#257 – Brian Keating: Cosmology, Astrophysics, Aliens & Losing the Nobel Prize
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The following is a conversation with Brian Keating, experimental physicist at USASD and author of losing the Nobel Prize and into the Impossible. Plus, he's a host of the amazing podcast of the same name called into the Impossible. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. First is Inside Tracker, a service I use to track my biological data. Second is athletic greens, the all in one nutrition drink. I drink twice a day. Third is magic spoon low carb keto friendly cereal. Fourth is masterclass online courses from world class experts and fifth is onit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. So the choice is health or wisdom. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track my biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which include blood tests that give you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on. They have algorithms. They're using your data. They're using machine learning to come up with brilliant analysis of that data. This data includes blood data, dna data, fitness tracker data, and the point is to use this data and the machine learning algorithms to provide you with a clear picture of what's going on inside you, and to offer you science backed recommendations for positive diet and lifestyle changes. Andrew Huberman the Great Andrew Huberman, host of the Huberman Lab podcast, talks a lot about it. David Sinclair was a new podcast out talked a lot about it in my conversation with him. It's obvious that we should be making lifestyle decisions based on our personal data, not some generic population data. 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Anyway, they'll give you one month supply of fish oil, which is another thing I take when you sign up to athleticgreens.com slash lex. That's athleticgreens.com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Magic Spoon, the OG sponsor of this podcast, the delicious, the incredible, the low carb, keto friendly cereal. It has 0 gram of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs, and 140 calories in each serving. You can build your own box or get a variety pack with a bunch of flavors. You can go to the website, check out the flavors it has cocoa, fruity frosted peanut butter, blueberry cinnamon. I think it goes on and they keep adding new ones. I don't know. For me, still, cocoa is the best flavor. It's the flavor of champions. It's the one I go to. In this life, a man must choose, and that is the choice I have made. And it has brought to me much happiness without sacrificing the nutritional sort of fortitude. Anyway, magic Spoon have a 100% happiness guarantee, so if you don't like it, they refund it. Go to magicspoon.com lex and use code Lex at checkout to save $5 off your order. That's magicspoon.com lexanduscode lex. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. $180 a year gets you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Exploration Chris Hadfield Neil degrasse Tyson. You all know who Neil degrasse Tyson is. Will Wright, the game designer the guitarist Carl Santana Garrett Kasparov, Daniel Negrano Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese, Tony Hawk, Jane Goodall. It just keeps going and they keep adding new ones. Like I'm doing one on portrait photography. Currently, I've been interested in understanding how a single photograph can capture an emotion, a deep, complicated emotion. That's so fascinating to me. The way you should learn, whether you're a beginner or you're an expert, is you should listen to the masters of those arts. Anyway, get unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership if you go to masterclass.com lex, that's masterclass.com lex for 15% off the annual membership@masterclass.com. Lex this episode is also brought to you by onit nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make Alpha brain. They make a ton of stuff, but Alpha Brain is probably my favorite. It's a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. Long stretches of deep work. So deep focus where I'm sitting there in the silence of my mind, focusing on a difficult thinking task, something that requires you think deeply. And whatever thoughts that come into your mind and try to distract you, you slowly let them drift past. It's a kind of meditation. I use alpha brain to help me when I know that it's going to be especially difficult. So I don't use it every day. I use it when I need that extra super rocket boost for a deep work session. It works. It helps me clear the mind and maintain focus. Anyway, go to lexfreedman.com on it to get up to 10% off alphabrain. That's lexfreedman.com on it. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Keating. As an experimental physicist, what do you think is the most amazing or maybe the coolest measurement device you've ever worked with or humans have ever built? Maybe. For now, let's exclude the background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization instruments.
Yeah, I'm slightly biased towards that particular.
Instrument, but talk about that in a little bit.
Yeah. But certainly the telescope to me is a lever that has literally moved the earth throughout history.
So the OG telescope.
The OG telescope? Yeah, the one invented not by Galileo as most people think, but by this guy Hans Lipoche in the Netherlands. And it was kind of interesting because in the 16 hundreds, 1415 hundreds, 16 hundreds. 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. Twelve point font, whatever. And that's what the eye charts are based on. They're just fixed height. But back then, there was no way to adjust your eyesight if you didn't have perfect vision. And there was no way to even tell if you had perfect vision or not until the Gutenberg Bible and movable type. And at that time people realized, hey, wait, I can't read this. My priest or my friend over here, he can read it. She can read it. I can't read it. What's going on? And that's know, these people in Venice and in the Netherlands saw that they could take this kind 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, two lenses, and go like, let me go like this and look at that bright thing in the sky over there until Galeo. So Galeo didn't invent it, but he did something kind of amazing. He improved on it by a factor of ten. So he ten x'd it, which is almost as good as going from zero to one as going from one to ten. And when he did that, he really transformed both how we look at the universe and think about it, but also who we are as a species, because we're using tools not to get food faster or to preserve our legacy for future generations, but actually to increase the benefit to the human mind.
Somebody mentioned this idea that if humans weren't able to see the stars, maybe there was some kind of makeup of the atmosphere, which for the early humans made it impossible to see the stars, that we would never develop human civilization, or at least raising the question of how important is it to look up to the sky and wonder what's out there? As opposed to maybe this is an over romanticized notion, but looking at the ground, it feels like a little bit too much focused on survival, not being eaten by a bear, lion. If you look up to the stars, you start to wonder, what is my place in the universe? You think, that's modern humans? Romantic?
It's a little romantic because they also took the tried. They took the same two lenses and they looked inward, right? They looked at bacteria, they looked at hairs. In other words, they made the microscope, and we're still doing that. And so to have a telescope serves a dual purpose. It's not only a way of looking out,
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