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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. And we speak of that now. Exactly.
Predicting the future, as you said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And yet they would build things, you know, in relation to the positions of stars and constellations.
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.
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 –
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.
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.
What's the standard? Wild.
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.
We've defined the second in terms of oscillations of a certain atom. called cesium and how many times it oscillates per second.
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