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
I think it's obvious why you have this particular affliction, and that's because you're used to doing experiment. You're a scientist. Your core identity, one of your core identities is a scientist, right? And you think of things scientifically. And as I said before, the scientific method, as we practice it, is based on hypothesis, observation, experimentation, iteration, right?
Well, think about this. If I have a hypothesis that certain people can detect sunspots, right? So I want to have a control group and I want to have a variable, right? So I want to be able to contrast and see if it's statistically significant, right? And I want a p-hack, right? So what do I have to do then? Well, I have to control the number of sunspots. Okay, sorry.
I'm not – you used to say you weren't around at the creation – at the design meeting for Human Beasts.
It's not good. You don't want to do it. Don't do it. Your colleague at Stanford, Guido Embens, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2021. And he's done a tremendous amount of work in this, confounding variables, p-hacking. Where do these things manifest themselves in physics? Well, high-temperature superconductors. This goes back to the late 80s. I remember graduating from high school.
There was a discovery of room temperature, what's called cold fusion. That was one thing that would create also limitless energy, too cheap to meter from just using hydrogen and from seawater and palladium and platinum.
It turned out to be bogus and it turned out to be – the data were manipulated in such a way that we would say probably fall into the realm of p-hacking, which may not have been maliciously intended. But the goal, the output of it is certainly a driving incentive that influences people to do things that are unethical. And that happens at all levels. And we saw it. I saw it in my own experiment.
not necessarily accusing my colleagues of being unethical. We were searching and we still are searching for what caused the Big Bang. We're going to get back to your question of how this comes, because I think I can help. But that plate's still spinning in the background. Yeah, it's still spinning. Like a planet. It's spinning like our solar system, right?
But the quarry was so big to unravel what caused the Big Bang to bang, what ignited the spark that became our universe. It's at least, it was called when we announced the discovery at Harvard, on St. Patrick's Day 2014. World News covered it, front page everywhere, New York Times, CNN, every single outlet covered it. It was called one of the greatest discoveries of all time.
Not only did it explain how our universe came into existence, it also predicted the existence of other universes in what's called the multiverse, which we've heard about maybe in quantum computing.
Yeah, exactly right. That's right. Among many things that we hear about only on that show. So the point is, it was a quarry for the ages. And I knew that because that's why I invented the experiment, right? I told you, my father and I, you know, we never really had the rapprochement that you and your father seemed to have had. And that's great. We always had kind of a difficult relationship.
As I said, he abandoned me and my book. I write about this rather. He abandoned me and my older brother, Kevin. I was seven, he was 10. And he just left us and Because of that, he didn't end up paying child support for me or my brother and alimony to my mother. And so my stepfather adopted us. And my last name was originally not Keating. It was Axe, A-X.
And so when we were adopted, I never saw him. I didn't see him for 15 years. But I knew one thing. He was a brilliant scientist. And he was actually the youngest. He was not only a tenured professor. He was full professor with like a chair at Cornell at age 26. So you and I got our profession, like our 30s or whatever.
Yeah. I mean, it's like a much, he was 26, 27. I was in math. It was a little different. But I knew he won. Basically, there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics. There's the Fields Medal, which is kind of equivalent at some level, but almost nobody knows about it. It's only given every five years. You have to be under 40, whatever.
He never won that, but he won like the prize just beneath that, if you will, called the Cole Prize. A remarkable scientist, got into incredible discoveries in mathematics and physics. And I knew one thing. He never won the Nobel Prize. So as some kids might compete with their father, who's a captain of the high school football team, and they want to be the captain of the college, very competitive.
Boys can be competitive with their dads, right? You know that. And I wanted to compete with him, but he was an athlete. I was an athlete. I can compete with him and do what he could not do, which was win a Nobel Prize. And I was estranged from him. And I was like, I'm going to win a Nobel Prize, and I'll show him, and he'll regret that he abandoned me and gave me up for adoption.
This is my thought. I'm not saying it's like the most elevated way to be, but that's the way I thought of it. So I said, I have to invent something, discover something that's worthy of a Nobel Prize. That's all I have to do, quote unquote. How hard can it be? There's been hundreds of Nobel Prizes given out. That's the way you thought about it? I was at Stanford and you're surrounded by Nobel.
You know what it's like. I was a postdoc at Stanford for a short time. We can get into that. And the point was I was obsessed with discovering or inventing an experiment that could take us back to the primordial universe before what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space. It's the origin of the first elements in the periodic table of the elements.
We still don't know what caused that event to occur. And I realized that if we discovered what caused that event to occur, which is hypothesized to be a phenomenon called inflation, which was co-created by at least three scientists, but two of whom were at Stanford, associate with Stanford, Alan Guth, who's now at MIT. He was a postdoc at Slack.
And Andre Linde, who's a renowned professor at Stanford to this day. So they predicted that there was this mysterious substance called a quantum field and that the fluctuations in this quantum field existing in the four-dimensional infinite space, the random fluctuations of a quantum field, what's called vacuum energy, is unstable.
You can't have what's called vacuum or negative energy and have it just sit there permanently. It eventually inexorably must fluctuate, and the fluctuations can actually spawn an expansion of that four-dimensional space locally. And that occurred at a specific time.
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