Transcript:

What exactly are you building?

Brian Keating: Many years ago, I proposed the very first experiment to look for basically the shrapnel of the Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang to bang? Raised $200 million for the project. So, the main leading theory behind how the universe came into existence involves basically a singularity, a time at which there was no time before that. That day, was that the first day that time existed? How does time come into existence when there’s no time for it to have come after? So, these are some of the biggest questions in all of consciousness, of all of what humans could conceivably be capable of visualizing. About 30 years ago, I had an idea that we could actually do it using technology. We could build technology tools and instruments that would be extremely advanced, very sensitive, and they would reveal the reverberations in the fabric of space and time. So this experiment that I co-lead with my colleagues around the world, this instrument is really poised to do what nothing has ever done before, to make this definitive measurement.

Amira Arora: Has your view though on God changed ever since you went into this journey of cosmology and science?

Brian Keating: Yeah, we care about God because God then transgresses and transcends the boundary between the laws of nature and the laws of how you treat your neighbor. If God really does exist, then why is there so much suffering? So those are concepts called theodicy. Good things happen to bad people. Why do bad things happen to good people? Believer has to account for the only one question, the existence of evil in a world created by God.

We’re trying to figure out what happened before the Big Bang. What was the origin of anything at all? But why not nothing? That’s an open question related to where my research is leading me.

Amira Arora: Simulation theory. The idea that our whole reality could be running on some deeper layer of code. Do you think that’s something science should take seriously?

Brian Keating: Let’s say you’re looking at something, a star, and there’s some angle. There’d be some fundamental discretization of the arrival of these objects, either the wavelength or their period. And if you can have quantization of energy, that would prove that you’re in a simulation, right?

Amira Arora: Hi everyone. Before we get into the podcast, I just wanted to say 90% of you that are watching this right now aren’t subscribed and it would mean the world to us if you would. So, if you can hit that subscribe button and the notifications icon, that would truly help us out and help us to give you the content that you want to watch. So, thank you so much and here we go on the podcast. Dr. Brian Keating, welcome to the show.

Brian Keating: It’s great to be here in San Diego with you New Yorkers. Thanks for coming out.

Amira Arora: Thank you so much. So, we’re going to get straight into it. You are leading an experiment involving I think over $200 million in scientific funding. So, of course, we would love to know what exactly are you building? What are you hoping to discover with this entire project?

The shrapnel of the Big Bang

Brian Keating: Well, so over the course of my career, I would say I’ve raised $200 million for the projects and I’m currently co-leading one of the biggest ones ever in my field called the Simons Observatory, and that’s done in collaboration with partners at Penn and Columbia. We do have people at Columbia, but primarily at Princeton, at Berkeley and the University of Chicago and San Diego, and we were the founders of this experiment to look for the beginning, sort of the signature of what caused the Big Bang to bang. We know that the Big Bang occurred through a host of different pieces of evidence, and in science the more pieces of evidence that converge on a singular explanation the better. And so we realized many years ago, I proposed the very first experiment to look for basically the shrapnel of the Big Bang. What would cause the Big Bang to bang was an open question. We know that the Big Bang happened but what caused it to explode, if you will. It’s not really an explosion but let’s talk about it in that way.

The Big Bang began. We know now. We didn’t know really with this precision but we know it took place about 13.8 billion years ago. And because of that we can search for the physical aftermath, effectively the aftershock, of this explosive expansionary process. So the main leading theory behind how the universe came into existence involves basically a singularity, a time at which there was no time before that.

So there was a day at which the Big Bang occurred. We could keep going back from today. Go back 24 hours, 24 hours, 24, till you get to 13.826 billion years ago in terms of 24-hour. And let’s say that today’s a Tuesday. Let’s say it was a Tuesday. Well, we didn’t have days. The sun didn’t exist. Humans didn’t exist. But let’s just say it corresponds to 24 times 13 billion times 365, et cetera. That day, was that the first day that time existed? How does time come into existence when there’s no time for it to have come after? So these are some of the biggest questions not just in cosmology, not just in science, but in all of consciousness, of all of what humans could conceivably be capable of visualizing.

And so about 30 years ago I had an idea that we could actually do it using technology. We could build technology tools and instruments, primarily telescopes, which we can talk about, that would be extremely advanced, very sensitive, and they would reveal not the light of the Big Bang, not the explosion itself, but the reverberations in the fabric of space and time. Okay, and that’s called gravitational waves. And if the Big Bang began with this period of rapid expansion, as many scientists think, many scientists believe the universe began with this inflationary aftershock. But it’s not proven. We can’t really prove things in science. We can falsify alternatives. We can’t prove it. So our job is to have as much physical evidence as possible that the universe had either a beginning in time or perhaps had many beginnings in time, where the universe exists not as a lone entity, a universe, a single singular cosmos, but perhaps part of what’s called the multiverse.

So this experiment that I co-lead with my colleagues around the world, about 450 scientists, engineers and researchers on six of the seven continents, this instrument is really poised to do what nothing has ever done before, to make this definitive measurement of perhaps the very first instance of the creation of our universe. And that would be beyond my wildest dreams if that can occur.

Your own big bang

Amira Arora: Yeah. Brian, one thing I’ve always found fascinating is that human beings seem uniquely obsessed with this question of existence itself. We’re constantly asking where all of this came from, why we’re here, why anything exists at all. Why do you think that question seems so deeply built into human nature?

Brian Keating: Well, I think it’s inevitable that we want to know about where we came from. I always say, what’s your favorite day on the calendar? I’ll ask each one of you, what’s your favorite day on the calendar?

Aryaan Arora: Wednesday. [laughter]

Brian Keating: Day of the year. Birthday.

Amira Arora: Your birthday, right?

Brian Keating: And what’s your birthday?

Aryaan Arora: Yeah, exactly. I was going to use that as a joke.

Brian Keating: What day is that? And then I’ll ask both of you guys that. You guys told me that you guys are twins. So your birthday, right? Or some people say New Year’s Day or Christmas or Diwali or any holiday, any event. What does that commemorate? It’s typically commemorating the beginning of something or a cyclical cycle of iteration. So, people like that. And what’s the only thing you can’t have personally witnessed? Your own origin story. I call it your own big bang, right? Your parents had you, you were there. You were there, but you couldn’t physically be a witness to it. So, you have to rely on what other people told you. The cosmology, the birth of the universe, if it indeed did take place on a single day. And there are many, many competitive ideas that suggest it didn’t. It might not have. But let’s just assume it did begin on a certain day at a certain time and then time itself came into existence. That no entity could witness, perhaps except for some omniscient God or simulator of reality. And so the question is, what does that imply for satisfying a human desire? I think it’s the most human question you can ask. And I think it taps into this desire to want to know what was the universe like, what were we like, what are the boundaries of our knowledge? Because if time comes into existence, you really can’t know about beforehand, right? So these are the real things that make it so fun to do cosmology because you’re addressing the most basic question of all. Every religion addresses this in some way or another. Every culture addresses this. What is the origin story of not just the human race, not just of Earth, not just of our solar system, our galaxy, our cluster of galaxies, but the universe itself. And perhaps, we don’t know, but there may be evidence that there is a multiverse of which we’re an infinite speck within. And so all of these have ramifications for meaning, for purpose, for theology, for philosophy, and in no other science as great as the biochemistry of nematode worms or whatever, they don’t really address the questions of existence, of meaning, of theology, of religion, of God. And so it’s really quite astounding that we can address that using these tools of telescopes, of instruments, of devices, whereas before it was pure speculation and theology.

Telescope means distance viewer

Amira Arora: Can we go a little bit deeper into the instruments you’re using for this project? I know you’ve brought some.

Brian Keating: Yeah, I brought some parts. So, in astronomy in one way or another, we’re always doing some type of telescopy. I never use that word, but telescope means distance viewer. Tele, distance, scope, to view. And so what we try to do is make visual what’s not observable. So, we have senses. We actually have two telescopes in our heads. Our heads have two devices that are refracting telescopes. They use lenses. This is a lens-based telescope, replica of Galileo’s first instrument, the very first telescope, not invented, but first used for doing observations of the universe. And so it has a lens on one side, a lens on the other side, couples to the human eye, and has detectors. Those are the basic components of a telescope. Doesn’t matter if it’s looking for neutrinos or if it’s looking for gravitational waves as we are or it’s looking for photons, like light particles. It has basically those common elements together. And so in our instruments we are looking for heat. We’re not looking for light. We’re looking for heat that came about from the creation of the first atoms in the universe. First atoms came about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Regardless of how that bang happened, we don’t know yet. We hope to get some information. The universe was a transition from being an ionized plasma of protons, neutrons, occasional heavier elements like lithium and helium and things like that, but it was primarily hydrogen and its isotopes. Hydrogen has three isotopes. At 380,000 years after the Big Bang, due to the expansion of the universe, the universe had both cooled and expanded enough that it was no longer possible for the heat present at the very moment of creation to ionize the atoms to keep them separate into plasma, ion of electrons and protons. So they combine together and the simplest atom is a hydrogen atom. Hydrogen, positive proton, a negative electron. When that occurred the universe becomes transparent. Now light can propagate. Light can’t propagate in a plasma. Gets scattered like in a cloud. When the universe becomes neutral, becomes atomic. That fusion of proton with electron that made the universe transparent to light. And then the light that was present traced the properties of that time period. So it’s a snapshot. When we look back in space, we’re looking back in time. You’re 6 feet away. I don’t see you as you are instantaneously now. Light travels one foot per nanosecond. So you’re six nanoseconds, I see you six nanoseconds younger, quote unquote, than you actually are. You send that to the sun, eight minutes. The sun could have disappeared at 8 minutes. I hope it didn’t. In San Diego, it’s tough to tell. It’s always so nice and sunny. But it could have disappeared. We won’t know for 8.3 minutes. Because of the finite yet fast light travel time. So what you look at when you see an astronomical source, you’re not seeing it as it is now. You’re seeing it as it was then. So we see the universe as it was when it created the first atoms, when the first atoms were neutral, created and present in the universe, and anything else that was there. The dark matter, which is not an atom as far as we know, the dark energy, which is this mysterious substance that’s all pervasive, vacuum-type energy that seems to fill all of space. And the fabric of space and time itself called the gravitational metric. So we perceive all the physical quantities of it as it was back then. So it’s a time machine. All telescopes are time machines. Our time machine uses that light to derive what were the properties of the matter, of the energy, and of the space and time itself. So we can see via the imprints that the light presents to us the fingerprints of the geometry of space and time, the composition of space and time, the early epoch of the space and time, and we can make projections about what we’ll see in the future. So it’s a very powerful time machine that is the representative of the oldest light in the universe. We can’t do that with our eyes. It’s in the microwave, which is the same that you heat up water in your oven in your kitchen. We can’t see it. If you could see it, your microwave would be glowing brighter than anything in your house. However we can build sensors that detect it. So our sensors don’t look like retinas. They look a little bit like CCD cameras like in your phone or whatever. But this is a cluster of 256 detectors and it’s about the same size as my iPhone, total size of the iPhone, which has in its camera 48 million pixels. So these pixels are much bigger. Why is that? Because the wavelength of light that we’re looking at is about the size of these little squares here. So there are 16 by 16 squares here. The wavelength of light that corresponds to the peak brightness of the cosmic background radiation that you study is 2 mm compared to 500 nanometers that your eye sees. So red light is 500 nanometers in wavelength. Microwave wavelength of the brightest light that we see in the microwave is 2 millimeters. So we have to build special detectors. We put them at the focus of a telescope. The telescope doesn’t use glass as its lens. It uses pretty ordinary material. This is just polyethylene plastic. It’s very high density, so it refracts light. It bends microwaves. You can’t see through it, but if I could see microwaves, it would go right through it, just like glass. Glass is more transparent to microwave. So, it’s a counter to your intuition. So, you wouldn’t use this for a camera that’s in this room that’s recording us, but you wouldn’t use that type of camera to record the cosmic microwave background. Similarly, we have these very advanced detectors. Because we’re looking at heat, we have to cool our detectors just like you wouldn’t build an optical telescope on Broadway in Manhattan and Columbia University. You wouldn’t build it there. The telescope there can barely see the moon. So you build it somewhere dark, like on top of a mountain. For us the equivalent of being dark is to be cold. So we take it to cold places, dry places, the South Pole, Antarctica, the mountains of Chile, sometimes into space, but it’s very expensive. But that’s really it. So, they all have these commonalities. They all have to minimize these natural or man-made backgrounds. They all have to maximize their sensitivity to the desired signal. And many telescopes use lenses. They could be reflectors, mirrors instead of lenses perhaps, but they use some type of optic to focus, concentrate, and then they have a detection. And then the hard part begins because you get a tremendous amount of data. And that’s where the fun begins. And that’s where the challenge really begins too. It’s hard to build the instrument, but it takes almost as long and as much effort, as many people that are brilliant brainiacs, to do the analysis.

Interstellar and the wormhole

Aryaan Arora: You know, Brian, some of these topics and aspects that you’re talking about, I’m sure a lot of the viewers watching this podcast are going to have in their head right now. Hollywood really heavily uses this in a lot of their films. I’m not sure if you watched Interstellar, but they talked about this whole topic of time, how if you’re on one planet, the time could pass differently on Earth versus that planet. Is there any possibility that any of this could actually be true?

Brian Keating: So, I had a controversial take. First of all, I’ll say I interviewed Kip Thorne, who won the Nobel Prize for detection of gravitational waves, of LIGO, and a prediction of theoretical analysis and analytical methods, as part of my podcast where I’ve interviewed 26 Nobel Prize winners. And I talked to him about the power of visualization in terms of scientific storytelling, and he actually wrote papers that are in physics journals about the accuracy and how you do these computational, heroic computational tour de force, where one second of film in the movie took 200 hours of supercomputer time to simulate. Okay. So the physics is accurate. The background story is not. So the teleportation, the wormhole, which he didn’t conceive of, the wormhole. That was sort of Einstein and Rosen first had this idea that you could have such a thing. But he made it much more popular. First in the movie Contact with Jodie Foster was based on a real-life story up until they detected aliens, and that’s Jill Tarter, a renowned radio astronomer from the SETI Institute here in California. And these measurements that they made were kind of fancifully displayed in terms of, well, could you teleport, could you use a shortcut through space and time? This is an old idea, like I said, goes back a hundred years almost. But it’s completely impractical. It’s very fanciful. I made a joke recently that Project Hail Mary, written by a former UCSD student, Andy Weir, who I also had on my podcast, is actually more scientifically accurate, even though it involves the eating of the sun by bacteria, than Interstellar in some ways because it doesn’t use wormholes as much. It uses faster than light travel perhaps or some version of very close to the speed of light. So, no, unfortunately, for one thing, the way it’s depicted is always highly idealized. So even though they did talk about these black holes in the movie very accurately, that level of detail was not applied to the story line that allowed the transportation of Matthew McConaughey to another world system. So that was highly inaccurate and yet when he got to his destination it was extremely accurate, right? And so that’s just artistic license, I think. There are a lot of things that are depicted in these movies that they take a lot of artistic license with.

Aryaan Arora: The reason that they do is not a surprise because you have to kind of sell it to the audience. You have to kind of make it, oh, it’s complicated. It’s technical. It sounds like, I don’t know, it could be. And when you combine them together, it is sort of surreptitiously attractive. It’s seductive, right? Because oh, the black hole is perfect. Brian told me, oh, the guy won the Nobel Prize, he’s talking about black holes, he must know what he was talking about. But the wormhole part of it, no, it’s not so much because even if you travel through a black hole, a human being can’t survive, right? [inaudible]

Brian Keating: That is one major problem. A human being couldn’t survive at least that transport. So what you’re referring to is that the wormhole actually needs, we think it would need two black holes on either side of it. So to make this bridge to cut through spacetime, if you imagine spacetime could have an opening on one side and an exit on the other side, leaving aside the stability and how hard that would be to make using tremendous amount of negative energy, which we don’t really know what that is or how it could exist, but let’s say you could stabilize it, how big it could be, could it be big enough to fit a human being in? I guess you’d have other problems. But yeah, these are devices that are just used because they sound a little bit plausible, but in fact, they’re much less plausible than Spider-Man spinning a web and swinging through Manhattan.

Aryaan Arora: And you were talking about how a lot of these tools that you have, equipment, they give you essentially the capability to know or try to at least predict what will happen in the future as well.

Anything that cannot be answered by science

Amira Arora: Do you think there is anything at all that cannot be answered by science, even in the future?

Brian Keating: Oh yeah. There’s a tremendous amount. Science at a certain level is very humbling because it can only answer a very prescribed, very limited set of questions, right? You can’t answer trillions and trillions of other questions. So, it’s almost more accurate to say it’s a tally. It’s a marker. It’s a logbook that encapsulates our ignorance. It’s telling us what we know, but what we know is so minuscule compared to what we don’t know. It’s sort of the most primitive thing, which doesn’t mean easy or trivial, but elementary, like elementary math, it’s actually really hard. To prove 1 plus 1 equals 2 takes over 100 pages of rigorous abstract mathematical proofs and the methods of the proof and all sorts of other tools that are used and discovering the underlying ontology of mathematics and then whether or not you can even do that in science. We, for example, we can’t prove anything in science. I can’t prove the Earth is round. I can prove it’s not flat, but I can’t prove it’s round. And so a lot of what we do in science is falsify other hypotheses, right? It could be that DNA has these four bases and RNA has five base pairs or whatever. But there could be some underlying mechanism that we have yet to discover, and maybe there’s a six or whatever. So if you just said science is fixed at any given moment, it’s actually limiting what science can do. And that’s sort of going against the scientific principle that you should be very humble when it comes to science. You shouldn’t say look how great we are. We can answer all these things. Yes, of course we can. And of course we can develop technology and sensors that allow us to visualize the invisible. But you shouldn’t confuse that with perhaps the truth, the underlying truth, which we don’t have access to. We can eliminate falsehoods but to the limit of what can we know to be true? How much of what there is knowable do we know? It’s very small.

What came before the Big Bang

Aryaan Arora: I think even before I started looking into your work, while growing up as well, essentially we were taught about this whole Big Bang, that’s how the world’s created, and that’s it, and no one talks about anything else. And that question was inside me, that what came before that? We’re assuming, okay, the Big Bang created the world, so what came before that? Besides, have there been scientists who have worked on this question deeply or gotten anywhere?

Brian Keating: There are scientists that work way more deeply than I do. What differentiates me from the scientists that mostly you’ll find discussing it or conceptualizing it, they’re typically theoreticians. They’re typically concerned with the underlying theory behind these models. So the Big Bang was created not by experimentalists or people building telescopes. It was predicted by actually it was a Catholic priest, Lemaître, who came up with this idea that perhaps the universe started in this what he called a primeval atom, something of nuclear density, extremely extraordinary high, the size of our solar system perhaps, and then it was unstable, it exploded and it began expanding in all directions. So it had some of the seeds and kernels of what would later come about. It was then criticized by Einstein for a long time. And then finally Einstein accepted it when he was shown experimental evidence from an observer, Edwin Hubble, who proved to him that the universe had at least a very, very vastly larger number of galaxies that were expanding away from the Milky Way. And that was revolutionary. Einstein believed the universe was static, had no beginning, and for thousands of years most cultures, most traditions, most civilizations except for Judeo-Christian culture or creation myth or story, cosmogony, had a cyclical or eternal cosmos. So that was the norm. And so Christianity really didn’t have, or Judaism didn’t have, a real quantitative demonstration that the verse of Genesis 1:1 was actually true until the discovery of these galaxies expanding apart. Then later the discovery of the cosmic microwave background that I studied, 1965, and then soon after the discovery of the abundance of different elements that can only be formed under conditions of nuclear fusion. So that was the prevailing narrative.

Now what typically happens is that a theory in science comes along to replace a theory that has some serious flaws or gaps in its predictive power. So let’s just say for 2,000 years plus, from Aristotle to Einstein, till 1929 at least, if you ask any scientist, when did the universe begin, they’d say what are you talking about, it’s always been here, something can’t come from nothing, it has to be here for all time. And the question was, okay, so what evidence was there to prove that wrong? Again we can’t prove something right, we can prove something wrong. So there was no evidence, it was just conjecture and theorists had this idea. Some people believe that yes, there certainly could have been something like an origin point to solve certain paradoxes, but it wasn’t quantitative. So it had no experimental support.

Aryaan Arora: Oh, yeah.

Brian Keating: So, you really had to be humble about it. And until these discoveries really people didn’t have that level of belief in anything except they just kind of accepted on faith that the universe looks static because it does look static on the time scale of a human being. The only things we see moving are the planets. In fact, the word planet in Greek means wanderer. Means it moves against the fixed stars. Same root word as plankton. Plankton means something that wanders in the ocean. Plane, the airplane you guys are going to be on. It means something that flies, moves. So we named the five things that we could see in the night sky, we named them planets, up until the 1700s when the first one beyond Saturn was discovered by William Herschel. So that kind of didn’t break a paradigm. We still knew that the stars seem to be fixed. We didn’t believe there were any galaxies other than the Milky Way. So it really was this rapid, like Cambrian explosion of knowledge in the 1900s up until this very day that suggested that there was a beginning. And then your questions are exactly appropriate. What came before the beginning? It’s these eternal questions. What happens when you come to the edge of the universe? That’s another question people like to ask. So some of these are founded upon our intuition. But when your intuition is dealing with cosmology and a story of the entire universe, the beginning of what we call time, which we don’t have a great definition of, by the way.

What’s the definition of time

Aryaan Arora: I was going to ask that. What’s the definition of time?

Brian Keating: Yeah. So, there is no one accepted definition of time. There are many different types of time, right? There are definitions that correlate with our experience. Like right now, this coffee is cooling down. I had some cream and coffee that mixed together. We correlate the arrow of time with the direction of the increase of entropy. It seems entropy only increases in the universe. You could think of using that as a type of a clock, measuring the temperature, but when it comes to equilibrium, there’s no change. So once something doesn’t change, you can’t measure elapsed time. So time is really the differentiator. So some people, I’ve talked to Nobel Prize winner Bill Phillips and Frank Wilczek, both of them won the Nobel Prize. They say, oh, time is just what a clock measures. Well, a clock is something that measures time. So, it’s tautological, which means that we don’t really have a great definition. That doesn’t prevent us from doing a lot of really important hard work. But certainly, it prevents us perhaps from speculating what came before the Big Bang because if time comes into existence, there’s no marker with which to, that concept doesn’t make sense. And a lot of people, including the late Stephen Hawking, did say that. He said it was an incoherent question to ask what came before the Big Bang. It’s like asking, I’ve been to the South Pole twice, so it’s like asking what’s south of the South Pole. It’s the end of the coordinate system. So you reach a singularity. You can’t go beyond it but the things don’t blow up. It’s just that’s not defined. Once you go south of the South Pole you go north. Any direction you move from the South Pole you’re going north. It doesn’t matter. Now that’s not really satisfying, right? You kind of want to know what it is. So, the truth is that we don’t really have a fundamental definition of time any more than we have really a definition of any quantity. That’s why I said we could be proud of ourselves, rightfully so, for measuring all these quantities, knowing the temperature of the universe to five significant figures, knowing the distribution of dark matter to unprecedented precision, building sensors that can detect the change of a single photon from the Big Bang. Those are things to be rightfully proud of, my colleagues and I, you should be proud of that. However if you ask what’s time, mass, energy, space, we can’t really say there’s a definitive answer for it. So a lot of it is built on kind of common acceptance of jargon, of language, of a lexicon, and that behaves through certain syntactical rules that are useful to us. A lot of science, we didn’t understand fully how transistors worked in terms of their quantum mechanical properties until the 50s or 60s, a decade after we started using them. So things could be very useful and then that can give people the idea that we actually understand all these things when in fact we don’t. There’s a lot of things, way more things we’ll never ever understand or poorly defined forever than we can possibly know and describe with precision.

Reality as a headset

Amira Arora: You know, there’s this growing idea that reality itself may be computational or even simulated. What are your thoughts on that?

Brian Keating: Well, I know I’ve talked to some people about this. Don Hoffman, I know you guys have talked to recently. For me there’s challenges for all these things because a lot of them depend on the understanding of what human consciousness is, which I didn’t even include in the project of cosmology. I mean we’re observing the universe but we don’t understand how the human mind works. We don’t understand what consciousness is. Don, with great respect to him, I’ll talk about reality as this headset and this interface that’s evolutionarily designed to,

Amira Arora: Okay.

Brian Keating: Okay, so where did evolution come from? Evolution didn’t create itself, any more than the laws of nature created themselves. A lot of people say, oh, the universe can come from nothing because it can emerge from a quantum fluctuation. Okay, what’s a quantum fluctuation? Where did that come from? Oh, it’s eternal. It’s always been there. And so what ends up happening for me is it’s very frustrating because it devolves into something that’s either tautological or it’s truly equivalent to a theological discussion, right? So you say, well, who created God? Or you could say, who created the universe? If God created the universe, oh, God’s eternal. Well, the universe could be eternal. You just get into these pointless arguments. Theorists may be like that, theologians, philosophers like that. I don’t like that. I like to build technology and telescopes that allow me to see things I can’t see and use those to learn more about the universe in a practical sense, if you could call it that, than to debate these really kind of esoteric, almost meaningless things that you can’t make progress on. Because as I said, no one agrees what consciousness is. There’s no definition of consciousness. Hundreds of different views.

Aryaan Arora: Everyone disagrees because everyone believes in their own theory, right?

Brian Keating: You said it better than me. It’s a very good way to put it. There’s hundreds and hundreds of theories. Now, we are writing down equations. Who is we? The brain, an AI system. What’s it doing? Is it conscious? Does it have free will? So, I find these questions frustrating. Maybe because I’m not good enough to do the theoretical hard work, but for me, I’m very comfortable downstream. What if we see these fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime? I know how relativity works mathematically. I know how quantum mechanics works up until a point. Again, quantum mechanics is another subject. We don’t have a universal definition of what quantum mechanics is. We don’t have a framework for it. We have this same person, Einstein and Rosen, who conjectured these wormholes that Kip Thorne would later use in movies and Carl Sagan, et cetera. He didn’t really believe in the kind of weird properties of quantum mechanics that we seem to be inevitably connected with, that the universe has these weird correlations and strange behaviors of what can influence what, causality, locality. These are very, very different concepts and in fact physicists will disagree on what it means that something is real, that something exists. And so again, people do like to talk about these things. I could talk about them, but I feel like it’s almost impossible to make progress into it. If I said to you, what is the number one? You guys can do stuff with the number one. You take flight number one, I push one for coffee, two for cream, whatever. We know how to use one, right? You’ve never seen a triangle in your life, right? It only exists in the human mind, which only exists because of a huge overlay of culture and civilization and language and constructs that you guys and I didn’t create. So I prefer downstream and I can say I pay $1 for this coffee or whatever you guys did, and from that perspective I’m a pragmatist. I just like to do stuff with it at much higher level than debating what is the reality, what is consciousness, what interpretation of quantum mechanics. For me it doesn’t make a difference. So I just go with what works.

Amira Arora: Yeah. Because we had done a podcast with the physicist Stephen Wolfram. I don’t know if you saw that.

Brian Keating: Yeah. I can’t remember what his definition of one was, or one plus one.

Amira Arora: He had his own separate view of consciousness, and we’ve done so many podcasts with different people and like you said, everyone has their different view of consciousness, and sometimes it matters for them to be able to work on their project and theory.

What do people even mean by a simulation

Amira Arora: Just to quickly bounce off the question though, when people do say a simulation, what do they even mean by that?

Brian Keating: Yeah. So, what we observe now is a very remarkable situation with technology, that we seem to have reached a level where we’ve been able to take computational devices, computers, silicon chips, et cetera. Not quantum computers, not things that are made of some exotic materials, but just ordinary classical computers, just giant versions of these transistors that were invented 100 years ago. Not giant, minuscule versions of things, but assembled in giant numbers, and they then seem to emerge with properties not unlike the human brain. And because of that, because the capacity for simulation is increasing, where we simulate the weather, we simulate physical domains, we can simulate the vacuum of quantum mechanics, we can simulate detectors and photons, we can simulate a whole host of different outcomes. And we tend to focus on things that are interesting to us, right? So if I told you you could simulate what it was like to live on Mars right now. Okay, that’s interesting. And I’m sure Elon Musk has some flight simulator somewhere to do that. But if I said you could simulate your 16th great-grandmother in India somewhere, right? Or for me in Europe somewhere. You can simulate them and get to know them and be in their shoes and visualize their world, even for a few hours or something like that. How much would you pay for that?

Aryaan Arora: Pretty much. Yeah, I’d pay a lot. I don’t know. It’d be really cool because we all matter, right? We want to connect with our ancestry and our heritage and it’s part of what makes us human, right?

Brian Keating: You asked, what is this fascination? Well, what’s a bigger fascination than how you came to exist? Your own personal origin of the universe, right? So then it’s natural to think, well, if we simulate things that are interesting to us, we don’t simulate, I’m a pilot, so we do flight simulation every now and then to make sure that we’re safe and we don’t have accidents or whatever. We don’t do things like, oh, we’re going to land at the South Pole. The South Pole is a single runway. It’s three miles long. It’s made of ice, just scraped out. It has no relation to San Diego airport where you guys are going from. So, yes, you could simulate it, but what’s the point of it? You’re never going to go there. You’re never going to be there. And if you were there, it wouldn’t make any difference to your safety or anybody else’s safety. You’re not a military pilot. That’s the only people that can fly there. Whereas if you’re learning to fly, you might simulate San Diego or New York. And I’ve done that my whole life. So you simulate things that are important, interesting, relevant, perhaps predictive, that can tell you about the future, help you understand the future perhaps, contextualize things. We simulate other planets. We simulate the origin of the universe. So why not simulate us? Why not, instead of simulating your 16th great-grandmother, why don’t you simulate your mother, how she was, or your father, right? So you could do that and then you can say, well, if I do that now with 2026 technology, you could do it, but maybe in the 2050s technology be better, but maybe in 2900 technology be even better, right? If things keep growing at this exponential pace, which there are questions about, can that happen, but if they do, the transition from the large language models of today to just four months ago, intelligence is doubling, the amount of intelligence doubling every four months. So that’s hypergeometric growth. So there won’t be, theoretically there could be no human on Earth that would know as much as the base model that you get for 20 bucks a month from Claude or whatever, right? So that could happen in four months from now, let alone in four centuries from now. So the idea is that we could be the products of a simulator who’s in the future and we might be what’s called their ancestor, just as you simulated your ancestor. You might want to, I might want to, they might be simulating us. Now can you prove that? No. It’s a derivation of Pascal and others who visualized in the 1700s and 1800s the so-called, how do you know that you’re not a brain in a vat? Basically said, the brain, I say Brian, in a, how do you know that you’re not? Because what is your brain? I’m vastly simplifying this, but your brain responds to chemical and visual stimulation, sensory stimulation, which is conducted purely through electrical channels, right? And they knew that. So what if you just take your brain up and it’s here and you just feed in stimuli to it? I’m smelling this? No you’re not, you’re just the chemical receptor is firing because we’re stimulating with the exact same tempo, exact same intensity, exact same spectral chirp signature, whatever. And you could be hearing things, seeing things, smelling, but you’re just a brain and you’re connected through a neuron and you’re fed nutrients, and I don’t know, would you have a different experience? So then if that’s true, well then what if that whole thing is then simulated in silicon like this and it’s just a massive computer that has grown at Moore’s law doubling every four months until five centuries from now. You can’t comprehend. So that’s the appeal. The objection to it is manifold at some level. You have to wonder why that would be, and at another level you have to confront the argument that it’s essentially recapitulating a religious framework, right? There’s some God who’s the master simulator, decided to simulate his ancestors or its ancestors, and the purpose for this is not really clear. Descartes and others got out of it by saying, well, God is not malicious, and so, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, I can only think that I can think about thinking, this metacognition, because there’s a God who’s good. But how do you know there’s a God that’s good? Maybe it’s a simulator. Maybe there’s no God, maybe there’s a devil. So I think that there’s fascinating questions that can be raised by it. There are people like Nick Bostrom who say there’s really only a couple different scenarios, that either there is a simulation or there’s not a simulation, or that there is a simulation and the simulator doesn’t care or does care about simulating their ancestors, or maybe has achieved or hasn’t achieved their goals, or there could be some weird causality thing, like they simulate us but then we somehow destroy the simul, like the Matrix or whatever, like we can escape the simulation. So again, what are the practical downstream ramifications of it? Is it just rehashing these arguments from the 18th century? Maybe, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but where does it actually get you? Can you distinguish between it? Could you falsify the simulation? Could you prove it? Actually, you might be able to prove that you’re in a simulation, right? The Truman Show is a famous movie, right?

Aryaan Arora: I love that one.

Brian Keating: The Matrix.

Aryaan Arora: Yeah, I love it, too.

Brian Keating: And so, yeah, the light fell out of the sky. Oh, take two or whatever. So he kind of proves that there’s a simulator, right? Or there’s someone manipulating him. What’s the purpose of it? They’re watching him. But the simulation of the entire universe, what kind of entropy demands would that create? What kind of limitations from the physical universe would it have? And then what if that simulation is simulated by another simulation, is simulated by another simulation? So it’s never ending.

Aryaan Arora: You get infinite regress.

Brian Keating: Exactly. Right. So again, interesting, unsatisfying, like many things in life because we are talking about the mystery of God.

The fine-tuning argument

Amira Arora: I’m sure as a cosmologist and in your field even more so, you must have been intrigued by this idea of God, and I want you to talk about that. Before we do that, I want to show a short 30-second video. You can also share your reaction on that as well.

[Video clip plays]

Did you know that if gravity were slightly more powerful the universe would collapse into a ball?

I did not.

Also, if gravity were slightly less powerful, the universe would fly apart and there’d be no stars or planets.

Where are you going with this, Sheldon?

It’s just that gravity is precisely as strong as it needs to be. And if the ratio of the electromagnetic force to the strong force wasn’t 1%, life wouldn’t exist. What are the odds that would happen all by itself?

Why are you trying to convince me to believe in God? You don’t believe in God?

I don’t. But the precision of the universe at least makes it logical to conclude there’s a creator. There are 5 billion people on this planet and you’re the perfect mom for me. What are the odds of that?

Aryaan Arora: When he talks about, if it wasn’t precisely tuned for that, he’s talking about fine-tuning, which is a strong argument for God, even though atheists will say this is one of the stronger arguments for God. So the question is, how finely tuned could the universe be for us to be here? He made it sound, and I’ll just ask you, if things were how much different that we wouldn’t be here? Do you remember, or what do you think? Is he saying exactly balanced, like it’s two scales and they’re totally in balance? Is that kind of what he’s conjecture is probably, I’m guessing.

Brian Keating: Yeah. So obviously there’s always some uncertainty, right? Nothing is exactly equal. Even you guys, you guys are twins. You’re not exactly the same. You guys are completely different, right? And that’s great. That’s what makes you guys unique. And if even twins can be different, how much more different is a non-twin from another stranger, right? So actually it’s quite coarsely tuned in many ways. What it’s typically called is apologetics, which is a fancy way of saying you assume God’s existence and then you reason back to the conclusion that will support the existence of God that you conjecture from the beginning, right? So we exist, it’s another version of cogito, I think therefore I am, a good God wouldn’t allow me to hallucinate, to deceive myself that I exist. But that’s assuming the existence of God to prove God’s existence, to prove consciousness is real. So it’s a circular argument. It’s called begging the question. People think begging the question is like raising the, no, begging the question means you answer your own questions, tautology typically. So in this case you’re assuming the existence of God, it has to be finely tuned. But what a scientist should do, and he’s supposed to be a scientist, I like the fact that they said five billion people because we know there’s 8 billion, so it must have been when he was young, Sheldon, so he’s a baby, but whatever. I could quibble with that too. But would he ask about his mother, is it him, is it his genetics, what made him become who he is, that he thinks that she’s the perfect mother? In some ways it couldn’t be otherwise. Even if you had a horrible mother, you wouldn’t exist if that mother didn’t give birth to you. So by definition. Anyway, in the case of fine-tuning of the strength of these forces, that’s completely nonsensical. So he talked about the universe would go into a ball. There’s no sense to that. There’s no ball. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I think he’s talking about a black hole, which is reasonable if there’s an extreme mistuning, but the problem is people always do these things for extremely special starting cases. Right now the universe is dominated by what’s called dark energy. The dark energy dwarfs the amount of mass energy that we’re made up of, even though we’re a very tiny sliver, less than half of 1% ordinary matter, like calcium, carbon. That’s a very small amount of the universe’s mass energy budget. Dwarfed by the amount of dark matter in the universe, but even more dwarfed by the amount of dark energy in the universe. Right now, we could dial up the dark energy to a factor of 10 times higher. Right at the second, nothing would happen to us. Life would go on existing. Our galaxy would be the same. The solar system would be the same. A trillion years from now, that’s a different story. Things would be different. But he’s using this very special time that he exists and he’s saying because of that these things couldn’t have been different in the universe today. But that’s simply not true. If you can double or triple the amount of mass in the universe and nothing happens to you, your mother, whatever you’re doing, your podcast, nothing would happen. Absolutely nothing. So how fine-tuned is that? So people say, oh, it’s extremely finely tuned, if these things didn’t happen exactly the right order, exactly the right time. But I say, look, I can’t play any musical instrument besides Spotify. That’s all I can play, right? So my tuning is pretty coarse. And yet I could figure out how to make some symphony or make some sounds on my wife’s violin, right? I could do that. That would be much closer to, there’s an infinity of different frequencies, pitches you can make, right? From zero frequency to infinity, right? Of that bandwidth of possible frequencies that are theoretically possible, I can make a huge number of them even though I suck. I’m just pulling the violin across, is that finely tuned? There’s an infinite amount. And so people say, yes, it’s an infinitesimal slice out of an infinite amount. But if my wife’s off by 1%, a note on the violin, 444 hertz instead of 440 hertz, you can slightly tell a difference. You could probably do it because you have a good ear. But one or two percent is not finely tuned at all. That’s actually extremely coarse. If you try to tune the Wi-Fi in this room, it’s actually tuned to like a part in 10 to the 9th. The frequency spectrum is allocated extremely small amounts of bandwidth. And if that’s changed a lot, they actually get a phone call from the US government. You’re actually violating the FCC regulations.

Aryaan Arora: Yeah.

Brian Keating: So that has to be much more finely tuned than a violin. And yet we wouldn’t say the universe where it can be 100% larger, not just 1%, 100% larger, it wouldn’t make a difference to us at all. So people like to cherry-pick. Oh, if the universe was one proton heavier per kilogram in the early universe, we wouldn’t have existed. Okay, that’s true. If it was one proton now, it wouldn’t have any effect whatsoever. So it could be completely the same quantity just at two different times. And people just cherry-pick. If you’re sitting in your seat, let’s say you’re taking a flight a week from now and you’re sitting in your seat and I tell you you’re going to be sitting in your seat at this time at this hour, right, and you’re going to be there plus or minus one hour, right? If that hour is one hour earlier than the flight, that’s fine. One hour later, you miss it completely. So it’s very crucial. People like to cherry-pick that to make their argument stronger. I find that manipulative. So that tender moment is, again, another Hollywood kind of manipulation of human emotions to generate some, ironically, support for God, even though Sheldon’s supposed to be an atheist, [inaudible] or whatever, right?

God cares if Brian Keating believes in him

Amira Arora: Has your view though on God, and you can define what your view on God is as well, because I don’t believe that God is a person with a white beard either, but what your view on God is now, and has it changed ever since you went into this journey of cosmology and science?

Brian Keating: Yeah, I would say it’s been a very circuitous and torturous [laughter] kind of relationship with God. I like to say, God cares if Brian Keating believes in him like the tooth fairy cares if I believe in her. If God exists, I can think as a scientist, I can only say a hypothesis of God. Is it a scientific hypothesis? Yeah, it is. You can hypothesize God exists. You can hypothesize a simulation exists. But let’s just stick to God. Within God, there’s many different types of gods, right? There’s multiple gods or single God, different names for God, different origin stories for God, prophets, there’s so much cultural overlay on top of that, right? But if you just describe a property to God that I can relate to, the question of science, God is the ultimate arbiter of law, of logic, of mathematics, of physics, and therefore has some domain expertise in the realm of cosmology, then I can start to talk about, well, how does this fit in? Now that’s a very bland God. I don’t really care. If there were multiple gods, one for each field in a department at UCSD, I don’t really, it’s meaningful, right? We care about God because God then transgresses and transcends the boundary between the laws of nature and the laws of how you treat your neighbor, right? Those are very different concepts, right? We say to God, so I’m Jewish by birth, but I also practice Judaism. And I’ll say why I do in a minute. But from the perspective of Judaism, the Torah, the Bible, the Old Testament begins with the creation of the universe, which is very strange, right? 99% of the book is not about the creation of the universe. In fact, there’s 35,000 verses in the Torah, in the Old Testament, just the five books of Moses. 35,000 verses. Of those 35,000, 35 verses about the origin of the universe, the creation of the days of the week, the Sabbath, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, like 35 verses. It doesn’t talk about molecular biology and spacetime geometry and negative energy density, right? So it’s obviously not meant to be a science book, but people intend to use it as that. And why is it in the Jewish tradition, it starts with the origin of the universe? Because only the lawgiver that created the universe has the ultimate jurisdiction to say that you shouldn’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife.

Aryaan Arora: Right. So it then transcends the physical laws of nature to the interpersonal, the ethical laws of behavior, morality.

Brian Keating: Exactly. So without that mandate, it was thought that God couldn’t do that. So it was logical, actually the first commentator ever to ask this question was a commentator who lived a thousand years ago, why does God start with that, not with another, like kosher? I can’t eat pork, right? I don’t eat pork. Other religions have different things, right? So it doesn’t say, here’s why you can’t eat pork, it’s delicious but don’t eat it. It doesn’t say why. It doesn’t tell you at all. There’s no reason for it whatsoever in the whole Bible.

Aryaan Arora: Oh, is it? I haven’t.

Brian Keating: Yeah, there’s no reason for it.

Aryaan Arora: It’s not a deity, it’s not something that we worship.

Brian Keating: No, it’s this is what you can eat and this is what you can’t eat. But if it was a book about law, like the US Constitution doesn’t start with the beginning of the universe, right? And we’re coming up on the 250th anniversary, right? So it doesn’t start with that. It starts with, here are the laws. We believe every person has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in the Declaration of Independence. [inaudible] But it does say endowed by their Creator God. So it does appeal to the same functionality, right? So that’s sort of a big preamble to say that the evolution of my viewpoint on God has changed a lot because starting off when you’re a kid, you’re born into a religion, right? Typically people are born into it. It’s rare to see, young Sheldon, right? It’s rare to see someone at 5 years old say, I’m going to choose to be a Christian Scientist, if their parents are Hindu, or it just doesn’t happen that much. Maybe it does, but everything has some chance, I suppose.

A Jewish boy who became an altar boy

Brian Keating: In my case, I was born to Jewish parents. Typically, you’re Jewish, you go to Sunday school, maybe. Most Jews are unaffiliated. They don’t really go to temple that often, if at all. Then they typically have a bar mitzvah and then the pot mitzvah and then maybe they don’t go to temple again or anything ever again until they get married and then they have kids. So, that’s 90% of at least US Jewry. In my case, my parents got divorced when I was seven, and my mother married an Irish Catholic man. And so I went from being completely non-observant Jewish to very observant Catholic. So much so that at age eight I have, it’s called a baptism, where they put water on, then a communion where you actually receive, you accept that Christ is your savior. Confirmation, you’re older. It’s sort of a rite of passage in a sense. And then I actually became an altar boy in the Catholic church of Chappaqua, New York, which is not far from where you guys live, in Westchester County. So I became an altar boy in the Catholic church as a Jewish boy who never had a bar mitzvah. So a little bit unusual. And around the time I was about 13, I got really fascinated with astronomy. Actually got my first telescope, made observations and really fell in love with, my scientific hero to this day is Galileo. So Galileo was a brilliant scientist, almost discovered calculus, almost invented the telescope, had incredible successes, was the first to use a telescope astronomically.

Aryaan Arora: And that’s the name of Avi’s project as well, the Galileo Project.

Brian Keating: That’s right. Yeah, the Galileo Project, right? So for many reasons he became a hero to me, one of which is that he’s the best scientific writer in terms of the English language, even Italian, but in translation he is a poet. He’s evocative, he’s humble, he’s arrogant. Again, he’s brash, he’s reserved, he’s introspective. And of course, he had this overlay narrative of battling against the superpower of the Catholic Church and being imprisoned for the last nine years of his life. He wasn’t killed, he wasn’t tortured, but he was threatened to be tortured and that was enough back then. It would be like the UN and every country on Earth, you’re an outcast, Interpol, America, everywhere, and you’re going to be punished for the rest of your life. So, it was pretty damn [inaudible], all for really using the telescope to support the claim that Copernicus made 80 years before on his deathbed that the sun was the center of the universe. And Galileo thought he had evidence to prove that it was, and he thought, because science is truth and God is truth, that the Catholic Church would accept that, but they weren’t so happy with that. And so when I heard that as a Catholic boy at that time, I was very depressed because it was really disillusioning to a 13-year-old to think that all this religion, and I loved being an altar boy. I loved being in the Catholic church, Sunday school. I actually liked it. And then to find out that my hero Pope John Paul and the popes at the time in the ’80s, they had never really found Galileo not guilty and they never really kind of pardoned him. It was kind of devastating. It’s like finding out you love this soccer team or football team, whatever, and they tortured your grandfather. It’d be hard for you to look at them in the same way.

Aryaan Arora: Of course.

Brian Keating: So a little knowledge is dangerous, and at that time then I became an atheist. So I stopped going to church. I really just fell in love with science. That’s all I wanted to do. Taught myself calculus, taught myself a lot about astronomy, and this is way before Google, the internet existed, and nothing like that ever existed until a decade later almost. And so it was very difficult, arduous to learn things but I was able to do it, and I think that’s what started this path of research. And as I matured and got more powerful tools, telescopes, technology and insight, then I started to think, well, maybe there’s something to religion, let me investigate it because they’re certainly coupled together. And I’m grateful for that. I’m really glad that I went through what I went through religiously, even my atheism experimentation, because I think I came back to it as an adult, not as a kid. Forced into it, like I had to go to temple, I had to go to church. No, no. If I did, I wanted to go. I wanted to learn. I realized I didn’t know how to read Hebrew. So, I taught myself Hebrew. I’d never read the Torah, the Old Testament. So, I read it and read the commentaries on it. And what started to be much more appealing to me than the religious aspects was the social, communal, cultural aspects of it, which I had also kind of abandoned just because I’d gone into different religions. You get Christmas instead of Hanukkah. It’s hard to go back as a kid, but as an adult, it makes more sense.

A practicing devout agnostic

Brian Keating: So now I call myself a practicing devout agnostic. Meaning that, what’s an agnostic or what’s an atheist? An atheist is someone who declares there is no God, right? Atheistic and not believe. What’s a theist? Someone who declares that they know, they believe, they know. So in science, we don’t do that. We don’t say I believe in gravity. No, I have evidence for gravity. Now, could gravity change? Yes, gravity could change. It may change in the universe. It may change in the galaxy. Who knows if it will change on the scale of this table, but certainly not today, right? So, we have evidence for it. We have replication. We have reproduction. We have peer review, right? We [inaudible] fully scientific tool. So, I don’t say I believe in gravity. I say I have evidence for gravity. But God is different. We don’t have evidence, scientific evidence, like a falsifiable hypothesis. If you did, there’d be no need for faith and belief, right? Why would you say you believe in God? If there was proof of God, do you say you believe in the traffic laws? You say, no, no, no, I know there’s evidence that cop’s going to pull me over. Or, I believe in the speed of light. No, no, you don’t believe in it. There’s evidence for it.

Why do bad things happen to good people

Amira Arora: One argument people often make is that if God really does exist, and if there’s intelligence or purpose behind reality, then why is there so much suffering, right? War, disease, childhood trauma, cruelty. Do questions like that make the idea of God even harder for you to prove from a scientific perspective?

Brian Keating: Yeah, those are the most challenging questions of all but I’m never afraid of a little hard work. Right. So those are concepts called theodicy. Good things happen to bad people. Why do bad things happen to good people? Some of the things you mentioned are human-made, war, famine. Most famines are caused by human mistakes or corruption. Even to this day certainly wars are, right? Cancer is not, right? So there’s a famous saying, the atheist has to account for everything, the existence of the universe, the existence of humans, the existence of goodness. In a pure Darwinian scenario, like maybe Hoffman believes and whatnot, it’s very hard to see the wasteful energy spent on things like love and kindness and compassion. And in fact many cultures, for example in the ancient Greek culture, if a baby was born deformed or had some illness they would leave it to die. I mean it was just Darwinianism in action and it wasn’t considered to be horrific. It was kind of expected. I mean life expectancy maybe wasn’t that great or whatever. So it’s not like these are foreign concepts to the human mind, the cruelty and so forth. So there has to be some accounting, and then, yeah, the believer has to account for the only one question, the existence of evil in a world created by God. Now I don’t think that those are really, again, these are the kind of questions like what is consciousness, what is time, it’s another version of that, right? Because we could say, well, everything happens for a reason, right? So God created cancer cells, I’m just making this up, but I’ve heard arguments that cancer cells are byproducts of the [inaudible] and the ability for life to reproduce, right? So without cancer, that would mean the fundamental alteration of the human genome, right? There’d have to be some process in nature which has no perfect reproduction, replication, never making too many copies of itself like cancer does, right? But that would then preclude other things like the ability of a cell to divide, like you guys were two cells, one cell split apart, right? Or two different, you guys were two different cells because you guys are not identical, right? So two, but developing exactly at the same time, dividing at the same time. I mean, why didn’t one of you come out like 30 pounds and one zero? It’s amazing how exquisitely finely tuned that is. Perhaps there’s some relationship. You couldn’t have that unless there were these things that we now think of as purely harmful, like cancer. On the other hand, we may also overcome cancer. We’re there. If you listen to these AI guys, I just installed this AI package that Claude makes to write scientific papers, and what it’s like, all biology. It’s like 36 different biological tools with protein folding and then cancer genomics and incredible stuff. There’s nothing about cosmology, so I’m going to try to change that. But all this effort getting into it, and companies are saying they’re going to cure cancer in a few years. Part of that is the human need to understand things. Now chemical warfare and weapons and biological, that’s another thing. We invented recombinant DNA in 1971, that was almost immediately recognized it could be a horrible, horrific weapon that could kill, be targeted, be manipulated.

Aryaan Arora: Yeah.

Brian Keating: And yet it could be very, very potent and it could be used for good, as it has been to make vaccines. And so CRISPR is another thing. CRISPR has some relation, I think, to gene editing, splicing, and even to cancer. These bacteria, phages, these viruses that we use for drug delivery, RNA, we use. So, it’s not clear, but you certainly have a point. There’s no easy way out of that question. You can appeal all you like and say free will, and if you didn’t have cancer, maybe you wouldn’t live life the same way. I think that’s kind of reductive. If you want the laws of physics to operate in a logical, consistent world, you’re going to have things that are unintended consequences.

God set the world into motion

Brian Keating: But you could still say God is a part of it. I don’t say this, but people could say, well, God set the world into motion, created the world with, God designed DNA and then disappeared. Now he’s off in the multiverse somewhere else, right? But all the laws of physics are just operating and evolving and Darwinian evolution is taking place. Okay, fine. It doesn’t mean that you have a personal God that you can confess your sins to or who has the authority to tell you not to covet your neighbor’s wife, right? But again, these things are so abstract. For me it’s like, okay, do I give 10% of my income to charity? That’s a commandment. So in Hebrew, you’ve heard of bar mitzvah, mitzvah, oh, it’s a good deed. No, it’s a commandment actually. It means you must do this. It doesn’t mean it’s optional, right? So you have to give 10% of your salary before taxes to charity. That’s one of the rules, right? Would I do that? I don’t know. Maybe you would, maybe you’re more kind of moral person than I am. But I know just every year I have to do that. I’m just going to write January 1. Just write it out. I’m going to do it. I don’t like doing it. I don’t love doing it. Some things I get money to, I like to do. But I do it. And I think, like a lot of people, having a scientific framework that you can then adjust. Okay. So you don’t believe that eating bacon is wrong. Okay, fine. But maybe you’re going to treat your parents in a certain way to honor the fifth commandment, for example, which is very hard for some people to do. I think there’s a lot of wisdom to it. So, I’m a pragmatist. I take the good stuff. I’ve seen the benefits of it.

I’m commanded to rest on the Sabbath

Brian Keating: For example, here’s a huge one. If you guys wanted to do this podcast on Saturday, I would have said no. As much as I like you guys, as much as I’m hoping for the twin bump, I wouldn’t do it because I’m commanded to rest on the Sabbath. And I know personally it makes me much more productive during the other six days of the week. I’m connected to my family, to my wife, to my kids, to my community, philosophically. And when else do you get to sit around for 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon just talking with your friends, your community, your rabbis, friends and everything, just together thinking about a higher purpose? Now, you may say it’s nonsense or it’s a fairy tale or whatever. I’ve talked to the greatest atheists alive. None of them have lives that I particularly want to emulate and all of them would benefit from the type of suggestion that I’m making. I was just on one of the biggest podcasts in the world with a brilliant guy, and I was talking to him about my prescription for him is that he takes a Sabbath. He just works 24/7. I said if you did this you’d actually be able to work hard, and he’s like, oh yeah, I will, but I just got to hit this number, like I don’t know, subscribers, money, whatever, and then I’ll do it. I’m like, no, you’ll just get to another number plus one. There’s always a bigger natural number. The desire is never

Aryaan Arora: Exactly. I’m curious though with your current, of course with the scientific mindset, but your current religious or spiritual view, do you pray at all during hardship?

Do you pray at all during hardship

Brian Keating: No, I don’t. I have a very challenging relationship with the prayer aspects of things. I tend to, but I do view it as a chance to meditate. So I will ordinarily, I can’t meditate. Just too distracted. Too many kids, too many classes, students, whatever, just work, travel, research, podcast. So, I found it very difficult. But when I’m in the temple on a Saturday, I’m like, there’s nothing. I don’t have my phone. I’m not on the internet. I’m not tweeting, podcasting, texting, or whatever. I might as well meditate and think about what really means something to me. In fact, the word Jew comes from the Hebrew word Yehuda, hoda’ah, and that means thankful. So thankfulness, gratitude is inherent in the word Jewish. So what I typically will do is, I don’t believe God is like my butler in the sky and that he’ll do, oh, I shouldn’t get cancer but they should get, I don’t think that makes any sense. I see the World Cup and I’m like, these guys, Morocco. They won yesterday and I was kind of happy to see them beat, I think they beat Germany or they beat one of the really great European team. I was like, yeah, that’s good. And then they just started praying. They got down on their knees and in one sense it’s humbling to see it, but on the other hand, sometimes I see my Padres here, they’re just so frustrating, but I love some of the players, just love them, and Manny Machado will hit a home run, he’ll make the sign of the cross. I was just like, okay, so Jesus was helping you with that. I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. I think he’s saying he’s grateful that he has this gift, right? So I do that too. I do that to myself, to God. Think about all my kids, my wife, my mother, still alive, my brothers, and I’ll just kind of expand the circle out. And I found that there is a practice actually, it’s a Zen, samsara, and loving kindness, [inaudible], these thoughtful meditations, and these traditions have a place in Judaism, so might as well do it. Sam Harris doesn’t believe Judaism is true, even though he’s born, raised Jewish, I guess. Meditates a lot.

Aryaan Arora: Yeah, he’s a whole thing, Waking Up. He’s got an app. He’s got courses. It’s a huge part of his life.

Brian Keating: And so he and I can agree on that even though we might disagree about the value of religion versus not religion.

Will machines surpass human beings

Amira Arora: I wanted to, we were talking about this before. You mentioned AI. I did want to talk about AI a little bit. Artificial intelligence, it’s advancing unbelievably fast right now. Do you think there will come a point where machines actually surpass human beings in understanding reality better than we do? Like you were saying, lots of AI software, they’re doing research on cancer, and you think that there’s a possibility that in a couple of years, using AI, cancer can be cured.

Brian Keating: Yes. I think they’re very good at doing things. These LLMs plus GPUs are very good at solving problems that are told to them to solve as valuable. They’re less convincing in terms of creating new breakthroughs, innovations, things that we haven’t conceived or told them what to do. They’re language followers. So, you can talk to it. You can program it using English or any language, right? Anything that has a logical structure. Even babies can talk to it. It’ll try to figure out what a baby or a dog, I mean, I’ve seen crazy things, right? But it’s not inventing new languages. My favorite example is it beat chess in 1993. The last human being that will ever win in chess played IBM’s version of this machine. It was a machine learning, but very similar to AI. And that was the last time humans will ever be able to win, but people still play chess. My kids play chess, right? You might play it or your listeners might play it. So, it’s still intriguing. Now, my example is then, yes, no human can ever beat, but will the computer ever invent an algorithmic kind of game with structure and rules that’s in place for 4,000 years? I doubt it, right? Or Go. Well, it can write like Shakespeare, sort of, but can it ever do something as evocative or as tender and connected to the human soul and spirit? No. I also don’t think it can do novel things in physics. I’ve yet to be convinced that you can create truly new knowledge. The holy grail in physics is what’s called a theory of everything that unifies all the forces of nature into one master force. The same way that we unified electricity and magnetism, were once thought to be separate forces. Now we know they’re one force, electromagnetism. The hope is to unify the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity into one master equation. And it’s just not clear that it could do that. It’s not clear that such a thing exists, by the way, but if it exists, it’s not clear how these things would come about.

Can it rederive what Einstein did

Brian Keating: And I’ve actually done research with some students here and talked to other researchers. Unfortunately got scooped by some other AI researchers because this isn’t my domain. But I had this idea about four years ago to take a large language model but cut off its knowledge base in 1911. Just say anything that happened after 1911, just erase it, anything happened before, keep it. Newton’s laws of gravity, the equations of thermodynamics, even relativity was around, special relativity, but not general relativity, and that’s important, and quantum mechanics wasn’t really understood until 1926. So lobotomize it, tell it nothing beyond that point and see, can it rederive what Einstein did four years later? And no, it doesn’t seem that it can. It can replicate, it can try to, it’ll keep doing it, it’ll keep forcing a solution until it gets an answer, and it can get arbitrarily close numerically, but it can’t come up with the insight that actually gravity is not a force, it’s a manifestation of the curvature of space and time, and that Einstein had. And it is very poetic to me that when Einstein realized that gravity is not a force in the common sense, he said it was the happiest thought of his life, and he came to it through what he called the Gedanken, or thought experiment, that if you were, and you’ve all had this experience, I’m sure, you go over a bump or you’re on a roller coaster for a little bit, you’re weightless. You go over this bump and you can visualize even now, you could probably feel it. You’re in a plane, you got turbulence, you’re going up, right? Or in space. But if you were in space and that happened, it would be the same. You’d be freely falling. You’d be weightless. You’d experience no gravitational force. He said, or the elevator, God forbid, breaks, the cable breaks, and you’re plummeting, right? He said that was the happiest thought of his life. Not that he’d die, but that you experience no force of gravity. You’re just floating in space. You don’t feel it pulling down on you at all. And he said that was the happiest thought of my life. Now, I always say, how does a computer have a happy thought? You give them no more power, you give it some more processor. What does it mean for a computer to be happy? And could a computer visualize that sensation that we have all had when we jump into space? So for all those reasons I’m not optimistic. I wish I was more because I think there’s so many things, but I think the limitations imposed not by the number of processors we have but just that that’s not the way that physics works. Physics is not a language like English or COBOL or Fortran or Python. It’s very different. It has language elements, just like we can describe consciousness. Is consciousness a language? I think it’s ridiculous. So, I’m very worried, but in some sense I’m excited because it means that physicists will have a place in the future to actually do stuff.

String theory has zero relevance to what I do

Aryaan Arora: You do talk a lot about falsifiability. And I do want to ask that, do you think modern physics is drifting into these ideas that mathematically they sound very interesting and beautiful but they are very difficult to explain?

Brian Keating: No, I mean, I think there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands that, oh, physics is over because string theory has been such a bad force on physics, and it’s really polluted and contaminated physics, and it’s really destroyed the ability. And I think that’s a very narrow, parochial way of looking at it. First of all, the long arc of science is not based upon what model of particle physics is the most important one. It is true that a lot of the famous physicists that we know about, from Feynman to Einstein, Schrödinger to Bohr, Oppenheimer, they work in quantum mechanics or particle physics, but at the same time there’s far more, at least as interesting if not more interesting, gravity, black holes, the cosmic background radiation that I study, neutrinos, other things that have nothing to do with string theory at all. But people are obsessed with doing what Einstein could not do. So Einstein allegedly wanted to construct this theory of everything, and in Stephen Hawking’s words that would then give you the answer to what is God thinking? The mind of God was his exact words in A Brief History of Time. I don’t believe that’s true. I think he used that to sell, but he was also an atheist. So people talk about God like young Sheldon, that doesn’t mean that they believe in it. Or Einstein. And so yeah, there is an overabundance of these [inaudible] approaches as science is hampered by this false quest to find a theory of everything, and string theory’s corrupt. I don’t believe that. I think it hasn’t been successful by the ordinary definitions of falsifiability because it doesn’t get into the arena of being testable, right? It predicts the existence of things that are unobservable. So in that sense, maybe it’s not part of science, but I don’t see it as monopolizing. It has zero relevance to what I do. We have nobody at UCSD, which is a top 20 physics department in the world or country certainly, and we don’t have anybody who works on string theory and is obsessed with string theory has got to be right. People are working on particle physics and we consider it. But no, I don’t think that is a fatal. There’s 50 Nobel Prizes since string theory was created. It’s not like physics just stopped, but it’s a popular narrative because it paints things as kind of quasi-conspiratorial, like people are only working on string theory. And I know Avi Loeb has talked about how bad string theory could be. And that’s true, but it’s not stopped him from doing what he’s doing. And he’s written 757 papers. So it’s [laughter] not like it’s hampering the output of scientists in general.

Do human beings have any free will

Amira Arora: And Brian, this is a topic that we’ve discussed in podcast before, so I really want to get your take on this. Physics often makes the universe, right, sound incredibly deterministic, like everything is just particles following laws. That being said, do you think human beings have any free will?

Brian Keating: Oh, undoubtedly. I’ve never met someone. I’ve talked to everyone from Sam Harris, like I said, to, and people are always, oh, he loves to drop names, but no, it’s important that you recognize that you’re not the authority on everything, right? So in this realm, I’m a podcaster, but I’m also a thinking, practicing physicist as well, right? So I have some things to say about the physical aspects of it. So typically, the reason that’s important to name-drop, so to speak, these people is because these are supposedly the greatest thinkers alive on the subject. Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, the late Dan Dennett, his final interview while he was alive was with me. So I’ve had a lot of the top people interacting in the space, and David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and I’ve yet to hear a convincing definition of what free will is other than the kind of simplistic notion that determinism is obviously assertable because you cannot control the charge on the electron and you cannot control the conditions of the Big Bang. And yet to a person I’ve asked them, have you ever met somebody who is normal and acts like they don’t have free will? No, they don’t. Have you ever met somebody whose actions, if committed against you, who doesn’t believe in free will, accept as without reservation? Sam Harris has two daughters. Sam, your daughter gets murdered by a crazy guy in Malibu, or a guy burned down Maui who almost killed you and burned down your house or our neighbor’s house or whatever. What would you like done to that person? I’ve never had anybody say, oh no, it’s fine. Oh, I would like to say that I wouldn’t want to do anything. That’s what Sapolsky told me. I think it’s a total copout. It means that you don’t believe in practice what you’re preaching. You don’t believe that these people deserve no punishment because their actions were predetermined at the time of the Big Bang or by the laws of physics that we can’t comprehend. But you asked about determinism and randomness and so people can misabuse some things. There’s a difference in the ability to know something and the knowing of. There’s certainly a lot of things we can know, right? We don’t understand the human mind, as I said, we understand the coffee in this cup better than we understand the human mind, that’s for sure. But certainly this doesn’t seem to have free will and yet we do. So I believe we operate as if we have free will. I believe that the superdeterministic kind of ideas, they fail the most basic test of, have you ever known someone normal? I believe there are abnormal people. And there’s certainly people with chemical imbalances. And you can make the argument maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t.

What happens to the ox in Judaism

Brian Keating: My favorite thing is in the Torah. So an animal, let’s say you have an ox, which is very common, like you have an ox kind of like a car, right? In today’s parlance. But it did some stuff and it was alive for sure. They gave it rights. You couldn’t abuse it. It had to not work on the Sabbath, which is very unusual for an agrarian economy to take a huge one-seventh of their economic impact once a week. You can’t let your animal work. It’s crazy. But it was done so that you, the owner, wouldn’t take the day to work as well. So it was protecting you as well as it was protecting the animal, your slave. If you had a slave, he or she couldn’t work on that day. But let’s say you have this ox and it goes next door and it kills your neighbor’s kid. What do you think happens to the ox in Judaism?

Aryaan Arora: The ox is an animal. The kid got in front of it, maybe it was throwing rocks at it or whatever, right?

Brian Keating: Maybe the kid deserved it, but the ox steps on the kid, kills the kid. What should he do with the ox?

Aryaan Arora: I mean, he didn’t mean it. It’s not like it was intentional.

Brian Keating: Right. So actually what happens is you kill the ox. You kill the ox.

Aryaan Arora: Yeah.

Brian Keating: In Judaism, yeah, it’s humiliating to a human being. Imagine your next door neighbor for the rest of his life, he has to see your ox walk. Oh, that’s the ox that killed little Jimmy. That’s humiliating. It’s degrading to the human spirit. That’s what the Torah suggests, that the weight of a human being is infinity. And that’s another reason I love this notion of religion and theology in general. You have to prize the human being. And I think a lot of the atheists, the people that are most likely to not believe in free will are atheists, right? Because they believe God didn’t do anything special if he created us and we don’t have free will. Why would I worship this thing that created these automatons? I don’t worship my GPU that Nvidia made, right? It’s just automatons doing some useful work. So the Torah prizes the human life because it’s created in God’s image. No other kind of thing can come close. I don’t care if it’s an ox, if it’s a bonobo, which is very similar to a human being, or a dolphin, like a beautiful dolphin eats my neighbor’s daughter, that dolphin should be put to death. I mean, it shouldn’t be that my neighbor has to suffer for the rest of his life looking at this creature that took the life of an infinitely valuable human being. And I think we’d all like that. I hear a lot of times, Israel outlawed the death penalty for many, many years after the Holocaust. They did kill a couple of Nazis that were still alive and then they stopped, and they, oh it was really tragic, and guess what, they’ve reinstated it after October 7th because they realized this is a cruel thing that people are allowed to live and exist and that you pay for these people, they get four meals a day. They get conjugal visits, and you pay, not only like in California, you’re not only not put to death, you’re allowed to live and get married and have concubines and do whatever and watch TV all day and exercise. Is that moral? Is that a society that we should want to live in, or should it be, yeah, the death penalty [inaudible]. And what the Torah also said is it didn’t say thou shalt not kill as most people think, it says thou shalt not murder. So from the context of valuing human life, that’s something that actually seems divine to me. Again, it’s not proof. Could it be used as evidence? Maybe.

What is it like to be Thomas Nagel

Amira Arora: You’ve talked about consciousness several times throughout this podcast so far and how we’ve figured out how there are so many views, but what is your view right now on the definition of consciousness? You mentioned earlier about David Chalmers as well, who coined the term hard problem of consciousness.

Brian Keating: Yeah. So what is my take on, it’s so frustrating. Again, these are not things you can really understand, even by their definition, right? These are qualia, like the sensation, what does the color orange look like? I mean, subjective experience, completely subjective. Again, you guys are twins, your photonic retina and cone and rod cells perceive the intensity of this light, of this table, of this telescope slightly differently. You don’t even know what you think of as this goldish color. You may both call it gold but you may see it as what you call red and you may see it as what you call green, but you’ll never know, right? So from that context it seems like, okay, so these are kind of unknowable questions, which physicists are more comfortable. We don’t know why the mass of the electron is 10 to the minus 28 kilograms or whatever it is, right? We don’t know why it is, but once we have its mass we can do particle accelerators, we can make fusion reactors, we can do all sorts of incredible things, we can create antimatter, and these are phenomenal technological achievements. So from my perspective it doesn’t trouble me, but it doesn’t make me eager to wade into those waters of, I want to go to a consciousness seminar. It’s just, one of my many, many side projects that AI is enabling, probably one of the sins of AI in the future will be recognized as, I’m writing kind of an essay, and there’s a famous essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, by Thomas Nagel, so I’m writing a different essay, what is it like to be Thomas Nagel, how would a bat visualize Thomas Nagel? And it’s actually influenced by one of the books that influenced me the most, actually a book that you get when you join my mailing list, briankeating.com. It’s called Flatland. Flatland is a book written by a square. It’s a square and he’s moving around this two-dimensional world. And by moving around this two-dimensional world, he encounters a three-dimensional being who comes into his existence in his universe and creates this havoc, and it’s like an alien invasion. It was written in the 1860s and it has some social commentary in the Victorian era, like slaves and women are treated really badly and they have different shapes, then priests are circles. They have the infinite number of sides, and a square is okay but not great. But [inaudible] is a brilliant story but it helps you visualize what it would be like to be in the fourth dimension. No. So, actually, it allows you to extend your consciousness or your awareness or whatever. So that’s kind of the only waters that I’ll wade into, have to do with, yeah, what would it be like for a lower dimensional being like a bat to try to perceive a higher dimensional being like a human? That’s an interesting question to me. But what is the conscious hard problem? I don’t think I can make any progress on that.

Why not nothing

Aryaan Arora: Right. Yeah. I don’t know if this is a question that you’ve been asked before, if you’ve thought of, but I guess as a human I would think that we’re trying to figure out what happened before the Big Bang. What was the origin of anything at all? But why not nothing? Why anything at all? Why not nothing?

Brian Keating: Yeah. There’s glib answers to that. So in physics, emptiness or vacuum state is not empty. It’s actually very rich structure in terms of the quantum mechanical properties that allow the existence or annihilation of different entities like electrons, like photons, quantum fields. If it didn’t have that, if we didn’t have the ability to have creation, destruction, matter, antimatter, then we wouldn’t have matter. So, it’s often said that nothing is unstable, right? So you can’t have nothing lasting forever. It’s a point of unstable equilibrium. So in physics if you have that situation the vacuum is unstable and it tends to create fluctuations out of which theoretically it’s possible to create something. So people think, oh, matter is conserved. If I get rid of this coffee cup and vaporize it and turn it into nothing, that’s impossible. No, you can actually do that. You can’t destroy energy, but you can destroy matter. In fact, antimatter and matter both have mass. Combine them together, you get no mass. You get photons, pure energy, and you get the energy equivalent of E equals mc squared for each one of the matter and antimatter particles. So nothing can come from something. And the reverse process can happen too. Two photons can come together and create a positron and antimatter and matter pair. That happens all the time. And so we know that that’s possible in the early universe. It happened at extremely high rates. But the question is where did the energy come from to begin with, out of which the matter could later come out? That’s an open question related to where my research is leading me, like what came at the beginning of time, or as close as we can get to with instruments, telescopes, optics, detectors that we talked about.

It’s like cotton candy

Amira Arora: And Brian, we touched upon this a little bit before but I want to talk about it more. So simulation theory, it’s become so popular now. The idea that our whole reality could be running on some deeper layer of code. As a physicist, do you think that’s something science should take seriously or is it mostly just a fun thought experiment?

Brian Keating: I don’t see the practical benefit of taking it seriously. Again, you could make the exact syllogism, you could equate God, right? There’s nothing that happens in the Matrix or in the Truman Show that is beyond the capability of an omnipotent God, right? And yet you’d never have a physics conference talking about God like that. Would never happen, right? At least not anymore. So that kind of tells me it’s like cotton candy or something, it tastes good but it has no value. It’s interesting to speculate on and it might lead you to some conclusions, and people do work on what would be the computational cost of studying the properties of the simulation, how much RAM does it need, how many GPUs does it need, and so I think that’s interesting in the same way, my kid collects Pokémon cards, I don’t think Pokémon is that interesting scientifically or culturally. But there’s this huge market of trading cards and grading and there’s this culture and the sociology behind it, or baseball cards when I was a kid. I had Yankee cards. I used to be a Yankee fan. And I still have one or two and I think my mom threw out one.

Aryaan Arora: Yeah. A really valuable Yankee. Oh, come on.

Brian Keating: Reggie Jackson is my favorite. So baseball cards are frivolous, but the study of baseball cards, the market, the economics behind them, it’s big business. It’s very serious stuff. I mean, my friend just paid $1,200 for a Fernando Tatis rookie card, right? So that’s serious business. So, in other words, the meta study of something may be more interesting than the topic itself, comic books, cartoons, the history of cartoons is actually more important than the cartoons itself, right? Cave paintings are cartoons, right? That’s more interesting than, oh, is that a really good giraffe by modern artistic history stuff? No, of course not. So the study of something may be interesting in itself even though the base layer of it may not be interesting to me.

Like a character in a video game

Aryaan Arora: And hypothetically, if we were inside a perfect simulation, right, would there be any way for science to prove it, or would it be like a character in a video game trying to figure out whether their world is real from inside the game itself?

Brian Keating: Yeah. So there’s only one way that I’ve thought about and others have thought about and it really has to do with the properties of mathematics. So like I said before, you’ve never seen a triangle, right? But you can conceive of a triangle, right? So the human mind can conceive of things that don’t exist. We could define it, but like I said, you can make the three points, but they’re not microscopic, they’re not one-dimensional. They’re not zero-dimensional, right? So you can approximate things. So the human eye can do that, but computers can’t. They have to be finite. At some level they have to be discrete. Even a quantum computer, it can have a large number of states, but in practice to realize the different states will be a quantization of those different outcomes. Right? Now if you think about all the things that are continuous variables, any number that’s a real number that has any value. There’s an infinite number of real numbers between any two real numbers. So you pick pi and pi plus 1 over 10 trillionth plus pi. There’s an infinite number of numbers between. So that means if you were, let’s say you’re looking at something, a star, and there’s some angle, at some level you would expect that unless you have an infinite amount of RAM or infinite amount of storage or infinite amount of CPU power, quantum or otherwise, there’d be some fundamental discretization of the arrival of these objects, either the wavelength or their period or something like that. Wavelength is another thing. You can have quantization of energy but wavelength is a continuous real number, so you can have an infinite number of real numbers between 500 nanometers and 501 nanometers. So if there was some experiment, and there are people that propose such experiments, that would effectively prove that you live in a simulation, you see these [inaudible], it would be like [inaudible] off the ceiling in the Truman Show, that would prove that you’re in a simulation, right? Now people would then argue about that, well, is that part of the simulation, right? Because if we know that then the simulator knows that. But again, this is just like talking about God, right? God could make you think that God doesn’t exist. You cannot disprove the hypothesis that God exists, right? So all these things again, it’s like chewing on cotton candy. It lasts for a second and then for me it doesn’t satisfy.

Homo sapiens is man who is wise

Amira Arora: Humans happen to be unique in the sense that we are essentially the only ones who are fully aware that one day we are going to die, and that does make me think that awareness of death, I guess, also is a place for us to create meaning in this life. Has studying the universe also changed your perspective or your thought on this idea of death as well?

Brian Keating: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of what Homo sapiens means, right? It’s man who is wise or knows, and the knowing is that you’re going to die. We’re the only entities, we think, that know.

Amira Arora: Yeah.

Brian Keating: And elephants supposedly will kind of know, like, oh, this one’s about to die, but they don’t know when they’re four years old that death is a possibility, right? So, yes, of course, it adds life to your years to know that they’re finite. If you had this infinite lifespan, in some sense that would be torturous unless everyone had an infinite lifespan, in which case where do you drop in on that continuum, when you’re 10, 30, 90, 100? What does it really matter? So having that finitude, and I think for me the recognition of milestones in life that is marked by certain seasons of life, when I was your age I wasn’t thinking about, there’s a lot of things I wasn’t thinking about, including podcasts, and they didn’t exist, but family or professorship, but now I think as you get older you start to live less for yourself and your accomplishments. I always wanted to be freaking awesome and win the Nobel Prize. That’s why my book’s called Losing the Nobel Prize, not winning the Nobel Prize. I just wanted to be awesome, have all these accomplishments, PhD, be a professor. I didn’t think I could be, but maybe I would be. But it wasn’t the really meaningful things.

There are two different types of resumes

Brian Keating: It was in some writing, I think it was David Brooks, who’s echoing some famous rabbis in the 1800s. He talks about there are two different types of resumes that you have. You have your resume that you present for grad school or getting in a show or something like that. And then there’s things that people say at your eulogy. People probably won’t say at your eulogy that you spent that much time that you went to Columbia. They’ll say, yeah, she went there, it was a really cool accomplishment, or you were in this play and it was amazing. Great accomplishments. But they’ll talk about how she was as a sister, a friend, a brother, sister, all these things. Mother hopefully, if that’s what you’re interested, those are the things. And those have time, natural seasons for it. My mom’s in her 80s, she’s not like, oh, I really want to go to grad school and become, no, she wants to be a grandmother. And I’m at that stage now. My oldest is interested in dating and stuff. But at the same time, I’m like, it’s natural and you kind of have to apply the intelligence that you’ve accrued, the knowledge. Homo sapiens is really knowledge man, but it’s not wisdom man. Just like artificial intelligence. There’s like 85 different LLMs that you can choose from. But where’s the artificial wisdom? I want wisdom. If you wanted knowledge, you can go anywhere. And for a long time all these things are just trained on human knowledge from the internet effectively in training sets, right? What differentiates them? Nothing, they’re all the same. But wisdom is unique, as anyone who’s ever met someone who’s truly wise. Now they might be wise in one small domain, like I really understand how to catch fish off the coast of Coronado, or they know how to interact with their spouse who has a difficult mother-in-law, whatever. There are so many things that you come to in different seasons, and I think the recognition that I’m maybe my third out of four seasons. I hopefully I’ll live a long time, but I’ve accomplished a lot. I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished. I still have things ambitiously that I want to do, but I have way more ambitions for the people that I love than for myself. And that was never true when I was your age. I just wanted to get my PhD or get my master’s and just get on to the next thing. Achieve, achieve, achieve, you write these papers, get this job, get tenure. And it’s like, they call it the hedonic treadmill for a reason. You just never get off of it. The more you try to approach that. So for me, yeah, as I get older, as I think about death and things on the horizon, hopefully long in the future, as Woody Allen said, what do you want people to say about you when you’re 100 years from now? And he said, I want to look good for a 150-year-old. Yeah, I’d like to live as long as possible. But I feel like what’s more important than transmitting your biology is your ideology. And anyone could do that, and hopefully I’ve done that, and in my writing, in my work, I’ll continue to do that. But now it’s about kind of rounding around the corner to think about how can I give back? And that’s more satisfying at this stage of my life.

A meteorite on the White House lawn

Aryaan Arora: If tomorrow we received undeniable proof that an advanced civilization had contacted Earth, what do you think would be the single biggest thing that changes about humanity overnight?

Brian Keating: That’s a really good question. In a sense, we’ve been there a couple times. We’ve discovered life that we thought was actually alien. In 1996, I don’t think you guys were alive, but 1996 on the White House lawn, Bill Clinton came on the White House lawn and he talked about this meteorite, and I don’t, like this meteorite here, that was found in Antarctica. And the meteorite was thought to have the microbial life on it that came from Mars. This is actually from the Moon, but the Earth and the Moon and Mars exchange material, meaning that impacts on asteroids on these other bodies kick off debris into the solar system. After enough millions of years, they eventually can land on other bodies, including the Earth. And in fact, some of them have. So, we know that this is from the Moon. I have another slice from Mars. So we have Martian meteorites. They happen to be easier to find in Antarctica because you see a rock on top of ice. It’s pretty obvious and there’s no other sources of those. And so it was found in the Allan Hills and it was looked at under microscopy and tested and originally thought to be alive. And immediately Clinton made this thing. And in fact, if you watch the movie Contact, he was the president in Contact. And they show a video at the White House, Jodie Foster’s there, Jill Tarter playing, whatever, the real scientist. And he’s saying now this rock, it speaks to us across the galaxy and tells the story of our origins, and if it’s confirmed to be, and so it really wasn’t retracted that that was a mistake, and it wasn’t, it was incorrect, it’s sort of disputed still to this day. Well, maybe it does, maybe, but nobody really takes it seriously that has serious evidence. But for, let’s call it 10 years, Earth knew, or a lot of people on Earth thought there was life. And obviously a lot of people think there’s not only alien spaceships, but beings, interdimensional beings and non-biologic humans and non-human biologics and interdimensional. It’s pretty astounding if those are true. Has life changed at all? I don’t know. Not for me. I haven’t. Now, you added the important caveat, indisputable, undeniable proof. Yeah. They haven’t brought out the alien yet, I haven’t seen them. We haven’t seen it. Unfortunately, people claim, oh, they can’t bring it out because they’re going to get arrested if they do and they can’t say what they know. But that’s pretty convenient. That’s a way of being unfalsifiable. So, a scientist needs to be able to do experiments on it. Should have some international [inaudible] group of people from countries around the world. You have to ask why do they see these things near military bases or off the coast, oceans and near military operating areas? Not really clear. So there are a lot more questions than answers, but the counterfactual where we do know, say we have discovered indisputable proof, I think it could be potentially one of the biggest discoveries of all time. But you also have to look at history. I mean, for me it would be this incredible thing. For you, it would be, the average person, and in Chula Vista or wherever, will they care about it? We discovered the origin of the universe in 1965. That the Big Bang occurred billions of years ago. Some people changed their lives, religious people tried to co-opt it and say it was part of the biblical narrative. Atheists said no, we don’t need. I think it’ll be disputed. I think anything will be disputed. I think it’ll be inconclusive for a long time and then it will just be accepted as mundane fact about the universe that we’re not alone. I believe that there’s life in the universe to some degree of credulity. I don’t like to say believe, but I believe that there’s a possibility of it, but there’s zero evidence for it. We don’t have any evidence, hard evidence, visual data, spectroscopic data, hard evidence of alien craft that scientists have had any chance to interact with.

Aryaan Arora: Avi Loeb has presented a lot of evidence from his side, but it’s

Brian Keating: Yeah, but even he doesn’t believe that those are aliens for sure. He believes that they could plausibly be from another solar system, which would be alien. But again, if discovering life on Mars alone in our own solar, we don’t need it to come from ‘Oumuamua or Atlas, we don’t need that. We just need it to be here in our solar system. We have yet to discover that. So the question is how likely is it in a universe teeming with life that we should find no other life just in our own solar system? We find abundant life on Earth. We find zero life elsewhere for now. They haven’t looked everywhere. But you can never look everywhere. Oh, well, you could always say, well, there’s aliens on the north pole of Titan, some moon of Saturn. Okay, that doesn’t do me any good. I’m never going to get there. There’s a unicorn on Neptune’s north pole. Okay, fine. But you can’t get there. You can’t explore it. You can’t falsify it. So, is it part of science? That’s the thing that troubles me. People conflate eyewitness reports, which I believe that they had, but some of those things are very unreliable. We don’t accept a lot of eyewitness testimony because human beings are fallible and they see things, they mistake things. But the underlying answer to your question, if it was discovered, for me it would be probably the greatest discovery of all time. Would it make me rethink all my life? Not necessarily. I don’t tie my kind of scientific epistemology to my interpersonal, as I said, I’m a pragmatist. I’m a behaviorist. How does this religion, how do the aliens change my behavior? Would I stop giving to charity? Would I treat my neighbor’s wife differently? [laughter] No. And not at all. Not in a microsecond.

The Nobel Prize was an idol

Amira Arora: You brought your book though. I want to talk a little bit about that. Your experience around the Nobel Prize. Did that also change your view about how you saw academia?

Brian Keating: Definitely. But it more changed my life and how I saw religion because for me it was sort of an idol. It was an idol that was acceptable to worship, like the World Cup or an Oscar, for me the Nobel Prize was all that wrapped into one. It was godlike figures of scientific history and lore going back to Einstein. And over time I had to confront that in myself that I did worship it. So it’s a memoir of what it’s like to aspire to this thing that you, the emperor, and then find out it’s naked at some level, that it has these foibles and flaws, and the people that win it aren’t gods. They’re normal men and women. Mostly men, unfortunately. But now there’s a few women that I’ve interviewed that have won it. And because of that, I no longer see it as this thing. I no longer need it as this talisman, like my kid asked me the other day, what if you win, Daddy? You have to take back your book. I’m like, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I don’t think it’s necessarily going to happen because I’m so critical of it and the damage it does, but also the wonderful people that win it. So it’s a very complex thing, it’s like Schrödinger would have a field day with it because it has good and bad aspects amalgamated into one.

I don’t regret the things I do

Amira Arora: Yeah. As we close, you obviously spend so much of your time, your work, talking about the universe, studying the universe. What’s your project that you’re currently working on? If tomorrow you were told that the universe will end and you have to say goodbye to the people you love, how does that make you feel personally? Because I’m sure these are questions that you wonder about. But I think about it as well.

Brian Keating: My answer is that I try to live in a state of being that I don’t regret the things I do. I celebrate. Like I told you, I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished, but the proudest things that I’ve accomplished have nothing to do with science or money or podcast or downloads or views. It’s people, it’s connections, it’s the community. It’s the things that make me uniquely human. And part of it, part of who I am as a scientist. Yeah, that is a dimension of it. So yeah, I know it’s not satisfying, like, oh, I’m going to cry, call my wife. But suffice to say, I think I try to live and comport myself in a way that, I wouldn’t want to, but I could not be here in the near future. And I hope that the impact, I know that the impact, I’m not going to be humble, so I hope that I don’t know. I know that big impact. Yeah. I know there’d be a lot of tears at my funeral and I know the next day people will get on with their lives. I’m open to the idea that life will go on without me. And I know that it will, but I hope that I made, I know that I made an impact on a certain subset of people. And I hope I get the chance to continue doing it through appearances like this and through my own work and teaching and research and writing, and I’m glad that I get the opportunity to be here with you guys and share it with your audience.

Amira Arora: Thank you so much. It’s always a wonder when we talk with scientists because it always ends up crossing bridges with philosophy and this purpose of life, human existence, what it means to be a good life. It was wonderful to see this side of you as well. It was such an honor. Thank you so much.

Brian Keating: You guys could be here. Yeah. Thank you for coming on the show.

Aryaan Arora: Thanks.