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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Appearances
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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