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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He basically, if you're listening, I'm taking my glass of matina. Yerba mate. Yerba mate, yeah. So he said that when the Earth is spinning, it rotates once per day, but it's also revolving around the sun. So these combined motions make this sloshing of the liquid. You see that? And he claimed that is what caused the tides on the Earth. And the fact that's completely wrong.
It's amazing, Andrew, when you think about how brilliant a scientist can be. And it's almost like the proportion... of their blunder is proportionate to how brilliant they are.
I would expect that it would influence other animals. I don't know what the menstrual cycles are, deer or whatever. Who knows? Or any animal that has an egg that – Well, a lot of animals have not a menstrual cycle but an estrous cycle.
And in the past, by the way, the moon was a lot closer than it is. Not a lot, but it was closer. The moon moves about the width of your – again, back to your fingers now. So the moon moves away by the width of about your thumb's fingernail every year. It moves further away.
A centimeter away from the Earth because there's a gravitational competition between the gravitational force of the moon and the Earth's oceans provide a source of friction. So over the years, it's getting farther and farther away such that it eventually won't be able to have total solar eclipses. It'll be what's called an annular eclipse where it doesn't obscure it completely.
Anyway, so in the past, this is the only way to say, millions of years ago when the first hominids were evolving, the moon was much, much closer. Millions of times of their fingernails eventually starts to add up. And certainly when the first life formed on the Earth, it was only, it was probably 30 times closer than it is now. So yeah. So short answer, I don't know.
On the special website that I made, briankeating.com slash Huberman, I list the four major meteor showers, one in each season, that people can watch with your naked eye. In fact, it's bad to use a telescope. You don't want a telescope.
Yeah, exactly. You want the whole field of view. And humans have an amazing, as you know, huge field, 190 degrees or something like that. Not as big as an owl, but quite big. And you want to take that in because you're looking for motion. You're looking for intensity. Sometimes you can see colors. And I list what elements contribute to the colors of different meteorites on this website that I have.
But yes, anywhere that's more than, say, 20, 30, 40 miles away from a major city, is fine. Even in San Diego, there's two dark sky communities. One is called Julian, California, and the other one's the Anza Borrego Desert, and it's called Borrego Springs. These are areas where they forbid upward shining light, so the only light can be downward facing.
It also has to have very narrow spectral bands on it, so like sodium vapor, you know, very high, so that you can filter it out, basically with certain very inexpensive optical filters. But like I said, almost anywhere. But the good thing to know is that if you get a telescope, again, you can see 90% of what's going to be fascinating to you as a layperson with a telescope that costs $50.
You can see all the craters. You can see mountains on the moon. And again, these mountains were not just like cool things. They destroyed, they falsified the scientific paradigm, quote unquote, which was that the moon was perfectly crystalline and spherical. Galileo showed, no, not only does it have mountains, I can measure the height of those mountains. I can measure the planes of lava flows.
And eventually they came up with theories that it doesn't have tectonic motion. It doesn't have an iron core. I mean, it's amazing. You can see all these things with the small telescope like the one I have for you. But you don't need like the Hubble telescope or Mount Willis. You don't need any of that. You can see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter.
You can even on a dark sky without a telescope. see an object that's outside of our galaxy. It's called the Andromeda Galaxy. It's very important in the history of astronomy. In 1929, 1923 rather, on Mount Wilson, not far from here, Edwin Hubble realized that that was not part of the Milky Way galaxy. It was way too far away to be located within the Milky Way.
It was about 20 times the radius of the Milky Way. And that revolutionized all of our conceptions of where the universe is located. Is it centered on us? Are we the most important thing? No. He showed that you can see that on most fall nights in the constellation Andromeda with your naked eye. It's six times wider than the full moon. It's incredible.
20 centuries before TikTok. So I cut them some slack. There are a couple that look similar to what they're, you know, Orion.
Those aren't constellations.
So they're portions of a constellation. So they're called asterisms. So an asterism is a collection of stars that's associated with each other, but it's not the full composition of a constellation. So the constellation is actually called Ursa Major. The Big Dipper is in the tail constellation. and the hindquarters of Ursa Major, which is the great bear.
The little dipper is the asterism, seven stars that make up, there's 80-something stars that make up the little bear, which actually doesn't look like a bear. Ursa Major kind of does look like the California Republic flag that we have. But yes, the asterism, I always ask for people to leave. You can't, you know, they're not making new constellations.
There's only 88 constellations over the whole four pi spherical dome of the sky. But you can leave your own asterism on the podcast. You can leave five stars on your podcast and mine. So you can't have a constellation, but you can have an asterism.
Yeah, I was 14. It was right after I got my first telescope.
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