Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, so I've been in love with telescopes since the age of about 12 when I could first afford one to buy one of my own. And that really came out of the fact that I recognized the limitations of the human eye. It turned out I was 12 years old, woke up in the middle of the night one night, there was this incredibly bright light, you know, brighter than these lights here shining into my room.
And I was like, I don't know, there's a street light outside. This is crazy. Let me look outside and see what it is. And it was the moon. And I had never seen it was near a moon set, which is near sunrise, full moon. And I looked at it and I kept staring at it. And there was a star next to it that kind of looked like a piece of the moon had broken off. It was that bright and that clear.
And it's unusual to see these kinds of things together. They're actually known as syzygies, which is a great Scrabble word. If you're ever pressed for a win in Scrabble, use the word syzygy. I think it's like 80 points. And that just means a conjunction, an alignment of astronomical objects. I was like, what the hell is this? This is 1984, Andrew. You're younger than me.
But Google did not exist for another 16 years. And I was kind of impatient. I wanted to know what this thing was. What is this thing? It's not moving. It's not flashing. It's not a drone. Back then, it's not Southwest Airlines, right? So I'm looking at it. It's not moving. And day after day, it was like that. And I was like, how am I going to find this out? Like imagine existing.
We're so blessed that we have the internet and we have these LLMs. It's so easy now to be a scientist or do research. And anybody can do research. Science is for everybody, right? You always highlight that fact.
So I realized the only way to find out about it was to wait for the New York Times to get delivered on Sunday because they did have a section back then that they don't have now called Cosmos. And in it, it depicted what the night sky looked like that night, which is a Sunday. And that was like three or four days after what – I had this observation, which was incredibly observant.
And I looked at it and it was the moon. It showed the moon and it showed Jupiter. I was like, what? You can see a planet with your naked eye? This was around the time Voyager was going by the planets on the grand tour of the solar system, never been done before. I was like, I thought you needed a spaceship. And I realized that was my first bit of astronomical research. I looked up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They don't know how the proof is constructed. I don't expect them to go and replicate what Aristarchus did 2,000 years ago. But this is knowledge we've had for, as I said, 2,000 years. The knowledge that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is only about 400 years old. But I would say 99%—I know for a fact— I went to Italy actually 10 years ago.
It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And we had a ceremony to honor the first person who ever came up with a theory of relativity, which is also Galileo. Galileo had the first notion that relative motion is indistinguishable. That if you and I are on a bike and I'm stationary, you can't tell if you're moving. I can't tell if I'm stationary.
That's called relativity of motion. Motion is not absolute. Einstein would later enhance that, put on steroids, and then come up with all sorts of cool stuff that we can get into.
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