Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Brian Keating. Dr. Brian Keating is a professor of cosmology at the University of California, San Diego.
Today's discussion is perhaps the most zoomed out discussion that we've ever had on this podcast. What I mean by that is today we talk about the origins of the universe. We talk about the Earth's relationship to the sun and to the other planets. We talk a lot about... optics, so not just the neuroscience of vision and our ability to see things up close and far away, but to see things very, very far away or very, very close up. using telescopes or microscopes respectively
So today's discussion is a far-reaching one, literally and figuratively, and one that I know everyone will appreciate because it really will teach you how the scientific process is carried out. It will also help you understand that science is indeed a human endeavor. and that much of what we understand about ourselves and about the world around us, and indeed the entire universe, is filtered through that humanness.
But I want to be very clear that today's discussion is not abstract. You're going to learn a lot of concrete facts about the universe, about humanity, and about the process of discovery. In fact, much of what we talk about today is about the process of humans discovering things about themselves and about the world.
Dr. Keating has an incredible perspective and approach to science, having built, for instance, giant telescopes down at the South Pole and having taken on many other truly ambitious builds in service to this thing we call discovery.
before we begin i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme this pod And now for my discussion with Dr. Brian Keating. Dr. Brian Keating, welcome. Dr. Andrew Huberman, it's great to meet you in person finally. I thought you were a legend.
I exist in real life and you do as well. And I'm delighted that we're going to talk today because I have a longstanding adoration. There's no other appropriate word for eyes, vision, optics. the stars, the moon, the sun. I mean, animals, humans. What's more interesting than how we got here and how we see things and what we see and why? That's right. You're a physicist. You're a cosmologist, not a...
That's right. I do do hair and makeup if you're interested. Please orient us in the galaxy. So I get to study... the entire universe, basically. And it's not really such a stretch that cosmetology and cosmology share this prefix, because the prefix cosmos is what relates those two words together that seem to be completely, you know, unrelated. to each other, right? But it turns out the word cosmos in Greek, the etymology of it, is beautiful.
or appearance. So we have a beautiful appearance. We look a certain way. We're attracted to certain things. But it kind of reflects the fact that the night sky is also beautiful, attractive, and evokes something viscerally in us. We humans are born with two refracting telescopes in our skulls, embedded in our skulls. And as you point out, the retina is outside the cranial vault, right? I'll never forget you saying that. That means we have...
astronomical detection tools built into us. We don't have tools to detect the Higgs boson built into us or to look at a microscopic virus or something like that. So astronomy is not only the oldest of all sciences, it's the most visceral one. So it connects us.
And of the sciences, of that branch of science, of astronomical sciences, cosmology is really the most overarching. It really includes everything, all physical processes that were involved in the formation of matter, of energy, maybe of time. itself. And it speaks to a universal urge, I think, to know what came before us. Like I always ask people, I'll ask you, I know what the answer is, probably, but what's your favorite day on the calendar? Favorite day on the calendar?
I love New Year's Day. New Year's Day. Exactly. What is that? It's a beginning. It's a new. Some people say their birthday, their kid's birthday. If they're smart, their anniversary, right? You don't want to get too out of control with the missus. What are those? Those are beginnings. What's the only event that no entity could even bear witness to? The origin of the universe. I think that speaks to something primal in human beings that are curious at least.
We want to uncover the secrets of what existed, what came before us. And we don't have any way of seeing that currently. So we have to use the fossils that have made their way throughout all of cosmic time to understand what that was like. at the very beginning of time, and perhaps, maybe...
about the universe as it existed before time itself began. So to me, it's incredibly fascinating. It encompasses all of science in some sense. It even can include life on other planets, consciousness, the formation of the brain.
And to me, I'm always interested in the biggest questions and the biggest topics that evoke curiosity in me is how did it all get here? And so that's what cosmology allows us to do, apply the strict exacting laws of physics to a specific... you know a domain which is the origin of everything in the universe that's what makes it so fascinating i'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors
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again that's betterhelp.com slash huberman before we get to the origins of the universe and the organization of the planets relative to the sun and their spins etc you said something that at least to me, feels intuitively so true, and I think it's very likely to be true for everybody, which is that there's something about looking up into space, especially at night when we see the stars.
hopefully see the stars we'll talk about light pollution a little bit later when we see the stars that yes we know these things are far away yes we know that they occupy a certain position in space they have a diameter etc we might not know what that is just by looking at them you probably do but but they also change our perception of time
And, you know, if I were to say one thing about the human brain especially is that, sure, it's got all these autonomic functions. It regulates heart rate, digestion, et cetera, sleep-wake cycles. It can remember. It can think. It can have states like rage or anger or happiness or delight. But what's remarkable about the human brain is that it can think into the past. It can be quote-unquote present.
and it can project into the future. And I'm sure other animals can do that, but we do this exquisitely well, and we make plans on the basis of this ability to contract or expand our notion of time. As a non-biologist, but somebody who I think appreciates and understands biology, why do you think it is that when we look up into the sky, even though most people might not realize that those stars...
probably aren't there and occupying the position that we think they are. Some of them probably are, some of them aren't. They existed a long time ago. But without knowing that, Why do you think that looking up at the stars gives us the sense of an expansion of time as opposed to just the expansion of space? Well, first of all, we have to take ourselves back. to deep prehistory we know that ancients were looking at um at the constellations because they
were seemingly either in control of or correlated with or perhaps causative of the seasons. And that was of divine importance, supreme importance for them, right? Their whole existence in early agrarian societies, hunting societies, gathering. So they had to know about time. So time, the essence of time and that.
On large scale for seasons, for holidays, for festivals, for propitiation of deities and so forth, they had to keep track of it. And that's why in the caves in Lascaux that date back to the 40,000 BCE, they depict. constellations orion the hunter taurus the bull all these different constellations they depict them there now partially that was because you know
Netflix didn't exist back then, right? There was no TikTok. And so there wasn't much to do at night. And in fact, the more you were out at night, you probably increased your opportunity to be consumed by some predator, right? So you were more focused on being stationary, observing.
And as I said, we can do astronomy uniquely so amongst all the sciences with just the equipment we're born with, you know, measurements with our eyes with respect to landmarks to calculate patterns. And humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, sometimes too good.
So for instance, knowing that a certain swath of stars is present at one time of year and not another relative to say the contour of a mountain ridge. Yes, and the repetition of it over and passed down through generations before there was written.
language there was pictography there was the cave paintings and so forth there was oral language and that was it for you know written language is only you know 10 000 years old or something like that so to store information that meant it was a continuity between generations my great
grandfathers, elders, whatever, taught me that when the moon is in this constellation, the sun is in this constellation, we all should plant or we should harvest in other times. And so it was, and we still do use the rotation. of the Earth, you know, hasn't changed that much since this 40,000-year period, right? I mean, the axis in which it rotates, that's a different story. But the actual spin rate, the angular momentum of the Earth has not appreciably changed that much.
And so the positions of these objects were of such importance that the ancients would use them for all these purposes. But there were so few things that changed position that they actually had names for them.
They're called planets. So planet in Greek, it's like the word plane, like airplane. It means something that moves or wanders. So when you name something, it means it's pretty different from the other things in which are not associated with that characteristic. So the planets, there are only five.
that they could see at that time up to Saturn. And they actually would associate those not only with astronomical events, but events down on Earth. That's what connected the Earth. So we have legacy of that in our calendar today. So Sunday. Named after the sun. Monday. Moon. Tuesday. And you go to the Latin languages. I think it's Mercury, Mercury, which is Mercury Day. Vontra Day, Venus Day. So you go to the Romance languages. And then the only one that's not.
A Latin name is, of course, for Thor, the god Thor, Thursday. And then comes back Saturn day, Saturday. So they were all used as a clock. And people don't really grasp this. I mean, we have an Apple watch. We have whatever. We didn't have a clock that was functional, that would work on all different time zones and all different conditions on the pitching deck of a ship.
till the 1700s basically. It was a huge problem. And so measuring time became crucial for commerce, for human culture and civilization to arise, for education, and obviously for planting, harvesting, and so forth.
There was an obvious connection between the two. They believed actually that they were causative, that actually the position of the planet Jupiter determined something on the day of your birth and the sun's relative position with respect to it determined something about your future and your life.
and your prospects in life and so forth. So when I'm not confused for a cosmetologist, because of my lovely hair and makeup, I'm usually asked, oh, you're an astronomer. I'm a Virgo. So what's going to happen to me? I'm like, I used to be, oh, OK.
Okay, that's an astrologer. I'm not an astrologer. But now I just kind of lean into it. I'm like, ooh, you're going to get a letter from the IRS next week. And that lump on your ass. You mean you're playing games with them. Yeah. You don't believe in astrology. There's no evidence for astrology. In fact, there's many, many random controlled trials, double bond studies that show not only is it – it's almost counter to the evidence. They say that a monkey can throw a dart at a stock chart.
do better than most hedge fund managers or something like that. Actually, astrologers are even worse. I don't even know. Protozoa could throw a dart. It's almost anti-correlated with what reality is. So no, there's certainly no... validity to that. And I had a provocative tweet, whatever, post recently. And it was about, there's actually, we believe there are 12 zodiac signs. And that dates back to the Persians and the Babylonians.
and how they divided up them. And it almost divides, you know, they were fascinated with the number 60. So that was the base of their number system. Our number system is 10 because we have 10 figures. For some reason, they love base 60. I don't know why. And so they love things that divide it evenly into it. Ten does, but anyway, you know, hashtag fail for the Babylonians. But they divided it up into 12 zodiac signs, so we still use those. There's a problem, though.
The zodiac that's your, do you know what this is? Do you know what determines your zodiac sign? No. Okay, so it's determined by the position of the sun. What constellation was the sun in on the day you were born? September 26th. So that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo. Oh, no, you were a Libra? Libra. Libra, okay. So you do know what you are, but you don't know why you are. So Libra.
means it's a constellation. There's 88 constellations that are accepted by astronomers. And one of them is Libra. And the path that the sun and the moon and all the planets travel in is called the zodiac. It's confined to a plane because the same... proto-solar system disk from which we formed out of. All the planets came out of a nebular cloud, a cloud of gas, dust, rocks, and so forth that came from a pre-existing star.
that exploded, creating what's called a supernova. The supernova provided the materials to make not only the Earth, but the entire solar system, including the sun. That happened about five billion years ago. And 4 billion years ago, the Earth formed out of that cloud. The spin of that disk, all things have a spin associated with them, like a figure skater. She's spinning around on her axis or whatever. She can have her arms out, brings them in. She spins fast.
That's called conservation of angular momentum. Spin is a type of angular momentum. The whole disk is spinning in a plane. It's like this desk, this table that we're sitting at. If you're listening, imagine a flat table. It's spinning. A circular disk is spinning with a certain direction.
All the objects are moving in that same direction due to conservation of this term called angular momentum. The sun apparently moves in that position. Obviously, we're rotating around the sun, but it looks like the sun's coming around us. The moon is Jupiter.
So on the day you were born, there's a constellation behind the sun from our perspective that was Libra on September 26th. And that was the day that you were born. That determines the fact that you're a Libra. But there's a problem. In December, where we are now... The sun is actually in a different constellation, the one that doesn't exist according to the zodiac that was created.
something like 6,000, 5,000 years ago. It's called Ophiuchas. So there's a certain segment of people born in a 17-day stretch in December, late November to early December, that are actually Ophiuchans or Ophiuchases or whatever. that should obliterate astrology as any semblance of a science because they didn't even know this constellation existed and yet something like 12 of all people
share that constellation. So it's just complete nonsense. There's no validity to it. Twins that are born on the same day have radically different histories, past, futures, and there's no predictive power to it. And that's what science is about, right? We want to make a hypothesis test.
that iterate on it and have confirmation of it. And there's zero, in fact, for astrology. In fact, if you'll permit me a kind of silly story, when I was dating my wife, who would become my wife in the beginning, she... You know, kind of thought it's fun. Maybe we'll go see, you know, someone who can tell our fortunes that we belong together. So we went to an astrologer.
and uh the astrologer asked me a bunch of questions you know when were you born obviously and um oh no she asked me what's your sign so i said i'm a gemini and she said okay cool and then she told me a bunch of things and at the end i said i just want to double check and i was playing i'm kind of a you know
A little bit of a jerk sometimes. So I said, I just want to confirm. Gemini is born in September. I'm born September 9th. She said, oh, no, no, that's a Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. Like it didn't change her outcome. And so in the language of. the philosophy of science, Karl Popper, others. It's unfalsifiable.
And you cannot be proven wrong. It's so flexible. You're going to find challenges. The stock market is going to fluctuate. Political turmoil reign. They're so flexible, it can accommodate any story. And that's a hallmark of non-science. anti-scientific thinking. One thing that really strikes me is the fact that, at least just the way you describe it, the first clock, the first time keeping
approach or mechanism was to evaluate the position of things in the sky relative to celestial landmarks. So irrespective of when people are born in astrology, I could imagine a tribe of people. a group of people who have charts because they've painted them onto some surface, doesn't matter what the surface is, that at some portion of the year, the stars.
are above this ridge. There are three bright stars above the ridge just to the left of the front of the village, so to speak. This is not an unreasonable thing to imagine. And that information is passed down. in the form of when those three stars are about to disappear behind that ridge, days are getting shorter. Whereas when those three stars are reemerging again elsewhere in the sky, days are getting longer.
Forgive me, this will be a little bit of a long question. Sometimes the listeners get upset with me, but I think it will frame it within the biology in a way that will be meaningful for us and for everyone. Other animals besides humans have this thing, the pineal gland that secretes melatonin. The duration of melatonin release is directly related to how much light there is. In other words, light suppresses melatonin, therefore in short days.
aka long nights, you get a lot more melatonin released. In long days and short nights, you get less melatonin. So this is the intrinsic clock keeping mechanism of all mammalian species and reptiles. Most people don't realize this, but reptiles often have either a thin skull, birds have a very thin skull, so that light can actually pass through the skull to the pineal. Some reptiles actually have pits.
in the top of their heads that light can pass directly in to the pineal. These are animals that, mind you, also have eyes for perceiving things. But this is the primordial, biologically primordial timekeeping device.
And you imagine why this would be really important. And then I'll get back to why I think that because humans have a pineal that's embedded deep in the... brain light cannot despite what some people think out there i'm not gonna name names but light cannot get through the skull to the pineal nor is putting a
a light in your ear is going to get there or even in the roof of your mouth, very unlikely, maybe some distant stimulation of the neurons in your hypothalamus with long wavelength light. But in any case. The pineal of humans is embedded deep in the skull. And so that information about how much light is in the environment has to be passed through the eyes, through a circuitous circuit, through a circuitous path to the pineal. But here's the thing. Here's the conundrum.
An animal or human born into an eight-hour day when days are getting longer has a very different future as an infant. infant or baby that's born into an eight-hour day when days are getting shorter, especially if you live closer to the poles, further from the equator. So think about this. You're a pregnant woman or you're the husband of that pregnant woman and you have a baby coming.
And you need to know that days are getting longer or shorter and what that means for resources because the probability of the survival of that child. and it and even the mother during and immediately after childbirth was strongly dictated by what resources were available the strength of the immune system etc animals solve this by light going directly into the pineal
I'm not one of those animals, so I don't know if they're conscious of this. Humans needed to solve this some other way. They needed to know whether or not days were getting longer or shorter. And so the question I have is, is the movement of the stars... or planets detectable enough with these telescopes that we have in the front of our skull.
Is it perceivable enough that one could know whether or not days were getting longer or shorter simply by looking up at the sky at night? Or are the shifts imperceptible and therefore you would need to create these charts? I think it's kind of obvious while I'm asking this question, because to me, this is the reason to chart time. And this is the reason it occurs to me why looking up at the sky at night is meaningful for tracking time. Absolutely.
And not only correlated with that, something even more perhaps basic is temperature, right? And the hemisphere that you're born in. You would expect that all – I'm born, as I said, September 9th. It turns out that's the statistically most common birth date of humans on earth.
And why is that? People are busy during the winter holiday. Exactly, right? So there's a correlation, right? Yeah, they're at home and they're indoors. They're at home. And they're procreating. Right. Or another thing is what month you're born in. Well, you go back nine months. the you know
capitalism is awesome, right? So it's so efficient. So when you go to CVS, and I've known this several times, thank God, because my wife's been pregnant several times, and we have several kids. And when you go to CVS, it's actually pretty interesting. goes there to buy a pregnancy test. Now, she's the kind of neurotic person. She had to buy like five.
pregnancy test for each kid. Okay. I don't know why, but that's what she did. So she's a... She likes data. She's got the gold card. How do you... Okay, everybody, statistics. How do you reduce variability? Increase sample size. Yes, unless it's a systematic error. And that's what I want to talk to you about later when it comes...
the eye and other things you go to cvs you buy a pregnancy test and you know she's on their gold plan program you know whatever she got the gold card from cvs uh because she's on so many times uh but um When you go there, they know you're getting a pregnancy test. So exactly nine months later, we start getting advertisements.
for Pampers and for diapers and for diaper creams and wipes and stuff because they know this. They're hedging even without knowing the results of the test. What's the downside for them? Well, she buys five tests. They're probably assuming something very different than if she bought one test. Anyway, so the temperature.
So if you're gestating during summertime versus wintertime, that obviously will have some kind of an effect. I mean you can tell me a lot more than that. But more than that, you hinted at this. And I'm not going to make you do any math surrounding pregnancy, but God forbid. I put out the correction of that. I was talking fast. The irony of that one, I'll just say for the record, I'm just blushing. The irony of that one is that...
we published numerous times for my lab cumulative probability and I teach this stuff. So it's oftentimes when you're going fast, but that one I totally deserved. And I, you know, whatever, whatever shades of red, I might, I might turn. That's what a good scientist does.
they actually think that the first astronomers were women think about it because they notice this correlation what's their monthly cycle their menstrual cycle is exactly 29 and a half days which is actually the lunar cycle down to almost a minute
It's insane, right? That they would have looked up and noticed this renewal and diminishing of the moon and that there's actually evidence. Now, they weren't professional astronomers until, you know, actually the first professional female astronomer wasn't until like the 1700s. England, where she was recognized for using telescopes and so forth. But no, they were very keen on that. And they were probably dialed into that. And what that portended, as you alluded to,
for the future of their child. I mean, this is a huge biological investment. Men don't have that. So actually, we are less symmetrical, you know this, than women, right? We have our testes or different lengths or whatever. I guess normal men, at least. But women are more symmetrical. But they're actually...
They have an extra timekeeping device that men – we can't relate to that. Their menstrual cycle. Their menstrual cycle. Yeah, and some women are keenly aware of the ovulation event. They will describe it as a feeling as if it's breaking off and migrating within them. have every reason to believe them. Earlier you asked, and I know this will get some people's ears pricked up, whether or not when a child is born with respect to the seasonal cycle, it impacts that child.
There are a lot of data around this. It depends on the... environment in which one lives. So closer to the equator. Yeah. It's a very different situation because the equal day is all day long. There were some data and I'd love to get an update on this.
somebody knows they can put in the comments that, you know, the schizophrenia was far more prevalent as you move away from the equator. And then there was a guy at Caltech, he has since passed, but had some interesting data about mothers who can... Tracted influenza during a certain phase of the second trimester, heightened probability for schizophrenic offspring. But big, big caveat here. None of it was... was causal, of course. And then there are all sorts of interesting things about
you know, placental effects. And so it's a multivariable thing. And we know that because identical twins, even that share the same chorionic sac, one can be schizophrenic and the other, no, although there is a... higher concordance than if, say, they're different, they're dichorionic, two different sacks. So, but time of birth relative to the seasons. Sure. Seasons correlating, of course, with...
abundance or lack of food, abundance or lack of various infectious diseases, influenza in particular. These things are relevant. But we'd have to make a real big stretch to then include the effects of the planet Jupiter, which is the biggest planet and is most of the mass. of our solar system outside of the sun, then it would be clear.
And you could do this test with identical twins that are identical versus fraternal twins, twins that are raised with the same parent. Some are separated at birth, and they turn out very much more similarly when they're identical twins. So it shows that genetics play more of a role. And we like to thank the genes. Genes are powerful. They are. I realize this is a bit politically incorrect to say in certain venues.
genes are extremely powerful yeah why wouldn't they be right yeah absolutely i mean nurture matters as well right genes are immensely powerful so and i think that gives us hope you know people say well you know we're we're we should not be so haughty. We should not be so arrogant. We have, what, 50% of the same chromosomes as a fruit fly. Who are you to be? And I say, I'll do you one better. I think some bonobos have 98% similarity. But that... should give us more, you know, sort of like
treat ourselves and think of ourselves in a way that's more you know uh you know more elevated i would say because we're not that there's many species of chimpanzees and primates and so there's only one human you know homo sapien which you know a lot of people don't know word, you know, homo sapien, which is our species and our genes. Sapien doesn't mean, it doesn't mean knowledge, like science. Scientia means knowledge. Sapiens means wisdom.
And I like to look at the etymology. I'm fascinated by it. But it kind of highlights what we should be doing and what is it that we are aware of. And I'm curious, have you ever encountered, like, why are we called?
You know, humans that like the wise hominid. And it's because we're the only entity, organism, that knows it's going to die. Yes, there's some elephants that, you know, before one dies, one will take care. It's not the same. It's like you knew you were going to die when you were a kid. Very young.
And it's that awareness of death and the awareness of how special we are. I think that's what invests life with a lot more meaning. I don't want to get too philosophical. It's time perception. That's exactly what I was going to say. I'm an expert on happiness sitting here. And then Morgan Houser is an expert on.
the relationship between psychological happiness and money sitting here. And he described this cartoon, which... inevitably makes me chuckle of a guy and his dog sitting by a lake and there's a bubble, you know, sort of bubbles coming out of the guy's head and he's thinking about whatever his stock portfolio and things back home, etc. And out of the dog's head is just... a mirror image of him sitting with his owner. Dogs are very present, but what that also means is that they are not...
able to perceive their own existence within time. And modeling of time, as you said before. We can forecast. We don't have the strongest muscles, the sharpest claws, the biggest teeth, right? What do we have? frontal prefrontal cortex that allows us to do what are called gedanken or thought experiments, Einstein said.
to predict the future, to model the future, not really predict it, we can't do that, but we can model likely outcomes and we can simulate in our minds what those would be like. And we're so dependent on that skill that we sometimes confuse correlation for... causation. And as you know, everyone who confuses correlation with causation ends up dying. So it's very dangerous to do that. But the point is, the...
notion of what's called confirmation bias is prevalent in every human being, scientist or not. And in fact, as scientists, you and I, we have to guard against that more than anybody because nothing really feels better than like...
Thinking of a hypothesis, modeling the future, and then feeling like you're right. And then you get celebrated and fed it. Maybe you win a golden medallion with Alfred Nobel's image on it or whatever. Those kinds of things are very powerful. And those kinds of things are also very dangerous, which is why.
It appeals to so many more people to think that the celestial orbs play a role in our lives. It's almost like we've reverted to a paganistic existence where we want to believe there's some force responsible for our fates.
When maybe it's random. I totally agree with you. I'll play devil's advocate for a moment. Not for astrology per se, but for instance, there are many species that... use magnetoreception they can sense magnetic fields sure i think turtles do this some migrating birds do this and pigeons there's even some evidence that within the I believe this is still true, that within the eye of the fly, the fruit fly, that there are some magnetoreceptors. So it turns out there are some humans that...
perform better than chance in a magnetoreception perceptual task. This is very surprising to me. It can be trained up somewhat, but I'm sure there are a number of people hearing this that they themselves feel that they can sense magnetic fields. there is a capacity to do that greater than chance in some individuals. It's a very weak capacity. So I think humans love the idea that there's something, skills or... qualities beyond our reflexive understanding that we all harbor.
This idea that we have superpowers that we just need to tap into. Sixth Sense, right. Sixth Sense or this person has a stroke and suddenly is speaking conversational French and therefore neuroplasticity, et cetera. Or what's a proprioception or our colleague when you were at San Diego. go Ramachandran. Oh, Ramachandran. Yeah, like synesthesia, right? Certainly synesthesia exists. People who will hear a certain key on the piano and it immediately evokes the...
The perception of a particular color, not just red, but a particular shade of red in a very consistent way. Now, if that was useful for something, maybe it is useful. I mean, it might be. Unusual cross-modal plasticity is what we would call it. Yeah. But so could that not be.
you know, made into an argument, well, that means that this is a general feature that we just don't know how to access, but maybe, like, we could go to the gym and, you know, mental gym or do something to enhance that, like you said. I don't know. Some people do that with, like, infrared, near-infrared wavelengths. that they do some kind of training and they claim they can see certain things. The question is how useful is it and then how predictive is it? And I don't think that –
We can make a case for the predictive elements of the position, as I said, of Mars and Mercury being in retrograde as it is now. But the thing that's shocking is that, like, look, there's a whole page in almost every newspaper except the X-gribble news. No, I'm just kidding. The New York Times. Are they still around?
It's very interesting. I'll tell you off the air, a recent encounter I've had with the New York Times. But most newspapers have more, you know, 10, hundreds of times more ink written about astrology than astronomy. I mean, it's barely. It'll barely be in there. And why is that? It's capitalistic society. So people crave this notion that there's some explanation for the random seeming events that occur in their lives. And that's an urge as ancient as human civilization itself.
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Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. It speaks to what I think is one of the core functions of the human brain, which, you know, umbrellas everything we're talking about, which is the human brain is a prediction-making machine. And it wants to make predictions on the basis of things that feel reliable.
And the ability for us to – well, confirmation bias, the ability for us to link A and T as opposed to A, B, C and work through things linearly and try and disprove our own hypotheses is much stronger than any – desire to work through things systematically unless you're trained as a scientist. And so it's no surprise to me that people want to understand themselves and understand others in a way that...
feels at least semi-reliable and to do that in a way where they don't have to run a ton of experiments and hence astrology. I'd like to stay within this vein of thought, but you said something earlier that's been kind of, you know. Nagging in the back of my brain. You said we have two refracting telescopes in the front of our skull. I will often remind people that your retinas that line the back of your eyes like a pie crust are part of your brain, your central nervous system that was...
literally squeezed out of your skull during the first trimester through a whole genetic program that's very beautiful and this might freak you out but think about it this is the only portion of your brain that resides outside the cranial vault yeah technically still in your skull but outside the cranial vault gives humans
an enormous capacity that they wouldn't have otherwise because what you can make judgments about space and time, space based on what's next to what, what's far from what, and time based on movement of things relative to stationary objects, etc. that we wouldn't otherwise be able to perform.
You could sense odors at a distance, smoke, etc. But it's a whole other business to have these two telescopes. Could you explain what you mean by two refracting telescopes? Because I think that will set the stage nicely for some of our...
other discussion about optics. Yeah. So I've been in love with telescopes since the age of about 12 when I could first afford one to buy one of my own. And that really came out of the fact that I recognized the limitations of the human eye. It turned out I was...
12 years old, woke up in the middle of the night one night. There was this incredibly bright light, you know, brighter than these lights here, shining into my room. And I was like, I don't know, there's a street light outside. This is crazy. Let me look outside and see what it is. And it was the moon.
And I had never seen it. It was near a moon set, which is near sunrise, full moon. And I looked at it, and I kept staring at it. And there was a star next to it that kind of looked like a piece of the moon had broken off. It was that bright and that clear. And it's unusual.
to see these kinds of things together. They're actually known as syzygies, which is a great Scrabble word. If you're ever pressed for a win in Scrabble, use the word syzygy. I think it's like 80 points. And that just means a conjunction, an alignment of astronauts. astronomical objects. I was like, what the hell is this? This is 1984, Andrew. You're younger than me. But Google did not exist for another 16 years. And I was kind of impatient. I wanted to know what this thing was.
What is this thing? It's not moving. It's not flashing. It's not a drone back then. It's not Southwest Airlines, right? So I'm looking at it. It's not moving. And day after day, it was like that. And I was like, how am I going to find this out? Like imagine existing. We're so blessed that we have the internet and we have these LLMs. It's so easy now to be a scientist or do research. And anybody can do research. Science is for everybody, right? You always highlight that fact.
So I realized the only way to find out about it was to wait for the New York Times to get delivered on Sunday because they did have a section back then that they don't have now called Cosmos. And in it, it depicted what the night sky looked like that night, which is a Sunday. And that was like three or four days after what, you know, I had this observation, which, you know, was incredibly, you know, observant. And I looked at it and it was the moon. It showed the moon and it showed Jupiter.
I was like, what? You can see a planet with your naked eye. This was around the time Voyager was going by the planets on the grand tour of the solar system, never been done before. I was like, I thought you needed a spaceship. And I realized that was my first bit of astronomical research. I had a hypothesis. What is it? I was wrong. I thought it was a star. It was a planet. I was like, this is insane. You know, imagine what I could see if I had a telescope.
But I couldn't afford a telescope. We were pretty modest means back then. I had a job working on a delicatessen down the street, and I'd do that once a week. And then, you know, I got a grant from a three-letter agency, you know, which is the beginning of many, many scientist careers. I got a grant. grant from the MOM agency, my mother. She supplemented my $2 an hour salary at the Venice Delicatessen in Dobbs Ferry. And I ended up getting a telescope for $75. And I cherish this thing.
And then I was like, oh, let me look at these things in the sky. And it's pretty amazing. I don't know if you know the history of telescopes, but the first ones were invented because of the glass that was present to make eyeglasses. So telescopes came from eyeglasses. Where was the best glasses? Where were the best glasses made?
Netherlands. So actually the telescope and the microscope were both invented in Holland. And the guy who invented the telescope is very interesting because it would be like he made the telescope. But he never thought to look at the night sky with it. He only used it as a spyglass to look at objects, you know, on the horizon or in a city or whatever. He never went like this, looked up, you know, in 45. That required Galileo.
So he's my absolute hero of all of science. We'll talk about him later maybe. Galileo was the first person to ever look up with this telescope and spot objects in the solar system, in the universe, that had never been seen before with a scientific tool.
So everybody had to use their eyes. Back to Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus, they had to use their eyes, which are telescopes. I'll get back to that. Don't worry. I know you afford me the podcaster's predilection of going off on long tangents. But I think this is good.
Galileo then said, well, I'm going to take this telescope and look at these objects that are otherwise look like stars. And in fact, we're called, you know, basically wanderers because they're the only things that moved. He first looked at the moon. Now take yourself back. to 1609 when he was first looking at these objects.
1609, there were no clocks. There were no scientific tools of any real virtue. He, in fact, would invent many of these things. There were simple things like a magnetic compass, a slide rule, which none in your main demographic will know what a slide rule is, but that's okay. Very simple tools. They would use tubes and whatnot. But Galileo looked at the moon. And the hypothesis was everything in the universe is orbiting around the Earth.
The earth is the most perfect place in the universe because God puts the things that are most important close to him in the center of the universe. God is the center of the universe. The Catholic Church held this. And everything will go around the earth.
I'm not going to challenge you because I think you'll defeat me in this, but in your audience, there are probably very many educated, I call them .edu people. There's many, many educated people. I find that even with my brilliant students at UCSD. They can't prove that the Earth is not the center of the solar system. In other words, I'll say on my Astronomy 101 quiz, I'll say prove that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, which was the whole universe back then, right?
And I would say it's about 75, 80% will not get it right. In fact, I can say to most people, prove the earth is not flat. I claim the earth is flat. Prove me wrong. Most people can't prove it. They don't know how the proof is constructed. I don't expect them to go and replicate what Aristarchus did 2,000 years ago. But this is knowledge we've had for, as I said, 2,000 years. The knowledge that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is only about 400 years old.
But I would say 99%, I know for a fact, I went to Italy actually 10 years ago. It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And we had a ceremony to honor the first person who ever came up with a theory of relativity, which is also Galileo. Galileo had the first notion that relative motion is indistinguishable. That if you and I are on a bike, I'm stationary, you can't tell if you're moving, I can't tell if...
I'm stationary. That's called relativity of motion. Motion is not absolute. Einstein would later enhance that, put on steroids, and then come up with all sorts of cool stuff that we can get into. But this notion that you could do observations, that you could use a scientific tool, couple with a hypothesis, and then iterate on those hypotheses to make both the instrument better and your hypothesis better, and then expose that to scientific peer review.
which was not what we have today. That was done by Galileo. He was the first person to use the scientific method. What did he use it with? A telescope. So a telescope that he used was a refracting telescope. Lenses like eyeglasses. Two of them, one put at the far end, called the objective. It's closer to the object. The other one, the eyepiece, close to your eye.
And he was able to magnify things about three to ten times pretty easily. Can you explain refraction for people that – Yeah, so when light travels at the fastest speed of any entity, photons travel at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second, except when they go into a medium. That's what they travel in the vacuum of space or in a vacuum in my laboratory or whatever. But when they go into a medium that's transparent or translucent, they slow down.
You can think of it as the light waves themselves. Imagine light waves as rows of soldiers marching together. And then imagine that they're walking an angle to the beach here in Los Angeles. They're marching an angle. The ones that encounter the water.
First, they start to slow down. The other ones keep moving at a fast speed. And then the whole beam of light, the whole beam of soldiers gets bent. That process is called refraction. We can do it. Well, this yerba mate is so delicious. We can't do it because it's got a little bit of a cut to it.
for instance, if you go and look at a fountain and you see a coin and you decide, you know, you're going to be that mischievous kid and you're going to grab that coin. So you can throw it back in like in any, you can, you can recycle the wish. And you reach down to grab it and you miss because where you see it is not where it actually is. Yeah. Put a pencil in a clear glass of water. Same phenomenon will happen.
That's refraction. It's the bending of light by what's called a dielectric or just a medium that's transparent or translucent. And you can do that in a way that you shape the wave of light coming in that it will be magnified. And that's, in fact, what a telescope does. Tele means distance. Scope means viewer. So a telescope really means distance viewer. A microscope means small thing viewer.
So this was kind of revolutionary to use it for scientific purposes. Galileo did other things. We just take these for granted. We got all these cool cameras here. These are all refracting telescopes. You can see the lens in one. You can see that it's on a tripod. Galileo invented the tripod. We take these things for granted, but people didn't.
realize that. What a stud. I want to get a list of all the things that Galileo did. I'm going to pause you for one second and please earmark where you're at because I have a number of questions that I just can't resist asking. First of all, if it's... too lengthy an answer feel free to say you know pass but
Why was the best glass in Holland? What is it about the Dutch and good glass? I think that they were extremely – as they are now. I have great colleagues that are from the Netherlands. They were obsessed with high quality. as Germans are, you know, they're very similar to Germans, into very precise instrumentation and high quality. It's interesting to note that glasses were only really invented in some sense because of the fact...
that there was an existing standard for human visual acuity. Okay, so we all know we go to the eye doctor. You mean eyeglasses. Eyeglasses, yeah. So we know today.
When you go to the eye doctor, there's an eye chart, right? It's called the Snellen chart. When you go to the DMV, you use the same thing. Numbers and letters of different sizes that at a given distance, if you can read all of them, then you have... whatever high acuity let's just say high acuity vision we won't get into it we won't get into yeah uh and if you can only read you know three lines down and then you're essentially um blind to the rest then you have less than average vision and
in the state of California, they'll still give you a driver's license. There are many people, by the way, there are many people driving in the United States, by the way, who qualify as legally blind. But because when you drive, you mainly use your peripheral vision, they are granted a driver's license. this should terrify everybody. But all those eye charts, every DMV here has the exact same size for the E at the top, okay? It's a calibration standard.
How could they do that 400 years ago? We're talking 430 years ago. It turns out there was one and only one standard that was acceptable across all of Western Europe. It was the Gutenberg Bible. The Gutenberg Bible was set in print by Gutenberg, and it had a fixed...
size of all the characters. So what they would do is at a couple of feet, they put the Gutenberg Bible in front of people. It's amazing to think about it because there's only like 10 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still left. They're all in vaults. They're all worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You can't buy them even if you're, you know, Elon.
When you look at it, you would be able to tell that you could not see at one foot what – I could not see what Andrew could see at one foot. So you knew that there was something diminishing my visual acuity, whether – who knows what it was. But they knew that they could then – correct that lens to be as good as 2020 or get up to your standard for me. And that was the way that they would judge how good your eyes were.
And so they then would correct that with lenses. And I always point out how ironic it is because later on Galileo would take those two lenses and instead of putting one on each eye, he'd put one in front of the other one and then use that to construct a telescope. But he didn't actually invent the telescope but he –
perfected the telescope. So just like Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they perfected it. Just like Facebook didn't invent social networking, they perfected it, right? So it's usually the second mouse gets the cheese, they like to say. He was the ultimate second mouse. He would always improve things much better that he would obliterate his competition. Galileo. But it was Copernicus, if I'm not mistaken, that was the first to say that.
the earth revolves around the sun while rotating on its axis and tilts which gives us the equinox correct yes okay so galileo corrected copernicus about the math but it was copernicus that um that gave us the first like
trusted statement that the Earth and the other planets rotate around the sun? Yeah. I would say he gave the hypothesis. He wasn't wrong. Galileo didn't correct him. It's just Galileo brought evidence to the table. He brought hard scientific observation. So who was this Copernicus guy? Was he just sort of – like a iconoclast he's like hey how about
We're not the center of the universe. It's the sun that's the center of the universe. So what was the milieu of the time was that the Earth was the center of the universe, which was our solar system effectively was the whole universe. They didn't know about stars and galaxies, certainly. We can get into that later. But there was what's known as the Ptolemaic concept of the organization of the cosmos. So the earliest cosmological models...
were that the Earth is the center of the universe and everything goes around it. However, these were not dopes. They knew that there were problems with that model. There are certain aspects of the orbits of planets, for example. Mercury's retrograde. And what does retrograde mean? We don't have to get into it, but there are anomalies that the planets will undergo at different times of the year due to the fact that the Earth is, we know now, rotating, revolving around the sun and rotating.
axis, but the main effect is revolution around the Sun. And the other planets are too, in the same plane, the zodiac plane, what's called the ecliptic, due to the angular momentum of the proto-solar system.
And sometimes the Earth goes faster than, say, Jupiter. So originally it'll be out in front, if you will, of the planet, you know, forward center of motion, as you like to say. And then it'll be behind it later on. And so it looks like Jupiter is making, like, this weird S-curve. And they couldn't explain that if the Earth...
Earth is the center of the solar system, except that they added on what are called epicycles. They added on extra little orbits of the planets in order to account for that motion that sometimes it appears, yes, we're moving bulk motion, but then sometimes it goes in the opposite direction when we're going in the same direction.
direction. So smart. Yeah, they were very smart. And they must have known by modeling this stuff on Earth, between objects on Earth. 100%. And that raises, for me anyway, an important psychological question. So you've got...
These Dutch folks with great glass, they're using that great glass to correct vision. I should say – sorry, Andrew. The reason that they had good glass is they were some of the foremost – explorers right a lot of the early trade and they were what did exploration give them access to trade so they could get the finest silicon and glass and they could make it themselves that's their economics again capitalism always wins right this is a lesson
that we shouldn't forget. Their commerce, their economies allowed them to do trade and acquire the best, highest quality materials. Then that was used to make the best scientific equipment. And it's just curious. It'd be like, you know, if they built these scientific... tools, but they didn't use them for science. So imagine like
building the Large Hadron Collider or Slack or something like that. And then not using it, you know, just like using it to like measure. I think Slack is sitting empty, right? But it wasn't originally. That's the point. Right. It was used for something. So what I'm curious about is... Why do you think it is that some humans get some technology, in this case, glass, and they want to look at things that are very close up? I like microscopes a lot. Yeah.
Right now, you know, I don't have my wet lab. We're still involved in some clinical trials. But, you know, I love microscopes. And I loved customizing my microscopes. I didn't like them, you know, I don't like a plug and play. I like them sort of the same way that people like hot rods. I didn't like motorized stages. I like manual stages, this kind of thing. Nowadays, you need motorized stages, et cetera.
But what was I going to invest my money into? It was higher numerical aperture. Yes. Basically, you're able to see things better. Deeper. Exactly. See smaller things better. That's what numerical aperture will do for you. So it's like putting more horsepower into a car as opposed to paying more attention to the... you know, the paint job. People do it with their cameras, you know, they geek out. Everyone's got their thing. Humans have this...
and they have the option to look at smaller and smaller things or to resolve their vision. Why do you think it is that a subset of humans? Because I think it's a special subset of humans. Instead, like, I want to look at things really far away. Yeah.
And you're one of these humans. I mean, I delight in the stars. I delight in the moon. I have some questions that I think most people have who appreciate sunsets and moonsets and things like that. But why do you think it is that it tends to be a small subset? of people who don't just want to appreciate the night sky, but want to figure this stuff out that is so far away. I'll be honest.
It never occurred to me. I'm curious about things deep under the ocean. I'm very interested in fish and aquatic life. But I like terrestrial things, arboreal things, things in trees. And I think most people... orient to the stuff that's more of this planet. Yeah. What do you think it is? I realize you're not a psychologist and there's probably no DSM whatever, six diagnosis specific for this. Check them all off. But is...
I'll just ask you, for you, was it a desire to better understand life here on Earth? Or was it a desire to kind of leave life here on Earth? I think it's the latter. I mean my childhood was pretty tumultuous. I think you and I have a lot of things in common, both fathers, scientists and physics and math in my case.
Very hard driving, very hard to live up to their shadows that they cast, for example, at least in my case. And you seem to have just a beautiful relationship with your dad now, but I'm sure it wasn't always like that. We did a lot.
about that we did a lot of repair work and i'm very grateful for where we're at and and i encourage anyone son daughter mother father whatever relationship that the repair work to the extent that it's possible is absolutely worth it yeah and that episode you got i texted you is a real gift, not only, you know, for all of us who got to witness it, but also, you know, for grandchildren, him, you know, his legacy and so forth. And even, you know, your dad's wife and your mom. But the point is...
Yes, it transported me. I was living through after the divorce of my parents. I live with my stepfather. who had adopted us, changed our names, moved to different – we were changing schools every couple of years. And that discovery of the moon next to Jupiter, it was sort of like solving a puzzle.
And there's a famous saying by Albert Michelson who was the first Nobel Prize winner in American history. For what? Physics, sorry. Michelson Morley, he proved in some sense that the earth is not moving through the ether. hypothesized by luminaries beforehand. But the point was when a child solves a puzzle, like...
You would think, well, like an adult, you solve a Rubik's Cube. Okay, I did it once. I don't have to do it again. But like my son, he'll keep doing it. He'll keep like showing off. Can I get it faster? Video game, same thing. Once you solve the video, you don't just like throw it out and stop doing it.
you get a taste of that thrill of discovery. Yes, it's diminished. And yes, we become inured to it as we get older and a little bit more, you know, there's just things we have to get, you know, take care of in life and especially as a professor scientist.
You can't marvel over the same things you did when you first did these experiments. But as an experiment, you get transported and you get to encounter something that you feel like no one has ever done before. For example, when I got my first telescope. that night, a couple of months after discovering this.
I looked through it and I saw the same features on the moon. And I have a 3D printed moon that my son made to show you. And it has all the craters represented on it. So cool. And I saw the exact same craters on the moon that Galileo saw. And then I looked at Jupiter.
And when you look at Jupiter, you not only see these beautiful atmospheric bands on it, and I brought you a telescope as your end-of-the-year holiday gift. It's yours to keep and no money down. Thank you. And Keating Brand Telescope. Thanks for the gift. And I looked at Jupiter. And when you look at Jupiter, as I hope you'll do tonight or with your crew later on, you will see.
Not only the planet, not only its little atmospheric stripes, maybe even the great red spot, which is amazing, three times bigger than the Earth. You can see it from Earth with this little telescope I got you. But you see four little stars. And there are four stars that are to the left, to the right. They're in a plane with the midpoint of these equatorial storms that are brewing on Jupiter. We know that they've been going on for at least 400 years because Galileo saw them.
So that sets a limit. Storms, when you say storms, what do these storms consist of? There are enormous hurricanes on the planet. And the equatorial bands like the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So there's plenty of water up there that's raining down? No, it's not water at all. It's methane, ammonia.
But it's a fluid. So it behaves like a fluid doesn't. So you have these swirling whorls and the colors will amaze you. You'll see colors on an astronomical object. It's going to blow your mind. And not only is it going to blow your mind because you're doing it, you're going to feel. unique in all of science. You will feel what Galileo felt. You won't know that he felt it before you. A billion people have seen it since then. Because for you, it's new.
And for you, you're viscerally connected to the maestro, to Galileo, and what he did. And there's no other branch of science that's like that. You can't look at the Higgs boson. First of all, no one person did. It's a team of 3,700 people that discovered the Higgs boson. people predicted the Higgs boson. Higgs was just one of them. One of my professors at Brown was another one, Jerick Galmick. He passed away. Unfortunately, he never won the Nobel Prize. But the point is...
You can't know what that felt like. You can't know what it felt like to discover gravitational waves because thousands of people did it recently in 2015. But the question of visceral connection... to the first discoverer of that phenomena, it's unique to astronomy. I don't know of another branch of science where you can have that. And best of all, from here in the center of LA, you can see the same craters. You can see these four Galilean, they're called the Galilean moons of Jupiter.
And we're sending spacecraft there now to see if they have life on it. It's incredible, Andrew. There's nothing else like that in all of science. For $50 to $60, I have a list on my website, briankeating.com. I have a telescope buyer's guide that I send to people. I don't make any money from it. love to share science with the public, just like you. But in my case, it's astronomy. And for $50 or $75, you can have this experience that Galileo had. It's an awesome feeling.
And I think that's what kept me going. It distracted me from the pains of the life that I had at that time and just struggling as most preteens and teenagers did. But to answer your question that you asked 20 minutes ago. It was really to transport teleport.
Exactly the opposite of the telescope. I really felt like I was transported to these other worlds. And that I could understand them with simple math and simple tools. Night after night, they were reliable companions and that people love to see it. You'll see Saturn hopefully with it. You can't help but feel this is amazing. It's thrilling. And it allows you to do science with your eyes connected to your mind. It's incredible. So it sounds to me like you were.
Thank you for sharing that, by the way. It sounds like you were able to connect to places distant in space, obviously, and time, Galileo. That's beautiful. I don't think the same experience occurs when one looks down the microscope. And it's true that the greatest neurobiologist of all time by a long shot...
was Ramoni Cajal, right? Supernatural levels of ability to understand what turned out to be the correct function of the nervous system just from anatomical specimens. But when I look down the microscope and I see a... even a Cajal Retzius cell, there's a cell named after him, you don't really feel a connection to him in the same way. Although the neurons are beautiful, but you don't, it's not the same the way you described. What's great about science in general is that the best science...
is apolitical. But I always say, look, there's no such thing as like, oh, well, that constellation is a democratic constellation. Oh, see that asteroid? That's a republic. No, it is a safe space. I think we do need safe spaces. And at best, science is a safe space. space, not meaning it never interacts with politics, because of course it does.
But for those moments, we as humans, and you know this better than I do, we need recovery. You can't just work out. You don't work out seven days a week. You work out six days a week or whatever. It's still more than six more than I work out. But the point is. We need to recover as much as we need to pay attention to the activity. We need to recover or pay attention to that too. And so the question is, where can we recover? from social media from politics from economic stress and all
I think science is an ideal vehicle for it. It should be apolitical. We shouldn't be always concerned with politics or what's happening on social media. And I'm guilty of this too. I'm certainly spending way too much time on screens. But the point being. Science can be that. And astronomy in particular, like I said, it's apolitical. It is safe to let your mind run to what you used to do when you were on a dorm with your bros at 3 a.m.
BSing, right? We don't get a chance to do that when you're thinking about mortgage payments and like who's taking the kids tomorrow and all these different quotidian things I would say.
We need to get back to that more than ever, I feel. Pondering the origins of life and connecting to people who existed thousands of years before us. Do you think that Galileo, Copernicus, and others... were doing the exact same thing, that there was a bit of an escapism to it, healthy escapism, as opposed to trying to solve the position of the plants and understand ourselves. for some other reason? Definitely. Yeah. I mean, Galileo in particular is sort of this tragic figure in some ways.
had the first notions and application of the scientific method, as I said, using an apparatus to confirm a hypothesis, iterating on that. So I said, when he saw the moon, he saw these craters and valleys and rifts and lava fields that you'll see tonight. Again, people, you can buy a telescope.
Amazon, $50. And you'll see the same things that he saw. And you can connect it to your iPhone and post it on Instagram if you want. And I hope you'll do that. That's your only homework assignment. The only one I'm going to assign to you as a professor. So I want you to take a picture of the craters on the moon.
But the point is you'll see the exact same things. From New York City, you can see them. From the middle of London, it doesn't matter where you are. If you have a clear sky and the moon is out, you'll see the same thing.
But when you look at Jupiter, you'll see these four dots. And here's where Galileo just had this otherworldly intellect that, you know, when I saw those, I was like, oh, cool, it's next to some stars. Until I realized, I had to do more research, that those are actually the moons of Jupiter. So in one night, tonight... you can quadruple the number of moons you've ever seen in your life. And some of those moons are almost the size of our moon.
Our moon is unusually large. And those moons sometimes will cast shadows on the planet. So there will be an eclipse. You'll witness an eclipse on Jupiter on another planet with this $50 instrument or whatever, OK? When he was observing these things, he...
would do things that were not only psychological and they were therapeutic for him in his later years. I'll explain that in a minute. He ended up going blind and so losing the sight and kind of the recollections that he had. And he lost his daughter who was a nun.
because he was – she was illegitimate as most of – I think all of his kids except maybe one, his oldest one. He had mistresses. He was never – he was married, divorced basically and I was kind of like – he was Catholic in Italy, primordial Italy basically. It didn't exist as a country but he – in Tuscany.
And he had a lot of challenges. He was almost always broke. Even when he invented his version of the telescope, again, he didn't invent the telescope, but he made it so much better. 10x'd it, 20x'd it, you know, zero to one. And it was incredible what he did with it. He realized this is great and all for me to discover these cool things and learn about the universe. He was deeply religious too. But I got to make money. I got to pay for my house.
Imagine like your students at Stanford are living with you because that's the only way you can afford to pay rent in your house. And you're cooking meals for them. And they're like slobs, right? I mean, I was a slob in college, right? So the point is he had bills.
pay and he was a businessman he realized well look if i if i start making these telescopes everybody will see the things that i'm seeing i won't have any monopolistic advantage over you know kepler who is his friend but also his competitor they were they were you know really vying for for who is the best astronomer of all time kepler in germany and obviously
Galileo in Italy, well, become Italy. And he realized Kepler was purely theoretical. He had great math chops. He came up with functions for the orbits of planets before Isaac Newton proved that they came from calculus and universal gravitation. Incredible scientist. But if he gave that, it was like giving a free particle accelerator to your arch competitors, right? He didn't do that. He said, no, I'm not going to make these telescopes, but I'm going to sell them only to the government.
And they're going to pay me because these are great military devices. And we don't think of them now. But with it, he went – he's so brilliant. He was so charming and charismatic. He said, I'm not only going to like sell you these things. First, he went to the Senate. in Venice, the Venetian Senate, the Doge, the original Doge. We think Doge is a coin or some department that Elon's going to head.
No, no, it was the Doge was like the chief of the government back in the Venetians, which was one of the most wealthy countries in all of Europe. It was separate from Tuscany and separate from Rome. And he went there and he said, you are a maritime.
Have you ever been to Venice? It's beautiful, right? So he said, look, come with me. I'm going to take you up into the Piazza San Marco, go up to the tower, and we're going to look out and we're going to see. There's a ship out there, but you can't see it with your naked eye. But if I give you the telescope, you can see it.
three days earlier before it comes into your harbor. That's like you have an F-35 stealth fighter and you sell the rights to turn off the stealth portion of it to your adversary and it's incredibly valuable. It's a time portal. Yes. You know, you could tell I'm keep harping on this theme of, you know, the ability to see things at greater distance. That's right. At higher and higher resolution gives you a window into time. Exactly. And we speak of that now.
has enormous advantage they're there because of you know the trajectory of the ship yeah you actually are getting a uh a sort of crystal ball into the into what's going to happen in the future whereas looking at uh position of the stars some anticipation of what's going to happen based on historical charts of the stars. Exactly. And we even speak of that now and come to think of it as you're saying it, light years. What is a light year? It's a measurement of distance, but it's in terms of time.
So it's exactly what consonant with what you're saying. We are always going to have this. combination, this interrelation, this competition between things in space and things in time. And he realized with this tube that he could see the great distances that also afforded him this extra advantage when it came to predicting the future, as you say. If we could do a...
top contour survey of the greats of astronomy, where would it start? Starting with people who got it wrong and then correct each other. Like if we were going to do a fast... a fast sprint through these yeah uh where would we start well you'd have to start with like you know gog or whatever you know the first cavemen and women you know as i said to 40 charting stars on the wall exactly we don't know who they are telling their their youngsters like okay you know
Because those stars are there relative to that ridge or et cetera, days are getting longer, days are getting shorter. That's right. Ergo, hunt now. Ergo, collect stuff to hunker down. Maybe even don't. Reproduce now. Maybe even behavioral restraint. 100%. Maybe reproduce now. Yeah. It's going to be much more optimal time for that. Exactly. So tens of thousands, pre-antiquity, you would say. Then the, I would say, fast forward.
to the maybe Egyptian epoch, 5000 BCE, so to speak, when they had also a very – zodiological and astrological conception of these objects. And yet they would build things in relation to the positions of stars and constellations. Sundial emerges. Sundial, obelisks, things that were used, primitive things.
Stonehenge also, I think it's like 20,000 years ago. They believe it's related to some astronomical observations. They're not entirely certain about that. We have to double click on Stonehenge. How do you think it got there? one of those great mysteries that's, I think it's less controversial Stonehenge than the pyramids. The pyramids seem to be like almost, you know, they lead people into thinking about aliens. But what do you think of it? I mean...
Given their mass, given their location, given what we knew about populations then and given what we know about the strength of people and the tools they had at the time, is it reasonable to assume that people built these things? Certainly. I mean, you'd have to convince me that. People didn't build them, but exactly how they built it is a great question. I mean, so for example, I mentioned this when I was on Joe Rogan's show. I said, you know, if you measure.
the bases of the pyramids. It turns out that they're a ratio of a qubit, which is actually qubits, not quantum bits like you and your dad talked about, but qubits is the length of the pharaoh's forearm. It's basically a foot and a half roughly. So back then, if you were... like the president, you were also the metric standard for all of civilization. Wild. Sort of like models on Instagram, right? Everyone's trying to attain these. What's the standard? That's right. Exactly. Wild.
And is this about carrying items? Yeah, well, it was just for length or like a foot. We talk about a foot. It was a pharaoh's foot. Yeah, that's where we get those from, right? So there was only kind of one rough standard for calibration, which is incredibly important for removing systematic effects in science in general. So you had a calibration standard. Now we have like a bar of platinum.
We've defined the second in terms of oscillations of a certain atom called cesium and how many times it oscillates per second. Sure, a degree, right? Yeah. A calorie, right? So now we want to define those in terms of physical quantity. not in terms of people. And so doing that has been a great advance forward in science. And we've only recently gotten rid of what are called artifacts. So it used to be there was a rod that was one meter long. And the meter was originally defined as 60.
I forget, of the distance from the North Pole to Paris. But that obviously depends on assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, which it's not, right? It's kind of chubby around the middle. Yeah, that's right. It bulges because it's an ablate spirit, right? Exactly. And so...
All these things that were relics, we want to get rid of them and tie them to fundamental properties of, say, a quantum system that's very pure and we can isolate it. We don't want to use a pharaoh's foot either. So we have to come with a link standard. So now we use the speed of light times the second.
define things in those terms. But back then, yeah, so they didn't know that. But I told Joe, as I said, if you measure the base of all the great pyramids at Giza, they're all multiples of a cubit times so many numbers of the number pi. So like – but Pi wasn't known to them. Pi wasn't known to be irrational to the Greeks and Euclid proved that it was irrational and that it didn't come from a computational – it couldn't easily be obtained.
an infinite number of digits, right? So how did these Egyptians know that? An alien told them, no. The way they did it is they laid it out. They used a surveyor's tool. One of the surveyor's tool is a stick with a wheel on it.
So the wheel's a circle, so you've got so many multiples they just counted. So we confuse a lot of things. So they stumbled into pi. Exactly, right? They walked all over. So you don't have to always posit supernatural explanations for things. The answer is simply we don't know. I certainly don't. know how stone engine was built nor how do i know how the pyramids were built um but it's not
you would have to convince me that it was built by some other means other than people and the tools that were available to them. Yeah, likewise. I'm not convinced it came from extraterrestrial sources. Yes, I don't remember how we got on this, but timekeeping. So we were marching through. So we have our ancient ancestors. And then at what point do we get to?
Copernicus and Galileo. Yeah, then it was Copernicus who had ideas but couldn't prove them. He had no data to substantiate the Copernican or sun-centered model of the universe, which is also, by the way, you know almost everything in science is wrong right copernicus is wrong the sun is not the center of the solar system right there's the center of our solar system is inside the sun because the planets orbit around it and they orbit around an elliptical pattern which has two
UFOci. So he believed that the orbits were all circles. So he's wrong, but he's more right than Aristotle. So that's how science progresses, right? Newton was right about gravity until he was wrong when Einstein proved them wrong, right? So then you come up to, after him, Kepler. discovered the laws of the elliptical motion of planets and their patterns that we still use. We discovered an exoplanet. My colleague David Kipping I want to introduce you to, he's discovered exomoons.
These are moons around other planets, some of which are in the habitable zone of their host star, and some of them have sun-like stars and are Earth-sized planets. It's incredible. There could be, as I said, a link between life evolving on Earth due to the moon on our planet.
So too, on an exoplanet, it could require an exomoon, which he's discovered or thinks he has. He's actually very cautious and hasn't said it explicitly. So Kepler's laws underpin all those discoveries, even to this day, 400 years later. Then Galileo, immediately afterwards with the telescope, phases of Venus that only occur if the Earth is not the center of the solar system. The rings of Saturn, he had notions about those.
He accidentally discovered the planet Neptune. It's amazing. And then he, of course, the moons of Jupiter falsified the notion that the Earth is the center of the solar system because these moons are going around Jupiter, not around the Earth. So that's completely... torpedoed the notion of the true nature of the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic Earth-centered cosmology.
Then soon after that, astronomers measured things like the speed of light using eclipses of moons of Jupiter. They measured distances to Saturn. They mapped out the solar system. And then from there, using parallax, you know, you can kind of gauge. the triangulation and using trigonometry measure the structure of our galaxy william herschel and his sister caroline hersel was the first female astronomer first female scientist she was the first person to use the scientific method and become
of the Royal Society in Great Britain. And then later off after that, we come to the era of the last, you know, kind of the big developments in technology were photographic plates after that, spectrographs. of light onto photographic material that could preserve you in memory. You didn't use sketches like Galileo did.
And then up until Hubble, when Hubble discovered two major things, which was – one was that the Milky Way was a galaxy. It wasn't the entire universe. There were other galaxies, island universes, billions of stars. And then he discovered the expansion of the universe with help from –
astronomer who doesn't get a lot of attention. A lot of the women in astronomy got really short shrift. People discovered how fusion works in the sun. Women, Gaspachin at Harvard. And then Henrietta Leavitt, who... who measured this relationship between the size and brightness of objects called Cepheid variables that Hubble then used to make his law that proved that the universe is expanding.
And then after that, people like Penzies and Wilson discovering the microwave and radio astronomy, Robert Jansky, all the way up until, you know, my colleagues today, some of whom I've interviewed, Adam Reese and Brian Schmidt and Barry Barish. the forward to my second book, detecting gravitational waves, the accelerating expansion of the universe due to dark energy, first Nobel Prize in astronomy in 2011, followed up 2015, discovery of 2017, discovered gravitational waves.
from in-spiraling black holes. You know, there's so many, and there's so many, you know, I've been blessed to know many of them, and I have them as my academic, you know, pedigree. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function.
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that made a lot more sense to me past there were a bunch of big explosions a bunch of the elements and stuff that you needed uh came together and then uh at some point there was water and at some point there were critters that moved and then multicellular organisms. Like, what am I missing here? I mean, I'm a man of science and I love science, but why can't, I can grasp it when it's told to me, but why is it that it's so hard?
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to comprehend this idea that a star exploded, dot, dot, dot, and here we are. I think it's obvious why you have this particular affliction, and that's because... You're used to doing experiments. You're a scientist. Your core identity, one of your core identities is a scientist, right? And you think of things scientifically. And as I said before, the scientific method, as we practice it, is based on hypothesis, observation, experimentation, iteration.
Well, think about this. if i study if i have a hypothesis that um you know that certain people can um can detect sunspots right so i want to have a control group and i want to have a variable right so i want to be able to contrast and see if it's statistically significant right and not on a p hack right so what do i have to do then well i have to control the number of sunspots
Okay, sorry. I'm not, you know, you used to say you weren't around at the creation, you know, at the design meeting for human beings. I wasn't consulted at the design phase. By the way, when Brian says p-hacking, p-hacking is people tinkering with the numbers or the experiment or the hypothesis. after the data are in, in order to try and establish statistical significance, which, and by the way, p-hacking is not just...
Not good. It's bad. It's cheating. It's not making up data, but it's tweaking the experimental design in hopes that you'll get something where you... Probably didn't. It's not good. You don't want to do it. Don't do it. Your colleague at Stanford, Guido M. Benz, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2021. And he's done a tremendous amount of work in this, confounding variables, p-hacking. Where do these things manifest themselves in physics?
high temperature superconductors. This goes back to the late 80s. I remember graduating from high school, there was a discovery of room temperature, what's called cold fusion. That was one thing that would create also limitless energy, too cheap to meter from just using hydrogen and from seawater. and palladium and platinum that turned out to be bogus. And it turned out to be the data were manipulated in such a way that we would say.
probably fall into the realm of p-hacking, which may not have been maliciously intended. But the goal, the output of it is certainly a driving incentive that influences people to do things that are unethical. And that happens at all levels. I saw it in my own experiment.
not necessarily accusing my colleagues of being unethical. We were searching, and we still are searching, for what caused the Big Bang. We're going to get back to your question of how this comes out, because I think I can help. But that plate's still spinning. Yeah, it's still spinning. Like a planet. It's spinning like our soul. system, right? But the quarry was so big to unravel what caused the Big Bang to bang, what ignited.
the spark that became our universe. It's at least, it was called when we announced the discovery at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014, World News covered front page everywhere, New York Times, CNN, every single outlet covered. it, it was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Not only did it
explain how our universe came into existence. It also predicted the existence of other universes in what's called the multiverse, which we've heard about maybe in quantum computing. Most people have heard of it on the Joe Rogan podcast. Yeah, exactly right. That's right. Among many things that we... hear about only on that show so the the point is um it was
It was a quarry for the ages. And I knew that because that's why I invented the experiment, right? I told you my father and I, you know, we never really had the rapprochement that you and your father seemed to have had, and that's great. We always had kind of a difficult relationship. As I said, he abandoned me and my book. I write about this rather. He abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin. I was seven. He was 10. And he just left us.
Because of that, he didn't end up paying child support for me or my brother and alimony to my mother. And so my stepfather adopted us. And my last name was originally not Keating. It was Ax, A-X. And so when we were adopted, I never saw him. I didn't see him for 15 years. But I knew one thing. He was a brilliant scientist and he was actually the youngest. He was not only a tenured professor. He was full professor with like a chair at Cornell at age 26.
So you and I got our profession, like our 30s or whatever. I was 40 when I got tenure. Yeah. I mean, it's like a much, it seems 26, 26. Now it's math. It was a little bit different.
But I knew he won – basically, there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics. There's the Fields Medal, which is kind of equivalent at some level, but almost nobody knows about it. It's only given every five years. You have to be under 40, whatever. He never won that, but he won like the prize just beneath that, if you will, called the – Nobel Prize. Remarkable scientist, got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics. And I knew one thing, he never won the Nobel Prize.
So as some kids might compete with their father who's, you know, captain of the high school football team and they want to be the captain of the college, very competitive. Boys can be competitive with their dads, right? You know that.
I wanted to compete with him, but he wasn't an athlete. I wasn't an athlete. I compete with him and do what he could not do, which was win a Nobel Prize. And I was estranged from him. And I was like, I'm going to win a Nobel Prize and I'll show him, you know, and he'll regret that he abandoned me and gave me up for adoption.
This is my thought, Brock. I'm not saying it's like the most elevated way to be, but that's the way I thought of it. So I said I have to invent something, discover something. That's worthy of a Nobel Prize. That's all I have to do, quote unquote. How hard can it be? There's been hundreds of Nobel Prizes given out. That's the way you thought.
I was at Stanford and you're surrounded by nobel. You know what it's like. I was a postdoc at Stanford for a short time. We can get into that. And the point was I was obsessed with discovering or inventing an experiment that could take us back to the primordial universe. for what we call the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space. It's the origin of the first elements in the periodic table of the elements. We still don't know what caused that event to occur. And I realized that if we discovered what caused that event to occur... which is hypothesized to be a phenomenon called inflation, which was co-created by at least three scientists, but two of whom were at Stanford, associated with Stanford, Alan Guth, who's now at MIT. He was a postdoc at Slack.
who's a renowned professor at Stanford to this day. So they predicted that there was this mysterious substance called a quantum field and that the fluctuations in this quantum field existing in the four-dimensional infinite space... the random fluctuations of a quantum field, what's called vacuum energy is unstable.
You can't have what's called vacuum or negative energy and have it just sit there permanently. It eventually, inexorably, must fluctuate, and the fluctuations can actually spawn an expansion of that four-dimensional space locally. at a specific time. When you say four-dimensional space, can you tell us the axes of that space? So you can think of it as just ordinary three-dimensional space, but imagine x, y, and z extend to infinity in all directions.
And we're sitting at our local, what we perceive as the center of our universe. It's just our observable universe. We can look out 90 billion light years in any direction, which is longer than the age of the universe times the speed of light.
That's because the universe has been expanding in addition to having existed for 14 billion years. It's been expanding for an additional power of three times that. And then imagine time. So time is a fourth component and we have to weave those together in order to – how objects behave in this landscape of what we call the cosmos.
But it wasn't limited to just what we now see as our universe. We have a horizon, just like if you go off to the Pacific Ocean here, away from land, you see a horizon. It's a circular horizon in all directions. So we live on a three-dimensional planet. The horizon is two-dimensional. It's one-dimensional, a circle, that we can see any ship that's above the horizon, we can see visible light coming from it.
But we can perceive that there are things on the other side of the planet that we can't see, and we have to learn about those through indirect methods. We can talk about that at a different time. So there's a horizon on a three-dimensional surface that's a one-dimensional surface. In four dimensions, it's a two-dimensional surface.
So you kind of lose two dimensions. And that means it's a sphere. It looks like our universe looks like a sphere centered on us. We look in all directions. We see constellations. We see galaxies. We see clusters of galaxies. If you go far enough back, you see this primordial...
heat that's left over from the formation of the elements. That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation. That's what I study, its properties. And what it reveals is the oldest light in the universe, the oldest possible light. It was once visible. You could see it if you existed.
Nobody existed back then. And it originates from the formation of the lightest elements and the lightest atoms on the periodic table. So you could look back. And if you could see this, you would see a pattern imprinted on that light. called gravitational radiation or waves of gravity. And that would be evidence of something beyond the visible horizon. And that would actually originate from this inflationary epoch if it occurred. So I had the idea.
to build the first telescope, a refracting telescope of all things, just a telescope with lenses, but lenses that are transparent to microwaves and focused microwaves. But I realized I could build that telescope. And if we were successful, I didn't think we wasn't guaranteed to be successful, but it was a big enough scientific quest that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we were correct. And in fact...
You know, spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because we had to retract the discovery that we made at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014, 10 years ago. So you had a paper that essentially led you to the –
like realistic possibility that you might win the Nobel Prize. Yeah. And then you had to retract it. Do you recall your state of emotional state or state of mind when you realized that you were wrong? Very clear. And that's how it relates to this p-hacking and everything else. We actually didn't have this paper peer reviewed. We were so concerned that a competitor...
which is a spacecraft, a billion-dollar spacecraft. We were just a $10 million experiment, a little telescope at the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been a couple of times. And that instrument... bested a scientific telescope led by 1,000 people costing a billion dollars led out of multiple countries in America and Europe. And we were terrified, as many scientists are, that we're going to get scooped. In fact, the original discovery...
of the cosmic microwave background was made by accident. The discovery of this 3 Kelvin heat source that's coming to us in all directions, i.e. it's a background, was made by accident at Bell Laboratories.
And Bell Labs accidentally discovered it because they were looking at the very first communication satellites. AT&T, Bell Labs is a communication satellite. So they stumbled on it. They accidentally said, I'm looking at the satellite that should have a certain amount of background hiss, noise, whatever that was expected. but I'm getting hundreds of times that amount. And where could that be coming from? They did very excruciating, very high precision measurements and they found they couldn't.
identify a single terrestrial source or a cosmic source of any other sort except for the fact that if the universe began essentially with a big bang, they didn't call it that back then, that there would be a pervasive heat left over that would be exactly this temperature, three degrees above. Absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin.
So I knew if they won a Nobel Prize, certainly I'd win a Nobel Prize for discovering why that effect happened. It's like you discover some amino acid and then you discover, well, it's produced by DNA. Well, certainly you know if the amino acid won the Nobel Prize, certainly DNA would win.
Well, hence Kornberg, Arthur Kornberg, RNA, son, you know, structure of RNA. Yeah. So you published a paper that wasn't peer reviewed. Correct. Because you were worried about getting scooped. Scooped is when someone else beats you to publication. folks and gets credit for the discovery. It's a whole discussion that we could have some other time if we just want to riff on the process of science. But so you publish the paper.
We didn't publish it. We submitted it to the archive. We had a press conference at Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. And it was televised. And in the audience were Nobel laureates and reporters. But the discovery that – You know, it was clear that we would have won it. However, at that time, I had been...
removed from the leadership of the experiment that I created. So I created the predecessor experiment. It's like iPhones. You build one, then you upgrade it, you build a better camera. So the first one I invented when I was a postdoc at Stanford, it was called BICEP. And it stood for background imager of cosmic extragalactic polarization. And it's also kind of a play on words because the pattern of microwave polarization, which we can talk about.
was a twisting, curling pattern. So I made the pun, like curl like you do bicep, the muscle behind curls. Anyway, it's not that funny. And they ended up trying to change the acronym, which pissed me off. But anyway. So the tragic thing is that we built this experiment. We upgraded this experiment. It was very hard to get money to build it. I got money from David Baltimore, who's the president of Caltech. I should say I was at Stanford. I should say about David Baltimore.
just because people might want to go to... Former president of Caltech. Maybe still? Rockefeller? No, he's not. Former president of the Rockefeller. That's an interesting story. If you want to look it up, look it up as they say. Scientists are human.
He landed at Caltech. So they funded you to do this? He gave me a special grant, just presidential. It's called Caltech Presidents Fund. He gave it to me and my postdoc advisor, Andrew Lang. He's an incredible scientist. He's married to Francis Arnold.
who won the Nobel Prize in 2018 in chemistry, renowned scientist as well. And they were just a power couple. And he invited me to give a talk, and I gave a job talk. He hired me on the spot. I couldn't help myself from saying yes before he finished this.
I was miserable at Stanford, by the way. It was 1999, 2000, dot-com boom. I was making $32,000 a year living on Alma Street. The Caltrans were running every 17 minutes. I know because I was awake from 5 a.m. I couldn't sleep more than four or five hours.
And I just said yes, moved down to Caltech. And because of that, I convinced him and my colleague, Jamie Bach, who's currently a professor, to build this telescope and put it at the South Pole in Antarctica. And that was the only place we could do it.
The only university that would fund it was this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund. So these confluence of events – and by the way, then because I got this job and because I built this telescope with my colleagues, I got the job at UCSD, which then enabled me to meet my wife. So let me – incredible.
story. You move down to Caltech, which is in Pasadena, amazing place. And then you get the money. How much was this? The initial one was a million dollars to build the first version. Okay. That's quite a gift for a postdoc, a million bucks. You decide the South Pole will be the place to do it. We can talk about why that is. And then you make this discovery, which turns out to be false. Yeah.
So – but it sounds like you have good feelings about the experience nonetheless. So because I was recognized and this experiment got a lot of attention because it was really the first one ever designed to look for the spark that ignited the whole Big Bang.
it became, you know, just the cause celebre of the cosmology field. And are you thinking at this point, forgive me for playing therapist here, I'm not one, I'm not pretending to. No, it's fine. Were you thinking at this point, okay, you know, this... Challenge that I think not all but a lot of sons have with their fathers, not necessarily to best them, but one evaluates themselves relative to like their family lineage. Sometimes it's a grandfather. This thing of having some... um
internal friction in order to live up to something. Yeah. Sounds like that was driving you. Tiger Woods, another Stanford. Right. Same story. Father, hard pushing, driving. And then what does he do after he is a PGA champion? He wants to become a Navy SEAL. or something. He was hanging out with a lot of SEAL team members. It wasn't enough for him. Sorry, I interrupted your question. So at the point where you made this discovery where you filmed like, all right, check that box.
What was kind of revelatory to me is that sometimes you start a quest or you start a journey and the fuel that gets you going, it's no longer serves you when you get there. You know, my brother always says, you know, baggage has handles so you can put it down nice so that like journey from initiating it um the experiment um to best my dad to show him up to make him regret that he abandoned me and my brother i mean
I always said, I could see a good band in me. I was only seven. I'm kind of boring. He used to joke, I only care about kids once they learn calculus. He was kind of funny. What a cruel thing to say. He would say it in jest. And it is true. We did reunite. And we did have a reproach moment.
but it was after inventing this experiment after i arrived at caltech it was i mean he was this kind of intellect and it was so lovely to see you and your dad you know my wish for you is is to have kind of an experience maybe similar maybe not but When you do have kids, and please God, you will, you get a do-over. You get to kind of correct.
the mistakes or the ways that you, and you'll never get it right. You know, one of my friends, a psychiatrist, he says, your job as a parent is to only pass on half of your neuroticism to your kids. And if every generation does that, you know, it will eventually be a perfect species. But I felt that passion and so forth to kind of best him. And then when we reunited and it no longer – as I said, it no longer served me. But the trajectory that I had launched this experiment on continued unabated.
And so that had this inertia, this momentum that couldn't be stopped. In fact, so many people wanted a part of it and so much pressure was surrounding it that I think partially that led to me actually being kind of kicked out of the leadership of the experiment. And that was precipitated by a truly tragic event. So I told you my advisor, Sarah Church, set up a job interview for me with her advisor when she was a postdoc at Caltech named Andrew Lang.
Andrew was like, at that time I was estranged from my dad. He was like a father figure. He was like,
Like you ever see the TV show Mad Men like Don Draper? He's just like handsome, good looking. Everyone thought he was going to win a Nobel Prize. He was stolen from Berkeley. They spent tons of money to recruit him from Berkeley to come to Caltech. He only – his wife was a power – couple Francis Arnold again what she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago and he just had the world at his fingertips charming funny and and he would say things like you know
Brian, this is so unrealistic that we have to do it. Like he was a kid. He loved to play and he loved – he's the one who inspired me in this way of just – Never stopping like that passionate curiosity and the reward that you get. I always say, you know, when you solve a problem, your reward is a harder problem. Like that's but that if you're a scientist, that feels good because it's like.
I would say – and I think it's one of your colleagues. I'm not sure. There's so much good stuff going on up there. But … But there's this concept of finite games and infinite games, right? So I would say science is an infinite game. You can't win science. It goes on forever. No one masters all of whatever science is. You can debate even what it is. But it's composed of an infinite number.
of finite games. Getting into college, getting into graduate school, getting a postdoc, getting a tenure track position. Those are all finite games, right? And the ultimate, what's the ultimate finite game? A Nobel Prize. Because only three people can win it each year. There's only 200 people have ever won it. You know, there's more people in the NBA than have won it in physics, right? So this is a very exclusive club. And if you win it, somebody else isn't going to win it, right? Odds are.
And this pressure to kind of get to that level should never exceed the passion that drove you to become a scientist in the first place. And so I was obsessed with that. And what Andrew Lang showed me is that... Science is its own reward. And the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman would say, is its reward. Science is its own reward. And that's characteristic of these infinite games. You just want to keep playing them. And the tragic thing.
is that I'm emotional thinking about this. When Andrew was at the peak of his life, he chose to take it. He took his own life. He kills himself. He killed himself. Ironically, tragically, he used helium, which is, you know, central to the formation of the universe. And the creation of our universe is reliant in large part on helium. And he asphyxiated himself in a cheap, dirty, sleazy motel. Actually, I had stayed at Pasadena when I was visiting him for my initial job talk. Do you mind if we...
I'm going to this event. I realize it's a painful memory, and I feel it. Not to shift the focus, but ironically, all three of my academic advisors, dead first one, shot himself in a bathtub two weeks after we celebrated. something for him. Suicide is such a peculiar thing. He did it for very different reasons, different stage of life. Let's get back to Lang. How old was he? He's 41, I think. So he's young.
He had three kids. Is his wife still alive? Yeah. Francis is still a renowned professor. Was she shocked? They were separated. They had to be gotten estranged and they weren't living together. It was interesting. He was always very close. She had two children, I think, from a previous marriage or one child from a previous marriage.
And he was like a father to that son as well, like a biological father, whatever that means. Kids were so dedicated to him. And look, don't cry for me. I mean I – It's still emotional because he meant so much to me as a mentor, as a friend, as an advisor, as a father figure basically. But he had real kids and he had adopted kids. It was tragic for everyone. Suicide is such a peculiar thing because in some sense it can –
quote-unquote, makes sense for if somebody we know is very depressed or they have a terminal illness, you know, and – but it sounds like it came as a bit of a surprise. Do you think that the – Sometimes there's this close relationship between genius and let's just say not mentally healthy that even what you mentioned before.
Like, we have to try this experiment. I mean, there's a bit of a recklessness to that when you're dealing with millions and millions of dollars in postdoc careers. And, you know, there's a, I mean, the delight of a fun experiment and an adventurous experiment, maybe as a, like a-
project where you kind of wade into it a little bit to see, but that's very different than like, we have to do this. I mean, there's a risk-taking element there that supersedes kind of my notions of like what an advisor's job is, which is to make sure that people progress toward... Sure, discovery, but also like...
You want some, one of the most important thing to mentoring scientists is that they have some sense that there is a future for them. Yeah. And you can't guarantee it, but you'd like to, like a parent would for a child, you want to give them some sense that like the sun's going to come up tomorrow. That's right. Like we're not going to implode her.
explode here and and he was a he was a pragmatist he would give me advice life advice you know and again i was a stranger my father he was playing this role and he was just so he was charming and he's handsome charismatic
He had just discovered, you know, came off this discovery of proving that the universe has a flat spatial geometry, which just means that any triangle that you make in the universe, whether it's three planets, three stars, three galaxies, three patches of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
always the interior angles add up to 180 degrees, as they do on a flat table here, as they did for Euclid. And that had astonishing implications for how the universe might have begun. And it's still true. And this is still true. It's more true than ever. So do you think that...
Perhaps. I mean, who knows? Perhaps he committed suicide because he was at a peak. You know, one of the things that people talk about is the peak and trough of dopamine. You mentioned infinite games. You know, I've said many times before that... it's very important that you not get fast, large amplitude increases in dopamine that are not preceded by effort. Methamphetamine will give you a large amplitude, you know, fast increase in dopamine, but there's zero effort involved.
procure it and it sinks you into a post-dopaminergic peak trough afterwards that will have you hanging on for... the will to live. So what comes up goes down and it often goes down further than it went up when we're talking about dopamine. Playing an infinite game is great because it's in the motivation for answers. It sounds like he hit a peak. and you wonder if maybe he was like okay now i'm going to check out now it's going to be hard to keep doing this
I don't think it's explicable. I don't think – I mean the human brain is the most complicated thing that human brains can even contemplate, right? It's solipsistic in a sense. I couldn't really wade into it. I mean I know details of his personal life and, yes, divorce and separation and so forth. But I don't think that's it just because the highs of the new quest and like the dopamine hadn't –
really come in from BICEP and it wouldn't come in for four more years after his death in 2010. So you got to continue the project. We got to continue the project, but because he was removed and he was kind of my, you know, consigliere, you know, whatever I was to him, I forget how the relationship goes.
conversion with the mafia as I should be. But with Andrew, with his death, one of the trivial in comparison consequences was that the … main patron and backer of me and my career who would, you know, help me get my job at UCSD, had helped me get, you know, this presidential career grant, which I received from President Bush and all these incredible accomplishments and just been my sounding board on experiments and kept me.
going and help me when I had troubles with my graduate students. And he would talk to my, I mean, it's unheard of, right? The compassion that this man had. And if he had only reached out to me, you know, I'm sure he had better friends than me, but like, I would have.
gone up in a second you know i went to the motel where he took his life when i was writing my book just to put me back and like try how could i comprehend it i couldn't i just cried i sat in front of the hotel and i cried but but no i don't think we can understand it but but the eventual high wouldn't come, and then a much more crashing low after we essentially had to retract it and were disconfirmed, as they say. So you continued with the project? Yeah.
I was at UCSD and I left Caltech. You get your job. You got this telescope down at the South Pole. How do you get to the South Pole? You fly to Chile and then you ride a bicycle down? I never had the physique to get into the military, although I wanted to at one point to be a pilot. Actually, I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like my stepfather did. But I didn't have the – I didn't have the HLP diet back then. But the point was you go on a military. It's a whole way. And you do it in –
Seven days, eight days if you're lucky. Sometimes it could take three weeks due to the weather down there. It's the most violent weather, most winds, turbulence, everything hostile. But it's a cakewalk compared to the explorer Shackleton or Scott.
of course, Amundsen. So the quest to get to the South Pole first, which is South Pole, I should say, for people that aren't familiar, Antarctica is the seventh continent. It's the last one to be discovered. It was only really discovered. It was thought to be there because it was thought that to balance the...
in the Northern Hemisphere, you needed a massive counterweight in the Southern. It's so stupid. But anyway, it wasn't discovered until 1900s, really, that they truly existed. And then it wasn't explored until 10 or 12 years later. And the quest to get to the South Pole, it was the last unexplored... you know, non-filled-in part of the map of the Earth. So the quest to get there was like going to the moon.
And in fact, it exactly parallels the moon in that once it was reached for the first time, nobody cared to go back again for many, many years. And we're only going back to the moon now, 60 years later, 50 years later, after Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions, right? Getting there and setting that bar, right, and making that accomplishment, sometimes that's the extent of it. Like when you have the dopamine hit of being the first to get somewhere. Scott was a British scientist and explorer.
And Amundsen was just an explorer. Amundsen, Roald Amundsen, he tried to get to the North Pole first. He lost. Somebody else beat him. And he said, well, I'm going to keep going with this ski and sled dog team that I have. And he literally went to the South Pole, 180 degrees around.
So the poles are the two endpoints of the Earth's axis of rotation. There's a North Pole. There's no land there. There's no continent there. There's ice there. And Santa is there. Exactly, right? And then the South Pole is a continent. I brought a piece of it here that I collected.
Probably illegally from Antarctica. I'll show it to you later. It's just rocks, right? So if you drill under the ice in Antarctica, you come to a continent. That's the difference between the North and South Poles. But the South Pole is 700 nautical miles from the coast of Antarctica, the closest point of... approach in the 1900s was you take a ship from New Zealand.
you sail due south and no other way to go and you come to the continental shelf the coastline is called mcmurdo station which was just you know basically there's some sea lines there and that's it and orcas and penguins and nothing else at that time now there's a whole research station
And then they got on skis and skied up 9,000 feet from sea level to 9,000 feet where the polar plateau flattens out. And they got to the South Pole. And Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott. And Scott was this British, you know, naturalist.
Like Darwin, but he was a scientist plus an explorer. So he wanted to collect samples, and he found flora and fauna. There's not much rocks, meteorites. He actually discovered meteorites in Antarctica. Incredible scientist. But because he was a scientist... It cost him his life.
because he was carrying all this scientific equipment and scientific samples, and he had to ski up them. Like, he would find it, and he's like, I'm not coming back the same way that he got there because of the wind patterns and stuff. So he knew he'd never come back, so he couldn't leave it there. So he had to carry extra... food, fuel, and men dedicated to it. Oh, and by the way, the Norwegian team, Amundsen was Norwegian, and they used sled dogs.
for two reasons. One, they conserved calories. They provided propulsion. And then they provided a tasty snack once you got to the South Pole. Because once you get to the South Pole, you can ski downhill 9,000 feet to sea level, basically. And so they ate. British would refuse to do that.
So they knew they couldn't eat their dogs. And they had dogs, but they wouldn't eat them. So they were the sled dogs. And when they got to the South Pole, they came within three or four kilometers. And it's totally flat like this table. The South Pole looks like this. Go out in the middle of the ocean. Freeze it.
paint it white and that's what it looks like it's white 100 you know 360 degrees around okay it's the most boring place on earth literally and i've been there um he got within so you can see things really far away he got there He got within three kilometers and he saw something on the horizon. He's like, oh, you know, bleep. And it was a Norwegian flag. Now, can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of, you know, the Eagle?
And he lands on a Soviet flag. I mean, it would be like the most crushing. It was the most, I think, the most depressing moment in human history to come so far. And he actually said, they said, great God, this is a horrible place. And all the more so for having. reached it without the benefit of priority. So the king and queen, they were depending on him to make the first – for king and country, right?
seeing the Norwegian flag. So what did he do? He was a good scientist. He said, maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they're off by 10 feet. I can say, no, no, they were right. The Norwegians got there first. And because he got there three weeks later in the middle of January, by the time he turned around, the winds had died down. They were no longer at his back. He was skiing. He had no food. He died.
about three weeks later or three months later in March. So his body was later recovered and it wasn't reported back to England for another six months. So they gave their lives for science, for discovery. And to come up short to be second, it must have been the most crushing defeat in history. But it happens to be the best place to do astronomy in the world. And you get there by flying to Santiago, Chile? No, first you go.
to Christchurch, New Zealand. We go to Auckland, LAX Auckland, Auckland to Christchurch. And then the US has a charter with the New Zealand Air Force. And we give them C-130 cargo planes. We have our own C-17 cargo planes, the jet-powered ones. Unfortunately, I got the C-130s, which is a four-prop plane. And I was on a plane that had the entire winter – summer supply. Sorry, the entire winter supply of bananas.
on this cargo plane, which is as big as room, the cargo hold, 12 by 12 or times 50 feet long. And it was filled with bananas. And at first you're like, oh, cool. This is great. Until you realize there's no bathroom on the plane. There's just literally a five-gallon bucket and a shower curtain. There are no windows on it because why do – Paratroopers need windows. And then there's enormous crates of bananas. There's 12 tons of bananas.
I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that. I know I'm missing potassium or whatever. But the point is you land on the coast and then if you're lucky, you take a flight the next day and it's a ski plane. It's the only plane that the U.S. does not export. In other words, we export the F-35. This is a strategic asset that we will not export. So it's hard to get to. It's very difficult. So why South Pole?
And does this take us into the realm of light pollution? Yeah. Right? I mean, when I look up at the starry night here in Los Angeles, even though I'm sort of back towards the eastern hills, I don't live at the coast. I can see some pretty impressive stars. Not as impressive as when...
I highly recommend people get up to the Yosemite High Country in the month of August. You can catch some great meteor showers. It's an amazing place to begin with. You have the meteor showers and you're transported to another place. And...
There's a lot of light pollution from cities. Yeah. And it travels very, very far. So I'm guessing you're down the South Pole because there's less light pollution. You're right. A slight deviation from that is it's not light that we're looking for. We're not looking for optical light. We're looking for heat.
So it's heat pollution. You're exactly right. We're looking to avoid heat pollution. So we want to be somewhere cold. We want to be somewhere that's far away from man-made sources of RF interference and microwave interference and communications, obviously. But the South Pole has a couple of other properties. One, the sun is below the horizon and the sun is 5,500 Kelvin.
And we're looking for something that's a fraction of a Kelvin, maybe a few milli or nano Kelvin at most. So it's billions of times that we want to get a void. Even the Earth itself is still 300. almost 300 Kelvin down there. Freezing is 273. So it does have that property. But the best part about it, it's above a lot of the Earth's atmosphere because it's at 9,000 feet above sea level.
And it's so cold. You don't know this because you're a California baby. But on the East Coast, when I would grow up, some days the bane of my existence would be. You'd listen on the radio, and they'd announce school closures due to snowfall in the winter. And sometimes they'd say, oh, you're out of luck because it's too cold to snow.
Sometimes the air temperature cannot saturate and form precipitation. And the South Pole is like that. It's so cold that if you took this glass, I'm holding a glass here, and it was empty on the table here. And I extend this glass up to outer space. The amount of water, if I took all the water in the atmosphere, the humidity in the atmosphere above the South Pole and condensed it into a liquid.
It would be 0.3 of a millimeter. Here in Los Angeles, it's about an inch or 25 millimeters or more. And so you'd like to not go there. Now, why is that important? Well, water absorbs microwaves.
That's how your microwave oven works. It heats up the water molecules. They start to vibrate and jumble. That causes friction. They heat up and eventually they'll boil, right? So that's why sometimes you can overheat liquid in a microwave. You can't tell, but it's super hot and actually it can be dangerous. In this case, we don't want a photon coming from the Big Bang, perhaps, or before the Big Bang with the spark that ignited it. We don't want that to travel for 14 billion years nearly.
and then get absorbed in a water molecule above the Earth's surface. So the best place to go is space. But space, even with SpaceX, I haven't done any scientific experiments, but it's about a... maybe a factor of 1,000 to a million times more expensive. So the same satellite that we were worried was going to scoop us was exactly 100 or almost 200 times more expensive than our experiment at the South Pole. Yeah, I was going to ask you about this. A million dollars given to a postdoc.
That was the first tranche of funding. We ended up getting about $10 million. $10 million. I mean even $10 million is a lot of money by any standard. Yeah. But probably to my mind doesn't seem like enough money to build a – high-powered telescope at the South Pole, bring people there, have the infrastructure. I mean, it's not like you're rolling this thing out onto the ice and just pointing at the sky. I mean, you need- Oh, it's true.
I mean, I guess you could use the bucket from the plane as a bathroom, but you need a number of things. So, yeah. you probably need hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility down at the South Pole. But those are all funded by you and your listeners and so are the taxpayers. So the National Science Foundation operates, those C-130s are part of the National Science Foundation.
fleet we don't pay a dime for them if i want to build a computer network system down there we don't pay a dime for it It's actually a point of contention because now I'm no longer with that experiment. I've recused myself from it for many years, not because of the incident where we were basically disconfirming, later disconfirmed our results. So you let the result out. You do this news.
conference. I didn't do the news conference. Okay. So it was a big press conference, big press conference. That's right. You know, fast forward some years, it turns out this was not correct. Some months, yeah. Some months. Only a few months. Well, better to be corrected quickly than, you know, and collect your Nobel Prize and have to like give it back or something, right? I have to say, and the pursuit of prizes.
is a complicated thing. I was always discouraged from pursuing prizes. All my advisors. Well, my graduate advisor was very pure in the sense that she just liked doing experiments. I remember she was very, very smart. Very smart. It's Barbara. Barbara Chapman. I mean, and, you know, it's not just her pedigree that...
is evidence of that. But since pedigree is something most people can at least understand internally and externally, I mean, she was, you know, went to Harvard as an undergraduate, then she was at UCSF and Caltech. And she actually had a project sending zebrafish up into space.
looking at development of vestibular system in the absence of gravity. And then fixing these specimens and bringing them back. Also did a lot of great work back on earth, but she wasn't somebody who was ambitious for ambition's sake. And my postdoc advisor was exceedingly ambitious, but he also discouraged. prizes and the pursuit of prizes. That's the right way to be. Yeah, I think that it's sort of like going into football to get a Super Bowl ring. These things do represent the pinnacle, but...
It's dangerous to be chasing that like singular carrot because you can miss the journey. Look, I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud that I had such a base, you know, kind of pursuit. I think it was, as I said, compounded by psychological factors, you know. But did you have fun?
Oh, I loved it. Yeah. I mean, getting to do what I do now, and now it's even more exciting in a sense because the project, you know, and by the way, it's not like we made a blunder and like, you know, Rob hopefully took the lens cap off the camera. We didn't make a blunder like that. many, many blunders and actually led to much worse retractions.
Our results are stronger than ever. I should say the BICEP team's results. I've left the team, as I said. But their results are still the very best by almost an order of magnitude. We hope with the Simons Observatory that I'm co-leading with colleagues.
Princeton and Penn and other places that we can actually supersede them. But we haven't yet. And so what we saw, I should be very clear. We didn't make a blunder. We didn't see like put our thumb in front of the viewfinder. We didn't make something stupid. mistook a signal produced by another astrophysical source as
representative of this curling pattern of microwaves for which bicep was named. That would be indicative, if confirmed, of the inflationary origin of the universe, which, by the way, would be concomitant.
with the existence of the multiverse. So the stakes are really high. That means the incentives to make sure you detect that are really high too and not get scooped, as happened many, many times. My advisor was scooped. He never won the Nobel Prize. My advisor's advisor. He never won the Nobel Prize.
evidently discovered, serendipitously discovered astronomers, Penzias and Wilson, they did win the Nobel Prize. So there is a pressure on scientists to get there first, like Falcon, Scott, Robert Scott getting to the South Pole first. There is a benefit to priority. It's just a fact. of life and science is no different. We teach undergraduates about seven or eight different experiments. All of them won the Nobel Prize at some point in physics history.
Doesn't mean they're going to win a Nobel Prize. No. Why? Because they didn't get their first. So getting their first in sight, that's for better or for worse, is the sign of greatest accomplishments, the sine qua non of. accomplishment is that that does lead to nubble prizes now the goal is always i i have a motto which is you know go as fast as you carefully can yeah um but sounds like you were
wrong for the right reasons, meaning no one made up data. There was a confound that you weren't aware of. You became aware of it. Yeah, I should say what we saw. What we mistook as the imprimatur of this origin spark of the universe was the humble... substance in the universe, namely dust. So when a star explodes, it produces, after its lifetime has expired, it fuses lighter elements into heavier elements. Eventually, it gets to produce iron.
And iron is the element for which once it's fused together from I think it's silicon or two nuclei before it, it produces too little energy to keep the star. buoyant and expanded. And so the star immediately starts to collapse. When that collapse occurs, it blasts out into the interstellar medium that surrounds it all the byproducts, the silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and the iron.
And it blasted out into the universe surrounding it. And that happens enough times in our galaxy that the galaxy is actually a pretty polluted place. It's smoggy. It's dusty. It's dirty. And the dust is actually little microscopic meteorites. So on my website, BrianKating.com, I give away – actually, I have a special link, BrianKating.com slash Huberman.
I will give away actual meteorites that come from your ancestral homeland of Argentina. And you'll see when you get them, they're highly magnetic. They're very dense, and I give you the material, the composition of these meteorites and the assay. We do X-ray crystallography on them. It's really cool. The actual composition of them is determined by this last event that a star does before it dies.
which is to produce iron. So we did discover a microwave signal from the galaxy, not from the Big Bang, not from the cosmos, but from... particular and unique to our galaxy, which is that when a star explodes, it produces this material, mostly made of iron. These micrometeorites that I talked about put on my website for your listeners. And these micrometeorites are also going to act like little compass needles.
They're highly magnetically susceptible. So the Milky Way, everything in the universe has a magnetic field. You have a magnetic field. Birds have it. Even bacteria can have it. And our planet obviously has it. And the galaxy has it. What happens when you put a compass in a magnetic field? Those needles get aligned with the magnetic field. That then produces a type of polarization. Now, polarization is the least familiar. Light has three characteristics. It's intensity.
its color or spectrum and its polarization Almost nobody knows what polarization is, but it's really the essence of what makes light a wave. If you think about an ocean wave, the ocean wave is going up and down, undulating up and down, and the undulation, the direction perpendicular to the sea surface, is sort of its polarization. happens to be that water waves are actually polarized longitudinally, but forget that. Or if you and I, separated by a meter and a half, two meters,
We have a rope between us. If we oscillate that rope up and down at a certain frequency, the frequency would be the spectrum, the color of the light. How hard we do that would be the intensity of the light. And the plane that we're oscillating, the jump rope or whatever, that's the plane of polarization. These little needles of cosmic dust from the exploded innards of a star that died to, you know, in our galaxy many years ago and many, many billions of these stars, they produce these...
these particles of dust. So we saw that pattern instead of seeing the birth pangs of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors. roca roca makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality i've been wearing roca readers and sunglasses for years now and i love them they're lightweight they have superb optics and they have lots of frames to choose from
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mini segue. There are a number of questions that I have, some of which I sort of know the answers to, most of which I don't know the answers to, but I think a lot of people either wonder about or if they don't... they can quickly enrich their experience of daily life if we were to get answers on the following. So I'm thinking about this, not rapid fire Q&A, but maybe like one to three minute answers about the following.
for instance why does the moon look so much bigger when it's near the horizon as opposed to overhead. Yeah, my son asked me that two days ago. So that's a fun one. So let's go first with that. Sometimes the moon is huge. Sometimes the moon is small. And I'm not talking about when it's full versus a sliver.
tell us why so the moon is always a half a degree wide same exact apparent angular diameter as the sun which is unique among the 290 moons in our solar system Only our moon has the same apparent diameter as seen from its planet as the sun does, meaning we're the only planet that can have a total solar eclipse, an exact total solar eclipse like we had a couple of months ago in Austin, Texas and elsewhere. um be that as it may the moon doesn't change its size
I would hope not. That would freak me out. Yeah. The moon is about 60 times the Earth's radius from the Earth. It's 250,000 miles away, which is about one and a half light seconds away. And it is about the size of the continental U.S. in diameter, or a little bit less. So the moon's size doesn't change. But when the human eye has something to compare it to, the brain has a reference.
to compare it to. And because it's so big, if there's something in front of it, a 747, a person, a large building even, if the moon is behind that object, Because it's so far away, moving even the Earth's entire radius doesn't change the moon's apparent angular diameter. It's the same in Peking as it is here, Beijing as it is in Los Angeles, right? So that means a very large change in the distance in the Earth would change. the building size dramatically could reduce it to zero basically.
But when you compare it to something that's close on the horizon, your brain has something visually to compare it to. When it's overhead, zenith or whatever, it doesn't have anything to compare it to, so you're just looking at it. But you can always measure it, and you can prove to yourself it's always the same size. It's about the size of your pinky finger.
and held at arm's length. Same size as the sun. And interestingly enough, it's the same- You said one degree. It's half a degree. Half a degree. Half a degree, yep. Oh, that's why you said pinky. So folks, most people probably aren't familiar with thinking in degrees. If you want to understand a degree, put your-
right or left, doesn't matter, arm out in front of you, raise your thumb like a thumbs up. So the width of your thumb at arm's length is... approximately one degree that's why you say for your pinky it's about half a degree i should also say and this is an opportunity to give a fun little lesson in visual acuity if i were to draw
30 black lines spaced from one another with just the light color of your nail in between them. We'd say there were 60 lines, you know, black nail, black, alternating. Your acuity... for 2020 vision is approximately 60 cycles per degree. A hawk, any kind of raptor is about 120 cycles per degree, which is why they can sit up on a lamppost and actually see the rustling of the...
of the grass below and probably make out some of the individual furs on the head of a rodent. But you can't. So what do I mean by 60 cycles per degree? If I were to draw... 40 black lines so now you have 80 total of black and then the color of the nail black then the color of the nail so you would see that as believe it or not as solid black right it's it's uh
you don't have, it's beyond your acuity threshold. So when you say one degree, so this is important. So when the moon is quote unquote giant at the horizon, put out your pinky, it covers the moon. You can eclipse the moon. You can eclipse the moon. When the moon is overhead.
You can eclipse the moon with your pinky. And most people are probably thinking, no way, that can't be true. But it's absolutely true. Fun fact. Which is bigger, the width of a rainbow or the width of the moon? Is a rainbow wider than a half a degree? You ever seen a rainbow? I mean, in the sky, it seems as... I'm not talking about the arc, the band thickness from red to blue. Roy G. Biv. Roy G. Biv, yeah. That's what's bigger.
Gosh, intuitively I want to say it's thicker, but now you're going to tell me that it can't be because it's... This is like the Pink Floyd album, right? This is literally just the polar... Dark side of the moon. The dark side of the moon. The rainbow coming through when you take light and pass it through a prism. I'm going to say it's one degree. So the rainbow's bigger?
No. The moon's bigger. It seems like roughly the same size, but when I think of the rainbow, I just think of like the... No, you're right. It's the same size. It's the size of the sun. Okay, so it's a trick question. Exactly, that's right. Thank you very much. There you go. Professor Fass is the test. for once yeah um okay next question people obsess over this i have my theories i think it's still debated when you watch a sunset
You get that beautiful long wavelength, short wavelength contrast that I blab about incessantly on the podcast and social media because that's what's setting your circadian clock. It's that orange, red tones. and the blue tones of the sky but right as the sun goes down across the horizon especially over the ocean there is the phenomenon known as the green flash
Yes. What is the basis for the green flash? I'll tell you something really cool. If you go to the South Pole, which is oversubscribed by a factor of 10 to 1, 10 times as many people want to spend their nine months of their year minimum at the South Pole. then we have room for to actually do work at the South Paltz Carpenters. Which means 10 people total. No, there's 45 people there. Just kidding. And they're all listening to you half the time.
When you want to go there, when you do go there, they actually don't know where the sun is going to set. Remember, the sun only rises and sets once a year, right? So it's one day and one night per year, six months long. Where the sun sets is unknown.
And actually, the days preceding it, the sun is making a big circle around your head. I've seen this with the moon. So the sun and the moon, they just make a circle. And slowly, after reaching their apex on the first day of summer, which is December 21st for them down there, upside down, eventually it crosses.
crosses the horizon on March 21st. Around March 21st, that's the first day of fall or when they start getting ready for winter. They don't know where it's going to go down. We think of it always going to the west, but where is west at the South Pole? Every direction you look is north, okay?
So when this occurs, the actual phenomenon that you mentioned, the green flash, can last for days or can last for hours. So if you really are an aficionado of Huberman protocols and you want to see the green flash, apply to be down there. But the bad news is you're stuck there. for nine more months, okay? So yes, it's a real phenomenon. Not only can you take pictures of it, but you can see it with your eye. The only correction I would say is you...
Pretty much need to have a perfectly clear day. You can't have any clouds on the horizon. And it's best seen over the ocean. So we're blessed here. But for those of us that... Don't end up at the South Pole. Yeah. God willing. Send me pictures. I don't like environments that cool. You can really kill it. But if I watch the sun set over the Pacific or –
I see the green flash sometimes. What's the basis of that? Yeah. So the Earth's atmosphere is actually layered, okay? But it's actually simpler to think about the Earth as being flat. Now, there's no... There's no fluffers out there thinking that Brian Keating is advocating the flat earth. But imagine this table. We're looking at a table. Imagine there's a slab of, you know, translucent glass on it. And we're sitting on the table underneath the slab of glass, pretty thick glass, right?
and you're looking straight up. You look through a minimum amount of the glass, right? Straight up would be zenith at your local horizon. Every direction you're looking is your horizon. You see off the edge of this flat earth in this analogy. When you look at a slight angle, you're going...
through more path length of the substance. More glass. More glass. Finally, if you did have this thing extending to infinity, you'd be looking through an infinite amount of atmosphere or glass when you're tangent to the horizon, when you're going parallel to the Earth. surface in this flat earth analogy uh the earth's atmosphere is not only made of oxygen it actually has a lot of particulates
And it's because of those particulates, a lot of them come from dust and a lot of them come from, you know, volcanoes and a large amount now comes from human-made sources, pollution and so forth. The more optical depth... The more path link that you look through, the more scattering of the sun's light. occurs when scattering occurs the longer wavelength light is eat more easily penetrates through dust smog particles even glass okay so that goes through easier
And the short wavelengths, comparable to the intermolecular spacing of the smog, the dust, the gas in the atmosphere, the oxygen, scatters much more efficiently. And so that gets scattered out of the beam of light from the sun. The sun's light though. actually peaks slightly in the green. We don't actually notice this because our eyes are, and we're used to thinking of it as very yellow. And the reason for this can be substantiated by night vision glasses. What color is the light?
coming in. It's green, right? They amplify versions of these things. Why? Because your eye is very sensitive to green light. It's even more sensitive to green light than the yellow light. And that's because the sun, which is what we've evolved to adapt to, being most sensitive to sunlight, is more green. than yellow. So there's more power at the wavelength, like somewhere between like 450 and 550 nanometers? Exactly. 100% right.
So at that green flash, at that moment of green flash, you're seeing two things. One is the sensitivity of the human eyes, slightly maximized to that. But that doesn't explain why photographs see it as well. And the other reason is that most of the yellow light and the...
sunlight is getting scattered away. And so you're mainly seeing that green light, but you're only seeing it at the point of maximum scattering, which occurs exactly when the sun crosses the horizon. Because of the interaction with all that atmosphere. Exactly. Yep.
That's wild because for the longest time, I had a biological explanation for this that I think was based on a paper that was published maybe in Nature, but don't quote me on that. Just because it's published in Nature doesn't mean it's wrong. I've got friends with a few nature editors still in a great journal. We do a whole episode about nature, nature science itself.
The explanation that was getting kicked around for a while was a biological explanation, which is that our ability to perceive... reds and greens and blues and yellows, is based on our trichromacy, the presence of these three different photoreceptors, short, medium, and long wavelength, or blue, green, red, so to speak, that absorb... short medium or long wavelength light and then the comparison there's this opponency
whereby our ability to see red is really contingent on our ability to perceive green. And so for someone who's red-green colorblind, one in 80 males, for instance, they still see... stuff out in the world that's red, but they see as more orangish or brown. Dogs the same way. They're not colorblind. True.
monochromats that don't see color are very rare. That is a one form. I think it's called achromatops, yeah. Don't quote me on that either. But in any case, the idea was that if you're looking at something that's very enriched in...
long wavelengths like orange red and you stare at it for long enough have you ever done that like american flag uh visual optical illusion when you stare at it then you look away from it and you see the opposite colors right and so one biological explanation is that the
sun is setting and you're looking at this orange red thing when the sun is low in the sky you can actually look at it without distressing your eyes right because right as opposed to overhead when you should never stare at the sun and then the moment that that reddish orange disappears the the biological explanation is that there's a kind of perception of a green flash yeah because of the opponents in the switch to the other
let's just say wavelength channel, so to speak. I don't think that's in disagreement. I think that might explain the amplification that we see, but then it doesn't explain why you'd see it in a photographic emulsion, right? There's nothing biological about it. I like your explanation better because it's explained by... by real physics and the biology of color ponency is also physics, but not as well worked out. Yeah. Okay, cool.
Earlier, we were talking about the perceived relationship between the menstrual cycle, which is not always 28 days, but is on average 28 days, and the lunar cycle. Is there any evidence that... Well, it'd be amazing if one influenced the other in the other direction, that the menstrual cycles were influencing the lunar cycle. But is there any evidence for a true relationship between...
The lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle. That's been documented. I don't know. It's interesting. The sun also produces tides and produces gravitational effect. But the dominant... effect on Earth due to that 28-day, 29-day cycle of the moon is its effect on the Earth's oceans, which produces four tides a day, too high and too low. And actually, Galileo incorrectly used that phenomenon.
as a way to buttress his argument that the Earth went around the sun. He basically, if you're listening, I'm taking my glass of Martina. Yerba Monte. Yerba Monte, yeah. So he said that when the Earth is spinning, it rotates one...
per day, but it's also revolving around the sun. So these combined motions make this sloshing of the liquid. You see that? And he claimed that is what caused the tides on the Earth, and the fact that's completely wrong. It's amazing, Andrew, when you think about how brilliant a scientist can be.
And it's almost like the proportion of their blunder is proportionate to how brilliant they are. Because it also correlates with the height of the problems they're chasing. Exactly. You were saying that Galileo got...
certain things wrong, but got a number of things right. That's right, Einstein too, Newton too. And being wrong for the right reasons is actually very important in science. And by the right reasons, I mean that nobody's p-hacking, p-value hacking, or fudging data that they're... not tossing data they're really trying to solve problems and you it's almost like in sports a great competitor wants great competitors yeah right i mean what's the like why would somebody want to like
cheat into a different weight class, knock somebody out and consider themselves the world champion at that weight class. Like it's just, it's silly. That's right. And in science, to not try and seek the truth is anti-science. Certainly it happens. But OK, so no clear evidence that the lunar cycle influences the menstrual cycle. I would expect that it would influence other animals. I don't know what the menstrual cycles are.
or whatever, you know, who knows? Or any animal that has, you know, an egg that, you know. Well, a lot of animals have not a menstrual cycle, but an estrus cycle. So like a lot of rodents, they'll have like a four day cycle. So it clearly doesn't map to the lunar cycle. But you hear a lot about these things. And humans are amazing at drawing correlations. Again, we're a prediction-making machine. We're a storytelling machine.
And in the past, by the way, the moon was a lot closer than – not a lot, but it was closer. The moon moves about the width of your – again, back to your fingers now. So the moon moves away by the width of about your thumb's fingernail every year.
Moves further away. A centimeter away from the Earth because there's a gravitational competition between the gravitational force of the Moon and the Earth's oceans provide a source of friction. So over the years, it's getting farther and farther away such that it eventually won't be able to have total...
solar eclipses it'll be it's called an annular eclipse where it doesn't obscure it completely anyway so in the past this is the only way to say millions of years ago when the first hominids were evolving you know the moon was much much closer you know millions of times of their you know fingernails eventually start
to add up and certainly when the first life formed on the earth it was only you know uh it's probably 30 times closer than it is now so yeah so i short answer i don't know where are some of the best places in the northern hemisphere And please don't say the North Pole, where people can go see spectacular nighttime stuff. Yeah. So I think of Yosemite High Country in August for the meteor shower. Yeah.
Certainly not at the level that you're accustomed to looking at things. But with the naked eye, you're going to be... Assuming that it's not cloudy, you're going to be treated to a light show that is... In my experience, beyond anything I've ever experienced, just extraordinary. On the special website that I made, bryankating.com slash Huberman, I list the four major meteor showers, one in each season, that people can watch with your naked eye.
In fact, it's bad to use a telescope. You don't want a telescope. Because it juts through the field of view. Yeah, exactly. You want the whole field of view. And humans have an amazing, as you know, huge field, 190 degrees or something like that. Not as big as an owl, but quite big.
And you want to take that in because you're looking for motion, you're looking for intensity. Sometimes you can see colors, and I list what elements contribute to the colors of different meteorites on this website that I have. But yes, anywhere that's more than, say,
20, 30, 40 miles away from a major city is fine. Even in San Diego, there's two dark sky communities. One is called Julian, California, and the other one's the Anza Borrego Desert, and it's called Borrego Springs. These are areas where they... forbid upward shining light.
So the only light can be downward facing. It also has to have very narrow spectral bands on it. So like sodium vapor, you know, very high so that you can filter it out basically with certain very inexpensive optical filters. But, you know, like I said, almost.
But the good thing to know is that if you get a telescope, again, you can see 90% of what's going to be fascinating to you as a layperson with a telescope that costs $50. You can see all the craters. You can see mountains on the moon. And again, These mountains were not just like cool things. They destroyed, they falsified the scientific paradigm, quote unquote, which was that the moon was perfectly crystalline and spherical.
Galileo showed, no, not only does it have mountains, I can measure the height of those mountains. I can measure the planes of lava flows. And eventually they came up with theories that it doesn't have tectonic motion. It doesn't have an iron core. I mean, it's amazing. You can see all these things with
You're with a small telescope like the one I have for you. But you don't need like the Hubble telescope or Mount Willis. You don't need any of that. You can see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter. You can even on a dark sky without a telescope. see an object that's outside of our galaxy.
It's called the Andromeda Galaxy. It's very important in the history of astronomy. In 1929, 1923, rather, on Mount Wilson, not far from here, Edwin Hubble realized that that was not part of the Milky Way galaxy. It was way too far away to be. located within the Milky Way. It was about 20 times the radius of the Milky Way. And that revolutionized all of our conceptions of where the universe is located. Is it centered on us? Are we the most important thing? No.
He showed that you can see that on most fall nights in the constellation Andromeda with your naked eye. It's six times wider than the full moon. It's incredible. When I look at many of the constellations, I don't see how... our ancient predecessors. got to the description of a bear or whatever, is that because they saw more stars than I did or is that because they had a wilder imagination or were taking psychedelics or something like that? 20 centuries before TikTok, I cut down some slides.
There are a couple that look similar to what they're – Orion. It depends on how you connect the dots. Yes. The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper are kind of like, okay, you get that. Those aren't constellations. Those aren't constellations. I have to be – I have to put on my very, very precise –
Why are they not constellations? So they're portions of a constellation. So they're called asterisms. So an asterism is a collection of stars that's associated with each other, but it's not the full composition of a constellation.
is actually called Ursa Major. The Big Dipper's in the tail and the hindquarters of Ursa Major, which is the great bear. The Little Dipper is the asterism of seven stars that make up, there's 80-something stars that make up the Little Bear, which actually doesn't look like a bear. Ursa Major kind of does look like the California Republic flag that we have. But yes, the asterism, I always ask for people to leave. You can't, you know.
They're not making new constellations. There's only 88 constellations over the whole 4 pi spherical dome of the sky. But you can leave your own asterism on the podcast. You can leave five stars on your podcast and mine. So you can't have a constellation, but you can have an asterism.
love it uh did you catch uh haley's comet when it came by when you were a few years older than yeah i was uh i was uh 14 it was right after i got my first telescope comes through every seven every 70 years yeah you're gonna make it to the next one 76 years yeah
That's right. I'm right? Yeah. That's very good. Yeah. I remember 70-something. All right. It's not like the best comment in history. In fact, there's been better ones. Yeah. I remember going out to see it. It was a part of a group that went camping, and it looked like a smear of light. It's hard to know.
Did I really see it or did I not? In any case. Your daddy probably. The only other comment that came to mind, oh, is the San Diego thing, was the Hale-Bopp. Hale-Bopp, yeah. Where there was a group that killed mass suicide. Yeah. Yeah, these were people that had castrated themselves, had been eating a sub-caloric, sub-maintenance caloric diet to live forever and then decide to wear Converse and kill themselves. What do you think? Let's not go dark there.
What do you think is the relationship between like comets and these wild human behaviors? It's so interesting you mentioned that. And lunacy for that matter, like full moon and lunacy. Yeah, lunacy, right. Crime statistics. So look at these words, disaster. catastrophe. They asked in both of those means star. They used to believe that stars, comets, eclipses, those things were influencing events on Earth.
caused by these celestial forces for not propitiating them, making the gods happy or whatever. And in fact, Columbus owes his life. He was almost killed in Jamaica. And I think it was 1498, a couple of years after discovering him, he's still exploring. And he failed to ingratiate himself with the local native inhabitants of Jamaica or wherever he was. And they were going to kill him.
And he luckily had on for navigation. Astronomy and navigation have always been intimately related because, first of all, if you know where Polaris is, which is not the brightest star, it's in the Little Dipper. It's the Polestar. It's the North Star. you've heard of, True North, North Star. It's actually very close to being, if you go to the North Pole and look straight up, it's very close to being directly above you.
And does it always mark true north? And any human timescale it does over thousands and tens of thousands of years, it changes. But right now for the next couple thousand years, so don't worry, you'll still be accurate. That is within a half a degree or so. What do your brain thinks at these times?
As long as you're talking for the next thousand years, you're good. Well, I say like this, you know, the universe could end in a heat death and a big rip or whatever. But, you know, that's not for a trillion years. So everybody keep paying your taxes. So you could use it for navigation. So you could know your. latitude but measuring longitude was very difficult.
Because you couldn't actually – to know longitude, you need to measure time relative to where Greenwich mean time is. That's how Greenwich became so important and that's why London had this huge economy. Again, these things are always related to capitalism and even how we measure.
latitude and longitude comes from the fact that London and the Thames River, 90% of the world's commerce flowed through there at one point or another. It's incredible. So anyway, latitude and longitude is very important. People started to know that, yeah, these events would occur and including... this event with Columbus and he brought along with him on his voyage an astronomer.
And this astronomer knew that in two days time from when these natives had captured some of Columbus's crew, that there was going to be a total solar eclipse and it was going to go through Jamaica. And he said, he told Columbus and Columbus said to the inhabitants, if you don't give. our people back, our God is going to obscure and kill your God, the sun God.
F you, you know, whatever. And then it happened and they totally believed that they were in control of these celestial events. We better give the people back and Columbus got the hell out of there. So it's an amazing story. But yes, comets have always been a disaster. So Columbus actually... um, used the sun as manipulative barter to threat to as a threat military yeah he used it for military and coercion an important book for anyone to read who's interested in basically why we're still here
in my opinion, is the book Longitude by Dava Sobol. I'm interviewing her tomorrow. It's an incredible book. Doesn't require any science or technical background to read and appreciate about. the development of the first reliable timekeeping devices for navigating at sea even on um Overcast Nights and Finding Longitude. It's a spectacular read. It is. And changed the way that I think about...
Human evolution and technology development generally. There's a direct connection. I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's a connection between that and the Nobel Prize. So there was something called the Longitude Prize in the 1700s to develop a clock that could be used in the naval situations on boats.
a grandfather clock as the pendulum acceleration. So they had to find something. And this guy, Thompson or somebody. Harrison. Harrison, yes. So he invented this mechanical clock, which is predecessor of our modern wind-up clocks. Obviously, we use cesium and atomic. clocks. But that prize for 10,000 pounds or whatever it was, was an early predecessor of the Nobel Prize.
I've been waiting this whole conversation to talk to you about adaptive optics. Let me give just a little bit of backdrop for how I'm approaching this. In the field of neuroscience, there's... as with any field of biology a desire to see smaller and smaller things at higher and higher resolution
And there have been all sorts of incredible discoveries in microscopy, like two-photon microscopy, one-photon microscopy, electron microscopy. You see things down to the, you know, tiny, tiny nanometer size. Some years ago... a group out of the university of rochester developed um adaptive optics i think it was david williams's group which is borrowed from astronomy and my very top contour understanding of this is that you're using the presence of noise.
in the environment essentially as part of the microscope to get a better image and this was used in the field of ophthalmology to look into the back of the eye this incredible three cell layer thick pie crust that lines the back of our eyes that it gives us all of our visual perception, not alone, but allows for all of our visual perception. As I mentioned before, that the eye has a lens, there's vitreous, there's all sorts of opportunity for light scatter.
And then within the eye itself, you've got these multiple layers you have to go through before you can see the photoreceptors. But using adaptive optics, you can take all that noise, all that stuff between the microscope and what you want to see.
way, way back in the eye and use that, in air quotes here, noise, and make it part of the microscope, so to speak. And without going into further detail there... I was always told that adaptive optics was borrowed from your field, astronomy, where people used the presence of atmosphere dust, of these stuff in the way, and made it part of the... lens if you will to be able to see things at higher resolution which i just think is so incredible it's like saying
The barrier becomes the portal through which you can see even more than had you had a clear path. The obstacle is the way. Let's shout out to Ryan. Shout out to Ryan. Ryan Holiday. Yeah, never met him, but I like that book very much. Okay, so... what what is adaptive optics yeah um at the level for astronomers okay so we live in an atmosphere a planet with an atmosphere thank god we wouldn't be here having this conversation right um
And that atmosphere is a dirty window. It's like literally looking through the windshield of your car and it's cloudy and dusty and contaminated. We live in its presence. And the best astronomical telescopes are the ones that are launched above the atmosphere, out of the atmosphere. Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, and now the James Webb Telescope. Again, those are multi-billion dollar telescopes. The James Webb to build it. And by the way, one lesson to leave.
you with and maybe your audience with as well, is whenever you hear a scientific instrument's cost, always in your mind at least double it. Andrew Lang, my late great mentor, used to say multiply by pi. Because... A, you're not taking into account the fact that you don't build, say, a destroyer or an aircraft carrier to build it. You build it to use it. And it's about...
10% of the construction cost to operate an instrument, a battleship, a telescope, whatever. It's a rule of thumb that project managers love to use. So that means in 10 years, it's going to double the price. And we hope that Hubble and Webb and Hubble's already lasted 40 years on it. So it lasts a long time. So whenever you hear this.
But it's incredibly expensive. One kilogram used to cost like $10,000 to bring to orbit. And Elon keeps talking about how cheap it's going to be. But he has yet to launch a scientific instrument. I talked to him for 10 minutes on my podcast once. And I tried to get him to shut off these. Starlinks are amazing. I have one in my house. But they have the property that they go through astronomical images and they leave a satellite trail behind them, which is.
you know, can be, you're taking a picture of a deep star, a deep, you know, galaxy or whatever, and you see these streaks going through it. It ruins the image and you have to wait until they're gone.
But at least in optical astronomy, you can physically, literally paint those satellites black, and they will no longer reflect, and so they won't obscure the image whatsoever. So you're saying that the Starlink satellites are going to make... your job more difficult they definitely are because you can while you can paint an optical satellite black and make it black we're looking for heat there's no way to stealth you know confuse or block out heat
Sorry, that's the law of thermodynamics. Anything that's above absolute zero will always give off heat. And worst of all, the signals that he uses are in the exact microwave spectral range that we use to look at the CMB, the cosmic microwave background. So what's his response? to this i told him that having internet everywhere is more important no he said he would look into it you know
Nine months ago, Elon, I know you like the show. So please do reach out to me. But this would be just turning it off when it's over our telescope, basically. And the South Pole. So it's not a big deal. So you have a specific request. There's no one at the South. It's not like he's getting millions of dollars in ad revenue from people at the South Pole.
They don't use them. So anyway, I'm asking Elon. It's a small ask. But anyway, so we want to be above the atmosphere, but it's millions and maybe billions of dollars to do that for a telescope like we're using or for an optical telescope here on Earth. So scientists became very convinced that there has to be a way to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere. Now what is the main effect of the atmosphere? Well, you learned it when you were a kid.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are. What is that twinkling? It's called scintillation. Scintillation is the property of a point source, which is a star is so far away, even though they're enormous, they still only subtend a zero-dimensional.
a zero-dimensional dot of light on the sky when it goes through the atmosphere the atmosphere has macroscopic turbulence features the atmosphere is a fluid there's turbulence there's roiling columns there's cells of the atmosphere and if you've ever looked at a star they jitter They they they looks like they're moving around. And that's the combination of the atmospheric cells each.
column of air that has slightly more density will refract light slightly different angles. Remember we talked about light when it goes through a lens, it refracts, it bends. So should we be thinking about the light from stars kind of like a jagged line coming towards our eye? It's coming.
through, it's getting deflected slightly and it's moving and it's landing on different retinal cells. And we're perceiving that as this motion or in a CCD array, it's also landing on different pixels. So you can't get away from it by using technology. It's still an effect. It's caused by these.
atmospheric turbulence cells and by the way you can tell and you can identify a planet by the fact it does not scintillate it does not twinkle twinkle so jupiter is visible tonight i hope you'll see it with the telescope we can see it after we're done recording uh we keep going we're about halfway done i figure uh we'll go outside we'll look at it and you'll see it's not as stationary and i actually use that
I kissed my wife for the first time, but I'm not going to talk about that. When you look at the planet, you can identify them by their lack of scintillation. So it's a way to identify if it's a plane, a star, or a planet. So astronomers, including a colleague of mine in the UC system, Claire Max, and other people, realized in the 1960s and 70s that if they had a fake star...
It's actually called either a guide star or an artificial star. I'll explain how they make that in a minute. Then if they knew the exact properties of that guide star, then they could measure just the guide star through the same optics of the telescope. And then they would take... the light from that artificial star onto a flexible, deformable mirror. So the mirror could actually wobble and wiggle, and it would do so in an exactly compensatory way to nullify the atmospheric turbulence.
It's basically what light does when it goes through a cell of the atmosphere. It traverses a slightly longer path difference. So they would shorten the path difference of the mirror. They make it a little bit closer in the direction of that cell and other places they'd make it farther away and vice versa. They compensate for it.
And this was done by a combination of two technologies. One was the deformable mirror that could flex 100 times per second. And the other was making these artificial stars. So how do they make an artificial star? They shoot a laser into the...
That laser illuminates sodium. What's the troposphere? Troposphere is a layer of the atmosphere. I used to know all the different layers. That's okay. Okay, ionosphere is the farthest away. So some layer of the atmosphere. Yeah, it's 40, 30, 40 kilometers above the Earth. It's not quite in space.
far enough away that the laser beam is still collimated. It makes a nice beam and it can illuminate and then cause this sodium ions to fluoresce basically. So they start to get really stimulated. It looks just like a star. They know exactly how they produced it.
exactly what phase and wavelength to correct in the mirror. And then they say it's almost as good as going into space. It corrects exactly the compensation of the Earth's atmosphere with the combination of this deformable mirror. And it was actually used by my colleague Andrea Ghez here at UCLA.
to measure the properties of stars orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and test Einstein's theory of relativity. Without this, on the... twin 10 meter diameter keck telescopes in hawaii she never would have won that nobel prize so it's amazing technology but it was classified
it was so uh useful to uh to astronomers uh but it wasn't as useful as to the military remember i said galileo used his telescope to sell to the military of venice It was immediately classified by the US military because if you think about a spy satellite …
What's it doing? Well, it's staring down to Earth and it's looking at whatever on Earth. It's also going through the atmosphere. It's going to have the same problems. So they wanted to use that and have this technological advantage over the Soviets probably in the 1970s and 80s. So they classified it. let many, astronomers could build things, they could deliver the finished product, but they couldn't patent it, they couldn't use it. And so Claire Max, as I said, she could have been super rich.
But it's interesting because now they're using it so it's bad enough to look from Earth to space. But as I said, if you imagine the Earth as having a slab of an atmosphere, imagine a sniper. The snipers trying to make a kill shot, you know, Jocko's out there trying to hit something five kilometers, three kilometers away or whatever. There's a lot of atmosphere in the way. And if you're looking through an optical sight, that will also happen. So now they're actually using this optical.
compensation and sniper scopes are using this technology, adaptive optics. So it's another way that astronomy has influenced military developments as well. Very interesting. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole. I'm aware that there are some technologies now to use lasers to extract sound waves.
in a similar way so there are technologies that exist where you can shine a laser at say a window on a building from very far away and actually hear the conversation inside the room by way of the sound waves hitting that window the conversion of sound waves to optical
And then from optical back to sound on your computer allows that. Also, there was a technology that was publicized a few years back, developed at least in part at Stanford, the ability to see around corners by shining lasers at the most visible location.
closest to what you want to see, and then capturing reflections and sound waves at that location and essentially being able to reconstruct images around corners, see how many objects are there. So pretty wild stuff. You can imagine the military and spy implications. but perhaps just as interesting, the ability to, for instance, map the positions and movements of critters in the deep ocean.
without actually having to quote unquote see them you could you could hear hear them i had a really interesting experience a few summers back of going to somebody's pool it was an impressive pool but the most impressive thing about it was that you could hear music perfectly well underwater using a
Adaptive, adaptive acoustics. And listening to your episode with Goggins. No, it's wild. You could dive, you listen to something above water, dive below water and still hear it as if it were playing in the headphones. Maybe not quite as well as in headphones, but, and if you sloshed around.
the water there'd be a little perturbation but it's pretty spectacular it wasn't my pool unfortunately I have one big question that I think everybody would like the answer to which is to what extent do you think there's life outside Earth or not on Earth. And when people hear this, they think aliens, but, you know, like an insect-like creature. uh single or small multi-cell organism on another planet that that itself would be a spectacular find yeah i mean beyond spectacular um
Is there any evidence that that does exist? Is there any reason to think that it couldn't exist? And if it does, would it have to be in a different – in a different galaxy altogether. What's the going belief among those who are like real scientists who don't believe that there's... Whatever, just real scientists. Like, what's the thought? Like a centipede on Mars? Like, I don't think too many people would be totally surprised. Right.
But that'd be pretty wild. Well, yeah, I'm kind of an outlier. So just everyone should look to the actual experts in this field. But I have some... rigorous, you know, kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability of life, I never say it's zero, but I think it's very low. And I think I can substantiate that. And the best part is I can't be falsified right now. There's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe. Period. Full stop.
End of sentence. There's no evidence, conclusive evidence. Lots of drones over in New Jersey right now. Not no evidence. Knew we'd get into drones. So the argument that it would somehow, first of all, transform. our understanding of human place is inarguable to me. I believe that's true.
Although in this movie, Contact is a really wonderful movie. It's not cheesy science fiction. It was the first to like use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances. But in that movie, there's a scene where President Bill Clinton. is talking about the discovery that this fictitious character made. But he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica. And they just clipped that. And the meteorite was believed to have microbial life.
and that meteorites origin was in inarguably from mars Okay? So the reasoning was, this is 1997, that there was a meteorite found in Antarctica where it's easy to find meteorites. Is it in the movie or in real life? It's in real life. In 1997, a scientist announced the discovery of a meteorite from Antarctica. It's called Allen Land Hill.
meteorite and it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts of these microbial life forms okay it was such a big deal that Within minutes, Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn where he goes, this rock speaks to us from across the generations. And if confirmed, will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding of the universe around it.
Now, the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie, the fictitious character, discovered SETI, extraterrestrial technology, not a microbe. But in the public's mind, that... Actual scientific discovery was never falsified. It was certainly never confirmed. No one's ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence of microbial life on Mars. Now, how did that meteorite get there? Well... Some asteroids hit the moon. That's why it has craters on it. It hits.
That's why we have Meteor Crater, Arizona, Winslow, Arizona, Yucatan, Chicxulub, where the dinosaurs' doom was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago. Those impacts occur on every planet, every moon in our solar system. So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars probably millions of years ago, ejected material. low gravity on Mars, low atmosphere. And that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the Earth.
Okay, so matter from Mars landed on the Earth. Does that make sense? That's how I gave you, I have a lunar meteorite that I'm giving to you, again, as a token of my appreciation for all you do. That came the same way. Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar. It's called breccia. It's the crust of the moon.
eventually made its way, landed in Northwest Africa, and I bought a slice of it from a, I got a dealer, you know, I got a meteorite dealer, and I got that for you, okay? So what's the lesson? Material gets exchanged from planet to planet. Now, I ask the following question. If that happened on Mars to the Earth, the moon to the Earth, so too has material from the Earth been ejected since life emerged. 3.7 billion years ago. There's literally millions of tons of Earth.
That's floating around in space. Some of that will have landed on Mars. So someday we'll get there. We'll find some piece of it. Now, could some of it have a tardigrade on it? Could some of it have a protozoan on it? Obviously it could. Maybe some interesting.
microbes. Yeah, it could. Maybe some ancient microbes that are no longer extant. Yeah, it could. It could have... What's an adaptogen? I have no idea. An adaptogen? You talk about adaptogens. Adaptogens are... It's a broad term used to describe... Any compound that allows you to...
modulate the stress response. So maybe increase your stress threshold or recover from stress more quickly. It's sort of like saying stimulant adaptogens. It's not biological necessarily. No, you know, it's a broad category. I mean, I think, you know, some people say like...
certain non-hollicinogenic mushroom strains are adaptogens. I mean, the ability to buffer the stress response. Interesting. I mean, things like rhodiola have been described as adaptogens and these... work through neurotransmitter system so broadly speaking they allow you to um
perceive effort as less effortful, this kind of thing. Okay. So one theory of the formation of life on Earth, you asked me about that earlier, the origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery. How did life get here? One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people. It sounds dirty, but it's... not, it's called panspermia. It just means that genetic material has been transferred from another astronomical object landed here on Earth. So the converse reaction occurs as well.
But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars. So if I told you, you know, we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right next to it and it has almost the same conditions. It's in the so-called Goldilocks zone where the temperature is just right to have liquid water, which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year.
in certain places on Mars. It had flowing water on it. We know for sure Mars had flowing water on it. We know for sure that material from the Earth got there when Earth had life on it. So the absence of life on Mars is a data point. It's not probative or provative. that life couldn't exist on Mars. We haven't searched all of Mars. But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it. So people are a lot fond of saying,
As I told you earlier, there's about 10 to the 24th planets probably in our observable universe. Going back to the Big Bang, going out to the farthest reaches of the universe. But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably, you know, literally 10 billion, 100. of billions of planets in our galaxy alone. And when you look at that, people like to say,
as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life, it's an awful waste of space, right? Why is there so much space and there's no life that seems incomprehensible? But nature, you know, I love when atheist scientists will say, like,
You propose God exists and that's the God of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand. But when science advances, we'll have an explanation for why thunder occurs. It's not because of Thor, right? We get rid of gods as we learn more and so the God of the gaps shrink smaller and smaller.
they'll say the same argument about life and they'll say, well, there's got to be life because there's so much room there. But as I told you, I've been to Antarctica twice. The only life forms I saw there. were people. I saw a few penguins in the distance and a couple of dead sea lions. There's no trees, there's no flora at all on the entire continent. It's incredibly barren. And yet, Andrew... it makes up 8% of the land mass of the earth. Wow.
And you would think, well, it's just proportional to the amount of area, i.e. the number of stars. There should be 8% of the life on Earth. There should be a billion people there or whatever, you know, 600 million people. No, there's nothing there except for scientists that go there. So the odds of life... You know, you can't construct probability from possibility.
That and many, many other arguments that I could give you, the improbability of life, how hard it is to create life. And, you know, if you just sprinkled – imagine you had a koala cannon, OK? People at PETA are going to get mad. Imagine you just go to Mars and spray it with koala.
It's obviously not going to like start life. Well, I think PETA would probably be OK with you populating an area with koalas. A cannon to take out koalas, they would probably protest. That's right. They would not like that. So yeah, so probably, you know.
Possibility is not probability. The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous. We have yet to reproduce, to make a functional cell in the laboratory. Not that that's a requirement to prove that life could exist elsewhere. I'm just saying it's very hard. Our history of life, we have an N of 1. It's very difficult to speculate on. And if we're alone, if life is abundant, as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago, if life is abundant and the galaxy is old, where are they?
Where are the aliens? There should have been plenty of time not only for them to evolve and be superior to us in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy, not even of the cosmos, of our galaxy. Where are they? Where are they? They've known about us for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 85 years. Do you know this theory about the gut microbiota?
Our guts, our skin, our eyes, our nose, but certainly our entire digestive tract, the whole way down from our lips. out the other end are populated with these little microbiota that influence everything from fatty acid production, neurotransmitter production, et cetera. It's more than human cells. Yeah. Oh yeah. And it's powerful for modulating all sorts of biological processes. And, and every time we interact.
shake hands if people kiss if you interact with dirt if you interact with a pet you the the microbiome changes it's a it's an inner uh reflection of
all your outer behaviors. Internet, yeah. Yeah, and we're learning a lot about it. There's this one theory that I like that kind of turns life as you and I know it on its head, which is that humans and other species are just vehicles for... the microbiome and that, you know, and, and so you would take something like, Oh, the desire to like, like populate Mars or to shoot or to land on the moon as just the microbiota, you know, taking advantage of this weird old world primates.
that we call Homo sapiens, that loves to develop technology, almost destroy itself, but then continues to evolve social media, et cetera. Warn each other about declining birth rates. And then just to basically the microbiome. Yoda have a, what, you know, a sort of quote unquote consciousness, not a brain, but consciousness of their own, which is like.
all species to make more of itself and to go further and further out and populate. It's hard to punch holes in the logic of this model, but it certainly diminishes our conscious experience. We could go on forever about this trail. I'll just kind of put a kind of a cliffhanger out there. It'd be wonderful sometime to sit down with you and discuss the possibility of rather than thinking about life elsewhere in the galaxy. Given what we know about physics and engineering, astronomy.
etc would it be possible to build a planet at the appropriate distance from the sun that we could spawn life by bringing things there as opposed to trying to take it you know figure out how to how to do it at a distance that it might not be amenable to life right you know maybe creating
a garden planet. Maybe we don't put humans there right away, but trying to create a garden that could thrive at the... some appropriate distance from the sun yeah um and seeing what what what nutrients could be grown there you know so you could have robots man this this planet but you'd have to somehow aggregate um stuff in space to build this planet or launch this planet up that it would
collect things. I mean, that to me feels like a fun experiment. It is, yeah. And a lot less risky than going up to other planets. Yeah, I was as blessed as my first guest on the Into the Impossible podcast, Freeman Dyson. You mentioned your dad, your dad mentioned him.
the greatest intellects of the last 100 years, great physicists. And he had these ideas for these Dyson spheres, which would be energy harvesting. So the first ingredient that you need to construct the Huberman planet habitable zone is. to have energy. It harvests as much energy as possible from a star. So he basically conjectured a megastructure, an alien megastructure that could be observable by astronomers could detect these objects.
of claim that we have but those have always been refuted and it would be basically surrounding a star capturing every photon worth of energy that came out of it and then converting that to mechanical energy and then yes and then once you have infinite energy you can actually do fusion you can make up whatever molecules you want. You could make up 3D printing at the quark level on up, basically. And so that was his conjecture of how super advanced aliens would behave. But again, we...
have no evidence for it, but it's fun. It's certainly fun to have the science fiction, you know, kind of, you know, a lot of interesting science, you know, originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction. So yeah, it'd be a lot of fun. You and I could talk about... the stars the planets optics animals life here on earth um infinitely um this is what happens folks when two real uh real nerds get together and want to learn from one another and i hope
You're delighted in this at least half as much as I did. Those of you listening, I mean, you occupy an incredible place. And I mean that, you know, like your intellectual place since you were a child is a remarkable place. that most people, I think, don't.
not because they don't have the training, but because they just haven't put their mind there on these questions. And I think one thing that's so clear is that through your podcast, your books, and certainly through the discussion today, you've placed us in the... in the position of scientist to be able to ponder these really big questions about really big, really distant things is not typically the way that my brain.
functions. I think most people are more focused on things proximal to them and here on earth. But I'm so grateful that you did. And I'm so grateful that you continue to educate. We didn't even get to talk about, but I'll just mention that you've been an absolutely spectacular proponent for popular science education and the importance of that. I've been very inspired by you and your work. Thank you. Very inspired by your story.
Sure, because of some similarities and fathers and sons and the tribulations, et cetera, different, but some overlap there. But also just because of the way that you approach life. And it's very clear to me that as a person who's focused on things very, very far away where... Apparently there's no observable life yet. Not yet. That you're also very grounded in this thing that we call daily life and the delight of exploration and asking questions.
If ever there was a call to arms for people to get outside and look at the stars. perhaps through a telescope or perhaps through the telescopes on the front of their their skull um certainly to do that and to think about some of what was discussed today because i i i'm certainly enchanted and i i know those listening and watching are as well so
Thank you for everything you do. Keep doing it. Come back. Let's keep talking. We didn't talk about God and the universe and the origins of life, but we'll do that before long. And Brian Keating, thanks for being you. I appreciate you. Thanks, Andrew. You've been a big inspiration to me, too.
Use your language. Thank you for your interest in science. It's really done so much for the world and you give it all for free. And it's truly an inspiration. And it's really fun to talk to somebody who's at the level that you're at and so many different things and still has that.
But as scientists, we get inured. We get kind of used to things. Oh, there's a rainbow. There's a meteor, whatever. But you still have that passion. You have that passion, that curiosity. And I think that's what makes a true scientist. The function of education seems to beat that out of kids, but really to have that in the domain and the expertise that you have is a real inspiration. And I think it's a huge service to society, so I want to thank you too.
Thank you. Well, it's a labor of love mixed with an affliction, so we'll keep going. Right back at you. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Andrew. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Brian Keating. I hope you found it to be as informative and indeed fascinating as I did. To learn more about Dr. Keating's work, his podcast, his book, and other resources, please see the show note captions.
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