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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
A Nobel Prize because only three people can win it each year. There's only 200 people have ever won it. There's more people in the NBA than have won it in physics, right? So this is a very exclusive club and if you win it, somebody else isn't going to win it, odds are.
And this pressure to kind of get to that level should never exceed the passion that drove you to become a scientist in the first place. And so I was obsessed with that. And what Andrew Lang showed me is that science is its own reward. And the pleasure of finding things out, as Feynman would say, is its reward. Science is its own reward. And that's characteristic of these infinite games.
You just want to keep playing them. And the tragic thing... Is that – I'm emotional thinking about this. When Andrew was at the peak of his life, he chose to take it. He took his own life.
He killed himself. Ironically, tragically, he used helium, which is central to the formation of the universe. And the creation of our universe is reliant in large part on helium, the abundance of helium. And he asphyxiated himself in a cheap, dirty, sleazy motel. Actually, I had stayed at in Pasadena when I was visiting him for my initial job talk.
He was 41, I think.
He had three kids.
Yeah. Francis is still a renowned professor.
They were separated. They had gotten estranged and they weren't living together. It was interesting. He was always very close. She had two children, I think, from a previous marriage or one child from a previous marriage. And he was like a father to that son as well, like a biological father, whatever that means. Kids were so dedicated to him. And look, don't cry for me.
I mean, I still emotional because he meant so much to me as a mentor, as a friend, as an advisor. As a father figure basically, but he had real kids and he had adopted kids.
And he was a pragmatist. He would give me advice, life advice. And again, I was estranged from my father. He was playing this role. And he was just so, he was charming, handsome, charismatic.
He had just discovered, came off this discovery of proving that the universe has a flat spatial geometry, which just means that any triangle that you make in the universe, whether it's three planets, three stars, three galaxies, three patches of the cosmic microwave background radiation, always the interior angles add up to 180 degrees as they do on a flat table here, as they did for Euclid.
And that had astonishing implications for how the universe might have begun.
I don't think it's explicable. I don't think, I mean, the human brain is the most complicated thing that human brains can even contemplate, right? It's the solipsistic in a sense, but I couldn't really wade into it. I mean I know details of his personal life and yes, divorce and separation and so forth.
But I don't think that's it just because the highs of the new quest and like the dopamine hadn't really come in from Bicep and it wouldn't come in for four more years after his death in 2010. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
: We got to continue the project. But because he was removed and he was kind of my consigliere or whatever. I was to him. I forget how the relationship goes. I'm not as conversant with the mafia as I should be.
But with Andrew, with his death, one of the trivial in comparison consequences was that the main patron and backer of me in my career who had helped me get my job at UCSD had helped me get this presidential career grant which I received from President Bush and all these incredible accomplishments and just been my sounding board on experiments and kept me going and helped me when I had –
troubles with my graduate students and he would talk to my, I mean, it's unheard of, right? The compassion that this man had. And if he had only reached out to me, you know, I'm sure he had better friends than me, but like I would have gone up in a second. You know, I went to the motel where he took his life when I was writing my book just to put me back in Like try – how can I comprehend it?
I couldn't. I just cried. I sat in front of the hotel and I cried. But no, I don't think we can understand it. But the eventual high wouldn't come and then a much more crashing low after we essentially had to retract it and we're disconfirmed as they say.
Yeah. Yeah. I was at UCSD and I left Caltech.
I never had the physique to get into the military, although I wanted to at one point to be a pilot. Actually, I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like my stepfather did. But I didn't have the physique. I didn't have the HLP diet back then. But the point was you go on a military. It's a whole way and you do it in seven days, eight days if you're lucky.
Showing 901–920 of 1,291 · page 46 of 65
← Previous
Next →