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
It was the first object we would call dark matter. We saw its unseen gravitational pull, a conflicting and affecting the orbit of an inner planet Uranus, which is closer to the sun. We didn't know why the anomalous behavior of the inner planet was being affected. It was predicted to exist. Truly dark matter discovered. And Whitman, you know, was kind of reacting to that.
And the poem starts off, it says, when I heard the learned astronomer arranging with facts and tables and figures, et cetera, how quickly I became depressed. and despondent by the night sky brought to numbers. And then he says, I walked outside under the silent canopy of stars to be alone and marveled at their great beauty.
Now, Richard Feynman, another, you know, Whitman and Feynman, I always put them opposed, and I do this in the course of Peterson Academy. I contrast them. He says, Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of all time. And a very cool and interesting person. Fascinating individual, complex, and incredibly brilliant. Provocative. Yes.
And often evoking Whitman's other famous phrase, I contain multitudes, right? But in Feynman's case, he said, what is it about scientists that you presume I see less than the poets? Poets will speak of Jupiter as if he is a god. But why do I see less when I speak of him as a ball of methane surrounded by a retinue of planets? In other words, can you see more or can you see less?
My wife makes fun of me when I see a shark. It'd be great to see both. Yeah. So that's the goal. And in fact, I say that in the course. I say, you don't, at the end, I say, who do you side with? And half the students say Whitman and half the students say Feynman. And I say, you're both right in a sense. You should embody both characters.
Yeah, that's what I... So often, and this is why I was drawn to Peterson Academy. I've been a professor for 21 years. You know, it's part of my identity as a human being, one of many. And I think...
For me, the opportunity to do something completely new, novel, and really interact with the type of intellect, the curiosity that hasn't been beaten out because they don't have to learn partial differential equations.
And they don't have to learn how to solder together a data acquisition system and all sorts of other things that are very important for professional physicists that aspire to do them. maybe some of them will. And I've, in fact, been encountered by people that do want to take that course further than when I presented in Peterson Academy.
But the point being, you know, if you can maintain that wonder, if you can maintain that curiosity, and you are undeterred by failure. You know, I always tell my students, when you solve a problem, guess what you win? You win a ticket to an even harder problem. And that's a good thing. Because that's It's like success in life. It's success, exactly. It's deferring gratification.
But the thing about science, Jordan, as you know, you can't win science. You know, science is an infinite game, as Dweck would call it, right? There's no such thing as completing. You've come to the end of science. No one will ever do that. No one will ever complete science. You may have the most knowledge. You may have a stack of Nobel Prizes, et cetera.
But you can't complete science because Mother Nature is undefeatable because she's an infinite array of ever-retreating forces that I think Wigner called it. And the point being, it's confusing because there's an ambiguity. The human mind hates ambiguity because we know to get a tenured position is a finite game. There's only so many professors that can get it.
To get the highest score on a test, to get into graduate school, to get a post, all these things. So science is comprised— It's an infinite game comprised of all these finite games. Nobel Prize, it only goes to three people. So how do you navigate in those realms?
And I think that people cleave towards the, well, if I just do the hard things, the differential equations and the circuits and the- If I master the finite games. Yeah, those finite games, then I will win the infinite game. And along the way, they beat out of themselves, unfortunately, sort of the suicide of that curiosity that got them interested in science to begin with.
Another Feynman quote. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Not their knowledge, not their wisdom. Or the ignorance of you.
And you look at the word, look, you know more than anybody what the meaning of words are. And you know in Hebrew the word for thing is the same as the word for word, suggesting an entanglement that's inextricable. But in the sense, science, let's look at the word science. What does science mean? It doesn't mean wisdom. No, that's sapience. That's sapienza. We are homo sapien.
We are man who is wise. What are we wise about, Jordan? That we're going to die. That's the only thing that we know. Though we know for sure is that we're going to die. And it's interesting that it also comes up in the first chapters of Genesis, right? As you've spoken about at many occasions. But the word science means knowledge. And what does the word knowledge in Hebrew connote?
Well, it connotes Adam knew his wife. Mm-hmm. So it's very different. The notion in sort of the Greek, the Roman, the tradition of Asa, et cetera, that is coming down through us. And it's very crucial to life. I mean, technology, science, and knowledge acquisition in general. That's sort of one tradition.
And the Hebrew tradition is a tradition where knowledge, as I say, means something radically different. And the aspiration for wisdom, Torah, wisdom, knowledge, truth, emunah, as you say, all these things have elements of illumination
Yes. A purpose. Purpose. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So these things, you know, and you should never confuse it. I mean, there's no one as dumb as, you know, someone who's brilliant. You know, there's no one who will believe some of the dumbest things, dumbest propositions that you couldn't convince that bricklayer you spoke about to believe than an intellectual, than an academic, you know.
They spoke of—Lennon spoke of useful idiots. Sometimes I think of useless geniuses. Some of my colleagues are useless geniuses. They're so bright. And then they'll lead their credibility to the domain of wisdom, of which they have none.
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