Transcript for #257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize

Yeah, I'm certainly biased towards that particular instrument, but talk about that in a little bit. Yeah, but certainly the telescope to me as is a lever that has literally moved the earth throughout history.

Yeah, the one invented not by Galileo as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lipper she and in the Netherlands. And it was kind of interesting because in the 1600s, 14, 1500s, 1600s, it was the beginning of movable type. And so people for the first time in history had a standard by which they could appraise their eyesight. So looking at a printed word now, we just take it for granted, 12 point font, whatever, and that's what the eye charts are based on. They're just fixed height. But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have, you know, perfect vision. And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and moveable type. And at that time, people realized, hey, wait, I can't read this. You know, my priest, my friend over here, he can read it. She can read it. I can't read it. What's going on? And that's when, you know, these people in Venice and then the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind of, you know, glass material and hold it up and maybe put another piece of glass material and it would make it clearer. and what was so interesting is that nobody thought to take that exact same device, you know, two lenses and go like, hmm, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there, until Galileo. So Galileo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of 10. So he 10 X to it, which is almost as good as going from 0 to 1 is going from, you know, 1 to 10. And when he did that, he really, transform both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species, because we're using tools not to get food faster or to preserve our legacy for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit of the human mind.

I think it's a little romantic. Because they also took the slide. They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at, you know, mirrors, and in other words, they made the microscope. And we're still doing that. And so, you know, to have a telescope is it serves to do a purpose. It's not only a way of looking out, it's looking in, but it's also looking back in time. In other words, you can see a microscope. You don't think, oh, I'm seeing this thing as it was, you know, one nanosecond ago, light travels one foot per nanosecond. I'm seeing it a nap. No, you don't think about it like that. But when you see something that's happening, you know, on Jupiter or the moon and drama the galaxy, you're seeing things, you know, back when Lucy was walking around the Sarangetti planes. And for that, I think that took then the knowledge of, you know, relativity and time travel and so forth. It took that before we could really say, oh, we really unlock some cheat codes in the human brain. So I think that might be a little too much, but, but nevertheless, I mean, what's better than having a time machine? You know, it's like we can look back in time. We see things as they were and as they are. And that allows us to do many things, including speculating about that. But one of the coolest things, I don't know if you're familiar with someone radio astronomer. I don't actually look through telescopes very often except, you know, on rare occasions when I take one out to show the kids. But a radio telescope is even more sort of visceral. I mean, it's much less cool because you look at it. You're like, all right, it looks cool. It's kind of weird shape thing. Looks like a belongings in sci-fi. It's going to blast, you know, as the Death Star or whatever. But when you realize that when you point a radio telescope at a distant object, If that object fills up what's called the beam, which is basically the field of view of a radio telescope is called this beam. If you fill up the beam and you put a resistor just a simple absorbing piece of material at the focus of the radio telescope, that resistor will come to the exact same temperature as the object that's looking at. which is pretty amazing. You're actually remotely measuring. You're taking the temperature of Jupiter or whatever in effect. It's allowing you to basically teleport. There's no other science that you can really do that. If you're an archaeologist, let me get into my time machine and go back and see, what was Lucy really? It's not possible.

We do it from Antarctica too. So there are some penguins around and we do it.

Yeah, okay. Usually people preface this by saying, I have a simple question. So yeah, what happened before the universe began?

Good. So when we think about what happened, it's more correct, it's more logical, it's more practical to go back in time starting from today. So if you go back, 13.874 billion years from today, that's some day, right? I mean, you could translate into some day, right? So on that day, something happened earlier than the moment exactly now, let's say we're talking around the one o'clock. So at some point during that day, the universe started to become a fusion reactor and started to fuse light elements and isotopes into heavier elements and isotopes of those heavier elements. After that period of time, going forward back closer to today, 10 minutes earlier, 10 minutes earlier, or later, rather coming towards us today, we know more and more about what the universe was like. In fact, all the hydrogen, you know, to very good approximation in the water molecules in this bottle, almost all of them were produced during that first 20 minute period. So I would say, you know, the actual fusion and production of the lightest elements on the pure out table occurred in a time period shorter than the TV show, the Big Bang Theory. Well done, sir. You know, most of those light elements, it besides hydrogen, aren't really used in, you know, encountered, right? We don't encounter helium that often, unless you go to a lot of birthday parties or pilot a blimp. You don't need lithium, hopefully, you know, but other than that, those are the kind of things that were produced during that moment. The question we came, how did the heavier things like iron, carbon, nickel, we can get to that later, and I brought some samples for us to discuss and how those came from a very different type of process called a different type of fusion reactor. and a different type of process explosion as well, called the supernova. However, if you go back to the beyond those first three minutes, we really have to say almost nothing because we are not capable. In other words, going backwards from the first three minutes since famous Stephen Weinberg titled his book, we actually marks a point where ignorance takes over. In other words, we can't speculate on what happened three minutes before the preponderance of hydrogen was formed in our universe. We just don't know enough about that epoch. There are many people, most people, most practicing car carrying cosmologists, believe the universe began and what's called the singularity. And we can certainly talk about that. However, singularity is so far removed from anything we can ever hope to prove, hope to confront, or hope to observe with evidence. And really, only occurs in two instantiations, the big bang in the core of a black hole, neither of which is observable. And so for that reason, there are now flourishing alternatives. That's a, you can actually, for the first time ask the question, that day, you know, Tuesday, you know, in the first, you know, moments of the, our universe, there was a Tuesday a week before that, 24 hours, time seven days before that. That has a perfectly well understood meaning in models of cosmology, promoted by some of the more eminent of cosmologists working today. When I was in grad school over 25 years ago, no one really considered anything, besides that big bang, that there was a singularity. And people would have to say, as I said, we just don't know. But they would say some future incarnation of some experimental tell us the answer. But now there are people that are saying there is an alternative to the Big Bang. And it's not really fringe science as it once was 50, 80 years ago. By the way, the first cosmology and history was not a singular universe. The first cosmology and history goes back to Akhenaten Ra and the temples of Egypt and third millennium BC. And in that, they talked about cyclical universes. So I always joke, you know, that guy, I can not in his court, you know, he'd have a pretty high H index right about now because people have been using that cyclical model from pen rows to Paul Steinhardt and Eges and right up until this very moment.

So there are many alternatives starting with the singularity quantum cosmologically demanding singularity origin of the universe. That stands in contrast to these other models in which time does not have a beginning. If many of them feature cycles, at least one cycle, possibly infinite number of cycles. called by Sir Roger Penrose and they all have things in common, these alternatives. As does the dominant paradigm of cosmogenesis, which is inflation. Inflation is sort of can be thought of as this spark that ignites the hot big bang that I said we understood. So it's an earlier condition, but it's still not a initial condition. In physics, imagine I'll show you a grandfather clock or pendulum swinging back and forth. You look away for a second, you know, I come into the room, pendulum swinging back and forth. Alex, tell me, where did it start? How many cycles is going to make before the, you can't answer that question without knowing the initial conditions. in a very simple system like a one-dimensional, simple harmonic oscillator, like a pendulum. Think about understanding the whole universe without understanding the initial conditions. It's a tremendous lacuna gap that we have as scientists that we may not be able to in the inflationary cosmology determine the quantitative physical properties of the universe prior to what's called the inflationary epoch.

Right. Yeah. So if you look at it right now, but if I said, well, when will it stop oscillating? So that depends on how much energy it got initially and you can measure its dissipation. It's air resistance yet infrared camera. You can see it's getting hotter, maybe. And you could do some calculations. But to know the two things in physics to solve a partial differential equation are the initial conditions in the boundary condition. Bannerkish, we're here on Earth as gravitational field. It's not going to excurs, you know, make excursions wildly beyond the length of the pendulum. It's not, you know, it has simple properties. So, but this is like another, you can't tell me, you know, when did the solar system start orbiting in the way that it does now? In other words, when did the moon acquire the exact angular momentum that it has now? No, that's a pretty pedestrian example. But what I'm telling you is that the inflationary epoch purports and is successful at providing a lot of explanations for how the universe evolved after inflation took place and ended. But it says nothing about how it itself took place. And that's really what you're asking me. I mean, you don't really look, what you care about, like, big bag nuclear synthesis and the elements got made in these fusion reactors and the whole universe was a fusion reactor, but like, don't you really care about what happened at the beginning of time, at the first moment of time? And the problem is we can't really answer that in the context of the big bag. We can't answer that in the context of these alternatives. So you guys need to add some of the alternatives. So one is A on theory, the conformal cyclic cosmology of surroghipeneros. Another one that was really popular in the 60s and 70s until the discovery of the primary component of my research field, the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMB, the three Kelvin all pervasive signal that astronomers detected in 1965, that kind of spell the death now in some sense, to what was called the quasi-steady state universe. And then there was another model that kind of came out of that. You hear the word quasi. So it's not steady state. steady state means always existed. That was a cosmology Einstein believed until Hubble showed him evidence for the expansion of the universe. And most scientists believed in that for millennia, basically the universe was eternal static on changing. They couldn't believe that after Hubble. So they had a pant onto it, concatenate this new feature that it wasn't steady, it was quasi-steady. So the universe was making a certain amount of hydrogen every century in a given volume of space. And that amount of hydrogen that was produced was constant. But because it was producing more and more of a century, the centuries pile up and the volume piles up, the universe could expand. And so that's how they develop. It's slowly very slowly and it doesn't match observational evidence. But that is an alternative.

I would assume that he thought it was infinite because there was really, you know, if something had a no beginning in time, then it would be very unlikely. We're in like the center of it or it's bounded or it has in that case, a finite edge to it.

And silly joke was that there are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe.

And the most kind of promising, although I hate to say that, you know, people say like, well, it's your favorite, not, you know, alternative, right?

inflation is not transitory, it is quasi-permanent.

And it's right. Although the first Nobel Prize and one of the first Nobel prizes in economics was awarded for inflation, not of the cosmological kind. So most people don't know, the inflation is already one in all of us.

Exactly. It's time translation invariant. So when we look at the alternative that's called the bouncing or cyclic cosmologies, these have serious virtues, according to some. One of the virtues to me, just as a human, I'm just speaking, you know, as a human, One of the founders of the new version of the, of the cyclic cosmology called, called the bouncing cosmology is Paul Steinhardt. He's the Einstein professor of natural sciences at Princeton University, made part of it. And he was one of the originators of what was called new inflation. In other words, he was one of the founding fathers of inflation, who now not only has no belief or support for inflation, he actively claims that inflation is Baroque, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent, not to science, not just to cosmology, but to society. So here's a man who created a theory that's captivated the world or universe of cosmologists, such as it is, and not of huge universe, but there are more podcasters and cosmologists. some to both, but this man created this theory with collaborators. And now I joke, I'm like Paul, you're denying paternity. You're like a deadbeat dead. And now you're saying inflation is bogus. But he doesn't just attack. See, this is what's very important about approaching things as an experimentalist. He got a lot of theorists on, and that's wonderful. And I think that's a huge service. An experimentalist has to say no. or she has to be confident to say, like, I don't care if I prove you right or I prove your enemy wrong or whatever. We have to be like exterminators. And nobody likes the exterminator until they need one, right? Or the garbage collectors, right? But it's vital that we be completely kind of unpersuaded by the beauty and the magnificence and the symmetry and the simplicity of some idea. Like inflation is a beautiful idea. But it also has consequences and what Paul claims, I don't agree with him fully on this point, is that those consequences are dangerous because they lead to things like the multiverse, which is outside the purview of science. And in that sense, I can see support for what he does, but none of that detracts from my respect for a man. Imagine like Elon comes up with this really great idea, space, and things are actually, it's not going to work. You know, but like here's this better idea and he's like SpaceX is not going to work, but he's now creating an alternative to it. It's extremely hard to do what Paul has done. Doesn't mean he's right. Doesn't mean I'm going to like have more and more attention paid to it because he's my friend or because I respect the idea or respect the man and his colleague and he just works really hard with him. But nevertheless, this has certain attractions to it. And what it does most foremost is that it removes the quantum gravity aspect from cosmology. So it takes away 50% of the motivation for a theory of quantum gravity. You talked a lot about quantum gravity. You talk people and people in the show. Always latent in those conversations is sort of the teleological expectation that there is a theory of everything. There is a theory of quantum gravity. But there's no law that says we have to have a theory of quantum gravity.

So, you know, one of the more kind of robust predictions of inflation according to its other two patriarchs, you know, considered to be his patriarch Alan Gooth at MIT in Andre Linde at Stanford, although he was in the USSR when he came up with these ideas, along with Paul Steinhardt, was that the universe has to eventually get into the quantum state. It has to exist in this Hilbert space and the Hilbert space has certain features. And those features are quantum mechanical and doubt with quantum mechanical properties. And then it becomes very difficult to turn inflation off. So inflation can get started, but then it's like one of SpaceX rockets. It's hard to turn off a solid rocket booster. It continues the thrusting and you need another mechanism to douse the flames of the inflationary expansion. which means that if inflation kicks off somewhere, it will kick off potentially everywhere at all times, including now, spawning an ever-increasing set of universes. Some will die still born, some will continue in flourish, and this is known as the multiverse paradigm. It's a robust seemingly robust consequence, not only of inflationary cosmology, but more and more we're seeing it in strength area as well. So sometimes two branches coming to the same conclusion is taken as evidence for its reality.

No, I think those are both kind of perceptive. The answer is a little both, because in one sense, it's meant kind of to explain this fine-tuning problem that we find ourselves in a universe that's particularly facade, that has features consistent with our existence, and how could we be otherwise? You know, this sort of weak anthropic principle. On the other hand, it's a theory that predicts everything, literally everything, can be said to predict nothing. Like if I say, you know, you've been working out, you look like, you know, you have an answer. You look like you're about somewhere under 10,000 kilograms. Like, all right, yeah, you're right, but that's comparably in precise. So what good is that? That's meaningless. I don't contribute any, what's called surprise or reduction in entropy or reduction of your ignorance about the system or something. You know exactly how much you weigh. So me telling you that tells you nothing. In this case, it's basically saying that we're living in a universe because the overwhelming odds of our existence dictate that we would exist, there has to be at least one place that we exist. But the problem is, it's a manifestation of infinity. So humans, and I'm sure you know this from there at your work with AI and L and everything else, that humans, as far as we know, really are the only entities capable of contemplating infinity, but we do so very imperfectly, right? So if I say to you, like, what's bigger than the number, you know, water molecules and this thing or the number of real numbers? Or if I say what's bigger than number of real numbers or rational numbers, there are all different classifications of the amount of infinities that they could be. Infinity to the infinity power. You know, we have kids someday they'll tell you. I love you infinity. You have to come back. I love you infinity plus one, right? So, but the human brain can't really contemplate infinity. Let me illustrate that. They say in the singularity, the universe had an infinite temperature. Right? So let me ask you a question. Is there anything that you can contemplate in the observed, you know, Einstein's little quip aside? That's infinite, like a physical property, density, pressure, temperature, energy. That's infinite. And if you can think of such thing, I'd like to know it. But if you can, how does it go to infinity minus one? You know, the opposite direction I go with my kids. How does it go from like the half of infinity? Because that's the infinity. How did it cool down? How did it get more and more tenuous and rarefied? So now it's only infinity over two in terms of passive infinity, more infinite.

Yeah, really. And I mean, how do you represent it in a computer, right? It's either some placeholder for infinity or it's one divided by a very, the smallest, you know, possible. Um, you know, rat real number that you can represent in the memory.

I came to the right place, but, um, but, you know, it in terms of what a physicist will mean. You're right. I mean, physicists will blindly, nonchalantly subtract infinity, you know, renormalization and do things to get finite answers. It's, it's, it's miraculous, but You know, at a certain point, you have to ask, well, what are the consequences for the real world? So one of them, you ask, you know, what, what's the problem? Does it make us more meaningless? They purport many of the people that support it like Andre Lindey. On, in fact, Andre Lindey says, you have a bias. You, Lex, me, Brian. You have a bias that you believe in a universe. But shouldn't you believe in a multiverse? What evidence do you have that there's not? So he turns it around. Whereas Paul Steinhardt will say, no, if anything can happen, then there's no predictive power within the theory. Because you can always say, well, this value of the inflationary field did not produce sufficient gravitational wave energy for us to detect it with bicep or Simon's observatory, but that doesn't mean that inflation didn't happen. And that's logically 100% correct. But it's like, it's like kind of chewing, you know, wonder, wonder bread. You know, well, um, apologies if they're one of your sponsors, but, you know, wonder bread slash slacks type in code, clad, right? It's my favorite Russian word is like, would you like a piece of bread?

You know what's amazing is how many of the Soviet scientists contributed to so much of what we understand today. And they were completely in high, like there's no Google, they couldn't look up on scholar. They had nothing that a way for journals to get approved by the Communist Party to get approved. And then, and only then, if they weren't a member of some class, I'm sure you know, like Jewish scientists, you had a passport. That said, Jew on your passport. And Zeldovic, the famous Yakuva Borisovic Zeldovic, he was the advisor, one of my advisors, Alexander Polnerov. And he had to only because he was like at a Nobel level, and was one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb program, could he even get his Jewish student, he was Jewish too. But only by virtue of his standing of his intellectual accomplishments, would they give him the dispensation to let his student travel to Georgia or something? It makes what we complain about. I complain about academia and it's like, oh, what can I talk about? We have no idea of how good it is and that they were able to create things like inflation completely isolated from the West. I mean, some of these people didn't meet like people like Stephen Hawking until he was almost dead. And they just learn this thing through smuggled in, you know, it's, it's a work of heroism, especially in cosmology. There's so many cosmologists that worked incredibly hard, probably because they were working in the, they could, they could pass off as well. We're doing stuff for the atomic bomb program as well, which they work.

Same in Germany, Germany had highly prized. I mean, one of the most famous tragic to me cases is Fritz Haber. who invented the, you know, Haber Bosch process that allowed us to, I don't know, have you eaten yet and you look, it looks, I mean, I know you fast intermittent fast every day and you do that.

You got to swipe left or right for that. I don't know. But when you think about like, you know, what he did and created the fertilizer process that we all enjoy and we eat from every day, He was a German nationalist, first and foremost, even though he was a Jew. And he personally went to witness the application ammonia, chlorine gas, applied during trench warfare in 1916 in battles and Brussels or whatever. And he was, they had a whole country, have Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. You know, that would go in witness these atrocities, but that was also, they were, they were almost putting science above, I don't know say, human dignity, but of like, the fact that he would later be suppressed and actually some of his relatives would die in Auschwitz because of the chemical that he invented also called Zykhan B. And so it's just unbelievable. So I feel like that does have resonance today in this worship of science, you know, and listen to science and follow the science, which is more like, scientism. And there is still a danger. You know, I always say, Just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you don't have a religion. Just because you, you know, in my case, in my books, I talk a lot about the Nobel Prize. It's kind of like a kosher idol. It's something that you can worship, you know, it doesn't do any harm. And we want those people that are so significant in their intellectual accomplishments. Because there is a core of America and the Western world in general that those worship and really look at science, predominantly because it gives us technology. Um, but they're something really cool about that. And so for me, it's hard to find that balance point between, um, between looking to science for wisdom, which I don't think it has. They're two different words. Um, but, uh, but also recognizing how much good and transformative power maybe our only hope comes from science.

Yeah, that book is in contrast to the second book. That's like a memoir. It's really a description of what it's like to feel what it feels like to be a scientist and to come up with the ignorance, uncertainty, imposter syndrome, which I cover in the later book in more detail. But to really feel like you're doing something, and it's all you think about, it is all consuming. And it's something I couldn't have done now, because I have too many other, you know, wonderful, delightful demands of my time. But to go back to that moment when I was first captivated by the night sky, who has a 12-year-old 13-year-old, and really mixed together throughout my scientific story has always been wanting to approach the greatest mystery of all, which I think is the existence or non-existence of God. So I call myself a practicing agnostic. And I do things that are that religious people do. And I don't do things that atheists people do. And I once had this conversation, you know, with my first podcast guest that I shouldn't say, oh, I was just just having a conversation with Freeman Dyson. But he was actually my first guest. And I miss a name drop. Name drop. Yes. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of conversations.

So when I talk to Freeman, I said, you know, Freeman, you call yourself an diagnostic, too. Can you tell me something like what do you do on Sundays? You go to church. It's like, no, I don't go to church. And I'm like, well, imagine there was like an intelligent alien. And he was looking down, or she would be like, I don't know, it thing was looking down. And it's off Freeman. And on Sundays, like, a group of people go to church, but Freeman doesn't go to church. And then there's another group of people that don't go to church. And those are called atheists. But Freeman calls himself an agnostic. But he does the things that the like Richard Dock, he doesn't go to the same church that Richard Dock and doesn't go to. So I said, how would you distinguish yourself? If not practice. So I'm a behaviorist. I believe you can change your mentality. You can influence your mind, view your bodily physical actions. So when I was a 12 year old, I got my first telescope. I was actually an ulcer boy in a Catholic church. Just kind of strange for it. Jewish kid who grew up in New York, maybe he'll get into that, maybe not. But I was just fascinated by these, these, we get into it for a second. Okay, yeah. All right, let's go there. All right. Let's go to Baby Brian or young Brian the new sitcom on CBS. Young Brian born to two Jewish parents. My father was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook. He was a mathematician, eminent mathematician. And my mother was an eminent mom and brilliant English major, et cetera. And they raised that they were secular. They think, you know, we'd go to Iowa, we'd go to synagogue, you know, two times a year on Christmas and Easter. No, we would go, yeah, yum kippur, Russia shun, right? That's the typical two-day year Jews. And, you know, we'd have, we'd have moths as once a year in Palm Pass, right? And that was about it. And for years, I was like that until my parents got divorced, my mother remarried and she married an Irish Catholic man on the name of Ray Keating. My father's name is James X. So when she remarried, Ray Keating, I was immediately adopted. I'm actually adopted into the Keating family. And he had nine brothers and sisters and just warm and gregarious. They, you know, did Christmas and Easter. It was one of the most wonderful experiences. I had and I do things with great gusto. Whatever I do, I want to take it all the way. So to me, that meant really learning about Christianity in this case Catholicism. So I was baptized, confirmed. And I said, I want to go all the way. I became an altar boy in the Catholic church.

I had like serious skills. You passed that collection basket. I could push people and get them to two extra contributions. But in this case, I was 13. I don't know if you remember, you know, when you were 13, but if you extrapolate the next level up, you know, it's like, you go, graduate student postdoc professor, the next level up from, you know, confirmation, alter boy is priest. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but priest are not entitled to have relations with women. And as a 13 year old boy, kind of like future forecasting with the ice going to be like for myself, if I continue in my path, I found it.

That's right. There was a serious gap in that future and that future. And instead, when I should have been preparing for my bar mitzvah, you know, as most Jewish boys would be at 12, 13 year old boy, I actually got a telescope and became infatuated with all the things you could see with it. I don't want some bigger than that one over there that your hedgehog's looking through. Is that hedgehog?

Why experimentalists versus an engineer? Because you assemble this telescope, you give it a mount. And you connected it to a very high level.

Well, that's always a joke. People say, oh, you're an experimental cosmologist. So I'm like, yeah, I build a lot of universes. We actually, most of my time is putting clamps on things, soldering things. It's not actually doing the stroking of my non-existent beard contemplating the cyclic versus the bouncing cosmological

Right. Yeah. It's not like having dancing dogs and whatever.

This telescopes are a very precious thing. In some ways, it's simple of what got me into what brought me all the blessings I have in my life came from a telescope. And I always advise parents or even people for themselves. You right here wherever we are, It's a big city on Earth, Manhattan, where I was growing up as a 12-year-old outside of Manhattan. You can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings of sound, and the same moons of Jupiter, the same phases of the... You can see the Andromeda galaxy, Lex2 and a half million light years away from Earth. You can do that with that little thing over there. One that's a little more expensive, get one that has a mountain, and you can attach now your smartphone, what the hell is that? I wouldn't have known what that was in 1994. And with that, you can do something that no other science to my knowledge can really replicate AB biology in some sense. But you can experience the physical sensation that Galileo experienced when he turned a telescope like that to Jupiter and saw these four dots around it, or that Saturn had ears as he called it, or that the moon was not crystalline polish smooth and made of this heavenly substance that quintessence substance, right? So where else can you be? This is really connected with the first person that ever make that discovery. Try doing that with the Higgs boson. Get yourself an LHC and smash together, you know, high luminosity, you know, call a parry cliff and say, you know, I want to rapidly, how did you feel? He didn't feel anything. None of them felt anything. It took years to go milder. You can't do it. But with this, you can feel the exact same emotions.

So I got this a little bit of a swag upgrade. So I got this a little bit of a swag upgrade. So I got this a little bit of a swag upgrade.

So I got this a little bit of a swag upgrade. So I got this a

So looking through this telescope was when your love changed my life because not only was I doing that I was replicating what Galileo did, but I was and I I'm 100% not comparing myself to Galileo Galileo. Okay, if there's any confusion out there, but I did replicate exactly what he did and I was like holy crap. This is weird. Let me write it down. So it had another effect, which all good scientists, butting scientists should do. And all parents should do. Get your kid a book, a little notebook, tape a pencil to it. Write down what you see, what you hypothesize, what you think it's going to be. Now, like in the high school, you know, like hypothesis thesis, but just like, wow, how did I feel? Better yet, astronomy is a visual science. Sketch, what you see, the lagoon nebula, the Pleiades seven sisters. You can see them anywhere on earth. And when you do that, again, you're connecting two different hemispheres of your brain as I understand it, and you're connecting them through your fingertips. You literally have the knowledge in your fingertips, in your connection between what you see, what you observe, and what you write down. Then you do research, right? The goal of science is not to just replicate what other people did, is do something new. And that's what we call it research and not just like studying, you know, Wikipedia. And in so doing, you start to train a cat at age 12 or 13 for 50 bucks. It's unbelievable. And now we can do even better because you got shared on Instagram or whatever. And you can by doing so have an entree into the world of what does it really mean to be a scientist and do so viscerally. You know, I often say, I always taught this by my English teacher, Mrs. Tomkins, and ninth grade, that the word educate, it doesn't mean to pour into. Let me pour in some facts into the lesson. It's not like machine learning. You're just showing billions of cats or you're not like forcing it in. You're bringing it out. It means to pour out of in Latin educa, right? And what more could a teacher want, then to have something that the kid is just like gushing?

She's watching, yeah. She's a big fan. Me, she doesn't care for her, but you.

So I call that the academic hunger games. You know, because it's like you're competing against like these people, you know, who are just getting smarter all the time is you're getting smarter all the time. They want to get into a fewer and fewer number of slots. Like there's fewer slots to get into college than not in high school. There's fewer slots in graduate school. There's fewer, very fewer slots to be a postdoc. And many, many, maybe infinitesimal number. You know, we just did a faculty search at UC San Diego. 400 applicants for one position. It's almost getting impossible. Like I almost can't conceive of doing what these new, brilliant young people applying to become a assistant professor at a state university that they're doing. It takes so much courage to do that. So I went from, you know, this kid in New York thinking I would never be a professional astronomer. A because I didn't know any. I'd never seen any. I didn't even know that they existed. And I thought, who the hell's going to pay me to look at the stars? Like, will they pay me to be like an ice cream taster? Like, it's just not something I could conceive of getting paid to do. Even if I had the brilliance to do it, which I didn't feel I did. And then I went to graduate school. And during graduate school, I and I had this kind of, on again, off again, relationship with my father. And I knew that he was a mathematician. He had left and gotten remarried himself and moved across the country. I didn't see him for 15 years. And in that time, I learned a lot about him, and I learned that he had gotten very interested not in pure mathematics, which he had been a number theorist and contributed several work on the affantine equations, which play a role in turn's work you may have seen. But anyway, he had become interested, turned completely away from that into the foundations of quantum mechanics and relativity, which is physics. And by that time, I was at Brown University. And I was thinking, oh, maybe I'll be condensed matter, physicists, or experimentalists. I never thought I'd be a theorist, and I'm not a theorist, so it was pretty prescient. But it always appealed to me, like, why not do what made me happy as a 12-year-old? We often forget about those primitive things about us. Are probably the most sustainable, durable, and resilient attributes of our character? So with my own kids, like what are they interested now in their young? And this means that's what they're going to do. I mean, some of them went on play Fortnite, you know, like professional Fortnite, which there are, but, you know, the odds of that is less than the odds of being a professor.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it did in very many ways. And he's been gone for a long time now. Thinking back to that time with him, he must have instilled some capacity for me to only want to spend my time, which is a limited quantity. I don't think it's the most limited quantity. Maybe we'll talk about that later. But to go into only the most challenging interesting things with the limited time that we have while we're alive. And for him it was the foundation of quantum mechanics. For me it was the foundations of the universe and how did it come to be and I felt like while people been trying since Einstein to outdo Einstein really have made great progress in the foundations of quantum mechanics. But this is an exciting time. The Kobe satellite had just released its data that the universe had this anisotropy pattern. Stephen Hawking called it like looking at the face of God. And so it seemed like this is a good golden age for what I'm going to do and what I'm most interested in. But always throughout that, I wanted to understand, I didn't want to be a wrench monkey. No offense to people that just do experiment and no offense to monkeys. That's right. That's a little guy. Sorry, man. But thinking back to what animates me, it's not doing the engineering as much as it is getting the data, but there's a lot of steps. I want to be the guy understanding what made the universe produce the signal that we saw. So I always joke with my theorist friends, you know, I call me a closet at theorist. You know, like, I want to be, you know, they call a guy hangs out with musicians, a drummer. So I want to be like, like, bad for physics, right? Like a theoretical physicist. I want to be like the guy doesn't do new theory, but understands the theory that the new theorists are doing.

Yeah. Yeah. And maybe those two things, the neuroscience and the cosmos, not getting too romantic, but yeah, maybe they're linked in some fundamental way, maybe they're some fundamental conscious cosmic consciousness. But we're going to get to that. Yeah. Yeah. No, we definitely have to say that. But getting back to yeah, so it's my origins. So I always say like, and I want to try this on you. You said you wouldn't answer any of my questions, but I'm going to ask you some questions. What's the most important day on the calendar? Don't tell me the date, but what to you? What is your most important day to you every year?

No, no answer. Like you don't have to tell me the exact date. I think it could be like your mistresses, you know, birthday or whatever, but I have so many had lose track.

Yeah, so I was gonna say New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. Some people say birthday anniversary, kids birth. They're usually signifying beginnings and ends, right? January means the portal between the God was the portal between the beginning and the end. So you're looking back, man, because you're rushing, you know, like the death side, the lightside looking forward to January the beginning, right? So everybody's most important day. It's usually some beginning or something significant. For me, it was studying the most significant thing of all. It's like, why did the universe get born, as I said before? And I didn't think they're, again, I didn't, I just, there was some mental obstruction that I didn't realize that I could get past because I didn't think like anybody does it. Like, I know astronomers knew these answers, like the universe at that time, between 10 and 20 billion years old. Now we know it's 13.872 billion years old. It's incredible. The five digit, you know, persignificent five. What is it again? 13.13.13.872 billion years. 872 million.

So for me, I'm 50. So it would be the equivalent of you looking at me and telling you within 12 hours, how old I am. Yeah. Half a percent, percent level accuracy.

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's this significance. Yeah. No, it's extremely well measured. I mean, it's one of the most precise things that we have in contrast to, again, 25 years ago, we didn't know if the universe was 10 billion or 20 billion years old, but there were stars in our galaxy that were believed to be as they are about 12 billion years old or in the universe that were 12 billion. So that would be like you being older than your father. It was embarrassing.

So we can come about it from two different ways. Basically, they rely on the most important number in cosmology, which is called the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is this weird number that has the following units. It has the units of kilometers per second per megaparsic. So it's a speed per distance, which means you multiply it by distance and you get a speed. And what does a speed you're measuring? Well, you're measuring the speed of a distant galaxy at many megaparsics away. So a galaxy at one megaparsic, this isn't actually strictly true because of local gravitational effects. But if you go out, say one megaparsic away would say that that galaxy is moving 72 kilometers per second away from you. And every galaxy, except for the local very most local group surrounding us, maybe a half a dozen galaxies, at a 50 to sorry, sorry, out of a 500 billion galaxies to perhaps a trillion galaxies. So 12 out of that number are moving towards us the rest are moving away from us. So that number, if you invert it, if you say, well, when did those things last touch each other? All those galaxies? Now they're really far apart. We know how fast they're moving away. It's a very simple algebra problem to solve when were they touching? That's where you get that number from.

Very little, because actually we understand how there's some other ingredients that go into it, namely how much dark energy there is in the universe, how much dark matter there is in the universe, how much radiation, light, neutrinones, et cetera, there are, and how much ordinary matter, like we're made up of neutrons, protons, crutons.

Oh, oh. Yeah. So you're talking about the fact that we can actually see stuff in our observable universe that's located at a distance that is farther than the speed of light times the age of the universe. Yeah. Now, Evely would say that. Yeah. So you're right. If the universe were static, If the universe came into existence and you can conceive of this universe came into a big bang and a fixed universe. So the universe just started off. Those galaxies were, you know, they could be moving towards us away from us who knows that you could say I can see a galaxy that's at a distance of only 13.8 billion years times a speed of light. That would be true. But the fact that the light is expanding along with the expansion of the universe. So imagine there were some very distant past that we were near a galaxy. It's going to produce some light. And that galaxy is going to be moving away from us. The light's going to be getting more and more red shifted as it's called. That's going to be moving farther and farther away from us as time goes on. There'll be some acceleration as we get into the air of dark energy. The light signals, there'll be some cone of acceptance, if you will. from which which represents all the events that we could have received information from. We can't currently communicate with that galaxy. It sent us some light and now it's moving away and it sent us some light and because the space is also dragging the photons with it if you like the photons are being participating in the expansion of the universe, that's why they're red shifting, that we can see things out to where the universe first began expanding, not just when it began existing. And because the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years, with no sign of slowing down yet, which is a huge surprise, serendipitous surprise. that we can see things approximately three times the age of the universe away from us. So we can see it's called the age of the universe 15 billion years just to make the math simple. We see things at 45 billion light years distance in that direction. And we see things at 45 billion light years in that direction just turning our telescopes 180 degrees away. So that means we see things that themselves are 90 billion light years away from each other. That's sort of the diameter of the observable universe. Is there another universe beyond that? We know no. So I'm conjectured. There's not only one, there's an infinite number of them.

So like, it's gonna be like any home, like with Alvee Singer.

watch propaganda I realized that you did yes so there's a thing all is a con kind of what is the bottom to get this movie with Woody Allen certainly canceled but nevertheless back when he was not canceled yet I made a movie called Annie Hall in which as he gets his self depictions. He's like a Larry David before Larry David was Larry David, neurotic, typical neurotic young Jew. He's in Brooklyn and he all of a sudden tells his mother he's not doing his homework anymore. He refuses to do his homework. Mother says why goes because the universe is expanding and it keeps on expanding. Everything will rip apart and no will never have anything in contact and everything is meaningless. I assume these are some of the topics we're going to get to. And she goes, what are you talking about? We're in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. And that's true. Brooklyn is not expanding. The solar system is not expanding. They'll often have to get asked, what is the universe expanding into? That's one of my favorite questions. Uh, what is it expanding into? And I say, it's actually an easy question if you think about it. Um, you've seen your friend Elani goes on space. He's got a rocket, right? What's outside of the rocket? If you take, if you take this bottle empty out this bottle, take the cap off it. Go outside the rocket, you know, seven, seven, some tang. Screw on the cover of it. What's in there? Is it empty?

Well, it's definitely not empty.

Yeah, you're in the vacuum of space. The quote unquote vacuum ups.

There's no more liquid in it. No, it's just a container. One cubic centimeter. Let's just make it simple. One cubic centimeter of a box. And you take it out into space outside the Falcon, whatever. Right. Um, what's inside that box? It's not empty. There's actually, I'm going to say, this is going to set your friends. There's 420 photons from the fusion of the light elements that we call the cosmic mercury background inside that box at any second. Okay.

Let's think outside the box now we're thinking inside the way so if you have every cubic centimeter of our observable universe is suffused with heat left over from the big bang dark matter particles, there's a little ordinary matter in the universe, and every cubic centimeter, there's some probability to find a proton, a cosmic ray, an electron, et cetera. There's actually an awful lot of neutrinos inside of that cubic centimeter. Now, just imagine how many cubic centimeters are in the universe. It's enormous. That's why there's enormous numbers of particles in our universe. It's a very rich universe. But now let's zoom in on that box. So now inside that box there might be, you know, one, let's let's say there might be one ordinary matter like a proton or an electron, a barion, a lepton. There might be a couple, some couple hundred neutrinos and there'll be a couple hundred photons they said, 420. What's between those guys? What's between the protons and the neutrinos and the photons? Just zoom in to the cubic micron now. Imagine 420 things inside a box this big. It's actually pretty empty. There's a zip in around in there, right? So between them, there's a lot of empty space.

Well, they have energy, they don't matter. Photons don't matter.

That's why they don't matter. That's true, right? Photons never bring suitcases with you with them because they're traveling light. I don't even get a lesson. That's corny dad jokes. Okay, you'll appreciate it.

That's what space is. That's what the universe is expanding into. Okay.

Yeah, and that intuition leads us astray. But you know, the gravity is the weakest of the so-called for fundamental forces. And yet it has the longest range, you know, pervasiveness. Gravity is, you know, we're being pulled towards the Andromeda galaxy at something enormous rate of speed because of its massive counter gravitational force to the force we exert on it. So gravity is enormously a long range, but incredibly weak. And because of that, we can think about these effects of expansion as the relationship between the, as you said, the, the grid lines on the notebook, right? Gravity is a manifestation of the interrelationship between those points. How far they are from each other and those can change. Those point distances can change over time because of the force of gravity. So it's weak and what we experience this gravity. is the changing of those trajectories from being rectilinear to curvilinear. That's what we experience as gravity. You have this analogy when you talk to Barry Barrish about bowling ball and a trampoline. That's almost right because it's actually you have to visualize that now in four dimensions like wrapping a trampoline at every point around the object. including on the sides and it becomes very hard to visualize. So a lot of people use that. It's also fraught analogy because you're using gravity, like the notion of gravity pulling something down to explain the notion of gravity. So it's a little overburdening the analogy.

Yeah, so gravitational waves were the Nobel Prize for gravitational waves discovery the first time. You know, it's discovered twice. indirectly by two men named Holson Taylor, and that was given my first year of graduate school. The day I entered graduate school almost, they announced these two guys want it. And the guy who wanted did the work that would later win him the Nobel Prize when he was my age.

Uh, this was it. No, this is not.

I was going to thank you. I got it, I got it. You know, two cosmologists age, it means nothing. Um, and to a tennis player. Not on Tinder. That's right. Gravitational waves do fit in because what we're trying to do now is use the properties of gravitational waves, the analogous properties that they have photons that they travel up the speed of light, that they go through everything they can go through everything. and that they're directly detectable, we're using them to try to confirm if or if not inflation occurred. So did inflation the spark that ignited the fusion of the elements in the early part of the universe and expansion in the initial expansion of the universe? Did that take place? There's only one way that cosmologists believe we could ever see that. through the imprint of these primordial gravitational waves. Not these old newcomers that got Barry studies, the ones that occurred a billion light years away from us, a billion years ago. But we're seeing things that happened 13.82 billion years ago during the inflationary epoch. However, those we cannot build all I go and put it at the big bang. So if you want to measure, let's say you have the old time firecracker, let's say there's a firecracker, and you want to see if it went off in the building next door to you. You can't see it, so you can't see the imprint of it, but you can hear it. And what we're trying to do is hear the effective gravitational waves from the Big Bang, not by using a camera or even an interferometer like Barry used in his colleagues. But instead using the CMB, the light, the primordial ancient fossils of the universe, the oldest light in the universe, we're going to use that as a film, quote unquote, onto which gravitational waves get exposed.

So the signal, as I said, it's, so there's 420 of these photons per cubic centimeter and there's a lot of cubic centimeters in the universe. However, what we're looking for is not the brightness of the photon, how intense it is. We're not looking for its color, what wavelength it is. We're looking for what its polarization is.

Yeah. So the origin story goes back again to like a father son rivalry. It really does. My father won all these prizes awards, et cetera. But he never won a Nobel Prize. And you know, some parents in America, they compete with their kids. You know, oh, I was a football player in high school. I'll show you. And whatever, wrestling, whatever. And some of us could be healthy, too. But with me and my dad, it wasn't super healthy. We would compete and, you know, he was much more of a pure mathematician. And I was with experimental physicists. So we had both different ideas of what was worth prioritizing our time. But I knew for sure he didn't win the Nobel Prize. And I knew I could kind of outdo him. So I feel pretty venal and kind of, you know, menace skill kind of character, I say.

And only if you're under 40, which he was.

That's right. So even if I had, you know, spoiler alert, the book's called losing the Nobel Prize. So I didn't do it. But I wanted to do something big. And I wanted to do something that would really just unequivocally be realized as in a discovery for the ages. As in fact, it was when we made the premature announcement that we had been successful.

That's all I wanted to do. I felt like if it's not, you know, if it's worth spending, you know, perhaps the rest of my life on as a scientist, it better be damn well, better be interesting to me, to carry me through, to give me the, you know, I always say passion is great when people say, oh, follow your passion, but it's not enough. Passion is like the spark that ignites the rocket, but that's not enough to get the rocket into space.

So bicep one was born out of kind of interesting circumstances. So I had gone to a Stanford University for postdoc. So an academic hunger games stand for Stanford University. It's a small little school. It's not like that technical college and Massachusetts that you're affiliated with. But as I went there, I was working for a new assistant professor. She had gotten there. only a year before I got there and she had her own priorities that things that she wanted to do. But I kept thinking in my spare time that I wanted to do something completely different. She was studying galaxies at high-red shift and I wanted to study the origin of the universe using this type of technology. And I realized courtesy of a good friend of mine who's now at Johns Hopkins, Mark Hemingkowski, that we didn't need this enormous Hubble telescope. We didn't need a 30-meter diameter telescope. We needed a tiny refracting telescope. no bigger than my head, you know, less than a foot across. And that telescope would have the same power as a Hubble telescope, you know, size telescope could have because the signals that we're looking for are enormous in wavelength on the sky. They're enormously long, large area signals on the sky. And if we could measure that, it would be proof effectively as close as you get to proof. There could be things that mimic it, but that we discovered the inflationary epoch. inflation being the signal originally conceived of by own Gooth to explain why the universe had the large-scale features that it does, namely that it has so-called flat geometry. So there's no way to make a triangle in space in our universe that has three interior angles that do not sum to 180 degrees. You can do that with spacecraft, you can do that with stars, you can do that with laser beams, you can do that with three different galaxies. All those galaxies, no matter how far you go, have this geometry. It's remarkable, but it's also unstable. It's very unlikely. It's very seemingly finely tuned. And that was one of the motivations that Guth had to kind of conceive of this new idea called inflation 1979 when he was a postdoc, also at Stanford, Slack. And he was trying to get a permanent job. I was trying to make my name for myself. And so I realized I could do this, but I was also being paid by this professor at Stanford to do a job for her. And I was kind of a crappy employee to be honest with you. And then one day, she couldn't take it anymore because I was like sketching notebooks and planning experiments. And I just, I wasn't, no.

And so one day I came in and actually involved another friend of mine, a astronomer named Jill Tarder, one of the pioneers in the study, science, business of detecting extraterrestrials, which I assume you'd never like to talk about aliens. So I'm sure we won't get into aliens. But Jill was visiting Stanford and I was like, I really want to meet her, can you introduce me? And she said, no, in fact, you're fire. My boss. So I was like, is this is possibly the best thing that could ever happen to me. I didn't know where would lead or what would happen to it, but getting fired from this ultra prestigious university turned out to be the path. I mean, literally it brings me here today in that because of that, I ended up working for another person in Caltech, which is in Pasadena. And she, my original boss, Sarah Church, she got me the job with her former advisor, man, by the name Andrew Lang. And Andrew was like, he was like this, I don't know, like, he is like any Steve Jobs or Elon, you know, charismatic, handsome, persuasive, idea man. Not the guy always in the lab, you know, doing everything, but understood the where things are going decades from now. And he had been involved in experiment that actually measured the universe was flat. Very close to flat, along with appreciating experiment done at Princeton by Lyman Page and other collaborators. It was shaped by the universe's flat. They geometry at the universe's flat.

So he used the cosmic mic, great background. And so what I said is you have to look for triangles in the universe, so you can measure triangles on earth. You can actually, it's hard to show that the earth is curved, but you can show the earth is curved using triangles, mount and tops, etc. If you have an accurate enough protractor.

God, you're like auto-canceling. This is great. My writings are going to show up, man. This is going to be great.

So what he used was the following triangle. There are protogalaxy-sized objects in the CMB. The cosmic microwave background has these patches, and so you can make a triangle out of the diameter of one of these blobs of the primordial plasma, the soup that constitutes the early universe, which is hydrogen, it's very simple material, understand hydrogen electrons and radiation, very simple plasma physicist's son, understand it. The diameter is, you know, one base of the triangle, and then the distance to the earth is the other two legs. So he measured along with his colleagues at Caltech and then University of Rome, and that's other group at Princeton, measured the angle into your angle effectively, very, very accurately, and showed that it added up to 180 degrees.

You can know where they are, but more than that there's so many of these patches. There are about one square degree on the sky. The sky you may know a sphere has about 44,000 square degrees in a sphere. So there's literally 44,000 of these size patches over which he could do these kind of measurements to build a very good statistics. That's not exactly how they do it or how they did it in this experiment called boomerang, but they did measure very accurately what was called the first Doppler peak or acoustic peak in the plasma, the Permanorio plasma.

And in fact, a lot of the fast kind of algorithmic decomposition of spheres and machine learning and the early 2000s still used today was created out of this field by data analyst using this thing called hierarchical, equal area, triangles called heel, heel picks is what it's called.

Yeah, get high statistical significance in order to reduce these statistical errors. Very clean signal and measurement device to reduce the systematic errors. Those are the two predominant sources of error in any measurement. those that can be improved by more and more measurement, you know, you take more and more measurements of this table, you'll get slightly better each time, but you only win as the number of the one over the square root of the number of measurements. But the square root of 44,000 is pretty big, so they were able to get a very accurate measurement. Again, it's not exactly how they did it, they also have to do a Fourier analysis, decompose that to a power spectrum, filtration, windows, there's a lot of work that goes into it, image analysis, and then comparing that with cosmological parameters, very simple model, just six different numbers that go into a model that made a prediction. And one of those is the geometry of the universe pops out. And that is the universe has zero spatial curvature. And that was called boomerang. So he had just come off of this. Now, let me remind you, who is the first person to measure the curvature of the earth? It's a guy named Aristophanese in that, you know, whatever, the live around Aristotel's time. His name is in history books. So this guy Andrew Lang. I was like, he's like the next Aristotle, Aristotle, and I just want to work for this guy. You know, he was clearly had this brand. He was about 40 at the time, California scientists of the year. I was sure he was going to win a Nobel Prize for that. And I knew that he, you know, so I went down to Caltech to give my job talk, and he said, you know, I love it. You got a job. And before I could even, you know, before he finished the sentence, I said, I'll take, you know, like it was too good to be true. And I started working there at Caltech and slowly but surely because Caltech's a rich private university at that time run by a Nobel Prize winner by the name of David Baltimore. He just wrote us a check, Baltimore wrote us a check and said, get started in this idea. And so we started coming with the idea for what I later named, bicep, background imaging, cosmic, extragalactic polarization, which is kind of ironic because we ended up measuring galactic polarization and get to that in a minute. But along the way, the idea was very simple. We're going to make the simplest telescope you can possibly make, which is a refracting telescope. Your eyes, you have two refracting telescopes in your head. Only way, you know, forward is making things more complex, right? And when you make things complex in science, you introduce the possibility for systematic errors. And so we want to build the cleanest instrument, it turns out a cleanest instrument you can build in astronomy or refracting telescope. We also had to unlike that telescope or Galileo's, we had to use very sensitive detectors. that were cooled less than 120th of the temperature of the cosmic background itself, which is the coolest temperature in the whole universe. So we had to cool these down to about 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. To do that, we needed to put it inside of a huge vacuum chamber and suck out all the air molecules and water molecules and take it to a very, very special place called the South Pole Antarctica, from which I retrieved for you a patch there it is over there. So when you go there, you get these bright red jackets.

And the base is called the Amazon Scott Southpolar Station. So it's a little known fact of geopolitics that whatever country occupies a region has ownership over it. Now, there is a treaty in Antarctica. You can't use it for military purposes, for mining, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't know if you know, but about 12 years ago, Putin sent a submarine to the North Pole. There's no land at the North Pole, right? So what did he do? He stuck it on an ocean underneath. But the South Pole is on a continent called Antarctica, which was first reached about 110 years ago. First time in human history, Antarctica means the opposite of the bear. It means like no bears there. Basically, the opposite of where polar bears are. Arctic is polar bear. That's where the Greek didn't know that. So Antarctica means the opposite place of that. So humans never even saw it. Let alone went to the South Pole, which is kind of in the middle of the continent. We went to take this telescope somewhere extremely dry. It turns out the Sahara Desert, San Diego, Texas, and there's no place like the South Pole or Chile. Those are the two premier places on Earth. Of course you'd like to go into space, there's no water in space.

Exactly. So that's why, for example, you can take this vodka and you could put it in this cup, right? And we could take it over to a microwave somewhere and heat it up. After two minutes, the water's boiling. You can't touch it. Take it for me. Don't touch it. But you can touch the mug and take it out if you want to, right? Why? Because the mug is totally bone dry. But the microwaves get absorbed by the water molecules. Because water molecules resonate exactly at these microwave frequencies. So we don't want these precious photons. 420 of them, traveling per cubic centimeter, from the big bang itself to get absorbed in some water molecule in the Earth's atmosphere. So you take it to a place with a few as number of water molecules per square centimeter of surface area. And that happens to be either Chile or my other product, the Simon Observatory's located, or you take it to the South Pole. We took it to the South Pole and spent a couple of months of my life down there. And it's like being on hoth. It's like it's a completely otherworldly environment. Ice, planar, flat as a pancake. And the buildings are built up on stilt. They're built up because a snow will otherwise cover them over. The nearest medical facilities or 4,000 miles away. If you have any issues with your wisdom teeth, they yank them before you go down there. If you have any issues with your appendix, they'll cut it out of you before you go down there. The Russians advanced stock base, not too far away, about 600 miles away. The doctors there, there's famous picture of one of them operating on himself, taking out his own appendix in the middle of winter by himself.

And we go to those great lengths because it's the pristine environment to observe these precious photons. And we built this telescope and it weighs tens of thousands of pounds. And it had to scan the sky almost like it's a robot. I mean, it's scanning the sky almost unattended. We have a guy who spends a year of his life down there. A girl spends a year of their life down there. They're called winter overs. They arrive in sometimes as early as November, and they don't leave until the following December. And we always joke, we'll pay you $75,000. You just have to work for one night in your life. That's all, but it's a long night. And what buy stuff is, and I couldn't bring my polarized sunglasses here so I brought these actual polarizers here. So if you take this and put in front of your telescope there, You have now made a polar emitter. You have made a polarization sensitive telescope. Now you may not be able to immediately know how you would use such a thing, but one way to think about it, now take this guy and look at a light, look at a light source, put one up to your eye, and now put the other one in front of it, anywhere, and now rotate them. What happens to light source?

Yeah, so let's call it quadri-polar pattern, right? So it's repeating. It goes bright dim, bright dim. It rotates twice in intensity for every single physical rotation. And that's because of the property of the photon. The photon is a spin one field, but the polarization of light is the axis in which its electric field is oscillating. Its electric field is marching straight up and straight down. And so therefore vertical polarization is the same as negative vertical polarization. And so you get the same pattern as you rotate two times for every one physical rotation. It's just like a spin two object. So now if you put that in front of the telescope, You can do one of two things. Now you're polarizing all the light that's going in because you have one of the polarizers. And then you can analyze it as you rotate the other one. You can analyze it and change the amount of polarization. Or you can put this kind of very special crystal in here. There's a crystal, it's called calcite. This is from Lex Luthor, not Lex Friedman. This crystal, put it on top of your printed notes there. And tell me, what does it look like?

It's a double image. That is a special crystal that has two different indices of refraction. So light emerging, which is unpolarized from the black ink, comes out and it splits into two different directions. And it's split even more if I made the crystal give you my more expensive crystal, but that's all I have.

It's called calcite. This is crystal. It's called bi-refrigent crystal. Bi means two. Refrigent means refracting. So this is special type of material that separates light based on its polarization.

It's very crest right, so that's yours to keep with every time you host me. Now take the polarizer underneath your left hand. Put it on top of the crystal and kind of move it back and forth.

Whoa, so that is now you are analyzing the polarization. You're confirming the light comes out of the crystal, two different types of polarization. And effectively, what we do is we have those two things, if you like, but working in the microwave, so we're the cosmic photons are brightest in the microwave regime in the electromagnetic spectrum, and we're coupling that to refracting telescope, but your eyes are refracting telescope. So you are a polarometer right now. The human eye can actually slightly detect polarization, but otherwise it mainly detects its intensity of light and the color. That's what we call color and intensity of brightness.

and doing so in the microwave region with detectors not made of biological human ice retina cells, but of superconductors and things called balometers and this has to be done at temperatures close to absolute zero under vacuum conditions one billions of the pressure we feel here at sea level.

So when the CMB was discovered, it was discovered serendipitously. There were two radio astronomers working at the time at Bell Laboratories. Now, why would Bell Laboratories be employing radio astronomers? Bell Laboratories is kind of like Apple, or is it like a think tank, or is it Google? Let's say it was like Google. Google has like Google X, and has this thing on that thing, right? So they were working there, but imagine if Google was employing radio astronomers, like they were actively recruiting, well, why would they do that? Well, it turns out, that was the beginning of the 1960s, was the first commercial satellite launch for communication. And so Bell Labs, which later become the telephone, you know, part of AT&T in the early telephone company, later invent the first cell phone, the year I was born, and they would take that 1946, and they would take that telescope technology that radio astronomers had developed, and they would use that to see if they could improve the signal to noise or the satellites that they were seeing, and they found they couldn't. They found that they could not improve the signal noise ratio of the first telecommunications satellite. It was like equivalent to one kilobit per second, Malcolm. They were bouncing signals from, you know, from the west coast up to the satellite, bouncing it down, landing it in New Jersey of all places in northern, northern New Jersey, home-dill New Jersey. And these writers from couldn't get rid of the signal. So I said, well, New Jersey is not far from New York. Let's see if the signal is coming from New York. No, not coming from New York. Let's see if it changes with the year. Maybe it's coming from the galaxy, which was also discovered there by Jansky in 1930 something.

They knew the signal was right. They couldn't get rid of the noise and there was excess noise over the model that had not only been predicted by them, but had been measured by a previous guy, guy, by the name of Edward Oam. He measured the same signal found that there was this hiss of static of radio static that he could not get rid of that had a value of about three Kelvin. So you can translate. Remember I said, if you take a radio telescope and you have a pointed at an object that's hot, the radio telescope's detector will get to the same temperature as the object. It's a principle of radial thermodynamics. So it's a really interesting thing. So thermometer, you can stick it into Jupiter from here on Earth. It's amazing. They were, and so we in a radio astronomy characterize our signal, not by its intensity, but by its temperature. So he found this guy Edward, oh, there's just three Kelvin signal. I can't get rid of it. It must be I did my era analysis wrong, and I would give him an F if he was one of my first year students. But he's just attributed to lack of understanding. These other guys, Pansius and Wilson, who are also radio astronomers, they said no, let's build another experiment, put that inside of our telescope and do what's called calibration, put inject a known source of signal, Every second that has a temperature of about four Kelvin, because the signal that they're trying to get rid of is about three Kelvin, and you want to have it as close as possible to the pernicious signal as possible. They did that once a second, so they got billions of measurements, millions of measurements over the course of several months, years, and even by the end, it made millions of measurements for sure. And they found they couldn't get rid of an either, but they measured it was exactly 2.7265 degrees kelvin.

It could be larger. Imagine like you're trying to calibrate the microphone, like you could do it with a really loud sound, but the gain would start to compress. So there amplifiers downstream from the detector and every experiment that I've ever worked on. And they only have a linear region over a very small region. And you want to keep it as linear as possible. That means you want if you're trying to get rid of you're trying to compare like a voice and you're trying to compare that to a jet engine. It's not as it's not going to be as easy on the amplifiers as getting, you know, a slightly a gong or something, you know.

There's a noise present in both, and you measure what they did is they made a separate measurement just of the calibration system, which they measured exactly very well. Four Kelvin is the temperature of a liquid helium. That's a temperature that's not going to change. And it's certainly not going to change about time scale one second. And so they can compare unknown signal, unknown signal, unknown signal, known signal, like a scale, like a balance. So another way to think about is like this, you've seen these Libra kind of balances where you put two weights in a pan, right? What happens if you put like a one ounce weight and one side in a 20 kilogram weight and you don't get any measurement, right? Did you do get kind of a measurement if they're close in weight? That's why they use four Kelvin.

Yeah, especially since, you know, all life is basically, you know, conversion of energy and trying to control entropy, which is then related to thermodynamics, exactly in that way. And this is a very crucial kind of thing to do in science, because they weren't looking for the signal. They found it accidentally. These two scientists, Pensius and Wilson. And I like to think that those kind of discoveries are the purest in science. Like when you see something Isaac Asimov once said, like the most important reaction as a scientist is not Eureka, which means Greek as you know, I have found it. No, he said no, he said like that's weird like that's a much better reaction or that's freaking cool like that's a scientist not like oh I found because surprise Yeah, because if you find what you're gonna find that's what leads us susceptible to confirmation bias, which is deadly and so hard. Yeah, it's close to deadly as possible

So, Pennsy's and Wilson weren't looking for a signal. They ended up discovering the heat left over from the fusion of helium from hydrogen, et cetera. And that was a serendipitous discovery. They won the Nobel Prize in 1978. It was the first one ever award in cosmology. My reasoning is, what if you could explain not only how the elements got one, but how the whole universe got formed? and kill off every other model of science. So, if that weren't enough, every scientist, you know, worth his or her salt, had told me and Angelang and our colleagues, this is a slam dunk nub ball prize, if you could do it. Because it was really explaining, again, the stakes of this science is different than like superfluidity, plasma physics. When you talk about the origin of the universe, It ties into everything, it ties into philosophy, theology. You realize if the Paulstein heart is correct, that the Bible can't be correct. In other words, the Bible is correct. Now, it isn't falsified if you like, if you believe it, I never use the Bible as a science book, obviously. But the Bible speaks of a singular beginning. What if you knew for sure the universe was not singular? It would be more like the cosmology of Ocaron and Egyptians than the biblical Torah, Old Testament, if you will, narrative. So in my mind, the stakes could not be higher. And again, it's not an effect because we need plasma and physics. We need every type of physics, except maybe biophysics. Like we literally use every branch of physics and thermodynamic, superconductivity, quantum mechanics, all that goes into our understanding of the instrument. even further, if you want to understand the theory, that predicts the signal that we've prepared to measure. So, I realize that if Pensius and Wilson won the Nobel Prize for this, if Halls and Taylor won the Nobel Prize for indirectly detecting gravitational waves, this is decades before LIGO, By me detecting gravitational waves indirectly, detecting how the universe began, detecting the origin of the initial conditions for the big bang nuclear synthesis, which won the Nobel Prize in 1983, these are like five Nobel prizes potentially. For that reason, it seemed as close as you could possibly get to being a slam dunk to outdo what my father did to do, you know, really this impossible. And at that time, Lex, you know, again, I'm You know, it sounds weird because people like, oh, you wouldn't, you know, you don't really, you still want the Nobel Prize. You're still like greedy. And look, you wrote another book about it. And I always joke, I'm like, well, if you want to see if I'm a hypocrite, just get them to give me the Nobel Prize in literature. And if I accept it, then I'm a hypocrite.

Yeah, so by step two, like, you know, iPhones or I know you're an Android fanboy, but, you know, every year they get a little bit better. They get more megapixels, they get more optics, triple X zoom, whatever. Okay. We upgraded our detectors as well. The initial detectors were based on what are called semiconductors. They have certain properties that make them very difficult to replicate at scale. And we want to make them into superconductors which had a virtue that you could then mass produce them. Why superconductors? Well, again, we're measuring heat. So one thing about a superconductor is that it transitions from some finite resistance to zero resistance over a very short span of temperature range. That means you can use that very short span dependency as an accurate and sensitive and precise thermometer. And so my brilliant colleagues around the world, in this case, Jamie Pock, and nowadays Suzanne Stags at Princeton, they are just exquisitely making these sensors tens of thousands of them. The initial bicep, one instrument, of course, we just called it bicep. That only had 98 detectors. Simon's observatory is going to have a hundred times more, just in one of our four telescopes. We're going to have 60,000 detectors operating full time at 0.1 degree above absolute zero in the outcome of desert. We'll get there. But in the case of getting back to what Bicep did, we upgraded main Bicep 2. In January 2010, we had just installed in the exact same location at the South Pole, in the same building, which is ominously called the dark sector laboratory, DSL, still operating for this very day. We installed a new receiver on the same platform as before. It has a very similar identical optics, cryogenics, vacuum, everything, except it went from 98 detectors to 512 detectors. So almost an order of magnitude, very substantial upgrade. And it had certain other features that made it even more powerful, but then just a naive factor of 5. And then we started observing with that and we knew we'd have years to go and maybe we'd never see anything again. We're looking for these tiny little reverberations in the fabric of spacetime produced close to the origin of the universes we could ever get to. So I was playing a role in that obviously it had upgraded my version of the original idea that I had had for bicep with along with Andrew Lang. And in January of 2010, we were, I was at a meeting at UC Berkeley, and I got a call from Andrew Lang's, or I was in a meeting with Andrew Lang's thesis advisor Paul Richards at UC Berkeley. And he said Andrew is dead and taken his life by suicide. And this is a man and I already lost my father at this point in 2010, but he was like a father figure to me, Andrew. He would give me advice on marriage and how I should be with my kids and what was the most important way to move through the academic ladder? Again, he was pretty naturally suited to win the Nobel Prize. Everyone always thought he would win it. He's still, you know, if he were alive, he still could win it. In fact, his wife and her ex-wife won it. Francis Arnold in 2018. And it destroyed me for a long time because he was just this magical person. I couldn't conceive of my career, my life, even like these aspects of raising kids and being married without him. And to do it in that way, I felt like, again, I'm not, you know, he's got kids and I feel terrible for them, obviously. But I did feel like a betrayal. I mean, I'm just being honest with you. I felt like, why didn't the F did you not reach out? You know, I thought we were close. And I couldn't, you know, I told him everything. And I felt like he had told me everything. And now he was gone and then inevitably we had to keep running the instrument. I mean those millions of dollars invested careers at stake young people working tremendously hard. And then here we were and like who's going to take over the lead. He was the lead of the project at Caltech and then it turned out that the other collaborators with whom I had been working for years and shared a lot of ups and downs with as well. They had, you know, decided to form a collaboration in which I was no longer the principal investigator. I was no longer one of the co principal investigators as I was on bicep one. So I continue on bicep one is the co leader of it. But none of my stuff too. And you know, obviously that was pretty painful.

Yeah, and he had kind of been the only one looking out for my interest in the new experiment. I had moved from Caltech to UC San Diego, and there were other postdocs in the mix. All of whom would come there to work with him to get the, you know, the upper patient that would then lead to their careers taking off as it did for mine. And, you know, so there was a competition. I mean, science is not free from egos and competition and desires rightfully or wrongfully for credit and attribution.

As a scientist, there were really two. There was one, this Russian cosmologist Alexander Polnerov, who thankfully is very much alive. It was a Queen Mary university, now he's retired. He was kind of a theoretical cosmological father to me, and then Andrew was this counterpoint that was teaching me You need to have a brand as a scientist. Every scientist has a brand and some of them don't protect it, some of them don't burn a shit. But some of the skills about being a scientist, we don't teach our students, involve how do you cultivate a scientific persona? And he was the exemplar for that. In addition to being the a vuncular father figure type character that really, you know, was the person I would talk to. I had issues with when I had issues with my own students and he would tell me how those were. And he would tell me, you know, this misgivings about about people that he worked with or things in this personal life. And it was It was devastating. But again, like, cool the hell am I, I'm not as kid. You know, his kid's lost father. You know, it's, so I feel guilty talking about it in that sense. But it's a reality, you know?

No, I mean, it was so wrapped up. with my identity as a person, you know, like there's only a few different ways to have identity and, you know, unless you're unhealthy psychologically. One of them for scientists is often that they're scientists, and that sometimes is their primary identity. Now I've got other, you know, husband and father, but, you know, at that time that was my identity. So to have that kind of taken away, It reminded me of being kind of adopted in a sense like one who created me, or that I played a role in my life, that he abandoned me in the sense, it felt like these people are abandoning me. The only thing I'd correct about the analogy that you use is in the war, they're all working for a common, it's not like I want to get the most kills, or even I compare it more to a band, think about the beetles and what they did. And then they like, you know, they grip the part because of Ego's credit. They had solo careers. They had, you know, relations with their intimates and so forth. And there it's not only for the common good. There is more of a zero sum aspect. Like I always say, science is not, science is an infinite game. You can't win science. You never get to the, oh, we won science. And even the Nobel Prize, they don't feel like, oh, we're done. They feel like a lot of times they're imposters, even to that day. However, science is made up of a lot of a lot of finite games where there is only one winner for 10 year. There is only three winners for the Nobel Prize. And because of that, I think it's heterodox and it's very confusing, especially there's no guide. I never got a guide had to be a professor, had to teach, had to lead a research group, had to deal with the death of an advisor, had to deal with an unrily graduate student or two. You know, so we're all like reinventing it, which is kind of ironic and insane if you think about it. Because the academic system that I am a part of and you are a part of is a thousand years old dates back to Belonia, Northern Italy, 1088 or so, first universities were established. And you know, very little change is some guy or gal scratching our rock on another piece of rock and you know lecturing in front and there's only one better aspect nowadays is that back then the students could go on strike if they didn't like the professor and then he or she wouldn't get paid probably mostly was he's back then. Nowadays, that barbaric process has been replaced by ten years. But no, it was a definite kind of feeling of the rug getting pulled out from underneath me because, you know, he was like my consigually or he was like, I, you know, sought counsel and counseled me and he's dead and I felt like there is no one who's going to honor the agreements that we had and he was a very soulful person. He was so much better at being a scientist than I could ever be. And just the loss for the cosmos. It just really hurt. And, you know, I thought, oh, like, you know, it's so sad because you could have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think like that anymore. First, I think about his kids. Felt at first, now there goes my chance at winning a Nobel Prize and hence the title of the book was like, I knew I would not win the Nobel Prize. It also means that there's parts of the Nobel Prize that have to be done away with. It's a double-on-tonder. Like, we need to lose aspects of the Nobel Prize to help science out. We can talk about that at a different time. in the context of like now thinking back on it that was such a miniscule part of it because let's say he did win the Nobel Prize or I did win the R you know any of us did with that have changed anything without brought anything back it's so you know we say it's like vanity it's utility And I just, you know, for me, the Nobel Prize is like, it's, I don't want to say it's like insignificant because obviously it has a lot of power and it has influence and, you know, I went back, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on my show. I'm going to name drama, okay? And he prepares. He prepares like a surgeon before doing surgery when he goes on a talk show. So you see him going on called their report. You think, oh, they just have a band there and he's just naturally gifted. No, he said, no, no. You say that, you're undermining what he does. What he does is he goes back. He watches the last month of Colbert reports or whatever it's called. Late show. And he says, how long does Stephen pause between questions? How long in the news cycle does he go back? What topics has he talked about with people similar to me? So I took Neil and I did that for you. And I look back. How many times does Lex mention the words Nobel and prize? And I put it into Google Engram and outcane Exactly the same number of times as show notes show episodes as of this moment. So you've to set the words number up prize over 240 times.

would I have done it without the Nobel Prize? You know, I can't necessarily counterfactually state that that would have happened. So no, it definitely has a place. And for me, you know, it is valuable to think about it. But the level of obsession that academics have about it is really, I think it is almost unbalanced, becoming unhealthy. And again, I have no, I make no truck with the winners of the Nobel Prize. Obviously, I've, you know, now I've had 11 on the show. And to think about, you know, like the one rule. So by the way, right after the day new month of the story, which I'll get to in a bit, you know, how our dreams went down to dust and ashes. I was asked by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to nominate the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. So like the one that I theoretically could have been eligible to win in 2016, actually, they asked me to nominate. Now imagine if I ask you, Lex, you say Brian, you know, instead of me inviting myself on a show. If you say Brian, would you like to come on Alex Friedman podcast? I think. You know what, Lex? You know, like I've broken, I think you might not. Can you introduce him to me? Like, do you imagine how that would feel? Like you feel it's half die, you know? I mean, so I was asked to nominate the winners and the one rule that they say of all the rules that Alfred Nobel stipulated, there's only one rule that they maintained. In other words, he said one person can win it for something they discovered in the preceding year And that had the greatest benefit to mankind. Made the world better, right? None of that was mentioned in the letter. It said many people can win it for what worked on long ago. They didn't mention anything in the letter to me signed by the Secretary General. Nothing about benefiting mankind. They said just one thing can't nominate yourself. So none of these guys nominated themselves.

That rule was created just that's called the Keating correlates. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, I mean, here's a good example. Again, this is my friend Barry Barr. She's become like a mentor and a friend. He wrote the forward to this, my book, and tell me about this. He, he won the Nobel Prize because a different guy died. And he admits it. And he said it. And actually it's funny with him because I've heard you talk, you know, very repsatically and loveling and romantically about with Harry Cliff and wonderful podcast with him, by the way, about the LHC and how wonderful it is. And how in that, you know, we were about to build the super conducting super collider right here in Texas and it didn't get built and I canceled by Congress and both of it. And I'd say to Barry, that was the best thing that ever happened to you. And he's like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm like, if that didn't get canceled, first of all, the, even though it did get canceled, the Europeans went on to build it themselves. Save the American taxpayers, billions of dollars. And we wouldn't have learned anything really substantially new as proven by the fact that as you and Harry talked about, nothing besides the Higgs particle of great note has come out. And actually, he's had a recent paper, but it's been an upper limit along with his collaborators on LHCP experiment that I'm going to be talking with him about. But the bottom line is, it was really built to detect the Higgs. So the SSC for twice as much money would have sucked up Barry's career, and he would have been working on that, maybe not. And then he would never have worked on LIGO, and then he wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize. So you look at counterfactual history. That's not actually a big stretch, right? If the SSC, it's still done on, he would have worked. Because he was one of the primary leaders of that experiment. The second thing. Imagine the following thing, it happened. They won the Nobel Prize because in September 2015, they detected unequivocal evidence for the inspiral collision of two massive black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the Sun, leaving behind an object that had just less than 60 solar masses behind. So one solar mass worth of matter, got mass, got converted to pure gravitational energy. No light, seen by them. This particular date, September 15th, September 14th, 2015. Okay. That explosion because of the miracle of time travel that telescopes afford us, that actually took place 1.2 billion years ago in a galaxy far far away. They actually don't know which galaxy took place and still to them. They never will. Okay. That, if that collision between these two things, which have probably been orbiting each other for maybe a million years or more, if that had occurred 15 days earlier, Barry wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize.

A billion, 200 million years ago, and if it had happened 18 days, 20 days, 30, because that was the deadline, for the Nobel Prize to be announced, they announced the findings in February, but you have to nominate the winners in January. So I could have nominated them up until January 30th, but they didn't announce anything, and they were just rumors. And so he didn't, but the reason that he wouldn't have won it, because there was another guy who was still alive, considered to be the founder and father of three of the three fathers, Ray Weiss, who did win it, kept on who did win it, and the third gentleman, a Caltech name, Ron Dreever, who passed away, again, He was alive in 2016, he died in the middle of 2017, and then he wasn't awarded the Nobel Prize.

to get those medals in front of another guy who wears even fancier claws, who is the king of Sweden, and then they got some free food afterwards.

I will. And yeah, exactly. No, and I want to point out to you think one is that I remember you went on Joe show maybe a couple of years ago and and then he gave you a watch. and give you like a Rolex, right? Yeah. And I tweeted to you and I think a mega. Oh, mega. Sorry. Okay. Fine. The watch that went to the to the moon, which we will get to in a bit. I don't think he could give you what I gave you. And we'll get to what that final gift package is for you.

I want he truly wants everybody like especially people close to people more successful like there's not even a thought like but you know why he does and this is what I tweeted to you and one of the few things I think you have retweeted that I sent you I said someday you're gonna give that to somebody and today I want it that to be me no no Joe's Omega. No, but but the point is he sees in you that same you know grandiosity that same genuine spirit graciousness and I think that's true. I mean you do do something very rare. I don't turn this into too much of a love fest, but I do want to say even back to Andrew you know who I've almost been hate heggie graphic about you know just treating him like a saint. He said to me the same thing when in a moment of peak said like like I have to train these guys and women that work for me so that they can be better than me so that they can go out and compete with me for the same limited amount of funding from the FNNS, you know, that wasn't who he was. Um, that was just an expression like I'm doing something which is fundamentally, but you know what, um, when you have kids, hopefully, you know, please God he will someday, because I think, and I hope we can get to talk about that later, but part of investment and part of doing something with, when you have a kid, like you can get married. You can marry someone because she's rich or he's rich or you can marry someone because they're good looking or he's good looking. You can marry for all these different reasons that are ultimately selfish. There's no way you can have a kid and be selfish. Nobody says like, oh, you know what? I really want this thing. That's three feet tall. That doesn't speak English. It crops on my floor. That wakes me up all hours of the night. The interferes my love life. You know, nobody says that because it doesn't benefit you for months and months. A friend of mine who actually does the videos for me and does a lot of my solo videos. He's having his first kid. He's like, what do I do? Because it always gets stupid if I will catch up on sleep now. Like, yeah, I'm gonna store sleep in my sleep bag. Like, I don't think he'll remember the new talk about that, right? He can't do that. That's stupid. What you can do, give the kid a bath. feed the baby, let the mother relax. Like in other words, do the things and this really relates back to our style. One said, our style, one said, why do parents love kids more than kids love parents? As much as you love your dad and your mom, they still love you more. And because you love that what you sacrifice for, here's a proof. I know a lot of families that have kids with special needs. Some was severe. One of my uncles, my kids I had to severe with a called mental retardation. That was probably, has a different name. that out of the nine other brothers and sisters, he was their favorite, because they had a sacrifice so much for him. And I think of that, you know, in a small case, like Joe is kind of mentoring you or whatever, you're going to mentor someone, you love that which you sacrifice for. Sacrifice is reduction of entropy, it's storing and investing, and you want to protect that. And you know, that to me really speaks to this. So yeah, I don't hold it against, but it is true, like scientists are You know, when they're described again, they're often said to be like children, right? You've heard this description. They're inquisitive. They're curious. They're passionate. They love them. Like, yeah, and they don't play well with others. They're jealous. They're petty. They're selfish. They won't share their ball in the go home. There's no such thing as a single edge sword. I wish there were, you know, because we need some more of that because you got to doll it up. But in this case, when you have this kind of investment in science, it's going to be natural. But that doesn't mean we have to feed the flames of competition. If you go to the homepage of the NSF or the Department of Energy or the recently released National Academy of Sciences future of science for the astronomical sciences, for the next 25 years or more, they talk about how many Nobel Prizes these different science things could win. Exoplanets, life, the discovery of the CMB, B-Mode polarization, the nice that, you know, that's figure two in this thing. And I'm like, what message is that sent to kids? Like, to young people? Like, that's what you should be doing so that you win this small, as you said, this prize given out by one hairless ape to another, where I'm going to fancy your costume using the reindeer.

which was never one of his stipulate. He actually said one, you can only give it to one person. So they change it. Why do they change it? I talk about speculating them. By the way, the book's only three chapters out of 11 about the Nobel Prize and it's a fact. But you know, one of the things that's been so interesting, like I'm speaking actually this coming up in December is that the Nobel Prize is given out on the day of Alfred Nobel's death. There's a lot of, and they bring in flowers, not from his birthplace, but from his mausoleum, which is in Santa Ramino, Ramino, Ramino, and Italy. It's a lot of like death fascination, you know, denial of death features heavily in the Nobel Prize. Because it's like, what outlives a person? Well, science cannot live a person. My father has a theorem named after him. It's still, you know, engraved in many places around the world. You or I, we can go to different places around the world. People know who we are based on our publications. We engrave things, we want to store things, we want to compress things. And I think that's, there's something beautiful about that, but there is a notion of denial, death, like there is a notion of what will outlast me, especially if you're among the many, 90, something percent of members of National Academy, don't believe in an active faith, you know, and a creator, and a God, and science can substitute for that, but it's not, it's not ultimately as fulfilling. I just, I don't believe it can fulfill a person the way, even practicing, but not believing in a religion, can fulfill a person.

Well, that's why I said, you know, it's like a scientist should, okay, you have to be careful and not have any, you know, physical, it has to be platonic, but you can think of scientists and mentor. I have a chart in the book and in my a plaque made by one of my graduate students, former graduate students, she's now a professor in New Mexico, Darcy Baron. And she made this plaque and it has 17 generations. So here I am, 17 levels down. There's a guy, livenants, not the famous livenants, different livenants. 1596, he was born, and I'm in this chain, and I don't know if you know this, but in the Russian language, the word scientist means someone who was taught. I'll say it very soon. One who was taught, right? Which one they? Which one? So it probably means a guy who was taught, right?

So what does that mean? To me, it has a dual kind of meaning, at least dual meaning. One is that you have to be a good student to be a scientist, because you have to learn from somebody else. Two, you have to be a teacher. You have to pay it forward. If you don't, I claim you're really not a scientist in the true sense. And I feel like with the work that I do and outreach and stuff like that, I'm doing it at scale. I'm influencing more than 24 kids I might have in my graduate class or undergraduate class. And they're potentially could reach thousands of people around the world. and make them into scientists themselves because that's the flywheel that is only beneficial. There is no competition. There's no zero sum fixed a fixed mindset versus growth mindset because it is an infinite game. Imagine a culture that had none of the trappings of the negativity of the Soviet Union or a pre-World War I Germany or Imperial Japan, you know, science celebrated and we're just making like a nation of scientists and like we're not doing it to become multibillionaires or necessarily, you know, for any military purpose whatsoever. But if we have that, you know, sometimes I'm flying, you know, home and night, like when you're flying to LA, you literally it's very very you can see like the number 10 million like it's very hard to like visualize things you see a brick wall you ask how many bricks are there might be a thousand two thousand ten million lights there's 10 million souls and you can see in there are discreet they're not like the milky way all blending together

Like the city is like a constant out. Hopefully I'll stay to keep the plane the right way up. But when you think, imagine they're all working together. And imagine, like, you always talk about love. But like, you don't know, you don't know that they're not where they love. Like, so you're looking down on them. And it's just amazing. Because you think, like, what amazing creation is, man, and humans, and what can we do? It's phenomenal. It's so exciting. And then I get to do it, you know, it's a job, I say, don't tell Gavin News about it, do it for free. You know, I love what I do. And, but to think about, like, oh, if my student succeeds, and I'm not, no, it's, it's, It is unfortunate that you have experience that I've certainly experienced it. And I think there are ways around it. I think it is a vexing problem because people want to, you know, it's very tempting to keep your own kind of, you know, garden fertilized. You know, one thing I said just thing is like, you know, people like, why are you doing this thing in podcasts or you're supposed to be a, you know, serious scientist leading this huge project and collaborators and And I'm like, well, most of what I do, as I said before, it's for you, it's Velcro. For me, it's like, you know, what is the deal with the safety standards on the truck that we're driving up to deliver the diesel fuel that will power the generator that will allow the concrete truck to, it has nothing to do with the big bang inflation, the multiverse, the God's existence has nothing to do with that, right? So those are people I say I have to talk to. The people who come on the show, those are people I want to talk to. And that's super fun. I mean, it's a, it's a real honor that I get to do it. I'm using, I have some unfair advantages, right? I'm at a top university. We have people that's affiliated with R3C Clark Foundation, you know, brilliant scientists coming through. And, but I felt like it would be kind of a shame if I didn't, you know, allow them to teach at scale because they're better teachers than I am.

Yeah, I mean, I'm still I'm still friends with them and they have still gone on to. So I should we should say like, why we didn't win the Nobel Prize and then what happened with the group that is now leading it completely the the I'm completely divorced from and that's in the secular sense. We're friends, you know, we we see each other, you know, we send each other emails and stuff like that.

I mean, I remember one of them was like, well, what's this I hear about a book? And a lot of people tell me not to write the book. They said it's going to give too much attention to the Nobel Prize. It's going to look like sour grapes. Again, I say you can prove I have sour grapes or not, just give me the next prize now.

It's funny because Sabina Hassan-Felder, who is a fellow kind of YouTube sensation and she's chewing for the Nobel Peace Prize. You're right, she's so gracious and so good. She is that German, you know, just gentle and gentilness.

I wish she could really say what she thinks. And be it snarky in the case. So she wrote a review of my book when it came out three or four years ago. And she said, well, you know, Brian Keating, like she said, well, it's, you know, it's a good, it's interesting. He talks about cosmology, but, you know, they can do whatever the hell they want. And he, you know, presumably has this, you know, problems with it, but it's none of his business basically. It's a private. And, and at the end, she said, but, you know, if you want one good thing, he's a really good writer and, you know, who knows, he could win the Nobel Prize in literature or something. I said, and then she allowed me to publish a bottle on her blog which was kind of funny but anyway um no so getting back to the guys that we were you know kind of collaboration means there are friend of me's and of course the look You know, we don't wish each other active ill. I've visited them. They welcomed the visit me. They have visited me. The thing I have to say is that I just wonder about introspection. Like, for me, literally, I don't care about the Nobel Prize other than what it can do to, you know, benefit science. But I no longer, I did, but by the way, I did seriously care about how a benefit Brian Keating early on in my career. I'm just totally honest. Yeah, I don't mind that proud of it. It's kind of embarrassing. But now, I would hope that people would say, OK, the guy is obsessed with it. My next book is not about this. It's about something completely different. And I do feel like people lack introspection a lot of times in science. We don't think about why we're doing what we're doing. And I think it comes down to curiosity. One thing about Joe and again, I've only listened to like, I have to confess, you know, you're like my father. Now I'm confessing my sins to you, father. Let's go on. Go on. I haven't listened to like that many of your episodes start to finish, okay? I'm with our friend, I'm a mutual friend. Eric, I've listened to a bunch of recent ones. Einstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, Weinstein, that sort of is.

The brothers are about to have the brothers ones. And a few others, I haven't ever listened to a phone which Joe Rogan episode, but from when I've seen with him, he has a preternatural curiosity. He doesn't have passion. There are a lot of podcasts that have passion. Like I've been on there shortly. He has curiosity. He's not going to stop talking about something until he hops it and fully understands it until he gets it this early. And I respect that because as I say in this more recent book, passions like kind of like the the dopamine hit that gets you started in like, oh, I'm gonna be great. Maybe I could win another product like that's not gonna sustain you the sustenance comes from the passion converting to curiosity and what I want to do is convert you know as many things as possible to cure to things that I can then because actually I've had on you know people that discuss addiction and there's an addictive quality to you know doing in doing podcast or there's an addictive quality being a scientist And you get to do things that are very specialized in specialized locations with special people, paid for by other people, have no frickin' idea what you do. Imagine working some job. And you know, Feyman said, he said all these contradictory things. Like, when he was one said, like, he said, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't understand it yourself. Then the day when the Nobel Prize reporter asked him, what'd you win it for? He said, if I could explain it to you, but it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So let's leave aside his inherent contradictions. But in reality, there is a kind of dopamine rush that you get from it. But what is ultimately going to be the sustenance of it? So I do feel like we have to find a way to nucleate that. I don't know if it's like, can you turn someone into a size to ask this question all the time? Can you make someone creative? Can you teach someone to be creative? Can you teach someone to be curious? I don't know. I do know that kids are naturally curious. As they get older, they get less curious. Just like I heard from the other forward authors, James Alltoucher, he said it once he did a study. Kids smile 300 times a day or a smaller laugh, adults 5 or 6. 5 or 6. No, I'm just trying to get you a laugh, but you're not going to laugh. But anyway, no, it's true. So somewhere he lose 30, you know, the 50 percent.

So can you, is it, or should another, should we invest our energy in getting the half life decay constant stretched out more for curiosity for kids? Or should we try to reset the, the dopamine hit and then, you know, I don't know. It's an open

Maybe some blockchain and they could like vintransfer.

That's what he does, yeah.

Well, it's funny, you know, I wrote these books and I don't know about you, but when you get all these books, I'm sure you get books, people send books. They always come in these dust jackets, right? I always was like, what the hell is a dust jacket? Like, how much dust is raining down at any moment? I mean, this is immaculate. This room is Russian, tidiness, color, but in a normal household, how much dust is raining down? It's not not really pretty until I wrote a book. And I realized, you know, I'm writing a story about the origin of the universe and then the prologue to the cosmos. And dust is going to cover this story. It was actually, it's actually more a story about astrophysics and cosmology than dust. And this is the link between the cosmological and the astrophysical. So what does that mean? So astrophysics is broadly speaking, the study of physical phenomena manifest in the heavens, astronomical phenomena. Cosmologies concern with the origin of illusion, composition of the universe as a whole, but not really concerned with stars, galaxies, and planets per se, other than how they might help us measure the Hubble constant, the density of the universe, the neutrino-content, etc. So we tend to have a tendency to kind of look a little bit, you know, they're like, not all astronomers or an astrophysicist are equal. They're all equal, but some are more equal than us. So we have kind of a prejudice a little swagger, right? And cosmologists are studying, you know, we're using Einstein, we're not using, like, you know, Boltzmann, or we're thinking of the biggest possible pictures. And so doing, you could actually become blinded to Otherwise, obvious effects that people would have not overlooked. In our case, when we sought out the signal, we were using the photons that make up this primordial heat bath that surrounds the universe, luckily only at three degrees Kelvin approximately. We're using those as a type of film onto which gravitational waves will reverberate it, make them oscillate preferentially in a polarized way, and then we can use our polarized sunglasses, but in a microwave format to detect the characteristic two-fold symmetry pattern of under rotation. That's the technical way that we undergo. I mean, there's a lot more to it. But there are more than one thing that can mimic exactly that signal. First of all, when you look at the signal, the signal if inflation took place, big if, but if it took place. The signal would be about one or two parts per billion of the CMB temperature itself. So a few nano-calvin. The CMB is a few kelvin. The signal from these B-mods would be a few nano-calvin. It's astonishing to think, Penn Z's and Wilson, 1965, measured something that's a billion times brighter. And that was what, 60 years ago, it was called 60 years ago since they discovered him. Moore's Law, you're more expert on. It's called every two years. So you're talking about like two to the 30th power doubling or something like that at that. So let's call it two to the 20th something like that. So that's like only two to the 10th is a as a as a as a thousand. All right, correct my math and wrong to the 20th is a million. to the 30th of a billion. So we're outpacing wars law in terms of the sensitivity of our instruments to detect these feeble signals from the cosmos. And they don't have to deal with, you know, on the semiconductor factory in Santa Clara, California. They don't have to deal with like, you know, meteorites and nasty things like coming into the laboratory. It's a clean room. It's pristine. They can control everything about it, right? We can't control the cosmos. And the cosmos is literally littered with particles of schmutz, of failed planets, asteroids, meteorroids, things that didn't call us to make either the Earth, the Moon, the planet Jupiter, or its moons, or get sucked into them and make craters on them, et cetera, et cetera. The rest of it is falling, and it comes in a power spectrum. There's very few, thank God, Chixil Absized, you know, impact, or, you know, progenitors that will take out life on Earth, But there's extremely large number of tiny dust particles and microscopic grains, and then there's a fair number of intermediate-sized particles. It turns out, this little guy here is the end product of collapsing star that explodes and what's called a supernova, type two supernova. So stars spend most of their life using helium nuclei, protons into a new trans into helium nuclei. And then from there, it can make other things like barilium and briefly make barilium and carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up until it tries to make iron. and nickel. Iron and nickel are endothermic. It takes more energy than gets liberated to make an atom of iron. When that happens, there's no longer enough heat supplying pressure to resist the gravitational collapse of the material that was produced earlier. So the star form is going to go inside out. That's how scientists discovered helium was discovered on the sun. That's why it's called helium. Yeah, they went there at night. Oh, well done. They went there at night. No. Helium means Helios is the god of the sun. It was discovered in its spectrum from observations of the telescope, like 150 years ago. It wasn't discovered like when oxygen and I knew what iron was discovered. So it's only a relatively recent cover to the pure octahelium came after oxygen. Oh, and first first hydrogen forms into helium. So that's the first thing that forms.

Oh, yeah, after oxygen, yeah, I think, precisely and yeah, and others, the Dalton discovered it in the 1700s. No, healing was really only discovered from the spectrum of looking at the sun and seeing the weird atomic absorption and, uh, called frown-hofer lines in the solar spectrum. So, but when it tries to make iron, there's no longer any leftover heat. In other words, there's heat left over from fusing, as you know, the son of a plasma physicist. He fused to hydrogen nuclei, you get excess energy plus you get helium. So that's why fusion energy could be the energy source of the future and always will be. Hopefully it'll come much sooner than that. And so doing trying to make iron, it takes more energy, doesn't give off enough energy, star collapses, explodes. And what does it spray out into the cosmic interstellar medium? It sprays out the last thing it made, which is that stuff. Luckily for us, because some of that coalesced and made the core of the earth, onto which the lighter like silica and carbon and the dirt and the crust of the earth were formed. And some of that made its way to the crust, the iron made its way to the crust, some of that your mother ate and synthesized hemoglobin molecules and hemoglobin has iron particles in it. It's quite amazing substance without it. We wouldn't have our red blood. We wouldn't exist as we are.

I've done enough dead jokes, my quote is up. So taking this object, you know, seriously, there's not all of it gets bound up in a planet. In fact, forming planets is very inefficient. And so there's a lot of schmutz leftover, some of which gets in the way of our telescopes looking back to the beginning of time. And some of those molecules like iron is used in compass needles, right? They're magnetized. And magnetic fields in our galaxy can align them and make the exact polarization pattern that we're looking for. As if the compass needles get all aligned, that's like the polarization of the dust grain. It's like that filter that polarizing filter. That means light polarized like this will get absorbed. And light polarized like this will go through. So it's absorbing it's making 100% polarized light out of an initially unpolarized light source. And that's what happened. And what we ended up declining on March 17th. And I'm sure if you were there, you might remember this at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. There was an announcement. There were like three or four Nobel Prize winners in the audience. And the Bicep 2 team, which I was no longer leading, I was still a member of it. In fact, in the announcement, the first person they mentioned besides, you know, thank you all for being here as me and my team at UC San Diego, although I wasn't invited to go to the press conference because that are very complicated. Yes, exactly. It's a little school up there in the Cambridge area. And so they ended up making this announcement that we had discovered the aftershox of inflation. We detected the gravitational waves, shaking up the CMB, and on that day, Lex Friedman podcast back when it was called artificial intelligence, Max Techmark said, goodbye universe, hello, multiverse, and hello Nobel Prize. See, he saw that as confirmatory evidence, not only of inflation, not only of gravitational waves, but of the multiverse, goodbye universe, hello multiverse.

According to its prominent supporters.

And I often note that this is a problem in what I call, you know, the science media complex, because oftentimes you'll see things like past gas air seeger, Venus life, you know, exists. And that will be really, I mean, it's fascinating, right? And what the work that she's doing or colleagues are doing, Clara, it was on your show as well. And that will be on front page, New York Times, Boston Globe, San Diego, Union Tribune, and it'll be above the fold. make headlines around the world. And then six months, 12 months later, as a case for us, retraction. Page C17 of the Saturday edition that nobody reads, you know, and underneath the personal. So we have a problem in science that the, you know, if it, if it explodes, it leads, you know, and we get this huge fanfare. And this is not unique to my experiment. This happened with the earlier discovery of so-called Martian life of discovered in an article. which was announced after peer review. We weren't peer reviewed at the point when we made the announcement. We had a press conference and there are other reasons that the team leaders felt it was important to do that so that we don't get scooped by a referee. It was unethical. We thought we had done everything right, but that's confirmation by it.

And there were people, you know, me warning about how it would be interpreted and wanting to also make sure that we put all the data out, including the maps, which we still haven't released. And so there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but the public never knows this. I think it's, so I've made a rule that if I am ever in charge of, you know, doming out large amounts of science funding, that when you, you should keep kind of an option. In other words, you should have money for publicity. It's fine. Have money for your press conference. But hold in reserve in a bond to be used, hopefully never. But if it's to be used, an equal fund for the retraction. If it should occur.

That is science, that is science. And when we don't do that, then we cultivate this aura that excludes other scientists. often from minorities or women that you have to be honest like Einstein came out of the womb and he was just like this guy with like curly no he wasn't he was he wasn't bad at math that was all and that's all nonsense but he said that he known he said he attributed his success to lex he said I never asked my dad what happened when I ran alongside a light beam as a kid. And thank God I didn't because had I, he would have told me the best answer of the day, which by the way, you know, he would create 20 years later as a 26 year old in the patent office, obviously in Switzerland. And in so doing by delaying when he asked these questions, he said, I approached it with the intellect of a mature scientist, not a little kid. And I wouldn't have accepted the same explanation. So sometimes assuming that scientists are infallible, ineffitable, omniscient, you know, being, I think that really does a disservice. And Jim Gates said, you know, he's like, Einstein wasn't always Einstein. And we cultivate this mystery and allure at our peril because we're humans. Until we have artificial Einstein, which I don't think will ever exist.

Yeah, so Galileo is kind of my avatar, my hero, kind of all around scientists that I would love to approach the logarithm of Galileo. He was not only a phenomenal scientist. He was an incredible artist, a writer, a poet, philosopher. And back then, they didn't have the stinctions between scientists and, you know, it was like a physician, it was like a physicist. Um, and he would indulge, you know, kind of these really intellectual fights of fancy, thinking about, uh, phenomena, such as that Earth's Tides or the, or, you know, the composition of the Milky Way. And what's interesting about Galileo is that he was almost as wrong, often as he was right. And Galileo, uh, was not alone like this. Uh, I always say like Einstein had at least seven Nobel prizes that he could have won for discoveries that later became true. But he also had seven You know, huge, you know, impossible to believe blunders in some sense. And it's too bad because you could have had a good career, as I would say. And Galileo was like that too. In other words, he would fall victim to, I think, this confirmation bias that all scientists have to guard their lives against, their careers, their brands, their reputations against, which is the exclusion of evidence that doesn't conform to what you're trying to prove for one reason or another. where the radical acceptance of things that do comport with it in order to bolster your confidence. And both are equally intoxicating. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug because it really reinforces this notion, which is partially sunk cost. You put so much time effort, money, reputation into it. You don't want to be wrong and go back on it. And with Galileo, he would be incredibly perceptive about things such as, you know, the earth being not located at the center of the solar system and the sun being the centers, because we'll call Copernican hypothesis. And he would use his evidence very, very interesting ideas that all of which were wrong, basically. And in fact, we weren't able to prove that the earth orbited around the sun and I ask you, like, can you prove the earth is not flat? No, well, you're a flutter if you're anyway.

But it's actually not trivial to do that, but most of my students graduate students can prove that the earth is round or explain how the earth is actually not trivial to do so.

Yeah. And much harder is to prove that the earth goes around the sun. In fact, that's extremely hard to prove. And almost none of my students, even after they get their PhD in the final exam, I kind of like to just give them a little bit of humility. Because I think they'd be a good scientist. You need to be humble, you need to have a little humility, and you need to have swagger. You need to feel like a little cocky, like I could do this. I can do this thing that Einstein, by definition, couldn't do. I'm going to attempt to do what was impossible. Just a generation ago.

So there are many ways to do it. I mean, obviously you could take a spaceship, park it at the north, the celestial pole of our solar system and just watch what happened. But obviously that that wasn't how it was discovered in the late 1700. So it's called aberration. So if you look at stars as the earth orbits around the sun, the position of the stars will shift slightly because of the tilt of the earth and because the earth is in motion around the earth and around the sun. And because the Earth has a non-trivial amount of velocity compared to the speed of light in its orbit around the sun, this stars will trace out little tiny ellipses and those will correspond to the fact that we're moving around, if they're at infinite distance, which we assume that they are, they're not really, but for all intents and purposes of the skill of solar system, they're infinitely far away. So that's called stellar aberration. And that was the first way it was discovered. And actually, we still use that. We have to correct for that effect. We measure the cosmic microwave background. Because imagine you're inside of an oven, it has some temperature three Kelvin and a thousand Kelvin whenever. If you're moving towards you, the photons that are coming to me in that direction will be blue-shifted hotter. And the ones behind me will be red-shifted. I'll artificially impute a greater or lesser amount of matter or energy where you are, and then extension of the Doppler effect. So we actually Make use of that and construct what's called like a local standard of rest. Anyway, so you can do it. But Galileo said, no, no, I'm not going to wait for that. I have other proofs for it. One of which is that the earth has tides. And the tides come in and out twice a day, high-tide and low-tide. And it's, he made the analogy, because the earth is moving around the sun, say, this is the sun here. And it's moving around the sun. But it's also rotating on its axis. See how the water is sloshing up and down inside the vodka bottle? As that happens, he said, that's what the tides are caused by. Totally wrong.

So as it's slashed around he claimed that was what now has nothing to do with that the moon Over there, the moon pulls differentially on the earth and the earth's ocean. That causes the oceans to bulge slightly towards and away from where the moon is. And the moon is actually the source of the earth's ties. It has nothing to do with Copernicus, the orbit of the sun. So he was totally wrong about that. He also thought that the Milky Way was comprised only of stars when we know it's made of gas, dust, nebulae, and things like that. So we had a fair share of blunt. Now, one thing I always kind of make note of, and I'm actually producing along with Jim Gates, Fabiola, Giannati, Frank Willchick, and Carlo Revelli, and my friend Lucia Pichirollo, the first ever audiobook of one of Galileo's dialogue, the one where he claimed to find evidence for the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, but it was an error.

Yeah, it's just incredibly in book. So this book was written 1632. It was written and it was the one that caused them to go into house arrest and almost threatened to be tortured. And that book laid out his arguments for what was called the Copernican or the not parapatetic or Aristotelian, et cetera, notion of the planetary dynamic. and eventually he would force to recant that he believed in it and allegedly he said he still leaves the earth moves. Anyway, so we're making that it's written a form of a trilocke. It's actually called the dialogue with three people. There's one named Salviati, who is espousing Galileo's notions about how the heavens were orchestrated. And Salviati means like the salvation, the Savior. Then there's a middleman, segredo. So Carlo Revelli is playing Salviati, brilliant one. I am playing segredo who's like an intelligent interlocutor, I'm kind of just, I can appreciate Aristotle, I can appreciate Copernicus, then there's this guy, Simplitcio, the Simpleton, and he espouses the words of the Pope. So you can imagine like, you know, you're working in the Putin's government or you're working in whatever and all of a sudden you're kind of putting the words of like the fool literally calling the fool but you're using the words of the all supreme powerful being on earth at that time is a Vatican church especially for an Italian like Galileo so he wasn't as brilliant you know politically as he was astrophysically and otherwise who's doing some cliché So, Plichio is a friend of mine and a university manchester named Luchio, pitcher in a low. He's a Irish guy, but he has an Italian. I only speak, and that forwards are written by, so one forward in this place has three forwards, which is like a 12-word. Okay. The forwards are in the joke for me. Yeah, that was a good one. The forward three four versus one of them is written by Albert Einstein in which he says Galileo was not only one of the greatest scientists in history. This is Einstein telling Galileo, but he was one of the greatest writers and minds of all of human history. That forward is read by Frank Wilchuk, who you've had. Jim Gates, he reads the translator still and Drake is renowned scientific translator. And then Fabiola Gianotti, she reads the introduction and dedication from Galileo to the Duke of Tuscany. and some of the different introductions at Galileo himself had. It's just, it's such a thrill to be able to do it. I only randomly found out because I wanted to study it and it's like 500 pages long and I was like, let me get the audiobook because I'm an audio medium coming guy. Didn't exist. So I said, let's do it ourselves. And so we did it and hopefully it'll be out on Galileo's birthday, which is February 15th, 2022. It'll be a ripe 457. But that's not the only one of his books. Galileo wrote many books. one of which is called the military compass. And this is an interesting book from my blockchain and your blockchain and fishing autos. In this book, he talks about a compass, which is not a magnetic compass, but actual like slide roll. It's basically a slide roll. And it's a manual. It's like imagine if your phone came with a manual nowadays, they don't, right? But this was a manual for how to use this slide roll, which is like enormously important. And he gives a whole bunch of worked examples. It's brilliant book. One of the examples is how do you convert money? So he does a money conversion between Dukati and Florentine Dukati and Skuti and whatever, you know, Lira, what are? He does all these currency conversions. One copy of this book, maybe two exist, first printings from 1600 still exist. If Galileo had just kept those in his family, there were $100 million. Nowadays, you can't get a scooody. A scooody's worth nothing. Like a Ducati's worth not, I mean, maybe some collector wants a piece of paper, right? So it's a lesson. Like, there are value in physical, you know, non-fungible tokens. This original non-fungible tokens. So, um, but then a third book is called the assayer. So what is an assayer? So assayers were kind of like these alchemist, you know, physicists, chemists that would would be around a court. And every so often for the treasurer, they would want to accept pieces of gold from the citizens and convert that to script or, you know, paper money. And to do that, they needed someone to verify with a standard of gold that they need to be gold and do some kind of semi non-destructive evaluation of the purported object, the metal that was supposed to be gold. So they would take these pieces of gold theoretically gold and they would rub it on something called a touchdown. Touchstone was a special piece of rock, granite, whatever. It has no intrinsic value. It's just a piece of rock. But with that rock, you could assay and determine the content of this thing that could be worth millions of lira or whatever, right? So it was incredibly important job. And so this person would take this piece of inanimate rock and use it to do something valuable. What I want to do in the assair project is take this plethora of physical theories of everything. And I said recently, you know, we should give a Nobel Prize to someone who doesn't come up with a theory of everything. Because there's just, there's just like, it's just rotten with them. And I think it's great. You know, I often say that, um, Theory is kind of like software and I'm not integrating software at all, but like you can create a lot of software. You can make a coin and it'll make its own coin and you can make infinite amounts of software. I look it up, kids. That's one of my favorite videos. And you can see it can rapidly, you can't make a telescope that makes a telescope that makes a telescope. There was hardwares kind of like the non-fungible token that's ultimate minted, you know, limited edition, the book, the compass book, like I thought. And so, it's very expensive. That means you have to be very careful before you invest decades, billions, and humans into pursuing one of these theories of everything. You have to have good intuition for it. And lately what I've seen is not predictions, but retrodictions. So you see that the Large Hadron Collider will come out with a measurement. And then someone saw, we'll say, oh, this is, you know, this is compatible with string theory, or G-2 of the muon. It has these bizarre properties, fifth force, string theory predicts this. String theory solves this. New trainos, sterile neutrinos, large hadgeron, collider, bottom, or B-experon, blah, blah, blah. They'll say that it's compatible after the fact. And it's not so bad, right? Because look, what did Einstein do with GR? General relativity. The first thing he did was not predict something new. He looked at the anomalous behavior of the planet Mercury. And he saw it was behaving strangely. And people had said, oh, that's because there's another planet hiding behind the sun that we can't see that perturbs the orbit of the planet Mercury. And it's always called Vulcan. That was one approach. That's kind of like the dark matter approach where it's like there's a clump of matter that we can't see that's influencing the planet that we can't see. And we use that to divine and to it the existence of the other planet. That's actually how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was discovered because of the anomalous behavior of the planet Uranus. So Neptune was dark. We couldn't see it. It was tugging on Uranus in a certain way. And that led to the very aide discovering the planet predicting where this planet should be found. So it had a good heritage and physics, right, to predict this planet that you couldn't see that work. But Einstein said, no, it's caused by the warping and bending of spacetime due to the presence of matter, and we later become known as the Einstein equations. So he explained why Mercury did that. He didn't print, and it was known since the time of Newton, that Mercury was behaving in this really freaky way. So he didn't predict it. He retrojected it. That's fine. But at some point, you should come up with something new. That's uniquely predictive of your theory, as I just said. The theory of dark matter in the context of Neptune is actually valid theory. It just happens not to make sense in the context of Vulcan. And so if he had kept doing that, maybe perhaps he wouldn't have come up with these other predictions that he would later reject. Like, he rejected the existence of gravitational waves. So you and Barry talked about that. He didn't actually believe it. There's a one peer-reviewed paper that he had. He used to send back in those days. He sent a letter to nature, physical review, publishes, you know, no, how much a cost. And they got it rejected because he said, you can't detect gravitational waves. And actually, are they're not real? And they got show that they're real because he can't correct it a math error in Einstein and Rosen's paper. So it's fascinating. Should the ass air do? He or she should look at these theories. Look what things they explained that already exist. And look at what new predictions they can claim to explain if we can build experiments to test them.

That's right. And the best scientists, the best physicists, were both experimentalists and theorists. or at least that they, if they were experimentalist, they understood the theory well enough to make predictions or to explore the predictions and the consequences of those predictions. They, or if they were theorists, they were like Galileo. Like Einstein has patents for things that he invented. And then, you know, some of his work led to the laser in the laser. So he had practically, it wasn't just pure airy fairy, you know, quantum reality and expanding universe. So in this case, what I want to do is look at, you know, there's 10 different theories of everything or cosmological models. They make predictions. They have advantages and disadvantages. And I just asking the question, why aren't we applying Bayesian reasoning with confidence intervals? Why don't we have updates? Every time an experiment comes out, We can update our credulity in that experiment, or that theory rather, based on the results of the experiment. And we shouldn't do it after the fact, or as you know, Mitch O'Coco has said, well, you have to tell me what the initial conditions are. And that's not my job. You're supposed to tell me if strength theories correct, what should it predict if it's true? There's one big problem, which I should say, that to be a good ass error, I think you have to be worldly in the sense of worldly and curious, like we were talking about before with you and Joe. You can't only talk your own book. You can't only understand your own pet theory of everything. You can't only say, well, I only understand string theory. And I don't have time for these other theories. Or as if it's beneath me to even go into Garrett, Lisi, or Eric Weinstein, or Stephen Wolfe from, or aspects of M theory, et cetera, and there are some that say, why do we give string theory so much So much about advanced past when we there actually predictions it's made that are completely anathema to what we observe in physics like the dark energy should be negative We see it as positive like that that's a huge strike you know if you told somebody here's my tenure application and what do you mean it's pretty if it wasn't done by you know maldicena and you know Whitton and folks like that I don't know if it would have had the traction the endurance the resiliency that's had and that worries me because All these men and some women are making these fantastic brilliant beautiful ideas and they're not even looking at what their neighbors do it.

And that is your respect. So there is one person who does take time and is what I consider to be a great scientist in terms of what he thinks. He obviously has an invested interest in his own theory and it's Eric. Eric's got a truly encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics. and he has a great warmth and graciousness when it comes to giving other, and I've witnessed this and I've had, look, first of all, I think debate is pointless. Like, I don't know about you, but if you've ever voted, like, oh, I felt it's debate, you know, because Trump did so bad, and I'm going to vote for Biden. They never have. You almost never change anybody's mind unless you debate with love unless you have almost like we're going to win together like the red team approach in the military. They were trying to win a war. So they may disagree on the tactics day to day, but the strategy we have to win this war. I love you and I want to protect you. I don't see that in very many of these physicists from Kaku. I want to see it as embarrassing in some ways because they'll almost mock with the exception of Eric. You know, Garrett's interesting, you know, his theory is, you know, people have a lot of issues very technical, but Eric has taken the time to try to understand it. Eric has taken the time to understand Peter White's theory. Then I don't see, I don't see the same graciousness extended from them, I'm sorry.

No, he did. No, actually, no, he did. I had to bait with them alive on my show.

I mean, what if it's not, you know, I mean, a joke when they were on, I was like, How many theories of everything can there be? Highlander. That can be only one. I don't know.

Well, you know, some of the response came from people, academicians, professors, some came from a lay audience and some came from train scientists or no longer, you know, maybe practicing in the universities. I thought it was, there was a lot of vitriol, which surprised me because I look at what he's trying to do and it was always, the vitriol would always come with some element of ad hominim. And maybe that's his personality, maybe that engenders, this or whatever, maybe there is kind of just a natural tendency. You know, I always get these emails. Professor Keating, I have a new theory. Einstein was wrong. I'm going to prove it. I'm not going to math, but if you help me, I will share my Nobel Prize with you. Oh, thank you. Have you read my books? In other words, it's always taking down a dragon. It's always taking down the kung fu master, right? That you get the hit points from D&D. You get their hit points. You take their cards. You get their wrist tokens from Kam Chaka. And thinking about it with Eric, it's like, because what he's doing is so aspirational, it is grandiose and a good sense. What he's trying to do is is construct a geometric theory of everything that has aspects of supersymmetry instead of stuff embedded in it. He's trying to meld that. It has very unusual features and that it features not only multiple spatial dimensions, multiple time dimensions. It uses new mathematical objects that he's invented. In look, I had, you know, had him on my show. I've talked with him. We've had consultations with other physicists, you know, where he'll come down and I have a visitor's office and he comes down to San Diego sometimes and spends time there. And we talk with eminent mathematicians and physicists. Erics, been out of the academic world for a long time. And there is, as I said before, an aspect of persuasion that must take place in order to get anything through. And I think there was a slight amount of good nature, not ignorance, naivete, but just the sense that if this is right, everyone will recognize it, if you build a better mouse trap, the world will be path to your doors, the expression goes, that's completely untrue. That doesn't even have a mouse trap. I mean, you don't have any frickin' mouse trap types, there are. No, they don't beat it with path theater. You have to sell that frickin thing. You have to sell it like Steve Jobs or Elon. I have never. I've had one paper of 200 papers. I've published and peer reviewed journals. I've only had one. Half a percent published with no referees comments. In other words, published like dream, submitted it, and happened to be in a prestigious journal. That was pretty psyched about that. But you almost have to crave the response, getting it back from a journal. And I think he doesn't, first of all, he doesn't subscribe to the peer review process. He thinks that is anathema to the way sciences, invest interest in public and journals, et cetera, et cetera. I think you can have elements of peer review that are substantive and valuable. I think you have to learn from your critics. One of my conversations with John Matherie talks about loving your critics in this book, but not being so open to their criticism that their criticism goes to your heart and not being so open to their compliments that their compliments go to your head. It's a very tough, silly and corruptist to walk.

Well, first of all, I want to ask you a question I've asked him. And then it comes from Animal Farm. By now.

So you remember Benjamin the donkey? Yes. And he's talking to the pick. I forget the picks name. Are you priming him? Anyway, the pig says to him, you've got this long, lustrous, beautiful tail. You're so lucky. I got this short, curly little squiggly thing, does Jack squat. Tell me, how does it feel to have such a lustrous tail? And Benjamin says, well, the good Lord, he gave me a tail to swat away the flies. But do you know what? And rather, not have the tail if I didn't have the flies. It's what I ask you, as I've asked Eric, as a worth it. You know, you've got these beautiful tail, but there are flies. I'm not saying in a negative way. I'm just saying you get unwanted distractions, dopamine, you know, kind of the highlight, the spotlight. In fact, it's obviously allowing you to do things that you could never do alone. And I think, you know, first of all, I'd love to know how you answer that because that's something I don't feel I can relate to myself.

Yeah, I forgot to write my whole test of it. It was a good podcast because how do you know like podcasts been around what 12 years? How do we know as podcasts which were doing a good job? Like sometimes you get someone say, that was the best interview I ever had, but that doesn't happen that often, at least for me. But if you realize that you forgot to put the SD card in that little guy and the Zoom didn't worry, would you do it again? And I think if you say yes to that, that was a good podcast. Yeah.

So yeah, I mean, that effect has been documented, everything from, you know, planning telescopes to dieting. So there's a, there's a tiny bit of dopamine that you get visualizing how you're going to feel. You don't need to know this, but you know, you don't deal, but losing five pounds. I say, oh, I'm going to lose five pounds. And I'm going to be able to do run, you know, a minute faster. So there's a part of me when I'm planning the diet and the meals and the exercise that I get a little bit of that thrill and that actually saps a little bit of my willpower to actually complete the tasks that will take me to that goal. So that's a document that affects. And that happens in project planning and project management. It's a very, very important thing to guard against as a manager of a big project. With Eric, it's interesting because with him, first of all, we relate extremely well on a friendship level and very close. He does remind me a lot of my father. And I've told him that, you know, just as a mathematician, as a big thinker, as, you know, in his case, as a father, you know, the father kind of figured that I didn't have as sense. But that he is a true lover of life. He knows he's got a huge platform. He knows he gets a lot of attention for what he does. And, you know, I jokingly say, well, it's one thing, like, how do you know, Lex, that someone's an expert? So that's an expert say. There's a good rule, Ray Dalio writes about principles. He says, an expert is someone who's done something three times successfully. Like, you can do one that something correctly once, you could do something correctly. It's very hard to pull off like three projects, three telescopes, three, whatever, right? So, um, so look for an arbitrary, it could be four, it could be two, right? But the point is, look at Erg. So how many things does he contributed to and made pretty substantive kind of paradigm shifts for different people? I would say he's been right many times. Does that mean he's invaluable that he's ineffable? No, of course not. For me, so what I'm saying is I get a little bit of the joy of kind of learning something purely as a scientist, something completely outside of what I do, mathematics, gauge theory, the kind of very advanced geometry topology that he's interested in. But every now and then, I will sneak in that I want, you know, I've told him now. I'm going to turn your son into an experimentalist despite you. You know, he is not going to be a thief. He is not going to be a thief. He is working with me. He is learning from me. We're trying to get him into, he wants to bypass all of the, you know, kind of nonsense of undergraduate and go straight to graduate school. And I've tried to encourage him that maybe he could do it, maybe he can't. But there's no other way than to try. And so we, I prepared a whole curriculum for Zav to basically bypass all of undergraduate. to his credit, he's done arms all the credit. He's wounded to a level that matches many of my graduates.

There's a polite way to damn somebody as a scientist and say, here she, they really know the history of physics, right? Like, like, if this is always lovely, like Sean Carroll is jokes about, like, you know, like, physicists should never talk about history of physics, but it's more than that. Eric is certainly contributed in finance and finance specifically and gauge theory in economics and in inflation dynamics and the non-negotiable.

He has a lot of powerful industries, calculus, calculus, proven. I mean, he has a gauge model for currency, for currency exchanges between different nations. That is explanatory, not it's not. You know, is it, is it something, in other words, it's a model and it's used for pedagogical purposes.

Well, let me use an example. So you know of James Clark Maxwell, and he invented the laws of lecture magnetism, which is the first example of a unification principle ever displayed by the human mind in history, purely mathematics, unifying completely disparate phenomena. In one case, electricity charges, static electricity, lightning, and the other magnets bar magnets, currents, etc. Unified them. You know what he did. I like to do a thought experiment. Imagine Twitter exists 1864 Maxwell's work in a way and he goes, I have this wonderful idea with flections and inductive virtue and blah blah blah and it revolves on this thing called an ether and by the way there are these little vortices and gears and the gears have these planetary things and they suck up vortices and the vortices to determine the density of the electromagnetic feel like this guy's a frickin' non-in' moron and what would you do, Colin? Honestly, you would say everything this guy does is wrong. I mean, he's got this idiotic idea and it would be falsified a couple of decades later by Mark Wilson and Morley. And in so doing, you would have thrown out a very beautiful baby with bathwater. Imagine a twit storm, you know, clerk Maxwell, at clerk Maxwell one would get. It'll be brutal, right? And to the detriment, and that might even set back history. Imagine Yang Mills doing the same thing, churn summons, all these things are very fantastic, but why Lex? Why does Ed Whitten? What is one now, the same? Let me give a good, good. I'm a long cast, brilliant guy, I love him. He is the reason that Stephen Hawking conceded his black hole information paradox loss issue. What did he conceded based upon mild the same as calculation in ADS CFT and five dimensional wormholes above. Any of that, first of all, we don't live in ADS universe. Second of all, we don't know if wormholes are traversable if they exist even. You know, these are devices, they are kept thorn as popularized for movies. To say that this is something on which I will concede a bet now. Obviously, Hawking was doing that for publicity. Why does Mao the Sainah? And he's got a pretty high H index, pretty real respect guy, I asked, love talking to him, brilliant guy. By the way, also had made use of Eric and Pia's work engaged theory in economics. Originally, and one, I believe the breakthrough probably can't remember exactly what, but partially, you know, credit, some of the work that he did, which appears, there's a footnote to Pia Milani's thesis and some conversations with Eric, I think, in it. Anyway, getting back to that. Why, why is there not the same skepticism? Is it because now the say no, who's an eminent physicist, obviously, has published, you know, realistic work and done, and what about Witten? You know, Whitten gets a pass.

Yeah, that M theory is correct. I mean, here's, well, let me just say, Hawking. Hawking gets the ultimate pass. Hawking would say things like M theory, there's zero evidence for it. I mean, there's the famous meme that went around this weekend, like, what a string theory predicted and it's nothing. And by the way, that's actually raw. I talked to Cumberon and you talked to Cumberon. Cumberon says that string theory does make predictions. It predicts the mass of the electron lies between 10 to the minus 1, plank mass and 10 to the minus 30 plank. Okay, whatever. Electroman. It's a huge range. Is that imagine Cumberon comes up and again, he's just some nobody, but he actually, you know, he doesn't have a profile. He's not a Harvard. I have zero H and X or whatever Eric says. Why do we not like, in other words, why are we more harsh on people that are trying?

You should send your emails to me and I'll send my emails to you.

That's true in there. Look, inherent in all this is an underlying grandiosity. Look, how could you talk about doing what Cox said on here in elsewhere? You know, we're looking for the umbilical cord to connect our universal universe, that will then reveal in a one inch equation that will surely win an up-up rise, the mind of God,

I think it's detrimental. I think doing that, first of all, I think there's an element of almost snarkiness, because none of these scientists are believing, you know, not sticks or the, they're not theists, right? So they're using it as kind of a stand-in, and I'll always talk about Einstein didn't mean it was like a spinozen and he wasn't, you know, a fear. God doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play dice, doesn't play But the point being, you're talking about something else to do with God, right? I mean, we're also you go from there. I mean, I think God for now enjoys a little bit more, you know, kind of PR than Elon or Joe or whatever, right? So, so like it's, you know, God's got a pretty good, you know, H index himself.

So if you look at that, you have to go in there. Again, you have to go in with some swagger. You have to have a little bit of arrogance, but you should, I agree, mix with a little bit of humility. So he's doing something. He comes from outside of academia. Now, if he rails against our own terminal. If he's just railing it, oh, the system, and I'm not going to publish because F that, and that's only created by greedy journals, I don't think he's doing himself any favors. On the other hand, if he's shopping it, if he's talking it, if he's willing to expose it to criticism, and to even embrace people who may not have the purest intentions, perhaps, but in the sense of like they're not arguing solely to get to the truth with a capital T, what they're trying to do is take down, hopefully those people aren't out there, But on the other hand, looking at what Eric does for other people, looking at the fact that he has courtesy. He will look at Wolfram. He will look at Lisa, who says one of his closest friends. I mean, he calls him as, as, as, as, as, as, as. Namuses. Namuses. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's interesting. That they're loving friends.

Some of these things, you know, look, so fundamentally, now I may disagree with him, Eric, on a different aspect, which is the only one I'm capable of, but let me say one thing, which is experimental, but let me say one thing. I understand probably a third of what Eric's talking about with you. I understand, you know, GR, I understand mathematics, I understand some group theory, fiber bone. I can get a little of it, the age theory. But I also understand what I don't understand. And I understand that there are people like Whitt and Melda Saina, Nima, other people that can understand it. And they're not trying to understand Sabina, she can understand. She makes all these, you know, oh, I don't understand it. I don't understand it. I don't have time. And then she makes a video a music video, you know, kind of mocking Eric and Steven and Garrett. I'm like, oh, you have a time to do and I love Sabina and I've actually promoted my show on her and I love her and she's doing a wonderful job. You have a video that you said yourself takes eight weeks to produce from start to finish and you couldn't have spent, you know, 30 minutes to hour. I had Brian Keating of done it as an experimental cosmologist. And I have enough to say, like this is interesting. It's part of the essay or project. And actually, I shouldn't say that there are no people. They're very silly. Louie Gau, Alvarez Gome, it's soon he's starting to break the time instead of a geometrical physics. So he and I are running this this seminar. Hopefully this summer we're going to reenact the famous Shelter Island conferences in 1900s. where we, you know, Feynman got together and they calculated the Lamb shift and all, but what did that feature? The harmony, the resonant minds behind the best experimentalist in cosmology, particle physics, condensed matter physics is now teaching us tremendous things about, you know, lower dimensional systems that can be applied, a theorist in experimentalist observers, cosmologists, we all were get together. And we're just going to do it out of a spirit of love. But if it's just like, oh, this guy's like, a loud man, I don't have time for that. I really don't. I don't think it's interesting to wait to spend my time.

I mean, this isn't talking tales out of school, but I mean, he has made claims that I fundamentally disagree with, you know, in terms of like, you know, he's had this Twitter baiting, you know, loving, trolling of Elon, you know, why are you spending all this money get the Mars, you know, we should be spending money on interdimensional travel and we can unlock it if we, and I said to him, like, and he makes the point, you know, that all the atomic theory, You know, that unleashed a nuclear age. And that, you know, could lead to planetary destruction. But I make the point pushing back with love on him. And I say, look, nobody looked into the equations, you know, like Fermi didn't like look into all these equations of the unification, which still doesn't exist, by the way, we spent all this time, Lex, and I don't know why it is. It's phenomenal purely in theoretical physics. People are looking for the toe. And they're overlooking the gut. In other words, there's been only something to theory of everything, the God and the Quay. And there's this gut that unifies the three stronger forces. We don't have a single theory for that. And people like LaShown, they've tried and failed at it.

Yeah, going to level, you know, a 256, time-axing thing.

The only two people in this book of nine Nobel laureates who told me they don't have the imposter syndrome or two theorists. Frank Wilchuk and Sheldon Glashow. And, you know, Frank is a pretty interesting, and I know eventually we're going to talk about the meaning of life, but you talk about Frank. Frank invented this theory along with his advisor and another third person in the early 1970s, which from 1974, three, when he was a Princeton, all the way up until 2004, when he won the Nobel Prize. Every day of his life, imagine this, like, you're going to have this startup, someone tells you you're going to win a lottery, you know, a lottery in 40 years. What becomes your singular focus in your life from now until the next 40 years?

You're guaranteed to win a lottery? Yeah. Here's this wallet that coin wallet. It's going to guarantee that I have as much money to stable coin, whatever. You're going to win it 40, but you have to wait 40 years. To me, it would be surviving for the next 40 years. You wouldn't leave your house. You would cover, go out in a bubble wrap hat. You wouldn't go out with that 20 map.

Your whole life would be consumed. Now imagine everyone telling you you're going to win the Nobel Prize, which is bigger than a lottery. I mean, many pea prizes are worth more than the Nobel Prize. And every person who wins a prize that's worth three times the money, like Maldesena, he would trade that breakthrough prize for a Nobel Prize in a heartbeat. These guys had a weight 40 years. Imagine they excruciating pain. What got him through it? He didn't feel like he didn't deserve it. He felt like hell yeah, I earned it. He has that swagger. And what I'm looking for in this asset is to try to find ways that we can test stuff now because I don't know if I'm going to be here in 40 year. I hope I can. But can we buy pets? Can we get shortcuts? What's called the low energy regime? And to me, that's what's interesting. Like, what can we do now? I don't care. Like Isaac Newton came up with color theory and he did something really interesting. Next time I come up with a new some prison. So what did he do? He took a white light. He took a prison from the sun, actually. He put it through a slit, put it through a prison, and it made a beautiful rainbow, like you've seen. And then he took another prism, and he put it upside down, like, you know, dark side of the moon, and the light went through the first prism turned into a rainbow, and then the rainbow went into a prism and came out a white light. That's pretty cool. Then he took a popsicle stick or whatever is, you know, pipe tobacco, and he put it in the beam, like, blocked out the orange, and it didn't make white light come out. He showed like colors as synthesis. It's a comedy. He didn't use like the Large Hadron Collider to do that. You know, he used a very low energy experiment to prove a unification in this color physics in the different kind of color physics, then quantum chroma dynamics. But nevertheless, can we find things like that? Are we spending way too much time in energy thinking about the future circular collider, which even if it gets built will cost 30 billion dollars just to build. By the way, anytime from now on, if I leave you with anything, anytime an experimental physicist tells you a number, always double it, maybe triple.

To operate it. So like do we build an aircraft carrier to build an aircraft carrier? Do we build a nuclear reactor, a semiconductor facility? And the rule of thumb that works pretty well in project management is a cost about 10% per year to operate a given object of sufficient complexity. And in this case, so, in 10 years, it'll cost double the cost. So, never believe a number, whether it's from our mutual friend, Harry, or whoever, don't believe the number. Double it, and then say, isn't worth it. And so, building a solar system size accelerator, even if it were possible, do we have to do that? Or can we use these two 30 solar mass objects colliding together to test the number of large extra spatial dimensions? Can we do that? People are working on it. I think it's fascinating.

So one of the alternative theories of cosmology that is not singular quantum gravitational requiring as the big bang and inflation are are these bouncing models. Some of them feature a similar kind of entity called the quantum field. And that quantum field in the initial stages of the universe of our current after the bounce, which is not a singularity, it compresses to a classical kind of rebound and the universe starts expanding. During that process, the expansion is governed by what's called a scalar field, of which we only know one that exists that's called the Higgs boson. Higgs is a scalar fundamental particle, fundamental field. That field then later does double duty, and it becomes dark energy. So it solves two problems. And I'm not saying it's correct. We don't know yet. But are there observations of, and so Dark Energy is manifest today. It's manifest in properties. We see in supernova explosions, et cetera, et cetera. We see the effects of accelerating universe caused by presumably dark energy. Is Dark Energy a constant or does it vary? That has to vary in order for this theory to be true, because that eventually has to decay so that the universe can not support itself in collapse again, again, classically. So we could use low energy phenomena. It's hard to think of supernova as being a low energy phenomenon, but we use as a tracer of the cosmic expansion field and see, does it change or is it a constant? That's an example of a low energy limit to prove a high energy phenomenon like this collapsing universe in the cyclic model.

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Louis de Bruyne's thesis was three pages long and he won the Nobel Prize for the Wave particle duality.

It's sufficiently different from what I do in my field that it's incredibly interesting to me because it's I have no you know horse in that race and so I'm not competing with them for time or money or resources or people or whatever. So I can purely be an advocate and an efficient out of science. It is in some sense the successor to Hubble. It will do things that Hubble can't do. It will also may or may not have the impact on a visceral kind of artistic level at Hubble Han. What are some of the most iconic things that Hubble did? The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the pillars of creation, you know, storms and imaging and of these twisted deep galaxies, those resonated with the public.

Yeah, when you look at these images, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, you'll maybe put that in, you'll show every speck of light except for one, 4,000 blobs of light. There's one star in our galaxy, the rest of galaxies. Now that image is less than one tenth of your fingernail held out at arm's length. It contains 4,000 galaxies. So now you can figure out how many galaxies are in the whole sky just by seeing how long is it take you to move your fingernail over the whole sky. So we have another couple of hours. So it comes out to be, that's how we get 500 billion or more galaxies. It sounds not exactly the galaxy, but it's a good order of magnitude estimate, maybe even better. Hubble produced that, and it was basically serendipitous. They pointed at some dark blanks piece of sky what they thought was blank, and they saw it. Same thing that happened with the CMB. They were looking, they were something they didn't find. Same thing they found when they were looking for the deceleration of the universe, and found it was ex-seller reading. So what I sometimes hear is that we don't know or going to discover. I never think that's a good idea to spend billions of dollars on something like you should have some guaranteed low hanging fruit and then there should be swinging for the fences. And I think in this case it was really everything is swinging for the fences because it's either it's kind of a single point failure if that tells scope. which is this origami construction of 22 hexagonal panels that have to unfold properly and then orient themselves a million miles from earth beyond the earth moon distance by a factor of four. And still transmit telecommunication back to the earth, get solar energy, keep it away from the sun, you know, you don't want to look through the telescope of the sun with your remaining good eye. And you do that and you cover, it's going to be phenomenal for science, for sure, if it works. There are a lot of people think, you know, it's so risky. It's a NASA sunk so much of their budget. It ate up, you know, and what if it does fail? I mean, there's no guarantee. Yes, it's insured, but so what? You're not going to get back those 20 years of people. Well, let's start building it again, like they didn't build two copies of it.

It will make a huge impact scientific. It's a hope for the best. Let's assume it does succeed. It's launched in a couple of weeks. And when it does, it will transform our understanding of, you know, we just discovered not only like extra solar planets that have moons on them and asteroid bill, we discovered an extra solar planet in another galaxy. This will be able to see crazy stuff like that. Spectroscopy imaging. But it's an it will be able to go back farther in time such that we will be doing Cosmo like Hubble did some cosmology and measure the Hubble constant that was its key project when it's designed and launched. But because it is optical telescope it's sensitive to more you know close in red shifts those shorter distances now James Webb is much much higher red shift it can probe the darker deeper distant universe.

So this chunk of the moon, if it were delivered by the Apollo and NASA missions, you and I would be guilty of a felony right now because they legal to own pieces of the moon collected by the Apollo astronauts. So don't even joke about that when you go over to Houston. This piece of moon rock was delivered via the old fashioned way by gravity. So this was a chunk of the moon, which is blasted off because the moon gets bombarded by asteroids and meteorites. Some of them eject material from the surface of the moon into space. And it will then orbit the common moon Earth system. And it will then eventually enter our atmosphere. And if the piece is large enough and the trajectory is proper, it can land intact. And this one landed with a few hundred grams worth and they sliced it up. And then it was delivered via US Postal Service to my house. So you can buy these pieces. And actually you can buy a piece of Mars. You can buy a piece of Mars delivered by the same route. Now what's so interesting about that? Well, if a piece of Mars can get here, a piece of Earth can get there. some piece of earth has some life forms on it. It could get there. And if that can happen in our solar system, it could happen throughout the galaxy. So I'm actually not of the opinion that there is life elsewhere in the universe, at least technological life that we can can see. I see this look a horror on your face. I view it. I am personally extremely pessimistic would be extremely surprised.

So that's a generalization of what the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle called. I know this is a PG-13. It's called Pantspermia. Pantspermia.

Yeah, please. And that's the exchange of genetic life formaterial from other reaches on Earth, which explains the origin of life on Earth, but not the origin of life itself, which I think is a much grander mystery and much more interesting. How did life get here? And you've talked with many eminent people about that. I'm not going to add that much, but just thinking about the reverse process. Let's say life started on the earth somehow and then made its way out into the universe. Is there enough time for the whatever material went from earth via panseparamic direction, you know, spraying the love gun out into the universe, did that then have enough time to incubate and go on to a planet that could support it? Certainly, not within our solar system, which traveling at the meteorite speeds would require hundreds of millions of years, then looking at the evolutionary history from bacteria to buck, from rocks to rock. I'm on and off. I don't know. I can do this all day. Oh, it's pretty good. How do you get from those very simple inanimate objects to life? I just simply think there's not enough time for Earth to see life technological life throughout the galaxy. I don't think there's any evidence for that.

Yeah, if it did originate on earth, my question for those that search for life outside the earth is what if you had a letter from God and the letter said, um, life didn't originate on earth. Like, would you choose a different profession? Like, it's it would seem hopeless. Like in other words, we only have a sample of one. In fact, we only know of one conscious life form, let alone one planet that has life on it, right? What if you knew for sure it didn't start here? That means that there's almost nothing about Earth that is originated. It didn't originate the life process. So just to say purely the origin of life, not life itself, I think that's still fascinating. But how could we learn about the origin of memory? You have to go from inanimate object to a living object. Whatever that definition of life is, and I'm not an expert in many definitions, Max, Sarah, you know, many different definition. But how do you actually go from, from, from inanimate to animate, it's a huge question.

What's the governing principle?

Yeah.

Right. And maybe maybe the existence of the Earth's life, symbiosis is critical. I think Sarah, you talked about Sarah Walker. That it's a planetary phenomenon, et cetera. So it doesn't that make it less like, in other words, like, not only do you need special life conditions to create life, but then sustenance of life, as you say, that also has to be maintained under very specific circumstances by very specific planets and with very specific tectonic activity and moon. And by the way, you need a Jupiter nearby, you need an Earth and a moon system so that you don't get bombarded too early. And I always think like this, like technological life haven't said this before, really, so I'm just speaking. I usually like to write down before I say it's different things.

Not every once in a while, every while. I claim that to get to sending people to the moon, our planet needed whales. dinosaurs, right? Like, you don't make a solar panel from another solar panel. Like, you made a solar panel from a factory that melted down glass, silica, you know, aluminum, extruded that using fossil fuels. Where do those fossil fuels come from? Like, so any civilization that's going to be a dice in, you know, car to chefs, uh, speak, they, do they have dinosaurs? Like, do they have like prebiotic life? Do they have a great oxygenation event? Do they have a, die, die morphism between pro-chariotic, you carry all those hurdles? Let's say they give each one, let's say there's eight hurdles. And each one of those has a probability of one in the thousand to go from, you know, you carry out a pro-carot, whatever. Let's say that it's one in the thousand chance. I think it's like one in 10 to the 40th or whatever if you really do it. But let's say it's first generous nature, one in 10 to the three. Let's say there's eight of those hurdles. That means you have 10 to the to the 24th power, different, a probability. And that's just with eight. Like the moon has to be there. Jupiter has to be there. Dinosaurs have to be there. All the different things that we have to get to technological life. There's only 10 to the 20. There's 10 to the 20 second we think, or planets in the observable universe, not the galaxy. So that's a hundred times fewer than the probability to get, you know, 100% clearing these eight very low hurdles of one in a thousand.

We thought I thought a little bit. I'd love to debate when I think of a lot of fun because we debate with love when I talk with Lee. I love him and he loves me. I think I hope. But let me ask you a question. I asked this of him and Sarah on our clubhouse ones. So what do you think would happen the next day? Let's say we discovered life. Approxima Centauri B. It looks just like slime mold like you got on your, you know, breaches or whatever. We just covered what would happen the next day. And they were like, oh, it's a bit transformative. And I'm not trying to be like, you know, total Cassandra about this, but I said, I don't think anything would happen. And what do you talk about? It would be transformational. I'm like, I stipulate that life exists. Go down to like the river, you know, I'm in San Diego. Go down to the Pacific Ocean. Scoop up a glass, you know? You can find life in there. And what are we doing? What are we doing to our earth or destroying it? Calously. We're like pumping crap into there. Like we have this toxic waste bill a couple months ago in San Diego. I couldn't go to the beach. Let me take a step further. You know how many people I'm sorry that you do know, but how many people died in the 20th century killed. These are advanced civil. This is a slime mold. We kill. We name we harm. We hurt. We hate. I don't think anything will happen the next day. Let me go back to what we had. And I said, if that weren't proof enough, life has been discovered at least two or three times just in my professional career. Once in 1996, these Allen land hills, meteorites in Antarctica, so like microbial respiration processes, still we don't know. It was a press conference held by Bill Clinton on the White House lawn that's featured in the movie contact. We purpose for that movie. And then there's this phosphorous life, this toxic life in the pools of monolake. Many extreme of file, we don't give a crap. We continue to treat. So why are we thinking that like our survey from whence will our salvation come as the Bible says? Like, it's not going to change how we are. It's not going to magnify how I treat you or you treat me. And we're pretty knowledgeable people you and I compare to, you know, lay people.

I mean, I actually see like, there's a hundred million literal counter examples about I mean, right now there's like like 700 million kids in poverty and like, we just, how do we go about our life and just not deal with that? I mean, I look, I put it aside. I eat hamburgers and I, you know, in the 100 years, I'll be canceled for being, you know, a carnivore or whatever. But, you know, so obviously to get through life, you have to make certain compliments, you're not gonna think about certain things. But I just think there is a sort of wish fulfillment. Like, every time there's, why are we going to Mars and digging and flying this cool ass helicopter? I'm, we're looking for water. Like, stipulate that water was there. Like, I believe there was water. I think we should invest again and see what the geology was like.

That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's not worth doing. I'm just saying there's a wish fulfillment aspect that people will find meaning for life from science. Okay.

I mean, I guess I get, I assume that because of this panceramic process or whatever, that the probability is much, much greater than zero. I mean, it's not one hundred percent, but it's much likely or the not that at least some living material from Earth has ejaculated itself into the solar system, into the universe, right? And to our gods. as well. That's right. So the fact that that could happen and that you're holding a piece from a planetary body, one that couldn't support life as far as we know, but next time if you if you if you play nice and you come on my podcast someday, I will give you a tiny chunk of Mars. So Mars theoretically could support stuff right. So yeah, so I believe that there's there could be remnants of Earth in this. So that means that could be evolution. I don't think there's any chance that there's like, you know, people using iPhones and having podcasts and stuff. And I don't think we can argue that.

Yeah. And to answer your, I think you're wise to push back. And like, what does it matter what I'm doing? And I like to think about that, because it's like, what is the value of what you're doing? Like, you have to answer that question or at the end of your life, you'll have these existential crises. So when I think about who I am, part of my identity is answering and asking scientific questions. For me though, there is a religious kind of undercurrent that does undergird in some sense this quest. Again, I'm not like a practicing, I'm not like wearing a young, like I'm not like full on into my birth religion Judaism. But at the same token, I think as, you know, one of the things Einstein did say is that religion without science is blind or is lame and science without religion is lame is blind and lame. Anyway, the point is that like you can't get meaning You know, from just knowing facts like Wikipedia knows more than all of us will ever know, right? It has no wisdom. You know, wisdom, it means, you know, sapient. The word wisdom and Latin is sapient. We are wise. And by the way, do you know what we're, what our real name is, homo sapient sapient. So it's man who knows that he knows. Do you know what he knows? Do you know what the knowing is? Is that he's going to die? Where are the only creatures that know that we are going to die? We don't know when we're going to die. But like, you know, I have a cat, a fierce attack cat. It's beautiful. She has no one she's gonna die.

But I think we should be humble in that way. I mean, again, another thing is, you know, you ever heard this saying, like, we shared 99% of our DNA with chimps or benobos or whatever. I share, like, pie more than that. You know, sometimes I wish we shared, like, 100%. Like, that would be so much more interesting. Like, oh, there's 50% of a fruit fly or banana, like, No, no, no. There's something, but that should make us feel more precious. And I almost feel like discovering life on another planet, whatever solar system would cause a diminution of humanity. Like the one thing I do hold fast to from a religion, I don't know where I am with God. Like do I believe and go, I think that's an unanswerable question. But I have some thoughts about it. But by the same token, I think the one thing I do get from religions that every human has infinite worth because we are in a religious capacity considered to be equal to God. In other words, we are God's not to be like, you know, but we can contemplate what God did. We have aspects of God. We have free will. God had free will. If he exists, I can't prove that God exists. Otherwise you wouldn't have any credit for believing.

So I thought you had just like one of the best podcasts with Sam Harris, this past summer. And one of the things I like about the conversation is he talked a lot about happiness and meditation. And he said something that's really resonated with me and I've been working on it around and trying to work on it my own way. They said like you could never, you could never be happy. You could only become happy. And I'm trying to take a little bit further than that because I think it's interesting like meditations like you're not like oh I'm happy and now like oh my kid came in and now I'm not happy at all like no like you can be satisfied Kurt Vonnegut said like something you ever catch us sometimes likes you're like walking around like life is freaking amazing like I'm happy and Kurt Vonnegut said you should say to yourself every time that happens like a little mantra like if this isn't goodness if this isn't happiness nothing is just remind yourself how awesome it is every breath everything that you do when you make an impact even some of the bad stuff that happens good it's good so Sam said that and it maybe think because I was like well What does it really mean to be happy? Because I can think of two or three ways that right now I could double my happiness. No, like when the lottery or whatever, like I could double I have, there's only a few ways. How many boats can you waters keep behind? You had twice as many followers, now you've got two million followers, five million, whatever. It doesn't do anything. It's called the hedonic treadmill. Once you get to a certain level, it takes a lot more change and followers, money, impact, women, whatever you want to make you have one more quanta of happiness. On the other hand, this is a concept from entropy. I could make your life miserable in an infinite number of ways. In other words, there's more space to make your life unhappy than happy. And so I thought about that in the context of what Sam said about happiness. So it's sort of like, yeah, it's an expression of entropy. And that what you should be doing in life. is doing that which will cause you devastation if it goes away. Because those are the things that are where you're reducing entropy, like a kid, like anyone who's a parent knows instantly when I'm talking about, like how to make your life a billion times worse. But there's no way to make your life a billion times better. And so thinking about that, now turning into the question of God's existence, I feel like there's no way that you can believe in God to quote misquote Sam, but there's ways that you can become a believer in God. In other words, you could increase the Bayesian confidence level that there is some, and let's not call it God because that's afraid of turn. Let's just call it some infinite source of goodness or our beautiful power in the universe, right? simple things can do that. You can increase your crudulity and the goodness of life. And we have this biases humans towards negativity, negativity bias, well-known fact. So what I want to do is it's called God Good, right? That's where it comes from. God Good, same words in German. And when we think about what is good, let's do those things that would devastate us. And a lot of that could be relationships. And there's a powerful concept from network theory, which is that the number of connections in a network, I'm just saying it for you. It grows as the square, the elements in the matrix, in the number. So you think of a matrix with n people, you know person 1, 2, 3, 4, and then there's four other people. There's 16 different pairs, but half of them overlap, the diagonals where you know each other, you know yourself. But that still grows as n squared. So those connections increase and decrease, right, give or have two friends that are fighting and like you're kind of upset, even though you're not fighting with either one of them. So like a network grows like that. So you want to increase your network as much as possible, but only the kind of high quality interstices between them. And I think in doing so, you make yourself fragile, not anti-fragile. And I think that is where purpose and maybe approaching some notion of God can come from.

That's one way. Think about it. Your brand, your business, your spouse, your kids. I mean, parents can't count though. I've known parents out of life. Jim Simon, here's a perfect example. He's one of my oldest friends and mentors. He is one of the richest people on earth. Gulfstream, mega-yah. This is all document that he books about. He lost two sons as adults. And I hear people say, oh, I'm so jealous of Jim Simon. Would you take everything? I don't know where he has that strength in his wife Marilyn and his first wife Barbara. I'm not, I'm not like that. Some people are, there are angels that walk among us. And, you know, there's a famous prayer, it's like, you know, God, you know, there's an old saying like, one of the hardest tests there are in life is to be given a lot of money. And you see it like happens with like, like people in the lottery or whatever, or NFL football players after their careers over, they get their broke, right? And I was like, like, God, please test me with money, you know, that'd be great. But in reality, you should never say I'm gonna, I want what X person has unless you're willing to take everything. And you'll find you won't want to take everything.

But are you using yourself as the, as the touchstone to use the asset amount? Like, what is your rubric to, to apprise if you have lived up to that 12 year old, whatever year old, Lex? Like, how will you know or not know if you've let yourself down or like, I always think live to impress yourself. Like, I don't care if I have followers. Like, it's nice or whatever, but it's hedonic and it's just never ending because you'll always see the next level. But I think it's pretty damn cool that like I've gotten to go to these places the South Pole and I've done these things and I've made a family and I'm able to teleport my values into the future through my children and I've had ideological children that are So by what metric, you know, have you not already A and press yourself and B could you let yourself down? I don't in terms of a therapist.

It's like the Oracle of Delphine, right? You know that I self, but I want to leave you with one thing, which is to say just on this topic. You know, it could be different, right? We could go down to the ocean and get some krill instead of the 7-11. You know, it could be that we have no other taste buds and, you know, Eric's talk to the four dimensions of, you know, the vibration of your tongue, right? It could be like there's one and it's just like not, you know, Memphis barbecue or whatever you like in your slim gym, it could be something, it could be very boring, similarly. What if, like, that's a clue? Like, what if that's giving us evidence? Here's another clue. There are many animals, most animals have single monocolor vision. They only see in black and white intensity. They only have rods and no cones. We could be like that, but we're not. Why is that not a clue? Like, God's not gonna like, hit you over the head. And say, like, here I am, because then everybody would believe in him. And there's very simplistic, I've had debates, even with like famous atheists like Lawrence Krauss, who's like self-declared militant atheists. And I was like, well, I don't believe in the same God, you don't believe in some guy in a white beard and a chair. That's infantile. I gave that away a long time ago. But what if there are clues? What if Yang mills theory, you know, Maxwell's equate, like, what are those are beautiful? Have you ever seen, like, you know, expressed in tenser notation, Einstein's equations or Maxwell's equations, or Maxwell's equations, and then Maxwell's equations riding on Einstein's, it's unbelievably beautiful. doesn't have to be that way. That we can comprehend it. That's a crack. Maybe that's where the light gets in. And the light is what reveals what's beautiful. So I don't believe in God. I think that's a stupid notion. Like, do I believe in God? Like sometimes I don't like. I want to have God believes in me. And I'm like more than that five believe in. Like he needs Brian Keating. Like, you know, what would, you know, it's like one of my friends is a rapper. He's like, um, what would I be doing if I were God? Exactly what God's doing right now, like you think I know more than God.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.