In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization. In Extraterrestrial, Loeb takes ...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 35 min•Season 2Ep. 113
Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics Leonard Mlodinow was Stephen’s closest colleague in his final years. Who better to put us in the room as Hawking indulges his passion for wine and curry; shares his feelings on love, death, and disability; and grapples with deep questions of philosophy and physics. Whether depicting Hawking’s devotion to his work or demonstrating how he would make spur of the moment choices, such as punting on the River Cam (despite the risk the jaunt posed), o...
Jan 26, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 112
Learn about the exciting promise of quantum computing and how it may solve problems in fundamental physics. Join my mailing list to get slides from this conversation: briankeating.com . We went deep…discussing Artificial Intelligence, the simulation hypothesis, lessons from Richard Feynman and more! You don’t want to miss his answers to my patented Thrilling Three final questions! John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology ,...
Jan 19, 2021•1 hr 18 min
Part 1 of 2 Learn about the exciting promise of quantum computing and how it may solve problems in fundamental physics. Join my mailing list to get slides from this conversation: briankeating.com . We went deep…discussing Artificial Intelligence, the simulation hypothesis, lessons from Richard Feynman and more! You don’t want to miss his answers to my patented Thrilling Three final questions! John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of ...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr
Michael J. Saylor is an American entrepreneur and business executive, who co-founded & leads MicroStrategy, a company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services. Saylor, an MIT trained engineer, authored the 2012 book The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. He is also the sole trustee of Saylor Academy ( www.saylor.org ), a provider of free online education. As of 2016, Saylor has been granted 31 patents and has 9 additional applic...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 46 min
Frank Wilczek is a theoretical physicist, author, and intellectual adventurer. He has received many prizes for his work, including a Nobel Prize in Physics. Win a FREE copy of his newest book Fundamentals: enter this giveaway – https://kingsumo.com/g/n7xeaa/win-a-copy-of-frank-wilczeks-fundamentals-10-keys-to-reality Wilczek has made seminal contributions to fundamental particle physics, cosmology, and the physics of materials. His current research focus includes Axions, Anyons, and Time Crystal...
Jan 12, 2021•1 hr 40 min
Does your mind create matter? What happens when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object? What is the nature of free will? Find out, in this special episode of the Into the Impossible Podcast in collaboration with Deepak Chopra’s “Chopra Well”. Fundamentals: Closer to Truth: A Look at the work of Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek and physicists Leonard Mlodinow and Brian Keating. In this riveting conversation, co-hosted with Deepak Chopra, physicists Frank Wilczek, author of Fundamentals: Ten ...
Jan 06, 2021•1 hr 27 min
Lord Martin Rees has played a huge role in my career and is an inspiration to me and millions of scientists around the world. There is literally nothing beyond his purview and our conversation bore this out — we covered everything from A to Z: artificial intelligence to zoology! Nothing was off-limits — we even shared our mutual and controversial distaste for alchemy and astrology! Lord Rees of Ludlow, the Astronomer Royal, is the Co-founder of Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and an Eme...
Jan 06, 2021•1 hr 38 min
Max Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. Check out his new center at MIT: https://iaifi.org Find him on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/us...
Jan 01, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Max Tegmark and Eric Weinstein chat on the last day of 2020! Let’s say ‘good riddance’ with good friends and great conversation! We’ll talk a bit about Artificial Intelligence, Theories of Everything & the seemingly impossible challenge of building a positive future for humanity. Max thinks that, by improving the news we receive with the aid of machine learning, we can achieve a brighter future. Check out his new center at MIT: https://iaifi.org Find him on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/us...
Jan 01, 2021•1 hr 20 min
MIT Physics Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss won a 1/2 share of The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 For his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. He was born in Berlin, where his father was a doctor and psychoanalyst and his mother an actress. His father was of Jewish descent, and the family fled Nazism to the United States. After schooling in New York, Weiss studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his doctor’s degree in 1962. A...
Dec 29, 2020•1 hr 55 min
Join me in welcoming Prof. Cumrun Vafa (Harvard) in his first major podcast interview! We discussed a wide range of topics including what message he’d put into a billion-year time capsule. Plus, we discuss his delightful new book. Beneath all of the complex and formidable mathematical structures that formulate physical laws rest simple but deep nuggets of truth. It is these simple truths, and not the complicated technical details, that scientists strive for when uncovering the laws of nature. Fo...
Dec 25, 2020•1 hr 13 min
Last week the Guardian and Scientific American announced that Breakthrough Listen astronomers using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia saw a weird radio signal coming from Proxima Centauri, the star system closest to Earth. The signal behaves strangely, only using a narrow 982MHz band typically not used by human-made spacecraft. It also does not correspond to known natural processes. The frequency moves around too…not what you’d expect from a planet. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I ha...
Dec 23, 2020•1 hr 7 min
Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel ‘s investment firm, a position he has held since 2015. Though not an academic physicist, he proposed a unified theory of physics in 2013. He and his brother Bret Weinstein coined the term Intellectual Dark Web to refer to an informal group of pundits . Weinstein received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the Mathematics Department at Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott Find Eric’s Portal Podcast...
Dec 22, 2020•1 hr 22 min
Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Join me on a cosmic journey with Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. We will embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. This is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. Wilczek is hardly alone amon...
Dec 17, 2020•1 hr 39 min
Barry Barish is an emeritus professor at Caltech, where he has worked since 1963. He became director of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project in 1997, which led to his Nobel Prize in 2017. He has many other awards and is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and American Physical Society, of which he was also president. Barry joins our Nobel Minds playlist on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rai Weiss and Kip ...
Dec 15, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Season 2Ep. 100
Sheldon Glashow is a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at Harvard, where he also earned his Ph.D. He was the first to propose a grand unified theory and also worked as a visiting scientist at CERN. Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg. He is a member of the Board of Sponsors for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It was an honor to have Sheldon Glashow on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE podcast. He joins our Nobel Minds playlist, having won the 1...
Dec 03, 2020•1 hr 33 min
We all have limited time on Earth, so how should we spend it? Financial advisors urge us to be more like the ant than the grasshopper: work hard to maximize our earnings, save early and often, and, in retirement, reap the fruits of our labors and the rewards of compound interest. “What a monumental waste of human life,” says multi- millionaire Bill Perkins. If you spend a lifetime working and die with lots of money left over, you’ve squandered a huge amount of life energy, bypassing the opportun...
Nov 28, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Eric Weinstein joins me live to take your questions about the past, present and future of physics. We’ll discuss my recent chats with Lenny Susskind, Shelly Glashow, and Barry Barish and Eric’s recent podcasts with Lex Fridman too. Eric and Stephen Wolfram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Join us in the chat room to ask questions! Previously featured: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/maili...
Nov 28, 2020•1 hr 40 min
Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul earned his PhD in physics in 2011 as a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow at the University of Illinois. He then spent three years at the Paris Institute for Astrophysics followed by two years as a research fellow at the Trieste Observatory in Italy. Prior to his current...
Nov 20, 2020•50 min
Evan Carmichael believes in entrepreneurs. At 19, he built then sold a biotech software company. At 22, he was a venture capitalist helping to raise $500,000 to $15 million. He now runs EvanCarmichael.com, a popular website for entrepreneurs. He breathes and bleeds entrepreneurship. He’s obsessed, aiming to help one billion entrepreneurs and change the world. He has set two world records, uses a stand-up desk, rides a Vespa, raises funds for Kiva, wears five-toe shoes and created Entrepreneur tr...
Nov 20, 2020•31 min
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is a 2008 popular science book by American theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. The book covers the black hole information paradox, and the related scientific dispute between Stephen Hawking and Susskind. Susskind is known for his work on string theory and wrote a previous popular science book, The Cosmic Landscape, in 2005. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 What has been lost due to COVID: congeniality and...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr 28 min
Janna is back to discuss her wonderful new book, BLACK HOLE SURVIVAL GUIDE https://amzn.to/2IlbpKS Keep your distance and enjoy the ride! Please subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 & watch my previous conversation with Janna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtGYQ7A0B4?sub_confirmation=1 Leave a comment in the comment section or join the livechat…we all want to engage with Janna! Several Topics are on the menu on our voyage, including: 1. Black Hole basics 2. ...
Nov 14, 2020•1 hr
Albert Einstein is often viewed as the icon of #genius, and his theories are admired for their beauty and correctness. Yet the final judge of any theory is the rigorous test of experiment, not the fame of its inventor or the allure of its mathematics. For decades, general relativity has passed test after test with flying colors, including some remarkable new tests using the recently detected gravitational waves. Still, there are reasons for doubt. Einstein’s theory of gravity, as beautiful as it...
Nov 13, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Host of Into The Impossible Professor Brian Keating, David Spergel, Janna Levin, Sara Seager, Wendy Freedman, & Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess debate the hottest topics in modern astronomy while celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30th birthday! An all-star (get it??) party featuring observations of Hubble’s ‘greatest hits’, courtesy of Wyoming Stargazing Association! Plus we debated the greatest mysteries in the Universe including: What is the nature of Dark Matter? How did the Universe...
Nov 13, 2020•1 hr 42 min
Join me for a very special discussion with Sir Roger Penrose, co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. We will discuss Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes, and of course, Nobel Prizes! GET OUR SLIDES: https://kingsumo.com/g/vn03wc/sir-roger-penrose-on-the-into-the-impossible-podcast-slides Sir Roger Penrose is co-winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics. We discuss Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Black Holes, and of course, Nobel Prizes! Roger is a mensch. He always makes time for me and p...
Nov 09, 2020•2 hr 23 min
Marwa A.ElDiwiny, an early stage researcher PhD, working on modelling and simulating self-healing soft materials for industrail applications at VUB. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 08, 2020•59 min
Seth Godin is a prolific writer, thinker, and self-declared “non-guru” guru to millions around the world. He invented email marketing. He started the AltMBA program. He has written 20 books, including the Practice. He thinks deeply about the way ideas spread whether these be née notions in quantum physics, science fiction, entrepreneurship, leadership, and–most of all- marketing. He’s worked with Nobel Prize winners, industry titans and even Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Seth’s past books include Linchp...
Nov 06, 2020•37 min
Betraying the Nobel: Secrets, Corruption, and the World’s Most Prestigious Prize! This was a fascinating interview for me to conduct, with a ‘sister-in-arms” who is rallying the world to restore Alfred Nobel’s lofty vision for the Peace Prize. Unni wrote The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer and comes back with a powerful shot across the bow of the Nobel Peace Prize: BETRAYING THE NOBEL! I was honored to write a blurb for the book, saying “The Nobel Peace Prize is perhaps the most closely held mon...
Nov 04, 2020•44 min
Race and diversity issues in STEM can no longer be ignored. Professor Gentry Patrick is a neurobiologist and the Director of Mentorship and Diversity at UC San Diego. As a kid from Compton, he didn’t have an easy road, but he is committed to making sure future generations have it easier than he did. We discussed the importance of diversity in science and academia and the unfair burden placed on people of color in those spaces. We also talk about failures, storytelling, and what Gentry looks for ...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 11 min
