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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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.
But that obviously depends on assuming the Earth is a perfect sphere, which it's not, right?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't remember how we got on this. So we were marching through.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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