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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There's actually more Gutenberg Bibles than first editions of Galilee's Compass. So this one was cheap, very cheap compared to those. You can almost get, they're priceless. They're kept under lock and key at the Galileo Museum. in Florence. But the point is, if he had taken those Florentines that he's talking about, or the ducats, you know, if I give you a ducat right now, it's almost worthless.
I mean, yeah, it's kind of cool historically. It might look good. It was a paper note. It's basically like a paper dollar. It got inflated to nothing. They would do things, you know, with the money back then. They would shave the corners of the coins. That's why coins have ridges on them now. All sorts of interesting historical tidbits. But if he had just kept one of these things,
you know, kept the original edition, his heirs would have hundreds of millions of dollars. And so you look at these people and you often find that the people who have the greatest scientific knowledge and technical and maybe practical knowledge, sometimes their wisdom is to be lacking.
But the average person will never look at that and say, wow, this person, you know, has been divorced six times or, you know, treats his illegitimate stepdaughter horribly or whatever. We never look at that. We never say part and parcel. And I think I'm not advocating we should look at Feynman and say, you slept with your graduate students' wives. No, no, no.
You should just say that there is a value in the people that, say, have those wonderful aspects, those wonderful characteristics, that don't have the foibles. Just they may not have Nobel Prizes. In other words, we prioritize the intellect over the ethical. And I think it's very dangerous. And it's very seductive for scientists to want to emulate Galileo.
Yeah, I've read the first couple chapters online, and it starts, you know, just to think about the connection as I start my cosmology class at Peterson Academy. You know, I start off by saying, you know, what is the most important day on the calendar? Let me say it to you. Like, what is the most important day on your calendar every year? It's probably Christmas, I would say. Yeah.
So what is Christmas? It's a birth. It's a beginning. It's a new—but what is the only event for which there might not have been a preceding day, let alone, you know, a repetition of that day, the origin of the universe? If we go back from now, late 2024, we go back 13.8 billion years. Let's say we're talking on a Thursday today. We'll come back. There'll be some Thursday. Just counting 24 hours.
Doesn't mean the Earth was here. Doesn't mean the sun was here. Just counting back in units of 24 hours. Back, back, back, back, back. Come to some Thursday, and, you know, perhaps that was the day the actual Big Bang occurred on, if we could keep track of it. I mean, it's totally practical to do this type of calculation. And we don't actually know what happened on the Wednesday before that day.
It's a concept. You can think about it, but you can't actually necessarily know what happened. And so that is why I feel like cosmology is the ultimate, the most primitive, primordial subject and why it evokes something in people. There's reasons why the caves of Lascaux, you know, 40,000 years ago, they weren't depicting like, well, here's how you make a good atlatl or spear, you know, whatever.
They were depicting like the stars and the movements.
It's visceral, right. By the way, it didn't have to be that way. Most stars are not like our sun. Our sun is not unique. I shouldn't say unique, sorry. Our sun is unusual in that it's a singular star. The preponderance of stars that you look up and see on a dark night sky... are multiples, pairs, binaries, triples, maybe even clusters of stars. And that would be very different.
That would mean you wouldn't have the ability to see because there'd always be a star out, effectively. They won't orbit right next to each other like in Tatooine in Star Wars. Remember, there's a red sun. But you don't have constellations. You don't have seasons and tracking. You don't have agriculture, the human being's first technology.
And there are some of my colleagues, and I'd love to talk to you about the psychology of aliens. There's a huge... murmuration in the zeitgeist right now, both that super advanced technology is visiting the Earth, incomprehensible distances and so forth, and simultaneously that there are untold worlds yet to be discovered where life is not only abundant, but it's also maybe superior to us.
And maybe they are so advanced and so in possession of Moore's Law for 80 more doubling periods than we've enjoyed it for that, in fact, they've created us in sort of giant silicon apparatus. This is called the simulation hypothesis. And, by the way, the greatest adherence to both the alien reality hypothesis and the simulation hypothesis are atheists, right?
But it's natural, right? Yeah. So, you're going to subordinate your belief in a God that is Judeo-Christian, say, because then you'd have to do things, right? Then you'd have to, you know, have obligations on you to the community, to your wife, to your parents. Sacrifices. Sacrifices to the Sabbath.
You might have obligations, but I don't need those if I believe in an alien who's on Proxima Centauri.
And the tuning. You have a fine tuner, right? These same people will reject the arguments of design from fine tuning, which I'm not saying I'm comfortable with those signs. We discussed that already. I mean, we can put up many counterexamples of things that are extremely exquisitely tuned that didn't have a designer whatsoever.
And the Earth's distance to the sun is not exquisitely tuned in a sense that necessitated a designer to do it. In other words, we wouldn't – the anthropic principle would suggest we wouldn't be here if the things were radically different from the way it is. Yeah.
And actually, a lot of the parameters in cosmology and particle physics and symmetries that we talked about earlier are not as finely tuned as a radio dial, if you remember those, as you and I do, but most of the younger folks won't. But you've got to tune it.
But actually, you don't have to tune it that exquisitely any better, in fact, than the universe was tuned along the lines of certain parameters. But this alien, you know, kind of hypothesis has gotten a lot of attention. You know, it has political ramifications. It has military ramifications. You know, what is it meant to do?
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