Dr. Brian Keating
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's confined to a plane because the same proto-solar system disk from which we formed out of, all the planets came out of a nebular cloud, a cloud of gas, dust, rocks, and so forth that came from a pre-existing star that exploded, creating what's called a supernova. The supernova provided the materials to make not only the Earth, but the entire solar system, including the sun.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, yeah. I'm kind of an outlier. So just everyone should look to the actual experts in this field. But I have some rigorous kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability of – I would never say it's zero. But I think it's very low and I think I can substantiate that. The best part is I can't be falsified right now.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe, period, full stop, end of sentence. There's no evidence, conclusive evidence.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I knew we'd get into drones. So the argument that it would somehow, first of all, transform our understanding of human place is inarguable to me. I believe that's true. Although in this movie Contact, it's a really wonderful movie. It's not cheesy science fiction. It was the first to like use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But in that movie, there's a scene where President Bill Clinton – is talking about the discovery that this fictitious character made, but he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica, and they just clipped that, and the meteorite was believed to have microbial life, and that meteorite's origin was inarguably from Mars, okay?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That happened about 5 billion years ago. And 4 billion years ago, the Earth formed out of that cloud. The spin of that disk, all things have a spin associated with them, like a figure skater. She's spinning around on her axis or whatever. She can have her arms out. Brings them in, she spins faster. That's called conservation of angular momentum. Spin is a type of angular momentum.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the reasoning was, this is 1997, that there was a meteorite found in Antarctica, where it's easy to find meteorites.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's in real life. That's in real life. In 1997, a scientist announced the discovery of a meteorite from Antarctica. It's called Allan Land Hills meteorite. And it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts of these microbial life forms. It was such a big deal that within minutes, Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
where he goes, this rock speaks to us from across the generations, and if confirmed, will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding of the universe around us. Now, the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie, the fictitious character, discovered SETI, extraterrestrial technology, not a microbe. But In the public's mind, that actual scientific discovery was never falsified.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It was certainly never confirmed. No one has ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence of microbial life on Mars. Now, how did that meteorite get there? Well, some asteroids hit Mars. the Moon, that's why it has craters on it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It hits the Earth, that's why we have Meteor Crater Arizona, Winslow Arizona, Yucatan, Chicxulub, where the dinosaurs' doom was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago. Those impacts occur on every planet every moon in our solar system.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars probably millions of years ago, ejected material, low gravity on Mars, low atmosphere, and that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the Earth. Okay, so matter from Mars landed on the Earth. Does that make sense?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's how I gave you – I have a lunar meteorite that I'm giving to you, again, as a token of my appreciation for all you do. That came the same way. Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar – it's called breccia. It's the crust of the moon. Eventually made its way, landed in northwest Africa, and I bought a slice of it from a I got a dealer. I got a meteorite dealer.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I got that for you, OK? So what's the lesson? Material gets exchanged from planet to planet. Now, I ask the following question. If that happened on Mars to the Earth, the Moon to the Earth, so too has material from the Earth been ejected since life emerged 3.7 billion years ago, there's literally millions of tons of Earth that's floating around in space. Some of that will have landed on Mars.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So someday we'll get there. We'll find some piece of it. Now, could some of it have a tardigrade on it? Could some of it have a protozoan on it? Obviously it could.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It could have – what's an adaptogen? I have no idea. An adaptogen? You talk about adaptogens.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Okay, it's not biological necessarily.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Okay. So one theory of the formation of life on Earth, you asked me about that earlier, the origin of life on Earth is a huge mystery. How did life get here? One proposition was made by Fred Hoyle and other people. It sounds dirty, but it's not. It's called panspermia. It just means that genetic material has been transferred from another astronomical object landed here on Earth.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The whole disc is spinning in a plane. It's like this desk, this table that we're sitting at. If you're listening, you imagine a flat table. It's spinning. A circular disc is spinning with a certain direction. All the objects are moving in that same direction due to conservation of this term called angular momentum. The sun apparently moves in that position.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the converse reaction occurs as well. But the fact is we don't observe it even on Mars. So if I told you we've discovered a planet and there's another planet right next to it and it has almost the same conditions. It's in the so-called Goldilocks zone where the temperature is just right to have liquid water, which Mars can have on it at certain times of the year in certain places on Mars.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It had flowing water on it. We know for sure Mars had flowing water on it. We know for sure that material from the Earth got there when Earth had life on it. So the absence of life on Mars is a data point. It's not probative or provative. It's positive rather that life couldn't exist on Mars. We haven't searched all of Mars. But it at least shows that there's an impediment to it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So people are fond of saying – As I told you earlier, there's about 10 to the 24th planets probably in our observable universe. Going back to the Big Bang, going out to the farthest reaches of the universe. But even if you just take the Milky Way galaxy, there's probably literally hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And when you look at that, people like to say, as Carl Sagan did, if there's no life, it's an awful waste of space, right? Why is there so much space and there's no life? It seems incomprehensible. But nature – I love when atheist scientists will say like you propose God exists and that's the God of the gaps to explain things that you don't understand.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But when science advances, we'll have an explanation. for why, you know, thunder occurs. It's not because of Thor, right? We get rid of gods as we learn more, and so the gaps shrink smaller and smaller. But they'll say the same argument about life in the universe. They'll say, well, there's got to be life because there's so much room there. But as I told you, I've been to Antarctica twice.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The only life forms I saw there, okay, were people. I saw a few penguins in the distance. And a couple of dead sea lions. There's no trees. There's no flora at all on the entire continent. It's incredibly barren. And yet, Andrew, it makes up 8% of the landmass of the earth. And you would think, well, it's just proportional to the amount of area, i.e. the number of stars.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There should be 8% of the life on Earth. There should be a billion people there or whatever, 600 million people. No, there's nothing there except for scientists that go there. So the odds of life are – you can't construct probability from possibility. That and many, many other arguments that I could give you, the improbability of life, how hard it is to create life.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And if you just sprinkled – imagine you had a koala cannon, OK? People at PETA are going to get mad. Why don't you just go to Mars and spray it with koala – it's obviously not going to like start life, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's right. They would not like that. So yeah, so possibility is not probability. The number of hurdles to create a single cell is enormous. We have yet to reproduce, to make a functional cell in the laboratory. Not that that's a requirement to prove that life could exist elsewhere. I'm just saying it's very hard. Our history of life, we have an N of 1. It's very difficult to speculate on.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Obviously, we're rotating around the sun, but it looks like the sun's coming around us. The moon is, Jupiter. So on the day you were born, there's a constellation behind the sun from our perspective that was Libra on September 26. And that was the day that you were born. That determines the fact that you're a Libra. But there's a problem.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And if we're alone, if life is abundant, as Fermi asked many, many, many years ago, if life is abundant and the galaxy is old, where are they? Where are the aliens? There should have been plenty of time not only for them to evolve and be superior to us in many ways and travel the distances of our galaxy, not even of the cosmos, our galaxy. Where are they? Where are they?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They've known about us for 80 years because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 85 years.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Internet, yeah. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
In December, where we are now, the sun is actually in a different constellation, the one that doesn't exist according to the zodiac that was created something like 6,000, 5,000 years ago. It's called Ophiuchus. So there's a certain segment of people born in a 17-day stretch. in December, late November to early December, that are actually Ophiuchins or Ophiuchuses or whatever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. I was, I was blessed as my first guest on the, into the impossible podcast that Freeman Dyson, now you mentioned your dad, your dad mentioned him. One of the greatest intellects of the last 100 years, great physicist, and he had these ideas for these Dyson spheres which would be energy harvesting.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the first ingredient that you need to construct the Huberman planet habitable zone is to have energy, is harvest as much energy as possible from a star. So he basically conjectured a megastructure, an alien megastructure that could be observable astronomers could detect these objects and some have claimed that we have, but those have always been refuted.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it would be basically surrounding a star, capturing every photon worth of energy that came out of it, and then converting that to mechanical energy. And then, yes, and then once you have infinite energy, you can actually do fusion. You can make up whatever molecules you want. You could make up, you know, 3D printing at the quark level on up, basically. And so
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So that was his conjecture of how super advanced aliens would behave. But again, we have no evidence for it, but it's fun. It's certainly fun to have the science fiction, you know, kind of, you know, a lot of interesting science, you know, originates from ideas and creativity that originates from science fiction. So yeah, it'd be a lot of fun.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So that should obliterate astrology as any semblance of a science because they didn't even know this constellation existed. And yet something like 12% of all people share that constellation. So it's just complete nonsense. There's no validity to it. Twins that are born on the same day have radically different histories, past, futures.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Thanks, Andrew. You've been a big inspiration to me too. And you know, Use your language. Thank you for your interest in science. It's really done so much for the world and you give it all for free. And it's truly an inspiration.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it's really fun to talk to somebody who's, you know, at the level that you're at and so many different things and still has that, you know, as scientists, we get inured, we get kind of used to things. Oh, there's a rainbow, there's a meteor, you know, whatever. But you still have that passion. You have that passion, that curiosity. And I think that's what makes a true scientist. And
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The function of education seems to beat that out of kids, but really to have that in the domain and the expertise that you have is a real inspiration. And I think it's a huge service to society. So I want to thank you too.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Thanks, Andrew.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
and there's no predictive power to it, and that's what science is about, right? We want to make a hypothesis, test it, iterate on it, and have confirmation of it, and there's zero, in fact, for astrology.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
In fact, if you'll permit me a kind of silly story, when I was dating my wife, who had become my wife in the beginning, she kind of thought it's fun, maybe we'll go see someone who can tell our fortunes, we belong together, so we went to an astrologer. And the astrologer asked me a bunch of questions. When were you born, obviously. Oh, no, she asked me, what's your sign? So I said, I'm a Gemini.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And she said, OK, cool. And then she told me a bunch of things. And at the end, I said, I just want to double check. I was playing kind of a little bit of a jerk sometimes. So I said, I just want to confirm. Gemini is born in September. I'm born September 9th. She said, oh, no, no, that's a Virgo. But the same things are going to happen to you anyway. It didn't change her outcome.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so in the language of the science, philosophy of science, Karl Popper, others, it's unfalsifiable. And you cannot be proven right. It's so flexible. You're going to find challenges. The stock market is going to fluctuate. Political turmoil, rain during your life. They're so flexible, it can accommodate any story. And that's a hallmark of non-science or sometimes anti-scientific thinking.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Dr. Andrew Huberman.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And not only correlated with that, something even more perhaps basic is temperature, right? In the hemisphere that you're born in, you would expect that all – I'm born, as I said, September 9th. It turns out that's the statistically most common birth date of humans on Earth. And why is that?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly, right? So there's a correlation, right? Yeah, they're at home and they're indoors. They're at home. And they're procreating. Right. Or another thing is what month you're born in, you go back nine months. So actually, capitalism is awesome, right? So it's so efficient. So when you go to CVS, and I've known this several times, thank God, because my wife's been pregnant several times.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And and we have several kids. And when you go to CVS, it's actually pretty interesting. She goes there to buy a pregnancy test. Now, she's the kind of neurotic, you know, person that she had to buy like five pregnancy tests for each kid. OK, I don't know why, but that's what she did. So she's a she likes data.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yes, unless it's a systematic error. And that's what I want to talk to you about later when it comes to the eye and other things. You go to CVS, you buy a pregnancy test, and she's on their gold plan program, whatever. She got the gold card from CVS because she's on it so many times. But when you go there, they know you're getting a pregnancy test.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So exactly nine months later, we start getting advertisements for Pampers and for diapers and for diaper creams and wipes and stuff. So they know They don't know this. They don't know... They're hedging even without knowing the results of the test. Yeah, exactly. What's the downside for them?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Anyway, so the temperature, right? So if you're gestating during summertime versus wintertime, that obviously will have some kind of an effect. I mean, you can tell me a lot more than that. But more than that, you hinted at this, and I'm not going to make you do any math surrounding pregnancy, but God forbid... I put out the correction to that. I defended you. I defended you.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's what a good scientist does. Oh, man. But they actually think that the first astronomers were women. Because they noticed this correlation. What's their monthly cycle? Their menstrual cycle is exactly 29 and a half days, which is actually the lunar cycle down to almost a minute. It's insane, right? That they would have looked up and noticed this renewal and diminishing of the moon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And that there's actually evidence. Now, they weren't professional astronomers until, you know, actually the first professional female astronomer wasn't until like the 1700s in England, right? where she was recognized for using telescopes and so forth. But no, they were very keen on that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's right. I do do hair and makeup if you're interested.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And they were probably dialed into that and what that portended, as you alluded to, for the future of their child. I mean, this is a huge biological investment. Men don't have that. So actually, we are less symmetrical, you know this, than women, right? We have our testes are different lengths or whatever. I guess normal men at least. But women are more symmetrical.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But they're actually, they have an extra timekeeping device that men, we can't relate to that. Their menstrual cycle. Their menstrual cycle, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So I get to study, you know, the entire universe basically. And it's not really such a stretch that cosmetology and cosmology share this prefix because... The prefix cosmos is what relates those two words together that seem to be completely, you know, unrelated to each other, right? But it turns out the word cosmos in Greek, the etymology of it, is beautiful or appearance.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But we'd have to make a real big stretch to then include the effects of the planet Jupiter, which is the biggest planet and is most of the mass of our solar system outside of the sun. Then it would be clear, and you could do this test with identical twins that are identical, fraternal twins, twins that are raised with the same pairing. Some are separated at birth and they turn out
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
very much more similarly when they're identical twins. So it shows that genetics play more of a role than we like to think. Genes are powerful. They are.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, why wouldn't they be, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So, and I think that gives us hope. People say, well, we should not be so haughty. We should not be so arrogant. We have, what, 50% of the same chromosomes as a fruit fly. Who are you to be? And I say, I'll do you one better. I think some bonobos have 98% similarity, but that should give us more sort of treat ourselves and think of ourselves in a way that's more...
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
you know, more elevated, I would say, because we're not that. There's many species of chimpanzees and primates. And so there's only one human, you know, homo sapien, which, you know, a lot of people don't know the word, you know, homo sapien, which is our species and our genes. Sapien doesn't mean it doesn't mean knowledge like science. Sciencia means knowledge. Sapience means wisdom.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I like to look at the etymology. I'm fascinated by it. But it kind of highlights what we should be doing and what is it that we are aware of. And I'm curious, have you ever encountered like why are we called humans that like the wise hominid? And it's because we're the only entity organism that knows it's going to die. Yes, there's some elephants that before one dies and one will take care.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's not the same. It's like you knew you were going to die when you were a kid, very young. And it's that awareness of death and the awareness of how special we are. I think that's what invests life with a lot more meaning. I don't want to get too philosophical.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And modeling of time, as you said before. We can forecast. We don't have the strongest muscles, the sharpest claws, the biggest teeth, right? What do we have? We have this prefrontal cortex that allows us to do what are called gedanken or thought experiments, Einstein said, to predict the future, to model the future. Not really predict it. We can't do that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But we can model likely outcomes, and we can simulate in our minds what those would be like. And we're so dependent on that skill that we sometimes confuse correlation for causation. And as you know, everyone who confuses correlation with causation ends up dying. So it's very dangerous to do that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So we have a beautiful appearance. You know, we look a certain way. We're attracted to certain things. But it kind of reflects the fact that the night sky is also beautiful, attractive, and evokes something viscerally in us. We humans are born beautiful. with two refracting telescopes in our skulls, embedded in our skulls. And as you point out, the retina is outside the cranial vault.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the point is the notion of what's called confirmation bias is prevalent in every human being, scientist or not. And in fact, as scientists, we have to guard against that more than anybody because nothing really feels better than like – Thinking of a hypothesis, modeling the future, and then feeling like you're right. And then you get celebrated and feted.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Maybe you win a golden medallion with Alfred Nobel's image on it or whatever. Those kinds of things are very powerful. And those kinds of things are also very dangerous, which is why it appeals to so many more people to think that the celestial orbs play a role in our lives.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's almost like we've reverted to a paganistic existence where we want to believe there's some force responsible for our fates when maybe it's random.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Or what's a proprioception or our colleague when you were at San Diego, Ramachandra. Oh, Ramachandra. Yeah, like synesthesia, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, if that was useful for something, maybe it is useful.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But so could that not be made into an argument? Well, that means that this is a general feature that we just don't know how to access. But maybe like we could go to the gym and – mental gym or do something to enhance that like you said. I don't know. Some people do that with like infrared, near-infrared wavelengths that they – do some kind of training and they claim they can see certain things.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The question is, how useful is it? And then how predictive is it? And I don't think that we can make a case for the predictive elements of the position, as I said, of Mars and Mercury being in retrograde as it is now. But the thing that's shocking is that, look, there's a whole page in almost every newspaper except the excreble New York Times. No, I'm just kidding. The New York Times.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Are they still around? No. It's very interesting. I'll tell you off the air a recent encounter I've had with the New York Times. But most newspapers have more – hundreds of times more ink written about astrology than astronomy. I mean it's barely – it will barely be in there. And why is that? It's capitalistic society.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So people crave this notion that there's some explanation for the random seeming events that occur in their lives. And that's an urge as ancient as human civilization itself.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I'll never forget you saying that. That means we have astronomical detection tools built into us. We don't have tools to detect the Higgs boson built into us or to look at a microscopic virus or something like that. So astronomy is not only the oldest of all sciences, it's the most visceral one. So it connects us.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And of the sciences, of that branch of science, of astronomical sciences, cosmology is really the most overarching. It really includes everything, all physical processes that were involved in the formation of matter, of energy, maybe of time itself. And it speaks to a universal urge, I think, to know what came before us.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, so I've been in love with telescopes since the age of about 12 when I could first afford one to buy one of my own. And that really came out of the fact that I recognized the limitations of the human eye. It turned out I was 12 years old, woke up in the middle of the night one night, there was this incredibly bright light, you know, brighter than these lights here shining into my room.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I was like, I don't know, there's a street light outside. This is crazy. Let me look outside and see what it is. And it was the moon. And I had never seen it was near a moon set, which is near sunrise, full moon. And I looked at it and I kept staring at it. And there was a star next to it that kind of looked like a piece of the moon had broken off. It was that bright and that clear.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it's unusual to see these kinds of things together. They're actually known as syzygies, which is a great Scrabble word. If you're ever pressed for a win in Scrabble, use the word syzygy. I think it's like 80 points. And that just means a conjunction, an alignment of astronomical objects. I was like, what the hell is this? This is 1984, Andrew. You're younger than me.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But Google did not exist for another 16 years. And I was kind of impatient. I wanted to know what this thing was. What is this thing? It's not moving. It's not flashing. It's not a drone. Back then, it's not Southwest Airlines, right? So I'm looking at it. It's not moving. And day after day, it was like that. And I was like, how am I going to find this out? Like imagine existing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We're so blessed that we have the internet and we have these LLMs. It's so easy now to be a scientist or do research. And anybody can do research. Science is for everybody, right? You always highlight that fact.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So I realized the only way to find out about it was to wait for the New York Times to get delivered on Sunday because they did have a section back then that they don't have now called Cosmos. And in it, it depicted what the night sky looked like that night, which is a Sunday. And that was like three or four days after what – I had this observation, which was incredibly observant.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I looked at it and it was the moon. It showed the moon and it showed Jupiter. I was like, what? You can see a planet with your naked eye? This was around the time Voyager was going by the planets on the grand tour of the solar system, never been done before. I was like, I thought you needed a spaceship. And I realized that was my first bit of astronomical research. I looked up.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I had a hypothesis. What is it? I was wrong. I thought it was a star. It was a planet. I was like, this is insane. Imagine what I could see if I had a telescope. But I couldn't afford a telescope. We were pretty modest means back then. I had a job working on a delicatessen down the street. And I'd do that once a week.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And then I got a grant from a three-letter agency, which is the beginning of many, many scientists' careers. I got a grant from the MOM agency, my mother. She supplemented my $2 an hour salary at the Venice Delicatessen in Dobbs Ferry. And I ended up getting a telescope for $75. And I cherish this thing. And then I was like, oh, let me look at these things in the sky. And it's pretty amazing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't know if you know the history of telescopes, but the first ones were invented because of the glass that was present to make eyeglasses. So telescopes came from eyeglasses. Where was the best glasses? Where were the best glasses made? In the Netherlands. So actually the telescope and the microscope were both invented in Holland.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Like I always ask people, I'll ask you, I know what the answer is probably, but what's your favorite day on the calendar?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And the guy who invented the telescope is very interesting because it would be like he made the telescope, but he never thought to look at the night sky with it. He only used it as a spyglass to look at objects on the horizon or in a city or whatever. He never went like this, looked up at 45. That required Galileo. So he's my absolute hero of all science. We'll talk about him later maybe.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Galileo was the first person to ever look up with this telescope and spot objects in the solar system, in the universe that had never been seen before with a scientific tool. So everybody had used their eyes, back to Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Copernicus, they had to use their eyes, which are telescopes, I'll get back to that, don't worry.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I know you afford me the podcaster's predilection of going off on long tangents, but I think this is good. Galileo then said, well, I'm gonna take this telescope and look at these objects that are otherwise look like stars. And in fact, were called basically wanderers because they're the only things that moved. He first looked at the moon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Now take yourself back to 1609 when he was first looking at these objects. In 1699, there were no clocks. There were no scientific tools of any real virtue. He, in fact, would invent many of these things. There were simple things like a magnetic compass, a slide rule, which none in your main demographic will know what a slide rule is, but that's OK. Very simple tools.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They would use tubes and whatnot. But Galileo looked at the moon. And the hypothesis was everything in the universe is orbiting around the Earth. The Earth is the most perfect place in the universe because God puts the things that are most important close to him in the center of the universe. God is the center of the universe. The Catholic Church held this. And everything will go around the Earth.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
New Year's Day, exactly. What is that? It's a beginning. It's a new—some people say their birthday, their kid's birthday, if they're smart, their anniversary, right? You don't want to get too out of control with the misses. What are those? Those are beginnings. What's the only event that no entity could even bear witness to? The origin of the universe.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And in fact, I'm not going to challenge you because I think you'll defeat me in this. But in your audience, there are probably very many educated, I call them .edu people. There's many, many educated people. I find that even with my brilliant students at UCSD, They can't prove that the Earth is not the center of the solar system.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
In other words, I'll say on my astronomy 101 quiz, I'll say prove that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, which was the whole universe back then, right? And I would say it's about 75%, 80% will not get it right. In fact, I can say to most people, proof the Earth is not flat. I claim the Earth is flat. Prove me wrong. Most people can't prove it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They don't know how the proof is constructed. I don't expect them to go and replicate what Aristarchus did 2,000 years ago. But this is knowledge we've had for, as I said, 2,000 years. The knowledge that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is only about 400 years old. But I would say 99%—I know for a fact— I went to Italy actually 10 years ago.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And we had a ceremony to honor the first person who ever came up with a theory of relativity, which is also Galileo. Galileo had the first notion that relative motion is indistinguishable. That if you and I are on a bike and I'm stationary, you can't tell if you're moving. I can't tell if I'm stationary.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's called relativity of motion. Motion is not absolute. Einstein would later enhance that, put on steroids, and then come up with all sorts of cool stuff that we can get into.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But this notion that you could do observations, that you could use a scientific tool coupled with a hypothesis and then iterate on those hypotheses to make both the instrument better and your hypothesis better and then expose that to scientific peer review, which was not what we have today. That was done by Galileo. He was the first person to use the scientific method. What did he use it with?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
A telescope. So a telescope that he used was a refracting telescope. Lenses like eyeglasses, two of them, one put at the far end called the objective. It's closer to the object. The other one, the eyepiece, close to your eye. And he was able to magnify things about three to 10 times pretty easily.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Light travels at the fastest speed of any entity. Photons travel at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second, except when they go into a medium. That's what they travel in the vacuum of space or in a vacuum in my laboratory or whatever. But when they go into a medium that's transparent or translucent, they slow down. You can think of it as the light waves themselves.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Imagine light waves as rows of soldiers marching together. And then imagine that they're walking an angle to the beach here in Los Angeles. They're marching at an angle. The ones that encounter the water first, they start to slow down. The other ones keep moving at a fast speed. And then the whole beam of light, the whole beam of soldiers gets bent. That process is called refraction.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We can do it – well, this yerba mate is so delicious. We can't do it because it's got a little bit of –
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I think that speaks to something primal in human beings that are curious at least. We want to uncover the secrets of what existed, what came before us. And we don't have any way of seeing that currently. So we have to use the fossils that have made their way throughout all of cosmic time to understand what that was like at the very beginning of time. And perhaps...
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Put a pencil in a clear glass of water, same phenomenon will happen. That's refraction. It's the bending of light by what's called a dielectric or just a medium that's transparent or translucent. And you can do that in a way that you shape the wave of light coming in that will be magnified. And that's in fact what a telescope does. Tele means distance, scope means viewer.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So a telescope really means distance viewer. A microscope means small thing viewer. And so this was kind of revolutionary to use it for scientific purposes. Galileo did other things. We just take these for granted. We got all these cool cameras here. These are all refracting telescopes. You can see the lens in one. You can see that it's on a tripod. Galileo invented the tripod.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We take these things for granted, but people didn't realize that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I think that they were extremely, as they are now, I have great colleagues that are from the Netherlands, they were obsessed with high quality, as Germans are. You know, they're very similar to Germans, into very precise instrumentation and high quality.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's interesting to note that glasses were only really invented in some sense because of the fact that there was an existing standard for human visual acuity. Okay, so we all know we go to the eye doctor.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Eyeglasses, yeah. So we know today that when you go to the eye doctor, there's an eye chart, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Snellen chart, okay.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But all those eye charts, every DMV here has the exact same size for the E at the top, okay? It's a calibration standard. How could they do that 400 years ago? We're talking 430 years ago. It turns out there was one and only one standard that was acceptable across all of Western Europe. It was the Gutenberg Bible.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The Gutenberg Bible was set in print by Gutenberg, and it had a fixed size of all the characters. So what they would do is at a couple of feet, they put the Gutenberg Bible in front of people. It's amazing to think about it because there's only like 10 copies of the Gutenberg Bible still left. They're all in vaults. They're all worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can't buy them even if you're, you know, Elon. When you look at it, you would be able to tell that you could not see at one foot – I could not see what Andrew could see at one foot. So you knew that there was something diminishing my visual acuity, whether – who knows what it was. But they knew that they could then correct that lens to be as good as 20-20 or get up to your standard for me.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And that was the way that they would judge how good your eyes were. And so they then would correct that with lenses. And I always point out how ironic it is because later on Galileo would take those two lenses and instead of putting one on each eye, he'd put one in front of the other one and then use that to construct a telescope.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
maybe about the universe as it existed before time itself began. So to me, it's incredibly fascinating. It encompasses all of science in some sense. It even can include life on other planets, consciousness, the formation of the brain. And to me, I'm always interested in the biggest questions. And the biggest topics that evoke curiosity in me is how did it all get here?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But he didn't actually invent the telescope, but he perfected the telescope. So just like Apple didn't invent the smartphone, They perfected it. Just like Facebook didn't invent social networking, they perfected it, right? So it's usually the second mouse gets the cheese, they like to say. He was the ultimate second mouse.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He would always improve things and make them so much better that he would obliterate his competition. Galileo.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I would say he gave the hypothesis. He wasn't wrong. Galileo didn't correct him. It's just Galileo brought evidence to the table. He brought hard scientific observation.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So what was the milieu of the time was that the Earth was the center of the universe, which was our solar system effectively was the whole universe. They didn't know about stars and galaxies, certainly. We can get into that later. But there was what's known as the Ptolemaic concept of the organization of the cosmos.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the earliest cosmological models were that the sun is the center – the earth is the center of the universe and everything goes around it. However, these were not dopes. They knew that there were problems with that model. There are certain aspects of the orbits of planets for example. I mentioned Mercury's retrograde and what does retrograde mean?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We don't have to get into it, but there are anomalies that the planets will undergo at different times of the year due to the fact that the Earth is, we know now, rotating, revolving around the sun and rotating on its axis, but the main effect is its revolution around the sun.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And the other planets are too in the same plane, the zodiac plane, what's called the ecliptic due to the angular momentum of the proto-solar system. And sometimes the Earth goes faster than, say, Jupiter. So originally it will be out in front, if you will, of the planet, forward center of motion, as you like to say. And then it will be behind it later on.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so it looks like Jupiter is making like this weird S curve. And they couldn't explain that if the Earth is the center of the solar system except that they added on what are called epicycles.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They added on extra little orbits of the planets in order to account for that motion that sometimes it appears, yes, we're moving bulk motion, but then sometimes it goes in the opposite direction when we're going in the same direction. So smart. Yeah, they were very smart.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I should say – sorry, Andrew. The reason that they had good glass is they were some of the foremost – explorers, right? A lot of the early trade and they were, what did exploration give them? Access to trade. So they could get the finest silicon and glass and they could make it themselves. That's their economics. Again, capitalism always wins, right? This is a lesson that we shouldn't forget.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Their commerce, their economies allowed them to do trade and get – acquire the best, highest quality materials, then that was used to make the best scientific equipment. And it's just curious. It would be like if we – they built these scientific tools, but they didn't use them for science.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So imagine like building the Large Hadron Collider or SLAC or something like that and then not using it, just like using it to like measure – I think SLAC is sitting empty, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so that's what cosmology allows us to do, apply the strict exacting laws of physics to a specific domain, which is the origin of everything in the universe. That's what makes it so fascinating.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
People do that with their cameras. Sure. They geek out. Right. Everyone's got their thing. Yep.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I think it's a lot. I mean, my childhood was pretty tumultuous. I think you and I have a lot of things in common, both fathers, scientists and physics and math in my case, very hard driving, very hard to live up to their shadows that they cast, for example, at least in my case. And you seem to have just a beautiful relationship with your dad now, but I'm sure it wasn't always like that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
In fact, you talked about that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. And that episode they texted you is a real gift, not only for all of us who got to witness it, but also for grandchildren, him, his legacy, and so forth. and even your dad's wife and your mom. But the point is, yes, it transported me.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I was living through, after the divorce of my parents, I lived with my stepfather who had adopted us, changed our names, moved to different, we were changing schools every couple of years. And that discovery of the moon next to Jupiter, it was sort of like solving a puzzle. There's a famous saying by Albert Michelson. It was the first Nobel Prize winner in American history. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
: For what? Peter Van Doren, Jr. : Physics, sorry. Michelson, Morley, he proved in some sense that the Earth is not moving through the ether. That was hypothesized by luminaries beforehand. But the point was when a child solves a puzzle, like you would think, well, like an adult, you solve a Rubik's Cube. Okay, I did it once. I don't have to do it again. But like my son will keep doing it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I'll keep like showing off. Can I get it faster? Video games, same thing. Once you solve the video, you don't just like throw it out and stop doing it. You get a taste of that thrill of discovery. Yes, it's diminished. And yes, we become inured to it as we get older and a little bit more – there's just things we have to get – take care of in life and especially as a professor scientist.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can't like marvel over the same things you did when you first did these experiments. But as an – you get transported. And you get to encounter something that you feel like no one has ever done before. For example, when I got my first telescope that night, a couple of months after discovering this, I looked through it and I saw the same features on the moon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I have a 3D printed moon that my son made to show you. And it has all the craters represented on it. It's so cool. And I saw the exact same craters on the moon that Galileo saw. And then I looked at Jupiter. And when you look at Jupiter, you not only see these beautiful atmospheric bands on it. And I brought you a telescope as your end of the year holiday gift.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's yours to keep and no money down. Thank you. Keating brand telescope. Thanks for the gift. And I looked at Jupiter. And when you look at Jupiter, as I hope you'll do tonight or with your crew later on, you will see not only the planet, not only its little atmospheric stripes, maybe even the great red spot, which is amazing, three times bigger than the Earth.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can see it from Earth with this little telescope I got you. But you see four little stars. And there are four stars that are to the left, to the right. They're in a plane with the midpoint of these equatorial storms that are brewing on Jupiter. We know that they've been going on for at least 400 years because Galileo saw them. So that sets a limit, a minimum time.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They're enormous hurricanes on the planet. And the equatorial bands like the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So there's plenty of water up there that's raining down? No, it's not water at all. It's methane, ammonia, but it's a fluid. So it behaves like a fluid doesn't. So you have these swirling whorls and colors will amaze you. You'll see colors on an astronomical object.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's going to blow your mind. And not only is it going to blow your mind because you're doing it, you're going to feel unique in all of science. You will feel what Galileo felt. You won't know that he felt it before you. A billion people have seen it since then. Because for you, it's new. And for you, you're viscerally connected to the maestro, to Galileo, and what he did.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And there's no other branch of science that's like that. You can't look at the Higgs boson. First of all, no one person did. It's a team of 3,700 people that discovered the Higgs boson. And seven people predicted the Higgs boson. Higgs is just one of them. One of my professors at Brown was another one, Jared Gralnick. He passed away, unfortunately. He never won the Nobel Prize, but...
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the point is you can't know what that felt like. You can't know what it felt like to discover gravitational waves because thousands of people did it recently in 2015. But the question of visceral connection to the first discoverer of that phenomenon, it's unique to astronomy. I don't know of another branch of science where you can have that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And best of all, from here in the center of LA, you can see the same craters. You can see these four Galilean – they're called the Galilean moons of Jupiter – And we're sending spacecraft there now to see if they have life on it. It's incredible, Andrew. There's nothing else like that in all of science. For $50 to $60, I have a list on my website, BrianKeating.com.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I have a telescope buyer's guide that I send to people. I don't make any money from it. It's just I love to share science with the public, just like you. But in my case, it's astronomy. And for $50 or $75, you can have this experience that Galileo had. It's an awesome feeling. I think that's what kept me going.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It distracted me from the pains of the life that I had at that time and just struggling as most preteens and teenagers did. But to answer your question that you asked 20 minutes ago, it was really to transport, teleport exactly the opposite of the telescope. I really felt like I was transported to these other worlds. And I could understand them with simple math and simple tools.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Night after night, they were reliable companions and that people love to see it. You'll see Saturn hopefully with it. You can't help but feel this is amazing. It's thrilling. And it allows you to do science with your eyes connected to your mind. It's incredible.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
What's great about science in general is that the best science is apolitical. But I always say, look, there's no such thing as like, oh, well, that constellation is a democratic constellation. Oh, see that asteroid? That's a – no, it is a safe space. I think we do need safe spaces and at best science is a safe space, not meaning it never interacts with politics because of course it does.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But for those moments, we as humans – and you know this better than I do. We need to – we need recovery. You can't just work out – you don't work out seven days a week. You work out six days a week or whatever. It's still more than – Six more than I work out. But the point is we need to recover as much as we need to pay attention to the activity. We need to recover or pay attention to that too.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so the question is where can we recover from social media, from politics, from economic stress and all – I think science is an ideal vehicle for it. It should be apolitical. We shouldn't be always concerned with politics or what's happening on social media. And I'm guilty of this too. I'm certainly spending way too much time on screens. But the point being, science can be that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And astronomy in particular, like I said, is apolitical. It is safe to let your mind run to what you used to do When you were on a dorm with your bros at 3 a.m., just BSing, right? We don't get a chance to do that when you're thinking about mortgage payments and who's taking the kids tomorrow and all these different quotidian things. We need to get back to that more than ever, I feel.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I mean, Galileo in particular is sort of this tragic figure. In some ways, you know, he had the first notions and application of the scientific method, as I said, using an apparatus to confirm a hypothesis, iterating on that. So I said, when he saw the moon, he saw these craters and valleys and rifts and lava fields that you'll see tonight.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Again, people, you can buy a telescope on Amazon, $50. And you'll see the same things that he saw. And you can connect it to your iPhone and post it on Instagram if you want. And I hope you'll do that. That's your only homework assignment. The only one I'm going to assign to you as a professor. So I want you to take a picture of the craters on the moon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the point is, you'll see the exact same things. From New York City, you can see them. From the middle of London, it doesn't matter where you are. If you have a clear sky and the moon is out, you'll see the same thing. But when you look at Jupiter, you'll see these four dots.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And here's where Galileo just had this otherworldly intellect that, you know, when I saw those, I was like, oh, cool, it's next to some stars. Until I realized, I had to do more research, that those are actually the moons of Jupiter. So in one night, tonight, you can, you know, quadruple the number of moons you've ever seen in your life. And some of those moons are almost the size of our moon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Our moon is unusually large. Those moons sometimes will cast shadows on the – so it will be an eclipse. You will witness an eclipse on Jupiter on another planet with this $50 instrument or whatever, OK? When he was observing these things, he would do things that were not only psychological and they were therapeutic for him in his later years. I will explain that in a minute.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He ended up going blind and so losing the sight and kind of the recollections that he had and he lost his daughter. It was a nun because he was – she was illegitimate as most of – I think all of his kids except maybe one, his oldest one. He had mistresses. He was married, divorced basically and I was kind of like – he was Catholic in Italy, primordial Italy basically.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It didn't exist as a country but he was in Tuscany. And he had a lot of challenges. He was almost always broke. Even when he invented his version of the telescope – again, he didn't invent the telescope. But he made it so much better. 10x'd it. 20x'd it. Zero to one. It was incredible what he did with it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He realized this is great and all for me to discover these cool things and learn about the universe. He was deeply religious too. But I got to make money. I got to pay for my house. He had like – imagine like your students at Stanford are living with you because that's the only way you can afford to pay rent in your – I mean – and you're cooking meals for them. They're like slobs, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean like – I was a slob in college, right? So the point is he had bills to pay and he was a businessman. He realized, well, look, if I start making these telescopes, everybody will see the things that I'm seeing. I won't have any monopolistic advantage over Kepler, who is his friend but also his competitor.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They were really vying for who is the best astronomer of all time, Kepler in Germany and obviously Galileo in Italy, well, become Italy. And he realized Kepler was purely theoretical. He had great math chops. He came up with functions for the orbits of planets before Isaac Newton proved that they came from calculus and universal gravitation. Incredible scientist.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But if he gave that, it was like giving a free particle accelerator to your arch competitors, right? He didn't do that. He said, no, I'm not going to make these telescopes, but I'm going to sell them only to the government. And they're going to pay me because these are great military devices. We don't think of them now. But with it, he's so brilliant. He was so charming and charismatic.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He said, I'm not only going to sell you these things. First, he went to the Senate in Venice, the Venetian Senate, the doge, the original doge. We think doge is a coin or some department that Elon's going to head. No, no. The doge was like the chief of the government back in the Venetians, which was one of the most wealthy countries in all of Europe. It was separate from Tuscany.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
and separate from Rome. And he went there and he said, you are in maritime, have you ever been to Venice? It's beautiful, right? So he said, look, come with me. I'm going to take you up into the Piazza San Marco, go up to the tower, and we're going to look out and we're going to see there's a ship out there, but you can't see it with your naked eye.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But if I give you the telescope, you can see it three days earlier before it comes into your harbor. That's like you have an F-35 stealth fighter and you sell the rights to turn off the stealth portion of it to your adversary. It's incredibly valuable.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly. And we speak of that now. Exactly.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Predicting the future, as you said.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly. And we even speak of that now and come to think of it as you're saying it, light years. What is a light year? It's a measurement of distance, but it's in terms of time. So it's exactly what consonant with what you're saying. We are always going to have this combination, this interrelation, this competition between things in space and things in time.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And he realized with this tube that he could see the great distances that also afforded him this extra advantage when it came to predicting the future, as you said.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, you'd have to start with like, you know, GOG or whatever, you know, the first cavemen and women, you know, as I said, the 40 guys.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be much more, you know, optimal time for that. Exactly. So tens of thousands pre-antiquity, you would say. Then the, I would say, fast forward, you know, to the maybe Egyptian epoch, you know, 5000 BCE, so to speak, when they had also a very zodiological and astrological conception of these objects.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And yet they would build things, you know, in relation to the positions of stars and constellations.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Sundial, obelisks, you know, things that were used, primitive things. Stonehenge also, I think it's like 20,000 years ago. They believe it's related to some astronomical observations. They're not entirely certain about that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's one of those great mysteries that's – I think it's less controversial, Stonehenge, than the pyramids. The pyramids seem to be like almost – they lead people into thinking about aliens and all sorts of –
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Certainly. I mean you'd have to convince me that people didn't build them. But exactly how they built it is a great question. I mean – so for example, I mentioned this when I was on Joe Rogan's show. I said if you measure – The bases of the pyramids. It turns out that they're a ratio of a qubit, which is actually qubits, not quantum bits like you and your dad talked about.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But qubits is the length of the pharaoh's forearm. It's basically a foot and a half roughly. So back then, if you were like the president – you were also the metric standard for all of civilization. Wild.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
What's the standard? Wild.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, well, it was just for length or like a foot. We talk about a foot. It was a pharaoh's foot. Yeah, that's where we get those from, right? So there was only kind of one rough standard for calibration, which is incredibly important for removing systematic effects in science in general. So you had a calibration standard. Now we have like a bar of platinum.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We've defined the second in terms of oscillations of a certain atom. called cesium and how many times it oscillates per second.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So now we want to define those in terms of physical quantities, not in terms of people. And so doing that has been a great advance forward in science. And we've only recently gotten rid of what are called artifacts. So it used to be there was a rod that was one meter long. And the meter was originally defined as 69,000. I forget, of the distance from the North Pole to Paris.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But that obviously depends on assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, which it's not, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, that's right. It bulges because it's an oblate sphere, right? Exactly. And so all these things that were relics, we want to get rid of them and tie them to fundamental properties of, say, a quantum system that's very pure and we can isolate it. We don't want to use a pharaoh's foot either, so we have to come with a link standard and
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So now we use the speed of light times the second and we can define things in those terms. But back then, yeah, so they didn't know that. But I told Joe, as I said, if you measure the base of all the great pyramids at Giza, they're all multiples of a cubit times so many numbers of the number pi. So like – but pi wasn't known to them.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Pi wasn't known to be irrational until the Greeks and Euclid proved that it was irrational and that it didn't come from a computational – it couldn't easily be obtained from – it had infinite number of digits, right? So how did these Egyptians know that? An alien told them, no. The way they did it is they laid it out. They used a surveyor's tool.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
One of the surveyor's tool is a stick with a wheel on it. So the wheel's a circle. So you got so many multiples, they just counted. And that's how, so we confuse a lot of things.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly, right? They walked all over. So you don't have to always posit supernatural explanations for things. The answer is simply, we don't know. I certainly don't know how Stonehenge was built, nor do I know how the pyramids were built. But it's not, you would have to convince me that it was built by some other means other than people and the tools that were available to them. Likewise.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't remember how we got on this. So we were marching through.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Then it was Copernicus who had ideas but couldn't prove them. He had no data to substantiate the Copernican or sun-centered model of the universe, which is Also, by the way, you know, almost everything in science is wrong, right? Copernicus is wrong. The sun is not the center of the solar system, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So then you come up to – after him, Kepler discovered the laws of the elliptical motion of planets and their patterns that we still use. We discovered an exoplanet. My colleague David Kipping, I want to introduce you to. He has discovered exomoons.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
These are moons around other planets, some of which are in the habitable zone of their host star and some of them have sun-like stars and are earth-sized planets. It's incredible. There could be, as I said, a link between life evolving on Earth due to the moon on our planet. So too, on an exoplanet, it could require an exomoon, which he's discovered or thinks he has.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He's actually very cautious and hasn't said it explicitly. So Kepler's laws underpin all those discoveries, even to this day, 400 years later. Then Galileo, immediately afterwards with the telescope, phases of Venus that only occur if the Earth is not the center of the solar system. The rings of Saturn, he had notions about those. He accidentally discovered the planet Neptune. It's amazing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And then he – of course the moons of Jupiter falsified the notion that the Earth is the center of the solar system because these moons are going around Jupiter, not around the Earth. So that's completely torpedoed the notion of the true nature of the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic Earth-centered cosmology.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Then soon after that, astronomers measured things like the speed of light using eclipses of moons of Jupiter. They measured distances to Saturn. They mapped out the solar system. And then from there, using parallax, you can kind of gauge the triangulation and using trigonometry, measure the structure of our galaxy.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
William Herschel and his sister, Caroline Herschel, was the first female astronomer, first female scientist. She was the first person to use the scientific method and become a fellow of the Royal Society. in Great Britain.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And then later off after that, we come to the era of the last, you know, kind of the big developments in technology were photographic plates after that, spectrographs, dispersion of light onto photographic material. You could preserve it in memory. You didn't use sketches like Galileo did.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And then up until Hubble, when Hubble discovered two major things, which was one was that the Milky Way was a galaxy. It wasn't the entire universe. There were other galaxies, island universes of billions of stars. And then he discovered the expansion of the universe with help from an astronomer who doesn't get a lot of attention. A lot of the women in astronomy got really short shrift.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
People discovered how fusion works in the sun. Women got at Harvard. And then Henrietta Leavitt, who measured this relationship between the size and brightness of objects called Cepheid variables that Hubble then used to make his law that proved that the universe is expanding.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And then after that, people like Pennsies and Wilson discovering the microwave and radio astronomy, Robert Jansky, all the way up until my colleagues today, some of whom I've interviewed, Adam Ries and Brian Schmidt and Barry Barish.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He wrote the foreword to my second book, Detecting Gravitational Waves, the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe Due to Dark Energy, First Nobel Prize in Astronomy in 2011. Followed up 2015 discovery of – 2017 discovered gravitational waves from inspiraling black holes. There are so many and there are so many. I'd be blessed to know many of them and to have them as my academic pedigree.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I think it's obvious why you have this particular affliction, and that's because you're used to doing experiment. You're a scientist. Your core identity, one of your core identities is a scientist, right? And you think of things scientifically. And as I said before, the scientific method, as we practice it, is based on hypothesis, observation, experimentation, iteration, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, think about this. If I have a hypothesis that certain people can detect sunspots, right? So I want to have a control group and I want to have a variable, right? So I want to be able to contrast and see if it's statistically significant, right? And I want a p-hack, right? So what do I have to do then? Well, I have to control the number of sunspots. Okay, sorry.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I'm not – you used to say you weren't around at the creation – at the design meeting for Human Beasts.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's not good. You don't want to do it. Don't do it. Your colleague at Stanford, Guido Embens, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2021. And he's done a tremendous amount of work in this, confounding variables, p-hacking. Where do these things manifest themselves in physics? Well, high-temperature superconductors. This goes back to the late 80s. I remember graduating from high school.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There was a discovery of room temperature, what's called cold fusion. That was one thing that would create also limitless energy, too cheap to meter from just using hydrogen and from seawater and palladium and platinum.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It turned out to be bogus and it turned out to be – the data were manipulated in such a way that we would say probably fall into the realm of p-hacking, which may not have been maliciously intended. But the goal, the output of it is certainly a driving incentive that influences people to do things that are unethical. And that happens at all levels. And we saw it. I saw it in my own experiment.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
not necessarily accusing my colleagues of being unethical. We were searching and we still are searching for what caused the Big Bang. We're going to get back to your question of how this comes, because I think I can help. But that plate's still spinning in the background. Yeah, it's still spinning. Like a planet. It's spinning like our solar system, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the quarry was so big to unravel what caused the Big Bang to bang, what ignited the spark that became our universe. It's at least, it was called when we announced the discovery at Harvard, on St. Patrick's Day 2014. World News covered it, front page everywhere, New York Times, CNN, every single outlet covered it. It was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Not only did it explain how our universe came into existence, it also predicted the existence of other universes in what's called the multiverse, which we've heard about maybe in quantum computing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, exactly right. That's right. Among many things that we hear about only on that show. So the point is, it was a quarry for the ages. And I knew that because that's why I invented the experiment, right? I told you, my father and I, you know, we never really had the rapprochement that you and your father seemed to have had. And that's great. We always had kind of a difficult relationship.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
As I said, he abandoned me and my book. I write about this rather. He abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin. I was seven, he was 10. And he just left us and Because of that, he didn't end up paying child support for me or my brother and alimony to my mother. And so my stepfather adopted us. And my last name was originally not Keating. It was Axe, A-X.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so when we were adopted, I never saw him. I didn't see him for 15 years. But I knew one thing. He was a brilliant scientist. And he was actually the youngest. He was not only a tenured professor. He was full professor with like a chair at Cornell at age 26. So you and I got our profession, like our 30s or whatever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. I mean, it's like a much, he was 26, 27. I was in math. It was a little different. But I knew he won. Basically, there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics. There's the Fields Medal, which is kind of equivalent at some level, but almost nobody knows about it. It's only given every five years. You have to be under 40, whatever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He never won that, but he won like the prize just beneath that, if you will, called the Cole Prize. A remarkable scientist, got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics. And I knew one thing. He never won the Nobel Prize. So as some kids might compete with their father, who's a captain of the high school football team, and they want to be the captain of the college, very competitive.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Boys can be competitive with their dads, right? You know that. And I wanted to compete with him, but he was an athlete. I was an athlete. I can compete with him and do what he could not do, which was win a Nobel Prize. And I was estranged from him. And I was like, I'm going to win a Nobel Prize, and I'll show him, and he'll regret that he abandoned me and gave me up for adoption.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
This is my thought. I'm not saying it's like the most elevated way to be, but that's the way I thought of it. So I said, I have to invent something, discover something that's worthy of a Nobel Prize. That's all I have to do, quote unquote. How hard can it be? There's been hundreds of Nobel Prizes given out. That's the way you thought about it? I was at Stanford and you're surrounded by Nobel.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You know what it's like. I was a postdoc at Stanford for a short time. We can get into that. And the point was I was obsessed with discovering or inventing an experiment that could take us back to the primordial universe before what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space. It's the origin of the first elements in the periodic table of the elements.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We still don't know what caused that event to occur. And I realized that if we discovered what caused that event to occur, which is hypothesized to be a phenomenon called inflation, which was co-created by at least three scientists, but two of whom were at Stanford, associate with Stanford, Alan Guth, who's now at MIT. He was a postdoc at Slack.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And Andre Linde, who's a renowned professor at Stanford to this day. So they predicted that there was this mysterious substance called a quantum field and that the fluctuations in this quantum field existing in the four-dimensional infinite space, the random fluctuations of a quantum field, what's called vacuum energy, is unstable.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can't have what's called vacuum or negative energy and have it just sit there permanently. It eventually inexorably must fluctuate, and the fluctuations can actually spawn an expansion of that four-dimensional space locally. And that occurred at a specific time.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So you can think of it as just ordinary three-dimensional space. But imagine x, y, and z extend to infinity in all directions. And we're sitting at our local, what we perceive as the center of our universe. It's just our observable universe. We can look out 90 billion light years in any direction, which is longer than the age of the universe times the speed of light.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's because the universe has been expanding. In addition to having existed for 14 billion years, it's been expanding for an additional power of three times that. And then imagine time. So time is a fourth component, and we have to weave those together in order to understand how objects behave in this landscape of what we call the cosmos.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But it wasn't limited to just our – what we now see is our universe. We have a horizon just like if you go off to the Pacific Ocean here away from land, you see a horizon. It's a circular horizon in all directions. So we live on a three-dimensional planet, right? The horizon is two-dimensional. It's one-dimensional, a circle that we can see any ship that's above the horizon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We can see visible light coming from it, right? But we can perceive that there are things on the other side of the planet that we can't see, and we have to learn about those through indirect methods. We can talk about that at a different time. So there's a horizon on a three-dimensional surface. That's a one-dimensional surface. In four dimensions, it's a two-dimensional surface.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So you kind of lose two dimensions. And that means it's a sphere. It looks like our universe looks like a sphere centered on us. We look in all directions. We see constellations. We see galaxies. We see clusters of galaxies. If you go far enough back, you see this primordial heat that's left over from the formation of the elements. That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's what I study. It's properties. And what it reveals is the oldest light in the universe, the oldest possible light. It was once visible. You could see it if you existed, but nobody existed back then. And it originates from the formation of the lightest elements and the lightest atoms on the periodic table.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So you could look back and if you could see this, you would see a pattern imprinted on that light called gravitational radiation or waves of gravity. And that would be evidence of something beyond the visible horizon. And that would actually originate from this inflationary epoch if it occurred.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So I had the idea to build the first telescope, a refracting telescope of all things, just a telescope with lenses, but lenses that are transparent to microwaves and focus microwaves. But I realized I could build that telescope. And if we were successful, I didn't think we wasn't guaranteed to be successful, but it was a big enough scientific quest.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we were correct. And in fact, spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because we had a retracted discovery that we made at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014, 10 years ago.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Very clear. And that's how it relates to this p-hacking and everything else. We actually didn't have this paper peer reviewed. We were so concerned that a competitor, which is a spacecraft, a billion-dollar spacecraft, we were just a $10 million experiment, a little telescope at the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been a couple times.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And that instrument bested a scientific telescope led by 1,000 people costing a billion dollars led out of multiple countries in America and Europe. And we were terrified, as many scientists are, that we're going to get scooped. In fact, the original discovery of the cosmic microwave background was made by accident.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The discovery of this three Kelvin heat source that's coming to us in all directions, i.e. it's a background, was made by accident at Bell Laboratories. And Bell Labs accidentally discovered it because they were looking at the very first communication satellites. AT&T, Bell Labs of communication. So they stumbled on it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They accidentally said, I'm looking at the satellite that should have a certain amount of background hiss, noise, whatever that was expected. But I'm getting hundreds of times that amount. And where could that be coming from? They did very excruciating, very high precision measurements.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And they found they couldn't identify a single terrestrial source or a cosmic source of any other sort except for the fact. that if the universe began essentially with a big bang, they didn't call it that back then, that there would be a pervasive heat left over that would be exactly this temperature, three degrees above absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So I knew if they won a Nobel Prize, certainly I'd win a Nobel Prize for discovering why that effect happened, right? It's like you discover, you know, some amino acid and then you discover, well, it's produced by DNA. Well, certainly, you know, if the amino acid won the Nobel Prize, certainly DNA would win the Nobel Prize, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We didn't publish it. We submitted it to the archive. We had a press conference at Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. And it was televised. And in the audience were Nobel laureates and reporters. But the discovery that, you know, it was clear that we would have won it. However, at that time, I had been removed from the leadership of the experiment that I created.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So I created the predecessor experiment. It's like iPhones. You build one, then you upgrade it. You build a better camera. So the first one I invented when I was a postdoc at Stanford, it was called Bicep. And it stood for Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it's also kind of a play on words because the pattern of microwave polarization, which we can talk about, was a twisting, curling pattern. So I made the pun, like curl like you do bicep, the muscle behind curls. Anyway, it's not that funny. And they ended up trying to change the acronym, which pissed me off. But anyway, the tragic thing is that we built this experiment.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We upgraded this experiment. It's very hard to get money to build it. I got money from David Baltimore, who's the president of Caltech.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He gave me a special grant, just presidential. It's called Caltech President's Fund. He gave it to me and my postdoc advisor, Andrew Lang, this incredible scientist. He was married to Francis Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. in chemistry, renowned scientist as well. And they were just a power couple. And he invited me to give a talk and I gave a job talk. He hired me on the spot.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I couldn't help myself from saying yes before he finished this. I was miserable at Stanford, by the way. It was 1999, 2000, dot-com boom. I was making $32,000 a year living on Alma Street. The Caltrains were running every 17 minutes. I know because I was awake from 5 a.m. I couldn't sleep more than four or five hours. And I just said yes, moved down to Caltech.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And because of that, I convinced him and my colleague, Jamie Bach, who's currently a professor, to build this telescope and put it at the South Pole in Antarctica. And that was the only place we could do it. And the only university that would fund it was this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund. So these confluence of events.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And by the way, then because I got this job and because I built this telescope with my colleagues, I got the job at UCSD, which then enabled me to
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The initial one was a million dollars to build the first version.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So because I was recognized and this experiment got a lot of attention because it was really the first one ever designed to look for the spark that ignited the whole Big Bang. So it became just the cause celebre of the cosmology field.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Tiger Woods, another Stanford. Right. Same story. Father, hard pushing, driving. And then what does he do after he, you know, is a PGA champion? He wants to like become a Navy SEAL or something like that.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It wasn't enough for him. Sorry, I interrupted your question.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
What was kind of revelatory to me is that sometimes you start a quest or you start a journey, and the fuel that gets you going just no longer serves you when you get there. My brother always says baggage has handles so you can put it down.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So that, like, journey from initiating it, the experiment, to best my dad, to show him up, to make him regret that he abandoned me and my brother. I mean, I always said, I could see how he could abandon me. I was only seven. I'm kind of boring. You know, he used to joke, I only care about kids once they learn calculus. He was, you know, funny.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He would say it in jest. And it is true. We did reunite. And we did have a rapprochement. But it was after inventing this experiment, after I arrived at Caltech. It was. I mean, he was this kind of intellect. And it was so lovely to see you and your dad. You know, my wish for you is to have kind of an experience, maybe similar, maybe not. But when you do have kids and please God, you will.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
um, you get to, you, you get a do over, you get to kind of correct the mistakes or the ways that you, and you'll never get it right. You know, one of my friends, a psychiatrist, he says, your job as a parent is to only pass on half of your neuroticism to your kids. And if every generation does that, you know, eventually be a perfect species.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But, um, but I, but I felt that passion and so forth to kind of best him. And then when we reunited and, and as I said, it no longer served me. But the trajectory that I had launched this experiment on continued unabated. And so that had this inertia, this momentum that couldn't be stopped.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
In fact, so many people wanted a part of it and so much pressure was surrounding it that I think partially that led to me actually being kind of kicked out of the leadership of the experiment. And that was precipitated by a truly tragic event. So I told you, My advisor, Sarah Church, set up a job interview for me with her advisor when she was a postdoc at Caltech named Andrew Lang.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Andrew was like, at that time I was estranged from my dad. He was like a father figure. He was like, ever see the TV show Mad Men, like Don Draper? He's just like handsome, good looking. Everyone thought he was going to win a Nobel Prize. He was stolen from Berkeley. They spent tons of money to recruit him from Berkeley to come to Caltech. His wife was a power couple, Frances Arnold.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Again, she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. And he just had the world at his fingertips, charming, funny. And he would say things like, you know, Brian, this is so unrealistic that we have to do it. Like he was a kid. He loved to play and he loved – he's the one who inspired me in this way of just – never stopping like that passionate curiosity and the reward that you get.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I always say, you know, when you solve a problem, your reward is a harder problem like that. But that if you're a scientist, that feels good because it's like I would say and I think it's one of your colleagues. I'm not I'm not sure so much good stuff and going on up there, but But there's this concept of finite games and infinite games, right? So I would say science is an infinite game.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can't win science. It goes on forever. No one masters all of whatever science is. You can debate even what it is. But it's composed of an infinite number of finite games. Getting into college, getting into graduate school, getting a postdoc, getting a tenure track position. Those are all finite games, right? And the ultimate – what's the ultimate finite game?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
A Nobel Prize because only three people can win it each year. There's only 200 people have ever won it. There's more people in the NBA than have won it in physics, right? So this is a very exclusive club and if you win it, somebody else isn't going to win it, odds are.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And this pressure to kind of get to that level should never exceed the passion that drove you to become a scientist in the first place. And so I was obsessed with that. And what Andrew Lang showed me is that science is its own reward. And the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman would say, is its reward. Science is its own reward. And that's characteristic of these infinite games.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You just want to keep playing them. And the tragic thing... Is that – I'm emotional thinking about this. When Andrew was at the peak of his life, he chose to take it. He took his own life.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He killed himself. Ironically, tragically, he used helium, which is central to the formation of the universe. And the creation of our universe is reliant in large part on helium, the abundance of helium. And he asphyxiated himself in a cheap, dirty, sleazy motel. Actually, I had stayed at in Pasadena when I was visiting him for my initial job talk.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He was 41, I think.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He had three kids.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. Francis is still a renowned professor.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They were separated. They had gotten estranged and they weren't living together. It was interesting. He was always very close. She had two children, I think, from a previous marriage or one child from a previous marriage. And he was like a father to that son as well, like a biological father, whatever that means. Kids were so dedicated to him. And look, don't cry for me.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, first of all, we have to take ourselves back. deep prehistory. We know that ancients were looking at the constellations because they were seemingly either in control of or correlated with or perhaps causative of the seasons. And that was of divine importance, supreme importance for them, right? Their whole existence in early agrarian societies, hunting societies, gathering societies.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, I still emotional because he meant so much to me as a mentor, as a friend, as an advisor. As a father figure basically, but he had real kids and he had adopted kids.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And he was a pragmatist. He would give me advice, life advice. And again, I was estranged from my father. He was playing this role. And he was just so, he was charming, handsome, charismatic.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He had just discovered, came off this discovery of proving that the universe has a flat spatial geometry, which just means that any triangle that you make in the universe, whether it's three planets, three stars, three galaxies, three patches of the cosmic microwave background radiation, always the interior angles add up to 180 degrees as they do on a flat table here, as they did for Euclid.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And that had astonishing implications for how the universe might have begun.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't think it's explicable. I don't think, I mean, the human brain is the most complicated thing that human brains can even contemplate, right? It's the solipsistic in a sense, but I couldn't really wade into it. I mean I know details of his personal life and yes, divorce and separation and so forth.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But I don't think that's it just because the highs of the new quest and like the dopamine hadn't really come in from Bicep and it wouldn't come in for four more years after his death in 2010. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
: We got to continue the project. But because he was removed and he was kind of my consigliere or whatever. I was to him. I forget how the relationship goes. I'm not as conversant with the mafia as I should be.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But with Andrew, with his death, one of the trivial in comparison consequences was that the main patron and backer of me in my career who had helped me get my job at UCSD had helped me get this presidential career grant which I received from President Bush and all these incredible accomplishments and just been my sounding board on experiments and kept me going and helped me when I had –
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So they had to know about time. So time, the essence of time and that On large scale for seasons, for holidays, for festivals, for propitiation of deities and so forth, they had to keep track of it. And that's why in the caves in Lascaux that date back to the 40,000 BCE, they depict constellations. Orion, the hunter, Taurus, the bull, all these different constellations, they depict them there.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
troubles with my graduate students and he would talk to my, I mean, it's unheard of, right? The compassion that this man had. And if he had only reached out to me, you know, I'm sure he had better friends than me, but like I would have gone up in a second. You know, I went to the motel where he took his life when I was writing my book just to put me back in Like try – how can I comprehend it?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I couldn't. I just cried. I sat in front of the hotel and I cried. But no, I don't think we can understand it. But the eventual high wouldn't come and then a much more crashing low after we essentially had to retract it and we're disconfirmed as they say.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. Yeah. I was at UCSD and I left Caltech.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I never had the physique to get into the military, although I wanted to at one point to be a pilot. Actually, I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like my stepfather did. But I didn't have the physique. I didn't have the HLP diet back then. But the point was you go on a military. It's a whole way and you do it in seven days, eight days if you're lucky.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Sometimes it could take three weeks due to the weather down there. It's the most violent weather, most winds, turbulence, everything hostile. But that's a cakewalk compared to the Explorer Shackleton. Scott and, of course, Amundsen. So the quest to get to the South Pole first, which is South Pole, I should say, for people that aren't familiar, Antarctica is the seventh continent.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's the last one to be discovered. It was only really discovered. It was thought to be there because it was thought that to balance the continents in the northern hemisphere, you needed a massive counterweight in the southern. It's so stupid. But anyway, it wasn't discovered until… 1900s, really, that they truly existed. And then it wasn't explored until 10 or 12 years later.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And the quest to get to the South Pole, it was the last unexplored, you know, non-filled in part of the map of the Earth. So the quest to get there was like going to the moon. And in fact, it exactly parallels the moon in that once it was reached for the first time, nobody cared to go back again, you know, for many, many years.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And we're only going back to the moon now, 60 years later, 50 years later. after Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 missions, right? So getting there and setting that bar, right, and making that accomplishment, sometimes that's the extent of it. Like when you have that dopamine hit of being the first to get somewhere. Scott was a British scientist and explorer. And Amundsen was just an explorer.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Amundsen, Roald Amundsen, he tried to get to the North Pole first. He lost. Somebody else beat him. And he said, well, I'm going to keep going with this skis and sled dog team that I have. And he literally went to the South Pole, 180 degrees around. So the poles are the two endpoints of the Earth's axis of rotation. There's a North Pole. There's no land there. There's no continent there.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's ice there and Santa is there. Exactly, right? And then the South Pole is a continent. I brought a piece of it here that I collected probably illegally from Antarctica. I'll show it to you later. It's just rocks, right? So if you drill under the ice in Antarctica, you come to a continent. That's the difference between the North and South Poles.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the South Pole is 700 nautical miles from the coast of Antarctica. The closest point of approach in the 1900s was you take a ship from New Zealand You sail due south. There's no other way to go. And you come to the continental shelf. The coastline is called McMurdo Station, which was just basically there's some sea lines there and that's it and orcas and penguins and nothing else at that time.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Now there's a whole research station. And then they got on skis and skied up 9,000 feet from sea level to 9,000 feet where the polar plateau flattens out. And they got to the South Pole and Amundsen got there three weeks before Scott. And Scott was this British naturalist, like a Darwin, but also he was a scientist plus an explorer. So he wanted to collect samples and he found flora and fauna.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, partially that was because Netflix didn't exist back then, right? There was no TikTok. And so there wasn't much to do at night. And in fact, the more you were out at night, you probably increased your opportunity to be consumed by some predator, right? So you were more focused on being stationary, observing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's not much rocks, meteorites. He actually discovered meteorites in Antarctica. Incredible scientist. But because he was a scientist, it cost him his life. Because he was carrying all this scientific equipment and scientific samples, and he had to ski up them. He would find it, and he's like, I'm not coming back the same way that you got there because of the wind patterns.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So he knew he'd never come back, so he couldn't leave it there. So he had to carry extra food, fuel, and men dedicated to it. Oh, and by the way, the Norwegian team, Amundsen was Norwegian. And they used sled dogs for two reasons. One, they conserved calories. They provided propulsion. And then they provided a tasty snack once you got to the South Pole.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Because once you get to the South Pole, you can ski downhill 9,000 feet to sea level, basically. And so they ate—British would refuse to do that. So they knew they couldn't eat their dogs. And they had dogs, but they wouldn't eat them. So they were the sled dogs. And when they got to the South Pole— They came within three or four kilometers, and it's totally flat like this table.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The South Pole looks like this. Go out in the middle of the ocean, freeze it, paint it white, and that's what it looks like. It's white, 360 degrees around. It's the most boring place on Earth, literally, and I've been there. So you can see things really far away. He got there. He got within three kilometers, and he saw something on the horizon. He's like, oh, bleep. And it was a Norwegian flag.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, can you imagine Neil Armstrong steps out of the Eagle and he lands on a Soviet flag? I mean, it would be like the most crushing. It was the most, I think, the most depressing moment in human history to come so far. And he actually said, he said, great God, this is a horrible place. And all the more so for having reached it without the benefit of priority.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the king and queen, they were depending on him to make the first, you know, for king and country, right? Seeing the Norwegian flag. So what did he do? He was a good scientist. He said, maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they're off by 10 feet. I can say, no, they were right. The Norwegians got there first.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And because he got there three weeks later in the middle of January, by the time he turned around, the winds had died down. They were no longer at his back. He was skiing. He had no food. He died about three weeks later or three months later in March. So his body was later recovered. And it wasn't reported back to England for another six months. So they gave their lives for science, for discovery.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And to come up short to be second, it must have been the most crushing defeat in history. Wow. But it happens to be the best place to do astronomy in the world. And you get there by flying to Santiago, Chile? No. First you go to Christchurch, New Zealand. You go to Auckland, LAX, Auckland, Auckland to Christchurch. And then the U.S.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And as I said, we can do astronomy uniquely so amongst all the sciences with just the equipment we're born with. you know, measurements with our eyes with respect to landmarks to calculate patterns. And humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, sometimes too good.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
has a charter with the New Zealand Air Force, and we give them C-130 cargo planes. We have our own C-17 cargo planes, the jet-powered ones. Unfortunately, I got the C-130s, which is a four-prop plane.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I was on a plane that had the entire winter – summer supply – sorry, the entire winter supply of bananas on this cargo plane, which is as big as this room, the cargo hold, 12 by 12 times 50 feet long. And it was filled with bananas. And at first you're like, oh, cool. This is great. Until you realize there's no bathroom on the plane.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's just literally a five-gallon bucket and a shower curtain. There are no windows on it because why do paratroopers need windows? And then there's enormous crates of bananas. There's 12 tons of bananas. I have not touched a banana in 12 years because of that. I know I'm missing potassium or whatever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the point is you land on the coast and then if you're lucky, you take a flight the next day and it's a ski plane. It's the only plane that the US does not export. In other words, we export the F-35. This is a strategic asset that we will not export. So it's hard to get to.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You're right. A slight deviation from that is it's not light that we're looking for. We're not looking for optical light. We're looking for heat. So it's heat pollution. You're exactly right. We're looking to avoid heat pollution. So we want to be somewhere cold.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We want to be somewhere that's far away from man-made sources of RF interference and microwave interference and communications, obviously. But the South Pole has a couple of other properties. One, the sun is below the horizon and the sun is 5,500 Kelvin. And we're looking for something that's a fraction of a Kelvin, maybe a few milli or nano Kelvin at most.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So it's billions of times that we want to get a void. Even the Earth itself is still 300, almost 300 Kelvin down there. Freezing is 273. So it does have that property. But the best part about it, it's above a lot of the Earth's atmosphere because it's at 9,000 feet above sea level.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it's so cold, you don't know this because you're a California baby, but on the East Coast, when I would grow up, some days the bane of my existence would be you'd listen on the radio and they'd announce school closures due to snowfall in the winter. And sometimes they'd say, oh, you're out of luck because it's too cold to snow.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Sometimes the air temperature cannot saturate and perform precipitation. And the South Pole is like that. It's so cold that if you took this glass, I'm holding a glass here, and it was empty on the table here. And I extend this glass up to outer space.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The amount of water, if I took all the water in the atmosphere, the humidity in the atmosphere above the South Pole and condensed it into a liquid, it would be 0.3 of a millimeter. Here in Los Angeles, it's about an inch or 25 millimeters or more. And so you'd like to not go there. Now, why is that important? Well, water absorbs microwaves. That's how your microwave oven works.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It heats up the water molecules. They start to vibrate and jumble. That causes friction. They heat up and eventually they'll boil, right? So that's why sometimes you can overheat liquid in a microwave. You can't tell, but it's super hot and actually it can be dangerous. But in this case, we don't want a photon coming from the Big Bang perhaps or before the Big Bang with the spark that ignited it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yes. And the repetition of it over and passed down through generations. Before there was written language, there was pictography. There was the cave paintings and so forth. There was oral language and that was it. Written language is only 10,000 years old or something like that. So to store information, that meant it was a continuity between generations.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We don't want that to travel for 14 billion years nearly and then get absorbed in a water molecule above the Earth's surface. So the best place to go is space. But space, even with SpaceX, I haven't done any scientific experiments, but it's about maybe a factor of 1,000 to a million times more expensive.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the same satellite that we were worried was going to scoop us was exactly 100 or almost 200 times more expensive than our experiment at the South Pole.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We ended up getting about $10 million.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But those are all funded by you and your listeners and some of the taxpayers. So the National Science Foundation operates those C-130s are part of the National Science Foundation's fleet. We don't pay a dime for them. If I want to build a computer network system down there, we don't pay a dime for it. It's actually a point of contention because now I'm no longer with that experiment.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I've recused myself from it for many years, not because of the incident where we were basically disconfirming – later disconfirmed our results.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I didn't do the news conference. OK.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Some months, yeah. Some months.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Look, I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud that I had such a base, you know, kind of pursuit. I think it was, as I said, compounded by psychological factors, you know. But did you have fun doing the work? Oh, I loved it. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
My great-great-great-great-grandfathers, elders, whatever, taught me that when the moon is in this constellation, the sun is in this constellation, we all should plant or we should harvest in other times. And so it was – we still do use – the rotation of the earth hasn't changed that much since this 40,000-year period, right? I mean the axis in which it rotates, that's a different story.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, getting to do what I do now, and now it's even more exciting in a sense because the project, you know, and by the way, it's not like we made a blunder and like, you know, Rob hopefully took the lens cap off the camera. We didn't make a blunder like that. There have been many, many blunders. and actually led to much worse retractions. Our results are stronger than ever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I should say are the BICEP team's results. I've left the team as I said, but their results are still the very best by almost an order of magnitude. We hope with the Simons Observatory that I'm co-leading with colleagues at Princeton and Penn and other places that we can actually supersede them, but we haven't yet. And so what we saw I should be very clear. We didn't make a blunder.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We didn't put our thumb in front of the viewfinder. We didn't make something stupid. We mistook a signal produced by another astrophysical source as representative of this curling pattern of microwaves for which BICEP was named. That would be indicative if confirmed of the inflationary origin of the universe which by the way would be concomitant with the existence of the multiverse.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the stakes are really high. That means the incentives to make sure you detect that are really high too and not get scooped as happened many, many times. My advisor was scooped. He never won the Nobel Prize. My advisor's advisor. He never won the Nobel Prize. These accidentally discovered, serendipitously discovered astronomers, Penzias and Wilson, they did win the Nobel Prize.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So there is a pressure on scientists to get there first, like Falcon Scott, Robert Scott getting to the South Pole first. There is a benefit to priority. It's just a fact of life. And science is no different. We teach undergraduates about seven or eight different experiments. All of them won the Nobel Prize at some point in physics history. It doesn't mean they're not going to win a Nobel Prize.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
No. Why? Because they didn't get there first. So getting there first in sight, that's for better or for worse, is the sign of greatest accomplishments, the sine qua non of accomplishment is that that does lead to Nobel Prizes.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I should say what we saw. What we mistook as the imprimatur of this origin spark of the universe was the humblest substance in the universe, namely dust. So when a star explodes, it produces, after its lifetime has expired, it fuses lighter elements into heavier elements. Eventually, it gets to produce iron.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And iron is the element for which, once it's fused together from, I think it's silicon or two nuclei before it, it produces too little energy to keep the star buoyant and expanded. And so the star immediately starts to collapse. When that collapse occurs, it blasts out into the interstellar medium that surrounds it all the byproducts, the silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and the iron.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it blasted out into the universe surrounding it. And that happens enough times in our galaxy that the galaxy is actually a pretty polluted place. It's smoggy. It's dusty. It's dirty. And the dust is actually little microscopic meteorites. So on my website, BrianKeating.com, I give away – actually, I have a special link, BrianKeating.com slash Huberman.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I will give away actual meteorites that come from your ancestral homeland of Argentina. And you'll see when you get them, they're highly magnetic. They're very dense. And I give you the material, the composition of these meteorites and the assay. We do X-ray crystallography on them. It's really cool.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the actual spin rate, the angular momentum of the Earth has not depreciably changed that much. And so the positions of these objects were of such importance that the ancients would use them for all these purposes. But there were so few things that changed position that they actually had names for them. They're called planets. So planet in Greek – It's like the word plane, like airplane.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The actual composition of them is determined by this last event that a star does before it dies, which is to produce iron.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So we did discover a microwave signal from the galaxy, not from the Big Bang, not from the cosmos, but from particular and unique to our galaxy, which is that when a star explodes, it produces this material, mostly made of iron, these micrometeorites that I talked about, put on my website for your listeners. And these micrometeorites are also going to act like little compass needles.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They're highly magnetically susceptible. So the Milky Way, everything in the universe has a magnetic field. You have a magnetic field. Birds have it. Even bacteria can have it. And our planet obviously has it. And the galaxy has it. What happens when you put a compass in a magnetic field? Those needles get aligned with the magnetic field. That then produces a type of polarization.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, polarization is the least familiar. Light has three characteristics. Its intensity, its color or spectrum, and its polarization. Almost nobody knows what polarization is. But it's really the essence of what makes light a wave. If you think about an ocean wave, the ocean wave is going up and down, undulating up and down.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And the undulation, the direction perpendicular to the sea surface, is sort of its polarization. Happens to be that water waves are actually polarized longitudinally, but forget that. Or if you and I, separated by a meter and a half, two meters, we have a rope between us. If we oscillate that rope up and down at a certain frequency, the frequency will be the spectrum, the color of the light.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
How hard we do that would be the intensity of the light. And the plane that we're oscillating, the jump rope or whatever, that's the plane of polarization. These little needles of cosmic dust from the exploded innards of a star that died in our galaxy many years ago and many, many billions of these stars, they produce these particles of dust.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So we saw that pattern instead of seeing the birth pangs of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It means something that moves or wanders. So when you name something, it means it's pretty different from the other things in which are not associated with that characteristic. So the planets, there were only five that they could see at that time up to Saturn. And they actually would associate those not only with astronomical events but events down on Earth. That's what connected the Earth.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So the moon is always half a degree wide, same exact apparent angular diameter as the sun, which is unique among the 290 moons in our solar system. Only our moon has the same apparent diameter as seen from its planet as the sun does, meaning we're the only planet that can have a total solar eclipse. an exact total solar eclipse like we had a couple of months ago in Austin, Texas.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Be that as it may, the moon doesn't change its size. I would hope not.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The moon is about 60 times the Earth's radius from the Earth. It's 250,000 miles away, which is about one and a half light seconds away. and it is about the size of the continental U.S. in diameter, or a little bit less. So the moon's size doesn't change, but when the human eye has something to compare it to, the brain has a reference point to compare it to.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And because it's so big, if there's something in front of it, a 747, a person, a large building even, when you were, if the moon is behind that object, because it's so far away, moving even the Earth's entire radius doesn't change the moon's apparent angular diameter. It's the same in Peking as it is here, Beijing as it is in Los Angeles, right?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So that means a very small, a very large change in the distance in the Earth would change the building size dramatically, could reduce it to zero basically. But when you compare it to something that's close on the horizon, your brain has something visually to compare it to. When it's overhead, zenith or whatever, It doesn't have anything to compare it to, so you're just looking at it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But you can always measure it, and you can prove to yourself it's always the same size. It's about the size of your pinky fingernail held at arm's length, same size as the sun. And interestingly enough, it's the same— You said one degree. It's half a degree. Half a degree. Half a degree, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So we have legacy of that in our calendar today. So Sunday, named after the sun. Monday, moon. Tuesday, and you go to the Latin languages. I think it's Mercury, which is Mercury Day. Venus Day, so you go to the Romance languages. And then the only one that's not a Latin name is, of course, for Thor, the god Thor, Thursday. And then it comes back Saturn Day, Saturday.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Fun fact, which is bigger, the width of a rainbow or the width of the moon? And is a rainbow wider than a half a degree? You ever seen a rainbow?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Roy G. Biv, yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's the same size. Okay. It's the size of the sun. Okay. So it's a trick question. Exactly. That's right.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There you go. Professor Faust is the test.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, I'll tell you something really cool. If you go to the South Pole, which is oversubscribed by a factor of 10 to 1, 10 times as many people want to spend their nine months of their year minimum at the South Pole than we have room for to actually do work at the South Pole. Which means 10 people total, right? No, there's 45 people there. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And they're all listening to you. So when you want to go there, when you do go there, they actually don't know where the sun is going to set. Remember, the sun only rises and sets once a year, right? So it's one day and one night per year, six months long. where the sun sets is unknown. And actually, the days preceding it, the sun is making a big circle around your head.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I've seen this with the moon. So the sun and the moon, they just make a circle. And slowly, after reaching their apex on the first day of summer, which is December 21st for them down there, upside down, eventually it crosses the horizon on March 21st. Around March 21st, that's the first day of fall or when they start... getting ready for winter, they don't know where it's going to go down.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
We think of it always going to the west. But where is west at the South Pole? Every direction you look is north. So when this occurs, the actual phenomenon that you mentioned, the green flash, can last for days or can last for hours. So if you really are an aficionado of Huberman protocols and you want to see the green flash, apply to be down there.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But the bad news is you're stuck there for nine more months. So, yes, it's a real phenomenon. Not only can you take pictures of it, but you can see it with your eye. The only correction I would say is you pretty much need to have a perfectly clear day. You can't have any clouds on the horizon. And it's best seen over the ocean. So we're blessed here.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So they were all used as a clock. And people don't really grasp this. I mean, we have an Apple Watch. We have whatever. We didn't have a clock that was functional that would work on all different time zones and all different conditions on the pitching deck of a ship until the 1700s, basically. It was a huge problem.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. So the Earth's atmosphere is actually layered, but it's actually simpler to think about the Earth as being flat. Now, hopefully there's no flurfers out there thinking that Brian Keating is advocating the flat Earth. But imagine this table. We're looking at a table.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Imagine there's a slab of translucent glass on it, and we're sitting on the table underneath the slab of glass, pretty thick glass, right? And you're looking straight up. you look through a minimum amount of the glass, right? Straight up would be zenith at your local horizon. Every direction you're looking is your horizon. You see off the edge of this flat earth in this analogy.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
When you look at a slight angle, you're going through more path lengths. of the substrate, of the substance. More glass. More glass. Finally, if you did have this thing extending to infinity, you'd be looking through an infinite amount of atmosphere or glass when you're tangent to the horizon, when you're going parallel to the Earth's surface in this flat Earth analogy.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The Earth's atmosphere is not only made of oxygen. It actually has a lot of particulates. And it's because of those particulates, a lot of them come from dust and a lot of them come from volcanoes and a large amount now comes from human-made sources, pollution and so forth. The more optical depth, the more path length that you look through, the more scattering of the sun's light occurs.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
When scattering occurs, the longer wavelength light more easily penetrates through dust, smog particles, even glass. So that goes through easier. And the short wavelengths, comparable to the intermolecular spacing of the smog, the dust, the gas, and the atmosphere, the oxygen, scatters much more efficiently. And so that gets scattered out of the beam of light from the sun.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The sun's light, though, actually peaks slightly in the green. We don't actually notice this because our eyes are – and we're used to thinking of it as very yellow. And the reason for this can be substantiated by – Night vision glasses, what color is the light coming in? It's green, right? The amplified versions of these things. Why? Because your eye is very sensitive to green light.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's even more sensitive to green light than the yellow light. And that's because the sun, which is what we've evolved to adapt to, being most sensitive to sunlight, is more greenish than yellow.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Exactly, 100% right. So at that green flash, at that moment of green flash, you're seeing two things. One is the sensitivity of the human eyes, slightly maximized to that, but that doesn't explain why photographs see it as well. And the other reason is that most of the yellow light and the sunlight is getting scattered away.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so you're mainly seeing that green light, but you're only seeing it at the point of maximum scattering, which occurs exactly when the sun crosses the horizon.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And so measuring time became crucial for commerce, for human culture and civilization to arise, for education, and obviously for planting, harvesting, and so forth. So there was an obvious connection between the two. They believed, actually, that they were causative.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't think that's in disagreement. I think that might explain the amplification that we see, but then it doesn't explain why you'd see it in a photographic emulsion, right? There's nothing biological about it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That actually the position of the planet Jupiter determined something on the day of your birth and the sun's relative position with respect to it determines something about your future and your prospects in life and so forth. So when I'm not confused for a cosmetologist because of my lovely hair and makeup, I'm usually asked, oh, you're an astronomer. I'm a Virgo. So what's going to happen to me?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't know. It's interesting. The sun also produces tides and produces gravitational effect. But the dominant effect on Earth due to that 28-day, 29-day cycle of the moon is its effect on the Earth's oceans, which produces four tides a day, too high and too low. And actually, Galileo incorrectly used that phenomenon as a way to buttress his argument that the Earth went around the sun.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
He basically, if you're listening, I'm taking my glass of matina. Yerba mate. Yerba mate, yeah. So he said that when the Earth is spinning, it rotates once per day, but it's also revolving around the sun. So these combined motions make this sloshing of the liquid. You see that? And he claimed that is what caused the tides on the Earth. And the fact that's completely wrong.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's amazing, Andrew, when you think about how brilliant a scientist can be. And it's almost like the proportion... of their blunder is proportionate to how brilliant they are.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I would expect that it would influence other animals. I don't know what the menstrual cycles are, deer or whatever. Who knows? Or any animal that has an egg that – Well, a lot of animals have not a menstrual cycle but an estrous cycle.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And in the past, by the way, the moon was a lot closer than it is. Not a lot, but it was closer. The moon moves about the width of your – again, back to your fingers now. So the moon moves away by the width of about your thumb's fingernail every year. It moves further away.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
A centimeter away from the Earth because there's a gravitational competition between the gravitational force of the moon and the Earth's oceans provide a source of friction. So over the years, it's getting farther and farther away such that it eventually won't be able to have total solar eclipses. It'll be what's called an annular eclipse where it doesn't obscure it completely.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Anyway, so in the past, this is the only way to say, millions of years ago when the first hominids were evolving, the moon was much, much closer. Millions of times of their fingernails eventually starts to add up. And certainly when the first life formed on the Earth, it was only, it was probably 30 times closer than it is now. So yeah. So short answer, I don't know.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
like, I used to be like, oh, okay, that's an astrologer, I'm not an astrologer. But now I just, I kind of lean into it. I'm like, ooh, you're gonna get a letter from the IRS next week, and that lump on your ass, that's... You mean you're playing games with them? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
On the special website that I made, briankeating.com slash Huberman, I list the four major meteor showers, one in each season, that people can watch with your naked eye. In fact, it's bad to use a telescope. You don't want a telescope.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, exactly. You want the whole field of view. And humans have an amazing, as you know, huge field, 190 degrees or something like that. Not as big as an owl, but quite big. And you want to take that in because you're looking for motion. You're looking for intensity. Sometimes you can see colors. And I list what elements contribute to the colors of different meteorites on this website that I have.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But yes, anywhere that's more than, say, 20, 30, 40 miles away from a major city, is fine. Even in San Diego, there's two dark sky communities. One is called Julian, California, and the other one's the Anza Borrego Desert, and it's called Borrego Springs. These are areas where they forbid upward shining light, so the only light can be downward facing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It also has to have very narrow spectral bands on it, so like sodium vapor, you know, very high, so that you can filter it out, basically with certain very inexpensive optical filters. But like I said, almost anywhere. But the good thing to know is that if you get a telescope, again, you can see 90% of what's going to be fascinating to you as a layperson with a telescope that costs $50.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can see all the craters. You can see mountains on the moon. And again, these mountains were not just like cool things. They destroyed, they falsified the scientific paradigm, quote unquote, which was that the moon was perfectly crystalline and spherical. Galileo showed, no, not only does it have mountains, I can measure the height of those mountains. I can measure the planes of lava flows.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And eventually they came up with theories that it doesn't have tectonic motion. It doesn't have an iron core. I mean, it's amazing. You can see all these things with the small telescope like the one I have for you. But you don't need like the Hubble telescope or Mount Willis. You don't need any of that. You can see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You can even on a dark sky without a telescope. see an object that's outside of our galaxy. It's called the Andromeda Galaxy. It's very important in the history of astronomy. In 1929, 1923 rather, on Mount Wilson, not far from here, Edwin Hubble realized that that was not part of the Milky Way galaxy. It was way too far away to be located within the Milky Way.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's no evidence for astrology. In fact, there's many, many random controlled trials, double-boned studies that show not only is it... It's almost counter to the evidence. Like, And they say that a monkey can throw a dart at a stock chart and get – do better than most hedge fund managers or something like that. Actually, astrologers are even worse. Like I don't even know.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It was about 20 times the radius of the Milky Way. And that revolutionized all of our conceptions of where the universe is located. Is it centered on us? Are we the most important thing? No. He showed that you can see that on most fall nights in the constellation Andromeda with your naked eye. It's six times wider than the full moon. It's incredible.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
20 centuries before TikTok. So I cut them some slack. There are a couple that look similar to what they're, you know, Orion.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Those aren't constellations.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So they're portions of a constellation. So they're called asterisms. So an asterism is a collection of stars that's associated with each other, but it's not the full composition of a constellation. So the constellation is actually called Ursa Major. The Big Dipper is in the tail constellation. and the hindquarters of Ursa Major, which is the great bear.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The little dipper is the asterism, seven stars that make up, there's 80-something stars that make up the little bear, which actually doesn't look like a bear. Ursa Major kind of does look like the California Republic flag that we have. But yes, the asterism, I always ask for people to leave. You can't, you know, they're not making new constellations.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's only 88 constellations over the whole four pi spherical dome of the sky. But you can leave your own asterism on the podcast. You can leave five stars on your podcast and mine. So you can't have a constellation, but you can have an asterism.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I was 14. It was right after I got my first telescope.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, you're making it to the next one. 76 years, yeah, that's right. I'm right? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's not like the best comet in history, in fact, there's been better ones.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And lunacy, for that matter, like full moon and lunacy. Yeah, lunacy, right, crime statistics. So look at these words, disaster, catastrophe. The ast in both of those means star, They used to believe that stars, comets, eclipses, those things were influencing events on Earth caused by these celestial forces for not propitiating them, making the gods happy or whatever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And in fact, Columbus owes his life. He was almost killed in Jamaica. And I think it was 1498, a couple of years after discovering him, he's still exploring Jamaica. And he failed to ingratiate himself with the local native inhabitants of Jamaica or wherever he was. And they were going to kill him.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
A protozoa can throw a dart. It's almost anti-correlated with what reality is. So no, there's certainly no validity to that. And I had a provocative tweet, whatever, post recently. And it was about – there's actually – we believe there are 12 zodiac signs. And that dates back to the Persians and the Babylonians and how they divided up them.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And he luckily had on for navigation – astronomy and navigation have always been intimately related because first of all, if you know where Polaris is, which is not the brightest star – It's in the little dipper. It's the pole star. It's the north star. You've heard of true north, north star.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's actually very close to being – if you go to the north pole and look straight up, it's very close to being directly above you.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
In any human timescale, it does. Over thousands and tens of thousands of years, it changes. But right now, for the next couple thousand years – so don't worry. You'll still be accurate. That is within a half a degree or so.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, I say it like this. The universe could end in a heat death and a big rip or whatever, but that's not for a trillion years, so everybody keep paying your taxes. So you could use it for navigation. So you could know your latitude, but measuring longitude was very difficult because you couldn't actually – to know longitude, you need to measure time relative to where Greenwich Mean Time is.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
That's how Greenwich became – so important and that's why London had its huge economy. Again, these things are always related to capitalism and even how we measure latitude and longitude comes from the fact that London and Thames River, 90 percent of the world's commerce flowed through there at one point or another. It's incredible. So anyway, latitude and longitude is very important.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
People started to know that, yeah, these events would occur and including this event with Columbus and he brought along with him on his voyage an astronomer. And this astronomer knew that in two days' time from when these natives had captured some of Columbus's crew that there was going to be a total solar eclipse and it was going to go through Jamaica.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And he said – he told Columbus and Columbus said to the inhabitants, if you don't give our people back, our god is going to obscure and kill your god, the sun god. They're like, F you, whatever. And then it happened and they totally believed that they were in control of these celestial events. We better give the people back and Columbus got the hell out of there. So it's an amazing story.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Military – yeah, he used it for military coercion.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I'm interviewing her tomorrow.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's a direct connection. Sorry to interrupt, but there's a connection between that and the Nobel Prize. So there was something called the Longitude Prize in the 1700s to develop a clock that could be used in naval situations on boats. You couldn't use a grandfather clock as the pendulum. The boats rock. Acceleration. So they had to find something. And this guy, Thompson or somebody. Harrison.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Harrison, yeah. So he invented this mechanical clock, which is a predecessor of our modern wind-up clocks. Obviously, we use cesium and atomic clocks. But that prize for 10,000 pounds or whatever it was, was an early predecessor of the Nobel Prize.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it almost divides – they were fascinated with the number 60. So that was the base of their number system. Our number system is 10 because we have 10 figures. For some reason, they love base 60. I don't know why. And so they love things that divide it evenly into it. 10 does. But anyway, hashtag fail for the Babylonians. But they divided it up into 12 zones. 12 zodiac signs.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The obstacle is the way.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The obstacle is the way.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Okay, so we live in an atmosphere, a planet with an atmosphere, thank God. We wouldn't be here having this conversation, right? And that atmosphere is a dirty window. It's like literally looking through the windshield of your car and it's cloudy and dusty and contaminated. We live in its presence.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And the best astronomical telescopes are the ones that are launched above the atmosphere, out of the atmosphere. Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, and now the James Webb Telescope. Again, those are multibillion-dollar telescopes.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
The James Webb to build it – and by the way, one lesson to leave you with and maybe your audience with as well is whenever you hear a scientific instrument's cost, always in your mind at least double it. Andrew Lang, my late great mentor, used to say, multiply by pi. Because A, you're not taking into account the fact that you don't build, say, a destroyer or an aircraft carrier to build it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
You build it to use it. And it's about 10% of the construction cost to operate an instrument, a battleship, a telescope, whatever. It's a rule of thumb that project managers love to use. So that means in 10 years, it's going to double the price. And we hope that Hubble and Webb, and Hubble's already lasted 40 years on it. So it lasts a long time.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So whenever you hear this, but it's incredibly expensive. One kilogram used to cost like $10,000 to bring to orbit. And Elon keeps talking about how cheap it's going to be, but he has yet to launch a scientific instrument. I talked to him for 10 minutes on my podcast once, and I tried to get him to shut off these. Starlinks are amazing.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
I have one in my house, but they have the property that they go through astronomical images and they leave a satellite trail behind them, which is ridiculous. It can be – you're taking a picture of a deep star, a deep galaxy or whatever and you see these streaks going through it. It ruins the image and you have to wait until they're gone.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So we still use those. There's a problem though. The zodiac that you're, do you know what this is? Do you know what determines your zodiac sign?
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But at least in optical astronomy, you can physically literally paint those satellites black and they will no longer reflect and so they won't obscure the image whatsoever.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They definitely are because while you can paint an optical satellite black and make it black, we're looking for heat. There's no way to stealth, you know, confuse or block out heat. Sorry, that's the law of thermodynamics. Anything that's above absolute zero will always give off heat.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And worst of all, the signals that he uses are in the exact microwave spectral range that we use to look at the CMB, the cosmic microwave background.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
No, he said he would look into it, you know, nine months ago. Elon, I know you like the show, so please do reach out to me. But this would be just turning it off when it's over our telescope, basically. And the South Pole. So it's not a big deal.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
There's no one at the South Pole. It's not like he's getting millions of dollars in ad revenue from people at the South Pole. They don't use them. So anyway, I'm asking Elon. It's a small ask. But anyway, so we want to be above the atmosphere, but it's millions and maybe billions of dollars to do that for a telescope like we're using or for an optical telescope here. on Earth.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So scientists became very convinced that there has to be a way to mitigate the effects of the atmosphere. Now, what is the main effect of the atmosphere? Well, you learned it when you were a kid. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. What is that twinkling? It's called scintillation. Scintillation is the property of a point source
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Okay. So it's determined by the position of the sun. What constellation was the sun in on the day you were born? September 26th. So that means that the sun was in the constellation Virgo. Oh, no. You were a Libra? Libra. Libra.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
which is a star is so far away, even though they're enormous, they still only subtend a zero-dimensional, almost zero-dimensional dot of light on the sky. When it goes through the atmosphere, the atmosphere has macroscopic turbulence features. The atmosphere is a fluid. There's turbulence, there's roiling columns, there's cells of the atmosphere.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And if you've ever looked at a star, they jitter, looks like they're moving around. And that's the combination of the atmospheric cells. Each column of air that has slightly more density will refract light slightly different angles. Remember we talked about light when it goes through a lens, it refracts, it bends.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's coming through, it's getting deflected slightly, and it's moving and it's landing on different retinal cells. and we're perceiving that as this motion or in a CCD array, it's also landing on different pixels. So you can't get away from it by using technology. It's still an effect. It's caused by these atmospheric turbulent cells.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And by the way, you can tell and you can identify a planet by the fact it does not It does not twinkle, twinkle. So Jupiter is visible tonight. I hope you'll see it with the telescope. We can see it after we're done recording. We keep going. We're about halfway done, I figure. We'll go outside. We'll look at it. And you'll see it's not stationary.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And I actually used that on the night I kissed my wife for the first time. But I'm not going to talk about that. When you look at the planet, you can identify them by their lack of scintillation. So it's a way to identify if it's a plane, a star, or a planet.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So astronomers, including a colleague of mine in UC system, Claire Max, and other people realized in the 1960s and 70s that if they had a fake star, It's actually called either a guide star or an artificial star. I'll explain how they make that in a minute.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Then if they knew the exact properties of that guide star, then they could measure just the guide star through the same optics of the telescope. And then they would take the light from that artificial star onto a flexible deformable mirror. So the mirror could actually wobble and wiggle And it would do so in an exactly compensatory way to nullify the atmospheric turbulence.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So it's basically what light does when it goes through a cell of the atmosphere. It traverses a slightly longer path difference. So they would shorten the path difference of the mirror. They make it a little bit closer in the direction of that cell and other places they'd make it farther away and vice versa. They compensate for it. And this was done by a combination of two technologies.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
So you do know what you are, but you don't know why you are. So Libra means it's a constellation. There's 88 constellations. that are accepted by astronomers. And one of them is Libra. And the path that the sun and the moon and all the planets travel in is called the zodiac.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
One was the deformable mirror that could flex 100 times per second. And the other was making these artificial stars. So how do they make an artificial star? They shoot a laser into the troposphere. That laser illuminates sodium.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Troposphere is a layer of the atmosphere. I used to know all the different layers. That's OK. OK, ionosphere is the farthest away.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, it's 40, 30, 40 kilometers above the Earth. It's not quite in space. Far enough away that the laser beam is still collimated. It makes a nice beam. And it can illuminate and then cause this sodium ions to Flores basically. So they start to get really stimulated. It looks just like a star. They know exactly how they produced it.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
They know exactly what phase and wavelength to correct in the mirror. And then they say it's almost as good as going into space. It corrects exactly the compensation. of the Earth's atmosphere with the combination of this deformable mirror.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And it was actually used by my colleague Andrea Ghez here at UCLA to measure the properties of stars orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and test Einstein's theory of relativity. Without this on the twin 10-meter diameter Keck telescopes in Hawaii, she never would have won that Nobel Prize. So it's amazing technology, but it was classified.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It was so useful to astronomers, but it wasn't as useful as to the military. Remember, I said Galileo used his telescope to sell it to the military of Venice. It was immediately classified by the US military because if you think about a spy satellite, What's it doing? Well, it's staring down to Earth and it's looking at whatever on Earth. It's also going through the atmosphere.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
It's going to have the same problems. So they wanted to use that and have this technological advantage over the Soviets probably in the 1970s and 80s. So they classified it. They didn't let many – astronomers could build things. They could deliver the finished product but they couldn't patent it. They couldn't use it. So Claire Max, as I said, she could have been super rich.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
But it's interesting because now they're using it so it's bad enough to look from Earth to space. But as I said, if you imagine the Earth as having a slab of an atmosphere, imagine a sniper. The sniper is trying to make a kill shot. Jocko is out there trying to hit something five kilometers, three kilometers away or whatever. There's a lot of atmosphere in the way.
Huberman Lab
Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Dr. Brian Keating
And if you're looking through an optical sight, that will also happen. So now they're actually using this optical – compensation and sniper scopes are using this technology, adaptive optics. So it's another way that astronomy has influenced military developments as well.
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Brian Keating: I’m Spending $200 Million To Explore Why We Exist! How God Fits Into Science Finally Explained, Is God Real?
Brian Keating is an astrophysicist and professor whose groundbreaking research and digestible explanations uncover everything we want to know about the universe and what lies beyond. Untertitelung des ZDF für funk, 2017
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Brian Keating: I’m Spending $200 Million To Explore Why We Exist! How God Fits Into Science Finally Explained, Is God Real?
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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Brian Keating: I’m Spending $200 Million To Explore Why We Exist! How God Fits Into Science Finally Explained, Is God Real?
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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Brian Keating: I’m Spending $200 Million To Explore Why We Exist! How God Fits Into Science Finally Explained, Is God Real?
100%.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, that's what I... So often, and this is why I was drawn to Peterson Academy. I've been a professor for 21 years. You know, it's part of my identity as a human being, one of many. And I think...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
For me, the opportunity to do something completely new, novel, and really interact with the type of intellect, the curiosity that hasn't been beaten out because they don't have to learn partial differential equations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And they don't have to learn how to solder together a data acquisition system and all sorts of other things that are very important for professional physicists that aspire to do them. maybe some of them will. And I've, in fact, been encountered by people that do want to take that course further than when I presented in Peterson Academy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But the point being, you know, if you can maintain that wonder, if you can maintain that curiosity, and you are undeterred by failure. You know, I always tell my students, when you solve a problem, guess what you win? You win a ticket to an even harder problem. And that's a good thing. Because that's It's like success in life. It's success, exactly. It's deferring gratification.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But the thing about science, Jordan, as you know, you can't win science. You know, science is an infinite game, as Dweck would call it, right? There's no such thing as completing. You've come to the end of science. No one will ever do that. No one will ever complete science. You may have the most knowledge. You may have a stack of Nobel Prizes, et cetera.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But you can't complete science because Mother Nature is undefeatable because she's an infinite array of ever-retreating forces that I think Wigner called it. And the point being, it's confusing because there's an ambiguity. The human mind hates ambiguity because we know to get a tenured position is a finite game. There's only so many professors that can get it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
To get the highest score on a test, to get into graduate school, to get a post, all these things. So science is comprised— It's an infinite game comprised of all these finite games. Nobel Prize, it only goes to three people. So how do you navigate in those realms?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I think that people cleave towards the, well, if I just do the hard things, the differential equations and the circuits and the- If I master the finite games. Yeah, those finite games, then I will win the infinite game. And along the way, they beat out of themselves, unfortunately, sort of the suicide of that curiosity that got them interested in science to begin with.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Another Feynman quote. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Not their knowledge, not their wisdom. Or the ignorance of you.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And you look at the word, look, you know more than anybody what the meaning of words are. And you know in Hebrew the word for thing is the same as the word for word, suggesting an entanglement that's inextricable. But in the sense, science, let's look at the word science. What does science mean? It doesn't mean wisdom. No, that's sapience. That's sapienza. We are homo sapien.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We are man who is wise. What are we wise about, Jordan? That we're going to die. That's the only thing that we know. Though we know for sure is that we're going to die. And it's interesting that it also comes up in the first chapters of Genesis, right? As you've spoken about at many occasions. But the word science means knowledge. And what does the word knowledge in Hebrew connote?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Well, it connotes Adam knew his wife. Mm-hmm. So it's very different. The notion in sort of the Greek, the Roman, the tradition of Asa, et cetera, that is coming down through us. And it's very crucial to life. I mean, technology, science, and knowledge acquisition in general. That's sort of one tradition.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And the Hebrew tradition is a tradition where knowledge, as I say, means something radically different. And the aspiration for wisdom, Torah, wisdom, knowledge, truth, emunah, as you say, all these things have elements of illumination
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yes. A purpose. Purpose. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So these things, you know, and you should never confuse it. I mean, there's no one as dumb as, you know, someone who's brilliant. You know, there's no one who will believe some of the dumbest things, dumbest propositions that you couldn't convince that bricklayer you spoke about to believe than an intellectual, than an academic, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
They spoke of—Lennon spoke of useful idiots. Sometimes I think of useless geniuses. Some of my colleagues are useless geniuses. They're so bright. And then they'll lead their credibility to the domain of wisdom, of which they have none.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's within all of us. And the smarter you get—look, I've interviewed 21 Nobel Prize winners on my podcast, and And never once – I mean, they've all been brilliant. They've all been incredibly accomplished in their field, obviously, to get to that level. And I've criticized the Nobel Prize, but not the people that win it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You can't – I mean, the one rule I learned when I was asked to nominate winners on the two occasions I've been asked to nominate the winners of the Nobel Prize is that you can't nominate yourself, right? That's the one rule that they adhere to that Alfred Nobel stipulated in 1880.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But most other things they've disavowed, unfortunately, which is a grave sin, by the way, because, you know, in Judaism, the greatest mitzvah, which means commandment, people think it means good deed. It doesn't mean good deed. It means commandment. You're commanded to do certain things. And one of the things you're commanded to do that has greatest, utmost importance is to bury the dead.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
and to not leave a dead body unescorted. Why is that? Well, it's the one thing they can't reciprocate, right? They can't, you bury the dead, they're not going to bury you, right, by definition. And so it's the ultimate altruistic, you know, beneficence in the sense. And when Alfred Nobel wrote his will, he specified exactly what he wanted.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
He wanted to go to one man who did the greatest accomplishments for the greatest benefit of mankind in the preceding year. So it was one person, preceding year, and it had to benefit all of humanity. So it was what we call, in Hebrew, an ethical will. So it wasn't just a will, here's my money. He had no kids. He had no wife. He had no heirs to give the money to.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So he gave it all, in the sense, towards the betterment of mankind. Literally, that's what it says. But many of the other things they've disavowed. He can have three people win it. They can win it for stuff done 30 years ago, 50 years ago. But one of the few things that they've actually kept is this focus, if you will, that it should benefit. It should provide a benefit to humanity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And then you wonder, well— That's also a non-scientific element of science, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And would you say then, just based on that, that somebody who identifies as a scientist alone is fundamentally unhealthy? Is not maybe psychopathic?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
All PhDs are like that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The problem is scientists don't, we don't get any ethical training. And I say that, you know. It's all implicit. It's implicit that you're just going to learn it. Similarly, we don't get training in public communication. I view my YouTube channel and my podcast, et cetera, as I don't get paid for it. The university has not revoked my tenure, but they don't help with it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
They don't provide any resources for it. There's no antagonism. I do it because— Well, at least they don't get paid.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But, no, and I have a great relationship with the chancellor and my deans and so forth. I'm very blessed to be where I am. And it's one of the best campuses for many other reasons. But all this to say, I don't get, you know, it's not part of my duties as a professor to do the explanations that I do and provide interviews with Nobel Prize winners. I do it because I believe in two things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I believe I have a moral obligation, and maybe you'll agree too, maybe not. I have a moral obligation. I'm taking your money. I'm taking taxpayer money. Imagine if you're the person who installed the countertops in your home. And they said to you, you said, you know, excuse me, you know, sir, you know, how's it going? I'm sorry, Jordan, what I do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
is so specialized, it's so erudite, you cannot possibly understand it. Even with your PhD and your success story, you'd say, go to hell. You don't talk to your boss like that. I am your boss. The public is our boss.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And a lot of it is p-hacked and, you know, implicitly, you know, hacked to get the results that were desired, whether it's for some drug company's benefit. But even beyond that, the workaday scientist, I'm talking to the person in the lab next door to me, not some, you know, shill for Pfizer or something like that. I'm talking about just a workaday scientist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And, you know, she or he will say to me, I'm not good at that. I'm sorry. You, Brian, you have to give to it. By the way, I don't think I'm that good. But I do think that I have an innate desire for the 1% gains that can be made by iteration. That every iteration, I try to get 1% better. My conversation, the questions I ask, the types of conversations that I have and the depth that I go into.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I think that's my unique skill, if anything.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, your videos are online from Harvard, from Toronto, et cetera. But when I say that to them, they say, well, I'm just not good at that. And I say, oh, yes, I forgot. I forgot. I forgot, you know, to my friend. I'll say, yeah, you were born knowing quantum electrodynamics. No, no, no. I work really hard at it. Oh, oh. So you work hard at that which you think is valuable.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So that means you're telling, you're admitting, you're copying to the fact that you don't think communicating to your boss is important. And I find it shameful. And I don't think that everybody should be out of the lab, you know, tanking 20% of their time and learning how to communicate like Neil deGrasse Tyson. But they should spend some of that time.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And they're trained to do diversity inclusion. Yeah, yeah. You're trained. Or they're punished for not doing it, at least. Well, you won't even get in the door now. You won't even have your applications reviewed. I'm interested to see what happens in the coming administration as we speak.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I've traveled literally trillions of micrometers and billions of seconds to be here, and we are going to explore this universe together. Cosmology is the oldest science known to humanity. Since cavemen and women, people have wondered, where did everything come from? We're not going to do any alien autopsies or anything in this class, but we are going to cover a lot of fascinating questions.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the universe made of? How can we possibly understand the grand landscape of the cosmos? When you look back in space, you look back in time. It's amazing we've been able to do this, to study the properties of the cosmos, time scales of billions of years, size scales billions of times bigger than our own.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And now the question is, can we go back to time equals zero? Can we go back to before time equals zero? And what does that even mean? I hope in this course to keep striving and asking these great questions, because without great questions, there can be no great answers. And without great answers, there can be no understanding.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You know, Jordan, I always joke, our profession, I call it the second oldest profession, right? I mean, there have been universities since the University of Bologna in Italy was established in 1082. And look how much has changed. There's a guy or a girl taking a piece of rock and scraping on another piece of rock. How innovative. After a thousand bloody years, we've done almost nothing different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Okay, so there's PowerPoint, and that's not that much different, let's be honest, right? But what if there were the opportunity to bring in literal the visualizations that they've done on my first course, and I can't wait to see on the second course. And my third course is – see, what's nice, I'm an experimental physicist. I'm not Brian Greene. I'm not –
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
manipulating wormholes like my friend Kip Thorne and so forth, who did the science behind the movie Interstellar. I was the advisor to Christopher Nolan. I'm not a theoretical physicist. So what do I do? I do experiments. The more experiments, the better. But you only do another experiment because some aspect of the previous experiment failed. And that's fine.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That's part of the iterative process of science that makes it not only so important and so annealed, so hardened by truth and the process of attempting to achieve truth, imperfectly as it may be, but getting things wrong. Look what happens when you get something wrong. Let's be honest. It's a surprise, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You didn't think you were going to go down and you're going to discover dust instead of the Big Bang, which is what happened to me in describing my first book. We thought we saw the gravitational wave aftermath of the inflationary universe that we talked about in my first podcast episode with you. But instead, that led to the Simons Observatory.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's led to a $200 million project that is now going to not only look for the gold, but also look for the dragons, look for the dust, look for the things that are in the impediments. So the surprise was not a failure at all. I mean, look, when you solve a puzzle, you get a little bit of thrill. And remember when you were a kid, you had a Rubik's Cube, you had this thing or that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You'd solve the puzzle, and you would do something that no adult does. You'd do it again. Like, my kids do this all the time. They solve a Rubik's Cube, then another one messes it up, then the other one solves it. And, like, I already solved it. Like, I don't need to rewrite my PhD thesis. Like, I already wrote it. But there's a little bit of that thrill that you get when you are surprised.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I say this to my students all the time. I say, flaws... in your experiment, in your theory, lead to new laws. It's not like we study. Do you know, Jordan, that we're made of matter, right? But in the early universe, we think that there was almost an exact symmetry. It's one of these guiding principles of physics, that there are symmetries. Conservation of energy is a type of symmetry.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Angular momentum's conservation is another type of symmetry. Displacement, the symmetry, those are all the things that we say exist. The laws of physics shouldn't change. They should not look different in a mirror or upside down or on Pluto or in Arizona. It should not make a difference who you are, where you are.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's kind of the great democratic process of science known as the Lorentz principle of Lorentz invariance that Galileo really crystallized and then later eventually— Fundamental things apply everywhere in all directions. Fundamental truth to the extent that we can perceive it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so, you know, when you do something and you find out, well, this is not correct, like the fact that the postulate was, and all the greatest scientists thought, there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Well, guess what, Jordan? We wouldn't be here if that were true.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
All the matter particles would annihilate with the antimatter particles and the universe would be a universe of complete, barren, sterile radiation. Pretty boring unless you happen to be a photon. But that's not the case. And it's obvious just from we exist. We know that that's not true. We can observe it. I refute it thus. Kick the rock. It's made of matter. Where's all the antimatter?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Is it segregated in some galaxy that we haven't been to yet? No, we don't think that's the case. So where did it go? Well, we have to look. How symmetric is the universe? How beautifully, finely balanced, tuned, if you believe in an intelligent designer? How... finally tuned, did he tune it to be? Well, it turns out he did a spectacular job.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Because for every particle of matter, there was another particle of antimatter. Except for there was one, for every billion particles of antimatter, there was a billion and one particle of matter. So the two matching a mirror image matter and antimatter particles, they destroyed each other. And what was left? One particle of matter. And the rest was a bath of photons. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It is not a rounding error. It's exquisitely balanced. Now, we don't know why. Some theists will say it's intelligently designed. And you can ask certain questions. How well designed does the universe have to be? In other words, how finely tuned? You have a good ear for classical music. My wife enjoyed talking to you about it. You know, she plays the violin. I play Spotify.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So I have no musical ability whatsoever. But you could perceive the note A, 440 hertz, right? Your ear can actually perceive if it's 441 hertz. In other words, one out of 400, so less than 1%, a quarter of a percent mistuning, you can perceive it. How well tuned does the universe have to be in order for us to be having this conversation?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And then the supposition is, well, if it's extremely finely tuned across a whole vast panoply of different areas, from the strength of these constants, the number of protons, to the number of antiprotons, then you might start to think this is suggestive. But it's not a scientific hypothesis, right? We can always say God, and we can always say there was no God, but you can't prove it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I think this is an important fact that people get. I was on with a young man that you've met many times, Stephen Bartlett, on his podcast, wonderful podcast. And we spent four hours together. And one of those hours was just about me, him asking me to prove God scientifically. I said, I'm sorry, Stephen, again and again. I cannot do that. He's searching. He's reaching for something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah. Well, he probably talked more about God with me than he did with you. And I was quite surprised that he did because I'm a cosmologist. I'm not a theologian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I always say I'd kill for 1% of God's book sales. And I told him, look, what you're searching for, I can't necessarily give you. I can give you the approach to me that I find persuasive, but it's not going to be persuasive to you because it's specific to me and my life history and how I understand how I got to be who I am.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And it doesn't use the strength of quantum electrodynamics, and it doesn't use all sorts of things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And when you search for that, I think I told him, I said, Stephen, you know, and I think I got this from you in the conversation you had with Dennis Prager that I was privileged to be a part of in Santa Barbara about five, six years ago. And you said, you know, who am I to say, this is you, who am I to say I believe in God? Like, what is a man to say such a thing? I mean, it's so ridiculous.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I've turned that around. I say, I don't believe in gravity. And he's like, what are you talking about? And Stephen said, you're a physicist. You have to believe in gravity. I said, no, if I take this meteorite and I drop it, I don't believe it's—I have evidence for it. What is the notion of evidence? It means it's something we can't necessarily define, but we can say it's certainly not faith.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't have faith that it's going to do that. We have empirical evidence. DNA leads to the genetic inheritance that we have. Those things you don't have to take on faith. You have evidence for them. So science and religion—science should not be used— It's not one of its tool, its best purposes. You know, you have a hammer. You don't use it to screw in a screw.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You have to use the tool in the domain for which it's designed or perhaps best.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so resonant, that phrase that you used that, you know, is tattooed on my brain, you know, who am I to do that? I found it as a call to kind of a clarion call because it made me think, look, Jordan, there's what, a billion, you know, Hindus and Buddhists and so forth. It can't only be that Judeo-Christian, you know, theology is correct. It's the only approach, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It can't be the only approach. And maybe it's not the only truth. In other words, maybe there's—just assume this proposition, and then you can take it apart. Assume all religions that have at their base a moral goodness, an aspect of improving— human flourishing and the human condition, not some nihilistic, you know, witchcraft or whatever that seems to serve no teleology whatsoever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But where there is clearly, and we know that Christianity and Judaism have this embedded within them, and Buddhism I'm most familiar with, but it has elements of that. And take away the theology and just talk about the values. there's an equivalence class in mathematical terms of all religions that practice good values. They have this in common.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, you came in January 23 to the house, and we had kosher rib-eyes. Yeah, that's right. Exactly two years, yeah. Yeah, your tour for the last time in San Diego. Yeah, that was the last time we were together. And then we did...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Whatever this is, this notion of human flourishing and goodness and treatment and so forth. Again, proposition, I'm not saying it's true. Assume it's true. Just assume that's true. Assume that God, in other words, is, you know, there's no such thing as a, we don't believe that there's a thing called a photon, like specifically a particle.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We believe the fundamental element is called the photon field. That the field, which exists everywhere at all times in all places, that that is what's fundamental. And then this photon, you know, the human eye is miraculous. We can see a single photon in the right circumstances. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's incredible. And that's part of the loss you spoke about earlier where we think about the loss of the night sky. I'm curious. We'll talk some other time about how the human psychology will be robbed of this and maybe that will do something like having phthalates or microplastics. Those things are tangible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But the intangible loss of the night sky from all places on earth perhaps, God forbid, but let's just say. Anyway, getting back to my proposition, imagine God is a field so that – and then each – what we see as a photon or what we see as Hinduism or Judaism or Christianity is an instantiation, is actually the particle version of it, if you will, of a field that exists locally.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
throughout all space and all time. In other words, what if God is, and we can't, and this is not refutable because you can't, you know, we're saying by definition it's incorporeal, it's a field, and just like you can't feel the photon field, you can detect its manifestations. And so what if the, you know, the fruits of the tree are sort of proof of what it was made to do, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
An apple tree doesn't produce a grapefruit, and a honeybee doesn't produce a spiderweb. So the instantiation, how do these things, you know, connect to one another?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And the Jews thought there early. Yeah, and I always say, you know, we have the Eskimos in northern Canada reputed to have 12 words for snow. And you find that with the Jews. You find there's six different types of words for knowledge and wisdom and intuition and wisdom. You know, you can identify them. They don't have as many words for snow. And so what were their tools?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
What was their environment like? It was saturated with religion. And with literacy. Yeah, and with literacy and, you know, the language and being able to communicate that as well, but also expressing something which must be intrinsic. And I find when I hosted Richard Dawkins in Vancouver, he asked me to come up. I had him on my podcast for two episodes for his most recent book. And...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I've recorded two. One's out currently, which is called Cosmology. Very simple. And then I've recorded a second one, Introduction to Astronomy, which you might think would come before cosmology, but actually cosmology encompasses most of astronomy anyway. In some sense, cosmology is one of the oldest sciences, if not the oldest science.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I'm always, you know, kind of—and I've had Sam Harris on the last year as well. And the thing that's frustrating to me about when I talk to scientists like them is how simple their understanding is, quite frankly, of religion, specifically Judeo-Christian. I'm not an expert in anything. I mean, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church as a kid, a complicated story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But I'm born Jewish, two Jewish parents, and I'm Jewish to this day. But the point— their understanding of things. Like, I said to Richard, you know, in Vancouver, a thousand people there, it was wonderful, people coming up, tears in their eyes, thank you for making me an atheist. And I found it so depressing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And because of the richness, and by the way, I often call myself a practicing agnostic, meaning, and which I think is in harmony with your famous statement that I mentioned before, In other words, if you know for sure that God exists, then you're an absolute fool or an imbecile if you don't believe in him or whatever that means, almost to the point of evidence.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I don't dispute that many, many Christians feel it in a way that Jews don't, you know, this personal relationship with God, Savior, and that he died for my sins. It's harder for Jews to relate to that. But I stipulate that they feel that way. But to say that you are an atheist, like that is your identity—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
is a very strange thing to me to believe, especially from these brilliant men like Sam and like Richard, because they have such simplistic ideas and knowledge.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You're just not going to get anywhere with it. The taste is not disputable, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I said to Richard, you know, I said, look, Richard, I also don't believe in the God that you also don't believe in. It's so simplistic. And Sam, to some extent, is worse just from the perspective that he's so persuasive. I mean, he's the only person besides you that I've ever known, I've spent four hours with, that never uses the word, you know, has any verbal communication.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
crutches whatsoever, and I don't mean to jinx our conversation, but he just speaks in complete—he speaks in prose, as they say, you know, paragraphs. And, you know, when we talk about things, very simple things, why don't you do—you know, what is your feeling about, you know, Judaism that made you reject, you know, I guess his dad is Jewish, I forget— And, well, it just takes slavery.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And he just asserts that, you know, slavery is, there's no such thing as, he said to me, Brian, Brian, you and I create a religion. Are we going to have slavery in it? I said, Sam, this is so, this is like my, you know, seven-year-old learns this, you know, in school, in her Talmud class. Like, you can't be serious.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's the science that you can do with the two telescopes that you're born with in your skull. And for that reason, it's accessible to everybody. You know, I was thinking on my way over here, you talk so much about freedom and how important that is. There are very few things that are literally free, right? Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Like, you think that slavery meant like black African slave trade, you know, in the deep South in America. And it's just not that. And once we go through it, and I taught him, you know, what it meant to have a slave. By the way, Moses is called a slave of God. Did that mean that Moses was whipped by God? No, it means he's a servant.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And there was this concept called indentured servitude, which is actually a kindness. If you couldn't pay your debt to me, Jordan, and you were going to steal something, no, no, no. I would give you, basically employ you, and I provide food and shelter. And by the way, sometimes you wouldn't want to leave.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
After six years, you wouldn't want to leave because I treated you so well as my slave that I would have to take your ear and hammer it into the door with a nail. And this was a part of a tradition that Jewish slaves had to undergo in order to remain with their masters because we're meant to be free. And so this was meant to show as an outward symbol to the world that I chose not to be free.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And we know many people choose to be slaves of a different kind rather than be free men and women. But I said—he—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The most common slavery that scientists practice is workaholism. They work 24-7. They work all days of the week. They're so fascinated because it's so intoxicating. You know, you have that feeling when you discover something and you realize, wow, gee, I am the first— Human, frail human that's ever understood this in the history of the planet. It might be small. It might be incremental.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Maybe it's not. Yeah, but you also don't know. But you don't know. And you don't know what these little seeds— Hard on the trail, man. Yeah, you may blossom into something so wonderful. And that's what's so great about science. But it's addictive. And I tell my students, you have to work. But people forget, Jordan, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Before it says, you know, on the seventh day you shall rest, it says six days you must work. In other words, it's not optional. It's a command. It's a mitzvah command form. Hebrew has it. English doesn't.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You must work, Jordan, because you can't appreciate the true sense of soul society, you know, satiating of your soul, unless you have that feeling of accomplishment of working the earth or working the laboratory. But if you only do that, if you only do that, you're a slave. I don't care. You might have a Nobel Prize, but you're a slave. Mm-hmm.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I could only think of two, and you'll probably correct me, but freedom of thought is not necessarily a guarantee around the world, right? Every human being doesn't have access to freedom of speech. Certainly not. Right, definitely not. Especially not your home country, especially nowadays. But air? so far as I know, is free. And the only other thing I could think about, Jordan, was the night sky.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And so, when I talked to Richard and I talked to—I came away, you know, somewhat depressed. Because also, you know, as you know, in Judaism, the word Judaism comes from the word gratitude, hodo, hodea, which means to give gratitude towards God. You know, Judah's name for the thanksgiving that his mother gave to God. So, it's endemic in our—and that's why we do say blessings.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Because you can't look at a meteor shower, you can't look at a rainbow, and if you bless it, you can't be angry and grateful at the same time, right? That seems to be impossible.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I look at the iPhone 16. So I'm a tech junkie. I love technology. It doesn't come with a manual. And actually, this is very interesting. I'm going to show it to you in a second. I brought you a very ancient manual. But it's very interesting. We have manuals, but you can get it online. So it doesn't come with a printed manual. You go to Apple, and they'll tell you every single feature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
There's 8,000 YouTube channels that have manuals. Millions of times more subscribers than me. And it will be listed, you know, how to get this shortcut, how to do this app. So there's an instruction manual for a bloody chunk of silicon glass and a little bit of rubber. And there's no instruction manual for people. I remember the night we brought our first son home. And we were bleary-eyed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
He wasn't nursing. He's going to die. Right? You remember that feeling? He's going to die. Like, he's not going to die. He's going to be fine. He's six pounds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
This thing might die. It's sheer terror. And it's the most responsible. And they send you home and there's no instruction manual. And I actually said, let's look at the manual to my wife. And she's, what the hell are you talking about? There's no manual. But humans need instruction. some instruction. And it doesn't have to come from somewhere, but it can't come from yourself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
When I talked to Stephen Bartlett, he said, I'm a good person. I don't kill anybody. I say, Stephen, how many people that committed great sin and great evil thought they were doing evil? None of them, not a single bloody one of them thought they were doing evil. They justified it as great good, whether it was eliminating Jews or whatever. I don't even have to take it that far of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So he's trying to justify, I think, his behavior. Because what happens, Jordan, when you believe in God or you have some notion of a moon or faith or just want to approach a creator or something bigger than you? Well, then you have obligations. And people hate that. I don't think Richard—I mentioned Richard Feynman.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We all can look at the night sky. We can all enjoy it. And we're in both those ways. You know this, I'm sure. We breathe in every breath has millions of molecules that Jesus himself breathed in. That's the nature of our atmosphere and the mixing of molecules, etc. It's guaranteed that that is the case. But the only other thing that we may share with Jesus is that we see the same night sky.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
If I told you 20 years ago, Jordan, you eat meat only and salt. You know, I have prepared meat. I think it was pretty darn good, kosher ribeye when you came to my house a couple of years ago. But if I told you 30, 20 years ago, Jordan, you're just going to eat ribeyes and salt. You would say, that's horrible. Like, I don't want to do that. That's going to be, you know, take away my freedom.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You're telling me it's composed. But now you took it upon yourself. I see it in you, the health, the vitality, the just, you know, incredible transformation that you've undergone. Who is happier? Jordan 20 years ago could eat all the Doritos, or I don't know what you ate back then, or has this prescribed thing to do in the prime of his life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I feel that way about, so I said that to, you know, Stephen and also to Sam, and When you're given, you know, look, as a Jew, I don't eat pork, right? I love to eat pork, you know. And why did we not get—who knows? There's no real reason why we think—it's not because they're dirty. But when you have an instruction manual, you—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
The assumption is the writer, the author of the instruction manual knew something that you don't. And maybe there's some benefit from following their instructions. The question is, you know, if you do believe in God and if you do practice some faith tradition or whatever, will you be happier or not?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
These people that came up to Richard Dawkins with tears in their eyes at the book signing after our event—
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I don't want to say, you know, okay, so now I don't have to listen to him because he was abused. You know, it's like if you meet somebody who was physically abused as a child and then they turn out to—you don't want to make that an excuse because look at the other people that were. Yes, of course, of course. So I don't want to let him off the hook so easily in that sense.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But I guess the challenge that I have is when I deal with somebody like that, because I can talk science with either one of them, Lawrence Krauss, again. Yeah, yeah. These people I can talk to, and they're so self-confident. But— They would never, and I told this to Lawrence Cross, because I had him on my podcast, and he's had me on his podcast.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We've talked about this, and we kind of joke I'm the religious Jew, he's the atheist. But he knows nothing about the faith. Why does he know nothing? Because most Jews, boys, have a bar mitzvah at age 13, which is a rite of passage, which sucks. I mean, I've got one of my kids going through it right now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And your voice is cracking, and you're in front of everybody, and you're embarrassed, you have pimples, and your girlfriend, you know, and it's horrible, right? But you go through, it's a rite of passage, right? And then what does it mark for most Jews, men? Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, if he had one. It marks sort of a graduation, right? from religion.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It marks the parole from prison of this obnoxious, not really satisfying or meaningful tradition that was forced upon you by the circumstances of your birth. I agree with Richard. No one can be a Christian, you know, like you're a Christian because you were born to a Christian family. That doesn't mean that you're actively doing anything in Christianity. And that's different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
We see the same cosmos as he did. There haven't been any new planets coming in.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So Judaism is more of a behavioral or religion where you have to do these mitzvahs and do certain things. It's behavior, it's practicing religion. But, you know, at the same token, if you deny somebody that, like, there's almost no chance. I'm sort of miraculously – because both my parents were kind of atheists. They didn't take Judaism very seriously. My dad was an active militant atheist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
He used to say to me, I don't believe in God. I believe in Satan because he made you believe in God. But the point being, you know, if you deny something that could be beneficial – Even if you don't believe it yourself, I think it's—I don't want to say child abuse, but you're denying your children something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And I said, you know, the avatar for me— Well, what do they have if they don't have a tradition? They have nothing. They have themselves. They have the medium.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That's true. They're free. That's free toothaches, I suppose. So I find it also quite a respite. You know, I'm a pretty tough person, but I do believe the human spirit needs safe spaces in a sense, not the kind of places we had on campus on November 6th with, you know, Play-Doh and finger painting kits for the students who were traumatized. That's Play-Doh, not Play-Doh. That's right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And it's going to be a bitter, unhappy hungry person.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But instead, we need safe spaces that the human mind can expand within. You know, if you just go to the gym and work out and you never recover, you can't fully grow to your potential. To me, cosmology, uniquely in science, you know, but less so generally science, certainly not virology, right? But science in its purest sense, the pure sciences, not political science, but pure science, not applied.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And to me, that's why, look, I struggle with God. That's the name of your book, right? Israel. Israel means wrestle with God. It's not Islam. Islam means submit to God. When you submit to God— That's a different vision, man. It's a very different vision, and we can debate about it. But the fact is, when you submit, it's like I've often noted with my children, the first word they said was no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Because if you say yes, you're just agreeing with somebody else's, whatever. Whatever they propose to you, you want to eat this? Yes, I want to eat this. You have no self-identification. I mean, you know, this is a trivial one-on-one for you. But that is true. So you express your individuality.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Absolutely. Yeah, no, and so all these things are self-evident. And the thing in Judaism where I feel is sort of denied to people that just refute. Look, I say, as I said, I don't believe in the God that Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in. It's trivial. Yuri Gagarin, when he circled the earth the first time, the communist, you know, Pravda, the truth, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
They asked him, what did you see up there? He said, I can't tell you what I saw, but I know what I didn't see. And they go, what? I didn't see a man with a white beard sitting on a chair. You know, congratulations, Yuri. That's really, you know, he's a hero of the Soviet Union.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That's so baby. Nobody thinks of that. Where's up? There's no up in space. There's no heaven.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I said, you know, or, you know, Stephen Bartlett asked me, he said, you know, the Bible says the earth is flat. First of all, it doesn't say that, but second of all, you know, I said— But it's locally flat. It is definitely flat. And I won't say this. I said, you know, look, Stephen, I could say this to Sam or Richard Dawkins. You know, I say the Earth is flat. Prove me wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
One in a thousand people, ordinary people, will get that right. About 50, 60 percent of scientists will get that right. If I say prove that the Earth orbits around the sun— 90% of scientists will get that wrong. I bet most scientists watching this, I'm not going to put anybody on the spot. Including me. Yeah, I'm not going to say, stand on one leg and prove it, Jordan. But we can prove it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's discovered in the 1700s how you could do it. It's called stellar aberration. And I'll give the answer to the test. But Galileo, one of the greatest minds in human history, he believed, and he was right, that the Earth goes around the sun. And he went to great lengths. And I think this is so beautiful. We put so much emphasis on scientists. that they are sort of gods, right? They manipulate.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
What did Arthur C. Clarke say? He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I actually opened my podcast with that, with his actual voice, because I'm at the Arthur C. Clarke Center. So when you look at that, who wields magic? Well, it's gods or it's magicians and fairies and all sorts of wonderful creatures that certainly aren't people.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But when a scientist can unlock the power of the atom, or can unleash humanity's need on electricity with infinite energy, or can develop a superconductor, or all the lasers, anything that we take for granted in technology all came from basic physics. The internet came from basic physics.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
like I get to do, I have the privilege of doing, which is studying the universe offers a space for the human mind, the intellect, to relax, to enjoy, to appreciate. And there's no secret. You've heard cosmetology. I make this joke in my Peterson Academy course. I say, you know, this course is not about hair and makeup, you know, despite my wonderful appearance.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And when you look at that, then you expect that they're ineffable, just like their primitive, childish, infantile notions of what we think God is, right? They think that we think that he's the guy in the chair in outer space with the beard, but they project that onto humans. So they'll say Richard Feynman was a god.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, literally, there's more people, Jordan, that play in the NBA right now than have won Nobel Prizes in physics, okay? And so when you look at these great men, including my hero, Galileo, They were greatly flawed individuals, horribly flawed. Feynman cavorted with his graduate students' wives. He had mistresses. He went to strip clubs.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Einstein married his cousin who was a horrible, horrible father. He neglected a child with severe mental illness. Never saw him after he moved to America to get fame and fortune. Cavorting with... What's the guy's name? Charlie Chaplin. He cavorted with Charlie Chaplin. And he loved the fame and attention. He had a huge ego. Not great. I don't want to emulate him. Do I want to be like Einstein?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Do I want to be like Feynman? Hell no. But you look at a man and you analyze him or you analyze a woman. What... Are they willing to teach me? What can I learn from them? And what you learn from Galileo is that great men can have great flaws, and they can be right and they can be wrong.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And if you can learn from both of them, both those tendencies that are mixed up within them, they have both within them, you must subdue.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I brought this to show you. I can't give you this because it's signed not by the great Jordan Peterson, but it's signed by Galileo. So, I'm going to show you what his signature looked like, and I want to point out just something interesting. That's his signature. Wow. So this was a book he wrote. It's called The Military Compass. Now, you and I, I told Stephen Bartlett this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I said, do you know what a slide rule is? He said, I have no idea what a slide rule is. Where did you get this? So I have a collector. So when I got my advance for my first book, Losing the Nobel Prize, I basically bought this book. And it's a— It's in great shape. Wonderful. Look at the pages on it. This is from 1646. It has a custom box and so forth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And there's an English translation that they made in the 70s. You can't get this anymore anymore. But there's an English translation of it. But there's a tag I put there. Why don't you open that up and read me what it says on a Post-it note page. I think it's on this side of the page. So these are all things that you could do with this thing called the military compass.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So I think it says there, right? What does it say? Can you read it? This one? Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And he goes through, and what does he mention, the currency that he's going to convert?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But it's actually related, cosmology and cosmetology, by the prefix cosmos, which in Greek means beautiful or appearance. So it's literally telling us that the night sky is beautiful and it's something to behold and it's a sensual pleasure. People don't think of that with cosmology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, so here's what the device looked like. It was like a slide roll. So maybe later we'll get the cameras to zoom in on it. It was a slide roll. It was a computer. It was a device to simplify calculations. And he invented it. And he wouldn't actually produce, as he did with his telescopes, he wouldn't actually give the hardware away. He'd give the software away.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
He'd give the operating manual away. This is how he made money, because he had illegitimate children. He had mistresses. He was also not the greatest of husbands and men and certain things. He was a deep believer in God. But when I look at this and I say, this book, this is the second edition. The first edition was written in 1601, and there's only about seven of them left.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
There's actually more Gutenberg Bibles than first editions of Galilee's Compass. So this one was cheap, very cheap compared to those. You can almost get, they're priceless. They're kept under lock and key at the Galileo Museum. in Florence. But the point is, if he had taken those Florentines that he's talking about, or the ducats, you know, if I give you a ducat right now, it's almost worthless.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I mean, yeah, it's kind of cool historically. It might look good. It was a paper note. It's basically like a paper dollar. It got inflated to nothing. They would do things, you know, with the money back then. They would shave the corners of the coins. That's why coins have ridges on them now. All sorts of interesting historical tidbits. But if he had just kept one of these things,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
you know, kept the original edition, his heirs would have hundreds of millions of dollars. And so you look at these people and you often find that the people who have the greatest scientific knowledge and technical and maybe practical knowledge, sometimes their wisdom is to be lacking.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But the average person will never look at that and say, wow, this person, you know, has been divorced six times or, you know, treats his illegitimate stepdaughter horribly or whatever. We never look at that. We never say part and parcel. And I think I'm not advocating we should look at Feynman and say, you slept with your graduate students' wives. No, no, no.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You should just say that there is a value in the people that, say, have those wonderful aspects, those wonderful characteristics, that don't have the foibles. Just they may not have Nobel Prizes. In other words, we prioritize the intellect over the ethical. And I think it's very dangerous. And it's very seductive for scientists to want to emulate Galileo.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, I've read the first couple chapters online, and it starts, you know, just to think about the connection as I start my cosmology class at Peterson Academy. You know, I start off by saying, you know, what is the most important day on the calendar? Let me say it to you. Like, what is the most important day on your calendar every year? It's probably Christmas, I would say. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
So what is Christmas? It's a birth. It's a beginning. It's a new—but what is the only event for which there might not have been a preceding day, let alone, you know, a repetition of that day, the origin of the universe? If we go back from now, late 2024, we go back 13.8 billion years. Let's say we're talking on a Thursday today. We'll come back. There'll be some Thursday. Just counting 24 hours.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Doesn't mean the Earth was here. Doesn't mean the sun was here. Just counting back in units of 24 hours. Back, back, back, back, back. Come to some Thursday, and, you know, perhaps that was the day the actual Big Bang occurred on, if we could keep track of it. I mean, it's totally practical to do this type of calculation. And we don't actually know what happened on the Wednesday before that day.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's a concept. You can think about it, but you can't actually necessarily know what happened. And so that is why I feel like cosmology is the ultimate, the most primitive, primordial subject and why it evokes something in people. There's reasons why the caves of Lascaux, you know, 40,000 years ago, they weren't depicting like, well, here's how you make a good atlatl or spear, you know, whatever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
They were depicting like the stars and the movements.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It's visceral, right. By the way, it didn't have to be that way. Most stars are not like our sun. Our sun is not unique. I shouldn't say unique, sorry. Our sun is unusual in that it's a singular star. The preponderance of stars that you look up and see on a dark night sky... are multiples, pairs, binaries, triples, maybe even clusters of stars. And that would be very different.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
That would mean you wouldn't have the ability to see because there'd always be a star out, effectively. They won't orbit right next to each other like in Tatooine in Star Wars. Remember, there's a red sun. But you don't have constellations. You don't have seasons and tracking. You don't have agriculture, the human being's first technology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And there are some of my colleagues, and I'd love to talk to you about the psychology of aliens. There's a huge... murmuration in the zeitgeist right now, both that super advanced technology is visiting the Earth, incomprehensible distances and so forth, and simultaneously that there are untold worlds yet to be discovered where life is not only abundant, but it's also maybe superior to us.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And maybe they are so advanced and so in possession of Moore's Law for 80 more doubling periods than we've enjoyed it for that, in fact, they've created us in sort of giant silicon apparatus. This is called the simulation hypothesis. And, by the way, the greatest adherence to both the alien reality hypothesis and the simulation hypothesis are atheists, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But it's natural, right? Yeah. So, you're going to subordinate your belief in a God that is Judeo-Christian, say, because then you'd have to do things, right? Then you'd have to, you know, have obligations on you to the community, to your wife, to your parents. Sacrifices. Sacrifices to the Sabbath.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You might have obligations, but I don't need those if I believe in an alien who's on Proxima Centauri.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And the tuning. You have a fine tuner, right? These same people will reject the arguments of design from fine tuning, which I'm not saying I'm comfortable with those signs. We discussed that already. I mean, we can put up many counterexamples of things that are extremely exquisitely tuned that didn't have a designer whatsoever.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And the Earth's distance to the sun is not exquisitely tuned in a sense that necessitated a designer to do it. In other words, we wouldn't – the anthropic principle would suggest we wouldn't be here if the things were radically different from the way it is. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And actually, a lot of the parameters in cosmology and particle physics and symmetries that we talked about earlier are not as finely tuned as a radio dial, if you remember those, as you and I do, but most of the younger folks won't. But you've got to tune it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But actually, you don't have to tune it that exquisitely any better, in fact, than the universe was tuned along the lines of certain parameters. But this alien, you know, kind of hypothesis has gotten a lot of attention. You know, it has political ramifications. It has military ramifications. You know, what is it meant to do?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
But I'm curious from your perspective, you know, putting on my podcast or hot now, is there, you know, this compulsion to sort of, you know, feel that there will be – you're familiar with the Drake equation. Maybe you've heard of it. I can describe it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Is that so is that because of the? Intolerance that we as humans have towards ambiguity right in other words the battle over abortion or the battle over immigration It's partly that it's partly because if you fail to specify you drown in ambiguity and anxiety
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, yeah. I've heard from so many, and I'm so impressed by them, Jordan. You and Michaela, Jordan.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I just hope I can get tenure. Yeah.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Yeah, and the dirty secret, the shameful secret of what I do with my colleagues is that most of us, myself maybe an exception, are completely inured to it. We're so used to seeing, we're so used to thinking of incomprehensible, literally astronomical numbers that we... Sometimes don't even bother to look up at the sky. There's an eclipse happening of the moon? Oh, so what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
I'll see it some other time. Big deal. We know what that is. I know what that is. I know what causes it. It's not mystery. It doesn't portend evil, doom, disaster, catastrophe. Those words have the word star, astro, within them, right? Evocative of the power that was once thought to be held within the night sky's domain.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Now the scientists know we've extirpated the sort of, you know, mysterious gods and demons and so forth. But at the same time, we've also, as I say, inert ourselves to the wonder that a normal person feels when they encounter the mysterious. And I think it's quite amazing when you see, you know, in my religion, you know, I'm Jewish and I'm practicing, I take it very seriously.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
You know, we are commanded, one of the many things we're commanded to do, in addition to the Sabbath and honoring our parents and so forth, is when you come upon a miracle, you bless it. So we actually have blessings for seeing a meteorite, for seeing a meteor shower, for seeing a rainbow, for these phenomena, for seeing the ocean when you haven't seen it. It's good.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And everything is new.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Are you familiar with the poem by Walt Whitman? Yes. It's called When I Heard the Learned Astronomer. Oh, no. Yes, this is a different one. Oh, okay. And it's really, they believe it was sort of written around the mid to late 1800s, and he had heard a lecture about the recently discovered planet Neptune. So Neptune was discovered in a most remarkable way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
It was the first object we would call dark matter. We saw its unseen gravitational pull, a conflicting and affecting the orbit of an inner planet Uranus, which is closer to the sun. We didn't know why the anomalous behavior of the inner planet was being affected. It was predicted to exist. Truly dark matter discovered. And Whitman, you know, was kind of reacting to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And the poem starts off, it says, when I heard the learned astronomer arranging with facts and tables and figures, et cetera, how quickly I became depressed. and despondent by the night sky brought to numbers. And then he says, I walked outside under the silent canopy of stars to be alone and marveled at their great beauty.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
Now, Richard Feynman, another, you know, Whitman and Feynman, I always put them opposed, and I do this in the course of Peterson Academy. I contrast them. He says, Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of all time. And a very cool and interesting person. Fascinating individual, complex, and incredibly brilliant. Provocative. Yes.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
And often evoking Whitman's other famous phrase, I contain multitudes, right? But in Feynman's case, he said, what is it about scientists that you presume I see less than the poets? Poets will speak of Jupiter as if he is a god. But why do I see less when I speak of him as a ball of methane surrounded by a retinue of planets? In other words, can you see more or can you see less?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
512. Time, Space, and the Miraculous | Dr. Brian Keating
My wife makes fun of me when I see a shark. It'd be great to see both. Yeah. So that's the goal. And in fact, I say that in the course. I say, you don't, at the end, I say, who do you side with? And half the students say Whitman and half the students say Feynman. And I say, you're both right in a sense. You should embody both characters.