Venus that

00:06:42.120 | only occur if the Earth is not the center of the solar system.

00:06:45.160 | The rings of Saturn, he had notions about those.

00:06:48.120 | He accidentally discovered the planet Neptune.

00:06:51.000 | It's amazing.

00:06:52.360 | And then he, of course, the moons of Jupiter falsified the notion that the

00:06:57.800 | Earth is the center of the solar system, because these moons are going around

00:07:00.280 | Jupiter, not around the Earth.

00:07:01.480 | So that completely torpedoed the notion of the true nature of the Aristotelian or

00:07:08.200 | Ptolemaic Earth-centered cosmology.

00:07:11.080 | Then soon after that, astronomers measured things like the speed of light

00:07:14.920 | using eclipses of the moons of Jupiter.

00:07:17.960 | They measured distances to Saturn.

00:07:20.120 | They mapped out the solar system.

00:07:22.280 | And then from there, using parallax, you can gauge the triangulation and using

00:07:26.920 | trigonometry, measure the structure of our galaxy.

00:07:29.560 | William Herschel and his sister, Caroline Herschel, was the first female

00:07:34.520 | astronomer, first female scientist.

00:07:36.440 | She was the first person to use the scientific method and become a fellow of

00:07:39.800 | the Royal Society in Great Britain.

00:07:42.200 | And then later off after that, we come to the era of the last-- the big

00:07:48.920 | developments in technology were photographic plates.

00:07:51.320 | After that, spectrographs, dispersion of light onto photographic material.

00:07:56.520 | You could preserve your memory.

00:07:57.880 | You didn't use sketches like Galileo did.

00:08:00.280 | And then up until Hubble, when Hubble discovered two major things, which was--

00:08:04.200 | one was that the Milky Way was a galaxy.

00:08:06.360 | It wasn't the entire universe.

00:08:07.640 | There were other galaxies, island universes of billions of stars.

00:08:11.320 | And then he discovered the expansion of the universe with help from an

00:08:14.440 | astronomer who doesn't get a lot of attention.

00:08:16.200 | A lot of the women in astronomy got really short shrift.

00:08:19.960 | People discovered how fusion works in the sun.

00:08:22.600 | Women-- Gaspachin at Harvard.

00:08:26.840 | And then Henrietta Leavitt, who measured this relationship between the size and

00:08:31.800 | brightness of objects called Cepheid variables that Hubble then used to make

00:08:35.800 | his law that proved that the universe is expanding.

00:08:38.520 | And then after that, people like Penzias and Wilson discovering the

00:08:41.400 | microwave and radio astronomy.

00:08:43.080 | Robert Jansky.

00:08:44.280 | All the way up until, you know, my colleagues today, some of whom I've

00:08:47.160 | interviewed, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt and Barry Barish, who wrote the

00:08:52.920 | foreword to my second book, detecting gravitational waves, the accelerating

00:08:57.560 | expansion of the universe due to dark energy.

00:08:59.560 | First Nobel Prize in astronomy, 2011.

00:09:02.520 | Followed up, 2015 discovery of--

00:09:05.320 | 2017, discovered gravitational waves from in-spiraling black holes.

00:09:08.760 | You know, there's so many.

00:09:11.000 | And there's so many, you know, I've been blessed to know many of them.

00:09:13.480 | And I have them as my academic, you know, pedigree.

00:09:17.080 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

A Brief History of Astronomy | Dr. Brian Keating & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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