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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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?
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.
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.
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.
We can do it – well, this yerba mate is so delicious. We can't do it because it's got a little bit of –
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.
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.
We take these things for granted, but people didn't realize that.
Yeah.
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.
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.
Eyeglasses, yeah. So we know today that when you go to the eye doctor, there's an eye chart, right?
Snellen chart, okay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He would always improve things and make them so much better that he would obliterate his competition. Galileo.
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.
Showing 741–760 of 1,291 · page 38 of 65
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