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
Yeah.
He gave me a special grant, just presidential. It's called Caltech President's Fund. He gave it to me and my postdoc advisor, Andrew Lang, this incredible scientist. He was married to Francis Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. in chemistry, renowned scientist as well. And they were just a power couple. And he invited me to give a talk and I gave a job talk. He hired me on the spot.
I couldn't help myself from saying yes before he finished this. I was miserable at Stanford, by the way. It was 1999, 2000, dot-com boom. I was making $32,000 a year living on Alma Street. The Caltrains were running every 17 minutes. I know because I was awake from 5 a.m. I couldn't sleep more than four or five hours. And I just said yes, moved down to Caltech.
And because of that, I convinced him and my colleague, Jamie Bach, who's currently a professor, to build this telescope and put it at the South Pole in Antarctica. And that was the only place we could do it. And the only university that would fund it was this gift from David Baltimore's presidential fund. So these confluence of events.
And by the way, then because I got this job and because I built this telescope with my colleagues, I got the job at UCSD, which then enabled me to
The initial one was a million dollars to build the first version.
So because I was recognized and this experiment got a lot of attention because it was really the first one ever designed to look for the spark that ignited the whole Big Bang. So it became just the cause celebre of the cosmology field.
Yeah.
Tiger Woods, another Stanford. Right. Same story. Father, hard pushing, driving. And then what does he do after he, you know, is a PGA champion? He wants to like become a Navy SEAL or something like that.
It wasn't enough for him. Sorry, I interrupted your question.
What was kind of revelatory to me is that sometimes you start a quest or you start a journey, and the fuel that gets you going just no longer serves you when you get there. My brother always says baggage has handles so you can put it down.
So that, like, journey from initiating it, the experiment, to best my dad, to show him up, to make him regret that he abandoned me and my brother. I mean, I always said, I could see how he could abandon me. I was only seven. I'm kind of boring. You know, he used to joke, I only care about kids once they learn calculus. He was, you know, funny.
He would say it in jest. And it is true. We did reunite. And we did have a rapprochement. But it was after inventing this experiment, after I arrived at Caltech. It was. I mean, he was this kind of intellect. And it was so lovely to see you and your dad. You know, my wish for you is to have kind of an experience, maybe similar, maybe not. But when you do have kids and please God, you will.
um, you get to, you, you get a do over, you get to kind of correct the mistakes or the ways that you, and you'll never get it right. You know, one of my friends, a psychiatrist, he says, your job as a parent is to only pass on half of your neuroticism to your kids. And if every generation does that, you know, eventually be a perfect species.
But, um, but I, but I felt that passion and so forth to kind of best him. And then when we reunited and, and as I said, it no longer served me. But the trajectory that I had launched this experiment on continued unabated. And so that had this inertia, this momentum that couldn't be stopped.
In fact, so many people wanted a part of it and so much pressure was surrounding it that I think partially that led to me actually being kind of kicked out of the leadership of the experiment. And that was precipitated by a truly tragic event. So I told you, My advisor, Sarah Church, set up a job interview for me with her advisor when she was a postdoc at Caltech named Andrew Lang.
Andrew was like, at that time I was estranged from my dad. He was like a father figure. He was like, ever see the TV show Mad Men, like Don Draper? He's just like handsome, good looking. Everyone thought he was going to win a Nobel Prize. He was stolen from Berkeley. They spent tons of money to recruit him from Berkeley to come to Caltech. His wife was a power couple, Frances Arnold.
Again, she won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. And he just had the world at his fingertips, charming, funny. And he would say things like, you know, Brian, this is so unrealistic that we have to do it. Like he was a kid. He loved to play and he loved – he's the one who inspired me in this way of just – never stopping like that passionate curiosity and the reward that you get.
I always say, you know, when you solve a problem, your reward is a harder problem like that. But that if you're a scientist, that feels good because it's like I would say and I think it's one of your colleagues. I'm not I'm not sure so much good stuff and going on up there, but But there's this concept of finite games and infinite games, right? So I would say science is an infinite game.
You can't win science. It goes on forever. No one masters all of whatever science is. You can debate even what it is. But it's composed of an infinite number of finite games. Getting into college, getting into graduate school, getting a postdoc, getting a tenure track position. Those are all finite games, right? And the ultimate – what's the ultimate finite game?
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