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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“Science and follow the science, which is more like scientism. And there is still a danger. You know, I always say just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion. Just because you, you know, in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize. It's kind of like a kosher idol. It's something that you can worship. It doesn't do any harm. And we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments because there is a core of America and the Western world in general that does worship and really look at science predominantly because it gives us technology. But there's something really cool about that. And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point between looking to science for wisdom, which I don't think it has. They're two different words. But also recognizing how much good and transformative power maybe our only hope comes from science.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to I think that's a website. You got to swipe left or right for that. I don't know. But when you think about what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day, he was a German nationalist first and foremost, even though he was a Jew. And he personally went to witness the application of ammonia, chlorine gas, applied during trench warfare in 1916 in battles in Brussels and whatever. And they had a whole conjure of Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics that would go and witness these atrocities. But that was also, they were almost putting science above, I don't want to say human dignity, but of like the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zyclon B. And so it's just unbelievable. I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of science.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. The same in Germany. Germany had highly prized. I mean, one of the most famous, tragic to me cases is Fritz Haber, who invented the Haber-Bosch process that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet? I know you fast intermittent fast every day and you do that. I said Kleb and you got a little drool but.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Zeldovich, the famous Jakob Borisovich Zeldovich, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polmarov. And he had to, only because he was like at a Nobel level and was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program, could he even get his Jewish student, he was Jewish too. only by virtue of his standing of his intellectual accomplishments would they give him the dispensation to let his student travel to Georgia or something? It makes what we complain about. I complain about academia and it's like, oh, well, what can I talk about? We have no idea of how good it is. And that they were able to create things like inflation completely isolated from the West. I mean, some of these people didn't meet like people like Stephen Hawking until, you know, he was almost dead. And they just learned this thing through smuggled in, you know, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology. There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working in the...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today. And they were completely in hiding. Like there's no Google. They couldn't look up on Scholar. They had nothing. They had to wait for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved. And then and only then, if they weren't a member of some class, I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists, you had a passport. I said, Jew on your passport.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wonder bread slash flex.com. Type in code cleb, right? Cleb. It's my favorite Russian word. It's like, would you like a piece of kleb?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To detect it with bicep or Simon's observatory or whatever. But that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen. And that's logically 100% correct. But it's like kind of chewing. I apologize if they're one of your sponsors. But”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I came to the right place, but in terms of what a physicist will mean, you're right. I mean, physicists will blithely, nonchalantly, subtract infinity, you know, renormalization and do things to get finite answers. It's miraculous. But at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world? So one of them, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless? They purport, many of the people that support it, like Andre Linde. In fact, Andre Linde says, you have a bias, you lex, me, Brian. You have a bias that you believe in a universe. But shouldn't you believe in a multiverse? What evidence do you have that there's not? So he turns it around. Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen, then there's no predictive power within the theory because you can always say, well, this value of the inflationary field did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy for us.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right? It's either some placeholder for infinity, or it's one divided by the smallest, you know, possible number that you can represent in the memory.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity. Let me illustrate that. They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature, right? So let me ask you a question. Is there anything that you can contemplate in the Einstein's little quip aside that's infinite like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature, energy that's infinite? And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it. But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one? You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids. How does it go from like to half of infinity? Because that's still infinity. How did it cool down? How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied? So now it's only infinity over two in terms of Pascal.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classifications of the amount of infinities that there could be. Infinity to the infinity power, you know, we have kids someday, they'll tell you, I love you infinity, you have to come back, I love you infinity plus one.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's horribly imprecise. So, what good is that's meaningless? I don't contribute any what's called surprise or reduction in entropy of your ignorance about the system. You know exactly how much you weigh. So me telling you that tells you nothing. In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist. There has to be at least one place that we exist. But the problem is it's a manifestation of infinity. So humans, and I'm sure you know this from your work with AI and ML and everything else, that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right? So if I say to you, like, what's bigger the number, you know, water molecules and this thing or the number of real numbers? Or if I say what's bigger the number of real numbers or rational numbers, they're all different.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, I think those are both kind of perceptive. The answer is a little of both because in one sense it's meant kind of to explain this fine-tuning problem that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly facunded, that has features consistent with our existence. And how could we be otherwise this sort of weak anthropic principle? On the other hand, a theory that predicts everything, literally everything can be said to predict nothing. Like if I say, Lex, you know, you've been working out. You look like, you know, yeah, it happened. Yeah, it's great. You look like you're, you know, about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spawning and ever increasing set of universes. Some will die stillborn, some will continue and flourish, and this is known as the multiverse paradigm. It's a robust, seemingly robust consequence not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more we're seeing it in string theory as well. So sometimes two branches coming to the same conclusion is taken as evidence for its reality.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation, according to its other two patriarchs, you know, considered to be its patriarchs, Alan Guth at MIT and Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe has to eventually get into a quantum state, has to exist in this Hilbert space, and the Hilbert space has certain features, and those features are quantum mechanical endowed with quantum mechanical properties. And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off. So inflation can get started, but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets. It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster, right? It continues the thrusting. You need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion, which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it. And what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology. So it takes away 50% of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity. You talked a lot about quantum gravity. You talk to people, eminent people on the show. Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything. There is a theory of quantum gravity, but there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Persuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some ideal, like inflation is a beautiful idea. But it also has consequences. And what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science. And in that sense, I can see support for what he does, but none of that detracts from my respect for a man. Imagine like, you know, Elon comes up with this really great idea, space, and he's like, actually, it's not going to work. And, you know, but like, here's this better idea. And he's like, SpaceX is not going to work, but he's now creating an alternative to it. It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done. Doesn't mean he's right. Doesn't mean I'm going to like have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea or I respect the man and his colleague Anna Aegis who works really hard with him.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists such as it is. It's not a huge universe, but they're more podcasters than cosmologists. Some do both. But this man created this theory with collaborators. And now he's like, I joke. I'm like, Paul, you're denying paternity. Like you're like a deadbeat dad. Now you're saying like inflation is bogus, but he doesn't just attack. See, this is what's very important about approaching things as an experimentalist. You got a lot of theorists on and that's wonderful. And I think that's a huge service. An experimentalist has to say no. He or she has to be confident to say like, I don't care if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever. We have to be like exterminators. And nobody likes the exterminator until they need one, right? Or the garbage collectors, right? But it's vital that we be completely kind of.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It's time translation invariant. So when we look at the alternative that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, these have serious virtues, according to some. One of the virtues to me, just as a human, I'm just speaking as a human, one of the founders of the new version of the cyclic cosmology called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt. He's the Einstein professor of natural sciences at Princeton University. You may have heard of it. And he was one of the originators of what was called new inflation. In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation who now not only has no belief or support for inflation, he actively claims that inflation is baroque, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Although the first Nobel Prize, and one of the first Nobel Prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind. So most people don't know. Inflation has already won a Nobel Prize.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that. You know, people say, like, what's your favorite? Alternative, right?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He has this silly joke. I'm sure you're familiar with this silly joke, right? Silly joke was that there are only two things that are infinite the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really if something had a no beginning in time, then it would be very unlikely we're in like the center of it or it's bounded or it has in that case a finite edge to it.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was another model that kind of came out of that. You hear the word quasi. So it's not steady state. Steady state means always existed. That was like cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe. And most scientists believed in that for millennia, basically. The universe was eternal, static, unchanging. They couldn't believe that after Hubble. So they had appended onto it, concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady, it was quasi-steady. So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space. And that amount of hydrogen that I was produced was constant, but because it was producing more and more every century, as centuries pile up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand. And so that's how they developed.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About how it itself took place. And that's really what you're asking me. I mean, you don't really look, what you care about like Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the elements got made and these fusion reactors and the whole universe was a fusion reactor. But like, don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time? And the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the Big Bang. We can't answer that in the context of these alternatives. So you asked me about some of the alternatives. So one is Aon theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of Sir Roger Penrose. Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s until the discovery of the primary component of my research field, the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB, the three Kelvin all-pervasive signal that astronomers detected in 1965, that kind of spelled the death knell in some sense to what was called the quasi-steady state universe.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah. So if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating? So that depends on how much energy it got initially and you can measure its dissipation, its air resistance, you had infrared camera, you can see it's getting hotter maybe, and you could do some calculations. But to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions and the boundary conditions. Boundary conditions were here on Earth has gravitational field. It's not going to excurs or make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum. It has simple properties. In other words, you can't tell me when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now? In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now? Now, that's a pretty pedestrian example, but what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended, but it says nothing.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a very simple system, like a one dimensional, simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum. Think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions. It's a tremendous lacuna, a gap that we have as scientists that we may not be able to in the inflationary cosmology determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are many alternatives, starting with the singularity, quantum, cosmologically demanding singularity origin of the universe. That stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning. Many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles, called by Sir Roger Penrose. And they all have things in common, these alternatives, as does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation. Inflation is sort of can be thought of as this spark that ignites the hot Big Bang that I said we understood. So it's an earlier condition, but it's still not an initial condition. In physics, imagine I show you a grandfather clock or pendulum swinging back and forth. You look away for a second, you know, you come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth. Alex, tell me, where did it start? How many cycles is it going to make before the can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because people have been using that cyclical model from Penrose. To Paul Steinhardt and Aegis, and right up until this very moment.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today. When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one really considered anything besides that Big Bang that there was a singularity. And people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know. But they would say some future incarnation of some experiment will tell us the answer. But now they're people that are saying there is an alternative to the Big Bang. And it's not really fringe science as it once was 50, 80 years ago when these models, by the way, the first cosmology in history was not a singular universe. The first cosmology in history goes back to Akhenaten, Ra and the temples of Egypt in the 3rd millennium BC. And in that, they talked about cyclical universes. So I always joke, you know, that guy, Akhenaten's court, you know, he'd have a pretty high H index right about now.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hydrogen was formed in our universe. We just don't know enough about that epoch. There are many people, most people, most practicing card carrying cosmologists believe the universe began in what's called the singularity. And we can certainly talk about that. However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe with evidence, and really only occurs in two instantiations, the Big Bang and the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable. And so for that reason, there are now flourishing alternatives. Let's say you can actually for the first time ask the question, that day, Tuesday, in the first moments of the R universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that, 24 hours time, seven days before that.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, most of those light elements besides hydrogen aren't really used in your, you know, in your encountered, right? We don't encounter helium that often unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pilot a blimp. You don't need lithium, hopefully, you know, but other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment. The question became, how did the heavier things like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later. And I brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor and a different type of process explosion as well called a supernova. However, if you go back to beyond those first three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing. Because we are not capable, in other words, going backwards from the first three minutes, as famous Stephen Weinberg titled his book, we actually Marx a point where ignorance takes over. In other words, we can't speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period. So I would say, you know, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the periodic table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show, The Big Bang Theory.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, good. So when we think about what happened, it's more correct. It's more logical. It's more practical to go back in time starting from today. So if you go back 13.874 billion years from today, that's some day, right? I mean, you could translate into some day, right? So on that day, something happened earlier than the moment exactly now. Let's say we're talking around one o'clock. So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor. It started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements. After that period of time, going forward, back closer to today, less 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, or later around they're coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like. And in fact, all the hydrogen, to very good approximation in the water molecules.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Usually people preface this by saying, I have a simple question. So, you know, what happened before the universe began?”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Measuring. You're taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever, and in effect. And so it's allowing you to basically teleport. And there's no other science that you can really do that, right? If you're an archaeologist, let me get into my time machine and go back and see what was Lucy really like. It's not possible.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are, and that allows us to do many things, including speculate about that. But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with someone a radio astronomer. I don't actually look through telescopes very often, except, you know, on rare occasions when I take one out to show the kids. But a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral. I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it and you're like, all right, it looks cool. It's kind of weird shaped thing. Looks like it belongs in sci-fi. It's going to blast, you know, the Death Star or whatever. But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object, if that object fills up what's called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope, it's called its beam. If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor, just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that's looking at, which is pretty amazing. It means you're actually remotely...”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at hairs, and in other words, they made the microscope. And we're still doing that. And so to have a telescope serves a dual purpose. It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time. In other words, you see a microscope. You don't say, oh, I'm seeing this thing as it was one nanosecond ago. Light travels one foot per nanosecond. I'm seeing it a nanose. No, you don't think about it like that. But when you see something that's happening on Jupiter, the moon, Andromeda Galaxy, you're seeing things back when Lucy was walking around the Serengeti plains. And for that, I think that took then the knowledge of, you know, relativity and time travel and so forth. It took that before we could really say, oh, we really unlock some cheat codes in the human brain. So I think that might be a little too much. But nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine? It's like we can look back in time, we see things as they were, not as.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't read it. What's going on? And that's when these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer. And what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, you know, two lenses and go like, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there until Galileo. So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of 10. So he 10X'd it, which is almost as good as going from 0 to 1 as going from 1 to 10. And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species, because we're using tools not to get food faster or to, you know, preserve our legacy for future generations.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“OG telescope. Yeah, the one invented not by Galileo, as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lipperchet in the Netherlands. And it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 141500s, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type. And so people for the first time in history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight. So looking at a printed word, now we just take it for granted, 12-point font, whatever. And that's what the eye charts are based on. They're just fixed height. But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have perfect vision. And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type. And at that time, people realized, hey, wait.”
2022-01-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source