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

“That mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch inflation being the signal originally conceived by Alan Guth to explain why the universe had the large-scale features that it does, namely that it has so-called flat geometry. So there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees. You can do that with spacecraft. You can do that with stars. You can do that with laser beams. You can do that with three different galaxies. All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry. It's remarkable, but it's also unstable. It's very unlikely. It's very seemingly finely tuned. And that was one of the motivations that Guth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979 when he was a postdoc also at Stanford Slack. And he was trying to get a permanent job. I was trying to like make my name for myself. And so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor. She had gotten there only a year before I got there. And she had her own priorities, the things that she wanted to do. But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different. She was studying galaxies at high redshift and I wanted to study the origin of the universe using this type of technology. And I realized courtesy of a good friend of mine who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Heminkowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope. We didn't need a 30 meter diameter telescope. We needed a tiny refracting telescope, no bigger than my head, you know, less than a foot across. And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, size telescope could have, because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky. They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky. And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively as close as you get to proof. There could be things.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So bicep one was born out of kind of interesting circumstances. So I had gone to a Stanford University for a postdoc. So an academic humminger games. Stanford University. Yeah, it's this small little school. It's not like that technical college in Massachusetts that you're affiliated with.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all I wanted to do. I felt like if it's not, if it's worth spending perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me to carry me through, to give me the, you know, I always say, passion is great when people say, oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough. Passion's like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So even if I had, which spoiler alert, the book's called Losing the Nobel Prize, so I didn't do it. But I wanted to do something big and I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery for the ages. As in fact it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the origin story goes back again to a father-son rivalry. It really does. My father won all these prizes, awards, et cetera, but he never won a Nobel Prize. And, you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids. You know, oh, I was a football player in high school. I'll show you. And whatever, wrestling, whatever. And some of us could be healthy too. But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy. Like, we would compete Know he was much more of a pure mathematician, and I was an experimental physicist, so we had both different ideas on what was worth prioritizing our time. But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize. And I knew I could kind of outdo him. So I feel pretty venal and kind of minuscule kind of character wise saying that.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the signal, as I said, there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter, and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe. However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is. We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is. We're looking for what its polarization is”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, those we cannot build a LIGO and put it at the Big Bang. So if you want to measure, let's say you have the old time firecracker, let's say there's a firecracker and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you. You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it. And what we're trying to do is here the effect of gravitational waves from the Big Bang, not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used and his colleagues, but instead using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe, we're going to use that as a film, quote unquote. onto which gravitational waves get exposed”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have to photons, that they travel at the speed of light, that they go through everything, they can go through everything, and that they're directly detectable. We're using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred. So did inflation the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe and the expansion, the initial expansion of the universe, did that take place? There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves, not these old newcomers that Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us a billion years ago. But we're seeing things that happen 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was no, this is a joke. That was good. Thank you. I got it. I got it. You know, to a cosmologist, age, it means nothing.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so gravitational waves were the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time, you know, it's this, it was discovered twice indirectly by two And that was given my first year of graduate school. The AI entered graduate school almost. They announced these two guys want it. And the guy who won it did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear. That's what we experience as gravity. You had this analogy when you talked to Barry Barrish about bowling ball and a trampoline. That's almost right because you have to visualize that now in four dimensions, like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object, including on the sides. And it becomes very hard to visualize. So a lot of people use that. It's also fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity. So it's a little overburdening the analogy.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray. But you know that gravity is the weakest of the so-called four fundamental forces. And yet it has the longest range pervasiveness. Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda Galaxy at some enormous rate of speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it. So gravity is enormously long range, but incredibly weak. And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the, as you said, the grid lines on the notebook, right? Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points, how far they are from each other, and those can change. Those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity. So it's weak, and what we experience is gravity is the”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why they don't bring suitcases. You know, that's true, right? Photons never bring suitcases with you because they're traveling light. I don't even get a last. Corny dad jokes. Okay, you'll appreciate something.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons? Like, just zoom into a cubic micron now. Imagine 420 things inside a box this big. It's actually pretty empty. Like, they're just zipping around in there, right? So between them, there's a lot of empty space.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to get. That's right. Let's think outside the box. No, we're thinking inside the box. So if you have every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the Big Bang, dark matter particles, there's a little ordinary matter in the universe. And every cubic centimeter, there's some probability to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera. There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter. Now, just imagine how many cubic centimeters there are in the universe. It's enormous. That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe. It's very rich universe. But now let's zoom in on that box. So now inside that box, there might be one, let's say there might be one ordinary matter, like a proton or an electron, a baryon, a lepton. There might be a couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be a couple hundred photons, as I said, 420. What's between those guys?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No more liquid in it. No, it's just a container, one cubic centimeter. Let's make it simple One cubic centimeter of a box, and you take it out into space outside the Falcon, whatever, right? What's inside that box? It's not empty. There's actually, I'm going to say this is going to set your friends up. There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic microwave background inside that box at any second”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it expanding into? And I say it's actually an easy question if you think about it. You've seen your friend Elon, he goes out to space, he's got a rocket, right? What's outside of the rocket? If you take this bottle, empty out this bottle, take the cap off it, go outside the rocket, you know, sip in some tang, screw on the cover of it. What's in there? Is it empty?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He made a movie called Annie Hall, in which, as a self depiction, he's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David, neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn, and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore. He refuses to do his homework. His mother says, why? Because the universe is expanding. And it keeps on expanding. Everything will rip apart and no one will never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless. I assume these are some of the topics we're going to get to. And she goes, what are you talking about? We're in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. And that's true. Brooklyn is not expanding. The solar system is not expanding. Oftentimes I get asked, What is the universe expanding into? That's one of my favorite questions.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realized that you did, yes. So there's a famous propagandist movie with Woody Allen, certainly canceled. But nevertheless, back when he was not canceled yet.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a huge surprise Serendipitous surprise that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us. So we can see that's called the age of the universe 15 billion years just to make the math simple. We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction. And we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away. So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We don't know. So I'm conjecture there's not only one, there's an infinite number of them.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we could have received information from. We can't currently communicate with that galaxy. It sent us some light and now it's moving away and it sent us some light. And because the space is also dragging the photons with it, if you like, the photons are being participating in the expansion of the universe. That's why they're redshifting. We can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing. And because the universe has been expanding.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Naively, you would say that so you're right. If the universe were static, if the universe came into existence, and you can conceive of this, the universe came into a big bang in a fixed universe, so the universe just started off. Those galaxies were, you know, they could be moving towards us away from us, who knows, that you could say, I can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times the speed of light. That would be true. But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe. So imagine there was some very distant past. We were near a galaxy. It's going to produce some light. And that galaxy is going to be moving away from us. The light's going to be getting more and more red shifted, as it's called. It's going to be moving farther and farther away from us as time goes on. There'll be some acceleration as we get into the era of dark energy. The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will, from which represents all the”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, oh, yeah. So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very little because actually we understand how there's some other ingredients that go into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinos, et cetera, and how much ordinary matter like we're made up of, neutrons, protons, croutons.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other, all those galaxies, now they're really far apart. We know how fast they're moving away. It's a very simple algebra problem to solve. When were they touching? That's where you get that number from.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we can come about it from two different ways. Basically, they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units. It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed. And what is the speed you're measuring? Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsecs away. So a galaxy at one megaparsec away. This isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects. But if you go out, say, one megaparsec away, I would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers per second away from you. And every galaxy, except for the local, very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half a dozen galaxies, out of 50 to 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies. So 12 out of that number are moving towards us. The rest are moving away from us.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I mean, there's this significance. Yeah, no, it's extremely well measured. I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have. In contrast to, again, 25 years ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old, but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are about 12 billion years old or in the universe that were 12 billion. So that would be like you being older than your father. It was embarrassing.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for me, I'm 50. So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling me within 12 hours how old I am. Half a percent level accurac”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I was going to say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. Some people say birthday anniversary, kids' birth. They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right? January means the portal between the God was the portal between the beginning and the end. So you're looking back, maybe because you're Russian, like the death side, the light side looking forward into January, the beginning, right? Everybody's most important day is usually some beginning or something significant. For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all. It's like, when did the universe get born? As I said before, and I didn't think there, again, I didn't, I just, there was some mental obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get past because I didn't think like anybody does it. Like I knew astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time between 10 and 20 billion years old. Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old. It's incredible the five digit significant fate five.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, answer like you don't have to tell me the exact date of the count. It could be like your mistress's birthday or whatever, but.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. No, we definitely have to But getting back to, yeah, so my origin. So I always say, like, and I want to try this on you. You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm going to ask you some questions. What's the most important day on the calendar? Don't tell me the date, but to you, what is your, what's the most important day to you every year?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And maybe those two things, the neuroscience and like cosmos, not getting too romantic. But yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way, some fundamental conscious cosmic consciousness.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Offense to monkeys. That's right. This little guy. Sorry, man. But thinking back to what animates me. Getting the data, but there's a lot of steps. I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw. So I always joke with my theorist friends who call me a closeted theorist. I want to be, you know, they call a guy who hangs out with musicians. A drummer. So I want to be like that for physics, right? Like for theoretical physics. I want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it did in very many ways. And he's been gone for a long time now. Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity. I don't think it's the most limited quantity. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But to go into only the most challenging, interesting things with the limited time that we have while we're alive. And for him, it was the foundations of quantum mechanics. For me, it was the foundations of the universe. And how did it come to be? And I felt like, well, people have been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein. It really made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics. But this is an exciting time. The Kobe satellite had just released its data that the universe had this anisotropy pattern. Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God and so forth. And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm going to do and what I'm most interested in. But always.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why not do what made me happy as a 12 year old? We often forget about those primitive things about us are probably the most sustainable, durable, and resilient attributes of our character. So with my own kids, I look like, what are they interested now when they're young? And it doesn't mean that's what they're going to do. I mean, some of them went on play Fortnite, you know, like professional Fortnite play, which there are. But, you know, the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I could conceive of getting paid to do, even if I had the brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did. And then I went to graduate school. And during graduate school, I had this kind of on-again off again relationship with my father. And I knew that he was a mathematician. He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country. I didn't see him for 15 years. And in that time, I learned a lot about him and I learned that he had gotten very interested not in pure mathematics, which he had been a number theorist and contributed seminal work on Diafantine equations, which play a role in Turing's work, you may have seen. But anyway, he had become interested Turn completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics. And by that time, I was at Brown University. And I was, you know, thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter physicist or experimentalist. I never thought I'd be a theorist and I'm not a theorist. So that was pretty prescient. But it always appealed to me.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I call that the academic hunger games, because it's like you're competing against these people who are just getting smarter all the time as you're getting smarter all the time. They want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots. Like there's fewer slots to get into college than in high school. There's fewer slots in graduate school. There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc, and many, many, maybe infinitesimal number, you know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego. 400 applicants for one position. It's almost getting impossible. Like, I almost can't conceive of doing what these new, brilliant young people applying to become an assistant professor at a state university that they're doing. It takes so much courage to do that. So I went from, you know, this kid in New York thinking I would never be a professional astronomer, A, because I didn't know any. I'd never seen any. I didn't even know that they existed. And I thought, who the hell's going to pay me to look at the stars? Like, won't they pay me to be like an ice cream taster?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see, what you observe, and what you write down. Then you do research, right? The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, is do something new. And that's why we call it research and not just studying Wikipedia. And in so doing, you start to train a kid at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks. It's unbelievable. And now we can do even better because you got share it on Instagram or whatever. And you can by doing so have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist and do so viscerally. You know, I often say I was taught this by my English teacher, Mrs. Tompkins, in ninth grade, that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into. Let me pour in some facts into Lex and, you know, it's not like machine learning is showing like billions of cats or, you know, you're not like forcing it in. You're bringing it out. It means to pour out of in Latin educare. And what more could a teacher want than to have something the kid is like gush?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changed my life because not only was I doing that, I was replicating what Galileo did, but I was, and I'm 100% not comparing myself to Galileo Galileo. Okay, if there's any confusion out there. But I did replicate exactly what he did. And I was like, holy crap, this is weird. Let me write it down. So it had another effect, which all good scientists, budding scientists should do, and all parents should do. Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it, write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it's going to be, not like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis, thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel? Better yet, astronomy is a visual science. Sketch what you see. The lagoon nebula, the Pleiades, seven sisters. You can see them anywhere on Earth. And when you do that, again, you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain, as I understand it, and you're connecting them through your fingertips. You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that. Or that Saturn had ears, as he called it, or that the moon was not crystalline polished smooth and made of this heavenly substance, the quintessent substance, right? So where else can you be viscerally connected with the first person to ever make that discovery? Try doing that with the Higgs boson. Get yourself an LHC and smash together high luminosity, you know, call up Harry Cliff and say, you know, I want to replicate how did you feel? He didn't feel anything. None of them felt anything. It took years to mile it. You can't do it. But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This telescope's a very precious thing in some ways, a symbol of what got me into all the blessings I have in my life, came from a telescope. And I always advise parents or even people for themselves, you right here, wherever we are, biggest city on earth, Manhattan, where I was growing up as a 12-year-old outside of Manhattan. You can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of Saturn, the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of Venus. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy lacks two and a half million light years away from Earth. You can do that with that little thing over there. One that's a little more expensive. Get one that has a mount, and you can attach now your smartphone. What the hell is that? I wouldn't have known what that was in 1984. And with that, you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate, maybe biology in some sense, but you can experience the physical sensation.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's always a joke. People say, Oh, you're an experimental cosmologist. I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes. Actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things. It's not actually doing the. Stroking of my non existent beard, contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological model.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. There was a serious gap in that future. And instead, when I should have been preparing for my Bar Mitzvah, you know, as most Jewish boys would be, 12, 13-year-old boy, I actually got a telescope and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it. It wasn't bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog's looking through. Is that hedgehog?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had serious skills. You pass that collection basket. I could push people and get them to 2XR contributions. But in this case, I was 13. I don't know if you remember when you were 13, but if you extrapolate the next level up, you know, it's like you go graduate student, postdoc, professor. The next level up from confirmation, altar boy is priest. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but priests are not entitled to have relations with women. And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future casting what life's going to be like for myself if I continue on my path, I found it maybe”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They did Christmas and Easter. It was one of the most wonderful experiences I had. And I do things with Greg Gusto. Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way. So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity, in this case Catholicism. So I was baptized, confirmed. And I said, I want to go all the way. I became an altar boy in the Catholic Church”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The new sitcom on CBS. Young Brian born to two Jewish parents. My father was a professor at Sunny Stonybrook. He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician. And my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant English major, et cetera. And they raised it that they were secular. We'd go to, I always joke. We'd go to synagogue two times a year on Christmas and Easter. No, no, we would go, you know, Yum Kippur, Rush Hashuna, right? That's the typical two-day year Jews. And, you know, we'd have matzas once a year on Palm Passover. And that was about it. And for years, I was like that until my parents got divorced. My mother remarried, and she married an Irish Catholic man by the name of Ray Keating. My father's name's James Axe. So when she remarried Ray Keating, I was immediately adopted. I'm actually adopted into the Keating family. And he had nine brothers and sisters. And just warm and”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I talk to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you call yourself an agnostic too. Can you tell me something? Like, what do you do on Sundays? Do you go to church? It's like, no, I don't go to church. And I'm like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien. And he was looking down or she was, I don't know. Thing was looking down and I saw Freeman. And on Sundays, like a group of people go to church, but Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church. And those are called atheists. But Freeman calls himself an agnostic, but he does the things that the like Richard doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dawkins doesn't go to, right? So I said, how would you distinguish yourself, if not practice? So I'm a behaviorist. I believe you can change your mentality. You can influence your mind view, your bodily physical actions. So when I was a 12-year-old, I got my first telescope. I was actually an altar boy in a Catholic church, which is kind of strange for a Jewish kid who grew up in New York. Maybe I'll get into that. Maybe not. But I was just fast.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't do things that atheists people do. And I once had this conversation with my first podcast guest, actually. I shouldn't say, oh, I was just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson, but he was actually my first guest And I miss”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that book is in contradiction to the second book. That's like a memoir. It's really a description of what it's like to feels like to be a scientist and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book in more detail, but to really feel like you're doing something and it's all you think about it, it is all consuming. And it's something I couldn't have done now because I have too many other wonderful, delightful demands in my time. But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated by the night sky as a 12-year-old, 13-year-old and really mixed together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all, which I think is the existence or non-existence of God. So I call myself a practicing agnostic. In other words, I do things that religious people do. And I...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source