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

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“It's pretty good. It's tweets of God Sweet of that. So, if you look at that. You have to go in there. Again, you have to go in with some swagger. You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of humility. So he's doing something. He comes from outside of academia. Now, if he rails against, I'm talking about Eric now. If he's just railing, oh, the system, and I'm not going to publish because F that, and that's only created by greedy journals, I don't think he's doing himself any favors. On the other hand, if he's shopping it, if he's talking it, if he's willing to expose it to criticism and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps, but in the sense of like they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital T, what they're trying to do is take down, hopefully, those people aren't out there. But on the other hand, looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has courtesy, he will look at Wolfram. He will look at Lisi, who's one of his closest friends. I mean, he calls him as M.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't play dice. God doesn't play Einstein's mentions of God yet. Yeah. And then Stephen Hawking says when we get M theory understood, we'll know the mind of God. That's the title of Kaku's book, The God Particle, the God Equation. Do any of them really believe in God? Is that a prerequisite? No, I'm not saying that. But the point being, you're talking about something that has to do with God, right? I mean, where else do you go from there? I mean, I think God for now enjoys a little bit more, you know, kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right? So God's got a pretty good H index himself.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's detrimental. I think doing that, first of all, I think there's an element of almost snarkiness because none of these scientists are believing Gnostics. They're not theists, right? So they're using it as kind of a stand-in and they always talk about Einstein and it was like a Spinozen and he wasn't a theist.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true in there. Look, inherent in all of this is an underlying grandiosity. Look, how could you talk about doing what Kaku said on here and elsewhere? You know, we're looking for the umbilical cord that connects our universe to another universe that will then reveal in a one-inch equation that will surely win a Nobel Prize, the mind of God.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge range is that imagine Cumran comes up, and again, he's just some nobody, but he actually, you know, he doesn't have a profile. He's not at Harvard, that's zero H index or whatever Eric's is. Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are trying?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The strength theory, yeah, that M theory is correct. I mean, here's what let me just say Hawking. Hawking gets the ultimate pass, Hawking would say things like M theory, there's zero evidence for it. I mean, there's the famous meme that went around this weekend, like, what does string theory predicted? And it's nothing. And by the way, that's actually wrong. I talked to Cumran, and you talked to Cameron. Carmen says that string theory does make predictions. It predicts the mass of the electron lies between 10 to the minus 1, Planck mass and 10 to the minus 30 Planck mass. Okay, whatever, our electron.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It. Anyway, getting back to that, why is there not the same skepticism? Is it because Malthusena, who's an eminent physicist, obviously, has published realistic work and done, what about Witten? Witten gets a pass. I mean,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information paradox loss issue. What did he concede it based upon Maldusan's calculation in ADS CFT and five-dimensional wormholes above? Is any of that? First of all, we don't live in an ADS universe. Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable, if they exist even these are devices. Kip Thorne is popularized for movies. Like to say that this is something on which I will concede a bet. Now, obviously, Hawking was doing that for publicity. Why does Maldesena? And he's got a pretty high H index, pretty well respected guy at IAS. Love talking to him. Brilliant guy. By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work on gauge theory and economics. Originally, and one, I believe the breakthrough. I can't remember exactly what, but partially, you know, credit some of the work that he did, which appears there's a footnote to Pia Milani's thesis and some conversations with Erica, I think.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be falsified a couple of decades later. By Michaelson and Morley. And in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bath water. Or imagine Twitter, imagine a twit storm, Clerk Maxwell, at Clerk Maxwell one would get. It would be brutal, right? And to the detriment, and that might even set back history. Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing. Churn Simons, a lot of these things are very fantastic. But Wilex, why does Ed Witten Why does Juan Maldesena? Let me give a good example. Juan Gas, brilliant guy, I love him.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me use an example. So you know of James Clerk Maxwell, and he invented the laws of electromagnetism, which is a first example of a unification principle ever displayed by the human mind in history. Purely mathematics, unifying completely disparate phenomena. In one case, electricity, charges, static electricity, lightning, and the other magnets, bar magnets, currents, et cetera, unified them. You know what he did? I like to do a thought experiment. Imagine Twitter exists 1864. Maxwell's working away. And he goes, I have this wonderful idea with fluctions and inductive virtue and blah, blah. And it revolves around this thing called an ether. And by the way, there are these little vortices and gears. And the gears have these planetary things and they suck up vortices. And the vortices determine the density of the electromagnetic potential. You'd be like, this guy's a freaking non moron. And what would you do? Come on, honestly, you would say everything this guy does is wrong. I mean, he's got this idiotic idea.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, he has a gauge model for currency exchanges between different nations that is explanatory. It's not. Is this something, in other words, it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purposes?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics works. So there's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say he or she, they really know the history of physics very well. Physics is always lovely. Like Sean Carr always jokes about physicists should never talk about history. But it's more than that. So Eric has certainly contributed in finance specifically and gauge theory and economics and inflation dynamics and the non-cosmological.”
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 encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe he can't, but there's no other way than to try. And so I've prepared a whole curriculum for Zev to basically bypass all of undergraduate. To his credit, he's not earns all the credit. He's learned it to a level that matches many of my graduates.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard to pull off like three projects, three telescopes, three whatever, right? So look for arbitrary, could be four, could be two, right? But the point is look at Eric. So how many things has he contributed to and made pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different people? I would say he's been right many times. Does that mean he's infallible, that he's ineffable? No, of course not. For me, so what I'm saying is I get a little bit of the joy of kind of learning something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do, mathematics, gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry topology that he's interested in. But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I've told him, I'm going to turn your son into an experimentalist to spite you. He is not going to be a theory. Zev is not.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a documented effect. And that happens in project planning and project management. It's a very, very important thing to guard against as a manager of a big project. With Eric, it's interesting because with him, first of all, we relate extremely well on a friendship level and very close. He does remind me a lot of my father and I've told him that, you know, just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as in his case as a father, you know, the father kind of figure that I didn't have a sense, but that he is, he is a true lover of life. He knows he's got a huge platform. He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does. And, you know, I jokingly say, well, it's one thing. Like, how do you know Lex that someone's an expert? Experts say there's a good rule Ray Dalio writes about in principles. He says, an expert is someone who's done something three times successfully. Like, you can do something correctly once. You could do something correctly.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented everything from planning telescopes to dieting. So there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're going to feel. You don't need to know this, but you don't deal. But losing five pounds, I said, oh, I'm going to lose five pounds and I'm going to be able to run a minute faster. So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that I get a little bit of that thrill and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually complete the task that will take me to that goal.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it got it right, my whole test of it was a good podcast. Because how do you know? Like, podcast has been around what, 12 years? How do we know as podcasters were doing a good job? Like sometimes someone say, that was the best interview I ever had, but that doesn't happen that often, at least for me. But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card in that little guy and the Zoom didn't work, would you do it again? And I think if you say yes to that, that was a good podcast. Yeah.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember Benjamin the Donkey? And he's talking in the pig. I forget the pig's name. You probably know. Anyway, the pig says to him, You've got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail. You're so lucky. I got this short, curly little squiggly thing does jack squat. Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail? And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies. But you know what? I'd rather not have the tail if I didn't have the flies. So I ask you, as I've asked Eric, is it worth it? You know, you've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies. I'm not saying in a negative way. I'm just saying you get unwanted distractions, dopamine, you know, it's kind of the highlight, the spotlight effect. It's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone. And I think, you know, first of all, I'd love to know how you answer that because that's something I don't feel I can.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subscribe to the peer review process. He thinks that is anathema to the way sciences invest interest in public and journals, et cetera, et cetera. I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable. I think you have to learn from your critics. One of my conversations with John Mathery talks about loving your critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism that their criticism goes to your heart. And not being so open to their compliments, that their compliments go to your head. It's a very tough Silla in Charybdis to walk.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been out of the academic world for a long time. And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place in order to get anything through. And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it. If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door as the expression goes. That's completely untrue. That doesn't even happen with mousetraps. I mean, you know how many freaking mousetrap types there are? It's like, no, they don't beat a path year. You have to sell that freaking thing. You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Eli. I have never, I've had one paper out of 200 papers I've published in peer-reviewed journals. I've only had one, half a percent published with no referees comments. In other words, publish like dream, submitted it. It happened to be in a prestigious journal. So I was pretty psyched about that. But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal. And I think he doesn't see, first of all, he doesn't.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other words, it's always taking down the dragon. It's always taking down the kung fu master, right? That you get the hit points from D&D. You get their hit points. You take their cards. You get their risk tokens from Kamchaka. And thinking about with Eric, it's like because what he's doing is so aspirational. It is grandiose in a good sense. What he's trying to do is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry and stuff embedded in it. He's trying to meld that. It has very unusual features in that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions. It uses new mathematical objects that he's invented. And look, I had him on my show. I've talked with him. We've had consultations with other physicists where he'll come down and I have a visitor's office and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there. And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists. Eric's”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors. Some came from a lay audience and some came from trained scientists who are no longer, you know, maybe practicing in universities. I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me because I look at what he's trying to do. And it was always, the vitriol would always come with some element of ad hominem. And maybe that's his personality, maybe that engenders this or whatever. Maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency. You know, I always get these emails. Professor Keating, I have a new theory. Einstein was wrong. I'm going to prove it. I'm not good at math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with you. Oh, thanks. Have you read my books?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what if it's not? I made a joke when they were on. I was like, how many theories of everything can there be? You know, Highlander, there can be only one, you know, I don't know. Maybe.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has taken the time to try to understand it. Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White's theory. And I don't see the same graciousness extended from them. I'm sorry to say.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your respect, so there is one person. Who does take time and is what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks, he obviously has invested interest in his own theory, and it's Eric. Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics, and he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving others. And I've witnessed this and I've had, look, first of all, I think debate is pointless. Like, I don't know about you, but if you've ever voted like, oh, I saw this debate. And, you know, because Trump did so badly, now I'm going to vote for Biden. No, it never happened. You almost never change anybody's mind unless you debate with love, unless you have almost like we're going to win together like the red team approach in the military. They're trying to win a war. So they may disagree on the tactics day to day, but the strategy, we have to win this war. I love you and I want to protect you. I don't see that in very many of these physicists from Kaku. I almost see it. It's embarrassing in some ways because they'll almost mock with the exception of Eric. Garrett's interesting, you know, his theory is, you know, people have a lot of issues very technical. But Eric.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these men and some women are making these fantastic brilliant, beautiful ideas, and they're not even looking at what their neighbors doing”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't only talk your own book. You can't only understand your own pet theory of everything. You can't only say, well, I only understand string theory and I don't have time for these other theories, or as if it's beneath me to even go into Garrett Lisi or Eric Weinstein or Stephen Wolfram or aspects of M-theory, et cetera, et cetera. And there are some that say, why do we give string theory so much of an advanced pass when there are actually predictions it's made that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics like the dark energy should be negative and we see it as positive like that's a huge strike you know if you told somebody here's my tenure application and what if it wasn't done by you know maldesena and you know witten and folks like that i don't know if it would have had the traction the endurance the resiliency that's had and that worries me because”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are. That's not my job. You're supposed to tell me if string theory is correct. What should it predict if it's true? One big problem, which I should say that to be a good assayer, I think you have to be worldly in the sense of worldly and curious, like we were talking about before with you and Joe.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And the best scientists, the best physicists were both experimentalists and theorists, or at least that they, if they were experimentalists, they understood the theory well enough to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions. Or if they were theorists, like Galileo, like Einstein has patents for things that he invented. And then some of his work led to the laser and the maser. So he had practical, it wasn't just pure airy fairy, you know, quantum reality and expanding universe. So in this case, what I want to do is look at, you know, there's 10 different theories of everything or cosmological models. They make predictions. They have advantages and disadvantages. And I just asking the question, why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals? Why don't we have updates every time an experiment comes out, we can update our credulity in that experiment or that theory rather, based on the results of the experiment. And we shouldn't do it after the fact, or as Michi Okaku has said.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Einstein and Rosen's paper. So it's fascinating. What should the assayer do? He or she should look at these theories, look what things they explain that already exist, and look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build experiments to test them.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become known as the Einstein equations. So he explained why Mercury did that. And it was known since the time of Newton that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way. So he didn't predict it. He retraded it. That's fine. But at some point, you should come up with something new that's uniquely predictive of your theory. As I just said, the theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune is actually a valid theory. It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan. And so if he had kept doing that, maybe, you know, maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions that he would later reject. Like he rejected the existence of gravitational waves. Ew and Barry talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. It was a one peer-reviewed paper that he had. He used to send back in those days, he sent a letter to nature, physical review, publish this, you know, let me know how much it cost. And they got it rejected because he said you can't detect gravitational waves. He corrected a math error.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blah blah blah, they'll say that it's compatible after the fact. And it's not so bad, right? Because look, what did Einstein do with GR, general relativity? The first thing he did was not predict something new. He looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury, and he saw it was behaving strangely, and people had said, oh, that's because there's another planet hiding behind the sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit of the planet Mercury. It's called Vulcan. That was one approach. That's kind of like the dark matter approach where it's like there's a clump of matter that we can't see that's influencing the planet that we can't see. And we use that to divine and intuit the existence of the other planet. That's actually how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior of the planet Uranus. So Neptune was dark. We couldn't see it. It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way. And that led to La Verrier discovering the planet, predicting where this planet should be found. So it had a good heritage in physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn't see that worked. But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping and bending of spacetime due to the presence of matter.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of my favorite videos. And you can see you can replicate. You can't replicate, you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes it. In other words, hardware is kind of like the non-fungible token that's ultimate minted, you know, limited edition, the book, the compass book. And so it's very expensive. That means you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing one of these theories of everything. You have to have good intuition for it. And lately, what I've seen is not predictions, but retradictions. So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will come out with a measurement. And then so-and-so will say, oh, this is, you know, this is compatible with string theory, or G minus 2 of the muon. It has these bizarre properties, fifth force, string theory predicts this. String theory solves this neutrinos, sterile neutrinos, large hadron collider bottom or B experiment.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's just like it's just rotten with them. And I think it's great. Theory is kind of like software and I'm not denigrating software at all, but like you can create a lot of software. You can make a quine and it'll make its own quine. And like you can make infinite amounts of software.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth, you know, millions of lira or whatever, right? So it was an incredibly important job. And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable. What I want to do in the assay or project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything. I said recently, you know, we should give a Nobel Prize to someone who doesn't come up with a theory of everything because there's just”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing like a Ducati's worth not, I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right? So it's a lesson. Like there are value in physical, you know, non-fungible tokens, this original non-fungible token. But then a third book is called The Assayer. So what is an assayer? So assayers were kind of like these alchemists, you know, physicists, chemists that would be around a court. And every so often for the treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script or paper money. And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold that they knew to be gold and do some kind of semi-non-destructive evaluation of the purported object, the metal that was supposed to be gold. So they would take these pieces of gold, theoretically gold, and they would rub it on something called a touchstone. Touchstone was a special piece of rock, granite, whatever. It has no intrinsic value. It's just a piece of rock. But with that,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of which is called the military compass. And this is an interesting book from my blockchain and your blockchain aficionados. In this book, he talks about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but an actual slide roll. It's basically a slide roll. And it's a manual. It's like, imagine if your phone came with a manual nowadays they don't, right? But this was a manual for how to use this slide roll, which is enormously important. And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples. It's a brilliant book. One of the examples is how do you convert money? So he does a money converge, currency conversion between Ducati and Florentine Ducati and Scuti and whatever, you know, Lyra, whatever. He does all these currency conversions. One copy of this book, or maybe two exist, first printings from 1600 still exist. If Galileo had just kept those in his family, they're worth $100 million. Nowadays, you can't get a scootie. A scooty's worth.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't exist. So I said, let's do it ourselves. And so we did it. And hopefully, it'll be out on Galileo's birthday, which is February 15th, 2022. There'll be a ripe 457. But that's not the only one of his books. Galileo wrote many books”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three forwards. One of them is written by Albert Einstein, in which he says Galileo was not only one of the greatest scientists in history, this is Einstein telling Galileo, but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history. That forward is read by Frank Wilcek, who you've had, Jim Gates, who you've also had. He reads the translation, Stillman Drake, who's a renowned scientific translator, and then Fabiola Giannatti, she reads the introduction and dedication from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany and some of the different introductions that Galileo himself had. It's such a thrill to be able to do it. I only randomly found out because I had to, I wanted to study it, and it's like 500 pages long. And I was like, let me get the audiobook because I'm an audio medium kind of guy.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sapio is a friend of mine in the University of Manchester named Lucio Picciarello. He's an Irish guy, but he has an Italian. No, no, he's a full-blooded Italian. But they all speak English and Italian. I only speak. And the forwards are written by, so one forward in this place has three forwards, which is like a 12-word. Okay, the forwards are in the joke. That was a good one. The forward.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then there's this guy Simplicio, the simpleton, and he espouses the words of the Pope. So you can imagine like, you know, you're working in the Putin's government or you're working in whatever. And all of a sudden you're kind of putting the words of like the fool, literally calling the fool, but you're using the words of the all supreme powerful being on earth at that time as the Vatican church, especially for an Italian like Galileo. So he wasn't as brilliant, you know, politically as he was astrophysically and otherwise.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this book was written 1632. It was written, and it was the one that caused him to go into house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured. And that book laid out his arguments for what was called the Copernican or the non-parapatic Aristotelian, etc. notion of the planetary dynamic. And eventually he was forced to recant that he believed in it. And allegedly he said he still believes the Earth moves. Anyway, so we're making that, it's written in the form of a trialogue. It's actually called the dialogue with its three people. There's one named Salviati, who is espousing Galileo's notions about how the heavens were orchestrated. And Salviati means like the salvation, the Savior. Then there's a middleman, Segrado. So Carlo Ravelli is playing Salvati, brilliant one. I am playing Sagredo, who's like an intelligent interlocutor. I'm kind of just, I can appreciate Aristotle. I can appreciate.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So as it sloshed around, he claimed that was what now has nothing to do with that. The moon over there, the moon pulls differentially on the earth and the earth's ocean that causes the oceans to bulge slightly towards and away from where the moon is. And the moon is actually the source of the earth's tides. It has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the sun. So he was totally wrong about that. He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars when we know it's made of gas, dust, nebulae, and things like that. So he had a fair share of blunders. Now, one thing I always kind of make note of, and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola Giannatti, Frank Wilchek, and Carlo Ravelli and my friend Lucio Piccarillo, the first ever audiobook of one of Galileo's dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, but it was in error.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of an oven, it has some temperature, 3 Kelvin, a thousand Kelvin, whatever. If you're moving towards you, the photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue shifted hotter and the ones behind me will be redshifted. I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter or energy where you are, and it's an extension of the Doppler effect. So we actually make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rest. Anyway, so you can do it. But Galileo said, no, no, no, I'm not going to wait for that. I have other proofs for it. One of which is that the Earth has tides and the tides come in and out twice a day, high tide and low tide. And he made the analogy because the Earth is moving around the sun, say this is the sun here, and it's moving around the sun, but it's also rotating on its axis. See how the water is slashing up and down?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there are many ways to do it. I mean, obviously, you could take a spaceship, park it at the North Celestial Pole of our solar system, and just watch what happens. But obviously that wasn't how it was discovered in the late 1700s. So it's called aberration. So if you look at stars as the Earth orbits around the Sun, the position of the stars will shift slightly because of the tilt of the Earth and because the Earth is in motion around the Earth. And because the Earth has a trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the Sun, the stars will trace out little tiny ellipses, and those will correspond to the fact that we're moving if they're at infinite distance, which we assume that they are. They're not, really. But for all intents and purposes on the scale of the solar system, they're infinitely far away. So that's called stellar aberration. And that was the first way it was discovered. And actually, we still use that. We have to correct for that effect when we measure the cosmic microwave background because imagine you're inside.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not and much harder is to prove that the earth goes around the sun. In fact, that's extremely hard to prove. And almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD on the final exam, I kind of like to just, you know, give them a little bit of humility because I think to be a good scientist, you need to be humble. You need to have a little humility. And you need to have swagger. You need to feel like a little cocky. Like I could do this. I can do this thing that Einstein, by definition, couldn't do. I'm going to attempt it. I'm going to attempt to do what was impossible just a generation ago.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's actually not trivial to do that. But most of my students, graduate students, can prove that the Earth is round or explain how the Earth”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The earth being not located at the center of the solar system and the sun being the center, so called Copernican hypothesis. And he would use as evidence very, very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong, basically. And in fact, we weren't able to prove that the Earth orbited around the Sun. And I ask you, can you prove the Earth is not flat? No, well, you're a flat Earther anyway. But I asked my graphics.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge impossible to believe blunders in some sense. It's too bad because he could have had a good career, as I would say. And Galileo was like that too. In other words, he would fall victim to, I think, this confirmation bias that all scientists have to guard their lives against their careers, their brands, their reputations against, which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove for one reason or another, or the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it in order to bolster your confidence. And both are equally intoxicating. Confirmation biases is a hell of a drug because it really reinforces this notion, which is partially sunk cost. You put so much time, effort, money, reputation into it, you don't want to be wrong and go back on it. And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive about things such as, you know,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero, the kind of all around scientists that I would love to approach the logarithm of Galileo. He was not only a phenomenal scientist, he was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, a philosopher. And back then, they didn't have distinctions between scientists and physician was like a physicist. And he would indulge of fancy thinking about phenomena such as the Earth's tides or the composition of the Milky Way. And what's interesting about Galileo is that he was almost as wrong often as he was right. And Galileo was not alone like this. I always say like Einstein had at least seven Nobel Prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true. But he also had seven, you know,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source