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
So the stakes are really high. That means the incentives to make sure you detect that are really high too and not get scooped as happened many, many times. My advisor was scooped. He never won the Nobel Prize. My advisor's advisor. He never won the Nobel Prize. These accidentally discovered, serendipitously discovered astronomers, Penzias and Wilson, they did win the Nobel Prize.
So there is a pressure on scientists to get there first, like Falcon Scott, Robert Scott getting to the South Pole first. There is a benefit to priority. It's just a fact of life. And science is no different. We teach undergraduates about seven or eight different experiments. All of them won the Nobel Prize at some point in physics history. It doesn't mean they're not going to win a Nobel Prize.
No. Why? Because they didn't get there first. So getting there first in sight, that's for better or for worse, is the sign of greatest accomplishments, the sine qua non of accomplishment is that that does lead to Nobel Prizes.
Yeah, I should say what we saw. What we mistook as the imprimatur of this origin spark of the universe was the humblest substance in the universe, namely dust. So when a star explodes, it produces, after its lifetime has expired, it fuses lighter elements into heavier elements. Eventually, it gets to produce iron.
And iron is the element for which, once it's fused together from, I think it's silicon or two nuclei before it, it produces too little energy to keep the star buoyant and expanded. And so the star immediately starts to collapse. When that collapse occurs, it blasts out into the interstellar medium that surrounds it all the byproducts, the silicon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and the iron.
And it blasted out into the universe surrounding it. And that happens enough times in our galaxy that the galaxy is actually a pretty polluted place. It's smoggy. It's dusty. It's dirty. And the dust is actually little microscopic meteorites. So on my website, BrianKeating.com, I give away – actually, I have a special link, BrianKeating.com slash Huberman.
I will give away actual meteorites that come from your ancestral homeland of Argentina. And you'll see when you get them, they're highly magnetic. They're very dense. And I give you the material, the composition of these meteorites and the assay. We do X-ray crystallography on them. It's really cool.
The actual composition of them is determined by this last event that a star does before it dies, which is to produce iron.
So we did discover a microwave signal from the galaxy, not from the Big Bang, not from the cosmos, but from particular and unique to our galaxy, which is that when a star explodes, it produces this material, mostly made of iron, these micrometeorites that I talked about, put on my website for your listeners. And these micrometeorites are also going to act like little compass needles.
They're highly magnetically susceptible. So the Milky Way, everything in the universe has a magnetic field. You have a magnetic field. Birds have it. Even bacteria can have it. And our planet obviously has it. And the galaxy has it. What happens when you put a compass in a magnetic field? Those needles get aligned with the magnetic field. That then produces a type of polarization.
Now, polarization is the least familiar. Light has three characteristics. Its intensity, its color or spectrum, and its polarization. Almost nobody knows what polarization is. But it's really the essence of what makes light a wave. If you think about an ocean wave, the ocean wave is going up and down, undulating up and down.
And the undulation, the direction perpendicular to the sea surface, is sort of its polarization. Happens to be that water waves are actually polarized longitudinally, but forget that. Or if you and I, separated by a meter and a half, two meters, we have a rope between us. If we oscillate that rope up and down at a certain frequency, the frequency will be the spectrum, the color of the light.
How hard we do that would be the intensity of the light. And the plane that we're oscillating, the jump rope or whatever, that's the plane of polarization. These little needles of cosmic dust from the exploded innards of a star that died in our galaxy many years ago and many, many billions of these stars, they produce these particles of dust.
So we saw that pattern instead of seeing the birth pangs of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe.
So the moon is always half a degree wide, same exact apparent angular diameter as the sun, which is unique among the 290 moons in our solar system. Only our moon has the same apparent diameter as seen from its planet as the sun does, meaning we're the only planet that can have a total solar eclipse. an exact total solar eclipse like we had a couple of months ago in Austin, Texas.
Be that as it may, the moon doesn't change its size. I would hope not.
The moon is about 60 times the Earth's radius from the Earth. It's 250,000 miles away, which is about one and a half light seconds away. and it is about the size of the continental U.S. in diameter, or a little bit less. So the moon's size doesn't change, but when the human eye has something to compare it to, the brain has a reference point to compare it to.
And because it's so big, if there's something in front of it, a 747, a person, a large building even, when you were, if the moon is behind that object, because it's so far away, moving even the Earth's entire radius doesn't change the moon's apparent angular diameter. It's the same in Peking as it is here, Beijing as it is in Los Angeles, right?
So that means a very small, a very large change in the distance in the Earth would change the building size dramatically, could reduce it to zero basically. But when you compare it to something that's close on the horizon, your brain has something visually to compare it to. When it's overhead, zenith or whatever, It doesn't have anything to compare it to, so you're just looking at it.
But you can always measure it, and you can prove to yourself it's always the same size. It's about the size of your pinky fingernail held at arm's length, same size as the sun. And interestingly enough, it's the same— You said one degree. It's half a degree. Half a degree. Half a degree, yeah.
Showing 961–980 of 1,291 · page 49 of 65
← Previous
Next →