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

“I think that really does a disservice. And Jim Gates said, you know, he's like, Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is science that is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists, often from minorities or women, that you have to be like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly. No, he wasn't. He wasn't bad at math. That's all nonsense. But he said that you know when he said he attributed his success to Alex? He said, I never asked my dad what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't. Because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20 years later as a 26-year-old, obviously, in Switzerland. And in so doing, by delaying when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid. And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible, ineffitable, omniscient.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were many levels and there were people, you know, me warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. So there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but the public never knows this. Think it's so I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of doling out large amounts of science funding that when you you should keep kind of an option in other words you should have money for publicity fine have money for your press conference but hold in reserve in a bond to be used hopefully never but if it's to be used an equal fund for the retraction if it should occur”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excitement. And I often note that this is a problem in what I call the science media complex because oftentimes you'll see things like past Gessar Seager. Venus life exists, and that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And what the work that she's doing or her colleagues are doing, or Clara was on your show as well. And that will be on front page New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego Union Tribune. It'll be above the fold. Make headlines around the world. And then six months, 12 months later, as is the case for us, retraction. Page C-17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know, and underneath the personal, so we have a problem in science that the, you know, if it explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment. This happened with the earlier discovery of so-called Martian life discovered in Antarctica, which was announced after peer review. We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made the announcement. We had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complicated, yes, exactly. It's a little school up there. And so they ended up making this announcement that we had discovered the aftershocks of inflation. We had detected the gravitational waves, shaking up the CMB, and on that day past Lex Friedman podcast back when it was called Artificial Intelligence. Max Tagmark said, goodbye universe, hello, multiverse, and hello Nobel Prize. He saw that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves, but of the multiverse, goodbye universe, hello multiverse.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember this at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, there was an announcement. There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience. And the Bicep 2 team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it. In fact, in the announcement, the first person they mention, besides, you know, thank you all for being here was me and my team at UC San Diego, although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference because that.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've done enough dad jokes. My quota's up. So I'm taking this object seriously. All of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact, forming planets is very inefficient. And so there's a lot of schmutz left over, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules like iron is used in compass needles, right? They're magnetized. magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for as if the compass needles get all aligned that's like the polarization of of the dust grain it's like that filt that polarizing filter that means light polarized like this will get absorbed and light polarized like this will go through so it's absorbing it's making 100 polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light source and that's what happened and what we ended up claiming we on march 17th and i'm sure if you were there you might”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some of that made its way to the crust, the iron made its way to the crust. Some of that your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin molecules. And hemoglobin has iron particles in it. It's quite amazing substance. Without it, we wouldn't have our red blood. We wouldn't exist as we are.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, after oxygen. Yeah, I think Priestley and others, the Dalton discovered it in the 1700s. No, helium was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and called Fraunhofer lines in the solar spectrum. But when it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat. In other words, there's heat left over from fusing, as you know, the son of a plasma physicist. He fused to a hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy, plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future, and it always will be. No, no, hopefully it'll come much sooner than that. And so doing trying to make iron, it takes more energy, doesn't give off enough energy. Star collapses, explodes. And what does it spray out into the cosmic interstellar medium? It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff. Luckily for us, because some of that coalesced and made the core of the earth onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went there at night. No, helium means Helios is the god of the sun. It was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope like 150 years ago. It wasn't discovered like when oxygen and iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent comer to the pure activity.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And microscopic grains, and then there's a fair number of intermediate sized particles. It turns out this little guy here is the end product of a collapsing star that explodes in what's called a supernoma, type 2 supernova. So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei protons into neutrons into helium nuclei. And then from there, it can make other things like beryllium and briefly make beryllium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron and nickel. Iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier. So the star forms goes inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun. I don't know. Did you know? That's why it's called helium.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the 30th is a billion. So we're outpacing Moore's law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos. And they don't have to deal with, you know, in the semiconductor fabric factory in Santa Clara, California. They don't have to deal with meteorites and things like coming into the laboratory. It's a clean room. It's pristine. They can control everything about it, right? We can't control the cosmos. And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed planets, asteroids, meteoroids, things that didn't coalesce to make either the Earth, the moon, the planet Jupiter, or its moons, or get sucked into them and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera. The rest of it is falling and it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God, chicksalub-sized, you know, impact or, you know, progenitors that will take out all life on Earth. But there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot more to it, but there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal. First of all, when you look at the signal, the signal, if inflation took place, big if, but if it took place, the signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature itself. So a few nano Kelvin. The CMB is a few Kelvin. signal from these B modes would be a few nano Kelvin. It's astonishing to think Penzias and Wilson, 1965, measured something that's a billion times brighter. And that was what 60 years ago, let's call it 60 years ago since they discovered it. Moore's Law, you're more expert than that. Let's call it every two years. So you're talking about like 2 to the 30th power doubling or something like that at that. So let's call it two to the 20th or something like that. So that's like only 2 to the 10th is a thousand. All right, correct me if I'm wrong. 2 to the 20th is a”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant, the density of the universe, the neutrino content, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a tendency to kind of look a little bit, they're like not all astronomers or astrophysicists are equal. They're all equal, but some are more equal than others. So we have kind of a prejudice, a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein. We're not using like, you know, Boltzmann. We're thinking of the biggest possible pictures. In so doing, you can actually become blinded to otherwise obvious effects that people would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal, we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately. We're using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way, and then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a microwave format to detect the characteristic two-fold symmetry pattern of under rotation. That's the technical way that we undergo it.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny, you know, I wrote these books, and I don't know about you, but when you get all these books, I'm sure you get books, people send you books. They always come in these dust jackets, right? I was like, what the hell is a dust jacket? Like, how much dust is raining down at any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This from is Russian tidiness galore. But in a normal household, how much dust is raining down? It's not really until I wrote a book. And I realized, you know, I'm writing a story about the origin of the universe, the prologue, you know, to the cosmos. Dust is going to cover this story. It was actually, it's actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between the cosmological and the astrophysical. So what does that mean? So astrophysics is broadly speaking, the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena, cosmology is concerned with the origin, evolution, composition of the universe as a whole, but it's not really concerned with stars, galaxies.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can I do this better? Maybe there's some blockchain and they could like VIN transfer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that is a good.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blow them out of the water Russian. So, can you is it, or should, in other words, should we invest our energy in getting the half-life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity for kids? Or should we try to reset the dopamine hit? And then, you know, I don't know. It's an open question.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five or six. No, I'm trying to get you a laugh, but you're not gonna laugh. But anyway, no, it's true. So somewhere you lose 30 to 50%.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in reality, there is a kind of like dopamine rush that you get from it. But what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it? So yeah, I do feel like we have to find a way to nucleate that. I don't know, actually. I don't know if it's like, can you turn someone into a son? I used to ask this question all the time, like, can you make someone creative? Like, can you teach someone to be creative? I don't know. Can you teach someone to be curious? I don't know. I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious. Just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Altitcher, he said once he did a study, kids smile 300 times a day or smile or laugh. Adults five or six.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I want to do is convert as many things as possible to things that I can then, because actually I've had on people that discuss addiction. And there is an addictive quality to, you know, doing podcasts or whatever, but there's an addictive quality being a scientist. And you get to do things that are very specialized and specialized locations with special people paid for by other people who have no freaking idea what you do. I mean, imagine you worked in some job and Feynman said, he said all these contradictory things. Like when he was one said, like, he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it yourself. Then the day you won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him, what'd you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, bud, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So let's leave aside his inherent contradictions.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The brothers caramats off. The brothers' wines, and a few others. I haven't ever listened to a full Joe Rogan episode, but from what I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion. There are a lot of podcasts that have passion. Like, I've been on their show. He has curiosity. Like, he's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it until he understands it, until he gets it viscerally. And I respect that because, as I say in this more recent book, passion's like kind of like the dopamine hit that gets you started. Like, oh, I'm going to be great. Maybe I could win a Nobel Prize. Like, that's not going to sustain you. The sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Haven't listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish, okay? With our friend, our mutual friend, Eric, I've listened to a bunch of recent ones, Einstein. Weinstein. Weinstein, that's what it is.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't wish each other active, ill. I've visited them. They're welcome to visit me. They have visited me. The thing I have to say is that I just wonder about introspection. Like for me, literally, I don't care about the Nobel Prize other than what it can do to, you know, benefit science. But I no longer, I did. But by the way, I did seriously care about how I benefit Brian Keating early on in my career. I'm just totally honest. I'm not proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now I would hope that people would say like, okay, the guy is like, you know, it's not, he's obsessed with it. My next book is not about this. It's about something completely different. And, you know, I do feel like people lack introspection a lot of times in science. Like we don't think about why we're doing what we're doing. And I think it comes down to curiosity. One thing about Joe, and again, I've only listened to like, I have to confess, you know, you're like my father. Now I'm confessing my sins.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she said, Well, Brian Keating, like she said, well, it's, you know, it's a good, it's interesting. He talks about cosmology. But they can do whatever the hell they want. And he presumably has these problems with it, but it's none of his business, basically. It's a private. And at the end, she said, but, you know, if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer. And who knows, he could win the Nobel Prize in Literature or something. And then she allowed me to publish a rebuttal on her blog, which was kind of funny. But anyway, no, so getting back to the guys that we were kind of collaborating or frenemies. Look.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say. I wish you could really say what she thinks and be snarky on occasion. So she wrote a review of my book when it came out three or four years ago.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They weren't happy I wrote the book. I mean, I remember one of them, you know, was like, what's this I hear about a book? And I mean, a lot of people tell me not to write the book. They said it's going to give, you know, too much attention to the Nobel Prize, going to look like sour grapes. Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not. Just give me the next prize.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on to, so I should say why we didn't win the Nobel Prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it completely that I'm completely divorced from in a secular sense. We're friends, you know, we see each other, you know, we send each other emails and stuff like that.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inflation, the multiverse's existence has nothing to do with that, right? So those are people I say I have to talk to, the people that come on the show, those are people I want to talk to. And that's super fun. I mean, it's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using, I have some unfair advantages, right? I'm at a top university. We have people that's affiliated with the Arthur C. Clark Foundation. Brilliant scientists coming through. But I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't allow them to teach at scale because they're better teachers than I am.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And humans, and what can we do? It's phenomenal. It's so exciting. And then I get to do it, you know, a job I say, don't tell Gavin Newsom, but I do it for free. I love what I do. But to think about like, oh, if my student succeeds, then I'm not, no, it is unfortunate that you have experience that I've certainly experienced it. And I think there are ways around it. I think it is a vexing problem because people want to, you know, it's very tempting to keep your own kind of, you know, garden fertilized. You know, one thing that's interesting is like, you know, people are like, why are you doing this thing and podcast? You're supposed to be serious scientist leading this huge project and collaborators. And I'm like, well, most of what I do, as I said before, it's, yeah, for you, it's Velcro. For me, it's like, you know, what is the deal with the safety standards on the truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator, that allow the concrete truck to it? It has nothing to do with the big bang.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine, like you always talk about love, but like you don't know, you don't know that they're not worthy of love. Like, so you're looking down on them. And it's just amazing because you think what an amazing creation is man.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like constellations, but upside down, like the city. It's like a constellation. Hopefully I'll stay keep the plane the right way up. But when you think about that, like imagine they're all working together.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nation of scientists, and like we're not doing it to become multi billionaires or necessarily, you know, for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we had that, you know, sometimes I'm flying home at night, like when you fly into LA, you literally, it's very rare. You can see like the number 10 million. Like it's very hard to like visualize things. You see a brick wall, you ask how many bricks are there? It might be a thousand, 10 million lights. There's 10 million souls. And you can see they're discrete. They're not like the Milky Way all blending together.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who was So, what does that mean? To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist because you have to learn from somebody else. Two, you have to be a teacher. You have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist in the truest sense. And I feel like with the work that I do in outreach and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than the 24 kids I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class. And they're, you know, potentially could reach thousands of people around the world and make them into scientists themselves because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition. There is no zero-sum fixed mindset versus growth mindset because it is an infinite game. Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or pre-World War I Germany or Imperial Japan, you know, science celebrated. And we're just making like...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's what I said, you know, it's like. Scientists should, okay, you have to be careful and not have any physical, it has to be platonic, but you can think of scientists and mentor. I have a chart in the book and in a plaque made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students. She's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Barron. And she made this plaque. And it has 17 generations. So here I am 17 levels down. There's a guy, Leibniz, not the famous Leibniz, different Leibniz. 1596 he was born. And I'm in this chain. And I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist means someone who was taught. I'll say it very slowly. Who was taught So it probably means a guy was taught, right? No.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a lot of like death fascination. You know, denial of death features heavily in the Nobel Prize because it's like what outlives a person? Well, science can outlive a person. My father has a theorem named after him. It's still engraved in many places around the world. You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our publications. We engrave things. We want to store things. We want to compress things. And I think there's something beautiful about that. But there is a notion of denial of death. Like there is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you're among the many 90-something percent of members of the National Academy don't believe in an active faith and a creator, in a God. And science can substitute for that, but it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way even practicing but not believing in a religion can fulfill a person.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most, which was never one of his stipulations. He actually said one you can only give it to one person. So they change it. Why do they change it? I talk about, I speculate in the book. By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel Prize, and its effect. But, you know, one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking actually this coming up in December, is that the Nobel Prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's death. There's a lot of, and they bring in flowers, not from...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feed the flames of competition. You know, I'm like really veteran. If you go to the homepage of the NSF or the Department of Energy or the recently released National Academy of Sciences future of science for astronomical sciences for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel Prizes these different science things could win. Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB, B-mode polarization, the nice thing. That's figure two in this thing. And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids? Like to young people. Like, that's what you should be doing so that you win as small, as you said, this prize given out by one hairless ape to another wearing a fancier costume eating reindeer.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite because they had to sacrifice so much for him. And I think of that, you know, in the small case, like Joe's kind of mentoring or whatever, you're going to mentor someone else. You love that which you sacrifice for. Sacrifice is reduction of entropy, it's storing and investing. And you want to protect that. And, you know, that to me really speaks to this. So, you know, I don't hold it against. But it is true, like scientists are, you know, when they're described again, they're often said to be like children, right? You've heard this description. They're inquisitive. They're curious. They're passionate. They love it. And I'm like, yeah, and they don't play well with others. They're jealous. They're petty. They're selfish. They won't share their ball and they go home. There's no such thing as a single edged sword. I wish there were, you know, because we need some more of that because you got to dull it up. But in this case, he, you know, I think when you have this kind of investment in science, it's going to be natural. But that doesn't mean we have to like, you know.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you love that which you sacrifice for. Here's a proof. I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs, some with severe, one of my uncles, the Keating side, had severe what they called mental retardation. Now it's probably has a different name.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can marry someone because she's rich or he's rich. You can marry someone because they're good looking or he's good looking. You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish. There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish. Nobody says like, oh, you know what? I really want this thing that's three feet tall, that doesn't speak English, that craps on my floor, that wakes me up all hours of the night, that interferes with my love life. Nobody says that because it doesn't benefit you for months and months. A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me and does a lot of my solo videos. He's having his first kid. He's like, what do I do? Because he always gets stupid if I'll catch up on sleep now. Like, yeah, I'm going to store sleep in my sleep bank. Like, I don't think Huberman and you talked about that, right? You can't do that. That's stupid. What you can do, give the kid a bath. Feed the baby. Let the mother relax. Like, in other words, do the things, and this really relates back to what Aristotle once said. Aristotle once said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents? As much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joe's Omega. No, but the point is he sees in you that same grandiosity, that same genuine spirit graciousness. And I think that's true. I mean, you do do something very rare. I don't want to turn us into too much of a love fest, but I do want to say, even back to Andrew, you know, who I've almost been hagiographic about, you know, just treating him like a saint. He said to me the same thing in a moment of peak said, like, goddamn it, like I have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the effing NSL. You know, that wasn't who he was. That was just an expression like, I'm doing something. which is fundamentally, but you know what? When you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God, you will someday. Because I think, and I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something with when you have a kid, like you can get married.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know why he does, and this is what I tweeted to you in one of the few things I think you have retweeted that I sent you. I said, someday you're going to give that to somebody. Today, I wanted that to be me. No, no.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flying wheel, and exactly. No, and I want to point out two things. One is that I remember You went on Joe's show maybe a couple of years ago, and then he gave you a watch. He gave you like a Rolex, right? Yeah. And I tweeted to you. And I think it's Omega. Omega, sorry. Okay, fine. The watch that went to the moon, which we will get to in a bit. I don't think he could give you what I give you, though, by the way. We'll get to what that final gift package is for you. And by the way,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A billion, 200 million years ago. And if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30, because that was the deadline for the Nobel Prize to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the winners in January. So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything and there were just rumors. And so the reason that he wouldn't have won it, because there was another guy who was still alive considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss, who did win it, Kip Thorne who did win it, and the third gentleman, a Caltech named Ron Drever, who passed away again. He was alive in 2016. He died in the middle of 2017, and then he wasn't awarded the Nobel Prize.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 times the mass of the Sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind, so one solar mass worth of matter mass got converted to pure gravitational energy, no light seen by them. This particular date, September 15th, September 14th, 2015. That explosion because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away. They actually don't know which galaxy it took place and still, and they never will. If that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“themselves saved the American taxpayers billions of dollars and we didn't we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the fact that as you and Harry talked about nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out and actually he's had a recent paper that's been an upper limit along with his collaborators an LHCB experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about but the bottom line is it was really built to detect the Higgs so the SSC for twice as much money would have sucked up Barry's career and he would have been working on that maybe not and then he would never have worked on LIGO and then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize right so you look at counterfactual history that's not actually a big stretch right if the SSE had still gone on he would have worked that because he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment second thing if imagine the following thing had happened they won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015 they detected unequivocal evidence for the inspiral collision of two massive black holes each about”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, here's a good example. Again, this is my friend, Barry Barrish. He's become like a mentor and a friend. He wrote the foreword to my book, Antony Boston. He won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died. And he admits it. And he said it. And actually, it's funny with him because I've heard you talk very rhapsodically and lovely and romantically about with Harry Cliff and a wonderful podcast with him, by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is and how in that, you know, we were about to build the superconducting super collider right here in Texas. And it didn't get built and it got canceled by Congress. And I say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you. And he's like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm like, if that didn't get canceled, first of all, even though it did get canceled, went on to build it.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say Brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on the show, if you say, Brian, would you like to come on the Lex Friedman podcast? I say, you know what, Lex? You know that guy Rogan, I think you might have heard him. Can you introduce him to me? You imagine how that would feel. Like you'd be like, after, you know, I'm humiliated. So I was asked to nominate the winners. And the one rule that they say of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they maintained. In other words, he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding year that had the greatest benefit to mankind made the world better, right? None of that was mentioned in the letter. It said many people can win it for work done long ago. They didn't mention anything in the letter to me signed by the Secretary General. Nothing about benefiting mankind. They said, just one thing. Can't nominate yourself. So none of these guys nominated themselves.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would I have done it without the Nobel Prize? You know, I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened. So no, it definitely has a place. And for me, you know, it is valuable to think about it. But the level of obsession that academics have about it is really, I think it is almost unbalanced becoming unhealthy. And again, I have no, I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize. Obviously, now I've had 11 on the show. And to think about, you know, like the one rule. So by the way, right after the denouement of the story, which I'll get to in a bit, you know, how our dreams went down to dust. I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. So like the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually, they asked me to.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stephen pause between questions. How long in the news cycle does he go back? What topics has he talked about with people similar to me? So I took Neil and I did that for you. And I look back. How many times has Lex mentioned the words Nobel and Prize? And I put it into Google Ngram. And out came exactly the same number of times as show notes, show episodes as of this moment. So you've said the words Nobel Prize over 240 times.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source