Accidental Discoveries That Shaped Astronomy
with Chris Lintott

Brian Keating:
Professor Chris Lintott.

Chris Lintott:
The simplest possible thing to point Hubble at the same patch of sky for a 100 hours, and the result of that was that this tiny patch of sky was transformed into a field of about 10,000 distant galaxies.

Brian Keating:
How come so many of the greatest cosmic discoveries came about by accident? Should we communicate speculative scientific ideas to the public? Will we ever rebuild the public’s trust in science? And is hype ruining astronomy?

Chris Lintott:
Your answer’s in the question. Right?

Brian Keating:
I had the pleasure of discussing these mind bending questions with my fellow astrophysicist, fellow professor, and fellow YouTube and science communicator, Chris Lintott. Chris is involved in a number of the most popular science projects aimed at bringing science to the public as well as communicating them on his BBC program, The Sky at Night.

Chris Lintott:
I think we need to keep space open for early career researchers who, let’s face it, do the work to try speculative things.

Brian Keating:
In this delightful conversation, we discussed everything ranging from the origin of life to aliens in the universe to the origin of the universe intelligence how these discoveries can be best communicated to you, the public. You guys pay our salary through your taxes after all. So sit back and enjoy this conversation through the cosmos as we explore accidental discoveries in astronomy. Let’s go. Chris, I wanna start off with a possibly provocative poser to you, and that’s the following. Half of the discoveries that are so amazing in this wonderful new book aren’t confirmed, will never be confirmed, have been disconfirmed. Isn’t there a danger in relying on speculation and hype in astronomy as has plagued many other science branches?

Chris Lintott:
I mean, your answer’s in the question. Right? Yes. Obviously, if we accept this hype and so on, then we have to be careful. I do think one of the problems with the way we talk about science inspired me to write the book, which is that we tend to give the headline result. Right? And there’s usually some clever person on stage accepting an award or, you know, announcing a result. And it can seem like that was a very linear process. Right? That my colleague, Bill Kiel at Alabama, talks about the Hollywood version of science. And the Hollywood version of science is that we all sit in a big and surprisingly plush conference room.

Chris Lintott:
No one says anything. And then some somebody suddenly goes, my god. I’ve got an idea. We go, well, we should test the idea. And then we test the idea, and it turns out they were right. And the thing is that’s not how it works. And actually, that’s not the fun bit. Being right is never the fun bit.

Chris Lintott:
So I think one of the things I want to do in the book, was show astronomy in action, show show how astronomy works as an everyday subject, particularly from perspective of an observational astronomy. Somebody who spends their life not, writing equations necessarily and not building simulations, but somebody who is interested trying to get the best out for telescopes that we have and to see what’s lurking and often the data that we’ve already collected. So I think that can help with the hype cycle. Because if people, see the sausage made, then they’re more likely to understand whether to eat the sausage or not at the end is a slightly convoluted, analogy. But I’m interested your your question, I know you’re trying to be provocative, but which are the ones you don’t think are true? Because I think I would stand by most of the things in the book.

Brian Keating:
Well, I know you for a fact, Chris, you don’t stand behind Oumuamua as an interstellar garbage barge or or a scout mission from extraterrestrial intelligence. Unlike past guest and friend, Avi Loeb, you say quite quite clearly in the book, let me get the quote here, something that it’s been debunked thoroughly. So that’s extreme hype. I mean, we love Avi, but he’s not afraid of of displaying a little bit of of over

Chris Lintott:
But but but in the book, Oumuamua is interesting regardless of the fact that it’s probably not an alien spaceship. So the the result, you know so so, yes, I, you know, I haven’t decided it would be fun if it was an alien spaceship. Like, this is the thing that I think sometimes when we get talking about Avi’s ideas with people they miss, like, the rest of us want it to be an alien spaceship too. It’s it’s not that we’re sitting here going, no, I don’t have time for that in my schedule. Though, there is a good story about Jocelyn’s bell by nails discovery of pulsars where she ends up pissed off annoyed that, aliens might have gotten away for theory, but we’re not all Jocelyn. Right? Aliens would be great. So look, Ome and Mu, it would be great for sales, but it’s not aliens. It’s a sample of another solar system.

Chris Lintott:
It’s the first of the things that we’ve ever found. It’s kick started this renaissance, this new set of ideas about what actually turned out to be the most common macroscopic objects in the galaxy. We think there are 10 to the 27. So 1,000,000,000,000,000 big these things floating through the cosmos. And we’ve seen 2 of them. And that’s exciting. So to me, Oumuamua, the story in the book is that it arrived from out of nowhere. It confound us.

Chris Lintott:
It was perfectly sensible to consider the alien hypothesis, especially if you’ve read your rendezvous with Rama and the rest of it. But it turns out to be consistent with being a population of objects that we’re now going to get to study. And so I was so excited by Oumuamua that I changed the whole direction of my research and have started working on predicting the properties of these instant objects, because I think they’re they’re amazing. They’re uniquely sensitive to sort of all of astronomy. So so to understand Oumuamua, you have to have the star formation history of the Milky Way. Right? You have to have how stars lead to planets. Right? You have to understand the dynamics of planetary systems. You have to understand what happens when things go spinning around the C, and you have to understand how the solar system interacts with all of those things.

Chris Lintott:
So it’s a fun challenging problem that until Oumuamua turned up, no one had bothered to think about. And now there’s a group of us who are working on this. So, yeah, not an alien spaceship. I thought the one you were going to say theory was, I’ve had some comments about the the chapter in the book about phosphine on Venus.

Brian Keating:
That’s my next one. Yeah. My next one is phosphine, then it’s, well, I’ll quote you the the the quote that really kinda stuck in my craw, so to speak, as we say here over in the former colonies.

Chris Lintott:
It’s alright. I speak American. I’m bilingual. That’s fine.

Brian Keating:
Okay. That’s great. Yes. And you have multiple copies of each one of your books. And she told you immediately, and you I quote that we might, quote, might have found aliens. But I think even then I mean, Chris, that was the least, you know, likely explanation even back then. So phosphine, I’ve had on, C Seeger. I’ve had on, other experts in theory research.

Brian Keating:
So I wanna get your take. When you look at this and you see bang astronomy, be it and and let’s conceal their names so we know it’s not Avi.

Chris Lintott:
Oh, I don’t think we need to necessarily in this case. Okay. Science fine.

Brian Keating:
I mean, she’s an eminent astronomer and and and, very familiar with her work. But, you know, when they say the first thing you jump to, you have to be quite cautious. Right? So how did you react to that? I mean, did you say, wow. I’m really excited.

Chris Lintott:
Could be Well, let let let’s have some context. Right? So this is Jane Greaves in in Cardiff who led the group who had gone looking for phosphine with first the JCMT on Hawaii and then followed up with with Alma. And Jane, I’ve known for theory. I should say she’s she’s, we we were, I’ve she’s a bit more senior than I am, but we became friends during a trip disastrous observing trip to Mauna Kea where neither of us the weather was so bang, neither of us got up the mountain. And so we sat in a bar and drank for most of a week, which is how was quite quiet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
Exactly. Yeah. Well, it’s the most miserable holiday. We were the 2 people who were sulking about the fact we were on the beach. But so Jane had gone looking for C more in hope than expectation. It was the sort of proof of principle theory. And she did it explicitly because it is a biosignature on Earth. It’s a thing that’s only produced by by life.

Chris Lintott:
So, you know, it wasn’t that she had some hypothesis about the chemistry of Venus that would lead you to suggest those fossils. She went looking because it on Earth, it’s a sign of life. And then slightly to her shock, they found it. Like, there’s the signature theory, and we’ll come back to whether it’s real or not in a sec. But what do you do at that point? What do you say to whom? Now the the quote that you have was from a day bang interview that I did with Jane, and and the story is that I was worried that, you know, Jane would be hyper cautious that, you know, there’s a there’s a story that makes sense, which is we have detected signs of phosphate on the atmosphere of Venus. It’s in the upper atmosphere. Theorists this nice intriguing bit that it’s in a part of the atmosphere where the temperature pressure is rather similar to that here on Earth. So it’s still very acidic.

Chris Lintott:
So it’s not earth like conditions. And, you know, you can imagine a sort of technical fudge. But the reason with my journalist hat on, we were excited. The reason anyone was excited about this this discovery was that it is a biosignature. So I needed Jane to to at least say that. And the fact that the top of the ad future said it might be aliens was very important. But when they presented their work a couple of days later to the world, Jane in particular was very careful not to claim aliens. The excitement here is that there’s something on there’s something on Venus that we don’t understand.

Chris Lintott:
And there is a, you know, the tier her team, I theory, have some internal tensions. There are people who are much more gung ho about the alien explanation. People who, you know, the alternative is volcanoes and weird chemistry. Right? And so it’s about how well you think we understand those things. We had a marvelous oh, I wish I could remember his name. We had a marvelous time with one of the chemists on the team who’d come to be interviewed. And you have to understand, this is post lockdown. So they that we’re in the experiment physics at Cardiff.

Chris Lintott:
It’s empty. It’s like, you know, we’re wandering around, James wearing a dinosaur dress, talking about aliens. It’s like some low budget postapocalyptic British movie that will later be made into some Hollywood blockbuster with other people starring. But that’s what it felt like. Her chemistry colleague, William, oh, I wish I could remember his surname, and turned up and and he bought his guitar. And so we did a serious interview there. They said, I’ve written a song about this. And we said, okay, well, we’ll we’ll hear the bang.

Chris Lintott:
And it turned out it had about 30 verses about his journey to discover life on Venus. So he was pretty sure. Anyway, I think actually that group did a really good job of standing on stage and saying we found a thing. We don’t know what it is. Here, it’s it’s a possibility. And I actually think they threaded that needle really well, and I hope I hope I say that in the book. Now they immediately got 17 people 17 types of people jumping on them, reanalyzing the data, and arguing that not only is it not aliens, but the phosphine doesn’t even exist. Right.

Chris Lintott:
And it turned out there were pipe there were mistakes in the pipeline, the software pipeline that processes data for Alma that hadn’t been found before because no one had looked with enough scrutiny. Looking at Venus is weird in the submillimeter, it’s too near the sun, you shouldn’t really be doing this. One of the reasons to do it was to test the capability. So theory were these mistakes. But if you talk to random astronomer on the street, phosphine is the equivalent of the fast than light neutrinos from CERN a few years ago that turned out to be a loose cable. Right? This is a a scary tell you tell graduate students about how things go wrong. But actually, the phosphine is there. The results that Jane have got following up with JCFT with with particularly reanalyzing old pioneer Venus data like theory is phosphine in the upper atmosphere.

Chris Lintott:
Is it aliens? I don’t know. But again, I don’t think that’s that’s a dud. I think maybe maybe I have a higher tolerance than most to be excited about things that aren’t aliens. I should tell you actually the title of the book was originally, it’s never aliens. And the idea was to list all the things that aren’t turned out not to be and then argue that they’re interesting, but it got killed by a note from a publisher. I don’t think it was either publisher we went with, but the note just said, but we wish it was.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Lintott:
And so we had to make a broader argument.

Brian Keating:
That’s the problem. That’s the Fineman’s, you know, directive and invective that you have to be careful not to fool yourself. And so here’s a couple other ones. Planet 9 hypothesis that turned out to be, largely discredited. Some of these are in the books. Some of these aren’t.

Chris Lintott:
No. Planet 9 is not. I think that’s interesting. And it’s interesting I mean, that’s a really good example because we I flew to the States, which is on a BBC budget is not something you do likely to go and interview Mike Brown and constitute the betake when they propose it. Because it’s such a cool idea that there would be a large planet out theory, and they still believe and almost no one else who studies the outer solar system does. So that’s an interesting example of how, you know, you I think maybe you can get sucked down. I mean, I’m pretty sure that Constantine at this point has blamed planet 9 for his socks going missing. You know, everything else seems to provide evidence for planet 9.

Chris Lintott:
So but we’ll see when we get Vera Rubin and maybe maybe I’ll have to eat my own socks.

Brian Keating:
Hey theory, you impossibly brilliant geniuses. As we set out on this journey with Chris Linton, I have a tiny favor to ask of you and that’s to make sure that you’re subscribed to this channel. I found that only 50% of you are subscribed to the podcast feed or to the YouTube channel. So please make sure to change that. I really really appreciate it. And allow me to keep getting great guests like Chris Lintott and many many more to come. All you have to do is subscribe, follow, like, and share and comment. That will really help a bunch.

Brian Keating:
Now bang to the episode. And there’s a Boyajian Arthur mystery. So, Tabby’s Tabby’s star. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
It turns out not to be aliens again, but it’s still interesting. And theory a whole search for all sorts of interesting things. Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Well, we we had your your friend, Lisa Kaltenegger not not too long ago, and it’s all about finding aliens. We had on Adam Bang. His book’s all about aliens. Yeah. See, it’s not a surprise that a publisher wouldn’t want that, to to be in the title because, exactly, we wish there were. But as scientists, you and I have to guard against that that that capacity. And, actually, I love the fact that you highlight serendipity, not the least of which, Chris, because the bread is buttered around the Keating household by the cosmic microwave background, which chapter 8, you know, describes as, you know, one of the most significant serendipitous discoveries of all time. And in fact, I claim that there’s something even better than serendipity, which is which is, I think, the strongest form of of collecting of evidence because by definition, you didn’t expect it.

Brian Keating:
No one says, let’s plan on serendipity, and then we’ll discover, you know, the origin of hydrogen, but I think there’s actually something stronger than that, which is serendipitous discoveries, which disconfirm your hypothesis. So I’m thinking about the discovery of the accelerating universe. Can you talk about that? Why that’s such a powerful thing and what they were actually looking for and what they found?

Chris Lintott:
This is a a group of people theory, an Australian and friends team, and an American and friends team who were trying to measure the deceleration of the universe, how much it was slowing down on the grounds that they’ll tell you how much stuff there is in the universe, this this parameter omicron that we that we’d like to constrain. And there’s a bit of revisionist history here in which some people will tell you that they were trying to measure whatever the change in expansion was bang acceleration decent I should perhaps they were neutral. But I’ve seen a talk from one of the groups where they showed their web page before and after the discovery. And beforehand, it said, measuring the deceleration of the universe. And then after theory results came back, because they discovered the unexpected that it was speeding up, they said measuring the acceleration of the universe. Now there are a few people who predicted that that if you look in the papers at the time, there Arthur you know, there are people who were writing about the fact that cosmology made more sense if in some sense, if you have this this experiment, but not many of them. And most people didn’t or experiment didn’t order it, and yet there the result was. It’s one of the things that got me interested in I was still at school at the time, and it it kick started this idea.

Chris Lintott:
A lot of these things for me are reminders that discoveries can still happen. The C and b one, I thought it was interesting to talk to you about this though, because we have this discovery of the cosmic microwave background. In some sense, I think it’s the best known story in the book, which is Penzias and Wilson working at Bell Labs who big their marvelous center. Have you ever been to see it, by the way?

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I have.

Chris Lintott:
I brought I brought my

Brian Keating:
book to it. Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
I’ve took a picture of a selfie from it. I I had a deeply emotional experiment.

Brian Keating:
I I I resonate with that. In in fact, in my first book, I call it a cathedral of science of which they’re very unique.

Chris Lintott:
You know they’re preserving it properly because I have

Brian Keating:
the right kid. Leader of the effort. I know the leader of the effort. Yeah. Well, do do

Chris Lintott:
say that it’s fantastic because I think I think partly because the thing looks like the photo. Right? Yes. And the sort of the only other thing in my life that, like, the Keating tower of pizza looks exactly like the postcard, it turns out. So it’s quite strange to be standing in front of it. I felt that, but in a physics way with the the antenna that Penzias and Wilson Houston. Yeah. The story is that they weren’t sure what they’re looking for, and they found this background. And there’s a crucial point in which they’re persistent enough to care about this tiny background signal as opposed to calling the drop of good and then going to whatever passes for a pub in Homedown, New Jersey to have a beer at the end of the week.

Chris Lintott:
So, you know, they they get a lot of credit, but, you know, they weren’t looking for this for this signature. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing. But I actually think it’s it might be the one discovery that that I get away with accidentally. So in the introduction, I report a conversation with a gin and tonic and Meg Urie, who’s the marvelous professor of astronomy at Yale who helped understand how black holes fit galaxies. Meg’s really wise. I try to have a drink with her whether we’re in the same place so I can get, you know, advice and wisdom and things. But when I was talking about the book, she said that she didn’t think there was a single discovery in 20th century astronomy that was made major discovery that was made deliberately. And the thing is, we got lucky with the CMB because down the road, there was the Princeton group, Dickie and peoples ago who the story is that they pick up the phone, they find out this discovery is made.

Chris Lintott:
Dickie goes boys, we’ve been scooped and they publish their theory paper next to the discovery paper, which is true. But what I hadn’t realized till I did the research for the book was that they’d already started fundraising to build their own experiment, which would have been better.

Brian Keating:
Sorry to interrupt you, but, so Wilkinson was my grand is my grand Oh,

Chris Lintott:
there you go. Okay. You know

Brian Keating:
this one. And Dickey, I I I never got to meet, but I but I loved him, by his work. But, but Dickey had predicted the CME that you could actually detect this because he and he invented the enabling technology. So I I went into a little bit more detail in my book. There was a guy named Ohm, not the famous Ohm of resistance fame, but the guy, his name was Ed Ohm, and he had the measurement. And you mentioned that he he basically said, that’s a bit of extra fuzz, and then he he went to the bar. So I always use that as an example of systematic error analysis can lose you a Nobel Prize. But the fact is Dicke invented the enabling technology.

Brian Keating:
It’s called the Dicke switch. We call it phase sensitive detection or lock in amplification. He knew how to do it. He built it in 1943 for the war effort, and he actually predicted the existence of the And there

Chris Lintott:
were measurements for the forties. Right? But they weren’t sensitive enough at

Brian Keating:
the time

Chris Lintott:
to to

Brian Keating:
Unless you think I’m doing too much hagiography, the reason that paper was published next to the pen paper by Penzias and Wilson is because they wanted to get the Nobel Prize still for the interpretation of it. You know, the the paper by Penzius and Wilson’s excess intelligence temperature at 40, 30 mega who cares? Like, no one ever think of that. But then you see, like, a primordial fireball in which, by the way, they never mentioned the word big bang in that No. But It’s astounding. So go on. Yeah. So Well, yeah.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s interesting. It’s like the one that Hubble site everyone cites for Hubble for the expansion of the universe doesn’t have the word expansion in it. But yeah. No. There’s also I forget who it was.

Chris Lintott:
I think it’s quote. It’s one or the other, but you’ll know the quote where he says that he only realized how important the discovery was when he saw the coverage in the Nobel top in the New York Times.

Brian Keating:
Yes. And they were about to get scooped. They were gonna get scooped in the by, you know, in the New York Times. They they feared, so they ended

Chris Lintott:
up So so I do I do have an asterisk next to that one in my head, I think. Because that’s accidental only because the physics tripped sort of like but they, you know, theory would have that would have been the great glory. And I think there are others you could point to if you look around. I mean, the other great one that’s not in the book that’s obviously not an accidental discovery is the great triumph of LIGO and the gravitational wave observatories that be built, which is 40 years of grinding away at a difficult problem, hoping that at some point, you’ll see something. And so that’s sort of traditional physics as we’re taught how it’s done. Right? But the rest of it, this this buzzing around, in in astronomy, I think it’s a lot more fun sometimes.

Brian Keating:
And, it’s appropriate we’re talking now because it’s right after solstice. And so in the Arthur hemisphere, we just started summer. Although in San Diego, you’d never know that it’s very cloudy.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. I spent all of yesterday explaining to people that the solstice can be on the 20th June. But, you know, the the stone Stonehenge did its job. The sun rose and we could good for the rest of summer now.

Brian Keating:
It’s still intact. I I heard it suffered a grave a grave injury.

Chris Lintott:
It it got sprayed a bit orange. There’s a long tradition of using Stonehenge for for protest. But the henge scandal that people should be paying attention to, 2 fold. 1 is Stonehenge is not a henge for some technical archaeological reason. It’s to do with the height of the ditch inside and out. And then second, Stonehenge was built for the winter solstice, we think. So everyone who was there a couple of days ago was 6 months early. You’re supposed to be there in the cold of an English winter hoping that the sun will rise over the heels.

Brian Keating:
If you really had a commitment to your cause, climate defense fund people, you would have stuck to it. Well, I I just, you know, I’m just fed up with it being, so useless for setting my my atomic clocks too. We we have a version here, Chris, if you’ve ever been to San Diego. We actually have a miniature version of Stonehenge on campus, and then we we have these, on the beach here at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We have a pier, and the pier goes directly west. Therefore, at certain times of the year, it’s called Scripps Henge. Right. And there’s

Chris Lintott:
I live in Chicago where there’s Chicago Henge and, of course, Manhattan Edge. But the one I’ve always wanted to visit is Carhenge, which I think is out in is it Nevada? It’s somewhere in the American West, but it’s made of 19 5th sixties cars, I believe, and it’s a reconstruction. I don’t know whether it’s astronomically accurate, but I think we should go and test.

Brian Keating:
Yes. That’s right. We’ll see if we can, we’ll take our sextants and our astrolabes, and we’ll have a go of it.

Chris Lintott:
I like the idea of an astronomical inspection just turning up, 2 of us, you know, with special hats or something.

Brian Keating:
With, with our telescopes and our, and our compasses and all sorts of other things that we’ll be talking about. So I made a list of, you know, serendipitous discoveries in history, and astronomy does pretty well. Penicillin, x rays, which led to the 1st Nobel Prize in physics, pulsars. Obviously, you talk about, past guest, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Microwave, oven, Velcro, Teflon, vulcanized rubber, and radiocarbon dating, just to name a few. But, which of these discoveries, you know, are most deeply connected to you? You’re doing with Zooniverse and and all the citizen science project. Is that, you know, kind of to go against my claim, you know, planning on serendipity, is that inspired by your kind of, fascination as I have with serendipitous discoveries.

Chris Lintott:
I think it should have been, but that I think we I stumbled over citizen science as well. So my own story is that I grew up as an amateur astronomy, and my my great serendipitous event was the discovery of comet Schumacher Levy 9, which crashed into Jupiter in 94, which I remember watching with my back garden telescope, and we weren’t expecting to see anything. You couldn’t see the impact site. But a couple hours later, it rotated around, and there was this bruise that I could see in a telescope that I bought with money that I’d obtained selling ice cream just to give you a scale of the of the telescope. And, you know, I I woke my parents up and made them drive me to school so that I could look through the big telescope that that we were allowed access to. It was that week, more comet fragments hit. So I I think this idea of discovery of serendipity of the unexpected went deep and and early. But then as I grew up and dabbled and got into professional astronomy, you know, I learned that people do things with surveys now that, you know, astronomy is occasionally going to Hawaii and having drinks with brains grapes, but mostly involves downloading data and making plots.

Chris Lintott:
I did an astrochemistry PhD with a a a side helping of cosmology with Ofa Lahav, working on, large datasets and and and then started working on Sloan, which has had a database of a 1000000 galaxies. Right? And you’ve studied their properties by making plots out of careful cuts through that database. And it was that effort that that led to to Galaxy Zoo. So the first of the systems and science projects I ran where I got told off, actually. I came for a job talk here in Oxford as looking for a first postdoc, and I got about 3 slides into my my seminar. And I said, we’ve divided the galaxies into blue and red, and that spiral and elliptical. And and about 3 people in the room stood up and started screaming at me because not all red galaxies are elliptical and not all blue galaxies are spiral. And one of them was particularly intense because this was Kevin Cherwinski, who was a student at the time, who just looked at 50,000 galaxies himself.

Chris Lintott:
And for the work I want to do, I needed another 950,000 classified, and Kevin wouldn’t do it. So, I tried buying him beer. That didn’t work. We, put them online without really thinking about it, thinking that maybe I give talks to local astronomical societies. We’ve got a great culture of local astronomical societies here in the UK. So I thought, okay. Talk to 50 people twice a month. Each of them goes and does 50 to a 100 classifications.

Chris Lintott:
In 5 years, well, I’ve had all the C seen. This is a great side project. I was scared of my adviser and I’m just trying to get anything to happen. So I was like, I’m gonna put 2 weeks into this with a bunch of of volunteers. And then we got 70,000 classifications an hour, which I didn’t expect. And this grew into the Universe. But one of the things that happened really quickly was that we realized that showing people data means they get distracted by it. And so people find things that you’re not expecting.

Chris Lintott:
The the early example from Galaxy Zoo was the in our naivety, in my naivety, we’d said, you know, you might find some rare things like ring C, you know, these nice beautiful things like the cartwheel. If you find them, drop us an email. And it turns out about 3 to 4% of all galaxies are rings. So we got quite a lot of email, which we eventually turned into a systematic search for these things. But it was this crucial idea that people and we could talk about some of the examples if you want, but people realized that they could get distracted by things. And so we had, my favorite example, still the the green peas, these small round background galaxies that were discovered by the volunteers that turn out to be dwarf galaxies that are turning all of their gas into stars for for reasons we don’t really understand. They may be the local analogs of what’s happening, what we’re seeing in some of these James Webb, JWST pictures in the early universe. These might be the last galaxies to go through that process, or there’s some weird type of local galaxy that we don’t understand.

Chris Lintott:
There’s 200 papers arguing about this stuff now. But as well as we’ve got Greenpeace, they’re now green bean galaxies as well. We’ve got most of our salad. But they were found by volunteers just noticing. They’ve been in papers since 19 fifties, but no one had paid any attention. So it became clear that one of the things this sort of distributed citizen science where you have hundreds of thousands of people online looking at data does for you is that it lets you find unusual things. And as we’ve gone forward, we’re in the age of machine learning now, of course, where large datasets can be processed by machine. But something very interesting is happening, I think, which is the finding how unusual things are.

Chris Lintott:
If you want to list the most the 100 most unusual images in a large dataset, We’ve actually got quite good machine learning techniques that let us do that. And we’re playing with those. We’ve got collaborators computers science, and lots of people around the world are playing with this. There’s just a whole conference on this in Tucson. But being unusual is not the same as being interesting. And as I know from my teenage years, and so, you know, whether identifying whether something’s interesting or not is a very human thing. And the bit that we haven’t cracked yet is how to quickly identify unusual interesting objects. And so a lot of my work is on that inspired by sort of these strands of my life.

Chris Lintott:
So an early search for serendipity, this book, and then then the capacity that Zooniverse gives us.

Brian Keating:
Hey theory. It’s me again. Exploring the universe through the lens of accidents is something I never thought I’d be doing but now I’m getting to do it. And I want you to know I’ve got a special offer for you and it doesn’t cost you anything. In fact, it may net you one of these beauties, a real meteorite, a real piece of the early solar system. And that’s if you join my Monday Magic mailing list at briancating.com/list. If you have a dotedu email address you’re guaranteed to win one of these beauties if you live in the United States. Now back to the episode.

Brian Keating:
I hope you’re enjoying this romp through the cosmos and maybe you’ll get a real piece of it yourself. Well, I realized, it was negligent in my duties that I promised, you early on, and I always promise my audience, which is to do the thing you’re never supposed to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. Chris, are you ready to judge Accidental Astronomy or our Accidental Universe, depending on which side of the pond you’re on, and explain the title, the subtitle, and the magical cover art that we C.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Well, they’re they’re both good, I think. They’re very they’re very different. I’m gonna get my copy of Accidental Astronomy, which has only been out for a couple of weeks, so I’m still getting used to having this in the house, which is nice. So this is should explain. This is the North American edition. So it has a different title and cover, and it has one extra anecdote in it, which I can either tell you about or I can leave your readers. Why not actually, why not buy both? And then you can compare.

Chris Lintott:
The audiobook is also the American edition, just so you know. But, yeah, accidental astronomy does what it says on the tin. You know, this is what we’ve been talking about. We’re talking about stumbling over truth in astronomy. And I really like the simplicity of the two words together because when I talk to people and tell them I’m an astronomer, one of the theory most common things they say is you must be really clever. And

Brian Keating:
our my horoscope. I’m a Virgo. No.

Chris Lintott:
No. I don’t get that so much. The other 2 are have you found aliens or do you know Brian Cox? The second one probably I guess you could translate to Neil deGrasse Tyson in the US, but you know?

Brian Keating:
Or or Brian Keating.

Chris Lintott:
I’m I’m working Yeah.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. Well Gotta keep Brian.

Chris Lintott:
Probably you. Maybe maybe you and I are 8th or 9th on the list. Who knows? That’s right. I think it’s quite surprising title. I think it’s like, this is not how people perceive what we’re doing, and I think that that’s quite fun. Subtitle is how random discoveries shape the science of space. Well, we’ve covered that except that I had a long argument with the publisher about random. Yes.

Chris Lintott:
Because random is not the same

Brian Keating:
fact that I asked you about. Yep. So let’s get into that because there’s a concept of different levels of luck, and there’s blind luck, which I interpret as random. Then there’s something like increasing your luck surface area. I just went up to LA, just a quick aside to go on a podcast, and I I met this guy. He’s like a TikTok influencer. And I had never really looked him up. I was gonna be in LA anyway.

Brian Keating:
I looked him up. His brains Candy Ken. He’s got, like, 40,000,000 followers more than you, Chris. And and I’m looking at I

Chris Lintott:
have very few followers on TikTok. You’ll be surprised.

Brian Keating:
I I was at a podcast earlier in the day and this guy who was a little overweight, older, not in good shape. And I, I found myself, I was drinking coffee, eating like candy bars. And then I went up to this TikTok, you know, punk model candy. And I was like, don’t even, I don’t even wanna have any water. And so the, the notion of, of surface area, of luck, of surrounding yourself by by people and putting yourself in the position you know, Penzias and Wilson had the exact literal same horn as Ed Ohm, but they did something different. So what is luck? What does that mean, and what has randomness got to do with it?

Chris Lintott:
The randomness provides the opportunity. So, you know, if the microwave background had been an order of magnitude less bright, you know, which we may exist in the university yeah. There may be other universes where that’s true. Pentiums bang Wilson could have had all the perseverance and and scientific nous that they the the the universe has provided and not found it. So, you know, there is a right as right time, right place thing. Jocelyn, you know, Jocelyn Belbenel’s project was to look at the scintillation of radio sources to try and determine whether they were near or or distant. This world that she was living in was one in which we first discovered there’s a radio sky, not just individual a few individual sources. You know, it was, in some sense, blind chance that she managed to find the pulsar that that made her famous.

Chris Lintott:
And and, actually, for Jocelyn, there’s this other slice of luck that I really like, which is that having discovered this source, which repeats really rapidly, theory were worried that it could be something to do with the telescope, the antenna, the electronics. And so they rejigged a a neighboring telescope to be able to detect high frequency changes. And they C, and she has supervisor and the rest of the team in Cambridge crowded into its observing hut to see if they could pick it up. They knew when it was going overhead. They knew when the tectoscopes should pick it up, and the pen that was recording the results did absolutely nothing. And for 8 minutes, they were convinced that it was a glitch, and then the pen moved. And the thing that Jocelyn will tell you is that if that had been what had happened was they’d miscalculated. Somebody had made a mistake in the calculations about what was overhead when.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Basic astronomy error. If that big 28 minutes, they may have gone home. They may not have been recording. And so that’s blind luck. Right? That’s random. That, of course, the piece of the Jocelyn story that isn’t that is that when she saw this signal for the first time, something in the back of her breath, she was attentive enough and she was awake enough and interested enough that she realized she’d seen that thing before Brian that she went back and found it and was able to follow-up on it as a Keating source. So lots of the stories in the book, we haven’t talked about it, the discovery of the fountains of Enceladus, which initially start off with a strange reading on a magnetometer that was only on as a test.

Chris Lintott:
But the thing that’s cool about that story is that the team were just testing their instrument worked. They got data. Most people, I think, would have said, okay. That worked. I’ll have a quick spot check. Yeah. Everything seems to be fine. They did a complete dry run and reduced the data as if it was going to be interesting, and then it turned out to be interesting.

Chris Lintott:
And then they went and advocated that maybe we should fly back and turn the cameras on, or on the next pass, we should turn the cameras on and have a look. So lots of these stories have yes. You need to beat the random science, but the reason we’re hearing about the story is that somebody had that sort of persistence and ability to follow-up. And I think one of the things that, you know, the the the we we’re away from the cover, and we will get back to it. But one of the things that actually, I can pick up. If we look at the the UK cover, this is our accidental universe, because I think it sounds a little more sort of British and pretentious. But one of the things I love about this cover is you have a variety of interesting things at the top. There’s Enceladus and and there’s Oumuamua and a few other things.

Chris Lintott:
But you notice the telescopes were all looking the other way. They’re deliberately looking away from the interesting stuff. And I’m slightly worried that in today’s astronomy, we’ve got very bad at giving ourselves time and space to follow-up on the unusual. Like, as things have become more efficient, it’s much harder to to chase the unusual. And so there’s a subtle message for professional astronomers in the book too. Oh, I’m

Brian Keating:
sorry, you and your publisher for not putting penguins on the cover. I mean, how do we talk about phosphine and not that I actually just went to we have in a local aquarium here called the Birch Aquarium, and they’ve got these penguins theory, and I’m thinking of naming one of them, you know, donating the money to name it phosphine because I just think that’s Yeah. That’s

Chris Lintott:
incredible. You know, I I got a call. I used to work at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. And if you know Chicago, just down as I I think you do, just down the road, there’s the Shedd Aquarium. Yeah. And for a while, the number one reason I think it’s better now, but when I was there, the number one reason people gave for visiting the Adler was that the line for the aquarium was too long. And our director of development used to say, look. It’s an indoor zoo.

Chris Lintott:
What do you want me to do? So the phosphine story is a perfect excuse for the Adler to get penguins, and then we can compete with the shed.

Brian Keating:
That would be phenomenal. I wanna ask you about an accidental discovery by my hero, this gentleman here, not far away on the continent, you know, long before Brexit was a thing, Galileo. And he took a he took a device that had been invented by a guy named Hans Lippershey about, 300 miles away from him at the time, and he did something that old Hans didn’t do. And I wanna ask you what in your opinion as an expert master of explaining the sky at night, How why do you think that good old Hans never went like this and then like that at night? I mean, it’s inconceivable that for 7 theory, it took 7 years before, anybody thought to take this thing above the horizon, the spec the the perspeculum tube. Why do you think that was?

Chris Lintott:
Well, I think I think the story is more complicated than that. And I should say I’m not a historian of of that period at all. So this is this is stuff I’ve picked up rather than any deep experiment. But it’s true that that you have to realize that Lipoche wasn’t the only person who invented this. This idea of putting lenses in a sort of interesting order to allow you to see just the things cropped up. It was motivated by a technology experiment. Producing lenses had become cheaper and easier. So across the continent, there are people who we think Lippershey was first, but there are people who have their claims to to get theory fast.

Chris Lintott:
So these things were all over the place. And then the other thing is that Galileo wasn’t the 1st person to look up. There are other records people do it. So in the UK, we tend to where Thomas, Harriet, I think his name is, who mapped the moon around the same time that Galileo

Brian Keating:
same day. Yeah. I think it was Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Brian Keating:
About Keating scooped. Right, Chris?

Chris Lintott:
Because you’re right. It’s an once you’ve got the instrument, it’s an obvious idea. Right? But I think what Galileo had was a publishing network. Right? So he was in a way that lots of these other people weren’t somebody who was thinking about science, who was making money from science. He had patrons who were funding him to do what we he would have called something like natural philosophy, but we’d think of as as science. And so he was the fur so he had the better publication record and was plugged into the network of quite aristocratic people. So there’s there’s an interesting thing in this country what happens in in the UK. I know a bit about this because I was mixed up.

Chris Lintott:
I was on the board of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich for a while as part of its museum existence, and everyone should should go and see it. But here, the people making the lenses are tradespeople, you see. They’re doing it for military purposes for for, on commission, but they’re basically people who work for a living. Whereas science at the time, because we’re a little before the foundation of the Royal Society, is done by gentlemen. And so there’s this disconnect between the people with the time to write about and think about, what they’re doing and the people who are making the instruments and presumably having fun at star parties as far as I could tell. So so I think it’s this, but but you’re right that Galileo’s discoveries were I mean, one of the nice stories about Galileo is that he clearly saw value in the publicity in in being first. You need I mean, people know maybe the anagram story, right, where he would publish first by sending really obscure anagrams to his rivals. And the idea was that

Brian Keating:
The highest planet is threefold.

Chris Lintott:
That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Which which got translated as something like Arthur Venus has 2 bumps or something, didn’t it? There was, yeah, there’s the Saturn drinks. He’s interested in publicity in a way that some of the other people wouldn’t that wouldn’t have come naturally. So

Brian Keating:
100%.

Chris Lintott:
Gallo’s many things, but he’s not a patron of open science.

Brian Keating:
No. He’s not. Yeah. In fact, the Theory Duncius was basically to conceal how the telescope was made. He never even gave one to Kepler, if you can believe it.

Chris Lintott:
Right. Chris, let me

Brian Keating:
ask you a question. How can scientists like me, professional scientists, increase our mindset and our surface area for serendipity? Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
I think it’s a really good question because we don’t live in I would come right at the start. We don’t live in this Hollywood version of science. Right? We’re not sitting around waiting for ideas. I always you know, I’m sure you do too. We I get these correspondents who say, look. I’ve I’ve figured out what dark matter is. Could you just do the math on my idea? You know, that or, you know, I don’t understand why astronomers aren’t considering my idea that dark energy could perhaps be quantum in some way or whatever the the theory of the day is. They’re often retired engineers.

Chris Lintott:
I quite enjoy engaging with them for a big. But they share this idea that we’re in an idea poor space. Right? That we we have few things that we want to trace. Whereas, actually, there are many more things that we want to observe, think about, theorize about, write simulations about, write papers about than we possibly have time to. So I think you’re a senior scientist these days, so so am I. I think we need to keep space open for early career researchers who, let’s face it, do the work to try speculative things, to investigate objects that might turn out to be boring. As you said, the the ones in the book are the ones that turn out right. But imagine if Jocelyn imagine if Jocelyn was a PhD student now, and she spent 3 months on this weird scruff that she thought she saw, and it turned out it was something in in the detector.

Chris Lintott:
A good adviser would say, well, we learned something about the detector. We could put that in the thesis anyway, and we’ll find a way to publish it. A lot of people under pressure would say, well, it’s a shame we’ve we’ve we’ve spent time on that. And so I think it’s about creating space for us to follow-up follow-up on on the unusual things. There was this conference I mentioned in Tucson. I went virtually, but, organized by a noir lab who run the US optical and and other big observatories. And it was about it was rare gems because it’s Tucson, about how we find unusual things. And and it was fascinating.

Chris Lintott:
It was a completely unique conference to me in my career because it’s clear that we have methods now that let us find unusual things in big data. We need to worry about whether they’re interesting or not, but that’s a separate issue. But what’s also clear is that the overlap between the people who are doing that work and the people with the capacity to follow-up those things is almost 0. So there are papers from 10 years ago where people have said, look, these are the 20 most unusual galaxies in all of the Sloan Digital Slice survey, and no one’s written a single paper on any one of those because no one’s had capacity to. So I think we need a bit of a step change to to allow that kind of work. And my there was a grants panel here in the UK, not an astronomy one, that used to have a system where 20% of their funding was for speculative work. And if you you just tick the box, you said this this application is speculative. And if it was speculative, then you didn’t have to explain what the outcome would be.

Chris Lintott:
You would just have to say why it was interesting. And I think we could do really quite well with having 10 to 20% of telescope time, perhaps of funding on things that are speculative, where you bang just say, look, no one’s looked for this type of thing before or, you know, we’ve got this cast object and we don’t know what it is, so we need to look at it. I think we we we’ve lost the ability slightly to do that sort of thing.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I think you’re right. I guess the the follow-up question to the previous one about, you know, ways that science, professional scientists, like me and you and our students and collaborators can make use of serendipity, there’s a dark side of it too in the in the connotation of accidental as, you know, kind of making a mistake. Like, no one said, oh, I had a I had a car accident. Isn’t this great? The serendipity that brought the Ford Bronco into into my Tesla. So are were you worried a little bit about that connotation? Oh, scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, Chris. Why why should we trust you guys as I asked Lisa, about alien atmospheres, you know, about, you know, if we if we, you know, make all these claims about alien atmospheres when there’s all this controversy, as you might say, about our own atmosphere and global warming and scientists don’t agree. Chris, are you worried about that, that connotation being misapplied?

Chris Lintott:
It’s obviously important. And I think thinking about how we communicate about our science and and about what we’re doing is vital. One of the reasons to do astronomy is, I think, that we happen to be in a a science that people care about. And so it creates a place where we can have conversations about science in a way that’s difficult in some of these more contentious areas. Right? We can have a conversation about why you crazy cosmologists believe in inflation, or we can learn about models and inference that way in a way that’s a little lower temperature most of the time than if we talk about climate change or or environmental issues or or medical issues that become very personal for people very quickly. And so I think it is important, but I think the way to build trust is to show our working. I think this is really fundamental because they’re in the world that certainly your society and my society are in the middle. We’re in the middle of an election campaign here in the UK.

Chris Lintott:
You know, we’re in a world in which there’s no shortage of people stating facts boldly that may or may not turn out to be true. And as scientists, we can easily get lumped with people who are playing that game. We can sound like the poll you know, the statement, the other party’s tax plans will cost you £2,000 a month sounds like the same category of statement as the Earth’s climate is warming and the average temperature will go up by 1.5 degrees in the next 50 years. Those sound like the same category of statement, but one of them has an enormous body of scientific research and consensus building underneath it. And the other one was invented by a researcher because it sounded good on the news. So so I think we’re not gonna win by sounding like another bunch of people with facts to sell. We win by getting people to be fans of what we’re doing and pay attention so that if if you followed along with the adventures of Jane trying to prove that phosphine is real or your search for proof of inflation or or my, well, whatever it is that I do for a living, whatever I get distracted by next, then I think when you come to read a news story that says that coffee either cures or doesn’t cure cancer, then I think you’re equipped to know what questions to ask next. So I’m I’m really struck by the fact that I had a very different pandemic from many of the people I know because I have a set of skills involving going online.

Chris Lintott:
I’m no epidemiologist, but I could at least filter out who to trust and how to get information. And so I was better informed than a lot of people. And so I could make choices that were based on that. I’m not blaming anyone who suffered during the pandemic. Yeah. There’s also life choices as well. But it was just very clear to me that I knew things that you weren’t getting from the media. And so I think we in astronomy, by demonstrating that, can get people to the point where they have those skills.

Brian Keating:
One of my favorite aspects of the book is, when you talk about the Hubble Deep Field and the origin of that as a sort of, again, you know, enforced serendipity or something like that. But I don’t wanna talk about that. I hate when I’m interviewed by podcasters and they you know, can you explain the whole book in such detail that, you know, my my readers and listeners don’t have buy it. Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
We should just say that the field is a great story, and it’s not one I knew bits of it, but I didn’t know the half of it. And so that was another one that was fun.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. You explained it so masterfully that I learned a great deal. And I, again, I thought I knew it. But I wanna talk about it in the context of of, challenge again to the scientific orthodoxy, big cosmology, big NASA. You know, with the James Webb Space Telescope, which made its own version of the HDF, we now hear claims that the Big Bang never happened, or I’m running an interview with Rajendra Gupta, University C Ottawa, who claims the big bang happened, but there’s also tired light, and it occurred 26000000000 years ago, not 13000000000 years ago. How do you react to these new claims based on evidence from new experiment, but, but that claim that things as radical as the big bang never happened and and the steady state and tired light models need to be resuscitated, also being done by citizen scientists. Right, Chris?

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. I theory, I mean, we certainly help got people helping us sort through JWST galaxies and so on. So that’s good fun. But, yeah, I think this is a really good test case. So, you know, I in my role as it’s not aliens guy, I should probably say where I think we Arthur. We’ve actually got a Skype night episode coming out if you’re in the UK, next month in a couple of weeks’ time that will cover some of this stuff. We’re doing a JWST 2 2 years on story. But, where we are is that we found, like like we did with the Hubble Deep Field, that the early universe is filled with galaxies that are brighter than we expected.

Chris Lintott:
They’ve got more star formation. They have black holes, large black holes earlier, and mature stellar populations earlier than many people would have expected. So this is fascinating and really exciting. It’s fun that it’s the same mistake we made with Hubble 30 years ago. So 30 years ago? Blimey. Yeah. 30 years ago. So you can explain that by saying we don’t understand star formation and galaxy assembly or you can start to the fun one, the one that everyone wants because again, we want things to be wrong is to start fiddling with cosmology.

Chris Lintott:
But what’s been really interesting is that there’s been a whole variety. One of the fun things about it has been that different groups have got different parts of this story, and lots of them have got publicity. And people have, I think, followed along in the way that I am Keating, but certain headlines have really flown. I haven’t given a talk in the last 6 months without somebody asking me about that study that the universe is twice the as old as we think it is. And, you know, I I don’t think the authors I don’t know them personally, but from what I’ve seen them say, I don’t think they disagree with the statement that we have nowhere near the evidence we need for that to jump to such a radical conclusion. Right? Maybe they would, but I I I don’t think we’re there yet. But, again, we’re bad at talking about types of evidence. Right? So it’s a bit like the phosphine story that got reported in some places as we might have found aliens.

Chris Lintott:
This is being reported as cosmology has been overthrown. Actually, we’ve got some galaxies doing some interesting things that we don’t understand. We’ve got some molecules that shouldn’t be there in Venus, and that a complex model needs adjusting somewhere. Now the fun bit is to work out which spanner to to turn which bolt with. So but it but but it’s certainly been true that the media I’m normally a defender. Usually, I’m a defender of the media in these things. But in this case, though, I think the media has jumped very quickly to cosmology is broken, sometimes with some prodding from our colleagues. Sometimes, you know, there was a a paper called panic at panic at the discs, which was about the fact there are too many early, which is what bang obscure eighties dance music reference, I theory.

Chris Lintott:
It sort of makes sense somewhere in the back of my head. This panic at the disco is a theory. But that was completely missed. And so, you know, that got reported as scientists in panic over Panicking. It’s a complex story and we’re not used to telling the story of we got this new telescope. We’re basically having fun with it, and we found some stuff. Yeah. The the funny thing about these galaxies is that we’ve got such good data that’s tied to people’s frustrations, I theory.

Chris Lintott:
We have to study them individually. Like, they’ve all got a history of the story of their own. So whereas, you know, I think beforehand people Clarke prepared for, we will collect a box of red blobs and we will plot their overall proper we will measure their staff information. Right? Right? And maybe they’ll all have the same staff information. Right? Then we’ll know what the staff information. Right? Actually, it turns out just like the local universe, there’s a whole variety. And so we’re having to take them out of the box and sort of look at them closely and write a paper or 2 on each one. And in a few years’ time, we’ll know what the general rules are.

Chris Lintott:
But it but it has proved this marvelous and and complicated story that no one was really ready to talk about. Right.

Brian Keating:
Which is make what makes it fun. Exactly. These are the fun bits. Right? Yeah. I would say the flaws lead to new laws. You may find some lacunae in your previous understanding. That’s the most exciting theory. Not like, yes, I’ve confirmed my hypothesis to 7 decimal.

Chris Lintott:
That’s right. So, of course, there are many laws at play here. Right? So jumping to fundamental cosmology doesn’t quite, you know, we we we own one of the fun things is we Arthur formation is one of those things in astronomy whereas if you write if you write a one sentence description of how stars form, we know that. If you try and write a paragraph, it’s all wrong. You then you have to write a textbook. So so theory there there is this stuff.

Brian Keating:
Hey. There’s a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer aspiring to be. Maybe going to school, graduate school, or after school, or maybe you’re a professor like me. If you’re wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist, you might wanna get my book, Into the Think Like a Nobel Prize winner with a foreword by my friend Nobel Clarke Bang Barish. In it we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate better, unlock your creative genius and get over common pitfalls like the imposter syndrome. I hope you’ll take a deep dive into it and I know you’ll enjoy it. You can read a free chapter at my website Brian bang you can buy it at amazon.com, an ebook, audiobook or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. I mean, I I I likened it too in a con I went on a Joe Rogan, podcast about a year ago and and talked about this controversy. And I said it’s like, evolutionary biologist, you know, looking at the Earth and seeing, oh, well, there are these creatures that are, you know, communicating on these slabs of silicon and glass and and, electricity, and, that’s not possible in our model. Therefore, the Earth has to be 8000000000 years old, not 4000000000 years old.

Chris Lintott:
Allow time for such silicon things to form. Yeah. I like that.

Brian Keating:
Instead of saying, I don’t understand, you know, how galaxies form okay, and that’s okay. But sticking with this theme of being you know, because I have a lot of skeptics. I have the brightest audience in the known universe. You know, apologies to your audience, but they ask a lot of questions. I wanna get to those questions. But one of the things that that comes up a lot, Chris, is this notion of, well, you guys in in astronomy, cosmology, maybe you’ll pass the buck to me or pass the pound. I don’t know.

Chris Lintott:
Do you

Brian Keating:
say that? But don’t talk

Chris Lintott:
pass the buck, weirdly.

Brian Keating:
Pass the buck. Yeah. Good. So as you should. And so they’ll say, well, you guys don’t know what 95% of the universe is. Why should we trust you on anything? I mean, dark energy, give me a Brian, dark matter. These are, like, placeholders, and I I’ve talked to, you know, Bob Kirschner coined the term dark energy. I didn’t talk to Zwicky, but but the point is is clear.

Brian Keating:
We seem to have more that we don’t know about. How can we be trusted on things that we do know claim to know about?

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. I think that’s I mean, but I I I think that’s a a fair enough point. But I think it misunderstands slightly what it is to know something. Right? So because it suggests that we think we know that there is a thing called dark matter. Whereas, you know, I I just gave a lecture theory. I I give lectures, they’re online or they’re on YouTube for an organization called Gresham College that since, 16th century has been giving lectures in the same 7 subjects, one of which is astronomy. So I’m the 39th professor at Gresham doing astronomy. Big now they’re on YouTube, which is not something that Christopher Wren was able to say when he was the 6th.

Chris Lintott:
But, I just gave you the

Brian Keating:
Other theory on his resume. Right?

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. He got well, he did very little astronomy. He got distracted by, you know, building St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Brian Keating:
London. Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
He also yeah. Anyway, that’s a whole other story. But I just gave a it’ll be online soon. I just gave a a talk about your world, about CMB and and cosmology and so on. And I I started by sitting on the edge of the stage and just Keating, look, physics is hard, but it’s not hard for the reason you think it’s difficult. You think it’s difficult often because no one’s had the idea about what dark matter is. But, actually, what’s hard is we have all these constraints from many different measurements that tell us what dark matter can’t be. And so if you want to replace the the idea so if dark matter is the idea that there’s a C of small neutral particles that fill the university account for most of the matter, if you wanna replace that with something else, and lots of us would like to, you know, fiddle with gravity a bit or prove Einstein wrong or, you know, have colliding universes or whatever your theory is, that’s fine.

Chris Lintott:
But you have to not break the solar system. You have to explain galaxy. You have to explain galaxy clusters, which is a different scale. You have to explain C cosmological model that seems to to explain everything that’s happened since the CMB. And doing all of those things at once, you know, down to the level where we, you know, we get into obscure arguments about, you know, the whether the insides of dwarf galaxies have slightly more or slightly less matter because it turns out that’s a really specific prediction of the dark matter model. So we we are stuck with dark matter, quite literally, because we’re pushed on all sides. And every time we come up with an idea, we might have fun with it, we might play with it, we might see whether it could explain one aspect of the universe. But the reason we’re still on dark matter is that we’re sort of constrained by the observations because we’ve got really good at observing the universe.

Chris Lintott:
Dark energy, I think, is a a a big different. I think the evidence for dark energy is exactly as I’ve described with dark matter. We have these observations that tie together that tell us that something that seems to be making the universe accelerate next to expansion is there and is real. There, I think we we do need a theorist to come along and have a big idea. You know, the Lintock Keating field has yet to be discovered or whatever it is. Sorry. The Keating Lintock field because you could do most of the work. Let’s go alphabetically when Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thing. Okay. Fine. You know, we don’t know what the key to Glintop Field is, but we need to have the big that is a place where there is a big idea waiting to happen. But the idea that we think that there’s a dark matter particle and believe that isn’t quite right.

Chris Lintott:
It’s that all the evidence is best explained by that. But we’re open to new ideas, but you’ve got to explain everything.

Brian Keating:
I always say, well, at least dark matter, we have one example of dark matter. It’s called a neutrino. Weakly interacting and massive. So until you can do that with your MOND or anything else, you know, come you know, we can wait. We we have claimed a serendipitous discovery recently that may excite you and maybe we’ll talk about some other time. But we we’ve claimed to find tentative hint that the Crab Nebula, the pulsar that you talk about in this wonderful new book, that its polarization axis is slowly changing on a time scale of about 2 months, and there’s no astronomical explanation. We can’t think of something that’s coherent on 60 light days timescales.

Chris Lintott:
So that would be some effect that’s happening while the light’s traveling towards us, presumably.

Brian Keating:
It could be, but, the interpretation that some have used, we are not we are I’m cautioning people. I’ve I’ve had some exactly

Chris Lintott:
what you said. You criticized Jane and Kate for saying, we found an observation. You know, is it is it aliased? Is it aliased?

Brian Keating:
I did that. I did that, Chris, in this book. Our my colleagues and Brian bicep did that. We were very much premature. No. We’re actually saying the opposite. We’re saying we’re interpreting it as some either systematic of it’s only 2 and a half sigma, but we’re interpreting the variation, the wobble periodicity of the polarization x’s as, some unknown systematic that we are dealing with, maybe some local contamination. Maybe there is some, you know, harmonic resonances, you know, with, with the moon lunar cycle.

Brian Keating:
We we think we’ve ruled a lot of these out, but some have claimed that this is the technique that you would use to search for axions. Axions modify they modify the electromagnetic potential here on Earth, not in the cosmos, and they could distort the, the polarization

Chris Lintott:
People have played this game towards the galactic center before. Right? This is the people people have looked at sources that done there. Yeah. Well, we’ve got lots of pulsar measurements. Right? So this is this is fun.

Brian Keating:
And so if we’re if we’re wrong that it’s not that, we learn something about pulsars, I mean, which would be incredible to this object that you mentioned is is the oldest, you know, continually studied object in astronomical history from 1054. Again, we’re trying to be cautious about it. We’re trying not to over interpret it. I wanna ask you. You’re you’re renowned for explaining things as an educator. How do you balance, you know, kind of the the passion that you have for telling stories? I mean, you’re one of the most legitimate, highly published, highly cited science in the world right now. How do you balance that? You know, I get a lot of grief. Real science shouldn’t do that.

Brian Keating:
Our friend, Carl Sagan, never got into the National Academy of Sciences here because of his allegedly because, you know, he wasn’t considered as serious even though he was an incredible scientist. But, Chris, how do you balance the outreach you do and also make time for your students, your teaching, your your hardcore very, very hardcore research?

Chris Lintott:
I think it’s easier here in the UK, actually. I think there’s a culture which is spreading, I think. You could look at people like Katie Mac in in Canada as well and so on, where universities and and institutions that employ people to research and teach recognize the part of the mission has to be to inform and educate as well. And so, in the UK, there’s a a technical thing where all the universities are assessed every 7 years. It’s a terrible waste of everyone’s time. But, nonetheless, a third of your marks goes to your impact on the world beyond your research and teaching. So lots of us in the UK who have dual careers like this have have been able to find positions and be supported because we we bring in money for the university that way. So theory is this culture.

Chris Lintott:
If you go to the Oxford Physics experiment website, I can’t remember the mission statement we came up with, but it has theory things in it. It’s we do world leading research. We educate the next generation of physicists, and we engage with the public. So it’s just seen as something that we do. How I find time for it all, I don’t sleep a huge amount. But that’s mostly because I have the I find the whole thing fascinating. And as as you’ll have seen, I hope in this conversation, like, the my engagement is mixed up with the research that I’m doing. And I think that’s been a nice thing ever since Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse that I couldn’t tell you a lot of the time whether I’m thinking about public engagement and writing a book or whether I’m thinking about brains proposals and and the upcoming re Rubin Observatory.

Chris Lintott:
So I think I am lucky that they combine in those ways. And being an infinitely distractible astronomer, you know, I think I currently have 3 separate research projects that started on the set of TV interviews where I got distracted talking to the person and got told off because we went down a rabbit hole Arthur scientists do when they start talking. You know, it took all my skill and confidence not to ask you lots more details about that pulsar just then. You know, but I’ve I’ve got lost occasionally. And and, actually, the stuff I’m doing on insular objects comes from comes from an interview that we did about Oumuamua.

Brian Keating:
I did a search on the top, Sky at night episodes in in all history. And, you know, sir Pat it is a long list, but you’re in the top 3 or 4, Chris. I wanna ask you about the unveiling Titan episode from February 2005. Tell a story about that. What was it like to get 45 minutes of data from Huygens and and you were at the center of history.

Chris Lintott:
I was, and I wish I’d ironed my shirt going back and watching that now. It was very early in my TV show.

Brian Keating:
Chris. I mean

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. I was at I was at Mission Control at Darmstadt for Huygens. So Huygens was dropped off by Cassini and and landed on Titan. And we’d actually, there’s a pre story that, like, a couple of months before, we got the first Cassini images of Titan that had been tuned so we could see that there was stuff on the surface, that there were features there. And Huygens came down through the clouds. We knew that it was sending back data, and it was supposed to last for a few minutes. And they actually stayed in touch with Cassini until Cassini disappeared over its horizon. So it’s 45 minutes.

Chris Lintott:
I remember people’s astonishment that they’ve got this much data. And then there there are a few good stories from that night. So one of them was we got called to the canteen to see the first images of Titan come up on the surface, and there would be more to come. We’d get all the download from the the display. But to see an alien world for the first time in the company of the people who’d made the mission happen was incredible, and they were exactly as you’d want a bunch of scientists to be. They weren’t paying any attention to us. The image came up on the screen and immediately they were like, right, what scale is that? Why is there a crack in that rock? Is that liquid in the distance? Like, no, it can’t be. Well, hang on.

Chris Lintott:
And they’re pulling up specs for their camera, and it was just wonderful to see it was great. But then I went outside, and there was this queue across the car park. And at the front of the queue, there were some local German amateur astronomers who’d set up a telescope and were pointing at Saturn. And I just stood near the head of the queue, and there were all these people, the engineers, the science who made this mission to land on Titan for the first time happen. I think none of them had seen Titan before. And they were all looking through a telescope looking at Saturn being impressed by Saturn as one is when one looks at Saturn and then going bang dot we we we’ve we’ve just landed there. So that that was fun. And then the other postscript was the next morning, there was this press conference, which we got interviews.

Chris Lintott:
And John Cinecchi, who’s become a friend, who’s the PI for Huygens, gave the results from the penetrometer. So there’s a little thing that stuck out the bottom of the probe, and it told you how hard the surface was. And they’d had this confusing result. So it had been initially, they got quite a lot science, and then it was soft. And so he said in the press conference, he said, I don’t know. Maybe it’s something like creme brulee. And so that was the headline. Right? The media took it.

Chris Lintott:
Right? Lands on Titan, finds creme brulee. Brilliant. It’s a great headline. It’s a European mission. It sort of works. You know, this is all good. But the bit of the story that John didn’t tell was that, they end up back in the lab. This got so widespread that he heard it, people using it at conferences.

Chris Lintott:
So they did drop tests into Creme Brulee with a flight spare of the penetrometer. It turns out it’s not a good model at all because the crust is the crust gives way too much. So yeah. So so so those were some of the Olegon stories. I’ve I’ve come to love. I’ve covered lots of things for the BBC. It’s been such a privilege to do that. But the things that stick in my head, I think, are that one and the new horizons fly by of Pluto.

Brian Keating:
Oh, tell me about that. What does that how does that feel to to be involved with that mission as well? Another planetary mission?

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Well, I was gonna say they’re they’re both similar because they were transient events. Right? It wasn’t like going into orbit or something. It was like, you got what you got, and then you were there. Oh, that it it was fun. We knew the New Horizons team pretty well, and they were very generous with their their access. So the good the the good bit was, you know, I got a great interview with Alan Stern, who I’m sure you’ve had on the podcast or should do at some point. Yeah.

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. Yeah. And the best thing was sitting with Carly Howard, who’s now here in Oxford the next morning, and she was holding the first color image of Pluto from the close flyby. It’s the one that you’ve all C, and she just made it. Her and Alex Parker and others overnight. I hope I’m getting the team right. Certainly, Carly and Co, had spent their time pulling together different images that bang downloaded, making this color composite so we could see Pluto for the first time. And I said to her, but hang on.

Chris Lintott:
It’s got more shade, you know, and you do the science thing. So hang on. So why is that so white? And why is, you know, there theory are these tholins on the top, these chemicals, but then why is theory a difference in color sheet? Well, I don’t know. I’ve just been making the image. And I thought to be there at that moment where the scientists were just asking those questions themselves was was great. I don’t want to sound negative about neuroscience, but there was also a strange aspect to it for me, which is that it was the team, I think, were very proud of what they’ve done, which made sense. And I think there’s the weirdness around Pluto. So they had their their jokes.

Chris Lintott:
They have their 9 sided logo and a 9 fingered salute to celebrate the 9th planet and and and so on. But it was of all the spacecraft events I’ve ever covered, it was, the most explicitly nationalistic. So it was talked about by the team as an American mission to prove to complete the American reconnaissance of the solar system. And there were, you know, at the moment of the flyby, not the moment the data came back, but at the moment of the flyby, there are people waving American flags and and so on. And, you know, cultures are different, and I’m not necessarily criticizing that. But it was notably very different from other missions that I’ve covered. And so, normally, there’s a nice story that one tells about internationalism in in space. And all the people involved are international collaborators, and Alan’s worked with Rosetta, Farrisa, and and so on.

Chris Lintott:
So I don’t think there’s much to this, but I remember I ended up writing at the time about this, this notion of an American expansion or or conquest store or exploration of the space, which as a Brit with a camera felt felt theory, interesting to be to to be covering.

Brian Keating:
Well, Chris, if you’ll indulge my audience for a few more moments, they have tons of questions while I have to filter them out. I used Galaxy Zoo to filter out the 10 to the 9th questions that I got. So a lot of them are just praising you. They love you and sir Patrick, legendary. They love Maggie.

Chris Lintott:
Oh, yeah. My cohost, the the legendary Maggie Adarim Pocock, who who is a spacecraft engineer. She she’s amazing.

Brian Keating:
First real question comes from a good friend from the UK, Joy Colbeck. I enjoy the projects in Zooniverse. Great way to, while away an hour here and there. That’s pretty cool. Instead of Netflix and chill, which is what I do.

Chris Lintott:
You could even do both, of course.

Brian Keating:
Is space stretching as it expands, or is more space being created? If the latter, how?

Chris Lintott:
Keating about this in front of a cosmologist. So the way I talk about the expansion of space is that it’s space that’s stretching because that gets us away from the idea that the galaxies are rushing apart in some explosion. So I think it’s a good way to think of it is that space itself is is being stretched. That raises questions about how far you can stretch it. You start to worry about whether it’s gonna ping back or not, which don’t quite apply. But I think a good mental model of the expansion of the universe is that it is space stretching.

Brian Keating:
I think that’s fair enough. Yeah. And that avoids the question of where did the big bang occur, which you talk about in the book, but they have to read the book. Don’t give it away, Chris. Alex 79 asks, okay. If we want to travel through the galaxy, what is the best protection from cosmic rays? And, second question, can we build a spacecraft that protect the astronauts and allow them to function? Thanks. Peace. Love the Gresham videos.

Brian Keating:
You do a great job.

Chris Lintott:
Great. I’m glad to hear somebody look at Gresham. I think if you could travel through the same magic technology that’s propelling you at close to the speed of light to protect from cosmic rays. So let’s assume like Star Trek, we have a magic shield. In the absence of that, I’m assuming you’re building a big generational ship, like, that you’re going to be in for 1000 of theory. And water is a good shield. So I think, you know, the old sci fi writers have this right. You have your, ice or water around the outside, and then you live in the center of that.

Brian Keating:
Next question comes, from perhaps something more closely related to what you do. Brian, Dron asks, how much research is going on for extragalactic stars and planets, and what have you learned about it?

Chris Lintott:
Yeah. This is tricky. So, C, we could do. So but we only really see stars themselves in, in the very nearest galaxies. So there would be my mate, Julian Del Canton, who’s now, Flatiron in New York, has led big surveys using Hubble to count individual stars and study individual stars in Andromeda and m 33, which are the other 2 nearby galaxies in in our sort of local group. What’s fun about that is that we then get stars that have had a different history from the Milky Way. So we know that those galaxies have have had different histories. They’ve encountered other galaxies at different times.

Chris Lintott:
And so we can sort of work out what is just stellar behaviour and what is, the consequence of living in our particular galaxy. So so those are great projects, but we’d love to look further, but it’s pretty difficult. Planets and other galaxies, there are 1, maybe 2 claims that there might have been the signature, from microlensing where a planet gets in front of a star, but very difficult to confirm and and and very difficult. So planets, we’re stuck to our own bubble around, the sun at the minute. Alright.

Brian Keating:
Few more before we release you to the pub on Friday evening. Chris had a guest. Dennis asks, does he think we’ll ultimately find microbial life on one of the moons like Europa or Enceladus, or might we see graphic evidence in an exoplanet, sometime in the future? Where will microbial life evidence come from?

Chris Lintott:
I, I think we’re going back to blind luck. I think if there’s a best chance of unambiguously finding life is theory for to be microbes in one of the oceans on Europa, organometeor, or Enceladus, particularly Enceladus where we can fly through the fountains and take samples. I’ve got got this half assed idea that the fountains of insulars. We know they’re salty and slightly fizzy, the water that comes out. So we I think we could sell the world’s most expensive bottled water and fund our missions that way. And I think if you knew it had alien bacteria in it, I think that would up the price. I think a few people would want to drink that. I’m trying to remember there’s a sci fi trilogy in which somebody ingests epsilonidines microbes.

Chris Lintott:
Not gonna get that quickly. Anyway,

Brian Keating:
so I Ozempic comes from, Chris. They got Ozempic from

Chris Lintott:
There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think I’ve seen strange creatures in the bottom of a pint every so often as well. But so so I think what’s nice about that is it’s clean. Right? We can go and get a sample and either analyze it on board or bring it back.

Chris Lintott:
Exoplanet atmospheres, I have huge respect for people doing this. We discover so much about these worlds. But look, there’s a whole chapter in the book. We just spent 10 minutes arguing about, politely, about what is happening in the atmosphere of Venus, and Venus is right there. So disentangling what’s happening in a distant exoplanet atmosphere to the level where we can say, yeah, there’s life there. I think that’s gonna be really hard. That’s a generational project at least. But in the meantime, people like my mate, Hannah Wakeford, tell us that she’s found an exoplanet where it rains sand in little harsh, shades, shards of glass.

Chris Lintott:
So, you know, we can imagine being on other places without having to look for life. But I do think the biosignature thing in exoplanet spectra is gonna be held.

Brian Keating:
They have soccer hooligans on other planets, I assume.

Chris Lintott:
Almost certainly.

Brian Keating:
2nd to last question. You don’t have to answer this. A very offensive question, from Jim Evans. You’re very tall. Is astronomy easy for you, or do you still need a telescope?

Chris Lintott:
So I don’t I don’t know. How tall

Brian Keating:
are you, mate? I don’t

Chris Lintott:
know if you can hear my dog going bang mad in the background. So he, he perhaps he perhaps has reacted to the question why You don’t

Brian Keating:
have to answer that.

Chris Lintott:
No. I well, you know, I if I’ve seen further, it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants even even at 6 foot 4. Let’s go with that.

Brian Keating:
Very good. You’re echoing and aping our good friend, Isaac. Okay. Last real question. This comes from, a viewer named Justin Pyle. I’d love to hear your opinion on the slow modeling problem in galactic evolution simulations and how we might create a more accurate simulation without using a computer the size of the universe. I remember Brooke Simmons was here at UC San Diego, and I I know she was involved in research like this. What do you think about this? Our our advances in AI, quantum computing, and the like likely to supersede the need for C sized brains?

Chris Lintott:
Would be nice to think so. I think the big challenge in simulation is always that you have to work out what you’re simulating and what you’re not. So, you know, the statements we we made earlier about these confusing JWST galaxies, which have formed stars faster than experiment, that faster means faster than when compared to a computer simulation that we previously trusted. But the thing to realize is that there isn’t some poor postdoc who’s written in the physics for star formation in great detail in that code. There’s some recipe that they’ve invented that says, you know, if the galaxy has this much mass, then form some stars. Because we otherwise, you’d have to keep track of every single atom in the galaxy and its molecular behavior and its chemistry, all this physics that’s really rather complicated. So the problem with with thinking about simulations and AI is that at least with the models that people are playing with at the minute, including my my myself, you slightly lose control over what you’re simulating and what you’re not. You know that you might be able to show that you’ve got a realistic galaxy out, but you won’t know the recipe that went in.

Chris Lintott:
And so if I then compare that to the real university find a discrepancy, I’m slightly lost. Right? All I know is that I need to improve my simulation, but not what physics has has changed. So I’m a slight skeptic about this stuff other than, you yeah, the people who build big simulations are smart. And then, actually, I can recommend I think it’s out in the US as well. Andrew Ponson, who’s who’s moved from UCL to Durham, has just got a book called The Universe in a Box, I think it’s called. I’ve just read that that’s that’s great about what you can and can’t do on simulations. And I think his book has suffered slightly because he’s a realist. But if you want a primer on this stuff, that’s really good.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. And there’s another book, I think, by Ramil Dave or Dave, as well about simulations. Chris Lintott, this has been a joy. I hope someday we get to meet in person, and I can really see if you’re truly 6 foot 4 or not, in person. And we can enjoy a pint of, some Intelligence water and, maybe a sprinkle of penguin poop and phosphine in it. That’ll be a lot of fun.

Chris Lintott:
Perfect. I will serve that we will call that cocktail a Keating, in this household from from evermore. So penguin poop with Enceladin water named in your honor.

Brian Keating:
Enjoy the weekend. Enjoy your dog and, hope to, as I say, meet in person someday. Thanks so much.

Chris Lintott:
Take care. Thanks for the chat.

Brian Keating:
Bye. If you watched all the way to the end of this episode, I know you’re gonna enjoy this conversation with Joe Rogan about other science communicators like Neil deGrasse Tyson. And click here for a playlist of my best astronomical episodes from the past few weeks. See you next time.