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 you can think of it as just ordinary three-dimensional space. But imagine x, y, and z extend to infinity in all directions. And we're sitting at our local, what we perceive as the center of our universe. It's just our observable universe. We can look out 90 billion light years in any direction, which is longer than the age of the universe times the speed of light.
That's because the universe has been expanding. In addition to having existed for 14 billion years, it's been expanding for an additional power of three times that. And then imagine time. So time is a fourth component, and we have to weave those together in order to understand how objects behave in this landscape of what we call the cosmos.
But it wasn't limited to just our – what we now see is our universe. We have a horizon just like if you go off to the Pacific Ocean here away from land, you see a horizon. It's a circular horizon in all directions. So we live on a three-dimensional planet, right? The horizon is two-dimensional. It's one-dimensional, a circle that we can see any ship that's above the horizon.
We can see visible light coming from it, right? But we can perceive that there are things on the other side of the planet that we can't see, and we have to learn about those through indirect methods. We can talk about that at a different time. So there's a horizon on a three-dimensional surface. That's a one-dimensional surface. In four dimensions, it's a two-dimensional surface.
So you kind of lose two dimensions. And that means it's a sphere. It looks like our universe looks like a sphere centered on us. We look in all directions. We see constellations. We see galaxies. We see clusters of galaxies. If you go far enough back, you see this primordial heat that's left over from the formation of the elements. That's called the cosmic microwave background radiation.
That's what I study. It's properties. And what it reveals is the oldest light in the universe, the oldest possible light. It was once visible. You could see it if you existed, but nobody existed back then. And it originates from the formation of the lightest elements and the lightest atoms on the periodic table.
So you could look back and if you could see this, you would see a pattern imprinted on that light called gravitational radiation or waves of gravity. And that would be evidence of something beyond the visible horizon. And that would actually originate from this inflationary epoch if it occurred.
So I had the idea to build the first telescope, a refracting telescope of all things, just a telescope with lenses, but lenses that are transparent to microwaves and focus microwaves. But I realized I could build that telescope. And if we were successful, I didn't think we wasn't guaranteed to be successful, but it was a big enough scientific quest.
that it was guaranteed to win a Nobel Prize if we were correct. And in fact, spoiler alert, my first book is called Losing the Nobel Prize because we had a retracted discovery that we made at Harvard on St. Patrick's Day 2014, 10 years ago.
Very clear. And that's how it relates to this p-hacking and everything else. We actually didn't have this paper peer reviewed. We were so concerned that a competitor, which is a spacecraft, a billion-dollar spacecraft, we were just a $10 million experiment, a little telescope at the South Pole, Antarctica, where I've been a couple times.
And that instrument bested a scientific telescope led by 1,000 people costing a billion dollars led out of multiple countries in America and Europe. And we were terrified, as many scientists are, that we're going to get scooped. In fact, the original discovery of the cosmic microwave background was made by accident.
The discovery of this three Kelvin heat source that's coming to us in all directions, i.e. it's a background, was made by accident at Bell Laboratories. And Bell Labs accidentally discovered it because they were looking at the very first communication satellites. AT&T, Bell Labs of communication. So they stumbled on it.
They accidentally said, I'm looking at the satellite that should have a certain amount of background hiss, noise, whatever that was expected. But I'm getting hundreds of times that amount. And where could that be coming from? They did very excruciating, very high precision measurements.
And they found they couldn't identify a single terrestrial source or a cosmic source of any other sort except for the fact. that if the universe began essentially with a big bang, they didn't call it that back then, that there would be a pervasive heat left over that would be exactly this temperature, three degrees above absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin.
So I knew if they won a Nobel Prize, certainly I'd win a Nobel Prize for discovering why that effect happened, right? It's like you discover, you know, some amino acid and then you discover, well, it's produced by DNA. Well, certainly, you know, if the amino acid won the Nobel Prize, certainly DNA would win the Nobel Prize, right?
Yeah.
We didn't publish it. We submitted it to the archive. We had a press conference at Harvard Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. And it was televised. And in the audience were Nobel laureates and reporters. But the discovery that, you know, it was clear that we would have won it. However, at that time, I had been removed from the leadership of the experiment that I created.
So I created the predecessor experiment. It's like iPhones. You build one, then you upgrade it. You build a better camera. So the first one I invented when I was a postdoc at Stanford, it was called Bicep. And it stood for Background Imager of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization.
And it's also kind of a play on words because the pattern of microwave polarization, which we can talk about, was a twisting, curling pattern. So I made the pun, like curl like you do bicep, the muscle behind curls. Anyway, it's not that funny. And they ended up trying to change the acronym, which pissed me off. But anyway, the tragic thing is that we built this experiment.
We upgraded this experiment. It's very hard to get money to build it. I got money from David Baltimore, who's the president of Caltech.
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