Transcript

Brian Keating:
I’m an astrophysicist at one of the top universities in the world. I normally don’t believe in the paranormal. Alien abductions, cattle mutilation, crop circles, near death experiences. But what if I told you that me, a practicing astrophysicist, believes in the phenomenon known as near death experiences? That’s right. And today I’m about to tell you about the most important near death experience that ever happened. And it’s one I believe in. And you should too. Now, most near death experiences that other people talk about are paranormal.

Brian Keating:
There’s a white light. You walk into it, or you’re hovering over the hospital bed where the surgeon left his glove in your otherwise beautiful cadaver. You see the loved ones wailing. You see the rogue cousin coming out of the woodwork, wondering what he’s going to inherit. Now, I don’t believe in any of those, and I can explain why scientifically, and I will. But there’s one near death experience that changed scientific history forever. I believe in it. And you should too.

Brian Keating:
It happened in Paris in April 1888, and the tale has gone down in history. But the truth is even stranger than the fictional apocryphal story told about it. The real story takes 30 years, four deaths and one uniting thread to tell. And now, if you’ve ever wondered why the most famous prize in the world exists, this is the answer, and is darker, more personal and more deeply moral in its implications in architecture than you’ve probably ever heard about. Now, I have a personal stake in this story that I’ll get to towards the end. To understand Alfred Nobel and the prizes named after him, we have to start with his family. Emmanuel Nobel, the father, the patriarch, had four sons who survived to adulthood. Robert, the eldest, Ludwig, the businessman, Alfred, the chemist, and Emile, the youngest, born in 1843.

Brian Keating:
Emile was the only one who went to university. As it turns out, he studied at Uppsala and helped at his father’s family factory in his free time. On September 3, 1864, Emil is just 20 years old. He’s in the family factory, and that morning he was experimenting in the workshop at Hellenenborg, just outside of Stockholm. He was tinkering with a dangerous substance that would go down in infamy, a substance his family was trying to commercialize, unsuccessfully. It was a liquid that had been discovered 17 years earlier by an Italian chemist, Ascanio Sobrero. The liquid was so unstable that Sobrero himself had refused to develop it further. He was so fearful of the dangers it presented, he doubted it could ever be Used safely, it’s known as nitroglycerin.

Brian Keating:
That fateful day in September, something went wrong. We don’t know exactly what. Nitroglycerin is incredibly unstable, and just a mere tremor can set it off. Five people died that day. Emil was one of them. Fortunately, Alfred was not at the factory that morning. But he would spend the next three years of his life trying to make that substance that killed his brother safe enough that other people could use it and never be harmed again. Ironically, it became one of the most dangerous substances on earth.

Brian Keating:
Dynamite. And to do that, Alferd had to embed the dangerous liquid nitroglycerin into a stable form of dirt, basically diatomaceous earth. In 1867, Alferd filed a patent that would make him one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He called it dynamite, which meant power rock in Greek. Alfred Nobel’s fortune was built on solving the problem that had killed his youngest brother and would also go on to kill millions more. According to the most famous obituary in history. We’ll get to that soon.

Al Gore:
Foreign

Brian Keating:
Emmanuel Nobel, the patriarch of the family Emiles and Alfred’s father was a brilliant inventor. He had invented naval mines that the Russian czar loved. They used it during the Crimean War. He invented a type of lathe that’s still used in manufacturing to this day. He designed an early central heating system useful in Sweden. By any reasonable standard, he should have died an extremely wealthy man. But he didn’t. When the Crimean war ended in 1856, a new tsar arose who cut the military budget and Emanuel’s contracts completely evaporated.

Brian Keating:
By 1862, his creditors had sold the firm and Emanuel was forced to return to Sweden a bankrupted man. Then, just a year later, Emile died at Hellenborn. The news obviously broke his heart. He had a stroke shortly afterwards and never fully recovered. He spent most of his eight remaining years bedridden. Then on September 3, he 1872, eight years to the day after his son Emil died, Emmanuel the father died as well. Alfred watched his father change the world with his inventions, but lose everything anyway. He was determined not to let that be his fate as well.

Brian Keating:
He realized that wealth without structure evaporates. He learned that a man can be the most inventive, creative, imaginative person on the whole continent and still have nothing to show for it. Let this be a lesson. If you want your work to outlive you, you can’t leave it to a family business. You have to build it into an institution that will long outlive not only you, your family, your Distant heirs, but maybe race for time itself. Ludwig was the Nobel brother who proved Alfred’s lesson wrong. While Alfred was racing between laboratories in search of a stable solution to the nitroglycerin problem, Ludwig had built a different for fortune on a different liquid oil. He built one of the largest companies in the world.

Brian Keating:
The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company operated in Baku, which is now in Azerbaijan. At its peak, it produced 50% of the world’s oil. Ludwig was sometimes called the Russian Rockefeller. Strange because he wasn’t Russian, but the company was in latter day Russia. On April 12, 1888, Ludwig had a heart attack while visiting Cannes, France. He was only 56 years old. Three days later, April 15, 1888, the newspaper Le Figaro, one of the biggest in all of Europe, printed Ludwig’s obituary. Except it wasn’t.

Brian Keating:
The newspaper committed the gravest editorial sin. They got two different men confused in an obituary. Now, most retellings of this story will tell you that the headline read in French, the merchant of death is dead. La marchand de la mort es morteg. That’s even the version Nobel laureate Al Gore quoted in his Peace prize acceptance in 2007.

Al Gore:
119 years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death, wrongly believing the inventor had just died. A newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him the Merchant of Death because of his invention, dynamite.

Brian Keating:
It’s in Wikipedia, it’s in dozens of biographies. But it’s not clear if that ever happened. Historians have searched French newspaper archives for a hundred years and they still haven’t found it. The phrase exists only in the retelling of the story. But there’s a kernel of truth behind it. Because what we do have is the actual death notice itself. A Figaro, April 15, 1888. Page one, it says, A man who can hardly be called a benefactor of humanity and died yesterday.

Brian Keating:
In Comm. It is Mr. Nobel, inventor of dynamite. Talk about fake news. Now, to give him credit, the paper retracted it the next day. They had confused the two brothers, but Alfred Nobel was very much alive and living in Paris. To quote Mark Twain, reports of my demise have been slightly exaggerated. Everyone read that newspaper.

Brian Keating:
It’s impossible to think that Alfred didn’t see it. It would be like you missing one of my banger tweets on X. And here’s what the milder, real version of the story actually does, that the dramatized myth, the folklore doesn’t do. The myth makes it sound like the editors were gleeful. But the real Notice is actually colder than that. It said that this man Alfred, in dying, had not improved the world one bit, despite being one of the wealthiest men on earth, worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s money. It’s devastating because it’s actually more measured, more thoughtful about the verdict, sober as it was, editorializing Alfred’s death and the seeming meaninglessness of his passing. But what it did give is a gift to Alfred, saying exactly what the educated reading public of Europe would think about him when he actually did die.

Brian Keating:
Now hold these four deaths in your head at once. Emil, killed by the substance Alfred would later make safe and commercialize. Emmanuel, the patriarch, the man who lost everything despite changing the world. Dying of a broken heart eight years to the day after his son’s death. Ludwig, the businessman who built an empire of oil and triggered through his own death the accidental editorial verdict on Alfred’s life. And then eventually Alfred did die. But that wouldn’t come for nearly a decade. He read that verdict and now he had to decide what to do with whatever time was left to him.

Brian Keating:
They say to write your will the day before you die. Alfred didn’t do that, but he came close. There’s a name for this type of experience, the one I hinted at the very beginning of the video. It’s one of the oldest narrative devices in all of human literature and storytelling. This one’s true. A man sees the world’s verdict on his life before the verdict is final. He’s given a chance to rewrite the ending before it’s etched in stone. Charles Dickens wrote about it in 1843.

Brian Keating:
You know it as A Christmas Carol. Scrooge sees his own grave and the indifference of the men who knew him, and he redeems himself. Frank Capra remade it in 1946 as it’s a Wonderful Wife. George Bailey given the chance to see what the world looks like without him in it. A second chance, a second lease on life, only brought possible through fictional near death experiences. Now, as a physicist, I’m quite doubtful about the claims of the paranormal type of near death experiences. And these stories, unlike the paranormal versions, for the price of a movie ticket or a paperback, give us what religions have always tried to give us a sense of what the meaning of life is, while we still have time to do it from this side of the grave. That’s the secret to the success of that type of genre.

Brian Keating:
The point of these stories is never the supernatural mechanism. The quantum mechanical collapse of the wave function, the lack of falsifiability of the claims that most paranormal encounters with death fail to substantiate. The point is the part where the protagonist is still alive. A chance to redeem himself. Alfred Nobel got the real version. He got it in La Figaro on a Sunday morning in 1888, with no Christmas ghosts and no guardian angels needed. And he had something Scrooge and George Bailey are only allowed to imagine. He had time.

Brian Keating:
He could act. He was on this side of the ground. On November 27, 1895, at the Swedish Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel did just that. He signed a one page handwritten will. Here’s what it looks like. Less than a thousand words, but over a century of impact. His will set aside 94% of his entire worldly estate, the equivalent of more than a quarter billion dollars in today’s money. This was to be used to fund a series of annual prizes.

Brian Keating:
The annual prizes specified were five in number. Physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, which is one category, Literature and peace. The prizes were to be given in his words, and I’ve read the will many times, to those persons, singular people, who in the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. It actually says mankind in the will itself. But if you go to the Nobel Foundation’s website, they’ve changed what he wrote to say, humankind, presumably for some politically correct purpose. Notice the language. Nevertheless, there’s an exact parallel between the French editorial about Alfred Nobel mistakenly attributed to him, which resonates around the term benefit to mankind. That’s a direct response to the obituary.

Brian Keating:
It couldn’t be clearer that this near death experience horrified him. The obituary said Alfred cannot be called a benefactor of humanity. And here in the will, he’s leaving an enormous fortune to do just that. He said, I will be remembered for the people I helped, for the world that I benefited for the benefit of all mankind. He turned the editorial verdict against him into a powerful criterion of the prize itself, one that still exists to this day. That’s the writing of a man who read what was said about him and decided to write his own last will and testament. As Lin Miranda says in Hamilton, who lives, who dies, who tells your story. It was driven by the man who had buried three members of his family and cut his own family out of most of the estate.

Brian Keating:
Now, he was never married. There’s another apocryphal story about him, that there’s no Nobel Prize in math because his wife cheated on Alfred with a mathematician. Total lie, Never happened, didn’t have a wife. He insisted, though, that the prize be given, not taking into Account nationality. At the time, that was almost heretical. Nation states were so powerful, obsessed with themselves in Europe, that he didn’t want it to be captured by any single dynasty. Now, because he watched his father’s family business collapse, he was determined not to leave this to chance. And he also had taken the lesson of his older brother, Ludwig.

Brian Keating:
For all his oil fortune, he left something that would later be confiscated by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution in 1918. There were no safeguards to save that family fortune. Alfred wanted something neither bankruptcy nor the winds of a war and revolution could ever blow away. Alfred died 14 months later, not the day after his will was written, but close to it. He died in San Remo, Italy, on December 10, 1896. And that day will come into play in just a bit. After his death, the will was contested by his family for years. The first Nobel Prize was not granted until 1901.

Brian Keating:
And in the giving of the first Nobel Prize, there’s another connection to death. Wilhelm Renjen had a wife named Bertha. He invented the X ray machine, a device that certainly has been responsible for the benefit of mankind. If you’ve ever had a toothache or a broken bone, you’ve benefited from Wilhelm Rendgen’s X ray machine. But his wife, who was the first patient or victim, depending on how you look at it, to be exposed to X rays and have her hand photographed on a photographic plate. When she saw her ring finger and the bones within her hand, she exclaimed, aghast, I have seen my death. Another brush with death, courtesy of the Nobel Prize. Now, here’s another detail that most people don’t know.

Brian Keating:
The Nobel Prize is held every year to honor Alfred Nobel on his death day, December 10th, not his birthday. And the ceremony at the Stockholm banquet hall, where the prizes are given out, are decorated in resplendent flowers that are imported from Alfred Nobel’s mausoleum in San Remo, the very town where he died. Because death is inseparable from Alfred Nobel and the Nobel prizes that bear his name. Now, hold that detail, because in a moment, I’m going to tell you about a different set of his wishes, written down, signed, witnessed, sealed, that the foundation has not honored as carefully as they should have. I have a personal stake in this story. In 2014, a team that I had helped to found, called Bicep, announced what we thought was the discovery of all time, one that was sure to win us the Nobel Prize in physics. We claimed we had detected gravitational waves from the inflationary epoch from a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second following the Big Bang. We were wrong.

Brian Keating:
We didn’t see the birth pangs of the Big Bang. The signal that we saw was contaminated by interstellar dust. Six months later, after collaborating with our competitors in the Planck satellite, we retracted the claim. Four years later, I wrote a book about that experience. It’s called Losing the Nobel Prize. Spoiler alert. But in the process of writing that book, I read Alfred Nobel’s will more carefully than most people ever have. I actually went to Stockholm.

Brian Keating:
I sat in the rooms where the decisions are made. I asked the tough questions. I was even asked to nominate winners of the Nobel Prize twice in my career. That was before I wrote the book. I’ll probably never get another invitation again. But that’s okay. Because what I came to argue in that book, and I want to be careful about what I say here because I have great respect for the institution of the Nobel Prize. Maybe not the way it’s exactly executed to this day.

Brian Keating:
And I certainly have gratitude and respect for the many people have won the prize. 22 so far have come on my podcast link down below. But I have to be honest. The Nobel committee has strayed quite far from what Alfred Nobel actually asked for in his will. Again, the will says the prize must go to the person who, during the preceding year, made an invention or discovery that conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. In practice, it goes sometimes goes decades after the fact to a maximum of three people, not one. For work that was almost certainly done by teams of dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of other people. The will says nothing about teams.

Brian Keating:
And you can’t win it if you’re dead. Which is ironic for a prize that’s so unquestionably associated with death. Alfred’s will said nothing about excluding the dead. But that’s become standard practice again, made up by the Nobel committee themselves. If that were not true, Rosalind Franklin would have shared the DNA prize Vera Rubin would have surely won for the discovery of dark matter. But they didn’t. Because they were dead. The foundation honors his death day.

Brian Keating:
They ship flowers from across the world from his death town and his death chamber to the ceremony that they celebrate on his death day. They get those things right, but they get some harder things wrong. In most world religions, the wishes of the dead are sacrosanct. They’re sacred. Honoring them is one of the highest ethical obligations that a person can do for someone who’s passed away. After all, the dead can’t speak for themselves. They can’t defend their legacy. They rely and they trust on future generations to honor their own intentions.

Brian Keating:
So the rest of us are bound to that honor. It’s a sacred duty to do what they asked us to do. And in violating that in many important ways, the Nobel Committee is ignoring the wishes of the death across cultures. Betraying the wishes of someone who can no longer defend themselves is a grave, grave ethical sin. Alfred Nobel can’t defend himself anymore. The committee can. And I think that the committee owes a deeper reading and a more close following of what he actually wrote. So you may be surprised to learn that a physicist believes in near death experiences.

Brian Keating:
Not the tunnel of light, not the hovering above the hospital bed, not the loved ones weeping or wailing over how they were excluded from their will. But the four deaths that taught a man through experience what his own death would mean. And we have something that he has too, while we’re still alive to do it. We can write a different ending if we’re unsatisfied with the story we’ve written so far. Write your will the day before you die. Alfred Nobel got an extra eight years from his brother’s death to his own. Most of us hopefully have a lot more. The question is, what are you going to do at that time? If you want the longer story about the will, the committee, the prize, and the cosmology, read my cosmic memoir, Losing the Nobel Prize.

Brian Keating:
You can find it anywhere books are sold, and it was voted one of Amazon’s best nonfiction books. Subscribe for the next video and you’ll learn something new, perhaps about crop circles or catamutilation or alien abduction. Until next time, Brian Keating, Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego and host of the into the Impossible podcast. See you next time.