YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Keating

lines on the record: 290
first: 2022-01-18
most recent: 2022-01-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I was like, well, I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in. Like some guy in a white beard and a chair. Like, that's infantile. Like, I gave that away a long time ago. But what if there are clues? What if Yang Mill's theory, you know, Maxwell's equation? Like, those are beautiful. If you've ever seen expressed in tensor notation, Einstein's equations or Maxwell's equations, and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's, it's unbelievably beautiful. Doesn't have to be that way that we can comprehend it. That's a crack. Maybe that's where the light gets in. And the light is what reveals what's beautiful. I don't believe in God. I think that's a stupid notion. Like, do I believe in God? Like sometimes I wonder if God believes in me more than if I believe in it. Like he needs Brian Keating. Like, you know, what, you know, it's like one of my friends is a rabbi. He's like, what would I be doing?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is that not a clue? Like if God's not going to like hit you over the head and say like here I am because then everybody would believe in him. And there's very simplistic. I've had debates even with like famous atheists like Lawrence Kraus who's like self-declared militant atheist.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like the Oracle of Delphi, right? You know thyself. But I want to leave you with one last thing, which is just to say, just on this topic, it could be different, right? We could go down to the ocean and get some krill instead of the 7-Eleven. You know, it could be that we have no other taste buds. And, you know, Eric's talked the four dimensions of the vibration of your tongue, right? It could be. There's one, and it's just like not, you know, Memphis barbecue or whatever you like in your slim gym. It could be something, it could be very boring, similarly. What if that's a clue? Like, what if that's giving us evidence? Here's another clue. There are many animals, most animals have single monocolor vision. They only see in black and white intensity. They only have rods and no cones. We could be like that, but we're not.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the touchstone to use the ASAM, like what is your rubric to apprise if you have lived up to that 12-year-old, whatever-year-old Lex? Like, how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down? Or, like, I always think live to impress yourself. Like, I don't care if I have followers. Like, it's nice or whatever, but it's hedonic and it's just never ending because you'll always say the next level. But I think it's pretty damn cool that like I've gotten to go to these places, the South Pole, and I've done these things and I've made a family and I'm able to teleport my values into the future through my children. And I've had ideological children that I so by what metric have you not already A impressed yourself? And B, could you let yourself down? I don't want to say a therapist.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know there's a famous prayer, it's like, you know, God, you know, there's an old saying that one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be given a lot of money. You see it like happens with lawyers, like people that win the lottery or whatever or NFL football players after their career's over, they get they're broke, right? And I always like, God, please test me with money. You know, that'd be great. But in reality, you should never say I'm going to, I want what X person has unless you're willing to take everything and you'll find you won't want to take everything.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One About it your brand, your business, your spouse, your kids. I mean, parents can't constantly, I've known parents that have, Jim Simons, here's a perfect example. He's one of my oldest friends and mentors. He is one of the richest people on earth. Gulfstream, Mega Yon. This is all documented books about him. He lost two sons as adults. I hear people say, Oh, I'm so jealous of Jim Simons. Would you take everything? I don't know where he has that strength in his wife Marilyn and his first wife Barbara. I'm not like that. Some people are, there are angels that walk among us.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That. So, you want to increase your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high quality interstices between them. And I think in doing so, you make yourself fragile, not anti-fragile. And I think that is where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I want to do is let's call God good, right? That's where it comes from God good. Same words in German. And when we think about what is good, let's do those things that would devastate us. And a lot of that could be relationships. And there's a powerful concept from network theory, which is that the number of connections in a network, you know, I'm just saying it for your own. It grows as the square of the elements in the matrix in the number, right? So you think of a matrix with n people, you know person one, two, three, four, and then there's four other people. There's 16 different pairs, but half of them overlap. The diagonal is where you know each other, you know yourself. So, but that still grows as n squared. So those connections increase and decrease, right? You ever have two friends that are fighting and like you're kind of upset, even though you're not fighting with either one of them. So like a network grows like.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone who's a parent knows instantly what I'm talking about, like how to make your life a billion times worse. But there's no way to make your life a billion times better. And so thinking about that, now turning into the question of God's existence, I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God, to quote misquote Sam, but there's ways that you can become a believer in God. In other words, you could increase the Bayesian confidence level that there is some, and let's not call it God because that's afraid of term. Let's just call it some infinite source of goodness or beautiful power in the universe, right? Simple things can do that. You can increase your credulity in the goodness of life. And we have this bias as humans towards negativity, negativity bias, well-known fact.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This kind of thought like how many boats can you water ski behind? Like, you had twice as many followers. Now you got two million followers, whatever. It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Like once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more change and followers money, impact, women, whatever you want to make you have one more quanta of happiness, right? On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy. I could make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways. In other words, there's more space space to make your life unhappy than happy. And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness. So it's sort of like, yeah, it's an expression of entropy. And that what you should be doing in life is doing that which will cause you devastation if it goes away. Because those are the things that are where you're reducing entropy, like a kid.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've tried to take a little bit further than that because I think it's interesting meditation is like you're not like, oh, I'm happy and now like, oh, my kid came in and now I'm not happy. Like, no, like, you can be satisfied. Kurt Vonnegut said, like, you ever catch this? Sometimes Alexa, you're like walking around. You're like, life is freaking amazing. Like I'm happy. And Kurt Vonnegan said, you should say to yourself every time that happens, like a little mantra, like if this isn't goodness, if this isn't happiness, nothing is. Just remind yourself how awesome it is every breath, everything that you do when you make an impact, even some of the bad stuff that happens. Good. It's good. So Sam said that. And it made me think because I was like, well, what does it really mean to be happy? Because I can think of, I can think of about, you know, two or three ways that right now I could double my happiness, like win the lottery or whatever. Like I could double my happiness. There's only a few ways though, right? Like, you know, I had.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thought you had it just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris this past summer. And one of the things I liked about that conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation. And he said something that's really resonated with me, and I've been working around and trying to work on it my own way. But he said, like, you can never be happy. You can only become happy”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. There's something, but that should make us feel more precious. And I almost feel like discovering life on another planet, whatever, solar system, would cause a diminution of humanity. Like the one thing I do hold fast to from religion, I don't know where I am with God. Like, do I believe in God? I think that's an unanswerable question, but I have some thoughts about it. But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religion is that every human has infinite worth because we are in a religious capacity considered to be equal to God. In other words, we are gods not to be like, you know, but we can contemplate what God did. We have aspects of God. We have free will. God had free will if he exists. Again, I can't prove that God exists. Otherwise, you wouldn't have any credit for believing in God.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we should be humble in that way. I mean, again, another thing is Ever hear the saying we shared 99% of our DNA with chimps or bonobos or whatever? I share like pie more than that. You know, sometimes I wish we shared like 100%. That would be so much more interesting. Like, oh, well, there's 50% of a fruit fly or banana.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ever know, right? It has no wisdom, you know, wisdom, it means sapien. The word wisdom in Latin is sapient. We are wise. And by the way, do you know our real name is Homo sapiens sapien? So it's man who knows that he knows. Do you know what he knows? Do you know what the knowing is? That he's going to die. The only creatures that know that we are going to die. We don't know when we're going to die, but I have a cat, a fierce attack cat is beautiful. She doesn't know when she's going to die. Doesn't mean I'm more valuable.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And to answer your, I think you're wise to push back. And like, what does it matter what I'm doing? And I like to think about that because it's like, what is the value of what you're doing? Like, you have to answer that question, or else at the end of your life, you'll have these existential kind of crises. So when I think about like who I am, part of my identity is answering and asking scientific questions. For me, though, there is a religious kind of undercurrent that does undergird in some sense this quest. Again, I'm not like a practicing. I'm not like wearing yamaka, you know, like I'm not like full on into my birth religion, Judaism. But at the same token, I think as, you know, one of the things Einstein did say is that, you know, religion without science is blind or is lame and science without religion is lame. It's blind and lame. Anyway, the point is that you can't get meaning, you know, from just knowing facts. Like Wikipedia knows more than all of us.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think the problem, well, obviously, the simple statement to say It's much, much, much higher probability that life exists than technological life exists, right? I don't think we can argue that. It doesn't mean it's forbidden. Again, I'm not saying any of this is forbidden, not worth studying, not interesting.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's right. So I like the fact that that could happen and that you're holding a piece, you know, from a planetary body, one that couldn't support life as far as we know, but I could next time if you play nice and you come on my podcast someday, I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars. So Mars theoretically could support stuff, right? So, yeah, so I believe that there could be remnants of Earth in this. So that means there could be evolution. I don't think there's any chance that there's like people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff and proxies in church.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I guess again, I assume that because of this pan-Steramic process or whatever, that the probability is much, much greater than zero. I mean, it's not one, 100%, but it's much likelier than that, that at least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into the solar system, into the universe, right, into our galaxy.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think you're going to get meaning from it. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's not worth doing. I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning for life from science.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or mine it for I mean, I just see, like, there's a hundred million literal counter examples about it. I mean, right now there's like 700 million kids in poverty. And like, we just, how do we go about our life and just not deal with that? I mean, look, I put it aside. I eat hamburgers and, you know, in the hundred years I'll be canceled for being a, you know, a carnivore or whatever. But, you know, so obviously to get through life, you have to make certain compromise. You're not going to think about certain things. But I just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment. Like every time there's, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying this cool ass helicopter? We're looking for water. Like stipulate that water was there. Like I believe there was water. I think we should investigate and see what the geology was like.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know it was a press conference held by Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie Contact. Repurposed for that movie. And then there's this phosphorus life, the toxic life in the pools of Mono Lake. Many extremophile. We don't give a crap. We continue to, so why are we thinking that like our salvation from whence will our salvation come, as the Bible says? It's not going to change how we are. It's not going to magnify how I treat you or you treat me. And we're pretty knowledgeable people, you and I, compared to, you know, lay people.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you talking about? It was transformational. I'm like, I stipulate that life exists. Go down to the river. You know, I'm in San Diego. Go down to the Pacific Ocean. Scoop up a glass, you know, you're going to find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we doing to our earth? We're destroying it callously. We're like pumping crap into there. Like we have this toxic waste bill a couple months ago in San Diego. I couldn't go to the beach. Let me take it a step further. You know how many, you know how many people, I'm sorry, that you do know, but how many people died in the 20th century killed? These are advanced civils. This isn't slime mold. We kill. We maim. We harm. We hurt. We hate. I don't think anything would happen the next day. We go back to what we had. And I said, if that were in proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three times just in my professional career. Once in 1996, these Allen Land Hills meteorites in Antarctica saw like microbial respiration processes still.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know we fought a little bit. I'd love to debate them, and I think it'll be a lot of fun because we debate with love when I talk with Lee. I love him and he loves me, I think. Hope, but let me ask you a question. I asked this of him and Sarah on a clubhouse once. So, what do you think would happen the next day? Let's say we discovered life. Proxima Century B. It's just like slime mold like you got on your breeches or whatever. We discover it. What would happen the next day? And they were like, oh, this would be transformative. And I'm not trying to be like, you know, total Cassandra about this. But I said, I don't think anything would happen.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the 24th power different possibility. And that's just with eight. Like the moon has to be there. Jupiter has to be there. Dinosaurs had to be there. All the different things that we have to get to technological life. There's only 10 to there's 10 to the 22nd, we think, not Earth planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy. So that's a hundred times fewer than the probability to get 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in a thousand.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not every once in a while, every while. I claim that to get to sending people to the moon, our planet needed whales and dinosaurs, right? Like you don't make a solar panel from another solar panel. You made a solar panel from a factory that melted down glass, silica, aluminum, extruded that using fossil fuels. Where do those fossil fuels come from? Any civilization that's going to be a Dyson, you know, Kardashev's, do they have dinosaurs? Like, do they have prebiotic life? Do they have a great oxygenation event? Did they have a dimorphism between prokaryotic eukaryotic? All those hurdles, let's say you give each one, let's say there's eight hurdles, and each one of those has a probability of one in a thousand to go from, you know, eukaryotic, prokaryotic, whatever. Let's say that's a one in a thousand chance. I think it's like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever if you really do it. But let's say it's first generous nature, one in 10 to the three. Let's say there's eight of those hurdles. That means you have, yeah.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And maybe the existence of the earth life symbiosis is critical. I think, Sarah, you talked about Sarah Walker, that it's a planetary phenomenon, et cetera, et cetera. So doesn't that make it less like, in other words, like, not only do you need special life conditions to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be maintained under very specific circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon. And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby. You need an Earth and a moon system so that you don't get bombarded too early. And I always think like this, like technological life. I haven't said this before, really. So I'm just speaking. I usually like to write down before I say it's different things. But one of the things I thought about.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it did originate on Earth, my question for those that search for life outside the Earth is what if you had a letter from God? And the letter said, life didn't originate on Earth? Like, would you choose a different profession? Like it would seem hopeless. Like, in other words, we only have a sample of one. In fact, we only know of one conscious life form, let alone one planet that has life on it, right? What if you knew for sure it didn't start here? That means that like there's almost nothing about Earth that is originated. It didn't originate the life process. So to study purely the origin of life, not life itself, I think that's still fascinating. But how could we learn about the origin of member? You have to go from inanimate object to a living object, whatever that definition of life is. And I'm not an expert in many definitions. Max, Sarah, you know, many different definitions. But how do you actually go from inanimate to animate? It's a huge question”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life? I just simply think there's not enough time for Earth to seed life technological life throughout the galaxy. I don't think there's any evidence for that.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, please. And that's the exchange of genetic life form material from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth, but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting. How did life get here? And you've talked with many eminent people about that. I'm not going to add that much, but just thinking about the reverse process. Let's say life started on the earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe. Is there enough time for the whatever material went from Earth via panspermic direction, you know, spraying the love gun out into the universe, did that then have enough time to incubate and go on to a planet that could support it, certainly not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would require hundreds of millions of years, then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to Bach, from rocks to Rakhmanoff? I don't know, I can do this all day.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called. I know this is a PG-13. It's called panspermia.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Mars. You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route. Now, what's so interesting about that? Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of Earth can get there, some piece of Earth has some life forms on it, it could get there. And if that can happen in our solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy. So I'm actually not of the opinion that there is life elsewhere in the universe, at least technological life that we can see. I see this look of horror on your face. I view it. I am personally extremely pessimistic, would be extremely surprised.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered by the Apollo and NASA missions, you and I would be guilty of a felony right now because it's illegal to own pieces of the moon collected by the Apollo astronauts. So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston. This piece of moon rock was delivered via the old-fashioned way by gravity. So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteoroids. Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space. And it will then orbit the common moon Earth system. And it will then eventually enter our atmosphere. And if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact. And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth and they sliced it up. And then it was delivered via U.S. Postal Service to my house. So you can buy these pieces and actually can buy a piece.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will make a huge impact scientific. Let's hope for the best. Let's assume it does succeed. It's launched in a couple weeks. And when it does, it will transform our understanding of, you know, we just discovered not only like extrasolar planets that have moons on them and asteroid belt, we discovered an extrasolar planet in another galaxy. This will be able to see crazy stuff like that, spectroscopy, imaging. But it'll be able to go back farther in time such that we will be doing like Hubble did some cosmology. I measure the Hubble constant. That was its key project when it was designed and launched. But because it is an optical telescope, it's sensitive to more close-in redshifts, so shorter distances. Now, James Webb is much, much higher redshift. It can probe the darker, deeper, distant universe.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insured, but so what? You're not going to get back those 20 years of people. Let's start building it again. Like, they didn't build two copies of it.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes here is that we don't know what we're going to discover. I never think that's a good idea to spend billions of dollars on something. Like you should have some guaranteed low-hanging fruit, and then there should be swinging for the fences. And I think in this case, it was really everything is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure. If that telescope, which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly and then orient themselves a million miles from Earth beyond the Earth moon distance by a factor of four and still transmit telecommunication back to the Earth, get solar energy, keep it away from the sun. You don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye. And you do that and you cover, it's going to be phenomenal. For science, for sure, if it works. There are a lot of people think, you know, it's so risky. NASA sunk so much of their budget. It ate up, you know, and what if it does fail? I mean, there's no guarantee. Yes, it's.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in, you'll show every speck of light except for one, 4,000 blobs of light. There's one star in our galaxy. The rest are galaxies. Now, that image is less than one-tenth of your fingernail held out at arm's length. It contains 4,000 galaxies. So now you can figure out how many galaxies there are in the whole sky just by seeing how long does it take you to move your fingernail over the whole sky. So we have another couple hours. No, so it comes out to be that's how we get 500 billion or more galaxies. Now it's not exact to the galaxy, but it's a good order of magnitude estimate, maybe even better. Hubble produced that. And it was basically serendipitous. They pointed to some dark blank piece of sky what they thought was blank and they saw it. Same thing that happened with the CMB. They were looking for something they didn't find. Same thing they found when they were looking for the deceleration of the universe and found it was accelerating. So when I...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sufficiently different from what I do in my field that it's incredibly interesting to me because I have no horse in that race. And so I'm not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever. So I can purely be an advocate and an aficionado of science. It is in some sense the successor to Hubble. It will do things that Hubble can't do. It will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral kind of artistic level that Hubble had. What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did? The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation, storms and imaging of these twisted deep sky galaxies, those resonated with the public.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it solves two problems. And I'm not saying it's correct, we don't know yet. But are there observations of, and so dark energy is manifest today? It's manifest in properties we see in supernova explosions, et cetera, et cetera. We see the effects of accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy. Is dark energy a constant or does it vary? That has to vary in order for this theory to be true because that eventually has to decay so that the universe can not support itself and collapse again, again, classically. So we could use low energy phenomena. It's hard to think of supernova as being a low energy phenomenon, but we use that as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or is it a constant? That's an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to leverage them So, one of the alternative theories of cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring, as the Big Bang and inflation are, is these balancing models. Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called a quantum field. And that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound, and the universe starts expanding. During that process, the expansion is governed by what's called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists, that's called the Higgs boson. Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field. That field then later does double duty and it becomes dark energy.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To operate it. So, like, do we build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier? Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility? And the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is it costs about 10% per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity. And in this case, so in 10 years, it'll cost double the cost. So never believe a number, whether it's from our mutual friend, Harry or whoever, don't believe the number. Double it. And then say, is it worth it? And so building a solar system size accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that? Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the number of large extrasalutions? Can we do that? People are working on it. I think it's fascinating.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever, it's probably pipe tobacco, and he put it in the beam, like blocked out the orange, and it didn't make white light come out. He showed color is a synthesis. It's a combination. He didn't use the large hadron collider to do that. You know, he used a very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics and a different kind of color physics than in quantum chromodynamics. But nevertheless, can we find things like that? Are we spending way too much time and energy thinking about the future circular collider, which even if it gets built would cost $30 billion just to build. By the way, anytime from now on, if I leave you with anything, anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number, always double it, maybe triple it.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Nobel Prize in a Heartbeat. So these guys had to wait 40 years. Imagine the excruciating pain, what got him through it? He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it. He felt like, hell yeah, I earned it. He has that swagger. And what I'm looking for in this assay is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now because I don't know if I'm going to be here in 40 years. I hope I am. Can we bypass? Can we get shortcuts to what's called the low energy regime? And to me, that's what's interesting. Like, what can we do now? I don't care. Like, Isaac Newton came up with color theory and he did something really interesting. Next time I come, I'll bring you some prism. See, what did he do? He took a white light. He took a prism from the sun, actually. He put it through a slit, put it through a prism, and it made a beautiful rainbow like you've seen. And then he took another prism and he put it upside down, like, you know, dark side of the moon or whatever. And the light went through the first prism, turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow went into a prism and came out of white light. That's pretty cool. Then he took a popsicle stick.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying you're guaranteed to win a lottery Here's this wallet, Bitcoin wallet. It's going to guarantee to have as much money, it's stable coin, whatever. You're going to win it 40, but you have to wait 40 years. To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years. You wouldn't leave your house. You would cover it, go out in a bubble wrap hat. You wouldn't go out with that 20 masks on, right? Your whole life would be consumed with. Now imagine everyone's telling you you're going to win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than the lottery. I mean, many people, prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize, and every person who wins a prize that's worth three times the money, like Malda Sena, he would trade the breakthrough prize.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only two people in this book of Nine Nobel laureates who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome were two theorists, Frank Wilchech and Sheldon Glashow. You know, Frank is it pretty interesting. I know eventually we're going to talk about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank. Frank invented this theory along with his advisor and another third person in the early 1970s, which from 1974 through when he was at Princeton, all the way up until 2004 when he won the Nobel Prize. Every day of his life, imagine this, Lex. You're going to have this startup. Actually, someone tells you you're going to win the lottery. You're going to win the lottery in 40 years. What becomes your singular focus in your life from now until the next 40 years”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said to him, and he makes the point that oh, the atomic theory, you know, that unleashed the nuclear age, and that, you know, could lead to planetary destruction. But I make the point pushing back with love on him. And I say, look, nobody looked into the equations, you know, like Fermi didn't look into all these equations of the unification, which still doesn't exist, by the way. We spent all this time, Lex, and I don't know why it is. It's a phenomenon purely in theoretical physics. People are looking for the toe and they're overlooking the gut. In other words, they're spending all this time in the theory of everything that God, and there's this gut that unifies the three stronger forces. We don't have a single theory for that. And people like Lash out, they've tried and failed at it.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this isn't talking tails out of school, but I mean, he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like, you know, he's had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving trolling of Elon. Why are you spending all this money to get to Mars? We should be spending money on interdimensional.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theorist and experimentalist, observers, cosmologists, astronomers. We all were get together, and we're just going to do it out of a spirit of love. But if it's just like, oh, this guy's like a loud map, I don't have time for that. I really don't. I don't think it's interesting way to spend my time.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, oh, you have a time to do. And I love Sabina, and I've actually promoted my show on her, and I love her, and she's doing a wonderful job, but you have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish, and you couldn't have spent, you know, 30 minutes, two hours. I, Brian Keating, have done as an experimental cosmologist. And I have enough to say, like, this is interesting. It's part of the assayer project. And actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people. They're very Louis Alvarez Gomez at Sunny Stonybrook, Simon Center for Geometrical Physics. So he and I are running this seminar. Hopefully this summer, we're going to reenact the famous shelter island conferences in 1900s, where Feynman got together and they calculated the lamb shift. But what did that feature, the harmony, the resonant minds behind the best experimentalists in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics is now teaching us tremendous things about lower dimensional systems that can be applied.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theers of everything, some of these things, you know, look so fundamentally now, I might disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I'm capable of. But let me say one thing, which is experimental. But let me say one thing. I understand probably a third of what Eric's talking about with GU. I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics. I understand some group theory, fiber bone. I can get a little of APH theory. But I also understand what I don't understand. And I understand that there are people like Witt and Maldesaina, Nema, other people that can understand it, and they're not trying to understand Sabina. She can understand it. She makes all these, you know, oh, I don't understand it. I don't want to understand it. I don't have time. And then she makes a video, a music video, you know, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source