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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“In the context of like now thinking back on it, that was such a minuscule part of it because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize or I did win the Nobel Prize or any of us did. Would that have changed anything? Would that have brought anything back? It's so, you know, we say it's like vanity. It's futility. And I just, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize is like, I don't want to say it's like insignificant because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence. And, you know, I went back. I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show. I'm going to name Job. Okay. And he prepares. He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show. So you see him going on Colbert Report. You think, oh, they just have a banther. He's just naturally gifted. No, he said, no, no, no. You say that you're undermining what he does. What he does, he goes back, he watches the last month of Colbert reports or whatever it's called, late show. He says, how long did...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At being a scientist than I could ever be. And just a loss for the cosmos. It just really hurt. And, you know, I thought, oh, like, you know, it's so sad because he could have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think like that anymore. First, I think about his kids. Felt at first now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel Prize and hence the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize. It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with. It's a double entendre. Like we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science out. We can talk about that a different time.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“System that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old dates back to Bologna, northern Italy 1088 or so, first universities were established. And very little has changed. Some guy or gal scratching a rock on another piece of rock and lecturing in front and there's only one better aspect nowadays is that back then the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor and then he or she wouldn't get paid probably mostly it was his back then Nowadays that barbaric process has been replaced by tenure, so okay but no it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me because you know here's he was like my consigliori he was a guy i you know sought counsel and counseled me and he's dead and i felt like there is no one who's going to honor the agreements that we had and he was a very soulful person he was so much better”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ripped apart because of egos, credit. They had solo careers. They had, you know, relations to their intimates and so forth. And there it's not only for the common good. There is more of a zero-sum aspect. Like I would say science is an infinite game. You can't win science. You never get today. Oh, we won science. And even the Nobel Prize, they don't feel like, oh, we're done. They feel like a lot of times they're imposters even to that day. However, science is made up of a lot of, a lot of, a lot of finite games where there is only one winner for tenure. There is only three winner. There are only three winners for the Nobel Prize. And because of that, I think it's heterodox. And it's very confusing, especially there's no guide. I never got a guide how to be a professor, how to teach, how to lead a research group, how to deal with the death of an advisor, how to deal with an unreally graduate student or two, you know. So we're all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it, because the academics.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, it was so wrapped up with my identity as a person, you know, like there's only a few different ways to have identity. And, you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically, one of them for scientists is often that they're a scientist. And that sometimes is their primary identity. Now I've got other, you know, a husband and father. But, you know, at that time, that was my identity. So to have that kind of taken away, you know what? It reminded me of being, you know, kind of adopted in a sense like my, like the one who created me or that I had played, you know, played a role in my life, that he abandoned me in the sense. It felt like these people are abandoning me. And the only thing I'd correct about the analogy that you use is like in the war, they're all working, you know, for common good. It's not like I want to be and get the most kills. I compare it more to like a band. Like think about the Beatles, you know, and what they did. And then they, you know, they.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was devastating. But again, like, who the hell am I? I'm not his kid. You know, his kids lost father. You know, it's, so I feel guilty talking about it in that sense, but it's just a reality, you know.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a scientist, there were really two there was one Russian cosmologist Alexander Polnarov, who thankfully is very much alive. It was a Queen Mary University. Now he's retired. He was kind of a theoretical, you know, cosmological father to me. And then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me, you need to have a brand as a scientist. Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it. Some of them don't burnish it. But some of the skills about being a scientist, we don't teach our students involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona? And he was the exemplar for that, in addition to being the evuncular father figure type character that really was the person I would talk to. I had issues with when I had issues of my own students and he would tell me how those were and he would tell me, you know, his misgivings about people that he worked with or things in his personal life. And it was.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he had, you know, kind of been the one looking out for my interest in the new experiment. I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix, all of whom had come there to work with him to get the approbation that would then lead to their careers taking off, as it did for mine. And so there was a competition. I mean, science is not free from egos and competition and desires rightfully or wrongfully for credit and attribution.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was no longer one of the co principal investigators as I was on Bicep One. So I continued on Bicep One as the co-leader of it, but not on Bicep two. And, you know, obviously that was pretty painful.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like, you know, these aspects of raising kids and being married without him. And to do it in that way, it felt like, again, I'm not, you know, he's got kids and I feel terrible for them, obviously. But it did feel like a betrayal. I mean, I'm just being honest with you. It felt like why didn't the F did you not reach out? You know, I thought we were close and I couldn't, you know, I told him everything and I felt like he had told me everything And now he was gone. And then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument. I mean, it's millions of dollars invested, careers at stake, young people working tremendously hard. And then here we were. And like, who's going to take over the lead? He was the lead of the project at Caltech. And then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well, they had, you know, decided to form a collaboration in which I was no longer the principal.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in January of 2010, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley, and I got a call from Andrew Lang's, or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor, Paul Richards, at UC Berkeley. And he said that Andrew was dead. He had taken his life by suicide. And this is a man, and I had already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure to me, Andrew. He would give me advice on marriage, on like how I should be with my kids. And, you know, what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder? Again, he was preternaturally suited to win the Nobel Prize. Everyone always thought he would win it. Still, you know, if he were alive, he still could win it. In fact, his wife or his ex-wife won it, Frances Arnold in 2018. And, you know, his power couple. And it destroyed me for a long time because, you know, he was just this magical person. I mean,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors. So almost in order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade. And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful than just a naive factor of five. And then we started observing with that. And we knew we'd have years to go and maybe we'd never see anything. Again, we're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of spacetime produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to. So I was playing a role in that. Obviously, it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for bicep along with Andrew Lang.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making these sensors tens of thousands of them. The initial bicep one instrument, of course we just call it bicep, that only had 98 detectors. Simon's observatory is going to have 100 times more just in one of our four telescopes. We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full-time at point one degree above absolute zero in the Atacama Desert. We'll get there. In the case of getting back to what Bicep did, we upgraded, made bicep two. In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole in the same building, which is ominously called the Dark Sector Laboratory, DSL, still operating to this very day. We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before, very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so bicep two, like, you know, iPhones, or I know you're an Android fanboy, but every year they get a little bit better. They get more megapixels, they get more optics, triple X Zoom, whatever. Okay, right, we upgraded our detectors as well. The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors. They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale. And we want to make them into superconductors, which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them. Why superconductors? Well, again, we're measuring heat. So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range. That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer. And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case Jamie Bock, and nowadays Suzanne Staggs at Princeton, they are just exquisitely”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began, detecting the origin of the input initial conditions for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which won the Nobel Prize in 1983. These are like five Nobel Prizes potentially. For that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk to outdo what my father did, to do really this impossible. And at that time, Lex, you know, again, I'm. Know it sounds weird because people like, oh, you wouldn't, you know, you don't really, you still want the Nobel Prize. You're still like greedy. And look, you wrote another book about, and I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature. And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Bible can't be correct. In other words, when the Bible is correct now isn't falsified, if you like, if you believe it. I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously. But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning. What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular? It would be more like the cosmology of Akhenaten and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative. In my mind, the stakes could not be higher. And again, it's not an offense because we need plasma physics. We need every type of physics except maybe biophysics. We literally use every branch of physics and thermodynamics, superconductivity, quantum mechanics, all that goes into our understanding of the instrument. And even further, if you want to understand the theory that predicts the signal that we purport to measure. So I rationalize that if Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Penzis and Wilson weren't looking for a signal. They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, etc. And that was a serendipitous discovery. They won the Nobel Prize in 1978. It was the first one ever award in cosmology. My reasoning is, what if you could explain not only how the elements got form, but how the whole universe got formed and kill off every other model of science? If that weren't enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt had told me and Andrew Lang and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk Nobel Prize. If you could do it, because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like superfluidity, plasma physics. When you talk about the origin of the universe, it ties into everything. It ties into philosophy, theology. You realize if Paul Steinhardt is correct, that”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you find what you're going to find, that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias. Is deadly, and so as close to deadly as possible.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, especially since all life is basically the conversion of energy and trying to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics exactly in that way. And this is very crucial kind of thing to do in science because they weren't looking for the signal. They found it accidentally. These two scientists, Pensius and Wilson. And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science. Like when you see something, Isaac Asimov once said, like the most important reaction as a scientist is not Eureka, which means in Greek, as you know. I have found it. No, he said, no. He said, like, that's weird. Like, that's a much better reaction. Or that's freaking cool. Like, that's a scientist. Not like, oh, I found one. Because.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's noise present in both, and you measure what they did is they made a separate measurement just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well. 4 Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium. That's a temperature that's not going to change. And it's certainly not going to change over a timescale one second. And so they could compare unknown signal, known signal, unknown signal, known signal like a scale, like a balance. So another way to think about it is like this. You've seen these Libra kind of balances where you put two weights in a pan, right? What happens if you put like one ounce weight on one side and a 20 kilogram weight? You don't get any measurement, right? You do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight. That's why they use four Kelvin.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be larger. Imagine you're trying to calibrate the microphone, like, you could do it with a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress. So their amplifiers downstream from the detector in every experiment that I've ever worked on. And they only have a linear region over a very small region. And you want to keep it as linear as possible. That means you want, if you're trying to get rid of, you're trying to compare like a voice and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine. It's not as it's not going to be as easy on the amplifiers as getting a slightly gong or something, you know, a violent.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To lack of understanding. These other guys, Penzias and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said, no, let's build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope, and do what's called calibration, put inject a known source of signal every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin because the signal that they're trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible. They did that once a second. So they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements over the course of several months, years, and even by the end millions of measurements for sure. And they found they couldn't get rid of it either, but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees Kelman.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They knew the signal was right. They couldn't get rid of the noise, and there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had been measured by a previous guy, a guy by the name of Edward Ohm. He measured the same signal, found that there was this hiss of static, of radio static that he could not get rid of that had a value of about three Kelvin. So you can translate, remember I said, if you take a radio telescope and you have pointed at an object that's hot, the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object. It's a principle of radiothermodynamics. So it's a really interesting thing. It's a thermometer you can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth. It's amazing. And so we in radio astronomy characterize our signal not by its intensity, but by its temperature. So he found this guy, Edward Ohm, oh, there's this three Kelvin signal. I can't get rid of it. It must be I did my era analysis wrong and I would give him an F if he was one of my first year students. But he's just a tribute.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal-to-noise of the satellites that they were seeing. And they found they couldn't. They found that they could not improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the first telecommunication satellite. It was like the equivalent to one kilobit per second modem, and they were bouncing signals from the west coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing in New Jersey of all places in New Jersey, Holmdale, New Jersey. And these radio stormers couldn't get rid of the signal. So they said, well, New Jersey's not far from New York. Let's see if the signal is coming from New York. Nope, not coming from New York. Let's see if it changes with the year. Maybe it's coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously. There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories. Now, why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers? Bell Laboratories is kind of like Apple or, you know, it was like a think tank or, you know, it was Google. Let's say it was like Google. Google has like Google X. It has this thing and that thing, right? So they were working there. But imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers. Like they were actively recruiting. Why would they do that? Well, it turns out that was the beginning in the 1960s was the first commercial satellite launched for communication. And so Bell Labs, which would later become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T and the early telephone company later invent the first cell phone the year I was born. And they would take that 1946 and they would take that telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human retina cells, but of superconductors and things called bolometers. And this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions, one billionth of the pressure we feel here at sea level.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is now you are analyzing the polarization, you are confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization, and effectively what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the microwave, so our detector, that's where the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we're coupling that to a refracting telescope. But your eyes are refracting telescopes. So you are a polarimeter right now. The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color. That's what we call color and intensity, brightness.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very Chris, right? So that's yours to keep with every time you host me now. Take the polarizer underneath your left hand.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called calcite. This is crystal. It's called birefringent crystal. Bi means two. Refringent means refracting. So this is a special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction. So, light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out, and it splits into two different directions. And it could split even more if I made the crystal give my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can do one of two things. Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers. And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one. You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization. Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here. There's a crystal. It's called calcite. This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman. This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there and tell me what does it look like.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's called a quadrupolar pattern, right? So it's repeating. It goes bright, dim, bright, dim. Rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation. And that's because of the property of the photon. The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is the axis at which its electric field is oscillating. Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down. And so therefore, vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization. And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation. It's like a spin, a spin two object. So now if you put that in front of the telescope,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have now made a polarimeter. You have made a polarization sensitive telescope. Now, you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way to think about it, now take this guy and look at a light, look at a light source, put one up to your eye, and now put the other one in front of it. Anywhere and now rotate them. Happens to the light sour”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earth, at least, and we go to those great links because it's the pristine environment to observe these precious photons. And we built this telescope and it weighs tens of thousands of pounds. And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot. I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended. It needed that we have a guy who spends a year of his life down there, a girl who spends a year of their life down there. They're called winter overs. They arrive in sometimes as early as November and they don't leave until the following December. And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000. You just have to work for one night of your life. That's all. It's a long night. And what Bicep is, and I couldn't bring my polarized sunglasses here, so I brought these actual polarizers here. So if you take this and put in front of your telescope there.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being on Hoth, you know, it's like it's completely otherworldly environment, ice, planar, flat as a pancake. And the buildings are built up on stilts. They're built up because the snow will otherwise cover them over. The nearest medical facilities are 4,000 miles away. If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there. If you have any issues with your appendix, they'll cut it out of you before you go down there. The Russians at Vostok base, not too far away, about 600 miles away. The doctors there, there's a famous picture of one of them operating on himself taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka and you can put it in this cup, right? And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up. After two minutes, the three minutes the water is boiling. You can't touch it. Take it from me. Don't touch it. But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right? Why? Because the mug is totally bone dry. But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies. So we don't want these precious photons, 420 of them traveling per cubic centimeter from the Big Bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's atmosphere. So you take it to a place with the fewest number of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area. And that happens to be either Chile or my other project, the Simons Observatory is located, or you take it to the South Pole. We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there. And it's like...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Antarctic means the opposite place of that. So humans never even saw it, let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the middle of that continent. We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry. It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas, and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile. Those are the two premier places on Earth. Of course, you'd like to go into space. There's no water in space.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The base is called the Amundson Scott South Polar Station. So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it. Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica. You can't use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole. There's no land at the North Pole, right? So what did he do? He stuck it on the ocean underneath. But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about 110 years ago, first time in human history. Antarctica means the opposite of the bear. It means like no bears there, basically opposite of where polar bears are. Arctic means polar bear. That's where it increases.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch. There it is over there. So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imaging cosmic extragalactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization. We'll get to that in a minute. But along the way, the idea was very simple. We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope. Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head. Only way forward is making things more complex, right? And when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic errors. And so we want to build the cleanest instrument. Turns out the cleanest instrument you can build in astronomies or refracting telescope. We also had to, unlike that telescope, or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors that were cooled less than 1 20th of the temperature of the cosmic background itself, which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe. So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. To do that, we need to put it inside of a huge vacuum chain.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person to measure the curvature of the earth. It's a guy named Aristophanes in the whatever lived around Aristotle's time. His name is in the history book. So this guy, Andrew Lang, I was like, he's like the next Aristotle Aristophan. Like, I just wanted to work for this guy. He clearly had this brand. He was about 40 at the time. California scientist of the year, I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that. And I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk. And he said, you know, I love it. You got a job. And before I could even, you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take it. It was too good to be true. And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely because Caltech's a rich private university at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore. He just wrote us a check. Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started on this idea. And so we started coming up with the idea for what I later named Bicep background.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get high statistical significance in order to reduce the statistical errors. Very clean signal measurement device to reduce the systematic errors. Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement, those that can be improved by more and more measurement. You take more and more measurements of this table, you'll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the number of one over the square root of the number of measurements. But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big. So they were able to get a very accurate measurement. Again, it's not exactly how they did it. They also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that, do a power spectrum, filtration, windows. There's a lot of work that goes into it. Image analysis, and then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model, just six different numbers that go into a model that made a prediction. And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out. And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature. And that was called boomerang. So he had just come off of this. Now, let me remind you, who is the first...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning in the early 2000s still use today was created out of this field by data analysts using this thing called hierarchical equal area triangles called heel picks is what it's called.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can know where they are, but more than that, there's so many of these patches. They're about one square degree on the sky. The sky, you may know, a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere. So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build up very good statistics. That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it on this experiment called Boomerang, but they did measure very accurately what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma, the primordial plasma.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what he used was the following triangle. There are proto-galaxy-sized objects in the CMB, the cosmic microwave background has these patches. And so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of primordial plasma, the soup that constitutes the early universe. It's just hydrogen. It's very simple material. Understand hydrogen electrons and radiation. Very simple. Plasma physicist sun understand it. The diameter is one base of the triangle and then the distance to the earth is the other two legs. So he measured, along with his colleagues at Caltech and University of Rome and that's other group at Princeton, measured the angle, interior angle effectively very, very accurately and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, God, you're like auto canceling. This is great. My ratings are going to go up, man. This is going to be great. Take out the if you want actual signs.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he used the cosmic microwave background. And so, what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe. So you can measure triangles on Earth. You can actually, it's hard to show that the Earth is curved, but you can show the Earth is curved using triangles, mountaintops, et cetera. If you have an accurate enough protractor.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was like this. I don't know, it's like Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive idea man. Not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything, but understood where things are going decades from now. And he had been involved in experiment that actually measured the universe was flat, very close to flat, along with appreciating experiment done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so one day I came in and it actually involved another friend of mine, astronomer named Jill Tarter, one of the pioneers in the SETI science business of detecting extraterrestrials, which I assume you never like to talk about aliens. So I'm sure we won't get into aliens. But Jill was visiting Stanford, and I was like, I really want to meet her. Can you introduce me? And she said, no, in fact, you're fired, my boss. So I was like, this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me. I didn't know where it would lead or what would happen to it, but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path, I mean, literally, it brings me here today, in that because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech, which is in Pasadena. And she, my original boss, Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor, a man by the name Andrew Lang. And Andrew was like,”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This professor at Stanford to do a job for her. And I was kind of a crappy employee, to be honest with you. And then one day she couldn't take it anymore because I was like sketching notebooks and planning these experiments. And I just, I wasn't, no, I actually did.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source