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
You're right. A slight deviation from that is it's not light that we're looking for. We're not looking for optical light. We're looking for heat. So it's heat pollution. You're exactly right. We're looking to avoid heat pollution. So we want to be somewhere cold.
We want to be somewhere that's far away from man-made sources of RF interference and microwave interference and communications, obviously. But the South Pole has a couple of other properties. One, the sun is below the horizon and the sun is 5,500 Kelvin. And we're looking for something that's a fraction of a Kelvin, maybe a few milli or nano Kelvin at most.
So it's billions of times that we want to get a void. Even the Earth itself is still 300, almost 300 Kelvin down there. Freezing is 273. So it does have that property. But the best part about it, it's above a lot of the Earth's atmosphere because it's at 9,000 feet above sea level.
And it's so cold, you don't know this because you're a California baby, but on the East Coast, when I would grow up, some days the bane of my existence would be you'd listen on the radio and they'd announce school closures due to snowfall in the winter. And sometimes they'd say, oh, you're out of luck because it's too cold to snow.
Sometimes the air temperature cannot saturate and perform precipitation. And the South Pole is like that. It's so cold that if you took this glass, I'm holding a glass here, and it was empty on the table here. And I extend this glass up to outer space.
The amount of water, if I took all the water in the atmosphere, the humidity in the atmosphere above the South Pole and condensed it into a liquid, it would be 0.3 of a millimeter. Here in Los Angeles, it's about an inch or 25 millimeters or more. And so you'd like to not go there. Now, why is that important? Well, water absorbs microwaves. That's how your microwave oven works.
It heats up the water molecules. They start to vibrate and jumble. That causes friction. They heat up and eventually they'll boil, right? So that's why sometimes you can overheat liquid in a microwave. You can't tell, but it's super hot and actually it can be dangerous. But in this case, we don't want a photon coming from the Big Bang perhaps or before the Big Bang with the spark that ignited it.
We don't want that to travel for 14 billion years nearly and then get absorbed in a water molecule above the Earth's surface. So the best place to go is space. But space, even with SpaceX, I haven't done any scientific experiments, but it's about maybe a factor of 1,000 to a million times more expensive.
So the same satellite that we were worried was going to scoop us was exactly 100 or almost 200 times more expensive than our experiment at the South Pole.
We ended up getting about $10 million.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But those are all funded by you and your listeners and some of the taxpayers. So the National Science Foundation operates those C-130s are part of the National Science Foundation's fleet. We don't pay a dime for them. If I want to build a computer network system down there, we don't pay a dime for it. It's actually a point of contention because now I'm no longer with that experiment.
I've recused myself from it for many years, not because of the incident where we were basically disconfirming – later disconfirmed our results.
I didn't do the news conference. OK.
Some months, yeah. Some months.
Look, I'm not proud of that. I'm not proud that I had such a base, you know, kind of pursuit. I think it was, as I said, compounded by psychological factors, you know. But did you have fun doing the work? Oh, I loved it. Yeah.
I mean, getting to do what I do now, and now it's even more exciting in a sense because the project, you know, and by the way, it's not like we made a blunder and like, you know, Rob hopefully took the lens cap off the camera. We didn't make a blunder like that. There have been many, many blunders. and actually led to much worse retractions. Our results are stronger than ever.
I should say are the BICEP team's results. I've left the team as I said, but their results are still the very best by almost an order of magnitude. We hope with the Simons Observatory that I'm co-leading with colleagues at Princeton and Penn and other places that we can actually supersede them, but we haven't yet. And so what we saw I should be very clear. We didn't make a blunder.
We didn't put our thumb in front of the viewfinder. We didn't make something stupid. We mistook a signal produced by another astrophysical source as representative of this curling pattern of microwaves for which BICEP was named. That would be indicative if confirmed of the inflationary origin of the universe which by the way would be concomitant with the existence of the multiverse.
Showing 941–960 of 1,291 · page 48 of 65
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