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, you're making it to the next one. 76 years, yeah, that's right. I'm right? Yeah.
It's not like the best comet in history, in fact, there's been better ones.
And lunacy, for that matter, like full moon and lunacy. Yeah, lunacy, right, crime statistics. So look at these words, disaster, catastrophe. The ast in both of those means star, They used to believe that stars, comets, eclipses, those things were influencing events on Earth caused by these celestial forces for not propitiating them, making the gods happy or whatever.
And in fact, Columbus owes his life. He was almost killed in Jamaica. And I think it was 1498, a couple of years after discovering him, he's still exploring Jamaica. And he failed to ingratiate himself with the local native inhabitants of Jamaica or wherever he was. And they were going to kill him.
And he luckily had on for navigation – astronomy and navigation have always been intimately related because first of all, if you know where Polaris is, which is not the brightest star – It's in the little dipper. It's the pole star. It's the north star. You've heard of true north, north star.
It's actually very close to being – if you go to the north pole and look straight up, it's very close to being directly above you.
In any human timescale, it does. Over thousands and tens of thousands of years, it changes. But right now, for the next couple thousand years – so don't worry. You'll still be accurate. That is within a half a degree or so.
Well, I say it like this. The universe could end in a heat death and a big rip or whatever, but that's not for a trillion years, so everybody keep paying your taxes. So you could use it for navigation. So you could know your latitude, but measuring longitude was very difficult because you couldn't actually – to know longitude, you need to measure time relative to where Greenwich Mean Time is.
That's how Greenwich became – so important and that's why London had its huge economy. Again, these things are always related to capitalism and even how we measure latitude and longitude comes from the fact that London and Thames River, 90 percent of the world's commerce flowed through there at one point or another. It's incredible. So anyway, latitude and longitude is very important.
People started to know that, yeah, these events would occur and including this event with Columbus and he brought along with him on his voyage an astronomer. And this astronomer knew that in two days' time from when these natives had captured some of Columbus's crew that there was going to be a total solar eclipse and it was going to go through Jamaica.
And he said – he told Columbus and Columbus said to the inhabitants, if you don't give our people back, our god is going to obscure and kill your god, the sun god. They're like, F you, whatever. And then it happened and they totally believed that they were in control of these celestial events. We better give the people back and Columbus got the hell out of there. So it's an amazing story.
Military – yeah, he used it for military coercion.
I'm interviewing her tomorrow.
There's a direct connection. Sorry to interrupt, but there's a connection between that and the Nobel Prize. So there was something called the Longitude Prize in the 1700s to develop a clock that could be used in naval situations on boats. You couldn't use a grandfather clock as the pendulum. The boats rock. Acceleration. So they had to find something. And this guy, Thompson or somebody. Harrison.
Harrison, yeah. So he invented this mechanical clock, which is a predecessor of our modern wind-up clocks. Obviously, we use cesium and atomic clocks. But that prize for 10,000 pounds or whatever it was, was an early predecessor of the Nobel Prize.
The obstacle is the way.
The obstacle is the way.
Okay, so we live in an atmosphere, a planet with an atmosphere, thank God. We wouldn't be here having this conversation, right? And that atmosphere is a dirty window. It's like literally looking through the windshield of your car and it's cloudy and dusty and contaminated. We live in its presence.
And the best astronomical telescopes are the ones that are launched above the atmosphere, out of the atmosphere. Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, and now the James Webb Telescope. Again, those are multibillion-dollar telescopes.
The James Webb to build it – and by the way, one lesson to leave you with and maybe your audience with as well is whenever you hear a scientific instrument's cost, always in your mind at least double it. Andrew Lang, my late great mentor, used to say, multiply by pi. Because A, you're not taking into account the fact that you don't build, say, a destroyer or an aircraft carrier to build it.
Showing 1021–1040 of 1,291 · page 52 of 65
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