Michael Turner Explains the Origins & Mysteries
of Dark Energy!

Brian Keating:

Michael Turner is a theoretical cosmologist, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, and former director of the Kavli Institute For Cosmological Physics. He’s a pioneer in exploring what he called the dark side of the universe. He actually coined the term dark energy, and his revolutionary ideas led to the cold dark matter theory of structure formation. Mike’s contributions to modern physics are truly invaluable, and I’m beyond thrilled to have him as a guest on my show. Join us in a deep dive into the dark side of our twisted universe. Welcome everybody to a very important, meaningful, and delightful episode of The Into the Impossible podcast with an impossibly brilliant guest who I’ve been, really, you know, in love with his mind since I was a wee lad, a graduate student, he’s a legend in the field, and it’s, professor Michael Turner, University Of Chicago, theoretical cosmologist who among many things is rumored to have coined the term dark energy. Michael, is that correct? Did you coin the term dark matter?

Speaker:

Guilt guilty as charged.

Brian Keating:

Who claimed that, I guess, Wiki coined the term dark matter in German. Correct?

Speaker:

That’s right. I can’t pronounce the German Dunkelmater or something like that.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. I think you’re you’re closer than I’ll ever get to it. Michael, where are you joining us from today?

Speaker:

I’m joining, from my office in Venice, California.

Brian Keating:

I really appreciate your time and whatever you’ll spare in person or online. But, Mike, we have a lot to talk about. We’ll run out of time before I run out of questions. Beg your forbearance as we go into the very first question I ask all my guests who honor me with, their presence on my humble podcast, And that is to judge a book by its cover. And in your case, your book with Rocky Kolb, your, colleague at the University of Chicago, has, really influenced generations of of cosmologists, of of theoretical particle physicists, astrophysicists, experimentalist like myself. And I want to do the following, if you will. To judge the book by its cover, I would like you to describe the cover art, The cover title and the subtitle. How did you and Rocky Kolb come up with it?

Speaker:

The original hardback version had a very boring cover. It was just white And the words early universe. And if my memory serves me correct, there was no subtitle. And, The paperback version which you may be referring to, has a wonderful story with it. The cover is a beautiful image of a galaxy, Actually, for its time. I mean, today, we get much better images from, JWST and and the Hubble. So the title, that was exceedingly easy. Rocky and I, were pioneers of studying the 1st microsecond.

Speaker:

And, I like to tell the joke by the time we got to cosmology, you know, everybody specializes. All that was left was the 1st microsecond. And that is the early universe, but we got there at a very good time because the early universe had just opened up. Shortly before we got there, you couldn’t talk about the early universe because it was just a mess. It was nuclei and protons and neutrons sitting on top of one another. And we were there when the doors opened when people realized that it was cork soup. And early universe, it you know, a good title’s gotta be simple. It’s gotta have cosmology, and, early Where it was at? Do you wanna hear the paperback version?

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Because we’re gonna springboard from the paperback to a discussion of these peculiar properties of galaxies, which in my mind, Michael, I’m not gonna teach I’m not gonna let the student teach the master, but a galaxy is not exactly, at least when I was a kid, An early universe phenomenon of the 1st microsecond. So, yes, how did that come to be? The Whirlpool Galaxy.

Speaker:

So that’s perfect. Our our our book did really, really well, And it was going into paperback, and I was in Aspen, Colorado, and they sent the artwork to me for the new cover. And it was this beautiful picture of a galaxy, and, I called up Rocky, And he said, well, you got the cover artwork. What do you think? And I said, it’s beautiful, but it has nothing to do with our book. And he said, we’ll take it. So our book is about the 1st microsecond, but that’s where the blueprint for the universe got laid out And that’s where galaxies can trace their origins to. So it’s not quite fair to say that, it was a bait and switch, that it’s not really about the Pretty Galaxies You See in the Sky, but the cover was chosen because oh my god. Well, the, I wish I had could easily get copies here.

Speaker:

It’s so funny. Rocky and I pioneered a lot of ground there. I think we were at book number 69, And David we we asked David to make some changes because he had a standard preface that talked about, You know, these are not to be designed to be polished, and, they’re typically from mimeograph notes. Yeah. And we said to David, David, what is a mimeograph machine? And, so we changed some of his, forward, but they had a standard. You know, that’s important when you have a brand. Frontiers in Physics was a brand, and it was very simple. It was white and blue.

Speaker:

But then when some other publishing company took it over and did the paperback, they made it really fancy.

Brian Keating:

It’s still in the top 200 of books in astrophysics even, you know, it’s, coming up on its 30th 30th anniversary, incredible, of the of the 2nd edition, I think.

Speaker:

Yeah. And I just I just got a royalty check yesterday.

Brian Keating:

Wow. Well, that’s That’s, that’s, what all us authors, make our make our living Yeah.

Speaker:

And I’m gonna go to Starbucks and have a coffee on

Brian Keating:

Alright. Well, let’s get into some of the topics in there, but, particularly, I wanted to be a little persnickety and And kinda poke fun. Yeah. The galaxy is sitting there, and we’ve heard a lot lately about conflicts not only with The structure formation within Lambda CDM, Lambda called dark matter, model, the prevailing paradigm, I would say. Not only that, but Whether or not the big bang even happened. I don’t know if you paid attention to this. There’s some fringe. I won’t call them crackpots.

Brian Keating:

I won’t call them cranks. I’ll I’ll let somebody else do that, but there are people out there that are claiming and getting tremendous amount of attention even from all the way up to Elon Musk, who was a physics major at UPenn for some time as I understand it, but he tweeted out and Joe Rogan, who’s become a friend of mine, tweeted out things about this. But anyway, Michael, What do you make of this controversy? Is it a tempest in a celestial teapot as Dawkins might say?

Speaker:

Yes. So, but let let me the you know, the the rich science is more complicated than was there a big bang or not. It’s never yes or no, and I like to organize my thinking in science about things we know for sure that are never going away. So one thing we know for sure that’s never going away is the universe is expanding. I would add to that, we also know that the unit the expansion is speeding up, but we can get to dark energy later. So the universe is expanding. We have so much evidence for that. That’s no never going away.

Speaker:

Well, if it’s If it’s getting bigger than in the past, it was smaller. And so if you extrapolate its size All the way back the extrapolations would say, you know the number better than I do, 13,800,000,000 years ago it had zero size, and that’s called the Big Bang. And the Big Bang theory is, you know, one of those Funny things in science, it’s not a theory about the Big Bang. It’s a theory about the events after the Big Bang. So the stuff that we know for sure, The the number one thing we know for sure is that the universe was much, much smaller in the past, and I would say that the one number one thing we know for sure how, You know, when you say how small, do you really mean 0? Very, very, very, very strong evidence takes it back to a size that is 10 trillion times smaller than it is today. That’s a lot smaller. Does it take it back to 0? No. And one of the big questions In, cosmology, that’s gonna take a while to answer is, was there a big bang? Was there ever a time when the universe had zero size? And that’s a really rich question.

Speaker:

Another thing we know for sure that you know for sure, you’ve spent your career studying it, is it was a hot big bang. So it it wasn’t just any old big bang. In the past, it was really hot. And I I don’t know if you’re allowed to use words like this on your show, but I use it in In the technical sense, it was hotter than hell. And, so that comes to us from the cosmic microwave background. The the There’s a microwave echo of the big bang, and that we can even get a picture of the universe. It’s 13,800,000,000 years old today. We can get a picture of the universe when it was only 380000 years old, the infant universe.

Speaker:

Not 380000 years ago, but when it was 380,000 years old before galaxies and stars and all that so the idea that I mean if you wanna you know have a oxford debate about You know, whether or not there was a big bang, then if I were arguing, no, there wasn’t, I would say, well, the big bang is, you know, when the universe was zero size, and we really say that, but the idea that the universe was much, much smaller, much, much hotter, and, Grew to a size today. That’s that’s really the big bang theory, which is the events after the big bang. And I know there are people Some of them are engineers. Some of them have degrees. I think there’s someone who even wrote a book called The Big Bang Never Happened. Eric Lerner.

Brian Keating:

That’s right. He’s a provocateur.

Speaker:

His book. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it because I was giving a lecture a public lecture in Aspen when the book came out. And his in fact, you will enjoy this, I hope. His number 1 piece of evidence is a very long book with a lot of words, But he had 1 piece of evidence was we hadn’t found the small variations in the intensity of the microwave background that need to be there To Explain Galaxies. And what was funny about this book is it literally written 6 months before those variations were discovered And made your career possible because your whole career has been spent doing this extraordinarily hard work of studying these tiny tiny variations that give us a picture of the infant universe, and you know this and and most scientists this is Science is a continuing process where I would say we’re we’re very firm on understanding universe back to a microsecond. And earlier than that, I would that that goes into my 2nd bin of really well formulated ideas That are knocking at the door to become fact. And inflation is one of those ideas knocking at the door to become fact. Another idea that’s knocking at the door to become fact is that the dark matter that we just touched upon very briefly earlier, is made of, elementary particles left over from the Big Bang.

Speaker:

That is not fact. You know, I would never, you know, Say that that’s fact. We have a lot of evidence for it, but it’s really banging at the door, but we don’t have The case where yeah. Likewise for inflation. There’s a lot of, and so it’s really easy To, you know, throw mud and get a headline, the Big Bang never happened. You know, if I said, oh, the Big Bang happened, we found another piece of evidence for it, And I go to the editor of your, you know, this San Diego Union paper. Can I get that on the front page? Nah. I don’t think so.

Speaker:

I have someone who’ll say the big bang never happened. Can I get that on the front page? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Brian Keating:

That’s right. That’s the, The big bang’s bleeding, so it’s leading. Exactly. Yeah. I I make a lot of that. I I made a video refuting mister Lerner of the plasma physics institute Of the Western, Pennsylvania, and and that’s fine. There there’s another gentleman, Rajendra Gupta at the University of Ottawa, who’s an actual professor and has worked in this field, and He reduced the age of the universe, you know, from infinity and static to, to a mere 27000000000 years. And, you You know, I’m happy to talk to these people.

Brian Keating:

I generally think along the lines of lord Martin Rees that, you know, debate is pointless. It’s it’s not like people change their mind. You know, They love to hear debates. They love to watch debates, but it’s like a baseball game. You go and see your your bears, and and you don’t want them to, to to lose. It’s not like you You really wanna, you know, see a great man. No. You want them to blow the other team out.

Brian Keating:

At least I do with the Padres.

Speaker:

We know the Bears are gonna lose, unfortunately. Yeah.

Brian Keating:

I know. Well, the same with the Padres, but at least you’ve had team that yeah. At least the Cubs have won a world series. The Padres never have. But let’s turn to, to inflation because, as I said before we press record. Your papers were really influential on on experimentalist. And I don’t know if you realize that, but but a lot of us who, you know, began Our careers, you know, in in the nineties with with Colvin Turner later turned our attention to the search for some circumstantial, but, nevertheless, very probative Information about inflation were to occur. And one of the most influential papers on a generation, my generation, was, you know, your papers on the scorecard For inflation.

Brian Keating:

And I don’t know if you can, you know, take us back to to what it meant when you prepare these, these these papers. Do you Do you think about the audience as being, you know, particular people like young Brian Keating’s experimentalist, phenomenologist? How do you how did you develop the brand of, and the taste that you have to develop things that would be of great utility to theorists, Observers and experimentalists. What goes be what went into that thought process of that particular series of papers?

Speaker:

In science, there are people Who just wanna be clever and write clever papers. Some of the theorists are that way. And that That’s really important to have clever ideas and tools out there and, and then then there are people who Would like to have clever ideas that are testable, and let’s see if they’re right or wrong. And if they’re wrong, oh, whatever. But if they’re right, that’s that’s very, very cool. And, early universe cosmology, underwent A transition. In the early days, we were just having a lot of fun. I mean, we we would invent a new kind of universe every week and And, discovery of those small variations in the, intensity of the microwave background, in 1992, April 23rd.

Speaker:

That was a really big deal because that meant you could really start testing these ideas. I’ve gone on record many places saying this. I’ve said it in a lot of papers. Alan Guth’s theory of inflation is the 2nd most important idea In cosmology ever after the Big Bang, after George Gamow’s Big Bang, whether or not it’s right. And it has Directed the field, since his 1980 paper. It might have been 1981 when it was published. And so starting in the early nineties, there was the idea you might be able to test this theory, And it’s a theory about events that happened at Jiffy after the big bang. You you know what a Jiffy is.

Speaker:

Right?

Brian Keating:

Yeah. It’s a skosh. It’s a little more than a skosh.

Speaker:

Yeah. That’s right. It’s it’s a microskoche. And oh, no. Maybe it’s a it’s 10 scotches. I always get that screwed up. So very early, you know, maybe 10 to the minus 35 seconds. And so you wanna guide people.

Speaker:

You also, And I wanna test this on you. Sometimes people think science is a cabal. Right? Brian and Michael work together. And so

Brian Keating:

Big big cosmology.

Speaker:

Yeah. Conspiratorial cosmology. Brian wants to confirm Michael’s ideas and then, you know, blah blah blah. And and, Typically, the best compliment an experimentalist can pay to a theorist is to try to disprove the theorist’s idea. And inflation was like that. Its boldest prediction and this was slightly before your time, but one of your mentors was involved in this. Its absolute boldest prediction was that the universe is flat, that it has the critical density. And the astronomers used to roll their eyes because they said, oh my god.

Speaker:

The we already know That the density is not the critical density. It’s only 10%. And so, you know, we love that inflation and the false vacuum energy and all that stuff but changed the flat universe. And maybe later, I’ll tell you a story about where it almost got changed, but it didn’t, And we stuck with the flat universe, and, then dark energy came along. And the person who showed That that was the 1st major test of inflation because all the evidence at the time, which was not perfect, it was just based upon counting up matter, and you could only count up matter, close to galaxies, said, No. You missed by a factor of 10. That’s a pretty big error. 1 of your I assume he was one of your your mentors, Andrew Lang At Caltech, he was your postdoctoral mentor, I think.

Brian Keating:

That’s right. Yeah. He and I made my studies.

Speaker:

And I don’t know if you were involved in his boomerang experiment. It was a boomerang.

Brian Keating:

No. He hired me after I got fired by Sarah Church at Stanford. And then but she kindly arranged for a meeting with Andrew who had been her postdoc adviser, and then the rest, as they say, is history. And we went on with Jamie Bach to build BICEP.

Speaker:

And then BICEP I hope we get to that because I am I am just in love with BICEP.

Brian Keating:

As a father, I I take I take great satisfaction.

Speaker:

But, anyway, Andrew’s balloon experiment, was fantastic, and that’s how I met Andrew. We we were together on the NASA press conference, and we flew back from Washington DC to Chicago. I had booked him for a colloquium, and that that was the first big piece of evidence. And then The what you what you have spent most of your career studying these small variations in the intensity of the microwave background across the sky, About a part in 10 of the 5. Really, really small. Very, very hard to measure. That’s a big area where you where you could where you could test it. How do they vary from angle to angle and getting more technical? What are their statistics and so on and so forth? And So you’ve got to spell that out.

Speaker:

First of all, if you ever want your if you ever want people to say, oh, you made a prediction and it was confirmed, You gotta make the prediction before it was confirmed. After it’s confirmed, you say, oh, yeah. No. No. No. That’s what I predicted.

Brian Keating:

Retro addiction. Yeah.

Speaker:

Yeah. My neighbors do that. You know every everybody does that. Eric Lerner does that but you’ve gotta get the predictions and you also have to say Here’s what’s really important one of the ones I take the most pride in in that paper these variations we have this term called scale and variant so They they don’t change from scale to scale, but a very important thing is they’re not scale invariant. They’re almost scale invariant, and, I believe, my collaborators and I were the first ones to put that word in front of there saying An important test is that they’re not quite scale invariant. So they’re close, but they’re 10% off. And if you find them to be exactly scaling variant, that that would not be a feather in inflation’s hat. You want them to be slightly off, And they indeed are 10% off and and the experimentalists really paid attention to that.

Speaker:

That was a big goal. Can we show That there’s a statistically significant deviation from scale and variance. And then the one that the big one, and I think most of my papers, I’m glad I was detecting the gravity wave signature, which at the time when I when when I started writing I’d be interesting to go back and look at the paper That was gonna be that was so difficult to do. There was no That one looked undoable but you if you’re a theorist you can’t say oh by the way here’s a really cool prediction but you’re never gonna do it You’ve gotta say this is a really cool prediction it may be impossible today but cutting edge science is making the impossible just really hard And that’s what you guys have done at BICEP. I mean, BICEP to me I am the biggest fan of BICEP. And when, I know you had I don’t know if I wanna call it a misstep, but a false alarm or whatever it’s called. I am your biggest defender because you guys set your sight On a goal. And you you you are more sensitive in looking for this signature.

Speaker:

It’s an important test of inflation because if you find this gravitational wave signature, you find out when inflation took place. Just like that. And but it’s really, really hard. It’s more than a decade that you’ve been doing this, and you just keep I watch you guys every if if I if I would give you $100, you would go buy some more detectors for the focal plane because Every penny penny that comes into this project, you you make the the experiment more sensitive, and it’s sitting down there at the South Pole. I hope it’s running right now.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s been upgraded. It’s on the 4th generation now. It’s called BicepArray. You know, it went from Bicep 1, Bicep 2, Bicep 3, and now we, gave up the creative naming scheme. But, yeah, speaking of money, that’s you know, you mentioned the the royalties you’re getting from the early universe. Hey, friends.

Brian Keating:

Just a short request to ask you to use your thumb while my thumb is occupied to leave a like on this video, and don’t forget to subscribe. It really helps us with the algorithm. Now back to the episode. Now you understand the reason that I’m calling you today, Michael. So let’s talk about inflation, Just a little bit. I I do wanna say one thing. You brought up the very important fact that is missed by 99% of laypeople and almost a 100% of scientists, which is that the job of an experimentalist is not to prove theories. Our job I call myself a theory exterminator, because that’s really what we should do.

Brian Keating:

And I tell my students, Michael, and I wonder what you would tell a student, you know, starting off nowadays. But I say my experimentalist. I want you experimentalist to understand theory as well as a beginning theory graduate student. I just don’t require that you come up with new theories or new tests or new models, But you should understand what you’re doing at least as well as an as a theorist. Otherwise, you’re and I’m not, you know, condemning plumbers and electricians, but that’s what I spend most of my time doing. I’m Electrician, a plumber, a technician, vacuum tube plumber, you know, looking for leaks and helium lines. I mean, this is not something I needed to get a PhD in in cosmology to do necessarily. But what would you what is the theoretical minimum? I told you the experimental minimum.

Brian Keating:

I want my grad students to know theory at least as well as a grad student in theory. I don’t require him or her to make new theories. What’s the theoretical minimum to use Lenny’s term?

Speaker:

I agree with everything you say, and I’m glad that’s you you’re telling your students that. But What’s interesting about science, and we’ll come back to baseball, but I won’t mention those pathetic Padres, science is A team sport. You’re in a and I don’t mean collaborations. You’re in a collaboration, but more generally, it’s a team sport. So let me just talk about the theory side. So we need theorists who write papers where every damn one of them you can trust. You can take the numbers to the bank and, so that’s somebody who gets on base, hits singles. In theory, there is a role for people Who swing for the fences, the Babe Ruths.

Speaker:

And most of their at bats are strikeouts. We need those 2, and you might say, well, which one do you want? I want both because if no one’s on base when you hit the home runs. And so, And it’s same in experiment. I I know, actually, in your field, in the microwave background, there are some people in your field who are extremely distinguished I don’t wanna mention names because this could be taken the wrong way, but who know how to get the science. Then there are people who know how to invent the instrumentation, but don’t have a clue about the science, but they and so if you get those 2 together, Andrew could do both. And, actually, Andrew also could conduct the the orchestra. So he could put together

Brian Keating:

Manage manage the baseball

Speaker:

He could manage the baseball team, and so I think science requires a whole bunch of of different skill sets on the theory side. But I guess all of them involve, you know, being able to, work abstractly and having command of the mathematics Today, I like to tell classes that the history in the history of science, was you may push back on this, Mathematics has always been the pacing item pacing item, and I can make a pretty good case about that that, you know, we had the Greeks And, oh my god, nothing happened, and then Euclid invented geometry. And, algebra helped. The Arabs invented algebra, and then Newton came along and invented calculus. And you can you can see where our understanding of the universe Jumped non Euclidean geometry. Einstein came along. It was so abstract that, people have a hard time believing this. Einstein was not a very good mathematician and he had his hired hand, Marcel

Brian Keating:

Grossman.

Speaker:

Grossman. That’s right. And So mathematics, a theorist has to know math. And do they have to know absolutely, You know, the cutting edge math or can they can’t know old fashioned math. Like, if all you’re good at is geometry, I think you might not be a great theorist, but Yeah. You don’t necessarily have to know string theory, so it takes a different skill sets and you know the Weinberg salons theory. Oh my goodness. Nobel Prize winners.

Speaker:

Shelley, who’s a good friend, always swings for the fences. He is The Big Idea Guy.

Brian Keating:

Past guest on the podcast.

Speaker:

Shelley is amazing. He hates string theory. That’s a whole another I I can’t explain that.

Brian Keating:

We’ll do that at a different time. Yeah.

Speaker:

And, Steve sweat the details, and The combination of them getting the Nobel prize is so crazy because the the 2 of them competed in high school, Bronx High School of Science, And there they are, you know, you you know, you’re judging how good you are by how many other people are at my level. There’s another guy who’s as smart as I am. They both end up as assistant professors at Harvard sharing the same secretary. And then Steve gets famous for his paper On what’s now called the Weinberg Salam Glashow Model, Shelley forgot he had invented the model Because it was one of his strikeouts, because he didn’t have a way that there was something missing from the model. And so then Shelley oh my god. I hope you’re oh boy. I’m being, but Shelley has said all of this in print. He said weinberg installed the toilet in his beautiful model And that which is the Higgs mechanism.

Speaker:

But so I say this. They’re both brilliant. You we would not have the Weinberg Salam Glashow theory without the 2 of them and Abdus Salam. And I’m sure you see it in experiment. There’s some people in your collaboration who are developing detectors for 20 years ahead, and you’re trying to say, yeah, but we’re trying to get these working at the South Pole.

Brian Keating:

That’s right.

Speaker:

And, well, they’re not gonna help you with that.

Brian Keating:

We love we love to plan. We love to forecast ahead. It’s you sort of get a little bit of the thrill of the you know, it’s like when I say I want to drop, you know, £5. I’m glad to say I did it, Michael. I dropped £5, but it was from my chin to my waist. It wasn’t that far. But, and later on, I wanna ask you. I have a tradition.

Brian Keating:

I’m gonna ask you to ask my next guest a question. My next guest is none other than, Gerard Et Hooft. I can’t the The first thing is how do you pronounce his name, but, he’s he’s agreed to answer some questions on the podcast. So I’d love to get a question from you to Gerhard or Gerard If you’re if you’re willing to play that at the very end of

Speaker:

the play that game.

Brian Keating:

In a couple of minutes. But, but before we do, I would be remiss. I had on, This guy, David Chalmers. I don’t know if you know who he is. He’s he’s, a philosopher at New York University. He came up with this concept called the The hard problem of consciousness. I had on a guy named Nick Bostrom, and he invented the term, the, singular not the singularity. That’s Ray Kurzweil, the simulation hypothesis.

Brian Keating:

So all these guys come on, and one’s from Australia, and David Chalmers is from Australia. And I said, David, look. It would be it would be as if I had on, you know, ACDC, and I didn’t ask them to sing Back in Black. You are the creator, the father, the paternal figure of dark energy. I would be as equally remiss As I would have been with Bostrom if I didn’t ask, you know, him, I I gave the example of Abba, if I didn’t ask him to sing dancing queen because he’s from Sweden. Anyway, tell me, please, Michael, How did this come to you? What was the motivating, inciting incident from literature we we we encounter these? What What was the origin story of your child, dark energy?

Speaker:

In the nineties, when you were a youngster, we had this idea called inflation. It predicted a flat universe, a a critical density universe. We we had this, idea of cold dark matter. These were the driving ideas. They were getting young people like you into the field. They were so beautiful, and they had a problem. Let let’s focus on the critical density problem. So the critical density problem was you have to find enough matter to get to the critical density.

Speaker:

And early on, we looked at the measurements that had been made by the astronomers, and, we realized they were missing the dark matter. And the dark matter is more diffuse than the visible matter and so and it’s harder to measure things that are far away from you. And so we pinned our hopes on the dark matter was gonna get the density all the way up to 1, up to the critical density. In a I think it was about 1994, There was a paper, I won’t describe the details, that really hit me in the face. It involved, We know at that time, we knew how many, atoms there were. We just didn’t know how many how much dark matter there was. And this paper Used a very clever technique looking at the ratio of dark matter to ordinary matter in clusters and then scaling it up Saying that the total amount of ordinary matter is only about 30%. You’re not gonna get that paper really eliminated that the possibility that dark matter was gonna take you all the way to 1.

Speaker:

So when you eliminate the impossible whatever’s left no matter how ridiculous I know I’m screwing up the quote It’s likely to be the answer and so you look at what could fill the gap and what could fill the gap is something like Einstein’s cosmological constant. And I’ve been writing papers, you know, theorists are always, You know, where this is my main prediction, but I got in my back pocket an answer just in case your experiment comes out a different way. Oh, here. Look at this paper. The, Lawrence Krauss and I wrote a paper saying the cosmological constant is back. And, that was in 1995. And in 1998, it was discovered, Blah blah blah. And then I realized in 1998 that the the astronomers were gonna say, okay.

Speaker:

We’re done. It’s just the cosmological constant, and we do not know that. We absolutely do not know that. And so If you allowed this stuff to be called the cosmological constant, oh my god. You could you’ve you guys have already measured it to better than 1%. We’re done. But we realized and it wasn’t for just for full employment. It was we don’t know what it is, And so unless we change the name and explain to people why it’s mysterious, unknown, I’ve called it the most profound mystery, 3.

Speaker:

Not the most important mystery, but the most profound mystery. So it needed a new name. So what is the new name? Well, we got dark matter. That’s really good, but it’s matter. And Yep. In the technical sense, and it’s more like energy than it is like matter. And I’ll I’ll just say that and not explain it because it’s not worth explaining. So, oh my god, dark energy and dark matter, dark side of the universe.

Speaker:

Better Better get that copyrighted right away. So there it was, and then you have to lay out the story. So we don’t know what dark energy is. We we do know that the simplest example of it is Einstein’s cosmological constant, but for I won’t go into all the reasons. It’s a big puzzle. It is a really big puzzle, And so about the same time, Martin White and I came up with, here’s how you determine whether or not it is Lambda. It’s the I’ll just use the letter, you know it w It’s the w parameter and so I made a really big deal of this is really important and it’s got a different name from the cosmological constant because It may not be the cosmological constant and you know this as well as I do Today, all the measurements are consistent with dark energy just being cosmological constant However, if that’s the answer, we don’t know why we don’t know why such a cosmological constant would be so small And so I remember the meeting. It was a wonderful meeting in Australia where I rolled out the new name.

Speaker:

Actually, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. The first name I tried was Funny Energy, And, I have a view graph that appeared in the New York Times.

Brian Keating:

You’re famously renowned for your sketching, your artistic abilities.

Speaker:

The focus groups told me, Okay. Oh, that’s fantastic. You know, that’s nonthreatening. People will really love it. And then I said, well, it’s gonna take $1,000,000,000 to figure out what funny energy is. You need a more serious name than that. And so in August of 1998, at the Mount Stromlo meeting In in Australia, I said, we’re gonna call this stuff dark energy, and, the name has stuck. Some people don’t like it.

Speaker:

They wanna call it dark negative pressure. That I said, I don’t think the focus groups are gonna like that. Dark energy is pretty good. But it the purpose, Get rid of all the silliness. Two purposes. Number 1, in order to make it a scientific target, you can’t just say, oh, that funny stuff that’s causing the universe to It needs a short name, and then you need to quantify it a little bit, and you need to differentiate it. So dark matter, has worked really, really well, but you have you have to differentiate it from dark matter. So it’s gotta be slightly different.

Speaker:

It can’t be a a long complicated name, and you have to be able to explain to people, oh my god. You’re just trying to be more famous than Einstein. Oh, no one could ever do that. So So why don’t you just call it Einstein’s cosmological constant? And the simple thing is we don’t know that it is. It is the biggest puzzle. It’s the most profound puzzle in all of science. And if we want people to, really spend time trying to figure it out, we got we gotta We gotta give it the right name.

Brian Keating:

Yeah. And I think it’s good. Speaking of somebody who’s got a name for, not a name. No pun intended for neologisms. I came up with the term the name BICEP. NASA recently, asked me to come up with a new name. Apparently, the name Uranus is very embarrassing, For some astronomers to pronounce, and we come up with ways around it, workarounds like uranus, like urine is better than uranus. So I’ve been tasked by the NASA task force, to come up with a new name, and I’m proud I’m gonna announce it right now.

Brian Keating:

I’ve come up with a new name. It shall be known as your rectum. And I think I think it’s gonna stick, but it’s up to folks like you. The the focus groups will come into play. Michael, I wanna read I wanna read something to you. And it’s, it’s it’s kind of a hallmark for my for my listeners to, to eventually send you more and more, of those precious royalty, scratch checks. This from an article you wrote, I believe, about 10, 15 years ago. No.

Brian Keating:

It’s 20 years ago. Oh my god. This is incredible, Michael, in physics today, and it’s about dark energy. And this is a section called destiny. One thing you wrote is clear. Dark energy leads to a revision in our view of cosmic destiny. With matter alone, destiny and geometry are 1. Closed universes recollapse And open or flat universes expand forever.

Brian Keating:

If dark energy is vacuum energy, our flat universe will continue accelerating to a bleak future in a 1000000000 years, all but a few 100 galaxies nearby will have their light shifted too far into the red to be seen. If dark energy dissipates, the universe will begin to decelerate, possibly even collapse. Then you go on to say dark energy is one of the deepest and most exciting puzzles in all of science. It is likely that a crazy new idea is needed to explain the cosmic speed up and resolve the cosmological constant problem. That does not mean that every crazy idea is a solution. The payoff will be well worth the effort. We will gain new insights into the nature of matter, space, and time, and shed light in our cosmic destiny. And that, you you said was predicated on adding in your 9 year old son’s theoretical work and progress was assured.

Brian Keating:

But, Michael, I wanna I wanna take a quote from A very well known scientist by the name of Alvy Cohen, who, was, in, any hall. Woody Allen, comes up and his mother says, you know, he’s not doing his homework to the psychologist. And the psychologist, why aren’t you doing your homework, Alvy? And Alvy says, I just found out the universe is expanding, and eventually, everything will be so diffused and nothing will be. And his mother goes, shut up, you idiot. Brooklyn’s not expanding. How do you deal with the existential dread of your creation, Michael? I’ve had on Adam Reese, I’ve had on Brian Schmidt On the podcast, 2 lovely men who you know very well, they don’t seem particularly overwhelmed by the existential, You know, kind of, Welch Smarts, I think is the German term, for, you know, kinda world weariness. Does this affect you? I mean, you write so beautifully, so poetically. I can’t imagine you haven’t thought of the philosophical Just as a man, as a father, as a, you know, as as as a scholar, how does this knowledge of something that you played a huge role in unleashing upon the universe, How does it affect you, if at all? Maybe it doesn’t.

Speaker:

Maybe it doesn’t, and I may have gotten that out of my system. I started out being trained in physics. And, at Stanford, my adviser wanted me to get more into astrophysics, and so I read the Astronomy book. It might have been the one by George a Bell, but they’re all the same. It’s the one for college courses, and I came away so depressed. That was before dark energy that the universe is so big and we’re so small. And, so I kinda got that out of my system. There are people as you know, you know, Doug Adams and Lawrence Krauss.

Speaker:

Freeman Dyson wrote the kind of first article about the long term history of the universe, And there’s so much to do today and so much to understand today. And I’m sorry. I’m giving you the the boring,

Brian Keating:

No.

Speaker:

It’s the least time in big company with 2 Nobel Prize winners.

Brian Keating:

2 Nobel and the 1st guest on the Into the Impossible podcast was none other than Freeman Dyson. He was adjacent, and he used to come to La Jolla every, summer. For some reason, he didn’t like being in, you know, Princeton, New Jersey in, the middle of January. So he was a brilliant guy. He came down, and, we got to know each other. And one of my favorite memories, he met my, you know, then 4 year old, and he was 94 or whatever at the time, and I have pictures of them together. He’s the lovely man. He was my 1st guest on this very podcast.

Brian Keating:

So you’re in great company, Michael, and you deserve it. I wanna ask now about another I I mean, you’ve been at the center of so many of these really interesting, conundrums. And I see you, there aren’t the technicians. There are the kind of people that work a day people Cash the paycheck and, you know, don’t really think about the philosophical implications. I know that you’re you’re saying that you’ve resolved those philosophical implications. But what do you make, of these recent kind of controversies as our as Freeman might say or a Brit might say about the the Hubble concept, the Hubble tension. I wanna get into Your work on magnetic fields, which is my preferred solution and and rectification of the of the Hubble tension. 1st explain, Is it really a problem that scientists are measuring, you know, this number 2 different ways to sub percent, you know, precision? And as you pointed out, I think you coined this term too, that, precision cosmology is is good, but accurate cosmology is better.

Brian Keating:

I use that without giving you the royalties, but that will now change. Tell me, Michael, what do you make of the so called Hubble tension? What is it, and what is it

Speaker:

being for? The Hubble tension, Talks to the maturity of cosmology. It it used to be a science with very few facts And now there are lots of facts. There’s enough facts that we can measure things in multiple ways and do cross checks. And so we can measure how fast the universe is expanding just by looking at the galaxies nearby. It’s not easy. It’s very hard work because you have to figure out their distances You can measure it that way and then you can use a way that’s probably more familiar to you using the microwave background and What you really do is measure how fast the universe was expanding a really long time ago and then say, I know Einstein’s equations tell me how the expansion rate should evolve with time and I can, run it up to today and it should agree with what those who measure it doing now get. And so the good news is it does agree to better than 10%. And, oh my god, when I was your age, getting a 10% measurement of the Hubble constant almost looked impossible, And it involved Wendy Friedman, my Chicago colleague, leading the Hubble Key project in doing it.

Speaker:

So we have 2 different methods That agreed to a a precision that 20 years ago would have been enviable. But then when you look more carefully And, take those numbers very seriously. They disagree, as you say, at at a few percent level, And and it’s statistically significant. It’s not just, oh, you know, with because error is a measurement. It and so This is an important cross check. Cosmology is not used to having cross checks. We now have a bunch of them. This is an important one.

Speaker:

And so the question is and there are 3 outcomes, 3 possibilities. 1, the microwave background could be wrong. I know you would find out that measuring it from the microwave background could be wrong. Actually, there are 4 possibilities. The direct measurements could be wrong. Both the direct and the microwave background could be wrong. They both could be right, but the extrapolation is wrong Because there’s something else in the universe besides, atoms, dark matter, and dark energy. And that’s what gets everyone Excited is that there’s something missing from this model.

Speaker:

I think you used the term Lambda CDM. I know Adam gets very, very excited about that, and that’s a possibility. And I Adam would be the 1st to say we’re not there yet. And then what and coming back to dark energy, We had a crisis then. We had a bunch of things that didn’t work. I’m I’m, mentioned the flatness, but there were other puzzles that didn’t work. You add 1 crazy thing, Lambda and everything works. And so that looked pretty good to me and Lawrence Krauss, and we wrote a paper.

Speaker:

Today, all of the fixes, they’re so complicated and they just solve 1 problem. So you, you know, you put it. Feynman was one of my mentors at Caltech, and he said, you know, an idea is good. It’s like putting a quarter in the Coke machine and 30 Cokes come out. The Golden Gumball. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker:

And that’s not happened with the the fixes. Like, they have All kinds of names that I could say early dark energy. I’ll say early dark energy is the most popular one. And they don’t even quite fix the problem, and then you say, okay. Well, okay. K. Let me pretend you fixed the discrepancy. What else are you predicting? What else new is out there? Well, this was just a toy model.

Speaker:

It was not it was not meant to so it doesn’t that doesn’t mean it’s not right, but it doesn’t have the sound of being Correct. And I’m usually pretty good at looking around the corners, and this is a real puzzle. I don’t see where this is gonna end. In fact, it would be wonderful to have a debate where it ended. And in the debate, you flip a coin to decide who takes what side because There are powerful arguments on both sides. Oh, it’s gotta be new physics. There’s an equally powerful argument. Oh my god.

Speaker:

That distance scale measuring galaxy distances is so hard. If you look at all the great astronomers, Hubble was off only by a factor of 10 in measuring distances. I mean, It’s it’s very hard to measure distances in the universe, so I don’t know how that one’s gonna end. And but the the it’s either gonna end Well, I guess it could end as the whole cosmology collapses. I don’t think that’ll be the case. But or it could end in, oh, there’s a mistake either in microwave background Or the local measurements, and now the 2 agree to 1%, so we have this end to end test. Or it could be, you know what? We just discovered just like, the discrepancy we had with the flatness of the universe, we just discovered something new about the universe. So it’s exciting.

Brian Keating:

That’s the other misconception among, you know, laypeople and less among professional scientists unlike the job of what an experimentalist is supposed to do being not prove a theorist, but prove them wrong. But, but actually it’s most exciting. I I always think it’s a little disingenuous though, Michael, when people used to say, you know, the most exciting thing about the Large Hadron Collider would be if we don’t find the Higgs boson. I’ll be like, yeah. I’d be really excited about losing €10,000,000,000, you know, just, you know, I that’d be so exciting to me. But, you know, other than that, in this situation, So many flowers can bloom. And one of the ones that I said appeals most to me, venally, because I’ve written papers about it with my, with my, friends in in various locations like Levon Pekosian and and others about, about magnetic fields. So, your paper and and this is a sign of just the titanic intellect.

Brian Keating:

So as we were talking before we start courting. We’re talking about your paper with Lawrence Woodrow back from 1988. And I said in that paper, you know, it’s being cited now As a, as, you know, one of the first citations to axioms and so forth. And and you were kinda arguing with me, Michael, but I I looked up the paper as we’re As we’re talking, I have it downloaded and, and nope. It’s right there. Equation 31. Sorry. You you talk about a, the the axion through which, through the anomaly couples to e dot b, which For those out there, my audience is the most brilliant in the known universe to the multiverse, but, that would be a a forbidden interaction in class electromagnetism.

Brian Keating:

But Michael is so incredibly, you know, brilliant that you’ve forgotten more than most of us will ever know. And one of those things was how an axion, which has become a very popular candidate for the explanation of dark energies, you know, sinister, older brother, dark matter. I wonder though, I don’t wanna talk too much about axions unless you wanna talk about. I’m fascinated by them, and it’s kind of buttering my bread lately because we’re We’re during doing a lot of searches as is your buddy John Carlstrom and and the South Pole Telescope. And I like to think I play a little role in that as I did with the search for inflation with BICEP, And that I started to think about, these parity violating things back in 2007 as as looking for these forbidden correlation functions in e dot b Of Cesar Cesar Belgrade. B. And people even John kinda laughed at me back then, but but now he’s he’s come around, and I hope to have him on the podcast too. But but Unless you wanna talk about axions, let’s talk about electromagnetic fields because these are the only things that we know for sure exist.

Brian Keating:

We don’t know if axions exist. We don’t know what dark energy is or, you know, maybe if it is a cosmological constant or not. We don’t know what dark matter, but we certainly know good as anything that magnetic fields exist, in you and me, on our planet, in this meteorite, which, you know, blew my chances at a Nobel Prize in some ways. But I do give these away if you have a dotedu email address. I give them away on my website, briankem.com. So you have a dotedu. I’ll I’ll bring you one when I come and see you up there in Venice. But, Michael, How do magnetic fields originate in what was the concept for these early magnetic fields, and what would you rate if you were doing a, A Hubble tension scorecard as I would love for you to do as you did with your magical inflation scorecard.

Brian Keating:

Please tell me, Michael. What would the idea of a primordial magnetic field rank, and what score would you give it For resolving potentially the Hubble tension.

Speaker:

Well, I would give any solution a pretty low score. Let’s go back to dark energy. When Lawrence and I wrote the paper about Lambda, I would have given it a chance of maybe 10 or 20% being correct, and I really thought it was a good idea. So,

Brian Keating:

The A calibrate thing.

Speaker:

Yeah. I wanna calibrate it. So I think any of the solutions I’ve heard, you know, less than 10%, Chance of Being Correct, but that’s really high because there’s a lot of ideas out there, and You should not trust my opinion. The, nature gets the last word and the experimenters get the last word And nature or ugly experiments kill beautiful theories. And so you can have the most beautiful theory. I don’t know if you ever had John Ellis on your show, but he’s very distinguished particle physics physicist.

Brian Keating:

Oh, no. Not John Ellis. I had Georgia.

Speaker:

And John Ellis said the first time and he’s a very creative guy. The 1st time he heard about the Weinberg’s law model, he said this is too ugly for nature to have chosen that, and it did. And so just because all this I find all the solutions uncompelling, my opinion really doesn’t count. We’ve got a problem to solve, and so we need ideas. And, you know, I’ll give you this is advice from an old person. So I did a tutorial with Feynman when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, and so he he looks at me just like I’m looking at you right now, and he says, I really envy your ignorance. And so I’m going, oh, that’s great. Thank you.

Speaker:

Thank you very much, professor. Ultimate backhanded compliment. Well, what he meant was on the theory side is that the older you get, the less creative you get, and you know too much, and you get a germ of an idea, And you can just completely discard it. And most ideas the first rendering of most ideas is just wrong. And so but if you kill that little germ of an idea so for example, you know, magnetic fields explaining the the tension, I’m what I’m a 100% sure of is that the solutions that have been written are not right. Whether or not they have a germ of a good idea, I don’t know. And so and I’m the wrong person to ask because you get old and you get you know so much more. And worse than that, you know that most ideas are wrong.

Speaker:

So, you know, if someone comes in and says, okay, it’s your life. The stakes of this question are your life. Is this new idea right or wrong? I’m going with wrong because I’m I’m going I’m going with the with the smart money because And so and it just doesn’t matter. There’s so many examples. I the neutrino oscillations. All the theorists said, oh my god. Nutrienting mixing angles are really small, and it’s matter induced. That’s so pretty.

Speaker:

The creator could not have chosen to do that. It’s large mixing angles all the way. The creator did not take the beautiful route. So what young people can do is put ideas out there, And a lot of them are just crap or not. Most of them are wrong. Some of them are even crap, but it’s generating those ideas is the hard thing. The easy thing is being the critic and testing them is not always easy either, but so I just don’t wanna discourage people from having ideas. Though my current betting odds on the Hubble problem, I gave you 4 solutions.

Speaker:

25, 25, 25, 25. It’s a real puzzle.

Brian Keating:

That’s a uniform prior for those of you playing at home. I think maybe if I could be, you know, so to merit this as to suggest what Feynman, might have also been implying, And and he would’ve had a field day with me because he he would’ve been very envious of my ignorance, because there was a surf fight of it. But There’s a feeling that you get. Yeah. I finished reading Moby Dick, 20 years ago. I I started it 800 times, never finished it. But when I was done, I was like, I really wish I could read this again for the 1st time. And, you know, you kinda feel that way sometimes when you’re Building a new experiment, you know, on those heady early days or I assume a theory coming up with a a theoretical idea.

Brian Keating:

But, but it’s just so it’s it’s it is it is important to realize that, yes, ideas on the one hand, ideas are cheap, and everybody’s got an idea, and and the hard thing is follow which takes a lot more time and attention and and so forth. But I think being guided by these big principles, trying to do as as, you know, another great orator said, you know, that the mankind’s reach should exceed his grasp. That’s the challenge. That’s what makes it so fun to be a physicist when there are so many different possibilities that that you could be right, you could be wrong, and and you should have a little bit. I always say you should have a humble, you know, kind of form of swagger. You should you should know that you’re probably wrong. But if you don’t have a little cockiness, you’re never gonna take on mother nature. You know, she’s just too powerful.

Brian Keating:

So let’s conclude in the next, you know, few minutes if you have a few more minutes, Michael. I’d love to talk about, your thoughts on, you know, upcoming guests. I have 2 upcoming guests that you know very well. One is Katie Fries, who you wrote many papers with, But also with with, David Schramm, who, who I I never really got to know David. He passed away, unfortunately, you know, before I came of age. But, Talk about, you know, Katie, who’s coming he’s she’s actually coming to UCSD in a in a week to give our, prize colloquium here. But talk about their ideas. She’s come to attention lately for this notion of dark stars, and that possibly being an explanation.

Brian Keating:

I wonder if you could, you know, channel your friend, your late colleague David, and and say, what would he make of these new ideas? And what do you make of of of of These very creative ideas like, dark photons, dark stars. Help us you’re the king of the dark, Michael. So please Opine for us on the state of this, and then, we’ll we’ll conclude in a bit.

Speaker:

David Schramm was my mentor, and, I I We’ll never forget the day, that that he died. I just, I don’t even wanna think about it. And Katie was a student at Chicago and David was was her adviser, and I also worked with Katie when she was a student. And So Dark Stars is really great. I can’t possibly believe it’s true. I can’t find out anything wrong with it, but most importantly, it’s very testable. And I also like, What you said about the swagger is Katie’s had the right amount of swagger that, you gotta let go of an idea if somebody can show you that it doesn’t work. But if it’s testable, that’s very important.

Speaker:

And Steve Weinberg once said that you can find countless examples where the theorists did not stick to their ideas enough. The microwave being background being 1. Gamow, they could have predicted it. They could have even Anyway, that’s it’s an interesting

Brian Keating:

Dickie Dickie Dickie did predict it and tried to measure it, and then he forgot about it.

Speaker:

It, and so I think The dark stars, I just can’t possibly believe it’s correct. And then case says, well, tell me what’s wrong with my arguments and tells me what’s wrong with these simulations, And that would be amazing. The dark photons so this is another one that, it’d be interesting to get Katie’s opinion on this. Here we have a dilemma. My generation said, guess what? We’ve got it down. There’s 1 dark matter particle. It completes the grand unified theory or the theory of everything. There’s Just 1 particle missing.

Speaker:

And guess what? That 1 particle missing also is the dark matter. We’ve got this really simple story. We called the 2000 tens, the decade of the wimp, of the weekly interacting massive particle, And you’re either looking for the lightest supersymmetric particle or the axion. And Rocky and I and others said By by 2020, we’ll be done. We’ll we’ll know the answer. And, well, of course, we never we don’t quite know the answer. We haven’t ruled either one out, but It’s not looking good. And so the young theorist said the new paradigm is the tip of the iceberg is the dark matter particle And the rest of the iceberg underwater that we can’t see is a whole new dark world.

Speaker:

All kinds of other particles, dark dark photons, dark this, dark that. It seems awfully extravagant to me for 1 problem. You invent a whole new world, but the, they’ve convinced me that I’m being fairly simple minded saying, you know, we just had one thing left to do. And now a question for Atufth. Well, he’s so smart, and he thinks about things in a very deep way. I was at a meeting with him, 5 years ago, and I was trying to think, but I would really like to know His opinion on inflation. Roger Penrose, who I don’t know if you’ve had on your show or not, but

Brian Keating:

many times.

Speaker:

Not think very highly of inflation. And he thinks that it’s just a blind alley. And You’ve probably had Andrei Linde who thinks, you know Yeah. Andrei Andrei Linde once said, the only way you can disprove inflation is with a better theory. You can’t do it with an experimental data, and he thinks very highly of it. I Gerard thinks about things In a way that I can’t often under understand, and he’s extraordinarily mathematically powerful. Full. When I hear him talk about black holes, I know I can’t understand that.

Speaker:

I get confused by that. But I would love to have just open ended, What do you think about inflation? Are we on the right track? Is it is it a distraction? Where where is that train going?

Brian Keating:

Okay, Michael. Last question. I usually ask a bunch of questions based on Arthur Arthur c Clark, who is the namesake of this podcast because he said, the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. You brought up Arthur Conan Doyle’s similar statement. But I wanna, and and sometimes I lay on my department chair, Clark’s other maxim, which is that for every expert, there’s an equal and opposite expert. I love that one. But I’m gonna do a different one. Also having to do with impossibility, and it’s the following quote.

Brian Keating:

When an elderly or distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is very likely to be correct. But when he says something is impossible, He is very likely to be wrong. I wanna ask you, Michael. What have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about? And and sort of And and sort of an advice to an earlier form of Michael.

Speaker:

I think we just covered the one that I’m struggling with. And I think the the struggle Struggles are really big. You know, this dark matter thing, have I, for the most of my career, been looking at it the wrong way? That is either the Axione or the Neutrolino, and you’ve heard of the wimp miracle. I hate that term. It’s not you will not find it in the early universe because it it seems clear to me I mean, you heard me kinda dismissive I didn’t mean to be dismissive, but saying this whole idea that you’re inventing a dark World to explain 1 experimental fact that seems so extravagant, but maybe I’m just looking at it the wrong way that this is the piece the only piece of the dark world that we can see. And I’m just so fixed in my old ideas that there’s just one last thing to find Like Michelson was saying, oh, you know, in the 1900, physics is done. We’re just putting extra decimal places on. So I would say that for me, you’re watching a struggle, and I I give talks.

Speaker:

I’m asked to give talks at dark matter meetings, and I’m slowly evolving. I’m at least willing to admit they may be right, and usually I can see around corners and see the end. This puzzle, I cannot see around the corner.

Brian Keating:

Michael, I appreciate you so much. I hope you’ll come down to San Diego and maybe give a colloquium of your own. We’d love to host you here. And, it’s been a delight as I knew it would be, and I I hope someday we can do a part 2. It’s been fascinating journey through the history and also the culture and taste that it takes to build a brand as strong as the Turner brand. Thank you so much, and, Best of luck to everyone that you mentioned except for those hated Dodgers.

Speaker:

Thanks a lot, Brian. It’s been it’s been fun, and I do hope I will get down to San Diego one of these days.