https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=o392_NrdflY
You should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I’m already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up. Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that’ll be the adventure of your life. And then you go back even further, 100 million years before that. So now you’re going back from 13.8 billion years. Let’s say today we’re talking on a Friday. We go back, there’s some Friday, 13.8 billion years ago. Okay? If you just kept going back seven times, 24, and you just keep counting the weeks and the years and the months, you’ll reach some day. And there’ll be some day that three minutes earlier, the laws of physics that we really understand know and love, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, that they all froze into the configuration that we can understand today. In other words, once you go beyond that, and it is a type of event horizon in a sense, in that it may be forever shielded from our vision, once you go beyond that gap, you can no longer speculate with the knowledge and certainty and precision that we have today. So it kind of marks a boundary, an ignorance boundary, an ignorance horizon beyond which we can only speculate. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] I’m looking very much forward today to speaking with Dr. Brian Keating. I met him recently in Miami, looked through the telescope at his beautiful San Diego house on the coast. He gave me a moon rock, which was very nice of him. We had a very good conversation. I’m looking forward today to talking to him about the unfolding of the cosmological landscape on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang forward. As I mentioned, he’s a cosmologist and also Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. He is also the author of more than 200 scientific publications, the equivalent of between 60 and 70 PhDs, by the way, two US patents and the best-selling books. Into the impossible, think like a Nobel Prize winner and losing the Nobel Prize. The latter was selected as one of Amazon Editor’s best non-fiction books of all time. He received his Bachelor of Science from Case Western in 1993 and a PhD from Brown in 2000. He was later a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford and Caltech. In 2007, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President George W. Bush for inventing the BICEP telescope located at the South Pole, Antarctica. He is also a commercial pilot and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 2022. Dr. Keating, let’s start out by telling everybody what your primary focus of concern is as a researcher and then let’s delve into what you can bring to people as a consequence of that research, what they need to know about the cosmic structure, let’s say. Yeah. So I always ask people, what’s the most important day on the calendar to them? And usually I get some version of Christmas or my birthday or hopefully for them my spouse’s birthday. And it’s an origin story. And I think humans are fascinated with origin stories. How did we come to be here? Because we don’t know, right? We come in, as they say, in media rays in the middle of the story. And so how do you get to understand what happened before you? The prehistory and the biggest prehistory of all is how the cosmos came to be. And my research centers on the oldest fossils of the earliest epoch in the universe. So I’m an experimental cosmologist. You’ve discussed many times with more theoretically inclined individuals. I actually build the telescopes. My colleagues and I, my students and I, we build telescopes that peer back as far as possible using light. Now the light’s not light we can see with the human eye. It’s in the form of microwaves because the universe has been expanding for some 13.8 billion years since a Big Bang. And we’ll get to the question of whether or not there was more than one Big Bang, I hope, later on. And the universe, as it expands, has cooled off from a fiery hot hellscape of an inferno to a more moderate climate that will support the existence of planets and people and all sorts of other interesting forms of matter. But the question of how the matter came to be in the first place is really the purview of what I do as an experimentalist. So my job as an experimentalist is not to prove theorists right, it’s to prove everything else wrong. And then what we’re left with will be a closer approximation to the truth, which is that we live in this incredibly intricate, fascinating universe filled with the most mysterious forms of matter and even consciousness and beings like you and I. So that’s the focus of the research. And the way that we do that is by building the most precise and accurate telescopes ever made and deploying them to the most interesting parts in the universe, including the South Pole, Antarctica, and the high mountain desert of the Andes Mountains in Chile, as well as into outer space. So it’s kind of every boy’s dream to grow up to be a rocket scientist, to build stuff, to shoot rockets into space, to go to these far extremes. And the beauty of it is I get paid to do it. So that’s my research focus. So why don’t we start with a comment you made right at the beginning of that explanation. You said that you build telescopes that peer back into time. And you might want to explain to everybody, there’ll be lots of people who are listening who understand that, but there’ll be people listening who don’t. Why is it that when you build a technologically sophisticated telescope that can peer out into the vast depths of space, that you’re also looking back in time? So all telescopes are time machines of a sort. And that’s by virtue of the fact that light, as fast as it travels, and it is the fastest propagating entity that we know about in all of science, it travels about this far, about one foot every nanosecond. So if you convert nanoseconds to miles, and you convert a feet to miles, and nanoseconds to seconds, it travels about 186,000 miles per second, which is pretty darn fast, but it’s not infinite. So therefore, whenever you’re looking at something, you’re not seeing it as it is right now. You’re seeing it as it was sometime in the past. And the farther away something is, the longer the light traveled to reach your eyes or to reach our telescopes. And telescopes are just eyes of a different sort. They might be sensitive to microwaves, in the case of the telescope that I build, radio waves, gamma rays, but just like your eyeballs, your eyeballs are two refracting telescopes. They have lenses, they have detectors. And so when we look at the sun, and I’m not advocating as a professional astronomer, never look at the sun with your remaining good eye, but when you look at the sun, you’re seeing it as it was, and that period in which it was was eight minutes ago, because it’s 93 million miles away, and if you convert feet per nanosecond, or miles per second, or miles per hour, you get it takes about eight minutes for light to travel from the sun. That means that, Jordan, the sun could disappear, and we wouldn’t see it, and we wouldn’t know about it, really, for at least eight minutes, and maybe even longer. So all telescopes are time machines, even the telescopes embedded in our skulls. So how far back can we look now, for example, with the Webb Telescope, and that’s the newest large scale deep-peering telescope that was launched into space, and how far back have we pushed the horizon of view now? So yes, the James Webb Telescope was launched on Christmas Day in 2021, and it’s been sending back phenomenal images. What makes the Webb Telescope so powerful is not that it can see farther back in time, although it can in a certain sense, but it doesn’t have extra magnification, and that’s not required to see things that are farther away. In other words, if you use a tiny little telescope, like the sort that Galileo used back in 1609 to spot the craters on the moon’s surface, you could use the Hubble Telescope, can also look at the moon, and it won’t see things that are, it’ll see more detail on the moon’s surface, but it won’t see farther than the moon, because the moon is in the way. Now, if you look where there’s no moon, where there’s no planet, where there’s no galaxies, where there’s no absorbing matter whatsoever, then you’re seeing back to the creation of whatever light your telescope is sensitive to. Now, visible light has only been around for a few billion years, because before that time, because of the universe’s expansion, that light has red-shifted. It has gone from visible light to infrared light, which is invisible to our eyes, but highly visible, and that is the quarry that the Webb Telescope is seeking. Now, if you go farther than the infrared, then you’ve come to microwaves, which is what I study. So the longer the wavelength of light you’re looking at, the farther you can go back in time, not because you’re impeded by something, but because the source, the very source that you’re looking at has been diminished in intensity and has been reddened by the expansion of the universe, which is a phenomenal discovery that we’ve only known about for less than 100 years, but because of that universal expansion, we can only see using particular wavelengths of light, and so that’s why the earliest light in the universe, there’s no light that we could ever see that is more primitive than the cosmic microwave background that I and my colleagues are studying. So the Webb Telescope can’t see far back in time as we can, but that’s really irrelevant. It’s designed to do something very specific, look at the first galaxies that form, the first stars that form, exoplanets, and other stellar solar systems in our own galaxy. And because of that, it’s a phenomenal machine and is unrivaled in its capability. So what element of the, let’s have you explain what the electromagnetic spectrum is, because people are not going to necessarily know what the relationship is, say, between visible light and microwave radiation. They might not know that those are varying forms of radiation that is very similar in its essence, and also to explain why the red shift occurs and how that was discovered, I suppose. Yes, yes. So a spectrum is a characteristic of light. Light has three major properties that we discuss as scientists. One is its intensity, how bright the light is, and the other is the color of the light. And the third is something called polarization, which happens to be my area of subspecialty, not political polarization, but it’s an actual useful form of polarization that has to do with the orientation of the electromagnetic field. But all forms of light, now people hear radiation and they get scared, did a bomb go off? Is there some nuclear reactor? No, no, no, it has nothing to do with that. It’s just a generic term that scientists call light of different wavelengths. So if you imagine a rainbow, which has an infinite number of colors, people say there’s seven colors, the famous Roy G. Biv we learned about in elementary school, maybe, but there’s actually an infinite number of colors, because the number that describes the color of light is called its wavelength. And the wavelength of light is a continuous number. It can be any number, can have any number of decimal places. So it’s a continuous number. Therefore, there’s an infinite number of real numbers. Therefore, the spectrum is not discrete in seven different increments. So now, imagine you go beyond the red color. You keep going to the left of that red color. And actually, this was an experiment done by a very famous scientist in Herschel and even Isaac Newton did similar types of experiments where they took the sunlight, they refracted it through a prism. So we’ve all seen these prisms that disperse light. And they had light of different colors coming out at different angles. And that’s the property of a prism that causes it to make a rainbow from ordinary white light. And what Newton and Herschel did is they put a thermometer, they went into the red light and they put a bulb of an ordinary thermometer and they kept moving it until it got beyond the red. And then they found that beyond the red color, there was still something coming in causing the mercury to rise in this thermometer. So there was clear, there was other light of a longer wavelength. They knew about the wavelength of light. And that longer wavelength is what we associate with heat. Now the opposite side, if you go past the violet side of ROYGBIV, you come to something called ultraviolet. Ultraviolet is also invisible. And we know about that from the sun. The sunlight produces damaging UVA and UVB, radiation. That’s not any different, except for the fact it buys characteristic wavelengths. So its wavelength is shorter than violet light. Infrared is longer than red light. And if you keep going in both directions, there’s photons and wavelengths of light in all different directions, add infinitum to the high frequency or short wavelength, and it goes to infinity in the other direction. You can have infinitely long, and that would be called a radio wave. So that’s the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, if you’ve ever listened to a siren approaching, you’ve heard the familiar Doppler shift. That’s interesting. Doppler, Christian Doppler and Wolfgang Mozart grew up in the same town in Salzburg, Austria. I like to think they’re kind of enjoying the irony of that fact, that they both have this fascination with sound and its phenomena. And the expansion or dilution of the wavelength of light is exactly the result of a Doppler shift, which is exactly analogous to the increase in pitch and the decrease in pitch that one hears when an ambulance first approaches you with its siren on. That pitch is increased, and that’s called a blue shift, meaning it goes to shorter sound wavelengths, or it goes to higher pitches. As it goes away, the opposite phenomena happens, and that’s why you hear this characteristic rise, wah wah wah wah, as it moves away from you. And that’s an analog of red shift. Well, the same thing happens in light. So if you’re being approached by a police car and you try to get away from it, its blue light will seem slightly more red because it’s effectively moving away from you. Now, you have to go a large fraction of that tremendous speed that I spoke about earlier to get even a tiny, minute shift in the wavelength either higher or lower. So the red shift that we observe for the universe was discovered in the early 1900s, and it was discovered that we could see these little nebulae. They were first called spiral nebulae. We didn’t know if they were part of the Milky Way galaxy. Some said they were outside the Milky Way galaxy, but that didn’t make sense because push yourself in the frame of mind of a scientist in the 1900s. Even the great Albert Einstein thought this was all there is, to quote a song, that the universe was the Milky Way galaxy, and that it was preposterous to think about something beyond our galaxy because that would mean beyond our universe. Nowadays, ironically, we talk about things beyond our universe, and we’ll probably get into some of that when we discuss the multiverse in a little bit. But the universe was found to be much larger than the Milky Way galaxy. And in fact, there were galaxies outside the Milky Way galaxy that we observed, the most famous one being the Andromeda nebula, which is now called the great spiral galaxy, Andromeda galaxy. It’s actually the farthest thing, Jordan, that you can see with the human eye. If you look up on a clear night, you can see a smudge, and I’ll show you the next time you’re in San Diego. But I will show you a clear smudge through my telescope, and you can see it with your naked eye as well. That smudge is particles of light, photons, coming from a galaxy, and those photons set out on their journey to your eye when there were hominids walking around on the Serengeti plains of Africa. The light that reaches us today is three million years old. It’s been traveling for three million years since Lucy was extant. So that light from that galaxy is not being redshifted or blueshifted tremendously. But if you look at every other galaxy, and we can see about 100 billion galaxies, and each one has at least 100 billion stars, and each one of those stars probably has tens or thousands of minor bodies, asteroids, planets around them, the numbers are truly astronomical. But if you go back and look at, and we see 100 billion galaxies, Jordan, of those 100 billion galaxies, all but 20, show their light, their characteristic spectrum is shifted to the red, some by tremendous amounts. And that implies, just as it would if you were at the, if you were in the city and you heard all these ambulances, and every single ambulance, you heard it as if it was moving away from you. You heard every siren’s wail being redshifted to lower and lower pitches. What would you conclude? You would either conclude you’re at a very special location where there was just an accident and the bodies have been cleaned up and taken away to hospital, or that every part of the city is experiencing all these, all the ambulance drivers are on strike and everybody’s leaving. And so the interpretation that Edwin Hubble began to make in 1929, this is not 100 years old yet, it’s incredible. The observation that every galaxy exhibits a redshift, that is, every galaxy is moving away from the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is no more special or more important than any other galaxy. Therefore, all galaxies to high approximation are moving away from one another. And that’s an astounding observation, a physical fact that we observe that when extrapolated to the future means the universe is gonna become more and more dilute. And in the past, it was much more tightly condensed, compressed, and presumably began in its infancy with what we call the Big Bang. So do you want to explain why the farther galaxies are away the faster they’re moving away? And is it also the case that it’s the redshift that explains the fact that the night sky is primarily black instead of lit up? Correct in the latter assumption and then let’s go to the former question. Yeah, the latter question is related to something called Olber’s paradox, which is that in an infinite universe populated with an infinite number of objects, stars in this case, no matter where you were in that universe, you would look out and your eye, your line of sight would terminate on a star’s surface somewhere. They might be really far away, but eventually your eye would come to rest on a star. So that would mean that it’s a paradox that our night sky, we have during the day, we see just one star, but even at night, we don’t see any stars that are, or the night sky’s intensity is nowhere near as close as the surface of the sun, let alone the infinite intensity of an infinite number of suns. And it’s as if you were in a forest, imagine a beautiful boreal forest and it’s effectively infinite. The trees are a finite width, but they’re spaced at some distance away from you, but there’s an infinite number of these trees. And as you scan around your local horizon, all you would see is bark. All you would see are the trunks of these trees. That’s Olber’s paradox for trees. And what you’re bringing up is this notion that was interestingly really encountered and proposed and even a solution perhaps by Edgar Allan Poe, the great poet in the 1800s. He conjectured this idea that it’s kind of strange that while we were told we live in an infinite universe, that even the Milky Way galaxy could be infinite in size, we didn’t know back then in the 19th century. And so it began to be a paradox. And the resolution of that paradox, as you’re pointing out, is several fold. One is that the condition for the night sky to not be dark is that the universe is infinitely old, that the universe is infinitely big and that the universe is static. These stars are not moving in that simple minded paradox as the trees are not moving in the Olber’s paradox analogy for trees. Those trees are stationary. The forest is infinite and the light has had enough time to travel to your eyes because the universe is infinitely old. So if any one of those three propositions is falsified, then you can demolish the paradox as a paradox. And so the resolution, interestingly enough, comes down to all three of those are false. In other words, it would have been enough, it would have been sufficient to falsify one or more of those three propositions. The universe is infinitely old, infinitely big and static. But we actually know now that the universe isn’t any one of those three, at least the universe that we can observe. So now you asked about how we can think about the expansion of the universe or how we can determine that or how it was determined. Is that right? Can you remind me, Jordan? Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and why the more distant galaxies are moving away faster. That’s right. So the analogy that astronomers use, no analogy is perfect, right? We’re dealing with things, not just in the three dimensions of space, but in the fourth dimension of what we call space-time. So we have to visualize things that are really unvisualizable by the human mind, by our own limitations. And so we make analogies. So one of the most common analogies is to think about, I’ll give you two. One is to imagine a balloon with little dots drawn on the balloon’s surface. The balloon’s surface is two-dimensional. As you blow up the balloon, the galaxies move away, the dots on the balloon’s surface move from one another. And they move with exactly that property, that a galaxy that is one centimeter or a dot that’s one centimeter away from another galaxy or a dot will move twice as much in the same amount of inflation or expansion as a galaxy that is half a centimeter separated or two dots that are only five millimeters apart from one another. But that’s confined to a two-dimensional surface. So it’s a little bit hard to maybe project that into three dimensions in our mind. So another one that people use is, imagine baking a raisin bread. So a bread and you put in a bunch of raisins inside of it. That too has the exact same property. If you sit on any raisin inside the bread and you watch, what are the other raisins doing? That all will be observed to move away from you. There won’t be any gravitational attraction between you and another raisin. So you’ll actually observe what’s like a perfect expansion of the universe from your perspective. Remember I said, there are about 20 or more galaxies that are gravitationally attracted to the Milky Way and they are blue shifted because they’re falling towards us and will eventually combine into an enormous mega galaxy called a milk drameda someday. But that doesn’t happen for raisins or for dots on a balloon. So the law that describes that type of expansion in either a raisin bread populated with raisins in three dimensions or a balloon dotted with a magic marker marks in two dimensions, those two phenomena are exactly displaying what’s called Hubble’s law, which is the velocity of every galaxy we see beyond a certain distance, that’s a minimal distance that we don’t have gravitational interactions between us and them. That galaxy will be moving away directly proportional to what’s known as Hubble’s constant. So the velocity in meters per second, miles per hour, furlongs per decade, whatever you want, will be directly linear. It’s the simplest law imaginable besides just a constant. It’ll be moving linearly proportionate to its distance away from you. And that’s a fascinating observation. And that’s the only type of observation that can produce the type of structures that we see in the universe. In other words, it could have been traveling as the velocity scaling as the square of the distance, the cube of the distance, the square root of the distance, whatever. We would live in a much, much different universe and it wouldn’t have any of the characteristics that we observe. Are you looking for an all-in-one e-commerce platform that can help you easily set up and grow your business online? Look no further than Shopify. With Shopify, you can quickly and easily build your own online store, manage your inventory, and accept payments from customers. 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It’s about wanting to discover something that’s not only viscerally connected to you and your career and making a living for yourself and your family, which as you said is by no means a trivial thing. I mean, we’re human beings. We have to support, and there’s a lot to be said about good, honest work and the work that colleagues and I are engaged in. But we were confronted with the discovery of a lifetime, and that would not only mean, as I said before, that we had discovered gravitational waves, which had never been observed in this fashion in 2014 when we made this announcement at Harvard, that we had discovered the aftershocks of the inflationary epoch, but that we had discovered evidence for the multiverse. And yet, what did it get undone by? The most humble, meager, meek substance in the whole world, which in the universe, which is called dust. And I thought it was so ironic, but it’s a teachable thing. We succumb to what Feynman, the great Feynman that we mentioned before, he said, the first principle is that you should not fool yourself. And the second principle is that you are the easiest person to fool, and that speaks of what’s called confirmation bias. The p-hacking and stuff, that’s downstream, as you said, the p-hacking, the replication crisis in your field, and by the way, it’s starting to become a crisis in my field. And things like room temperature. Of course, most discoveries aren’t real. If science progressed at 5% a year in real fact, and so 95% of it was tripe, we were still progressing at 5% knowledge increment a year. That’s a heck of a rate. Okay, so what happened on the dust front? And then I want to tell you a little story from Exodus, and then we should wrap up this section. So what happened on the dust front? So on the dust front, we were so consumed with this notion. And I want to speak mostly for me, although I know that it did afflict colleagues involved with this. For me, as I said before, it represented the greatest idol, the talisman of all, not just of society, and not just of science, Jordan. You have to imagine when people run to be president of the United States, they always get, whoever’s running on the democratic side gets a letter from 70 Nobel Prize winners about why the democrat should be president. When there was the COVID vaccine, sorry, the gain of function research was being sponsored by the EcoHealth Alliance, by Peter Dajic and Fauci, 70 Nobel Prize winners wrote to President Trump to say, this is wrong, you shouldn’t cancel the gain of function research, and people can invest. In other words, Nobel Prize carries weight, punches way above its weight class. It doesn’t just affect egghead boffins in the laboratory, it does, and it does affect my funding probability and how many people we can hire in a given field, and what the direction of the field may be, but it percolates to the front page of the New York Times as well. So it’s the most, kind of highest example of an idol. And I always look back when we talk about Exodus, maybe we’ll talk about the sin of the golden calf, which is a very natural thing. But when you actually see Jordan, that scientists will give their eye teeth and they will literally bow down to the King of Sweden and accept a gilded graven image. I mean, the mapping of the symbolism could not be more perfect if you wrote it in a Hollywood script, but it comes directly out of Exodus. And in our case, in my case, this idol that I had worshiped and set so much of my being, my psychology towards, that it could be undone. It worried me, but it didn’t cause me to pull the plug and to not go forward or to say, over my dead body are we gonna publish this? And what ended up happening is we saw the pattern of polarization called curling polarization. This whirlpools, these eddies that you spoke about earlier, and that speaks of the inflationary origin of the universe, because if the universe were filled with a quantum field at its earliest moments and perhaps in perpetuity via what’s called the inflaton, this would then be the field in which reverberations could take place. Those reverberations are the curvature perturbations that you asked about a while ago. Those provided the nucleation sites for matter to collapse, condense, agglomerate into, which then ignited the stars, which then made the supernova, which then made us. So the story is an incredible story. It hinges on inflation being correct. Inflation hinges upon a quantum field called the inflaton, and the inflaton hinges upon a super arching structure called the multiverse for it to be filling. In other words, inflation didn’t just happen once, Jordan. It didn’t happen twice. It happened an infinite number of times, and it’s happening right now, and it’s unavoidable because it cannot be sort of superseded. It cannot be shut off. And yet, and yet, because we live in a galaxy, a galaxy is a very, very dirty place. It’s a place filled with asteroids and subatomic particles and charged particles, and it’s filled with the most humble substance that’s left over, and thank God, thank bloody God, as you might say, that dust exists, because we are, as Carl Sagan called the Earth, a moat of dust riding on a sunbeam. In other words, the Earth is a giant block of dust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecule that powers your body right now came from that supernova that produced the dust that obscured and mimicked with perfect fidelity the signal that I was hell-bent, and my colleagues were hell-bent on detecting. It mimicked the curl mode polarization signal to a T, and we saw what we wanted to see, and best of all, it meant that we had seen the multiverse. People on the front pages of every headline, every newspaper, from San Diego to New York to CNN, we have detected the first physical evidence for the multiverse. Okay, so walk me through that, because I still don’t quite understand it. So you talked about the fact that the initial quantum perturbations that existed prior to our ability to detect the background radiation were a consequence of gravitational waves, and we talked a little bit about the fact that those perturbations could be mimicked by cosmic dust, the perturbation-induced polarization could be mimicked by cosmic dust. So was the polarization you detected a consequence of the quantum fluctuation, or was it a secondary consequence of polarization by this widely dispersed dust? So when you came to visit San Diego, I gave you some chunks of rock. They look like ordinary chunks of rock, but they’re actually meteorites, and actually I give them away on my website for free. I have these giveaways where people can get. It’s a meteorite. It’s actually, what you see is a meteor shower. When some of the material in a meteor shower reaches the Earth’s surface, it’s called a meteorite, and that meteorite that I gave you, and I give away on occasion to people who go to my website, is a chunk of iron, and it’s iron, it’s cobalt, it’s nickel. I also will send people the chemical assay of it as well, because it’s just so cool to see that this chunk of rock is 4.3 billion years old. It predates the Earth’s formation, and it shares a lot in common with the Earth. One thing it shares in common with the Earth is that it has magnetic susceptibility. If you take that little meteorite that I gave you, and you put it next to a refrigerator magnet, it’ll suck onto that like a parasite sucking on a brain, okay? That suction is due to the magnetic properties of iron, which is a ferromagnet, and that will attach to a magnetic field, just like the Earth does. Those magnetic fields are not confined to the Earth, Jordan. The galaxy has a magnetic field. The universe as a whole may have a magnetic field, but what happened was there’s these particles of meteorites in our local region of the Milky Way galaxy, through which we are always looking, like a dirty window, like looking through a dirty window, there’s unavoidable, we live in a galaxy. So we’d have to go outside the galaxy, which is technologically and almost theoretically impossible, and go outside to get away from this dust. So we’re stuck inside this dusty cloud, this dusty region. Again, thank God for it, because without it, there wouldn’t be blood in our veins, and there wouldn’t be a planet for us to sit on. So it’s a chimera. It gives and it takes away. In this case, it took away the Nobel Prize, because the magnetic field of our galaxy can cause the same twisting, curling eddies of the emission from these meteorites, or these dust particles as well. And that provided the chimeric illusion that we had seen exactly fidelidus to the origin if the universe began with inflation. The exact same pattern. It’s almost devilish, it’s almost satanic, because it exactly mimicked it. And of course we knew about it. We weren’t babes in the woods. We didn’t make a blunder, we didn’t put our thumb in the front of the lens cap, but we did our job. But we de-weighted that probability. We assessed it, we said, it’s not as likely as the explanation that we found. Of course the opposite is true, right? To say that the universe began out of a spawn nucleation site within the multiverse, providing curvature sites for agglomerations. That’s a much, much wilder story to believe in retrospect than we detected dust from our galaxy. But I don’t want to condemn myself too much, too harshly, or my colleagues too, because we immediately tried not only to falsify that hypothesis, but we worked with another team which was our competitor, which is a billion dollar satellite called the Planck satellite, and they had been hot on the trail of the exact same signal as us. Science is very competitive. You mentioned all these different traits of scientists all the time. I always say scientists are like children, right? We’re curious, we’re playful, we’re whimsical, but just like children, we don’t like to play with others, we’re jealous, we’re petty. We have all the good qualities of children, but it’s a double-edged sword. We have some of the negative. Some of those are the desire for credit and for affirmation and for attention. I’m speaking for me specifically here, but this is a very common affliction, especially when the stakes are as high as they are to say that we live in a multiverse, which is the direct conclusion of this discovery if it had held up, which it did not, so the results were accurate. So what’s the status of the quantum fluctuation field agglomeration theory now? You didn’t provide evidence that it was the case, but is that still the extent theory in relation to the initial agglomeration of matter? It is. It is. We can’t validate that theory. No, no, no, in fact it’s- You just invalidated your claim to have provided evidence for it. Exactly, and we made the most precise detection ever of this type of signal, it’s just the interpretation was wrong. We didn’t make a blunder, we didn’t say there’s faster than light neutrinos or whatever, we made an exquisitely precise measurement of dust in our galaxy, which is useful, by the way, because what we see, we’ll never see a unit, as I said, until we get out of the galaxy, which won’t even happen with trillions of dollars of funding, it’s physically impossible, right? So until we, we’re always going to be measuring a combined signal, a potential cosmic signal, plus an actual dust signal. So now with other experiments, including the experiment that I lead with my colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, at Princeton, at Berkeley, in Chicago, called the Simons Observatory, funded by Jim Simons at the Simons Foundation in Maryland Simons, that project is $110 million project in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, which has as one of its tools, as one of its pieces of apparatus, Jordan, has a dust detection experiment. So the only way to get rid of a systematic experiment, a systematic contaminant, is to dedicate a whole new experiment to it. Imagine you’ve got your thumb on the scale and you’re pouring your coffee beans in, you’re going to get too few coffee beans, oh, I do another experiment, and this is trivia, I saw my thumbs on the scale. For us, we have to do a separate experiment. We have to dedicate some of our extremely exquisitely produced detectors, my colleague Suzanne Staggs at Princeton makes these, no one’s ever made anything like what she’s been able to do with her group. And they detect the faintest possible microwave signals from the Big Bang, but they can also detect dust. So she’s dedicating some of these- So you can control for it now. Exactly, so she has channels, Jordan, that only measure dust, which if you had told me 25 years ago, you’re going to be measuring dust, I’d say, I thought I was interested in the biggest questions. If I want to study dust, I can follow my teenager around. I don’t need to build a hundred million dollar project. No, we measure the combined total signal, we’ll subtract the dust signal, what will be left is the cosmic signal, and we hope to have first light or first microwave of that instrument in the coming next year. Oh well, congratulations on that. So let me close this up with this Exodus story, because I think it’s relevant to, well, the metaphysical speculations we’ve been indulging in, but also I think it’s biographically relevant. So when Moses, before Moses emerges as a leader of his people, he encounters the burning bush. And that’s a very interesting story, because what happens is Moses is basically out for a stroll and something attracts his attention. Now it’s not a burning oak tree, it’s not a volcano. It’s something that flickers and glimmers on the edge of his perception, you might say. It attracts him. So it attracts his curiosity, and he decides that he’s going to investigate that which attracts his curiosity. Now, the burning bush is a paradoxical manifestation, because it’s being, and that would be the bush or the tree, the small tree that’s alive, that’s being, but it’s also becoming, because fire is an agent of transformation. And so the burning bush is a symbol of the paradox of existence, which is that things are and are becoming at the same time. And so Moses is attracted by this, and he decides to investigate it, to inquire into its nature. And the consequence of his inquiry into its nature is that the voice of being itself speaks to him, right? And that’s basically how God announces himself. He says, I am that I am, or I am that I will be, or I was that I am now. It’s a statement of the essence of being. And the idea behind that story is that if you assiduously pursue that which attracts your attention, the voice of being itself will speak the ultimate truth to you. And that’s a hell of a thing to understand. And so when you’re trying to teach your students ethics, you can say, look, you can subjugate the search for truth to your venal ambition, but the cost of that will be that if the voice of God beckons to you from the unknown, you’ll miss it. And if you think about that for like 30 seconds and you have any wisdom at all, there isn’t a chance in hell that if you were the least bit wise, that you would put the exigencies of your ambition, even if they’re Nobel Prize oriented, above the possibility that the structure of reality itself could reveal itself to you as a consequence of you having the delightful opportunity to pursue what effectively attracts your interest. There isn’t a better deal than that. And scientists who are real scientists are imbued by that desire and they believe it too, because they do believe that if they investigate something, no matter how trivial, dust, let’s say, no matter how contemptible, that the consequence of that will be that they will be able to peer into the furthest expanses of what would you say? The sacred fundamental realities of existence itself. And all of that seems to be true. So that’s a good ethical lesson for students to know. That is, yeah, to be open to what your eyes can see, right? The Torah speaks about being able to hear the shma, the catechism of the Jewish faith, is here, not see. Don’t follow after what your heart leads you astray. It actually says to prostitute yourself after what your heart wants. No, here, here is a passive, but you can be sensitized to it. No, I absolutely appreciate that, Jordan. I appreciate that. Yeah, well, that’s also a matter of, rather than thinking and imposing your desire onto the phenomena, which is what you said you were tempted by and you described why, is that you have to let the phenomena speak for itself. Phenomena, by the way, means shine forth. That’s the original derivation of the term. So a phenomena is something that shines forth, right? And it does, in fact, attract your attention. And if you pay enough attention, then, well, you’ll be rewarded for what you pay and you’ll be rewarded by a glimpse into the structure of things. And that can help you reconcile yourself to the catastrophe of existence itself, right? By peering into that underlying structure and to feel as a consequence in some manner in harmonious relationship to the cosmos itself. And there isn’t a better prize than that. No, there isn’t. That’s right. All right, well, for everyone watching and listening, that was a brief walk through the entire structure of cosmological reality at a relatively low resolution, but in a very interesting manner. And so thank you for taking us on a 90-minute long, 13.8-billion-year trip. It’s much appreciated. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today and to answer all my questions. And to everyone who’s watching and listening, your time and attention is always appreciated and not taken for granted. To the Daily Wire Plus people for making this conversation possible, for facilitating it, that’s also much appreciated. They bring that all to you, all of you who are listening on YouTube. That’s all courtesy of the Daily Wire. And that’s a big deal on their part, a real public service as far as I’m concerned. And to the film crew here in, where the hell am I? Oh yes, I’m in Miami. I’m in Miami in Florida. And so, and doing this podcast, I’m gonna continue to speak to Dr. Keating for another 30 minutes on the Daily Wire Plus platform about some of the autobiographical issues that we described. And if you guys are interested in pursuing this conversation further in a more psychological direction, then jump on over to Daily Wire Plus. And if you don’t have a subscription, consider supporting them. And in any case, thank you very much, Dr. Keating. It was wonderful talking to you and to everybody who was listening and watching. Ciao, we’ll see you again. We think it’s time we tell you what it is that we’d like you to do. Nefarious in theater zero 14 for D-DAR. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on DailyWirePlus.com.